Keeping the United States united

The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs is a very dubious human

If Barack Obama or any other prominent black participant in the big leagues of American politics had 13 CHILDREN OUT OF WEDLOCK with 4 DIFFERENT WOMEN, it would be all anyone could ever talk about. Most conservatives seem not even to know this about [Elon] Musk.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Keeping the United States united

The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability and willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their disagreements with their fellow Americans. You have to start from the position “no American is my enemy.” I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my enemy and I will impose restraints on myself.

…

Not much matters. The things that matter matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed by David Brooks.

Corruption then and now

In aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. In democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. The consequence is that in aristocratic States the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; whilst the reverse is the case in democratic nations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s observation may be reaching its expiration date, with avarice having become, in some quarters, insatiable.

More and less respectable conspiracy theories

⁠⁠If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes … traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.⁠⁠

Kevin D. Williamson

Attention

Attention is an indicator of love.
Not attending to what merits our love is indifference.
Attending to what does not merit our love is idolatry.
When businesses work hard to commodify our attention, we should consider who and what actually deserves it.

David O’Hara (who disclaims both originality and remembering where it all came from).

Can you recite a 7-digit phone number backward?

As we get older, we’re all going to lose a few of our marbles. As the word gets out that Parkinson’s disease is not just a movement disorder, there will be people whose careers will be destroyed because, on a particular day at a particular time, they can’t recite a seven-digit telephone number backward. Allowing someone’s fate to depend on performance on some test that has nothing to do with the job in question is just the reductio ad absurdum of the meritocratic machinery that has been pretty good to me (and to you, I suspect) over most of a lifetime.

Michael E. Kinsley, For Those Who Grow Old (originally titled Old Age)

Readwise

I’m a highlighter, a clipper, a curator. Digital life is very congenial to me. My blog posts here are full of digital clippings from my storehouses.

The trick is knowing how to manage highlights, and also to be reminded of things I once thought worthy of curation.

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years. There was a flat-file database manager for Mac, from the makers of Filemaker. I can’t even remember its name as I write. There was (and still is, I think) Evernote, which I suspect is a database manager with a diversionary user interface. Then there was DevonThink, another database manager. None of them gave me reminders of what I’d saved; nothing serendipitous ever happened. And then DevonThink crashed and made proprietary hash of much of my work.

I decided that I needed to keep things in plain text, or at least in Markdown (through which the target text would remain readily discernible in a worst-case app meltdown). On top of that text could live various tools. That led me to Obsidian, with which I’m pretty happy. I was on the path to Plaintextistan, I thought. But again, Obsidian didn’t give me surprising reminders of what I’d saved.

But darn it, a non-plaintext tool I had almost forgotten emerged from the mists: Readwise. Even worse, it’s web-based.

I’ve taken a little time to explore its nooks and crannies, and in recent months, it has become an integral part of my daily websurfing as well as a smart reminder of things I once noted but might forget. I’m pretty sure it has integrated AI so that the 15 daily highlights I’ve requested increasingly have a sort of theme woven through them (Tocqueville appeared in two of 15 items today). I find myself spending more time daily pondering the 15 items Readwise has surfaced and offered. My plain text commitment has faltered.

Readwise is not an instant panacea, but it’s not too time-consuming to set up.

If you’ve highlighted your Kindle books and Apple Books, or if you’ve saved things to Instapaper (or maybe Pocket – I don’t recall if Pocket integrated), you’ve got a jump-start because it will import all that on request. It’s got a lot of other integrations.
It also will do Optical Character Recognition on highlights from your paper books and put them in the system. This is through its smartphone app.
It offers browser plugins to save web content; it’s gotten to the point that I put every interesting web item into it and read it there; if it seems upon reading to be ephemeral, I delete it then to avoid clutter; if it’s worthy, I’ll have highlighted along the way and can add tags quickly for future retrieval.

You might want to give it a look. Not surprisingly, Readwise describes itself better than my little endorsement.

Shorts

A society whose members know what is enough might be poor, but its members would be equally free. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
What I called “the master wish” in this religion of wishful thinking went something like this: Please, Lord, let us keep driving to Walmart forever. (James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency)
Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism Sometimes, I think Wendell Berry and his agrarian friends were 21st Century America’s only true conservatives — and although they have my admiration, through long habit I don’t live like them.
The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
The kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets. (Paul Kingsnorth, via Brady Bowman)
Money can buy the megaphone, but it really can’t buy the mood that we see in the country. (Henrik Schatzinger, a political scientist at Ripon College, about the massive spending on next month’s election)
Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse. (Emmanuel Macron on the French riots)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

If you wanted to have a meaningful impact, you didn’t want to waste your vote on the weak and incompetent center. The Social Democrats were not enough to hold back the communist menace. Only the Nazis proved capable of reversing the leftward slide. If you believed the communists were the greater evil, you felt a moral duty to vote for the Nazis.

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

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.

Attention Economy (and more)

Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age is one of the more thought-provoking things I’ve read in the past few weeks, and I’ve been reading a lot of thought-provoking things. It’s your introduction to “the attention economy” and it’s worth burning a freebie at the New York Times’ metered paywall.

Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.
“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, [Liz Cheney] went further. Trump “does not have a role as the leader of our party going forward,” she asserted, making a public case—to viewers of Trump’s onetime favorite network—that expanded on the one she delivered in the House GOP Conference meeting on Wednesday.

Cheney isn’t alone. Late last week, it became clear that Sen. Ben Sasse was headed toward another censure from the Nebraska Republican Party. Among his supposed offenses: accusing Trump of “pouring gasoline on these fires of division” that led to a riot at the U.S. Capitol and “persistently engag[ing] in public acts of ridicule and calumny” against the former president.

Sasse—who was just elected to a second six-year term—did not shy away from the confrontation, instead cutting a five-minute video response to the Nebraska GOP’s State Central Committee. “You are welcome to censure me again,” he said, “but let’s be clear about why: It’s because I still believe (as you used to) that politics is not about the weird worship of one dude.”

At the end of the message, Sasse, like Cheney, pointed to the future. “We’re gonna have to choose between conservatism and madness,” he said, “between just railing about who we’re mad at, versus actually trying to persuade rising generations of Americans again. That’s where I’m focused. And I sincerely hope that many of you will join in celebrating these big, worthy causes for freedom.”

[Shout-outs to Sen. Pat Toomey, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez and Rep. Peter Meijer omitted.]

… Only 21 percent of Republicans in a recent Echelon Insights poll strongly or somewhat supported impeaching and convicting President Trump.

But the same poll also found Trump’s stranglehold on the party’s voters loosening. In December, according to the survey, 61 percent of GOP voters said they hoped Trump would continue to be “the leading voice” for Republicans going forward. By January, that number had dropped to just 41 percent. After the events of January 6, only 45 percent of Republican voters said they wanted Trump to run for president again in 2024, down from 65 percent the month prior.

The Morning Dispatch

How these sane people live in the same party with Matt Gaetz, MTG and other contemptible clowns is an open question, but I can understand them not wanting to cede the party of Lincoln to limelight-loving loons.

I was shocked that OAN would run Mike Lindell’s 3-hour Absolute Proof conspiracy video, considering reports that it repeats defamatory claims OAN already had retracted under threat of lawsuit. But this extraordinary disclaimer helps me understand.

I won’t watch the video because:

People I trust and respect have already debunked the major “stolen election” evidence — some of which is fabricated, some of which is third-hand hearsay, and some of which may be honest misunderstandings of the significance of first-hand observation (e.g., “when I went to bed, Trump was ahead but when I woke up Biden was pulling away” — a red crest/blue wave that was long predicted and easily understood, but that Trump consciously exploited with his premature victory announcement).
I’m not so sophisticated about election mechanics that I can, on my own and in real time, dismiss all the claims that might be made in a 3-hour video. So watching it would only produce confusion — probably unwarranted (see my appeal to authority in the preceding point) — or require hours and hours more to regain a working clarity.
I do not apologize for trusting analyses of people I’ve found trustworthy. Everyone does it. Everybody budgets how much time to spend on various things, and most people budget little time for seemingly-quixotic quests, If others find a cocaine-addled domestic abuser, conspiracy theorist and TV pitchman more plausible than seasoned political observers, all I can say is “bless their hearts.”

Timothy Wilks, 20, is shot and killed outside of Nashville’s Urban Air Trampoline and Adventure Park. Police told reporters that Wilks was trying to create a viral video of himself staging a fake robbery prank for his YouTube channel. Apparently unaware of the hilarity of having a stranger run at you and your friends with butcher knives, one of Wilks’ intended foils drew a pistol and shot him dead.

The Dangers of the Derp State – The Dispatch

Well, bless his heart, he was just trying to gain the attention to which he’s entitled.

The state of Victoria in Australia … just passed a bill that will considerably intensify the conflict between religious freedom, individual choice, and identity politics. And it might well become a model for laws elsewhere in the democratic world.

The legislation that just passed is the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill 2020 …

The law defines a change or suppression practice as follows:

“a practice or conduct directed towards a person, whether with or without the person’s consent on the basis of the person’s sexual orientation or gender identity; and for the purpose of changing or suppressing the sexual orientation or gender identity of the person; or inducing the person to change or suppress their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

…

But the really important part of the bill from a religious perspective is its list of “change or suppression practices.” This includes: “carrying out a religious practice, including but not limited to, a prayer-based practice, a deliverance practice or an exorcism.”

In short, if someone asks a pastor, a priest, or a Christian friend to pray for them that their sexual desires or gender dysphoria might be changed, that pastor, priest, or friend runs the risk of committing a criminal offense. Presumably this also applies to parents praying for their children—or perhaps even parents teaching their children that untrammeled expressions of sexual desire (at least within the canons of contemporary bourgeois taste) are inappropriate.

…

The legislation also demonstrates one of the oddest results of the modern emphasis on the radical freedom of the individual. In such a world, all must theoretically be allowed to have their own narratives of identity. But because some narratives of identity inevitably stand in opposition to others, some identities must therefore be privileged with legitimate status and others treated as cultural cancers. And that means that, in an ironic twist, the individual ceases to be sovereign and the government has to step in as enforcer. The lobby group of the day then decides who is in and who is out, with the result that, in this instance, the gay or trans person who wants to become straight or “cis” (to use the pretentious jargon), cannot be tolerated. His narrative calls into question that of others. We might say that his very existence is a threat. To grant any degree of legitimacy to his desire is to challenge the normative status of the desires of others.

And so prayer for such heretics must be prohibited, even if they specifically ask for it. This is not so much because it harms the people for whom it is being offered, but simply because it witnesses to the fact that not all people—not even all gay and trans people—buy into the current confections of the politics of sexual identity.

Perhaps that is encouraging. Perhaps at long last Western societies are beginning to wake up to the fact that Christianity at its very core witnesses to the fact that the world is not as it should be ….

Prohibiting Prayer in Australia | Carl R. Trueman | First Things

A Los Angeles Times opinion column is firing up the Internet after Virginia Heffernan wrote about her anguish in not knowing how to respond to neighbors cleared the snow on her driveway. They problem is that they also voted for former President Donald Trump. The column entitled “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?” explores her struggle with how to respond while comparing all Trump supporters to Nazis and Hezbollah. It is unfortunately hardly surprising to see such unhinged hateful comparisons in today’s age of rage. What was surprising is need to publish such a column containing gratuitous attacks on over 70 million voters as compared to genocidal murders or terrorists.

Thank You For Shoveling My Driveway . . . You Nazi? LA Times Runs Bizarre Column Revealing Liberal Angst And Anger – JONATHAN TURLEY

I never thought the end of the world would be so funny.

Jonathan Pageau, Q&A at Seattle Conference – Oct. 2017 – The Symbolic World