I had to lead with a shout-out to my brother and sister-in-law, Mark and Kathi, observing their Golden Anniversary today. They’re kinda private people, so that’s all I’ll say.
A gentle but firm “no”
Lionel Shriver notes a lot of parallels between two prestige (and therefore socially contagious) disorders, anorexia and gender dysphoria.
“Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s delusions to the hilt. Rather than coach a child to reconcile with reality, clinicians twist reality to reconcile it with the disorder. Anyone who dares describe the bizarre and biologically baseless conviction that one was “born in the wrong body” as a mental health issue is tarred as a transphobe. Were teenage anorexics treated anything like trans kids, they wouldn’t be encouraged to finish their dinner, but rather abjured, “You’re right: you’re fat! Your true self is even thinner! You will never rise to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty until you completely disappear!”
… we’re implicitly dangling the promise that on the other side of transitioning to the opposite sex — or feigning transition, since inborn sex is written in our every cell — all a young person’s problems will be solved.
…
What these conditions have most in common is being dreadful answers to the questions that inevitably torture young people: who am I, what makes me unique, what makes me loveable, what do I want to achieve, why does just being alive seem so hard, am I the only one who feels so dejected, what does it mean to become a man or a woman, and is there any way I can get out of growing up? The responsible adult’s reply to that last one must be a gentle but firm “no”.
Lionel Shriver, Is trans the new anorexia?
I can hardly imagine a more timely or courageous essay. I say “courageous” because Shriver doesn’t have the deep pockets of J.K. Rowling, who got in online trouble for a less sustained bit of iconoclasm.
Skip the debates?
A poll released this week by NBC found 60 percent of Americans believe Donald Trump shouldn’t run for president again while 70 percent, including a majority of Democrats, believe Joe Biden shouldn’t either.
Numbers like that portend competitive primaries but Biden and Trump look increasingly like prohibitive favorites. Biden owes his advantage to incumbency and to history, as Democrats remember how Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush fared after facing serious primary challenges. Trump owes his advantage to the mule-headed cultishness of the Republican base and the cowardice of right-wing influencers who fear the consequences of crossing it.
What’s truly amazing, though, is that at a moment when most of the public is yearning for alternatives, the 2024 primaries might be not just uncompetitive but lacking a single meaningful debate between the candidates.Last week the Washington Post reported that “the national Democratic Party … has no plans to sponsor primary debates,” outraging progressives as well as right-wing trolls who forgot that the Republican Party behaved the same way in 2020. When incumbent presidents face token opposition in a primary, the national party has no reason to give the upstarts a media showcase by hosting a debate.
We used to pick our Presidential nominees in “smoke-filled rooms.” We now let lunatic partisans pick them in primary elections. There’s no going back to smoke-filled rooms, but maybe the parties skipping primary debates is a helpful corrective to part of what ails us politically.
What Twitter is made for
Ordinary courtesy and respect for one’s intellectual opposites are actually liabilities on Twitter. They run against the grain of what one might call “effective” use of the platform. The platform isn’t made for debate. Contra Elon, it isn’t made to be a digital public square either. Twitter is made for identity curation via meta-positioning ….
The obverse side of “woke capital”
“Woke capitalism” may seem like corporations gravitating to the left, but it’s also corporations watering down the left.
Tucker
For any idea with an establishment imprimatur, absolute suspicion; for any outsider or skeptic, sympathy and trust.
Ross Douthat’s characterization of Tucker Carlson’s “hermeneutic.”
I never watched Tucker Carlson, though it’s near-impossible to avoid clips of him on the internet. So I have no first-hand impression of him, and I am suspicious of anything with an establishment imprimatur — not absolute suspicion (which would be stupid), but sharp and increasing.
But is Ross Douthat an establishment figure? I’d say not, but your mileage might vary.
Live not by lies wherever you live
Before my Harvard speech, I naïvely believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out “Live not by lies!” in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out “Live not by lies!” in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.
Wordplay
Adjectival overkill is the method of bad polemicists who don’t have much to report.
The Smearing of Clarence Thomas
the distinctive “occupational psychosis” of Silicon Valley is sociopathy
There is an immense and important difference between seeking justice and seeking power.
Angry populism is a force that can only be stoked, never assuaged.
… culture-war chum-tossers …
Nick Cattogio, characterizing Tucker Carlson (and others).
For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 