Happy Accession Day

70 years ago today, Queen Elizabeth took the throne. There’s some festivities planned, though the big affair will be the anniversary of her coronation.

Would “Voldemorting” suit you?

Freddie deBoer is a bit put out that the armies of the Successor Ideology reject every label for them, so he suggests “Voldemorting”:

Voldemorting has an obvious political purpose: that which you cannot name is made that much harder to discuss, and that which is harder to discuss is harder to criticize. That they would hide within these discursive tricks does not say good things about the content of their politics or their ability to defend them. What’s more, the people who act this way seem to think that there is no reason to give their faction a name because what they want isn’t politics, it’s just “the moral arc of the universe,” just progress, just the way things ought to be. There’s no need to talk about what they want because their politics are just right.
…
Whatever term [you allow for your ideology] – come out into the light and fight like the rest of us have to fight. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to.

Downgrading the forecast

As of Friday the 4th, Russia’s “imminent” invasion of Ukraine had been downgraded to “planning to fabricate a pretext to invade.”

Your sins will find you out

CNN President Jeff Zucker appeared to close a messy chapter in the cable news network’s history in December when he fired anchor Chris Cuomo after an investigation into his efforts to help his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, respond to allegations of sexual harassment.
The drama was far from over.
Mr. Cuomo’s legal team then contacted the cable news network to collect severance he feels he is owed, people familiar with the matter said. In the course of those talks, Mr. Cuomo’s legal team said they believed CNN was applying its policies inconsistently, citing that Mr. Zucker hadn’t disclosed a relationship he was having with a top aide, the people said.

Wall Street Journal.

I’ve found fortification though life in the out-of-context warning “be sure your sins will find you out.” That’s exponentially truer if your sins are know to thugs like the Cuomos.

Go, Sarah!

It takes a lot to get me to root for Sarah Palin.

But consider the 2017 New York Times editorial, falsely and ghoulishly insinuating that the 2017 shooting of Steve Scalise and other Republican lawmakers was the logical eventuality of Sarah Palin’s (nonexistent) 2011 incitement of violence against Gabby Gifford (I’m giving you the gist of the NYT screed, which appeared immediately after the 2017 shooting).

That has done the trick.

I wish Palin well in her libel suit, going to trial this week. I’m not altogether happy with the prospect of eroding the New York Times v. Sullivan libel standard, but now as then hard cases make bad law.

Best outcome: Palin wins, but jury decides her reputation was already too low to be damaged much. Nominal damages of $1.

Cheap slurs

Speaking of the New York Times, its columnist Michelle Goldberg can’t even defend suspended Georgetown law professor Ilya Shapiro without misrepresenting the gist of what he said:

A libertarian constitutional law scholar named Ilya Shapiro sent out some ugly tweets last week. Shapiro, who’d recently been hired by Georgetown University’s law school, criticized Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Indian-born judge Sri Srinivasan was “objectively” the “best pick.” But Srinivasan, wrote Shapiro, “alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” He claimed that if Biden considered only Black women, whoever he chose would always have an “asterisk attached.”
Many people were rightly incensed by Shapiro’s suggestion that a Black woman — any Black woman — would necessarily be “lesser.” … Shapiro’s tweets implied disdain not for a specific nominee, but for the entire universe of Black female jurists.…
… Georgetown’s Black Law Students Association started a petition demanding his firing; as of Thursday morning it had more than 1,000 signatures. “Shapiro’s racist rhetoric and continued association with the university sends the visceral message that even if Black women attend the best law schools, hold the highest clerkships and serve on the most prestigious courts, they still are not good enough,” it said.
I wouldn’t argue with anyone who interprets Shapiro’s insulting tweets that way.

(Emphasis added)

I call bullshit.

Nobody was “rightly incensed,” and Shapiro didn’t disdain anybody.

It is impeccably logical that if Sri Srinivasan is “objectively” the “best pick,” any other pick will indeed necessarily be “lesser.”

It’s also nevertheless true that Ketanji Brown Jackson is very well-qualified, and would be on any Democrat President’s short list. I’d bet a modest amount that Shapiro would agree with that. He was just arguing for someone he thought better.

Shapiro’s full phrase, “lesser black woman,” was admittedly a groaner, for which Shapiro has apologized.

As Mark Twain once wrote, “I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.” Shapiro could have stopped after his praise of Srinivasan, but nobody with an active Twitter life has entirely avoided infelicitous short-hand to fit the 280-character limit (or to fill it with just one more point).

Twitter groaners don’t “incense” healthy people in a healthy society, but it feels at times as if the Times wants to keep us sickly and polarized.

Hungary the besieged

At the moment, Hungary is facing persecution by the European Union because of a law it passed last summer that restricts media information about LGBT aimed at minors. It is perfectly normal for any country to restrict what information is available to children. Did you know that Sweden bans advertising that targets children? …
What the Hungarians banned, or at least restricted, was advertising and other forms of information aimed at propagandizing children and minors for a permissive, left-wing take on LGBT. … The problem for the EU, of course, is that the Hungarians hold traditional views about sexuality and gender. If Budapest wanted to restrict ads selling candy and soft drinks to minors, nobody in Europe would mind, but when Budapest wants to restrict selling gender ideology to children, then it’s the most wicked thing in the world ….

Rod Dreher, ‌Hungary & American Conservatives

History Rhymes

What we are witnessing today on the international stage is more than a re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 with the roles of the United States and Russia reversed. It is an intentional reversal of roles and language up and down the line on Russia’s part. Nebenzya’s brazen denial that his country is intimidating Ukraine by moving its armed forces around on its own territory was intentionally serving up to the USA and NATO the tripe that has been served up to Russia these past 25 years: that NATO is a purely defensive alliance which does not threaten Russia in any way when it holds massive war exercises at Russia’s borders or stages a mock recapture of the Kaliningrad enclave.
… Russia is in a ‘gotcha’ position if things go to extremis, that it probably has a first strike capability, meaning it could so destroy the United States war-making capabilities on a first strike as to preclude an effective riposte. This is the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ that Russia has created for itself by developing and deploying hypersonic missiles and other cutting edge strategic weapons over the past twenty years while the United States poured its military budget into bloody wars on the ground in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Gilbert Doctorow

It ain’t the 60s any more, kids

When Neil Young and Joni Mitchell saw an injustice, they used to attack it by writing protest songs, taking on racism in the “Southern Man” and the Vietnam war in “The Fiddle and the Drum”. Today, the two musicians prefer to speak out by pressing the mute button.

The Economist

Who are the real democrats?

Ben Rhodes at the Atlantic says one major political party (the Republicans) no longer accepts democracy. “Not so fast, pal,” says Ross Douthat. “It kind of depends on how you look at ‘democracy’.”

I think I’d lay low a while if I were Ben Rhodes.

Not that the Republicans aren’t deviants, mind you.

The RNC censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on Friday, including this jaw-dropper:

Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse….

Another point on Trump, which reflects poorly on the GOP:

So a prime minister who won a landslide victory only a couple of years ago may well be defenestrated by his own party in the near future — because he broke Covid rules and said something disgraceful about an opponent. Now imagine the GOP doing that to Trump. Inconceivable. The man instigated a mob attack on the Congress, for Pete’s sake. He has regularly lied about opponents — and no one in the GOP gave a shit. Johnson did indeed have a populist cult of personality, like Trump. But the British Tories never went so far as to worship the man, like a golden calf, and merge their entire identity in his image.

Andrew Sullivan

(I am neither Republican nor Democrat.)

Covid deaths

I noted recently that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky couldn’t say how many Americans of the then-reported 836,000 Covid deaths have died from Covid as opposed to with Covid. That made me suspect that deaths from Covid have been over-reported (as they have in at least a few case).

The Economist, however, watches the reality-checking statistic of excess deaths, and thinks we’ve under-counted. The Economist thinks our real Covid toll is 1,001,190.

It also has data on much of the world, though it appears at a glance to be weak on sub-Saharan Africa.

Quick take

There’s nothing like censorship to quell conspiracy theories.

Caitlin Flanagan on the US surgeon general suggesting that the government and corporations use their power to censor citizens like Joe Rogan. Via Andrew Sullivan

Liquid Modernity versus the Counterculture of Commitment

[Pete] Davis opens [Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing] by asking us if we’ve ever felt the despondency of “infinite browsing mode”: unable to decide on a Netflix show, say, paralyzed by the desire to keep options open. Fear of making the wrong choice, coupled with an infinite amount of options, may make us lackadaisical. But many have also experienced anxiety resulting from our gig economy’s lack of job stability or employee loyalty, or hurt resulting from friends and loved ones who weren’t faithful to us. Infinite browsing mode tempts us, but it also pains us.
Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman refers to this state, Davis explains, as liquid modernity: “We can’t rely on any job or role, idea or cause, group or institution to stick around in the same form for long—and they can’t rely on us to do so, either,” Davis writes. “That’s liquid modernity: It’s Infinite Browsing Mode, but for everything in our lives.”
Davis compares this with what he calls “a Counterculture of Commitment,” and considers a diverse array of people—Fred Rogers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, piano and school teachers, and more—who “took the same radical act of making commitments to particular things—to particular places and communities, to particular causes and crafts, and to particular institutions and people.”

Gracy Olmstead, ‌The Day of Small Things

Discerning the truth

Not unrelated to Infinite Browsing Mode, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is winnowing falsehoods out of truth. Nobody wants to commit to a lie, but we simply don’t have time to exhaustively investigate every claim that, if true, might well change our course in life.

So we all develop heuristics. I intend to write soon about mine. Meanwhile, I’d be interested to hear yours — both of you, all of you — heck, I don’t even pay attention to the statistics any more.

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.

Red and Blue America on Covid

Blue and Red America on Covid

[T]he reason the hyper-cautious approach to the pandemic has taken such a firm hold in Blue America in the first place is it’s an outgrowth of an aversion to risk common among highly educated, politically progressive urban professionals. Red America has its own pathological relation to risk. (What is vaccine refusal if not an expression of the conviction that getting the shot is more dangerous than taking one’s chances against the virus, combined with a generalized distrust of experts?) But it’s the risk aversion common to Blue America that is driving public and private presumption in favor of rules and restrictions designed to keep people safe. Not just the elderly and the immunocompromised, but everyone, including kids with very little danger of becoming seriously ill.
…
But there’s also a culture war dimension to where we find ourselves.
Those in Blue America who favor remaining on a COVID-hawk footing aren’t just trying to protect themselves. They’re sending a message about who they are. The masks, the willingness to hunker down at home, the insistence on constantly proving vaccination status and submitting to tests — all of it is a symbolic expression of the moral conviction that the common good must come first. It’s a statement that those who refuse to go along with such restrictions are behaving with selfish indifference to their communities and probably prolonging everyone’s misery in the bargain.

Damon Linker

Covid denoument?

[E]arlier this month, [CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky admitted to Fox News that she didn’t know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the United States linked to COVID were people who died with COVID versus people who died from it.
…
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many regular people without special degrees have been able to develop a clear, rational understanding of the COVID threat by using common sense or by simply looking at the data themselves. In May 2021, a group of MIT researchers studied some of these people, whom they called “anti-maskers.” The researchers found that, rather than being unfamiliar with the data around mask efficacy, the anti-maskers were highly data-literate and had created sophisticated visualizations to demonstrate that masks weren’t working. The MIT paper concluded that the anti-maskers “espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist” and “champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy.”
For the MIT researchers, this was a problem. For them, science does not consist of an observable and testable body of knowledge, but of institutional titles filled by people with the power to determine what is true.

Clayton Fox, ‌COVID Affects Your Memory

Harsh, but I’m beginning to think it’s warranted.

I haven’t said much about my own views on Covid, and I haven’t said it for good reason.

I was not one of the “regular people without special degrees [who were] able to develop a clear, rational understanding of the COVID threat by using common sense or by simply looking at the data themselves.” But I do not feel like a patsy for listening to the government, even if it’s turning out that they were repeatedly wrong and sometimes misleading.

My status as a retired introvert made staying in (most of the time) pretty easy for me, and my grandchildren’s school re-opened pretty promptly after the initial near-universal lockdowns.

So I did not take the time for a timely take on Covid, and instinctively recognized that the carrying (mainstream or dissenting) coals to Newcastle added nothing to anybody’s useful knowledge.

You gotta pick your battles, and this one wasn’t mine.

The only opinion I now care to share is that it’s foolish for anyone over, say, 55 or with comorbidities not to follow the current Covid vaccination recommendations (and yes, I’ve read some Alex Berenson).

Joining the billious geezers

I’m coming to understand why old men become crotchety. From National Review (emphasis added):

Last week, musician Neil Young issued an ultimatum: Spotify could either remove Joe Rogan’s immensely popular podcast or it could remove Young’s catalogue of music …
Young’s lonely lament might not have succeeded in silencing Rogan, but he did manage to win himself more attention than he’s had in decades. (I can say in all sincerity that I can’t remember having heard of him until this incident.) …Young also got a bit of support from fellow C-list celebrities Joni Mitchell and Brené Brown, who joined him in Spotify self-exile.

Alexandra DeSanctis, ‌Joe Rogan: The Real Reason They Want to Cancel Him

I’m sure DeSanctis is writing “in all sincerity” because nobody would say calculatedly something that damning.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen casts a jaded eye, seemingly well-deserved, on Young and Mitchell, who have both been dissenters from the “scientific” consensus, Young on GMOs, Mitchell on DDT (and, noted in comments to Cowen, her self-diagnosis of “Morgellons“).

The Orange Demagogue Returns

[I]n his weekend outburst, the former president asserts that by “desperately trying to pass legislation” to amend the ECA, “the Democrats and RINO Republicans” are, in effect, admitting “that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and now they want to take that right away.” Trump thus concludes that “unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
This is sheer nonsense.
A well-settled doctrine of law instructs that “subsequent remedial measures” are not admissible to prove that the occurrence the remedial measures seek to avoid would otherwise have happened or have been permissible. One of the best known iterations of this doctrine was long ago codified in Rule 407 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.
It is a commonsense good governance rule, particularly for a litigious society: If there are beneficial actions that could be taken to avoid some potential wrong, or to prevent a recurrence of a wrong, we don’t want policy-makers to shrink from taking them. But they might demur if they feared that their proposal of a good-faith remedy would be distorted into an admission that the wrong was actually permissible at the time it happened. The idea is that one who proposes a suspenders requirement just to be on the safe side should not be taken to be admitting that having everyone wear a belt wasn’t good enough.
Proponents of amending the ECA to state more emphatically that the vice president has no authority to discount votes are not conceding that, absent such an amendment, the vice president has this authority. They are saying that, since a former president and his loyalists took this indefensible position in connection with what is now an infamous event, we should be as clear as we can be that this scheme is invalid — we should do things we are in a position to do, even if they are just gestures, to prevent a future January 6 debacle.

Andrew McCarthy

Wordplay

Illuminotion: the depiction of an idea as a light bulb over a person’s head. (Attributed to Spelling Bee puzzle in the New York Times.)
Extravagant upsucking, as in “I’m very doubtful about DeSantis’ ability to out-Trump Trump, despite the governor’s extravagant upsucking to the nationalist right.” (Chris Stirewalt)
Embuggerance: Any obstacle that gets in the way of progress. The person who passed that along to (Chris Stirewalt) referred to it as a “term of art” rather than as a neologism. Stirewalt responds with some etymology for this brit variant of snafu.
Workism: religious devotion to work for work’s sake, as a priority, imperative, strategy, solution, delight, governing philosophy. (Derek Thompson via Michael Toscano) [Tipsy: Its dehumanizing effects wax as genuine Christian faith wanes.]
“So ancient that it might actually mean something.” Peter Hitchens contrasting Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation with modern democracy.

Special bonus Speech-Police supplement:

A new inclusive language guide from the University of Washington IT Department:

Housekeeping: “It carries a fraught history and connotation of women’s traditional domestic role as housekeepers.” Replace with: Maintenance. Cleanup.
Blind spot: “This phrase is ableist, connoting that ‘blind’ is equivalent to ignorant.” Replace with: Unaware.
Jerry-rigged: “‘Jerry’ is a derogatory term used by soldiers and civilians of the Allied nations for Germans in WW2.” Replace with: Poorly designed.
Also on the verboten list: Grandfathered; blackbox; brown bag lunch. It goes on. Some poor kid who didn’t learn about the evil of “blind spots” at Brearley will be sent to HR for the phrase.

Nellie Bowles

TGIFS

Today, I’m thankful for Freudian Slips, and call out this paragraph already mentioned:

[I]n his weekend outburst, the former president asserts that by “desperately trying to pass legislation” to amend the ECA, “the Democrats and RINO Republicans” are, in effect, admitting “that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and now they want to take that right away.” Trump thus concludes that “unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

Trump’s Absurd Attack on Pence | National Review (emphasis added).

Looks like we actually did “stop the steal.”

Legal defense funds, Bitcoin, and other rat-holes

January 6 Legal Defense Funds

If you are contributing for the legal defense of January 6 rioters because you think everyone is entitled to a good legal defense against criminal charges, I salute your intentions but caution you that some pretty fishy lawyers are stepping forward and may be snorting your money up their noses.

If you are contributing for the legal defense of January 6 rioters because you think they are patriot heroes being persecuted for righteousness’ sake, then by all means fulfill your evolutionary destiny by giving generously — maybe your entire IRA — and forget what I just said about fishy lawyers. I probably was lying.

Since when did the Italians become such prudes?

I’ve met a surprising number of Italian conservatives – not think-tank intellectuals, who are my usual crowd here, but normies – who startled me with their anti-Americanism. It’s the same kind of thing: they blame American pop culture for debasing their kids. They’re right to, in my judgment. What startled me, though, was how this sometimes went hand in hand with sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s government. The argument seemed to be that whatever Putin’s faults, at least he won’t force us to be woke. This was the same thing I heard from some Hungarians when I expressed concern about Orban’s flirting with the Chinese. Personally, I am far more worried about Orban and the Chinese than I am about Orban and anything else. I do note, however, that many ordinary Hungarians seem to be open to the Chinese for the same reason that Italians are open to the Russians: because they fear American cultural hegemony more than they fear whatever Russia and China stand for.

This is not something I had imagined before going to Hungary. And frankly, it blows my mind that this kind of thing is never reported on in the US media. The American people have no idea how much our country’s progressivist pop culture disgusts people in other countries, even European countries. Of course, the Hungarian woman I spoke to ended up conceding that her son’s generation may well be lost on these questions – which, if true, means that Hungary, as a democracy, will eventually become a Magyar Sweden. That might be inevitable, but I certainly understand why people like her – and she’s a Fidesz supporter – are angry about it.

Is Dreher wrong? Are we beloved? Are complaints about our pop culture some kind of prudery? From Italians?

Liberal Democracy versus traditional moral and cultural values.

Just as communism was not possible with families adhering to the feudal-patriarchal system, so liberal democracy is believed to be incomplete and unsuccessful with schools respecting traditional moral and cultural authoritarianism. The arguments are analogous. Just as a person coming from a noncommunist community could not become a full-fledged, dedicated, and efficient citizen of the communist state, so a graduate of a traditional school will never be a faithful and reliable citizen of the liberal-democratic state.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy.

So far, liberal democracy has not shut us down, but there’s battle going on for the soul of democracy. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." (Paraphrasing John Philpot Curran, who I have reason to believe is the true source of this oft-misattributed wisdom.)

Cybercurrency

Bitcoin, for the uninitiated, is a technology that purports to solve a host of problems with old-fashioned national currencies. It is designed to safeguard wealth against the depredations of inflation, public authorities and financial intermediaries.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Some products become popular because they’re useful. Bitcoin is popular despite being mostly useless. Its success rests on the simple fact that the value of a Bitcoin has increased dramatically since its introduction in 2009, making some people rich and inspiring others to hope they can ride the rocket, too.

It’s not really a virtual currency at all. It’s virtual gold, a vehicle for speculative investment made possible by some interesting technical innovations. It’s the absurd apotheosis of our financialized economy, an asset unmoored from any productive purpose. In the beginning were bonds and then synthetic bonds and then Bitcoin.

Binyamin Appelbaum, ‌Bitcoin Cosplay Is Getting Real

Bitcoin first really caught my attention when criminals were demanding ransoms paid in Bitcoin. "Oh, a special super-secret money for criminals. What won’t they think of next?"

But James Poulos now proposes that Bitcoin (and other cybercurrencies) can protect thought-criminals from the emerging American "soft social credit" system.

I can imagine myself a thought-criminal. Heck, I probably already am a thought-criminal since I believe some of the things one just doesn’t say. But I still don’t understand cybercurrency, and I tend to agree with Binyamin Appelbaum about it.

And anyway, if I’m forbidden to buy or sell because I’m a thought-criminal, how am I going to find sellers and buyers, respectively, who are criminal enough to do business with me but who insist on being paid in Bitcoin or Ethereum or something?

Maybe I’m out of my depth even trying to write about crypto, but I have no practical doubt that, failing to understand it, I’d be well-advised to stay the hell away from it.

The job of tenured federal judges — higher and lower

If anyone ever asks a Justice if they are concerned with public perception of the Supreme Court, the answer is simple: "No. I focus on my job. People can perceive the Court however they choose." The existence of life tenure presupposes the Court will be criticized. And life tenure is designed to insulate jurists from those criticisms. Often, it is difficult to resist that pressure. Indeed, protestors are demonstrating outside Justice Kavanaugh’s house! But judicial independence is essential to the judicial role. And preserving judicial independence is inconsistent with trying to monitor public sentiments about the Court.

Josh Blackman, Did Justice Barrett Say She Was “Concerned About Public Perception of [the] Supreme Court”? – Reason.com

Darkness — but a glimmer of dawn

[T]hanks to the lies of Donald Trump and the self-serving gullibility of millions of Republican voters, the GOP has actively embraced the position that American elections are systematically and unfairly rigged against them.

This is hands down the most dangerous political development in recent American history — a civic time bomb placed smack dab at the center of American democracy.

Damon Linker.

This was written of the California gubernatorial recall.

Important update: Though California Republicans were screaming ‘fraud’ as soon as the recall count on Gov. Gavin Newsom was running against them, their candidate — black conservative radio talk-show host Larry Elder — was quick to concede the loss.

As they said about this on the Bulwark podcast, it’s a heck of a note to have to congratulate a Republican for acting in accordance with long-settled norms, but congratulations, Mr. Elder. May your tribe increase.

Is Elizabeth Holmes on trial because she’s a "she"?

The Sexism That Led to the Elizabeth Holmes Trial
In tech, brash male founders are allowed to overpromise and underdeliver, time and again. Not so much for women.

Interesting take on the Theranos saga.

Bottom line is that the tech bros who overpromise and underdeliver, time and again, should also be in the dock.

Stress-testing Covid vaccine religious objections

In Arkansas, about 5 percent of the staff at the privately run Conway Regional Health System has requested religious or medical exemptions.

The hospital responded by sending employees a form that lists a multitude of common medicines—including Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, Preparation H, and Sudafed—that it said were developed through the use of fetal cell lines.

The form asks people to sign it and attest that “my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true and I do not use or will not use” any of the listed medications.

In a statement, Conway Regional Health President and CEO Matt Troup said: “Staff who are sincere … should have no hesitancy with agreeing to the list of medicines listed.”

‌Religious Exemption Requests Spike as Employers Mandate Vaccine

Because of my many decades as an ardent supporter of religious freedom, I feel liberated to say that my patience is being taxed by vaccine objectors with implausible claims that their weird tribalism is really "religious."

I know, abusus non tollit usum. And confabulation to explain one’s visceral reaction is not unique to religion. But bullshit exegesis of scripture and selective objection to benefitting from one type of medical research will give religious freedom a worse name than it has already gotten by legitimate (but countercultural) claims.

In related news, Yasmin Tayag at the Atlantic wants us to Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’. For my money, her best argument is this paragraph:

It’s important to differentiate between the vaccine hesitant, who are on the fence for legitimate reasons, and the vaccine resistant, who flat-out don’t support vaccines. By one estimate, 8 percent of the U.S. population consistently identifies as anti-vaxxers. Bacon said there’s no use trying to persuade them. It’s the former group we should be careful not to push away with divisive policies, because they are key to getting the pandemic under control.

She fails in the end to dissuade me from calling a spade a spade. The vaccine-hesitant, too, are part of the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

No true leftist …

[T]hinking you know best does not qualify for making a better world. Unless you are willing to debate your ideas openly, you are by definition an authoritarian conservative.

The modern-day book-banners, no-platformers, deniers of free speech and opponents of universalism in the name of identity politics are not of the left, the liberal left or even the New Left of the 1960s.

Tor Hundloe, Emeritus professor, University of Queensland. I’m a bit surprised that an Emeritus Professor would commit a No True Scotsman fallacy, but there it is.

Elsewhere in this week’s Economist letters to the editor regarding last week’s take-down of wokeism was this:

One thinks of Michael Macy’s sociology experiments illustrating how, when faced with an illogical group consensus, individuals tend to publicly agree and even condemn dissenters, while privately expressing concern.

Unsupported theories, such as those of the illiberal left, that have taken root in societies require brave individuals to break the cycle and express their disagreement, regardless of the condemnation. But someone else can go first.

Of course, the first paragraph is as true of the Trumpified Right as it is of the woke Left, but the really priceless thing is that last sentence, and that the letter was, indeed, Anonymous.

Insignificant yet … telling

And there are the million goofy things that are insignificant and yet somehow feel . . . telling. The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.

That’s what I see with leaders all over America’s business life. What follows the lost thread is go-with-the-flow. Even when you know it isn’t going anywhere good. Especially when it’s going nowhere good.

Peggy Noonan, ‌America Has Lost the Thread

What’s the plural of "conundrum"?

Why are arts expected to pay for their own venues while taxpayers pay for sports venues through tax abatements and other gimmicks?
Rooting for a professional sports team, a business, is like rooting for Coke against Pepsi.
Why is cock fighting illegal while boxing and MMA are legal?

(H/T Fran Liebowitz, Pretend it’s a City, on Netflix)

Give them better dreams

Little kids should not dream of being YouTubers when they grow up.

Give them better dreams: become like your grandma, your preacher, your teacher, like Dorothy Sayers or John Lewis or Yo-Yo Ma.

Do something beautiful with your life, even if you think no one’s looking.
— Jessica Hooten Wilson (@HootenWilson) September 16, 2021

I discovered Jessica roughly two years ago as a speaker at a symposium. She was astonishingly good — especially for (then) a professor at a "university" I attended for three semesters and left shaking the dust from my feet. She also was very conversant with, and friendly toward, Russian Orthodox giants like Dostoyevsky.

Of course, it’s small surprise that she left there and, I have reason to think, no longer adheres to the Evangelical Protestantism for which said "university" stands. Alas, I think she swam the Tiber rather than the Bosphorus, and not just because she went to the University of Dallas.

Is there nothing Fox News won’t stoop to?

I had no idea that anything could make me like Fox News less, but they found something:

Inbox: Piers Morgan is joining Fox News

Piers Morgan will join News Corp and FOX News Media in a global deal, launching a new TV show in early 2022. Morgan will also join The Sun and the New York Post as a columnist.
— Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin)
September 16, 2021

Ameliorative measure

If English Departments were shut down and their students given jobs driving cabs and given the classics to read while they wait for fares, this would be a step forward.

Garrison Keillor, ‌ Women: don’t read this, for men only

A periodic sorta invitation

A friend on micro.blog has new business cards describing himself as "Master Generalist." He says it’s easier than “Writer, Speaker, Technology Consultant, Home Restorer, Circus Rigger and a few other significant things I’m leaving off because brevity.”

No, he’s not typical. But micro.blog is a fascinating place which disproves the common judgment that social media are inherently toxic.

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.