Saturday, 5/31/25

AI doomsday?

[Jaron] Lanier agreed that it’s up to humans to protect the truth in the age of AI, but was less optimistic that we will do so: “The issue with AI is not the AI. It’s not the large language model. It’s the concentration of power and wealth around who owns it,” he said. “You have to look at the big system, including the people, the money, the business, the society, the psychology, the mythmaking, the politics.”

A Free Press Debate on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco

Jaron Lanier had fallen off my radar for a few years. I’ll forever be interested in his take on anything regarding computers and humanity (together, not separately).

Bon mots

Codgers and technology go together like peanut butter and sardines.

Frank Bruni. Then this, merely via Frank Bruni, not from him:

In the quarterly journal Sapir, Bret Stephens made a kind of peace with the heavily partisan slant of so much cable television news: “To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.” (Naomi Lerner, West Orange, N.J.)

A non-tribal Democrat

Some of my subscribers dislike when I throw elbows to my left. They share my disdain for Donald Trump and his party, and my commitment to understanding them in light of political theory and history, but they are also devoted Democrats who have warm feelings for Joe Biden, were thrilled by the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and still seethe about Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

That isn’t me. I vote for Democrats. I directionally agree with them on most issues. And I consider the Republican alternative thoroughly unacceptable. Yet I am not a devoted Democrat. A big part of the reason is that I’m not a joiner—of anything. I value my own independence too much and temperamentally resist deploying my talents to advance a cause—any cause, even a worthy one, and even one wrapped up, at this moment, with the fate of liberal democratic self-government in the United States.

But this way of thinking presumes that working to help the Democrats should take the form of deferring to and falling in line behind party leadership and elected officials, taking marching orders, rallying around candidates and nominees endorsed by the party bigwigs, and then maintaining message discipline to get them elected. That’s what I resist. But there’s another kind of devotion—one that expresses itself as tough love and a willingness to speak candidly, and even harshly, about faults.

…

… a Democratic researcher is quoted as saying that when she asks swing voters to liken the two parties to animals, they consistently describe Republicans as lions, tigers, and sharks—“apex predators” that “take what they want when they want”—but Democrats as tortoises, slugs, or sloths, creatures typically considered “slow, plodding, [and] passive.”

Damon Linker, A Party of Sloths

Substance, process

One of this crazy-making aspects of life in Trump 2.0 is that the media coverage of the administration’s antics focuses, mostly on the substance of what they are doing, ignoring the process, and the question of whether they have the authority to do it at all.

Such, I feared, was the infirmity of NPR and PBS Aren’t Entitled to Your Tax Dollars, a Free Press article by a serious Ivy league constitutional law professor. I slogged my way through it, agreeing with the author again and again, but frustrated that he was ignoring the elephant in the room. Finally, in literally the last paragraph, he mentioned the elephant almost as a throwaway line:

NPR also alleges in its complaint that the federal statute creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting prohibits Trump from making this defunding decision. That’s a very different argument, which I’m not addressing here ….

I would venture a guess that nine out of ten people who read this column will come away with the impression that NPR and PBS are suffering from a liberal sense of entitlement to tax dollars, and miss the point about there being some limits to executive power.

In the end, it may not matter because this Congress is sufficiently servile that if Trump asks Congress to defund CPB, PBS and NPR (a longtime GOP talking point), it almost certainly will oblige him.

But process does matter, tremendously. Where the power to do something resides also matters.

Dissing Adoption

The New York Times … has never found a basic human good it couldn’t ponderously criticize with the shuffling-foot smarm of the ideas festival class. There’s “I Was Adopted From China as a Baby. I’m Still Coming to Terms With That.” There’s “World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud.” There’s “Given Away: Korean Adoptees Share Their Stories.” (In easily-digestible video format!) There’s “I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict.” (Subtle.) The New Yorker, a $12,000 espresso machine transformed into a magazine by a mischievous wizard, has “How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams,” “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath,” and “Where is your Mother?” (The answer is that she has been separated from her child by a cruel and fickle child welfare system despite being perfectly fit, which I’m sure is how it usually goes.) The Atlantic has “No One’s Children: America’s long history of secret adoption.” (Would you be shocked to learn that said history isn’t a good one?) They’ve got “The New Question Haunting Adoption,” the question being whether adoption is really a secretly selfish act, you know, the selfish act of taking a severely-disabled toddler into your home to provide them with support and love after their birth parents smoked meth throughout pregnancy. They also have, incredibly, “What Adoption ‘Salvation’ Narratives Get Wrong,” “Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending,” “The Dark, Sad Side of Domestic Adoption”…. I could go on, and that’s just three prestigious publications. There’s a whole world out of this out there.

This is all, for the record, a really excellent example of what we used to mean when we used the word ideology. Once upon a time, one wouldn’t say “My ideology is…” because ideology referred to the hidden, unexplored, unconscious politics that lay beneath the public, open, explicit politics. An ideology was those pre-political assumptions and beliefs which conditioned and limited political thought, which made the conscious political philosophy of any individual what it was. Ideology is the skeleton that hides unseen within the animal of politics but nevertheless determines the structure of that which is seen. Ideology exists in both the macro and the micro; this bizarre upper-caste antipathy towards ideology is a good example. If you asked leadership at these publications if they had any particular interest in leading a charge against the practice of adoption, they’d say no, of course not, what a weird question! If you were to show them just how repetitively this particular set of critiques and questions and hrm hrm hrm noises gets published in their pages, they’d swear to you that it reflects no underlying party line. And yet there it is, the evidence, in black and white. Something about the current constitution of the anxious educated urbanite liberal soul cries out inside of them: the real problem is adoption.

Freddie deBoer, Adoption is Good

If the shoe fits

A well-regarded Evangelical pastor published this weeks before the 2020 Election.

[T]his is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

…

I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.

This is true not only because flagrant boastfulness, vulgarity, immorality, and factiousness are self-incriminating, but also because they are nation-corrupting. They move out from centers of influence to infect whole cultures. The last five years bear vivid witness to this infection at almost every level of society.

…

Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).

…

I think it is baffling and presumptuous to assume that pro-abortion policies kill more people than a culture-saturating, pro-self pride.

When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.

It is naive to think that a man can be effectively pro-life and manifest consistently the character traits that lead to death — temporal and eternal.

John Piper, Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election

Piper did not say who he was voting for. He did not name names. For that reason, I’m blogging this separately from pointed political material.

But I’m not going to deny that my heart soared to see that our current President had not captured and reduced to servility the entirety of one of America’s most prominent Christian traditions.

The right to know isn’t the whole story

To further clarify our situation, consider W. H. Auden’s discussion, which I’ve cited before, of the idea that, as he put it, “the right to know is absolute and unlimited.” “We are quite prepared,” Auden wrote,

“to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, ‘What can I know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.”

L.M. Sacasas, Structurally Induced Acedia (The Convivial Society)

Harvard and the Trump administration

Harvard and the Trump administration have each finally met an adversary too big to push around. America’s richest university never really considered how much it depends on government policy, including lavish federal research funding, federal student aid, and a permissive immigration regime for the foreign students—who make up a third of the university’s student body and often subsidize the rest by paying more. Progressives also never thought through how the many tools they devised for using government leverage against private institutions—including threatening tax exemptions, as the Supreme Court allowed on dubious grounds in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)—could be used against universities that engage in race discrimination for the “right” reasons, cultivate a political monoculture among the faculty, and permit campus mobs to terrorize minority groups who are out of progressive favor (Jews). Now, Trump is trying to strip Harvard of everything—tax exemption, federal funding, and visas for foreign students already enrolled. While the comeuppance for Harvard is admittedly delicious, the president is abusing powers he ought not to have, and Harvard has deep enough pockets to fight him in court.

National Review Weekly email.

Some cases don’t have valid arguments on both sides. That I find nothing “delicious” about Harvard’s “comeuppance” is an example of why I ignore National Review’s regular email invitations to resubscribe.

Can a car have a “catfish smile”?

“Behind that catfish smile, the company’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter DOHC V8 now discharges a drama-drenched 656 hp and 590 lb-ft—153 hp and 85 lb-ft more than the previous Vantage Roadster—thanks to larger turbochargers, revised camshaft profiles, optimized compression ratio and upgraded fueling and cooling.”

Kudos to Dan Neil for the spot-on “catfish smile.”

The car, by the way, is a 2025 Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, which will set you back $300,000 as equipped (this week’s ephemeral tariffs not included).

Credentials, good times, and genuine learning

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly …

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world …

… Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

Alan Jacobs, responding to Ted Gioia on the topic of ending AI cheating.

Potpourri

After Trump held a crypto dinner last Thursday night, crypto moguls who paid to be there felt scammed that the president didn’t even stick around at the event they’d hoped to do their own scams at. I saw someone describe him as the apex scammer. Our Scammander in Chief.
In other Russia news, a new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station was unveiled this month. President Putin has called Stalin an “effective manager,” and has said that enemies of Russia use the “excessive demonization” of Stalin to attack “the Soviet Union and Russia.” Stalin is back, big time. Interesting that “effective manager” is being used here to describe a man who facilitated the death of millions—and not efficiently. But I’m not a businessman.
The continued reckoning: A postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign cited a “perception gap” as one of the reasons she lost, saying voters believed she held positions that she didn’t. “Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%), mandatory electric vehicles by 2035 (82%), decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).” But Harris had, in fact, supported all of these positions. Like, she is on record supporting each of those positions (here, here, here, and here). So it’s not really a perception problem so much as a reception problem, like these ideas are not popular even though I support them. There’s a sense among Dems that people should simply ignore the things that are unpopular and that referencing them is fake news. Like, how dare you talk about the surge of migrants coming through our new open borders thanks to swift changes from the Biden admin. Yes, it’s technically true, but it’s disinformation-coded.
Leave Bruce alone: A bar in New Jersey canceled a performance by a Bruce Springsteen tribute band after the real Springsteen called Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” while on tour in England. Citing the bar’s MAGA clientele, the bar owner said that a Springsteen cover band would be “too risky at the moment.” And: “Whenever the national anthem plays, my bar stands and is in total silence, that’s our clientele. Toms River is red and won’t stand for his bull—.” [But MAGA doesn’t have a violent streak. No way. That’s fake news.]
Things that are not antisemitism: The Democratic Socialists of America “Liberation Caucus” has announced its support for Elias Rodriguez, the suspect arrested for slaughtering two Israeli Embassy staffers outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week. Here’s the statement signed by the DSA Liberation folks and a bunch of others: “As imperialism has made the entire world its battlefield, it is justified to fight it, by any means necessary, without regard for geography.” And: “[T]here must be consequences for genocidal [Z]ionist imperialism, and those consequences are righteous.”

Nellie Bowles

Fake my …

The latest fitness craze is surely going to be Fake My Run. It fits perfectly with the national ethos whereby university students are already doing Fake My Education.

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.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks)

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 social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com as well.

Thursday Tidbits 12/16/21 (remember that date)

Brevity is the soul of opacity

Although the parties’ briefs, the record on appeal, our caselaw, and even IDEA itself contain an alphabet soup of administrative acronyms, we will spell things out for the sake of clarity. E.g., 20 U.S.C. § 1414(d)(1)(A)(i) (referring to an “individualized education program” as an “IEP”); Appellants’ Br. (using no fewer than twenty-two unique initialisms); Appellee’s Br. (similar). Given their frequency and intelligibility, we nonetheless will continue to abbreviate IDEA and RISD.

For those who prefer acronymic efficiency, however, our holding is roughly as follows: RISD did not violate IDEA with respect to K.S. because, as the SEHOs correctly found at the DPHs: (1) the ARDC’s IEPs for K.S., which included PLAAFP statements, TEKS goals for K.S.’s grade level, various accommodations, and a transition plan, were appropriately individualized in light of K.S.’s SLD; and (2) no actionable violation resulted from wrongly excluding K.S. from the Sept. MDR, which reviewed K.S.’s prior FIEs, FBA consultations, his IIE, Ms. H.’s reports of K.S.’s ADHD (an OHI), TBI, and mood disorders, and concluded that K.S.’s SLD did not cause him to commit the assault for which he was assigned to DAEP. And, in sum, the D. Ct. did not err in holding that K.S. received a FAPE in the LRE in compliance with IDEA.

Footnote 2, Leigh v. Riesel Independent School District, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, November 22, 2021. H/T Advisory Opinions podcast

Cloning S.B. 8

California Governor Gavin Newsom may need to wash some egg off his face after his preening announcement that he’s going to imitate Texas S.B. 8 but in the context of chilling gun sales:

In oral arguments last month, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Texas’ solicitor general if allowing S.B. 8 to stand would incentivize states to pass similar laws infringing upon other protected liberties. “It could be free speech rights, it could be free exercise of religion rights, it could be Second Amendment rights,” he said. “If this position is accepted here, the theory of the amicus brief is that it can be easily replicated in other states that disfavor other constitutional rights.”

That’s the theory that Newsom is now hoping to put to the test in California, but constitutional scholars warn that his proposed gun control legislation may not be analogous to what Texas did with abortion.

“I think the Court would treat similar legislation dealing with guns or free exercise or what have you the same way. … So there’s nothing about this unique to abortion,” said Will Baude, faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School. “That said, I don’t think Gavin Newsom … fully understands what S.B. 8 is and how it works. For it to work—at a minimum, for instance—he would have to eliminate the ability of the state to prosecute people for those assault weapons or ghost weapons and things like that. I don’t know that he really means that. My guess is nobody will actually try to replicate this law’s particulars because it’s pretty complicated how it works.”

“To replicate this law and its effects in other contexts, you’ve got to pretty much do almost everything the law does,” added Jonathan Adler, professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. “It’s not merely private enforcement, and it’s not merely retroactivity. You have to, for example, divest state officials of any authority to enforce the same law. There are a whole bunch of other things you’ve got to do. Is California willing to do all of those things with regard to guns or with regard to assault weapons or whatever? Maybe, maybe not.”

‌The Morning Dispatch: Newsom Vows to Model Gun Legislation on Texas Abortion law

The dumbest audience in America

Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?

Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America.

The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this.

But, apparently, some people need to have it explained to them.

Kevin D. Williamson

The Morning Dispatch is favorably impressed by both Williamson and Michael Brendan Dougherty:

There are a pair of pieces up at National Review about the recent January 6 Select Committee disclosures. First, Kevin Williamson makes the case that comparing January’s Capitol riot with the riots that subsumed American cities in the summer of 2020 is a false equivalence. “There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it,” he writes. “What has been clear to some of us for a long time—and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day—is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état. … A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.” Second, Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at how right-wing narratives about that day have shifted over the past year. “In the months after January 6, the politically correct move for Trump’s cable-news apologists has been to ignore the fact that the people who set about ‘investigating’ the supposed vote fraud have turned up nothing of consequence or merit,” he writes. “But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. … Treating Trump like a baby whose feelings had to be coddled at the end resulted in Ashli Babbitt’s getting shot as she tried to break into Congress against a lawful order to desist. He could no more Stop the Steal than make Mexico pay for the wall. But, pay for his actions? Some people did.”

And Jonah Goldberg, recently resigned from Fox, lays it on:

A "law and order" conservatism that says, "As long as liberals fail to condemn thuggish violence for their side, we feel no obligation to condemn thuggish violence on our side," cares neither about law and order nor conservatism.

Desperate times call for desperate nonsense

The left’s argument this week is that adoption is so traumatic for a child, who bonds in utero with the mother, that abortion is a mercy. The idea that the fetus can bond with the mother in utero seems to make the implicit case against legal abortion but no matter. Last week, a New York Times piece written by an adoptee argued this: “Babies bond with their mothers in utero and become familiar with their behaviors. When their first caretaker is not the biological mother, they register the difference and the stress of it has lasting effects.” Interracial adoption is apparently especially problematic: smells of white colonization.

The other issue is that good progressives are having a hard time talking about abortion as a women’s rights issue, since men can and do become pregnant (remember, the phrase now is “pregnant people”). …

Nellie Bowles, ‌Abortion, Guns, and Other Polite Topics of Conversation

Bowles also mentions:

This week, Lia Thomas, who competed for years on the men’s swimming team before joining the women’s team, has broken several women’s swimming records and finished one race a full 38 seconds before her nearest rival.

The Turn(s)

[A]fter 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.

When “the left” becomes the party of wealthy elites and state security agencies who preach racial division, state censorship, contempt for ordinary citizens and for the U.S. Constitution, and telling people what to do and think at every turn, then that’s the side you are on, if you are “on the left”—those are the policies and beliefs you stand for and have to defend.

…

So look at the list of things supported by the left and ask yourself: Is that me? If the answer is yes, great. You’ve found a home. If the answer is no, don’t let yourself be defined by an empty word. Get out. And once you’re out, don’t let anyone else define you, either. Not being a left-wing racist or police state fan doesn’t make you a white supremacist or a Trump worshipper, either. Only small children, machines, and religious fanatics think in binaries.

Liel Leibovitz, ‌The Turn

We need people to abandon the right as well for its betrayal of conservative principle, and the Trump era has produced a bumper crop of them.

Now we need to figure out how to build a home for the politically homeless from both ends of the political spectrum.

(For what it’s worth, I keep stumbling onto good stuff at Tablet magazine. I may feel honor-bound to contribute if this keeps up.)

S’il n’y a pas de solution, c’est qu’il n’y pas de problèm

Two choristers tested positive between Monday’s Lessons and Carols rehearsal and Wednesday’s. Rehearsal cancelled.

Sunday’s performances? Who knows. Brings to mind this oldy:

(If there’s no solution, there’s no problem.)

The decade of ideological fantasy

The years 1991 and 2001 are commonly treated as breakpoints, markers that inaugurate distinctive chapters of history, the first labeled “Post-Cold War,” the second “Post-9/11.” Yet there is a strong case to be made for amalgamating the two decades into a single period: call it the “era of ideological fantasy,” when U.S. self-regard and Washington’s confidence in its ability to remake the world in America’s image reached unprecedented heights.

Bacevich, Weyrich, Lind et al, The Essence of Conservatism

Not at all sure I agree (but then I wouldn’t be, would I?)

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes.

How would I monetize flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality? Rupert Murdoch already founded Fox, back around 1988 (I remember where I was when I heard, and scoffed, that he was starting a fourth network).

Mythbusters

Second, Amar explains how the Chief Justice and Justice Sotomayor misread Marbury.

And what does Marbury v. Madison really mean? Marbury got invoked today by the United States Supreme Court. They don’t actually cite Marbury v. Madison in every single case. So they ratcheted up the stakes today, they meaning John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor, and this is what I teach Marbury vs. Madison isn’t just ConLaw, it’s FedCourts, you know, 101, and this is what I was hired actually at the law school to teach so so I want to actually go through it with just a little bit of care here. Here’s what Marbury does not say, quote, "The Supreme Court is the ultimate interpret the Constitution" unquote. It doesn’t say that at all. Our audience will put the will put the case up on our website, so they can do a word search, they will not find that they will find if they go online, the Supreme Court at least half a dozen times in the 20th and 21st century, citing Marbury for that proposition, but never with a page cite. The Supreme Court, the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution. Marbury actually didn’t say that. It actually didn’t say much at all about the Supreme Court as such. It actually talked about courts in General, the judicial department which includes, at a minimum, all federal courts, maybe state courts as well, which which Ed invoked.

Amar is 100% correct. This mythical account of judicial supremacy comes from Cooper v. Aaron, and not from Marbury v. Madison. I explain this history in my article, The Irrepressible Myth of Cooper v. Aaron.

Josh Blackman (based on an Otter transcription of a podcast)

Misplaced sentimentality

Americans are a little sentimental about revolutions, because we had one of the very few good ones. But the revolutionary family tree gets pretty ugly pretty quickly: The American Revolution helps to inspire the French Revolution, with its purges and terror; the French Revolution provides a model for Lenin and his gang; the Russian Revolution informs the Iranian revolution. The line from the Boston Tea Party to the Iran hostage crisis is not a bold, straight one, but it can be seen, if you want to see it. Revolutions are dangerous, often in ways that are not obvious at the time and become understood only decades later.

Kevin D. Williamson, March of the New American Leninists

The January 6 insurrectionists vigilantes

The problem with treating every Republican more supportive of Trump than token GOP committee members Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) as an existential threat to the republic is twofold. One, the reason the more serious legal efforts to overturn the election failed is because there were people with fidelity to the Constitution working for Trump. Sidney Powell wasn’t White House counsel. The second is that strengthening Capitol security — the riots were quashed the moment they were met with an appropriate level of response — is probably a better deterrent than trying to marginalize eccentric but widely held political views.

Republicans should take Jan. 6 more seriously, but they are also correct to resist treating ordinary members of their party as horn-wearing, violent extremists.

Damon Linker, The dangerous vigilantism that fueled Jan. 6

Rain Man

I thought Dustin Hoffman was brilliant in Rain Man, but then I’m a sucker for autism spectrum movies (Mozart & The Whale is another). Particularly effective was the bit about him memorizing the phone book — and then card-counting.

This came to mind as I overheard a 59-year-old Aspie of my close acquaintance recounting some trivial event that occurred when he was 7, on December 16, 1969 (see the post title, above).

The human mind is a marvel.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

Abortion law, the Performative Jackass Caucus, Race, and more

Abortion Law

Politicization of the Supreme Court

In an exchange with Scott Stewart, the Mississippi solicitor general defending the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Sotomayor had this to say:

Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.

…

Here’s what one reader of mine had to say about Justice Sotomayor’s “stench” comment:

Whoever smelt it, dealt it. Sotomayor and Alito are the two most partisan, results-oriented members of the Court. It’s pretty rich of her, of all the justices, to be complaining about politics stinking up SCOTUS—in a soundbite that was clearly crafted to fire up the left.

David Lat, Original Jurisdiction

Abortion and adoption

The last thing we should take from our nation’s debates about abortion is that adoption is a problem.

… the very idea that poverty—in this nation, of all places—could be the factor that causes a mother to part with her child is and should be a clarion call for action, both private and public, designed to facilitate family formation.

David French, Don’t Denigrate Adoption to Defend Roe

Politics, briefly

A guy can dream, can’t he?

GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California is resigning from Congress at the end of the month to become CEO of former President Trump’s new social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group. First elected in 2002, Nunes served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 to 2019, and would have been a contender to lead the House Ways and Means Committee if Republicans recapture the chamber next year.

The Morning Dispatch

This seems like an epic bad career move, but given my opinion of Devin Nunes, he’s certainly welcome to it.

I wonder if Trump can get Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of the GOP Performative Jackass Caucus to come work for him, too?

When the only meaningful correlation involves racial ambivalence

After January 6, a team led by Robert A. Pape, head of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, scoured the profiles of the capital insurgents:

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

Barton Gelman, January 6 Was Practice.

This is a (the?) major article in a brand-new issue of the Atlantic largely devoted to the threat posed by the Trumpist Republican party. Recommended.

I apparently lead a sheltered life. I genuinely thought that frank racism (white people are better than darker people) had faded close to extinction, though I thought it likely that stereotypes remained (e.g., that black English did its speakers no favors in the job and other "markets").

Then came Barack Obama, and with it, birtherism and other unreasoning opposition.

Now, the "replacement theory" and the terrors it incites.

I’ve got to think this stuff was latent all along — just not obviously among my usual circle of mostly-Christian acquaintances.

Other

Root causes

Mark Bauerlein and Tim Perry discuss the deterioration of Christian burial practices, for which Perry finds startling roots:

Bauerlein: You link this deterioration to a bigger conceptual trend, and that is what happened with eschatology in the 20th Century. What went on there?
Perry: I think it’s a twofold story and it’s a little bit ironic. On the one hand, the Church lost its eschatological vocabulary. In the mainstream Protestant Churches and perhaps in the Catholic Church, more immediate concerns came to the fore: keeping the machine going in the days of decreasing revenues, decreasing membership rolls. In the churches that I’ve been shaped in as a child, I think we became a little bit embarrassed at our eschatological excesses, where we stopped talking about the traditional last things — death, judgment, hell and heaven — and started talking instead about secret rapture, great tribulation, who’s the antichrist, what’s the mark of the beast. I think evangelicals have, perhaps rightly, become a little embarrassed at that kind of speech. But instead of going back to the far richer and far more important language of the traditional last things, we’ve just stopped talking about eschatology altogether.

First Things Podcast, A Proper Christian Burial.

Well, I guess if you’re coy about death, judgment, hell and heaven, and allergic to orderly "liturgies," you’ve got little but novelties and pabulum to preach at funerals.

God will never forsake chosen America

This occurs to me so rarely, but seems so fitting when it does, that I thought I should capture it this time: a lot of support for Donald Trump, particularly but not exclusively among Evangelicals, results from fear that Democrats are an existential threat to the country, so they should vote Republican because God would never so forsake (or judge) America that we are left with shitty and unsuitable candidates in both major parties. That simply is unthinkable, since America supposedly is some kind of new chosen people.

I disagree — so much that I’m tempted to cease voting for Democrats or Republicans. That would mean I sit out many individual races. It should send at least a teensie-weensie signal of discontent that some voter in my precinct voted American Solidarity Party in the Presidential race, Libertarian or some other third party where ASP has no candidate, and not a single D or R.

Verbal tics

“Look, I’m an up-front guy,” Bear Hobart said. “I have to be honest with you—” Here it comes, Dylan thought. He was pretty convinced that you didn’t ever have to be honest with someone; maybe you should, and maybe you wanted to, but “I have to be honest with you” was a self-defeating sentence, since it was never true.

Eve Tushnet, Amends

There’s a kindred verbal tic: "Do you realize that you just [e.g., accused all the teachers in this school district of being sexual perverts]?", addressed to one who asks unwelcome questions. The italicized portion is a signal that the speaker is going to twist words beyond recognition in order to paint the initial speaker as some kind of crazy.

Modernity’s faith

“[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity.”

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies

Recently-acquired aphorisms

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. —Edward de Bono, The Mechanism of Mind
I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers. —Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World

Via Philip Yancey’s Where the Light Fell.

I recommend this memoir (about which I wrote earlier), but read it to understand Yancey’s inner life, not to lay out a timeline of events in U.S. and American church history, which Yancey confuses or conflates at times.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

So nervous, so happy

R.R. Reno comments on the dual character of adoption, as noted in Meilaender’s Not by Nature but by Grace: Forming Families through Adoption:

On one hand, it transcends the limitations of genetic kinship and serves as a sign of our life in Christ, which is rooted in God’s grace, not in the logic of flesh and blood. On the other hand, the fact that adoption is necessary reveals the brokenness of our fallen world. Adoption can bring extraordinary blessings. Yet it is almost always haunted by loss.
…
I was eating lunch on the patio of a fast-food restaurant near my home in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a hot day. Nobody else was outside. I was looking forward to reading the book I had brought with me. But an agitated, middle-aged woman sat down in a chair close to mine. She lit a cigarette. “I’m so nervous,” she said in a way meant to elicit my attention. I complied, and she told me that she had driven that morning from Ames, Iowa, to meet her daughter for the first time. She had given her up for adoption at birth. “It was hard, but it was the right thing to do.” Recently, her daughter found her on Facebook. They corresponded, but her daughter didn’t want to meet—until now. She looked at her watch. “She’s not coming until one, but I didn’t want to be late.” She was proud. “She’s a registered nurse.” And frightened. “What will she think of me?” “I’m so nervous,” she said again, lighting another cigarette, fighting back tears. And then she said, “I can’t wait. I’m so happy.”

I couldn’t not share that.

* * * * *

We develop heart and mind in parallel, that the mind will protect us from the wolfs, and the heart will keep us from becoming wolves ourselves. (Attributed to Serbian Patriarch Pavle)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.