Notebook Dump 6/13/24

Culture

Incentivizing misery (bad urbanism)

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated … to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Assignable Curiosity” — ouch!

As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

By what authority?

The newest [Covid conspiracy theory] I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

Zeynep Tufekci, A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (emphasis added)

And then there’s the National Security officials who prostituted themselves to declare Hunter Biden’s laptop a made-in-Russia hoax.

If I were on the Left, I hope I’d have the objectivity to reject most of what comes out of HRC and SPLC, both of them media-coddled bullshit factories, dependent on fear to stay in business. (By all rights, HRC should have declared victory and closed up shop after Obergefell; instead, it took up a version of transgender rights that many gays and lesbians reject.) But the Media lap up their stuff.

I don’t know who’s trustworthy any more. Whereas I formerly read stuff regularly from sources on the fairly far Left and Right, I now try to stick to sane-seeming, more-or-less-centrist sources, the fairly far Left and Right having become chronic liars. But I have no conclusive reason to think the center isn’t lying, too.

Any glimmers of absolute certainty I saw in the past were probably unwarranted, but these days it’s hard to find “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Elusive higher purposes

L.M. Sacacas attempts to disenthrall us from a subtle delusion:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

…

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one’s breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind’s wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn’t paint some days, didn’t even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

Teflon Sam

A liberal (maybe even left-wing) provocateur named Lauren Windsor attended a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society and, with hidden recording device and pretending to be a fervent Catholic conservative, tried to bait Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito into saying something inflammatory. She utterly struck out with Roberts but got an polite, anodyne response from Alito. The liberal media are now dishonestly engaged in trying to distill something sinister, even theocratic, from the weak tea of what he said.

But …

To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.

Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.

As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.

Marc O. DeGirolami. And:

Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Rod Dreher.

Errata

In March, I wrote:

IVF is in fact popular … (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

I stand at least semi-corrected:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels. (Source: politico.com)

Via John Ellis, whose daily new curation I recently discovered.

I note that the SBC resolution does not call for legislation, but I’m placing no bets on this being the end of the subject.

If you have no idea why anyone might opposed IVF, you need to get out more. As an oblique reminder, I again dig into my archives:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Beginning with the paragraph “The media’s manipulations …”, Ryan Anderson critiques IVF more directly.

Politics

Trading Power for Liberty

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

David French, MAGA Turns Against the Constitution

Western Hegemony has ended

Five hundred years of Western hegemony has ended, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.

NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war between the West and Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.

The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony as opposed to its revival. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganised as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, socialising inferiors is replaced by negotiations, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.

The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect of compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear wan increasingly likely.

Summary blurb for Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, recommended by cyberfriend and blogger Terry Cowan.

Although Diesen, even Cowan, pay closer attention to such things than I do, this is very much my view as well. So do I buy the book to confirm my priors or move on to another topic? If the Russia-Ukraine war ends before I buy it, I’ll probably move on.

But first, a key quote, from 1987 and from an eminent source, to keep and ponder:

George Kennan:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to go on, substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Via Diesen and Terry Cowan

Nothing has changed. It is literally true that we invent enemies to justify feeding what Dwight Eisenhower presciently called “the military-industrial complex.”

J.D. Vance (see below) also thinks the world is becoming multipolar.

J.D. Vance

Ross Douthat has an important interview: J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party. I’m sharing an unlocked version which, if you wonder, as I do, “What happened to the never-Trump author of Hillbilly Elegy?” is worth reading.

I’ll probably wrestle with it more if he becomes Trump’s running mate. For now, I’m slightly less cynical about his change(s) over eight years than I was before, and I find that I’m of one mind with him substantively on a few things.

Balancing Sociopathy against policy

I don’t apologize for the votes I cast after careful (indeed, searching) consideration. However, I do have to apologize for my view of the never Trumpers whom I found to be histrionic and unrealistic. They saw further that there were significant risks involved with Donald Trump that could very well outweigh the policy outcomes. They were right about that, and they deserve an apology from me (and perhaps others who saw it the way I did) for not perceiving that their concerns were grounded in reality, not merely some idealistic moral fragility. They perceived a legitimate threat, which did come to significant fruition.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers

This, published 9 days after the January 6 insurrection (or whatever you want to call it, except “patriot rally” or its cognates) remains worth reading — if only for his rationale for voting as he did. I consider his rationale incoherent; one need not vote for a menace who might do some good things in order avoid being a “free rider” if the menace actually does them. One can say “I think the menace outweighs the possible benefits.”

Reminder …

I’ve moved most political stuff to another blog, but if you’re curious, they’re just a click away.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Thursday, 11/10/22

Election 2022

With a little help from their foes

[M]uch of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes … that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold, no choice but to apologize for his every transgression, no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and now no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.

But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn, Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work.

Jamelle Bouie, No One Forced Republicans to Do Any of These Things

Nobody forced them, but a sleazy and dangerous Democrat tactic worked:

Democrats’ cynical decisions to boost more extreme Republican primary candidates seem to have paid off last night, as Price reports, with all six of the boosted primary winners losing to Democratic candidates. That’s likely to encourage future Democratic meddling—but operatives say it should also be a wake up call for Republicans supporting extreme candidates.

The Morning Dispatch

Some of these MAGA candidates were so thinly-funded — apart from the boost the Dems cynically gave them — that they were unlikely to win. And in the end (the general election), they didn’t.

For more, see Price St. Clair, Primary Meddling Pays Off for Democrats. Excerpt:

The Democrats meddling in Michigan’s 3rd District generated the most controversy. Incumbent Peter Meijer was one of only 10 Republican House members to vote to impeach Trump in the aftermath of January 6—but he lost his primary to Trump-aligned candidate John Gibbs after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $425,000 boosting Gibbs. Pre-election forecasts suggested that the race was likely to end up being the closest of the six “MAGA meddling” races. On Tuesday, Gibbs lost by 8 points to his Democratic opponent Hillary Scholten, who had run an explicitly moderate campaign.

Lashed to the Orange mast as the ship overturns

Mastriano and Lake, meanwhile, successfully navigated their respective primaries by lashing themselves to the former president in essentially every respect. That meant throwing themselves behind stolen-election conspiracy theories, but it also meant disdaining the notion that they had to care about uniting the party. It was their job to wave the MAGA flag, and everyone else’s job to get in line.

This produced bizarre spectacles, like when Lake went out of her way to attack, not just the late Sen. John McCain, but any of her own potential voters who might have liked him. “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” Lake said at a campaign event. “Get the hell out!”

In a wave election, that sort of behavior might pay off as a triumphal assertion of who is in charge around here. With a loss, it ends up as a remarkable display of political hubris.

Andrew Egger, The End of ‘Stop the Steal’?

Voldemorting 45

“What every Republican leader knows, but few dare say out loud, is that 2022 would mark the third consecutive year that Republicans not named or tainted by Trump had a good election,” Jonathan Martin writes for Politico. “For all the affection Trump enjoys from his base, there’s a reason why it’s Democrats who are the most eager to make him the face of the GOP.”

The Morning Dispatch

Dissent

While others suggest this election was a defeat for Trump, Trumpism, and the Big Steal bullshit, the New York Times narrative makes it about America’s love of abortion together with a defense of democracy against its enemies.

I know I’m nowhere near the mainstream in many ways, and I was sufficiently inattentive to the campaign that I unwittingly early-voted for an Indiana candidate who, I learned on Election Day, is under a dark cloud. But despite the success of a few abortion-permissive post-Dobbs referenda, I’m not buying the Times narrative. It’s not absurd, but I don’t find it persuasive, either.

Politics more broadly

The GOP’s Urban failures

Young, educated urbanites in Texas are a lot like their counterparts anywhere else in the country. Imagine yourself as a high-achieving young Texan who wants to attend an elite university, graduate, move to Austin, and work at Apple. What does the Republican Party stand for that makes you feel that you belong there? Parker, the Fort Worth mayor, looks like precisely the kind of voter Republicans have an increasingly hard time reaching: a millennial woman with an elite university education, a graduate degree, and an address in a major city in what will soon be the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area.

…

There is good evidence that conservatives can get good things done in big cities. But, for the most part, big-city voters are not interested in Republicans.

“We’re the old man saying, ‘Get off my lawn!’” says Kevin Robnett of Fort Worth, a businessman, veteran, and longtime Republican activist. “We as a party have become anti-intellectual, and we have become anti-institution,” he continues. This has made it more difficult to connect with college-educated professionals in the cities and suburbs. “Our message is: ‘Something has been broken and you have been robbed, and things were better in the past.’ That’s our mantra now, and it is a losing vision for the entire millennial generation. They want to suck the marrow out of life. That’s why you don’t see them in offices, and they’re hard to employ. But one of the things about that generation that I really like—that we are not appealing to—is the sense that we can fix our problems, that our best days are ahead. I have an optimistic view of that generation, but our party does not.”

Worse than merely failing to sympathize with the values and aspirations of these voters, Republicans often sneer at them, denouncing the cities and the mode of life lived there as corrupt, dismissing the colleges and universities that prepare students for professional life as dens of inequity, and, increasingly, treating those at the commanding heights of business as cultural traitors. “You don’t tell a woman she’s ugly and should have made better choices and then try to get her to go out with you,” Robnett says.

Kevin D. Williamson

It can’t happen here

I didn’t read past this, but I’m inclined to agree with the top-level summary:

A MAGA America Would Be Ugly
Forget Orban’s Hungary. We’d be worse. By Paul Krugman

I’m still on the fence about whether Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” is per se anathema (currently reading Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies), but I don’t think that today’s dramatis personnae on the American Right could pull it off here — with the possible exception of Ron DeSantis, who is far smarter and more thoughtful than his street-brawler looks suggest.

Culture

Good science not (necessarily) welcome here

Students are often happy to hear that there are genes for sexual orientation, but if you teach that most human personality traits, and even school achievement, have a heritable component, they start to squirm …

[I]t has become taboo in the classroom to note any disparities between groups that are not explained as the result of systemic bias.

…

Some grants focus almost exclusively on identity, as federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, now offer a surplus of grants with the purpose of “broadening the participation of members of groups that are . . . currently underrepresented”—instead of funding research to answer scientific questions.

But the field that is most directly affected is research related to humans, especially those dealing with evolution of populations.

As an example: The NIH now puts barriers to access to the important database of “Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).” The database is an amazing tool that combines genomes (the unique genetic makeup of each individual) and phenotypes (the observable characteristics of each individual) of millions of people. These phenotypes include education, occupation, health and income and, because the dataset connects genetics with phenotype at an individual level, it is essential for scientists who want to understand genes and genetic pathways that are behind those phenotypes.

The NIH now denies scientists access to this data and other related datasets. Researchers report getting permits denied on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” According to one researcher, this happens even if the research has nothing to do with race or sex, but focuses on genetics and education.

Luana Maroja, An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science

Not with a bang but a whimper

Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, her lawyer David Boies and the disgraced financier’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday that they have dropped their defamation lawsuits against one another, ending a yearslong feud involving two of the nation’s best-known attorneys.

…

In announcing the resolution of the lawsuits, Ms. Giuffre said in a statement that she now recognizes that she might have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz as one of her alleged abusers.

…

Mr. Dershowitz said in a statement Tuesday that he never had sex with Ms. Giuffre.

“I have nevertheless come to believe that at the time she accused me she believed what she said,” Mr. Dershowitz said. He added that he now believed that he was mistaken in accusing Mr. Boies of engaging in misconduct and extortion.

Defamation Lawsuits Dropped in Jeffrey Epstein Saga

Well, I’m glad that’s all — well, “cleared up” seems a bit strong.

Pro tip from someone who practiced law for 37 years and heard many jury verdicts announced: very seldom does either side feel fully vindicated and satisfied after the jury comes back.

Too typical

This is a humiliating moment. Or at least it should have been. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and asserted that “millions” of kids have been on hormone blockers. That’s laughably absurd. There has been a spike in students identifying as genderqueer or non-binary, but millions of kids on puberty blockers?

Rogan’s team fact-checked Walsh in real time, and found that the true number of children placed on puberty blockers was less than 1,000 kids per year, out of the more than 70 million children in the United States.

[Embedded Tweet omitted]

I want to be crystal clear on where I stand. I don’t believe minor children should receive “gender-affirming” surgery or be placed on puberty blockers. States have the constitutional authority to block such treatments, and they should.

At the same time, one of the reasons why our politics has become so hysterical is constant exaggeration. Critical race theory is everywhere! Drag queens are overrunning our schools! Millions of kids are on puberty blockers!

Take something that’s bad (there are, in fact, harmful anti-racist training modules, drag shows for children are absurd, and no child should be given life-altering “gender-affirming” medical treatment) and then hype the threat. Make it pervasive. Frighten people. It’s a formula for ratings and clicks, but it’s also a formula for reactionary politics and constitutional violations. It’s a formula that heightens American polarization and contributes to pervasive anger and despair.

Walsh has cast himself as an expert on these matters. He created a documentary attacking radical gender ideology. He should know better.

David French

I am sick to death of implausible, if not outright innumerate, hyperbole from people I basically agree with.

(For what it’s worth, contra French, I’m uneasy with outright bans on “gender-affirming care” of adolescents because, even if “trans” is a social contagion, and there has been profiteering and ideological blinders at gender clinics, I’m not prepared to say that no adolescent needs such a band-aid, if only to cover the deep wound of genuine, persistent and extreme gender dysphoria.)

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Xmas, Observed (U.S.) 2016

What is the meaning of this city?
More on “reality”
Tidbits from The Great Divorce
Dateline Bethlehem
Biden on Clinton
Trump’s Attorney General

Continue reading “Xmas, Observed (U.S.) 2016” →