I seldom agree so strongly with anything R.R. Reno writes, in First Things or elsewhere, as I agree with this:
Along with online sports betting, marijuana legalization is an instance of the grotesque misgovernance by leaders in the West. Instead of promoting the welfare of citizens, our elites accommodate our vices. More than that, they turn them into industries and revenue producers. Historians writing of this period will note that the policy response to catastrophically high levels of drug overdose deaths was to legalize marijuana. And the response to the inability of younger people to buy homes (the “affordability crisis”) was to legalize easily accessible and addictive gambling.
A Provocative Observation
A couple of years ago, I was at city hall in my little town when I got caught in a conversation with our assistant city manager. I mentioned that I was a professor at EIU at the time, and that we had a lot of students studying public administration and public policy. In fact, many of our recent graduates wanted to do exactly what he was doing for a living.
He said something that’s really stuck with me — and I think it highlights one of academia’s biggest problems. The kinds of questions we try to answer in the ivory tower just don’t line up with the ones people in the field actually need answered.
For example, he wanted to know: How much money should a city keep in reserves to supplement its general fund during an economic downturn? What a practical and important question. Yet, despite earning a concentration in public administration in grad school, I’d never seen a single article about that topic.
Ryan Burge, introducing a post on money in one prominent Protestant denomination (emphasis added).
Unwinding the revolution
The Bolshevik nationalization of property had, in a real sense, placed a curse on the Soviet regime. Unless it could find a way to divest itself of the exclusive property rights its founders had seized, it would be torn asunder. It could no longer return property to the individuals who once had owned it, most of whom were dead, and there were no legitimate claimants other than the nation as a whole to the assets that had been created during the Soviet period. Nevertheless, if it was to survive, the regime needed to find a way to empower its citizens to own and administer property directly. The state bureaucracy, theoretically a trustee for the people, had proven to be not merely inefficient but faithless and corrupt as well.
Legends of the curse carried by ill-gotten property are staples in many cultures. Whether it is a stolen gem or the gold of the Rhine immortalized in Richard Wagner’s cycle of operas or one of the many other variants, one invariable feature is that the greed of the illegitimate owner blinds him to the danger of possession.
Throughout 1990 and 1991, as I witnessed repeated futile efforts to reform the economy, I was often reminded of these legends. Unless the state could find a way to divest itself of control over most income-producing property, reform could not take hold since no real market system of economic interchange would be possible. Unless Gorbachev could find a way to terminate the central government’s possession of most property in the Soviet Union, his own position would crumble under the pressure of newly empowered republics that were no longer willing to have their economic fate decided by bureaucrats in Moscow. Yet, like the protagonists of countless legends, he seemed oblivious to the curse. He could not bear the thought of some of his authority passing to others. By clinging to the power over property, he doomed his own office and the state he headed.
Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire. I’m quite interested in Russia, partly because it occasionally claims that it is the “Third Rome” as leader of the Church after Rome and Constantinople, partly because I know many Russian immigrants. I enjoyed this book a lot, as it avoids the cartoonish simplifications of the popular press.
Chosen troubles
Every generation has its burdens to bear, and many of Americans’ burdens—9/11, COVID, etc.—are not burdens of Americans’ choosing. But some of those burdens Americans have chosen: the national debt, inflation, the unresolved problems in our immigration system and in urban administration, the cozy crony capitalism that has contributed to economic stagnation, a class of elected political leaders that range from time-serving mediocrities (Nancy Pelosi, Mike Johnson) to corrupt authoritarians (Donald Trump) to elderly incompetents who used to be middle-aged incompetents (Joe Biden). Some of our troubles have been dropped upon us as though by some malevolent storm cloud, but others we have chosen. Into every nation’s life a little rain must fall, but the decision to spend all our umbrella-and-galoshes money on gelato and strip clubs while letting the gutters clog up and the storm sewers go unmaintained—that is on us.
…
In September, we will be a quarter-century on from 9/11. And though the idea may seem alien to many Americans right now, 25 years is more than enough time to grow up and get your act together.
I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities. They are impressive institutions filled with impressive people. But they remain stuck in the apparatus that Conant and his peers put in place before 1950. In fact, all of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s. Even being a well-rounded kid with multiple interests can be self-defeating, because admissions officers are seeking the proverbial “spiky” kids—the ones who stand out for having cultivated some highly distinct skill or identity. All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.
Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker, is buying a lot of second-hand items these days, even for gifting:
For a start, you are immune to AI slop, which is now flooding the market, especially for books and music. Technology is empowering scams and frauds at an unprecedented rate.
I now pay close attention to dates. I just can’t trust any cultural artifact made after 2023. I hear from other people who have the same concern. They don’t want slop, and the people peddling it refuse to put warning labels on it. So your only sure way to avoid it is by picking the vintage secondhand object.
Cultural conservatism originated in the experience of a way of life that was under threat or disappearing. The memory of that way of life could be preserved, and its spiritual meaning enshrined in works of art. But the way of life itself could not be so easily protected.
Roger Scruton, Conservatism
Frustration
I’d really like to link book recommendations to Bookshop.org instead of to the Bezos empire. But too often, books that have formed me do not appear at Bookshop.org.
Shorts
Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into execrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. (David Bentley Hart, of Adam Gopnik)
It is impossible to study the radical right without noticing its profound suspicion of Christianity… (Matthew Rose, The World After Liberalism)
When the traffic lights go out during a storm, it sometimes feels like waking up from a long slumber. We realize that we can work things out for ourselves, with a little faith in one another. (Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive)
I’m fully aware that today is Epiphany in Western Christianity, Theophany in Orthodox Christianity. But it’s also the 5th anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, the attempted autogulpe of 2021.
In some ways, I think 1-6-21 is worse than 9-11: we did this to ourselves, and to this day there are tens of millions of Americans who will insist that it was a great patriotic outpouring of love rather than an attempt to overturn a Presidential election that ousted the incumbent.
Baloney!, say I to keep this post as family fare.
With friends like this …
What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.
After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection ….
Jeffrey Goldberg, MAGA’s Foundational Lie. Subtitle: “The movement claims to stand with the police. Trump’s decision to pardon the cop-beaters of January 6 exposed his movement for what it is.”
And what have we gotten from the incorrigible electorate’s insistence on re-electing Trump four years after his defeat?
Defining “sedition” down
One indicator of a polity’s health is whether a citizen can be punished merely for telling the truth about the law. The signs for American democracy are not good.
This morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he has begun the process to demote Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, and reduce his pension pay. The operative facts here, naturally, are not Kelly’s past service but his current rank and service: a Democrat serving in the U.S. Senate and a political adversary of President Donald Trump.
“Six weeks ago, Senator Mark Kelly—and five other members of Congress—released a reckless and seditious video that was clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline,” Hegseth wrote on X this morning. He cited two articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Kelly, unlike the other five, holds retired military status, which makes him subject to sanctions from the Defense Department.
What Hegseth did not cite was what Kelly and his colleagues actually said in the video, and for good reason. Doing so would expose the absurdity of the charge and the abuse of power involved in the attempt to demote him. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” Kelly said. No one in the Trump administration has disputed that this is true. A more agile or even-keeled administration would have smoothly dismissed the video as irrelevant: This is true, but of course we would never issue an illegal order. (As Kelly and his lawyers have noted, Hegseth has cited the same law about disobeying illegal orders in the past.) Instead, Trump and his aides threw a fit, dubbing the Democrats the “Seditious Six.”
…
Members of the armed forces, and retirees like Kelly, are particularly susceptible to Hegseth’s abuse of power, because they can be punished by the Defense Department internally. But the chilling effect does not end with those who are serving or have served, or with the particular question of illegal orders. The administration has told the other five Democrats that it is investigating them as well. The core belief underlying all of this is as plain as it is dangerous: Criticizing Donald Trump and defending the rule of law is sedition.
“My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife,” former Representative Gabby Giffords, “recovered from a gunshot wound to the head—all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder,” he said in a statement on X. “If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it.”
Remember that Hegseth purports to be a devout Christian. He should bear in mind that “taking the name of the Lord in vain” has a deeper meaning than “don’t cuss.”
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
If you believe that all reactions ought to be ‘rational’, which means open to examination by calculative reason, then all reactions which stem from felt intuition, but which reason has trouble explaining, are at a disadvantage. This explains why a mystic will never win a debate with an atheist: he may have a truth on his side, but it will not be demonstrable through anything other than personal experience, and that doesn’t count. Therefore, he loses.
I understand why we developed a social convention that one is only obligated to believe things that can be rationally proven. But I do not understand the irrational corollaries that one is barely permitted to believe what one cannot rationally prove and certainly may not try to persuade others of it.
I don’t think those corollaries are straw men, but I have no rational proof at hand that they’re real.
One person seeks to be admired for the clothes he is wearing; another seeks the same admiration in priestly vestments. One wishes to be admired for singing on stage, another for chanting in church. One wants to be thought of as tough and cool, another as prayerful and humble. It is the same vainglory in them all.
Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven
More Anecdata
A congregation that is overflowing. On Christmas Eve morning we baptized 25 adults and 2 babies. We borrowed a second adult-size immersion “font” (actually, a Rubbermaid cattle trough) from a neighboring church, and the two priests just kept baptizing side-by-side till they got through them all.
Also, you can see that the majority of the baptized, wearing white, are young. This is going on all over the country. It’s a fine time to be Orthodox, just as a wave is rising. It’s not always been this way in the past, and may not always be this way in days to come; but right now, it’s pretty terrific.
Iona remained a place of pilgrimage, until the Protestant Reformation snuffed out its monastic life. The abbey was dissolved, and its traditions dispersed.
Nothing makes me angrier at the Protestant Reformation than two sentences like this, which recur depressingly in history.
Orthodox Christianity is the branch of the Christian faith that split from Roman Catholicism in the Great Schism of 1054.
Nothing makes me angrier at lazy journalists than a sentence like this, which recurs depressingly in stories about Orthodox Christianity.
The Orthodox side had four patriarchs. The Roman Catholic side had one patriarch, who had increasingly claimed supremacy over the four others. Prima facie, if you know nothing but that, who’s likelier to have been schismatic: the one or the four?
The Journalist even knows better, though he hasn’t bothered connecting the dots:
[Orthodox Christianity] retains the early creeds, sacraments, and saints of Western Christianity; but where the Western faith has diverged, its theology, liturgy, and rhythms of life have remained unchanged.
UPDATE: I left a thought hanging. The second sentence makes me angry because the Protestant Reformation sometimes bore an uncanny resemblance to ISIS, destroying anything “religious” it didn’t understand, including genuine and venerable Christian practices and symbols its bad religion disallowed. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.
Reaching the lost as a journeyman trade
Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.”
Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.
This account of Finney’s stunningly presumptuous theory of revival is in a section of Noll’s book titled “Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology.” I strongly suspect that this theory is how we got the foregrounding of manipulative rhetorical technique:
The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper
dimmed lights
“every head bowed and every eye closed” altar calls,
If manipulating people to an emotional climax, to get insta-saved, is your metric for “revival,” I suppose Finney was right. But I’ve lived too long and seen to much to think that such manipulated response is in any very meaningful sense a conversion to Christian faith. The wiser course is the Orthodox catechumenate.
What St. John Chrysostom knew that Jefferson Davis wanted to forget
Chrysostom’s Homilies posed problems for slaveholders, as elsewhere in this work the bishop instructed Christians to educate their slaves and manumit them as soon as possible.
Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. I had never heard of St. John Chrysostom until I entered an Orthodox Church for a Sunday observance of his Liturgy. He was perhaps the greatest preacher in Christian history — in the 4th century.
Credit where credit is due: though Gutacker is neither Orthodox nor Roman Catholic, he knows of Chrysostom.
Is Christianity a Religion?
I recall the formulation, uttered many times in my presence (or written many times in sources I read), that “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.”
As best as I can recall, I thought that was facile, though not entirely worthless, and was formulated in response to a then-current cultural bias that religion was bad (which bias I think I never shared).
But here’s a weightier explanation of why Christianity is not a religion:
Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.
Unlike immediately after the Protestant Reformation, almost all Christians today are happy to affirm that Protestants or Catholics or the Orthodox are truly Christians—and are thereby burdened to explain why their differences actually matter. The partial success but overall failure of the modern ecumenical movement has meant that many members of churches, especially Protestant, have become fundamentally post-denominational in their outlook. When churches can acknowledge that other churches from whom they are separated are equally valid as Christian churches, but don’t overcome the actual divisions, the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all, and the result is a church culture of consumer choice about where to worship and what to believe. But a faith decision based on preference is no faith decision at all—it permits no authority. The agony of those with faith is to respond to authority in this situation of choice.
Matthew Burdette, Zero Gravity. I struggled with “the unintended message is that the divisions are evidently not so theologically important after all.” It seemed to me that the unintended message is that that divisions are important — almost like we’re just being polite when we acknowledge that other traditions are Christian, too. But he said “that the divisions are … not so … important,” not “that doctrine is not important.” We’re too dismissive of the grave sin of schism seems to be his meaning.
I’m going to forego my temptation to theorize why we’re dismissive of schism.
No, on second thought, I’m going to give the short answer: we’re “making a virtue of necessity.” We can’t stop doing it, and we’re good people, aren’t we? So how can it be all that bad?
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
The best thing about New Years Day 2026 is that it means 2025 is over. President Ozymandias really hit the ground running for his second term, having surrounded himself with evil, shrewd, and power-hungry operatives this time instead of Republican normies who muted his bellowing. It’s hard to imagine (knocks on wood) that the worst of the self-aggrandizing vandalism isn’t over now.
Wordplay
Aphorisms
A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.
In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank responded to some Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa.)
In The Atlantic, David A. Graham processed the addition of “Trump” to “Kennedy” in the moniker for Washington’s premier performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes acknowledged that Senator Lindsey Graham was maybe joking that Trump should be the next pope — but maybe not: “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rued the effect of obsessive replays on the determination of what, in pro football, constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier,” he wrote. “It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.” (Bill Sclafani, Rockport, Mass.)
\[I\]n The Washington Post, Ron Charles assessed “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.” (Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Hannah Reich, Queens, among others)
Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
In The Times, Kevin Roose worried that when it comes to regulations, the stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of A.I.: “It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
In The Times, A.O. Scott sang a similar song: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Charles Kelley, Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser, Durham, N.C., among others)
I saved three of Bruni’s best as personal favorites:
Also in The Times, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling considered the importance of an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz., and Hillary Ellner, Durham, N.C., among others)
In The Times, James Hamblin parodied the typical message and script of a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson gave thanks for academia, despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.” (Dan Markovitz, Corte Madera, Calif.)
The first just feels perfect; “explosive ear discharge” in the second was the only thing in the list that made me laugh uncontrollably; Kevin Williamson captures perhaps the single most tragic thing about what “we” are doing, (purely by coincidence, of course, during the second reign of the orange barbarian).
Finally: “Some of you should walk a mile in my shoes, because then you would be a mile away from me. Keep the shoes.” (Encountered by my wife on Pinterest)
My 2025
Reading
As I always note in my footer, I blog and socialize at micro.blog in addition to here. One of my friendlies at MB, an uncommonly sane Evangelicalish pastor in Chicagoland (very keen on racial reconciliation is he), posted his 2025 reading list and inquired about what others read this year.
My response:
At 77, I feel the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck, and I already own more books than I’ll get read before he wins. Further, I’ve read many, many books in my life already, including multiple books on many perennial themes. And although I love poetry, I either had poor teachers or was too barbarian to learn how to read demanding examples.
So I don’t have much toleration for books that are cumulative of what I already understand, or are neither pleasurable nor (so far as I can tell after reading a bit) profitable, including ones that many good people were raving about.
To avoid performative listing, then (e.g., Geoffrey Hill poetry, which defeated me utterly), I’ve eliminated all the books I abandoned part way in. Finally, listing a volume of poetry doesn’t mean I’ve read it all yet.
Book
Author
Rings Trilogy
Tolkien
Albion’s Seed
David Hackett Fischer
The World After Liberalism
Matthew Rose
Coracle
Kenneth Steven
Table for Two
Amor Towles
Till We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis
Godric
Beuckner
Stalingrad
Anthony Beever
Small Is Beautiful
Schumacher
Rilke Poetry
Rilke
Apocrypha
Stephen De Young
The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition
Philip Sherrard
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe
Marshall Sahlins
Bread & Water, Wine & Oil
Fr. Meletios Webber
Lost in the Cosmos
Walker Percy
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
The Long Loneliness
Dorothy Day
The innocence of Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
Against the Machine
Paul Kingsnorth
You Have Arrived at Your Destination
Amor Towles
The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality
Extra pills are piling up across America. Excessive refills by U.S. pharmacies cost Medicare and patients $3 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to a WSJ analysis of Medicare prescription data.
WSJ. Based on my own rigorous anecdata, this is 1000% true. Which means that although mail-order pharmacies may have started it, brick-and-mortar local pharmacies are in the game now, too.
I really would rather not manually refill every prescription, but my pharmacy seems incapable of waiting 90 days to refill a 90-day prescription, and when I get a text that a prescription is ready for pick-up, I go pick it up (with rare exceptions, like a post-op opioid painkiller I definitely did not need).
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves.
Nothing in her political career before September inclined me to cut Marjorie Taylor Green any slack whatever, but something has happened since then.
Her political conversion story, if you can call it that (it’s not about changing from MAGA to progressive or any other political position), rings true.
It started at the Charlie Kirk Memorial service:
What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”
I thought at the time that should have been a wake-up call for every “Christian” Trump supporter in America. I still do. It speaks ominous things about our religious and political culture that it seems to have awoken so few.
But Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people, recognized it! And it appears that she has genuinely repented of her role in stoking hatred and division!
Time will tell; she’s been taking the potent MAGA pill for a long time, and withdrawal may prove too hard. But it’s looking good so far.
I wish her what I wished for Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981: a long and happy and private life — plus a sustained repentance.
Paganism with worship music
We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)
“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” Ross Douthat warned presciently at the dawn of Trumpism in 2016. … What Douthat calls the “post-religious right” certainly is more obnoxious and morally degenerate than its Bush-era forebear was, but it’s not correct to call a movement that’s developed its own alternate morality “post-religious.” It’s not even correct to call it “post-Christian,”…
The modern right is boisterously Christian, but without Christ. It extols Christianity aggressively but has ditched most of the moral content …
…
The purest expression of Christianity without Christ came from Trump himself, not coincidentally. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, shortly after Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved viewers by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, the president strode to the mic and said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” That’s the literal antithesis of Christian morality …
But there were no mass defections by Christians from the president’s camp after his heresy. Erika Kirk herself remains a loyal Trump ally in good standing. And why not? Hating one’s enemies is squarely in line with the three purposes of post-Christ right-wing Christianity. The first is establishing the right’s cultural hegemony over other American factions; the second is narrowing the parameters of the right-wing tribe to exclude undesirables; and the third is deemphasizing morality as a brake on ruthlessness toward one’s opponents.
Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy.
Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism
At the outset of debate
If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community. And even if at the end of the day we have to conclude that we all do not want the same goods (which can, alas, happen), it is better that we learn it at the end of the day than decide it before sunrise.
Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism.
Reinhold Niehbur, The Irony of American History
Read the fine print
On the surface, it would seem that the assurances given in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia were clear and unequivocal. But lurking in the shadowy annals of communist polemics there was a catch. To paraphrase, but not distort, Lenin’s position, nations have the right to self-determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide. And, as if that were not enough, only the Communist Party can speak for the proletariat.
Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire
Raising the bar for Tinhorn Dictators
Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice.
A new crop of moderate Democrats is trying to counter both President Trump and progressive influence in their own party. (WSJ) May their tribe increase.
And so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America)
Conservative and mainstream media were drifting apart, not just ideologically but epistemically… (Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge) This epistemic drift (of the Right, I think, not the mainstream) tempts me to despair.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” … was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. (Kevin D. Williamson)
The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror. (Kevin D. Williamson)
One category I used to apply to some of my posts became obsolete almost overnight around 1/20/2017: Zombie Reaganism. You never see that any more, and I miss it more than I thought I would.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Okay, this may seem out of place. My Sunday posts are usually “religious”- that undefinable, indispensable concept we apply to some ultimate concerns but not to others.
But there are two things I’d like to say about AI:
I like it quite a lot. I’m gradually finding more applications for it, and it can be very helpful.
I’m seriously concerned that misuse of AI can be spiritually damaging. That’s why I think this is a fit Sunday topic.
It’s not damaging because it’s demonic. I’d quit it if I thought that. I’m no demon-tamer. But there is one fairly sharp distinction between things it’s good for and things where using it can be deranging and rarely is helpful.
AI is an adjunct to the left hemisphere of your brain which can free up a lot of your time to go spend it on the right by loving other people. But we probably will screw it up by pretending that AI is your therapist, friend or lover, all of which are actually right-brain things. If you’re using it to help your right brain, you’re getting it wrong and your brain won’t be fooled. You will not fool yourself. Even if it passes the Turing test in your consciousness, in your subconscious you’ll become more anxious, more lonely, more afraid and more depressed.
I have not been using AI to do right-brain things, but neither was I thinking “Okay, having gotten all that tedious, analytical left-brain stuff out of the way, let’s do something right-brained.”
Brooks’ insistence against AI for right-brain stuff isn’t just ipse dixit. AI has no intuition, no meaning machine, no metaphysics, and all indications are that it never will. If you ask it a metaphysical question, it will do something like culling probable word sequences from college bull sessions that have been transcribed, from which it will spit out an “answer” of sorts, but not one that will prove satisfying.
This explains my sense of how spiritually dangerous it is when people take on AI boyfriends and girlfriends, or look to AI as a therapist.
So when you’ve freed up time by using AI appropriately, Brooks has six non-psychedelic ways of accessing your right hemisphere (volunteered when Andrew Sullivan, interviewing him, extolled the virtues of psilocybin for accessing meaning):
Ask questions that can’t be Googled. This is why college bull sessions were so valuable and happiness-making. If you ask a question that can be answered by AI (meaningfully, that is; AI will always make up some kind of “answer”), it’s not a right-hemisphere question.
Fall in love. Our becoming more left hemispheric is why more people are less capable and less interested in falling in love.
Worship. Look for the metaphysical. If you’re not religious, figure out what it means to transcend yourself.
Beauty. You need more beauty: moral, natural and artistic.
Look for a calling in what you do.
Find meaning in suffering.
I’ve almost entirely ignored Brooks’ Atlantic articles, assuming he was a male Oprah. I was very wrong. He’s a daily-mass Catholic on a mission from God and I intend to look at all his articles from here forward.
Not my God
Seventeenth-century thinkers, among whom “nearly all original philosophical minds were Nominalist,” showed that they could be quite loquacious when it came to talking about God based on reason. Apparently unbeknownst to some of them, it was no longer the transcendent God of traditional Christianity about whom they were speaking. Augustine had famously said in one of his sermons that “if you comprehended [cepisti], it is not God.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
On a related note, something from Father Patrick Henry Reardon has stuck with me for decades now. I can’t give an exact quote, but it was basically that every Christian heresy stems from efforts to make logical something meant to be received as mystery.
There is no need to be profane, my dear boy.
‘Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?’ ‘Now that you mention it, I don’t think we ever do give it a name. What do you call it?’ ‘We call it Hell.’ ‘There is no need to be profane, my dear boy. I may not be very orthodox, in your sense of that word, but I do feel that these matters ought to be discussed simply, and seriously, and reverently.’ ‘Discuss Hell reverently? I meant what I said. You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.’
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce. Almost thou persuadest me of purgatory, Clive.
I’ve been a Lewis fan since college, though I’ve read most of his stuff so often that I rarely read it any more.
The exceptions are The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man. The former is the Lewis book that most tangibly affected me. Lewis made it plausible that most of the day-trippers to Heaven got back on the bus to hell; I didn’t want to be like them. How that ramified is that rarest of things: something I intend to keep private.
Almost syllogistic
I enjoyed reading Martin Shaw’s latest retelling (I Saw Christ on a Hill) of his re-conversion to Christianity, settling in its Orthodox expression. It makes my own conversion (from Calvinism to Orthodoxy) look almost syllogistic in comparison.
God works in mysterious ways — perhaps especially so with dense, mythical/mystical mensches like Martin.
Shorts
But if the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go? (Brad East)
It is hard to be saved if we have them; and impossible if we love them; and scarcely can we have them, but we shall love them inordinately. (St. Augustine on riches)
[This post was edited after first publication. The meaning doesn’t change, but when I read it after it posted, I found one awkward and redundant section.]
… in the Christian East, that is. The West commemorated him yesterday.
A profitable political pairing
Two Right-coded voices, Glenn Loury and Ilya Somin, take up recent events, emblemized by Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Nick Fuentes, and reach similar conclusions: a fundamental rift in the Right is between universalists and particularists/nationalists.
For figures such as Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law. Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being—an anthropology that descends from classical philosophy, Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. For George, conservatism is first a moral project: It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person. George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy, public policy, and constitutional thought. His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent things, the universals that transcend time and place.
Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right—a coalition influenced by the populist energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as John Zmirak. This faction sees conservatism less as an expression of moral philosophy than as a defense of Western civilization: a concrete culture, a historical inheritance, with its own people, faith, memories, and vulnerabilities. This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist. It begins not with abstract principles but with cultural loyalties. Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival. Whereas George sees imperatives and violations of the moral law, Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, porous borders, and cultural disintegration.
[T]he root of the problem is the Trump-era shift of most of the American right towards ethno-nationalism. For reasons outlined in detail in my recent UnPopulist essay on this topic, nationalist movements are inherently prone to anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry. It is not surprising that anti-Semitism among MAGA conservatives has risen alongside nativism and bigotry towards other minority groups, such as Indian-Americans.
As I explained in the UnPopulist article, the only sure way to avoid this problem is to reject ethnic nationalism and instead recommit to the universalist principles of the American Founding, which the Heritage Foundation once claimed to stand for, but has more recently betrayed ….
As I skimmed Lourie’s article (which I’m pleased to see in First Things, which under R.R. Reno has been leaning increasingly toward particularist nationalism), I felt a flush of shame (or was it the shiver of a near-miss?) as I looked back on my admiration of “paleoconservative” thinkers and commentators — guys who now appear to be the ancestors of today’s ethno-nationalist types.
Even now, I sense the fortress America appeal of the nationalist appeal. But when I watch ICE trying to evict putative undesirables from the fortress before we pull up the drawbridge, and see antisemitism rising among the nationalists as well, I can’t help coming down on the side of human dignity: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Slouching Toward Something Worse
[Ben] Shapiro originally hired [Candace] Owens at The Daily Wire, thereby helping to launch her career into the stratosphere. The fact that he now feels the need to try and drive a stake through her heart “contains the entire story of the conservative movement within it,” in the words of Substacker John Ganz.
…
[Rod] Dreher longs for Vance to take a firm stand against Fuentes and his followers. But will he?
So far, there’s no sign of it. And yes, that includes in the recent UnHerd interview, where Vance told Fuentes (in the debased public rhetoric favored by populists) to “eat shit.” The vice president made clear that his rightward volley was provoked, not by any of Fuentes’ political views, but by him insulting Vance’s (South Asian) wife. “Anyone who attacks my wife,” Vance declared, will be attacked in turn, “whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes.”
That’s right: the sitting vice president of the United States made clear he was equally inclined to rise up in defensive anger against a former White House Press Secretary from the mainstream opposition party and a man who regularly proclaims his admiration for Adolf Hitler and loathing for Jews.
I’m afraid anyone placing their hopes in Vance serving in the role of gatekeeper or force for moderation is going to be sorely disappointed.
…
It’s not clear a right-populist political movement needs policy intellectuals at all. After all, intellectuals are elites who think they sometimes know better than the elected Leader of the People. That is unacceptable. What a right-populist political movement needs, instead, is propagandists to justify what the Leader already intends to do.
In case you’ve forgotten, do not trust any high-generality assessment of JD Vance by Rod Dreher. Dreher “discovered” Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, and his discovery elevated mediocre sales to stratospheric sales. He and Vance are now friends, Rod feels a personal investment in him, and Vance probably feels a debt of gratitude to Rod for launching his explosive political rise.
So Dreher is just not capable of objectivity about his friend, and that’s probably to his credit; dissecting friends is kinda reptilian — and certainly is a deviation from the conservative tendency on Jonathan Haidt’s Loyalty/betrayal moral foundations axis.
Too ad hoc to be fascist
Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.
But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power.
…
He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.
…
Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán ….
Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window
French Integrity
The headline read, “What It’s Like to Experience the 2016 Election as Both a Conservative and a Sex Abuse Survivor.”
Nancy French, Ghosted. As the book blurb has it, “when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.”
Part of the reason for David French and Nancy French becoming personae non grata in much of the North American white Evangelical world was candor, like in the cited article Nancy wrote, and their various relatively unflinching looks at topics like sexual abuse at a very popular Evangelical summer camp for kids. I learned recently that they fairly quietly have moved out of their deep red part of Tennessee to the Chicago area (I was aware that Tennessee Evangelicalism exhibited pretty unrelenting and vocal antipaty to Frenches). That move won’t do much for Nancy’s work as a ghost-writer in Evangelical and Conservative circles, but they should at least be able to find a Church whose Christianity matches theirs (Reformed-tinged Evangelical) without the political tribalism. (That’s my read on it.)
The differences between their Evangelical/Reformed piety and my Orthodoxy manifests in my ill-ease with some of their takes on things (I will never again trust a David French endorsement of a movie or television series, for instance), but I’ll give them high marks for trying to act with integrity (which endears them to me despite reservations).
Quantum physics
Quantum entanglement blows my mind. How do they even find the entangled needles in the cosmic haystack to study entanglement?
That they manage to find and study them makes me sympathetic to the predictions that we’re going to figure out everything — predictions I nonetheless think are ultimately delusional.
Trying to deal with things like this has sent me back to Iain McGilchrist for a second round of mind-bending, this time via The Matter with Things.
The mixture of politics and religion in this theory makes my head hurt, and my eyes avert, but I suspect that Mattingly knows more about Kirk, and about the consequences of his assassination, than I do.
Jingoists and Patriots
The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us.
To prepare young Oklahomans for the demands of a high-tech future, the state’s board of education mandated instruction about “discrepancies” in the 2020 presidential election. (Via George Will)
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
In recent years, I’ve read a lot of American religious history, and I’ve shared snippets of those histories constantly. This year brought a particular question into focus:
A theological Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in the early 1740s and waking up half a century later would have found Americans speaking his language with such a decidedly strange inflection as to constitute a new dialect; yet those Americans would have been hard-pressed to tell him why and how their speech had grown so different from his own.
…
The striking contrast was that amid America’s post-Revolutionary tide of antiformalism, antitraditionalism, democratization, and decentralization, trust in the Bible did not weaken but became immeasurably stronger. It was still “the Bible alone,” as proclaimed during the Reformation, that American Protestants trusted. But it was also “the Bible alone” of all historic religious authorities that survived the antitraditional tide and then undergirded the remarkable evangelical expansion of the early nineteenth century. … Deference to inherited authority of bishops and presbyters was largely gone, obeisance to received creeds was largely gone, willingness to heed the example of the past was largely gone. What remained was the power of intuitive reason, the authority of written documents that the people approved for themselves, and the Bible alone.
By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.” Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will. Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.
I highly, highly recommend both Noll and Hatch if American religious history is of interest to you. Their two tomes are among my most heavily-highlighted (along with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which sort of sets the stage for America’s religious tragedy). But I never synthesized them explicitly.
One of the big ideas that captured my imagination this year, and that seemed at least a start on my overdue synthesis, is that Evangelicalism is not unequivocally Protestant. It took Brad East to water and fertilize Noll’s and Hatch’s seeds:
As I use it, “evangelical” names non-Catholic Christians who are “low church.” By this I mean that evangelicals are:
1) biblicist, meaning the Bible isn’t just chief among many authorities, including church tradition, but the one and only authority;
2) autonomous, meaning their organizational leadership structures are either local or, if trans-local, then voluntary and quite loose;
3) egalitarian, meaning they either do not ordain pastors or, if they do, then the qualifications for and prerogatives of the ministry are modest;
4) entrepreneurial, meaning churches are often analogous to start-up business ventures, founded and led by charismatic individuals who cast a vision for the community;
5) evangelistic, meaning proselytization is high on the agenda, using money, grassroots training, and parachurch ministries to support foreign missions and local efforts at gaining new converts;
6) affective, meaning their piety is focused on the heart, which is more likely to find expression in music, song, and spontaneous spiritual gifts than in robes, rituals, and sacraments.
a third species in the genus of Western Christianity. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it has taken more than two centuries to come into clear view. It goes by many names, but the best is also the most hotly contested: evangelical.
But that third species has changed:
[A]s I have documented almost obsessively, biblicist churches are moving in a post-biblicist direction while younger generations have utterly lost even the rudiments of biblical literacy, along with literal literacy. (Translation: They don’t read, period.)
Beyond such literacy—beyond intensive, universal lay Bible study (should we call it IULBS?)—there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.
Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
For whatever reason, I’ve been doing a bit more reflection than usual. Piling several of those reflections into a single, long post didn’t feel right, so this likely will be followed by other stand-alone posts, each with my fingerprints all over it:
Our human moral agency is not so strong that it can overcome every conceivable shock and influence thrown at us. Sometimes, human character turns bad owing to things beyond our control. “Moral luck” is thus a way to raise the question of whether we truly possess a meaningful freedom and true moral self-determination. If the right temptation could bring any of us down, in what sense is one person truly “good” and another “bad”?
Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty. The first time I read this, it really resonated with me.
Is a man virtuous who avoids adultery only by being so homely and mediocre that beautiful women don’t come on to him? Is he more virtuous than the handsome, powerful adulterer he accuses satyriasis?
Or again:
“Lucy,” said the trader, “your child’s gone; you may as well know it first as last. You see, I know’d you couldn’t take him down south; and I got a chance to sell him to a first-rate family, that’ll raise him better than you can.” The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice. His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
This, my favorite excerpt from W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being, more properly belongs to March 25. But Annunciation Gospels get read at Nativity, too, and Auden subtitled his poem A Christmas Oratorio, so here goes:
GABRIEL.
Mary, in a dream of love Playing as all children play, For unsuspecting children may Express in comic make-believe The wish that later they will know Is tragic and impossible; Hear, child, what I am sent to tell: Love wills your dream to happen, so Love’s will on earth may be, through you, No longer a pretend but true.
MARY
What dancing joy would whirl My ignorance away? Light blazes out of the stone, The taciturn water Bursts into music, And warm wings throb within The motionless rose: What sudden rush of Power Commands me to command?
GABRIEL
When Eve, in love with her own will, Denied the will of Love and fell, She turned the flesh Love knew so well To knowledge of her love until Both love and knowledge were of sin: What her negation wounded, may Your affirmation heal to-day; Love’s will requires your own, that in The flesh whose love you do not know, Love’s knowledge into flesh may grow.
MARY
My flesh in terror and fire Rejoices that the Word Who utters the world out of nothing, As a pledge of His word to love her Against her will, and to turn Her desperate longing to love, Should ask to wear me, From now to their wedding day, For an engagement ring.
GABRIEL
Since Adam, being free to choose, Chose to imagine he was free To choose his own necessity, Lost in his freedom, Man pursues The shadow of his images: To-day the Unknown seeks the known; What I am willed to ask, your own Will has to answer; child, it lies Within your power of choosing to Conceive the Child who chooses you.
No commentary can improve “that the Word … as a pledge of His word to love her … should ask to wear me, from now to their wedding day, for an engagement ring.”
I’d be remiss if I failed my annual sharing of this gem from YouTube.
I love the guy’s chanting, which sounds exotic to my ears as it likely will to yours. But heed even more the paradoxes expressed in the captions. While I can’t sing like that, I sing those same paradoxes in English, with music less captivating but less distracting, too.
The religious/secular distinction is not a neutral set of descriptive categories, and the idea that religion has a greater tendency than the secular to promote violence is not a commonsense observation about the world. Both are ideological constructs that privilege certain Western secularist arrangements.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idoloatry
Don’t try to titrate poison
This French reactionary antisemitism came to a head in 1940, when the Nazis invaded, France surrendered, and Philippe Pétain became the dictator. Right-wing reactionaries, (including the vast majority of French bishops) were all too happy for the regime to enact laws that limited the civil rights of Jews. Many of those same bishops would later regret this when the cruelty of the anti-Jewish legislation became too blatant to ignore. In the end, around 70,000 Jews who had been under the jurisdiction of Vichy France would perish in concentration camps.
I sometimes worry that populist rabble-rousers, with the roused rabble SWATting and making death threats against recalcitrant authorities, were the inevitable result of the “conservative” politics I long favored.
I don’t think that’s true, but once stung, twice cautious: these days, when I see an opinion piece that seems to make sense, but with comment boxes full of cheering conspiracy theorists and antisemites, I reflexively drop (or at least loosen my grip on) the opinion.
If you’re looking for rigorous logic in that, you’ll not find it. It’s just one geezer’s heuristic.
Primarying faithful legislators
The first time I recall hearing of Charlie Kirk was in connection with “The Falkirk Center,” the name being a portmanteau of “Falwell” and “Kirk.” Yeah, that Falwell. The Junior one. The sleazy one driven out of Liberty University eventually.
So I had a bias against Kirk from the start. No, he didn’t deserve to be murdered. Nowhere near. But 3+ months is long enough. I’m not going to bite my tongue any longer about the him and his Turning-Point-this-and-Turning-Point-that constellation of Christianish MAGA adjuncts.
He wasn’t my cup of tea. His Christianity was substantially alien to any traditional Christianity. I object to him being lionized as a Christian martyr and to the erection of a sort of cult around him. The more I learn about Turning Point shamelesslessly subordinating its version of Christianity to the will of über-pagan narcissist Donald Trump, the more it nauseates me.
All that to introduce much less:
[A]s early as August 18, Charlie Kirk said in an X post: “We will support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.” Months later, on the eve of the vote, Trump ratcheted up the warnings to Indiana Republicans, saying as part of a lengthy post on Truth Social: “Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats. … He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!”
The way primary elections tend to turn out the most extreme members of the party base, it’s possible that primarying Indiana Legislators who voted for the will expressed by the people of Indiana, rather than for the imperious wills of Donald Trump and Turning Point Action, will succeed. But I think not. I think the spell is broken. I’m looking forward to three years of quacking.(Yeah, that’s got a bit of wishcasting in it.)
Turning Point just concluded its conference
I suppose if Turning Point USA wanted its conference to make a big splash, it accomplished its mission. But a movement led by a president who made regular appearances in the world of professional wrestling now has rallies that resemble WrestleMania with podcasters, complete with boasts and threats and chest-thumping.
When you book a bunch of clowns, don’t be surprised if you end up with a circus.
Wherein I register a rare disagreement with Kevin D. Williamson
A person who evacuates is emptying his bowels. A person removed from a place of danger is a person being evacuated. If you have 100,000 people evacuating all at once … well, maybe they won’t notice it too much in Seattle.
Those 100,000 were not ordered to evacuate; they were ordered to leave, to seek safety, to head for the hills, to make forhigher ground, etc.
I love Williamson, but he’s lost me on this one. From the Department of Usage Makes Proper, evacuate has become broader than he insists. Even I, a card-carrying curmudgeon, would not use “evacuate” as he does; I’d add “evacuates his bowel” if that’s what I meant.
I completely agree with Williamson on something else, though. After alluding to things like “messaging” in the upcoming election, he simplifies things:
I would like to suggest a relatively simple approach: Democrats should run on a platform of what it is they actually intend to do in office, and that platform should be what they believe to be the right thing. I would offer the same advice to Republicans if they had not made it so perfectly clear that they cannot and will not do any such thing, that their party and their movement is incapable of candor and good faith.
Thoughts at 3 am
That’s a metaphor. I rarely if ever fret about things at 3 am, and it I fret, it’s likelier to be about family or things closer to me than politics.
My current “political” concerns, though, seem to be antisemitism and the quest for certainty — even false certainty preferred to uncertainty.
According to the Manhattan Institute’s recent survey of registered Republicans and others who voted for Donald Trump last fall, no less than 25 percent of those under 50 admit—admit—to expressing antisemitic views. Among those over 50, just 4 percent do.
The Nazis gave antisemitism a bad name. The memory of that is fading.
[Bari] Weiss has an impossible dilemma [in running CBS]. She’s in charge of a first-world news organization that aims to hold government accountable (especially when it’s run by Republicans) but was appointed to the position to satisfy a third-world regime led by a demagogic boor who believes “news” should look like … this.
…
“The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation,” the president declared this morning. “Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” He didn’t specify the supposed “national security” threat that prompted that, but earlier this month he accused the Times of “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” behavior for reporting on his obviously declining health.
That’s the kind of media Trump wants. Not one where Stephen Miller does more interviews but one where you go to prison if you acknowledge the plainly observable fact that the president sounds addled.
This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.
Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files. I immediately recognized the first image of Epstein and deduced that it had been Photoshopped from a widely distributed photo of Epstein hugging Ghislaine Maxwell. The second image seemed to be an AI rendering. (To add to the confusion, images reportedly do exist of Epstein cuddling children.) I let him know that the imagery was fake, and a distinctly non-yuletidy conversation ensued. Yes, Epstein was a heinous pedophile and convicted sex offender. Also, the internet is awash in fake, traumatizing slop that’s being used to score points in an ongoing information war. Happy holidays!
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, Via Peggy Noonan
Shorts
In such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty. (Phil Ochs)
He is like a strange general who can’t quietly establish camp or dig new fortifications. He shoots his cannon for no reason, just for the sound. (Peggy Noonan describing you-know-who)
He just can’t do intimacy. He can’t do reassurance. His fireside manner has always been gasoline. (Andrew Sullivan)
Prediction markets may promise clarity, but what they really offer is another way to feel excitement in a world that feels rigged. (Charlie Warzel)
Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them. (Michelle Goldberg about the rise of toxic influencer Candace Owens)
In The Times, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer … mused about Trump’s troubles prosecuting his perceived enemies: “Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.” (Via Frank Bruni)
In her newsletter, Stacey Patton recognized the humiliation of the Trump administration’s repeated failures to convince a grand jury of its case against Letitia James: “In federal court, a prosecutor not getting an indictment is like a chef burning cereal.” (Via Frank Bruni)
A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. (David French)
AI Sends School Into Lockdown After It Mistook a Student’s Clarinet for a Gun. (Futurism – H/T TMD)
We take the state’s monopoly of violence for granted, but when that monopoly is challenged, people turn to gangsters to keep the peace. Eli Lake, A History of Tough Jews (podcast episode)
Why these people are coming our way is that Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism. (Former Vice President Mike Pence on the (ahem!) evacuation of the Heritage Foundation, with refugees fleeing to a Pence-founded, more traditionally conservative, alternative.)
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 