Sunday, November 2

The final blow

A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last—to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

The Great Schism between the papacy and Eastern Christian patriarchs is conventionally dated 1054, and not without reason. But those who dig deeper (or, like me, who read those who have dug deeper) tend to think that the 1054 schism was curable until this sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders.

A quintessential American heresy

[L]iving by no rule but the Bible turned out to be a defense against virtually the same list of enemies as living up to the standards of republicanism: “Many are republicans as to government, and are yet half republicans, being in matters of religion still bent to a Catechism, creed, covenant, or a superstitious priest. Venture to be as independent in things of religion as in those which respect the government in which you live.” Few Protestants expressed themselves as flamboyantly as [Elias] Smith in the early republic, but most followed where he led.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I was reminded this week of a distinction that’s relevant here. I believe I learned it from the late Richard John Neuhaus, who I followed closely starting sometime in the 1980s. I won’t give a name (other than “quintessential American heresy”) to the view expressed so flamboyantly by Elias Smith, a view which I once effectively held, but I’m now in the camp of “ecclesial Christians”: those for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.

I decidedly do not venture to be independent in things of religion, but very consciously submitted to the tradition of the Church particularly about Mary, the Mother of God-in-the-flesh, who was a stumbling-block to me as she has been to other Protestants (who in our generation call her “blessed” only sullenly, bound by scripture to do so).

The worst of the worst

Church management is a tricky and complicated business. I am glad that it is not my job. But I do know this much: The church is there for Gyp the Blood and Humpty Jackson, for Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Booth and me. If there is no room for the worst of the worst in your church, then you do not have a church: You have a crappy book club.

Kevin D. Williamson (hyperlinks added).

Work and play

But there is the question. What, precisely, is “the business of life”? We can get onto an endless carousel if we try to decide which is the serious stuff of life, work or play. It is possible to take either view: either we toil away our eight hours so that we can get down to the real stuff—pleasure and love and recreation—or we enjoy periodic intervals of escape from the real stuff, the work.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? I would not have retired had I thought the real stuff was work; that’s just livelihood, not life.

What evangelism can obscure

With the clergy focused on the task of evangelism, their doctrines received so little scrutiny that laypeople took them for granted: the Bible was an infallible guide in every situation, and the church taught what was written in it. Coming into contact with people who read the Bible differently, southerners, unconscious of their own scrim of interpretation, concluded that those others were not Christians.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

Fallen hero

Jérôme Lejeune was a hero of the National Right to Life Committee for his stance against aborting unborn children with Down syndrome.

He also was a thief—a stealer of glory that belonged to others.

It was apparently how the game was played back then. (Gift Link) That may not have changed much.

There’s probably a better moral to this little story than I can write: convention is no assurance of morality.

Upright life, sound doctrine

Over and over again he insisted that in electing an abbot upright life and soundness of doctrine were to be the prime considerations, not rank or family influence. ’I tell you in all sincerity,’ he said, ‘that as a choice of evils I would far rather have this whole place where I have built the monastery revert forever, should God so decide, to the wilderness it once was, rather than have my brother in the flesh, who has not entered upon the way of truth, succeed me as abbot. Take the greatest care, brothers, never to appoint a man as father over you because of his birth; and always appoint from among yourselves, never from outside the monastery.

Bede et al, Bede

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

November 1

MAGA nihilists

Sometime in 1985 I had lunch with Sam Francis in the cafeteria of The Washington Times, where we both worked. You may never have heard of Sam Francis, but MAGA people (at least the more intellectual ones) know him as one of the seminal thinkers of their movement.

The lunch was awkward because I found him dark and creepy (and he probably found me naïve). Back then I didn’t understand that his way of thinking would triumph in conservative circles and my way of thinking would be vanquished. I don’t think he won because he was a flat-out racist, though he was. (He was later fired for writing a column arguing that “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin.”) I think he won because he was a revolutionary, while I was a conservative. I wanted to reform things; he wanted to burn it all down.

…

Sam Francis (who died in 2005) explicitly cited Gramsci as his role model as he waged his culture war struggles. Christopher Rufo does the same today. This is why Trump is going after the universities, public broadcasting and the Kennedy Center. Francis once wrote, “The main focus should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime — within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it.”

David Brooks, Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game (Gift link)

I was reading Sam Francis at roughly the time Brooks had lunch with him and for some years thereafter. He was brilliant (which is little assurance of a sound mind). He also was purged by more respectable conservatives—my kind of conservatives—for his increasingly explicit antisemitism.

Joseph Sobran followed a similar trajectory. He, too, was brilliant, but less radical than Francis (and thus less consequential). He was a devout Catholic, and his antisemitism was never explicit, but William F. Buckley wouldn’t tolerate even a whiff of it.

I viscerally detested Christopher Rufo almost from my first notice of him, which involved his gloating over making the term “Critical Race Theory” toxic while leaving it vague enough that it could beslime anyone he cared to beslime. I doubt that Rufo will be as consequential as Francis or even Sobran in the long run, but we’re in an era of pas d’ennemis á Droite, and there’s no magisterial authority trying to purge him.

Sentient and respectable conservatives like me necessarily ask ourselves if MAGA was always the eventuality of our political preferences, if we were all embryonic Sam Fracises and Joe Sobrans all along.

I don’t think so, but I’m increasingly appreciating that some truths simply need not be uttered—because of how very, very foreseeably they can be abused. To deny them would be sin, to utter them, imprudent. I save them for my private journal now when I recognize that.

Pardon me?

On Tuesday morning, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report on former President Joe Biden’s use of autopen signatures on the many pardons and commutations he handed out during his term, and particularly near its end. Many of these were scandalous enough taken on their own terms, but what made them particularly outrageous was the suspicion that the bulk of these acts were the work of Biden’s staff, not the senescent president himself. One might reasonably understand how Biden found the time to preemptively pardon his family members, breaking frequent promises never to do so, but it was harder to believe that he was setting aside personal time to commute the sentences of people like Maryland’s thrice-murdering “Black Widow” killer. The House report confirms what voters long suspected: Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and, after he dropped out of the race, used his autopen as part of their campaign to set a new record for presidential clemency.

The GOP argument that Biden abused his pardon power in an unacceptable way is undermined, however, by Trump’s nonchalant, even gleeful pardoning of absolute sleazeballs who have ties to his own family business. There aren’t a lot of large financial institutions that are willing to simultaneously do work with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts, but the crypto firm Binance did so. Back in November 2023, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. In a court filing, U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said Zhao caused “significant harm to U.S national security” through his criminal acts and “violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale.” But not only did Trump pardon him earlier this month, he claimed Zhao was in fact persecuted by the Biden administration. It gets worse. The Wall Street Journal reported in August: “The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election—some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.” Trump’s crypto fortune is of course facilitated by a partnership with “an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.” It’s an egregious decision that is unlikely to generate more than a peep of objection from congressional Republicans.

National Review email.

Who damaged the nation more: Biden with his autopen pardons or Trump with his blanket pardon of the January 6 rioters and targeted pardons of lucrative cronies? (That’s a rhetorical question, of course.)

Indictment

Let us not belabor the obvious truth that what the Western world calls an “energy” crisis ineptly disguises what happens when you can no longer control markets, are chained to your colonies (instead of vice versa), are running out of slaves (and can’t trust those you think you still have), can’t, upon rigorously sober reflection, really send the Marines, or the Royal Navy, anywhere, or risk a global war, have no allies only business partners, or “satellites” and have broken every promise you ever made, anywhere, to anyone. I know what I am talking about: my grandfather never got the promised “forty acres, and a mule,” the Indians who survived that holocaust are either on reservations or dying in the streets, and not a single treaty between the United States and the Indian was ever honored. That is quite a record.

James Baldwin, Open Letter to the Born Again, p. 785.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings

The problem is that Trump, perhaps owing to his nouveau riche background and the carefully wrought deformity of his soul, has a taste for the trappings of aristocracy—a princely estate as imagined by a trust-fund dork from Queens. You can see it in his enthusiasm for ghastly imperial furnishings, in his love of monarchical pomp, and even in his sometimes evident desire to pass something of his political position along to the sons he obviously despises. … But what is most objectionably kingly about Trump is not his Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace bad taste but his personalist posture, e.g., treating the White House as though it were his personal property, to be knocked down and rebuilt at his whim, treating the Department of Justice as though it were his personal goon squad, treating judges as though they were his personal servants and factota, etc. Trump talks about “my generals” and unilaterally raised tariffs on Canadian goods because someone in Ontario hurt his personal feelings.

L’État, c’est moi—it is not only gilt moldings that Trump has taken from Louis XIV.

The king spoke, and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty?”

While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, Oh, king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.

Nebuchadnezzar had to learn things the hard way. Julius Caesar, too. Why should Americans be any different?

Kevin D. Williamson

Pas d’ennemis à Droite, Heritage Foundation Edition

[A] video of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, went viral. “There has been speculation that Heritage is distancing itself from Tucker Carlson over the past 24 hours,” Roberts tweeted, reacting to the uproar over Carlson’s notorious interview with head groyper Nick Fuentes. “I want to put that to rest right now.”

And that’s what he did. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” he said in the clip, declining to explain why criticism of Carlson is “slander” and who that “someone else” whose agenda is being served might be. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains—and, as I have said before, always will be—a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Nick Catoggio

Stagnation

Today’s suburbs are different. Highways and zoning have broken the feedback loop between location and value. These developments are typically built to a fixed, finished state and then locked down through zoning codes that discourage or prohibit change. There’s no natural process of maturing or intensification. No organic evolution. Just a one-time buildout, followed by stagnation and decline.

America Should Sprawl? Not if We Want Strong Towns

Snippets

  • “Quantity is a quality of its own.” (Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, on the United States advantage in WW II. German stuff was engineered better, but we made up for it with more stuff, much more stuff. Via Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast (Gift link))
  • “[E]very good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy … What if AI’s promise for American business proves to be a mirage? What happens then?” (Matteo Wong, Charlie Warzel, Here’s How the AI Crash Happens)

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.

(Sigh!) Politics, 10/30/25

General

History rhyming

In the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, voters were faced with two revolting choices: David Duke, a neo-Nazi and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Edwin Edwards, a former three-term Democratic governor who had been indicted and acquitted on corruption charges.

Edwards’ supporters printed bumper stickers with what became an unofficial slogan of his campaign: “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.”

Well, today, New Yorkers face an equally unpalatable choice between the Marxist Zohran Mamdani and Andrew M. Cuomo, the sleazy former three-term Democratic governor who was forced to resign in a sexual harassment scandal and whom many New Yorkers blame for the deaths of their grandparents during the covid pandemic.

Well, to those New Yorkers I say: “Vote for the Sleazeball: It’s important.”

Mark A. Thiessen.

I’m inclined to think the national press is paying too much attention to the NYC mayoral race, but maybe Mamdani really is the Democrats’ future, not just a lefty press reverie. But I always chuckle at the old “Vote for the Crook” story from Huey Longistan.

Not even subtle

“They say” that some guy named Jack Posobiec is the heir apparent of Charlie Kirk as top MAGA influencer. Among other things, he’s author of a book titled Unhuman, which is a polemic against progressives.

The working title for the German translation surely is “Untermensch.”

National

Incorrigibly ignorant

[V]arious right-wingers feigned confusion earlier this month about the “No Kings” rallies across the country. What exactly were the protesters protesting, they wondered? Where did they get the idea that Donald Trump presumes himself a king?

Well, in the nine days since those protests were held, the president slapped a new 10 percent tax on Americans for no better reason than that he’s mad about a TV commercial; he’s preparing to go to war with Venezuela without authorization or even meaningful input from Congress; he’s told people privately that he’s effectively the speaker of the House now, insofar as the House still exists after being out for about a month; he’s pardoned a corrupt Chinese crypto mogul who helped enrich him and the Trump family; he’s thinking of looting nearly a quarter billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury to reward himself for beating the rap on various crimes he almost certainly committed; and he demolished part of the White House so that he could build himself a ballroom worthy of a proper palace.

As others have noted, some of Trump’s sins against democracy are so quintessentially monarchical that they appear in the bill of particulars against George III in the Declaration of Independence. If you can digest all of that and still end up scratching your head at what the “No Kings” demonstrators were on about, it’s not because you don’t understand. It’s because you won’t understand. You’ve resolved psychologically not to take Trump’s autocratic desires seriously because doing so would force you to choose between loyalty to your tribe and loyalty to the Founders’ vision.

Nick Catoggio

Small favors

Kudos to Republicans for passive-aggressively monkey-wrenching, at least as to the Federal District courts, Trump’s effort to pack the federal courts with political cronies rather than qualified judges.

Senate Republicans are holding firm against President Donald Trump’s pressure to scrap a longtime tradition in Congress’ upper chamber, issuing a substantive rebuke to his desires and openly disagreeing with him on the issue.

Trump has repeatedly called on the Senate GOP to eliminate its blue slip practice, which allows senators from the minority party to block judicial appointments such as lower court nominees and U.S. attorneys who hail from their states. The president has argued that Democratic senators are obstructing his nominees, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is staunch in his resolve not to take away the century-old tradition.

“After a hundred years, why would you do away with it?” he told The Dispatch. “It’s supported by a hundred members of the United States Senate.”

Senate Republicans’ defiance of Trump here is perhaps the most substantive stand they have taken since they stonewalled the nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general after last year’s election. To this point, members of the congressional GOP have often raised concerns or pushed for more information about Trump’s actions, but rarely have they obstructed his agenda. This time, however, they are refusing to sacrifice one of the Senate’s time-honored traditions, one that guards Congress’ power in an age where the legislative branch is often happy to cede authority to the executive.

Charles Hilu, Senate Republicans Are Actually Defying Donald Trump.

Passive-aggression is probably all we can hope for from Republican Senators who often appear emasculated by Trump.

But continuing the blue slip tradition is only part of it. Unusually high numbers of nominees to various offices have been withdrawn after back-channel communication:

[T]he Trump administration has faced some very significant resistance more privately to a large number of nominees, and that this has led a surprising number of them to be withdrawn. So far this year, the White House has withdrawn 49 nominations for Senate-confirmed positions. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out earlier this week, that is a (much) larger number of nominees than any modern president has had to withdraw from consideration in any year of his presidency.

And it is a particularly large number of withdrawn nominees in the first year of a new presidency. Ronald Reagan withdrew five nominations in his first year; for George H.W. Bush it was three; for Bill Clinton six; for George W. Bush seven; for Barack Obama twelve; for both Donald Trump in his first term and for Joe Biden the number was 13. The year is not even over and Trump has had to withdraw 49 nominations.

…

This is surely in part because it is in no one’s interest to draw attention to it. The administration wants to always look triumphant, regardless of reality. Republican senators want to appear to be firmly backing the president, which they mostly are ….

Yuval Levin

Your tax dollars at work

Who says government can’t do anything right? ICE is advertising for thuggish goons and it’s getting them.

In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline” and even save “civilization.”

Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?

Says who? Says mild-mannered true conservative octagenarian George Will (When ICE came for a U.S. citizen and Army veteran).

And just like that, bribes are a normal business expense in Trumpistan

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio, To Bribe or Not to Bribe

The kid with the Golden Shield

This kid (who supposedly has a law degree already) can magically provide a “Golden Shield” of immunity from prosecution for assassination, murder, torture and other governmental passtimes by writing a secret opinion that they’re legally A-Okay. Jack Goldsmith tells us all about it.

Not that the President needs it, mind you.

I wonder where the snowflakes are?

Any writer these days, who hasn’t been radicalized or redpilled, can tell you who the snowflakes are now. The people who were not long ago the loudest in preaching free speech are today the quickest to silence anyone who uses it to disagree with them. The people who railed against cancel culture are now trying to use the machinery of the state to try to destroy anyone who dares to posthumously criticize Charlie Kirk and the stances he took—which, it should be continually pointed out, included proudly sending buses to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s the people who love to dish out jokes and criticisms, but are not only outraged at Jimmy Kimmel’s distasteful jokes about Kirk, but fine with overt government pressure to take him off the air.

Ryan Holiday.

50 days after assassination, I think de mortuis nil nisi bonum passes its freshness date.

A real downer

Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.

Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.

…

[I]f Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.

To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.

…

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming.

I got over naïve American exceptionalism a very long time ago — or so I like to imagine. The speed of our descent astonished (astonishes? do we have further to go?) me; that America was capable of deep descent does not.

And I don’t know how to climb out of the hole in an America where thinking outside the tribe will draw death threats for both the politician and his or her family.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Thursday, 10/30/25, politics-free

Radical autonomy is a delusion

In partial response Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” just published by Lisa Siraganian in Academe, a healthy dose of realism versus sanctimony:

As for insisting on your right to complete self-governance, free from “secondary, external aims,” as Siraganian puts it … well, if you expect someone else to pay you to pursue truth, at some point, you must accept some secondary, external aims.

Academics tend to recoil from such a crass and mercenary idea, and fair enough, but the world is a crass and mercenary place. We talk about pursuing truth for its own sake, but most academics are pursuing it in exchange for money they can use to satisfy their many less elevated needs. The people who provide that money want something in return. Many will not be content to know that somewhere the global stock of Truth is increasing. Especially if one of the Truths you insist on is that they are dim-witted bigots.

Megan McArdle

Not victimless

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an announcement. “In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults,” he wrote on X.

…  

It is odd to treat adult spaces as though the marker of maturity is simply abundant pornography. In response to Altman’s post, one user asked: “Why do age-gates always have to lead to erotica? Like, I just want to be able to be treated like an adult and not a toddler, that doesn’t mean I want perv-mode activated.” Altman ducked the question, replying simply, “You won’t get it unless you ask for it.” 

But the cultural impact of increasingly violent pornography makes it obvious he is wrong. Women who have never watched pornography will still meet men in their dating pool who are disgusted by pubic hair, since those men’s appetites have been formed to desire pre-pubescent-appearing women. Women will meet men who assume women commonly enjoy anal sex. And increasingly, women meet men who assume choking is a natural part of sex.

Leah Libresco Sargeant, You Can’t Opt Out of Sam Altman’s Erotica.

(And seemingly everybody takes for granted that “dating” means some kind of sex, notes Tipsy.)

Incorrigibly ignorant

All those nice scientists from 1970 to 2000 sitting in their Presbyterian and Lutheran church pews on Sunday telling the world that feeding dead cows to cows was a wonderful way to feed everyone because their parts-and-pieces worldview said so. Eventually, they were jolted out of their self-assured righteousness when mad cow raised its ugly head. But they didn’t repent in sackcloth and ashes, like they should have. Oh no, they went about their Western thought processes with nary a break in stride.

Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain’t Normal

USSR and Russia

Epilogue

The USSR is not quite dead in Russia. It has just shrunk to the size of Russia proper.
VITALY TRETYAKOV, July 1992

Not a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed.
BORIS YELTSIN

An unreformed Russia will not have the strength for empire. A reformed Russia will not have the will.
JACK F. MATLOCK, JR., 1995

Jack F. Matlock , Autopsy on an Empire

Snippet

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.

Simone Weil, Love in the Void

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

25 years

Early Sunday posting.

Sunday is the 25th ordination anniversary of our Priest, Fr. Gregory. He was getting close to retirement age already, but he has worked tirelessly well beyond normal retirement age, and we have seen huge numerical growth and, I think, growth in our sense of community. I’m not leaving out spiritual growth; I just don’t know if I’m a competent judge of that or have any right to try. By the criterion of “what you convert them with is what you convert them to,” we should be doing fine.

Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV

  • A man of significant ecclesiastical responsibility who gets to age sixty-nine without attracting attention to his thinking has made a deliberate choice.
  • Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, he saw what Catholic immigration to the United States could accomplish—and how the lack of deep adherence, interior conversion, and evangelization led it to unravel in only a few generations.

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, Two Takes on Pope Leo

The Fissiparous Principle

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

Union with God

But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

This idea lingers

This dual idea of the depravity of infants and the perversity of their natural will led Puritans to the conclusion that the first and most urgent purpose of child rearing was what they called the “breaking of the will.” This was a determined effort to destroy a spirit of autonomy in a small child—a purpose which lay near the center of child rearing in Massachusetts. The idea of “will-breaking” was not invented in New England. It also appeared among Puritan clergy in the east of England, and among Calvinist writers from the Netherlands to Hungary.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

A surprising figure

Nearly half of the congregations that recently exited United Methodism have not affiliated with the new Global Methodist Church or any other denomination or network. They understandably feel burned by their previous denomination and see these outside connections as only a hindrance, sometimes expensive. But can they survive long term if suffering scandal or deep division among themselves? Absent denominational ties, what will keep them together long-term institutionally?  Perhaps the future of American Christianity is even more Protestant, with constant schisms and new creations, with most Christians not staying anywhere for very long. Congregations will survive only so long as they can command a customer base, like a grocery store. This arrangement has some merit.  Dull or dysfunctional churches quickly die, while more vital ones quickly take their place. Such a cycle seems unstable, with a somewhat low view of the institutional church. But at least it is dynamic.

Mark Tooley at Juicy Ecumenism

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Friday, 10/24/25

Against the Machine?

I’ve paid closer attention (plus Substack subscription fees and book purchases) to Paul Kingsnorth since his conversion to Christianity and specifically to Orthodox Christianity. (No, he did not convert to “Romanian Orthodoxy,” though his regular parish is predominately Romanian. There is no substantial difference between Romanian, Serbian, Greek, Russian, Georgian, Syrian or other Orthodox ethnic identifiers.)

I’ve also paid closer attention (plus Substack subscription fees and a book purchase) to Martin Shaw since his reversion to Christianity, this time as Orthodox.

But I’ve been trying to keep in mind the scriptural cautions against putting novices on a pedestal Cf. I Timothy 3:6. Neither novice, Kingsnorth or Shaw, is a Christian authority – yet.

Mercifully, neither is claiming the prophet’s mantle, but careless readers can cloak them with it anyway.

I’m happy for Kingsnorth that his new polemic, Against the Machine, is selling well, and that he is getting blogged and podcasted by everyone and his brother. I’ve read the book, which was more than a stitching together of old internet posts. But if you read it, do also read some critiques, such as ‘Unnatural’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Wicked’, by non-Orthodox Christian Tara Isabella Burton.

Elites failing to reproduce

PhDs are falling: At Harvard, PhD programs are collapsing amid budget woes. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences just slashed the number of PhD student admissions slots by more than 75 percent in the Science division and 60 percent in the Arts & Humanities division for the next two years.

The PhD racket was always a weird one. These schools pushed their smartest, most annoyingly ambitious kids to get a PhD (there but for the grace of god go I). During that PhD, these guys do all the work of being a professor—teaching courses, grading papers. But they’re paid next to nothing. And then the clincher is that at the end, there are no jobs available. Maybe one English department job in Idaho for a group of 300 of them to battle to the death over. So I support this belt-tightening. We will have about 5,000 fewer antifa soldiers produced each year. They might even spend their 20s making money.

Nellie Bowles

Claiming a privileged position

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal.

Legal realism

A new analysis of insurance data finds that more than one in ten of the women who take the abortion pill experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another “serious adverse event.”  The only reason regulators tolerate such a high level of danger to the mother is that the ability to kill her baby cheaply and conveniently trumps all considerations.

J Budziszewski (bold added).

High tide recedes

Wow, it really was a social contagion: As the great vibe shift sweeps our country, it turns out that the rise in transgender identities really was a fad—between 2022 and 2024, the number of trans-identifying young people has dropped in half. Last week, another study hinted at the same conclusion, but it was widely criticized due to its failure to distinguish between trans and nonbinary identities, which are obviously very different, you ignoramus. This week’s data from writer and psychology professor Jean Twenge proved that both identities are in free fall among the youth. …

This is good for a lot of reasons—but in particular, it’s good for trans people! Why? Because there have always been a small number of people who feel truly dysphoric in their sex. And the last thing you want is a horde of depressed teen girls latching on to your situation as a way to rage against their bodies, a stand-in for anorexia or cutting. I’ve never been more worried about my rights as a gay person than when all the angry youth started announcing they were gay or trans or queer because then I just knew backlash was coming. Anything funky they did, they called it gay. They wore a weird jacket and got creative with their haircuts and all of a sudden, they’re claiming my identity. I say, scram, kids! Get out of here! I’m putting up a border around Gay Territory and saying No more may enter. It’s me, it’s everyone in Provincetown, and it’s my dykes in the Midwest, and that’s it. We’re full up. Go see if the Mormons are taking applications.

Nellie Bowles

Politics

The next two items are the most pointedly political in this post – and that’s not very pointed. I just don’t have it in me to spit into the wind recently.

A new presumption of bad faith

I was reminded by a New York Times guest editorial on the dangers of the Insurrection Act that our laws almost all assume that the law enforcer will be sane and will act in good faith. As a consequence of electing an insane and vengeful President, we now “enjoy” the full American expression of Joseph Stalin’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” My reflex is to disbelieve every word Trump says and to suspect invidious discrimination in all his Orders.

It might behoove our legislators to consider, before passing a law, what injustices could be wrought by bad actors wielding the proposed law.

Bring back hypocrisy

The Wall Street Journal has somehow decided to position its Editorial Page just slightly “left” (whatever those terms mean any more) of the Falun Gong’s Epoch Times. Thursday, it was Barton Swaim’s both-sides demi-defense of Trump’s lawfare against his perceived enemies.

I counter with “Yes, but Trump truly is worse because he does it right out in the open, shamelessly.” If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, it joins smoking and drinking on the very short list of vices Trump doesn’t practice. Otherwise, his brazenness coarsens every thing he touches and everyone who cheers him. For a guy so enamored of gold leaf, he’s oddly opposite King Midas.

I never thought I would lament the loss of hypocrisy.

Conservatives in Academia

Writing in the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Lisa Sirangian, a Johns Hopkins literature professor, offers seven reasons why “viewpoint diversity” — that is, making room for conservatives on campus — is wrong. I’ll summarize it for you: “Because conservatives are wrong and don’t care about truth; ‘viewpoint diversity’ is a MAGA plot.”

The WaPo’s Megan McArdle isn’t having it. Excerpt:

In the wider world, asking whether academia really skews left makes you look like an idiot or, slightly more charitably, like someone so encased in a bubble that they don’t even know what they’re missing. As for insisting on your right to complete self-governance, free from “secondary, external aims,” as Siraganian puts it … well, if you expect someone else to pay you to pursue truth, at some point, you must accept some secondary, external aims.

Academics tend to recoil from such a crass and mercenary idea, and fair enough, but the world is a crass and mercenary place. We talk about pursuing truth for its own sake, but most academics are pursuing it in exchange for money they can use to satisfy their many less elevated needs. The people who provide that money want something in return. Many will not be content to know that somewhere the global stock of Truth is increasing. Especially if one of the Truths you insist on is that they are dim-witted bigots.

Anyway, this is how the AAUP responds to the conversation on X:

Well, there it is. Conservatives are FASCISTS! Patrick Deneen responds to that tweet:

The more I see institutional elites, in government and the private sector, the more I realize these people are like the pre-revolutionary Tsarist circles. They had no idea why so many people hated them, and what kind of precarious situation they were in.

Rod Dreher

Google

They always invest in businesses that put them in the ‘trade routes’—controlling the linkages, and never getting involved in the creation of tangible value.

Ted Gioia, Google Is Now the East India Company of the Internet

Today in History

Kagi News, a new and useful aggregator, offers “Today in History as one of its tabs, with events at the top, people at the bottom.

For some reason, I find that a lot of composers and poets I had place mentally in the late-19th century were actually in early-19th century. Edgar Allen Poe never even saw the late-19th. Who knew?

Snippets

  • … the Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of movable rent-a-troll event … (Anne Appelbaum via Frank Bruni)
  • The old Saudi brand was ‘austere theocracy,’ but the new one is ‘fun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.’” (Helen Lewis via Frank Bruni)
  • We live the given life and not the planned. (Wendell Berry, Sabbath poems 1994 number 3)
  • I love her more than evolution requires. (Charles Murray’s wife, reflecting on their first child. Attributed to others as well. The insight doubtless matters more than the source.)
  • Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. (W. H. Auden, in memory of W. B. Yeats)
  • Music is a conspiracy to commit beauty. (Linda Ronstadt)
  • States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens). Looking at the last 62 years of American history seems to confirm this.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Sunday, 10/19/25

The cultural formations of western Christianity

Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity (italics added).

The italicized phrase warms my heart because almost every non-Orthodox writer in the West, including anti-Catholic polemicists, inverts it to Orthodox Churches severing themselves from Rome.

A well I keep returning to

It’s mind-bending in a good way to consider the possibility that Protestantism is effectively dead because the nondenominational megachurchy world is something, or some things, else:

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism, First Things.

Stumbled onto this …

As a 14-year-old I had embraced Jesus as my Savior but had confused the abundant Christian life with the great American dream: I was a Christian and would lose weight, get good grades, get voted captain of the hockey team, go to college, marry a wonderful man who made $250,000 a year, and we’d have 2.5 children. It was me-focused: What can God do for me? I almost thought I had done God a great big favor by accepting Jesus ….

Joni Eareckson Tada.

I recently got a digital subscription to Christianity Today, a magazine I’ve known all my life, in order to keep up a little with doings in the non-Orthodox Christian world. Eareckson Tada was a big deal in the Evangelical tradition decades ago and apparently has remained so, living a remarkably long life for a quadriplegic – perhaps because she has kept so busy with her talents.

Related: Frederika Matthewes-Green reported in one of her books the comment of a first-time visitor to an Orthodox Church: “Wow! That was soooo not about me!”

Duly Noted

A line is being crossed in Canterbury. I share a communication published by a priest who received it:

Almost inevitably, these “Forward in Faith” and other GAFCON Anglicans will be painted in the popular press as schismatic for not going along with a radical provocation. I hope, but faintly, that the popular press will report their claim (encountered elsewhere) that they are the Anglican Church.

I make no facile prediction that “history will vindicate them,” but I’d rather be among them than the innovators when, at the end of history, Christ comes from heaven to judge the living and the dead.

Not every wound is PTSD

Therapists themselves are noting that if every time a soldier confesses his soul wound from combat we then label him with PTSD, that we will find ourselves recommending psychological therapies and prescribing psychiatric medications when what is needed is something like a religious ritual of purification and forgiveness.

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty.

Note to Peter Thiel

In the Lateran, at a council held in 1513, a formal prohibition had been issued against preaching the imminence of Antichrist.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Evangelicals and Calvinists

A lot of the evangelical world leaves the dirty work to the Calvinists.

Derek Rishmawi, Calvinist.

Caveat: Political Application is Patent

On Sundays, I rarely post things with pointed political applications. For that matter, I rarely post political items with explicit Christian underpinnings on Mondays through Saturdays. Today marks an exception where I judged that these fit Sunday better than weekdays because my target readers are specifically Christians.

Salt & Light

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

MAGA Christianity

In last Sunday’s “Dispatch Faith” Column, Paul D. Miller asks Is MAGA Christianity True Christianity?, and essentially answers “no”: MAGA Christianity often mixes Christian symbols and Scripture with partisan rhetoric and calls to fight enemies, producing superficially Christian religion that departs on key theological and ethical points.

Commenting on The Charle Kirk Moment, Nijay Gupta resurrected a saying I’m pretty sure I last heard decades ago:

What you win them with is what you win them to.

Gupta’s role in this podcast was that of a more progressive Christian, relatively skeptical of the work of Charlie Kirk, and this comment had in view Kirk’s interweaving of conservative politics and evangelism.

I repeat from prior posts: I knew very, very little about Kirk until he was killed. From what I’ve learned since, I suspect he’d have insisted that conservative politics is such a concomitant of Christian faith that it is meet and right to interweave them from the podium/pulpit. (He said repeatedly that one cannot be a Christian and vote for Democrats.)

That is a message I’ve heard (though almost always tacitly) most of my life, and have resisted for almost as long. Despite my impression that most conservative Christians in North America lean right, and acknowledging that I, too, do so (though the meaning of “right” grows ever fuzzier), I nevertheless endorse the shared thrust of Miller and of Gupta.

And that’s why I consciously avoid political talk at Church coffee hour. All are welcome, regardless of politics, though some politics will prove to be baggage that must eventually be shed, as I’ve had to shed some of my own baggage.

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.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

No Kings Saturday, 10/18/25

No kings!

Binding precedent

Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.

Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25 (bold added). This is now the law in the 7th U.S. Circuit – Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Look for the Administration to try to provoke a rebellion it can crush. Everyone who’s paying attention knows Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act (as he stuffs his pockets and those of his family).

Wanted: a viable counternarrative

Trump’s actions … are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.

…

Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?

To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.

David Brooks.

You can’t beat something with nothing. I can’t come up with a political counternarrative to Trumpism. The Democrats can’t come up with a political counternarrative, either. Brooks couldn’t come up with a strong political counternarrative.

I can only hope and pray that people will look for their compelling (counter-)narrative to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (And that meantime there will be some legal counternarratives to prevent irretrievable damage, as in the preceding item.)

Music Reviews

There may be nothing better than old music reviews to let you know that it’s okay to like what you like, critics be damned.

I like Debussy’s La Mer, and I don’t care what the stupid early reviews said:

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Giving the Devil his due, impressionism had to be a real mind-blower for critics attuned to, say, the sonata-allegro form.

Comprehensive tradition

We’re often not very aware of the “tradition” in which we live. A student in a classroom would readily agree that the words of a teacher or professor were a “traditioning” of sorts. But they will fail to notice that how the room is arranged, how the students sit, what the students wear (or don’t wear), how the professor is addressed, how students address one another, what questions are considered appropriate and what are not, and a whole world of unspoken, unwritten expectations are utterly required in the process. The modern world often imagines that “online” education is equivalent to classroom education since the goal is merely the transmission of information. But the transmission of information includes the process of acquiring the information and everything that surrounds it. Those receiving the “tradition” online will have perhaps similar information to those receiving it in a classroom – but they will not receive the same information.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Tradition of Being Human

Stages of life

Two questions:

  1. Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?
  2. Should I read/watch/listen to this?

When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.

Alan Jacobs

Alan is a decade or more younger than me, yet I only very recently seem to have arrived at this point, especially regarding political matters.

Note that he’s talking about a change in personality. This isn’t a life rule. There are things that younger people should read/watch/listen to, in order to become well-formed human beings.

Two ways

[R]evival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, “I have sinned.”

MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, “You have sinned.”

David French

Noteworthy

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, we witnessed young people at vigils rather than at “mostly peaceful” demonstrations.

R.R. Reno in First Things

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Wednesday, 10/15/35

Vagrant metaphors

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut straight to the heart of Chiles v. Salazar [Tennessee’s ban on medical transitioning of gender dysphoric minors] with one hypothetical: If a dietitian decides to help anorexics starve themselves, can the government stop them?

…

This was clarifying in more ways than one, illuminating not just the legal dispute, but deeper problems with how our country is handling LGBT issues.

Sotomayor’s analogy was apt, but it was also a little startling coming from her, because in these debates comparisons to anorexia usually come from skeptics of pediatric medical transition. When an anorexic feels at odds with their body, the skeptics argue, we use therapy to alter their feelings. So how come when gender dysphoric kids feel that way, we use hormones and puberty blockers to alter their bodies?

It’s an obvious question, but I doubt that Sotomayor meant to bring it up, since she is hardly critical of pediatric medical transition …

… We spend a lot of energy on analogies and hypotheticals and semantics, instead of analyzing the issues more systematically. That’s why these cases keep ending up in court.

…

That’s all very interesting for the lawyers. But for most people the semantics are irrelevant, and both cases involve the same key question, though not the one that was actually before the court: Should gender dysphoric kids be encouraged to transition, or encouraged to embrace their biological sex?

The rest is strategic word games, which is how a metaphor favored by one side can so easily slip its moorings and turn up bobbing around on the other side of the harbor.

Megan McArdle. I really like that idea of a metaphor “slipping its moorings.”

Nobel Peace Prize

Disney World used to have a bust of [Bill] Cosby at its Hollywood Studios theme park but removed it in 2015 because of, well, you know. Them’s the breaks sometimes when bestowing a grand honor on a living person. Said person might yet live to disgrace himself, or be disgraced by old skeletons tumbling out of his closet, before he’s passed on and history’s verdict has settled.

Cosby came to mind after the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose not to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the one person in the world who wanted it more than anyone else. The lazy explanation for that snub was “liberal bias,” but I suspect that declining to give it to Donald Trump had more to do with fears of a potential Cosby problem. The committee has been burned before—badly—in prematurely celebrating a warmonger as a peacemaker, after all. Imagine if it had honored the president and he turned around next week and bombed Venezuela. Or invaded Greenland. Or declared martial law in the United States.

The peace prize is a totem of the rules-based international order that governed the world for 80 years until Trump returned to office in January. Handing it to the man who’s overseeing that order’s destruction would be a bit like awarding the Nobel Prize in medicine to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Nick Catoggio

Sometimes a pundit puts eloquently what I’ve thought clumsily. Catoggio here goes one better, responding to something I never articulated at all until now: “Of course, giving the Peace Prize to Trump would be deeply absurd despite any superficial plausibility, but I’m darned if I can can put the reason in words.”

I also like his explanation of Trump’s diplomatic success in the Middle East:

If you’re looking to broker peace in the Middle East and are stuck negotiating with a bunch of tribalist, kleptocratic, authoritarian cultural imperialists, who’s more likely to get through to them? Condoleezza Rice or a tribalist, kleptocratic, authoritarian cultural imperialist?

…

He cares about getting rich, persecuting his enemies, and eliminating threats to his own power—just like his Middle Eastern counterparts do. He knows what to say and what to offer to get them to work with him.

Redistricting

I hate the GOP’s new-found disregard of norms. Therefore, I hope that the norm-breaking mid-decade redistricting is punished swiftly and poetically:

  • Trying to squeeze out another Republican district means spreading a state’s Republican voters more widely but thinly.
  • Thus if public sentiment turns less favorable toward Republicans, they stand to lose more seats than if they settled for one or two fewer but safer districts.
  • Therefore, I’m hoping for a shift of public sentiment away from Republicans before the 2026 elections and for Republicans to lose at least two seats in every state where they tried to gerrymander one more seat.

Not that Congress has been doing anything anyway, but it feels important to take Congress away from the GOP for so long as Chairman Donnie remains in office pushing his Great Leap Forward. It will probably happen in any event, but it would sure be swell if it happened this way.

Kinky loons

Not long ago, when people still listened to the radio in their cars, you could tune into some freaky talk late at night. “We know a third of us are star children, implanted by the visitors,” the anchor might drawl matter-of-factly. “What we’re learning now is, there’s two groups of star children — two tribes of visitors — and they’re butting heads. And we’re in the middle of it, y’know? Iraq, Obama, recession, it all goes back to the star children …”

Writer Abe Greenwald dubs this genre of late-night crankery “star-child radio.” These days, you don’t need to take a long drive through the middle of nowhere to catch it. It is everywhere online. Indeed, much of right-wing media now resembles star-child radio: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanized.

…

I have spent much of my career pointing out the ideological blind spots of center-left outlets: their near-total alienation from the Bible-believing sectors of society; their tendency to select and present stories in the light least likely to help the right.

But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring the framing of stories and the quest to “prove,” as the some on the right have, that the president of France’s wife is a man.

Sohrab Ahmari.

Before “Bridget Macron is a guy,” there was “Michelle Obama is a guy.” These aren’t just loons; they’re kinky loons.

Now he’s normal, now he’s not

Time and again, the pattern repeats. When Trump is on offense, he’s celebrated as a president like no other. But when he has to answer for his actions in court, he demands that he be treated as a president like any other.
…
[W]hen Trump faces lawsuits, he defends his [National Guard] deployments by leaning on the deference earned by other presidents through their responsible use of power. Because other presidents were deemed trustworthy, his representatives argue, the courts should trust Trump, too.

David French, explaining judicial recognition that Trump has forfeited his claim to any Presidential presumption of regularity. French’s column is lucid and comprehensive enough, and the loss of the presumption of regularity (if that loss withstands appeal) is so consequential, that the preceding link gifts his column to my readers.

Ada the Algorithm

Elites today have no idea how to speak to the public or what to say to it. They have shown little interest in trying. The hyper-educated individuals who ran the Clinton campaign were utterly indifferent to public opinion: they believed in big data. An algorithm nicknamed “Ada” delivered “simulations” of opinion to the campaign staff. Ada was the public as elites wish it would be: safe, clean, and speaking only when spoken to. The voter in the flesh was clearly perceived by this group as an alien and frightening brute. His very existence was deplorable. The shock of Election Day followed naturally from such distortions of distance.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Losing student visas then and now

I remember when I was a Canadian citizen in the United States on a student visa, we were warned if you got into a bar fight, you could theoretically lose your student visa. Now, in those days, that meant that you’d have to go back to Canada and go to school in Canada, which is not the end of the world. In today’s America, that could mean you could lose your student visa and be accused of terrorism, and a bag put over your head and be put into a car and sent to a prison in El Salvador for the rest of your life.

David Frum

From the current GOP Hymnal

Do you remember January 6, 2021? It was the day of a Great Patriotic Rally after the re-election of Donald Trump to a second consecutive term. But the real reason it’s memorable is that the nefarious Democrats used that Great Patriotic Rally as an excuse to tap the phones of Republican Senators and Congressmen!

Poems

Reclaim the Sites

We are spared the Avenues of Liberation
and the water-cannoned Fifths of May
but I tire of cities clogged with salutes
to other cities: York, Liverpool, Oxford Streets
and memorial royalty: Elizabeth, Albert, William, unnumbered George.
Give me Sallie Huckstepp Road, ahead of
sepia Sussex, or Argyle, or Yankee numbering
– and why not a whole metropolis
street-signed for its own life and ours:
Childsplay Park and First Bra Avenue,
Unsecured Loan, the Boulevard Kiss,
Radar Strip, Bread-Fragrance Corner,
Fumbletrouser, Delight Bridge, Timeless Square?

Les Murray, Reclaim the Sites, from New Selected Poems

Terra Firma

Yes, you’re right. I’m sure Armageddon’s coming:
wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, locusts,
killer flus, et cetera. Yes, I’m awed by
all the destruction.

I concede your point that the world might end, and
all your puny labors will be as nothing.
Still, you can’t go out with your friends until you’ve
folded the laundry.

Julie Steiner

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.

Sunday evening

“We took the freedom of speech away …”

At the round table … he diverted to a tangent about flag burning, saying he had instituted a “one-year penalty for inciting riots.”

“We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts and the courts said, you have freedom of speech,” Mr. Trump said. “But what has happened is when they burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds.”

Charlie Savage, Trump Baselessly Claims He ‘Took the Freedom of Speech Away’ From Flag Burners.

Trump’s word salads are incoherent, but I think he’s saying that he recognizes a heckler’s veto on flag-burning, like the one he tried on Colin Kaepernick for kneeling.

Sorry, Donnie: Street v. New York (1969).

Quick, easy, and stupid pigeon-holing

Using the old Left-Right duality distorts our political thinking. Consider what counts as “Leftist” today: Open immigration, transgenderism, antiracism, gay marriage, opposition to Israel’s incursion in Gaza, violence against conservatives and Christians, unbending support for Ukraine, pro-choice, anti-Trumpism.

Once these positions are grouped as “Left,” anyone who holds one “Left” position is labeled a “Leftist.” If you have reservations about Trump (as I do), question Trump’s immigration policies, believe African Americans have suffered and still suffer injustices, or express sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, you’ll get lumped in with transgenders and homosexuals, rioters and assassins.

…

Everybody but everybody condemns “third way” Christian political agendas. That condemnation is childish, first because it’s utterly unhistorical. The specific contours of the American Left and Right are entirely contingent, constantly shifting political outlooks and moods. They don’t exhaust our political options.

Peter Leithart

Losing the real storyline

Ross Douthat is definitely one of my favorite journalists these days, but, bless his heart, whenever I see a column about Donald Trump’s “policies,” I get the feeling that the author is trying too hard to make him a normal President.

Setting the record straight on “sanctuary cities”

I have very high regard for professor J Budziszewski, who writes on natural law and blogs at the Underground Thomist. But his latest post blows it, not because of illogic, but because of a badly mistaken premises. I write because his mistake is very wide-spread.

The topic is so-called “sanctuary cities.” Here’s Budziszewski’s false premise:

So called sanctuary cities … claim … that … any locality may invalidate federal laws within its territory. This isn’t about the form of the federal union. It is a rejection of federal union.

Sanctuary cities claim no power to invalidate federal law. What they claim is the power to refuse cooperation in the enforcement of federal laws (typically involving immigration) that they don’t like (or even, during the reign of terror of Trump 2.0, if they don’t like the way the feds are enforcing the law via jack-booted, masked goons).

I don’t want to get into the weeds too far, but:

  • States are not obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. “Commandeering” is the term frequently used to describe federal efforts to force cooperation.
  • Cities, as subdivisions of the state and as entities that normally have a degree of home rule to determine their financial priorities, are not necessarily obliged to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing federal law. This only becomes controversial when cities engage in grandstanding like “sanctuary city” declarations.
  • Non-cooperation isn’t the same as interference, which would be dubious at best.
  • States may forbid cities to withhold cooperation with the feds because cities are not in themselves sovereigns. Some states have purportedly done so, though laws forbidding sanctuary cities could easily stumble over their own sort of grandstanding.
  • Feds probably can retaliate by denying some or all federal aid to sanctuary cities.

I have not been a fan of sanctuary cities because they made a big, virtue-signaling deal out of what could be done quietly. The tactics of ICE under Trump is unlikely to change my mind, though even then I’m inclined to favor quiet non-cooperation. Trump, after all, is itching to declare insurrection and to impose martial law, and virtue-signaling declarations of non-cooperation provide a readier excuse than passive-aggression.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[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.

Nick Catoggio

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.