Thanksgiving 2025

Sportsball

Surely you don’t read me for sports tips! I’m not even a journeyman sports fan—more like “notional”, as in “I love Premier League soccer” but watching it is always a lower priority than something else.

My only “drop everything” sport is Purdue men’s basketball, and “drop everything” even there is notional in a way. I had a conflicting church service last week and I didn’t even sneak a peak at the ESPN app during the service to see how the game was going.

That said, I have a prediction. Purdue’s consensus All-American point guard, Braden Smith, is not going to continue his scorching pace on assists and will not break the national record. I’m seeing it already.

He’s every bit as good as ever, but he’s surrounded by a deeper team, and they are getting a lot of the assists he might have gotten earlier, most notably when Purdue was the Braden Smith/Zach Edey show.

Big men Trey Kauffman-Renn, Oscar Cluff and Daniel Jacobsen, for instance, are assisting each other (Smith gets it to one of them but he in turn immediately gives it up to another as the defense collapses on him and his teammate moves into the alley-oop zone — for instance). It’s reflected (in its most boring form) in the box scores, where the scoring and assists are both better distributed.

Add to that Omer Mayer, who played some pro ball in Israel before coming to Purdue, and who is getting a lot of playing time as Smith’s designated successor. Sometimes they’re on the court together, but Smith’s getting more mini-rests on the bench this year.

This bodes to take Purdue to a fantastic season and deep into March Madness in part because it will be harder to beat Purdue by keying off Smith or Smith and Kauffman-Renn.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Suppressing the urge

Having established my guy bona fides by rhapsodizing about sportball, I trust I can share a softer story:

[M]y dad was a near model of classic masculinity. He was a superb athlete who had competed for England as a middle-distance runner; he had been captain first of his high school rugby team and then of our town’s. He was taciturn and bloody-minded, threw his weight around in our house, fished in the North Sea, raised rabbits and chickens, and drove fast. He routinely knocked down parts of our little house whenever he felt bored to add extensions, which he rarely finished. His mates drank lots of beer, and it was clear he was much happier among them than with his own family. He even had a mid-life crisis, and bought a racy car and a leather jacket. It was as if he felt the need to act out a near-parody of “toxic masculinity.”

He wasn’t cruel to me, but he never came to any of the school plays I was in, or any of my debating contests. Too girly, I suppose. And of course I felt as if I had let him down. I remember with more than a little poignancy how he once gamely tried to teach me how to kick a soccer ball. And how utterly useless I was.

What he didn’t let himself experience to its fullest for a long time was another side of himself. He loved to draw and to paint. After his death a year ago, we found a letter that showed he had once been admitted to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, perhaps the finest such institution in the country, and a great honor. He never told us of this, and I don’t know why he turned down the place. Probably his need to earn money, but maybe also the price of gender-conformity. But as soon as he retired, and especially after he got divorced, he started painting again — and the results were spectacular. I cannot help but wonder what kind of life he might have had, if he had had the courage of his own, non-conforming desire, what great paintings he might have produced over time.

Andrew Sullivan, Two Sexes, Infinite Genders

SWATting update

As threats escalate against Indiana lawmakers, Braun says his family also targeted • Indiana Capital Chronicle.

As of Friday, the acknowledged count was up to seven incidents.

I’m going to apologize for and retreat from something I wrote earlier, when I attributed this to “Hoosier MAGA ghouls.” I still think MAGA is likely and ghoul is a sure thing, but Hoosier ain’t necessarily so. We don’t yet (I fervently hope we find out and prosecute) know, and I should not have voiced my speculation.

(There’s a long backstory about a time when I was closely adjacent to a group falsely accused by lazy and biased press.)

Think tanks

[A] think tank should be … about ideas. As soon as the purpose becomes advocacy alone, or some other purpose related to gaining money or power, the “think” part is lost. The organization becomes a mere propaganda machine. There is nothing inherently wrong with policy advocacy for its own sake. But an organization that does only that should not be described as a think tank. Nor should its word on policy be trusted. Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.

…

For many years, the Heritage approach was to apply the principles of economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and strong national defense to the task of formulating policies. Today that is no longer the case. The doctrines driving Heritage’s output, as determined by the foundation’s president and the board of trustees, are a combination of Pat Buchanan-esque populism, nationalism, Trumpism, and various strains of what is called postliberalism.

Kim Holmes, To Be or Not to Be a Think Tank

Vaccine update

Bewilderment and doubt are among the anti-vaccine movement’s most powerful weapons. It’s true that doctors cannot say with absolute certainty that some ingredient in some vaccine, or combination of vaccines, does not contribute in some way, however small or large, to the rise in autism diagnoses. We also can’t rule out the possibility that infant vaccines cause tornadoes or bad movies. Uncertainty is inseparable from science.

Benjamin Mazer

Why Tucker is so tragic

I met a Christian friend in London for a pint a few hours before the event. He told me that his American in-laws are normie Boomer conservative Christians who had no idea who Nick Fuentes was, until he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s softball interview. They are big fans of Tucker, and came away from that interview convinced that this Fuentes boy makes a lot of sense. My friend had to try to convince them otherwise. See, this is why Tucker’s normalization of Fuentes through that mushy interview is so dangerous. Had Tucker done a proper interview, it might have been otherwise, but he didn’t, so here we are. Lots and lots of normal conservatives trust Tucker, who was great on Fox. This is why what has happened to him is so tragic — and so potentially dangerous.

Rod Dreher

Bitcoin

Proponents have told me for years that bitcoin is money (it’s not, really), that it’s an inflation hedge (come on, now), or that it’s a haven asset for times of stress (LOL), but it turns out that its most useful function is to serve as an early warning system that markets are unwell. On several occasions of late, it has been a lurch lower in bitcoin that has led a decline in global stocks. It sinks, stocks follow. And it has sunk a lot, down by a third since early October to $84,000 or so. Only another $84,000 to go before it reaches fair value. (Source: ft.com)

Katie Martin via John Ellis News Items

Random Thoughts

For what it’s worth, I seem to be thinking more clearly, and I certainly am happier, now that I’ve more-or-less completely resigned myself to living with the consequences of my fellow-citizens’ quadrennial electoral folly.
If you don’t predict when the bubble’s bursting, you’re not really a prophet but merely a Eeyore. I’m not a cryptocurrency prophet.

Shorts

“More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves—the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.” Kevin D. Williamson, Against Nostalgia
“There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all,” – Andy McCarthy, conservative lawyer, via Andrew Sullivan.
“[I]t’s a movie about how Glinda and Elphaba need to be allowed to feel good about themselves no matter how much harm they do to everyone around them.” Sonny Bunch on Wicked: For Good.
“Here’s the brutal truth: no immigrant wants to be here. He’s only here because it’s better than being “there.” That’s the thing about immigration that makes it both sad and scary. Those poor slobs didn’t want to uproot and come here, but things suck so bad back home, they felt like they had to.”(Shocker, Shocker: Foreigners Steal from the United States)
“So my poll numbers just went down, but with smart people they’ve gone way up,” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
“Suspicion of metanarratives, then, means thinking that no one ever gets the Big Story right. But then postmodernists too have a Big Story: that no one ever gets it right.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
“My new all-girl punk band is called Quiet Piggy,” – Anka Radakovich via Andrew Sullivan.
“Namibian politician Adolf Hitler Uunona is expected to win reelection tomorrow, proving that name recognition really is everything in politics.” (The Morning Dispatch)

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

A corollary of not loading this blog up with anti-Trump stuff is that steam must be let off elsewhere:

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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.

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I didn’t know we could seize things back.

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

I’ve now listened to two podcasts in which journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon defends Trump.

I don’t think she really believes it. Some verbal tics when challenged suggest she doesn’t really believe it (notably, her repeated retreats into “I’m just a journalist explaining why people like him” when that’s plainly false). I suspect she has just found a niche (Center-Left Journalist Becomes Ardent Trump Defender!) that gets attention.

But whether or not she believes it, most of it is gibberish, nonsense-on-stilts — and it ignores Trump’s norm-breaking, due process and other constitutional violations, focusing on the (supposed) policy goals which (refrain) 80% of voters want, so they’re entitled to it immediately.

Well no, they’re not necessarily entitled to it at all, let alone immediately. The Constitution of the United States is deliberately counter-majoritarian in several of its structural provisions (e.g., the Electoral College and the Senate) and even more of the Bill of Rights.

Even the “right” policy, if executed unconstitutionally, is wrong.

I’m resolved not to inflict Batya Ungar-Sargon on myself again. She’s a vexation to my soul. But I’m still waiting for a coherent defense of Trump. Surely I’m missing something.

Conservative critics of Trumpism

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

When Amazon reportedly considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on the price of items, Trump was furious. Here’s what an official anonymously told CNN: “Of course he was pissed. Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” Fascinating. This is like when socialists, during the pandemic inflation, were talking about how greedy grocery store owners were to let prices go up. This is so phenomenally economically illiterate. Their argument is that Amazon should absorb the cost of the tariffs? What they really want is for Amazon not to point the tariffs out.

So Trump called Jeff Bezos, perhaps threatening to use the full weight of the U.S. government to make his life miserable (though Trump later described him as a “good guy” and said that Bezos “solved the problem very quickly.”). Amazon then told CNN “this was never approved and [was] not going to happen.” Right. . . so we’re in a gangster government now. The White House will personally target you if you don’t comply with their harebrained schemes. That’s a nice logistics and web services company you got there, Jeff, would be a real shame if the U.S. government went after it. Even Jeff Bezos—a man who is flying ladies to space for fun—caved. Our gangster government means conservative values are whatever Trumpo says they are, capisce? And Trumpo says it’s tariffs—or your other option is to buy $MELANIA coin, do you hear me? [Knee digs deeper into neck.] Am I not being clear, Jeff? Do I gotta enunciate more, Jeff?

Speaking of gangsters, a new private club for MAGA has launched in D.C. It’s called Executive Branch, and the membership fee is $500,000. Well, do you want your corporate merger approved or not?

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

Of Trump’s ~~Tweeted~~ Truthed declaration Sunday, declaring that foreign flicks are a National Security threat and authorizing institution of “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Since when do we tariff national security threats, by the way!?)

Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are “reeling” today from Sunday’s post, with studio executives reportedly convening emergency calls to plot a way forward financially. Billions of dollars and countless jobs here and abroad will turn on a random thought that the president had, one which he may or may not lift a finger to follow through on … We’re all living in a demented baby boomer’s endless nostalgia trip.

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

What you will not find in the [Secretary of Education Linda] McMahon letter [to Harvard] is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

Were I not already leery of cryptocurrency as a scam, Trump’s creation of a même-coin on the cusp of his second term, and the way it’s being openly used to buy access to him (putting untold millions of actual U.S. dollars into his pockets), would have made me leery.

Another impeachable offense (foreign emoluments clause, for instance), but I’m pissing into the wind to note that.

Congress’ default

Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.

…

[Newt] Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.

As a result, many ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news. Our broader political culture has pushed in the same direction, encouraging performative partisanship. And the narrowing of congressional majorities has put a premium on party loyalty, further empowering leaders, and leaving many members wary of the cross-partisan bargaining that is the essence of legislative work.

…

In his first 100 days, Donald Trump signed only five bills into law—fewer than any other modern president. In a period rife with constitutional conflict in Washington, the first branch has done essentially nothing.

Yuval Levin

Since Levin wrote this, Congress has gotten on the stick by passing the vital bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Marjorie Taylor Greene led the charge. And if that’s not serious enough for you, you’re probably out of luck.

Excerpts from Sully

“The Trump admin was about to send a former POLICE OFFICER to be imprisoned in El Salvador without trial because an ICE officer looked at his social media and said his ‘hand gestures’ meant he was a gang member,” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
Bonus track (Not Suitable For Work) about the decor of the Trump Oval Office.

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

“It is of interest to note that [the patient’s family] were all reassured to discover that George was not a homosexual. The diagnosis of ‘transexual’ provided an explanation for his feminine behavior and was, especially for the parents, psychologically relieving,” – a 1970 report on teen transition..

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

Writing in Reason, Marc Oestreich explores what data server farms and new sports stadiums have in common. “The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte, [ Indiana], is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people. Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.” For Oestreich, this sounds familiar. “Just 60 miles up the toll road sits Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. The stadium’s 2002 post-modern renovation cost $587 million, $387 million of which was shouldered by taxpayers. Two decades and two dozen quarterbacks later, Chicago only has $640 million (thanks to $256 million in interest) left to pay,” Oestreich writes. “Today’s stadium boondoggle is a server farm … The sales pitch is nearly identical to the stadium era: ‘It’ll create jobs. It’ll put us on the map. It’s worth the investment.’”

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

A friend drew my attention to a January 21, 2025 article in the New York Times. The topic was the Trump administration’s effort to limit the scope of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that accords citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The article’s title: “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child be a Citizen?” When the issue is abortion, the New York Times would never dream of referring to an “unborn child.” Apparently, that editorial discretion falls away when illegal immigration is under discussion.

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

Ides of March

Simile of the week

[I] n The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus, who recently resigned from The Washington Post, explained that she and other columnists were confused by the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ new edict that the Opinions section write only in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”: “Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)

Via Frank Bruni

Justice Barrett

After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to stop $2 billion in foreign-aid spending, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Chief Justice John Roberts and all three Democratic-appointed justices to leave that order in place. The decision provoked a fiery and warranted dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, as well as some bitter complaints about Barrett from the right-leaning commentariat. It is understandable that conservatives might be nervous about the Supreme Court. For good reason, the names “Stevens,” “Souter,” “Kennedy,” and “O’Connor” echo eerily in the originalist mind. But while she was wrong in this particular case, there is no evidence that Barrett is at risk of joining their ranks. She concurred in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe; in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., the case that barred affirmative action; and in Bruen, the case that expanded the protections of the Second Amendment. More important than those outcomes is how she did so. Unlike the judicial nomads of the past, Barrett has a transparent and well-considered approach to the law that explains her actions even when she disappoints. In the case that prompted the criticisms, she was likely motivated by her mistrust of the shadow docket and her dislike of big cases built atop disputed facts. To conclude from this that Barrett was “a mistake”—or, worse, “a DEI hire”—is absurd. Judges are not supposed to play for a team.

National Review email for 3/14/25

Meritocracy is the death of noblesse oblige

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

Gold and Bitcoin

I’ve shunned Bitcoin as an investment because it’s useless other than for criming and speculation.

I’ve always shunned gold for similar reasons. Its industrial and jewelry uses are not the reason for it rising to more than $3,000 per troy ounce.

Regarding this Presidency

Trump censorship worse than cancel culture

I’ve been relegating most of my bile toward Trump and his goons to another blog, referenced in the footer below, but this is so patently un-American that it needs the widest exposure I can give it:

[T]his is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.

Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. …

…

JD Vance — who lectured Europeans on free speech online, while his own administration was using AI to police the web for dissent! — said on Fox that a green card holder “doesn’t have an indefinite right to stay in America.”

Andrew Sullivan

In a Feb. 6 editorial, [Purdue] Exponent editors wrote: “And don’t get it twisted: When letters of visa revocation arrive in these students’ mailboxes and federal agents come to Purdue’s campus, no distinction will be made between ‘pro-jihadist’ and pro-Palestinian. Pro-ceasefire will continue to be conflated with ‘antisemitic.’ Anti-war can only now mean ‘pro-Hamas.’ Such twisting of language to be used as a weapon is contrary to the First Amendment, which gives the Exponent its right to exist just as much as it gives the right to students to protest as they see fit. It is the opinion of the Exponent that standing back while our website is potentially used to identify the state’s enemies would be directly against those principles.”

Based in Lafayette, Indiana

The statute cited by the Trump administration for expelling Khalil is very broad — and vague. I don’t think it will be struck down in its entirety, but surely permanent residents are entitled to know with some clarity what behaviors could get them kicked out of the country.

So I think the likeliest outcome is “unconstitutional as applied” to Khalil.

Living in fear

I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

Patrick Healy, introducing a conversation with M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens.

Just sayin’

Narcissism has a very high correlation with conspicuous consumption in an effort to boost social status and self-esteem. Narcissists are focused on the symbolic, rather than functional, importance of commodities, and the symbolism of the products they purchase is often used to compensate for fragile egos and fluctuating self-esteem.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Re-assessing

As I have said any number of times, I have voted for the American Solidarity Party in each of the last three election cycles. But in the 2024 election, I was beginning to feel some sympathy for the people who thought Trump was less bad than Kamala Harris in the forced binary choice too many voters feel.

I no longer have any sympathy for that position, although I’m obviously working with the benefit of hindsight: Ready, Fire, Aim — over and over again ad infinitum. This is no way to run anything, quite apart from the autocracy.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Christmas Eve

I have nothing Christmas-Evish to say, but I wanted to get these out.

Culture

Welcome to Dystopia

Welcome to Dystopia. Enjoy your ejection.

Crypto: Money without a purpose

Hip, hip, hooray! Finally, someone with credentials call out crypto for what it is:

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s why everyone in Washington seems to think that federal financial-services regulators are the natural overseers of crypto trading. This is wrong. Crypto trading should be regulated for what it is—a form of gambling that emulates finance—and not what its advocates tell you it is.

Todd H. Baker, Crypto Is Money Without a Purpose

My view is even more cynical than his. He thinks it’s risky like gambling. I think it’s oftener a Ponzi-like scheme that will inevitably collapse after the promoter has spent it most of it in riotous living. That’s worse than “a gamble.” Its opacity merely buys the crooks extra time.

Return of the face-palm

I heard a young reporter on local TV Tuesday Night reporting on the Respect for Marriage Act because a local couple was invited to the White House for the signing ceremony. It wasn’t going too badly until:

This ensures that the Supreme Court cannot overturn the same-sex marriage laws placed by the Obama Administration in 2015.

That is soooo wrong on multiple levels!

The Supreme Court, not the Obama Administration, mandated recognition of same-sex marriage under constitutional pretexts.
What the Supreme Court giveth, the Supreme Court can taketh away (though I’d wager a health amount at fairly long odds that it will not do so in my lifetime or, probably, the lifetime of the next generation).
The Respect for Marriage Act assures, more or less, that if SCOTUS decides that the Constitution doesn’t require allowance of of SSM, such “marriages” already contracted will be recognized throughout the country. In exchange for that concession from SSM opponents, it assures against the most egregious infringements of their religious freedom.
Had the Obama Administration done it, in no case would its action be referred to as “placing” SSM laws.

With that kind of misinformation in responsible legacy media, it’s no wonder that people are tempted to seek their news elsewhere and that the Supreme Court is viewed as a profoundly political branch, just like the legislative and the executive branches, of the national government.

Follow the incentives

[W]ithin the community of people who claim to speak on Black America’s behalf – professors, writers, think tankers, diversity consultants, etc – most of the incentives point towards more extreme stances. You will be tempted to think that I am speaking only about Black public intellectuals, but of course America’s most-read racism expert is a very wealthy white woman with a lucrative business taking white people’s money to tell white people they’re racist so that white companies can limit their liability if they should ever be sued by a non-white employee.

Freddie deBoer, The Synecdoche Problem

Racial Ridicule and Hate Speech generally

If you want to know why hate-speech laws are perverse, read FIRE’s and My Amicus Brief on Connecticut’s “Racial Ridicule” Law

The Four Dimensions of Military Power

When I read this again, it occurred to me that Russia is struggling (failing, one hopes) in Ukraine because of failing on the third dimension. Not for lack of perverse effort:

(The Economist)

Cradle of Ponzi Schemes?

Purdue University likes to call its football program “the cradle of quarterbacks,” the University overall “cradle of astronauts.”

Leaders of such educational institutions readily take credit for Rhodes and Fulbright scholars. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and schemes of the get-rich-quick? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that they learned in college?

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Politics

Diversionary tactics

The January 6th Select Committee released its 845-page final report last night, days before Republicans are set to take back the House and almost assuredly dissolve the panel. The report includes 11 recommendations to prevent a similar event from happening again, including reforms to the Electoral Count Act, additional oversight for Capitol Police, and harsher punishments for attempting to impede the transfer of power. House Republicans released a 141-page counter-report of their own earlier this week, focused primarily on security failures at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 rather than the reasons the U.S. Capitol required additional security in the first place.

TMD (emphasis added)

An unfamiliar pathogen

Some populists were up in arms that Ukraine’s President Zelensky didn’t wear a suit to the White House:

[T]he interest in Zelensky’s garb is curious, particularly since it’s plain as day that he would have been attacked by this same crowd of chuds if he had dressed finely for the occasion. Populists would have demanded to know how much of their hard-earned taxpayer money had gone toward buying natty new duds for “this grifting leech,” in Matt Walsh’s words, or for Zelensky’s better half. “We want nothing to do with you,” Candace Owens tweeted at Zelensky. “Stop stealing from our people while your wife drops tens of thousands of dollars shopping in Paris.” The claim that Mrs. Zelensky is living high on the hog in Paris is an inch thin, it turns out, but no matter.

…

It’s what Zelensky represents that irks them—competence, sacrifice, bravery, honor. … He could have whimpered. He could have fled. He fought.

And people whose political immune systems have been exposed to nothing but Trumpism since 2015 simply cannot handle it. Their reaction to an honorable figure at this point is almost immunological, inducing a sort of fever as they struggle to fight off an unfamiliar pathogen. That’s how they end up having a group conniption about someone not wearing a three-piece in the White House.

Nick Cattogio, Fashion Statement

Vacillating Rhythm

American policy has oscillated between a hubristic interventionism and a callous non-interventionism. “We overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments, never pausing in between, where an ordinary country would try to reach a fine balance,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic recently. The result has been a crisis of national self-doubt: Can the world trust America to do what’s right? Can we believe in ourselves?

David Brooks.

One of the things that bothers me most about our political polarization is that the world cannot count on a new President keeping the commitments of a former President.

Spare Us

It is certain that Donald Trump will never again be president. The American people won’t have it …

He’s on the kind of losing strain that shows we’re at the ending of the story. Next summer it will be eight years since he went down the escalator. Time moves—what was crisp and new becomes frayed and soft. His polls continue their downward drift. He is under intense legal pressures. This week the Jan. 6 committee put more daggers in: Only the willfully blind see him as guiltless in the Capitol riot. He will be 78 in 2024 and is surrounded by naïfs, suck-ups, grifters and operators. That was always true but now they are fourth-rate, not second- or third-rate.

He has lost his touch. Remember when you couldn’t not watch him in 2015 and 2016? Now you hear his voice and give it a second before lowering the volume …

The party he’s left on the ground seems to be trying to regain its equipoise. November’s results will speed the process. The GOP in Congress is a mixed bag. There are more than a handful in the House who try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, and they will no doubt continue to batter the party’s reputation. In the Senate only two members really try to out-Trump Mr. Trump, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.

Peggy Noonan, Spare Us a Trump-Biden Rematch (emphasis added just because I think we all need to remember those things).

Natural Selection at work

The fates of Republicans and Democrats began to diverge markedly after the introduction of vaccines in April of 2021. Between March 2020 and March 2021, excess death rates for Republicans were 1.6 percentage points higher than for Democrats. After April 2021, the gap widened to 10.6 percentage points.

David French

It hadn’t occurred to me that stupidity about Covid vaccines could have measurable effects on mortality. And bear in mind that vaccine resistance is not universal among Republicans, so a relative handful of dummies is really paying a price for their mantra of “do your own research.”

A bright spot in Tampa Bay

After losing his wife to illness and later rediscovering joy, Frantz Laroche—an Uber driver in St. Petersburg, Florida—is on a mission to bring off-the-charts levels of holiday cheer to each ride, Gabrielle Calise reports for the Tampa Bay Times. “He wears a festive headband and a glowing string of Christmas lights around his neck,” Calise writes. “His sleigh is a black Honda Odyssey complete with glossy leather seats. Each person who enters it during the holiday season will be quizzed on classic Christmas music as they zip through the streets of St. Pete.” Laroche plans to keep driving for the rest of his life. “Because of politics, because people hurt each other for no reason, somebody’s got to drive his butt all over Florida to spread the positivity to others,” Laroche told Calise. “You are among 30,000 passengers I’ve entertained just to put a smile on their face. And I intend to entertain 30,000 more.”

TMD

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

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.

Tuesday, 11/29/22

Sam Bankman-Fried

I stopped reading Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF” — hereafter, “the guy”) stories a week or two ago, and I really didn’t read many before that.

But I did listen to a somewhat penitent podcast, one of Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin podcast offerings, revisiting an insufficiently critical and probing prior podcast interview with the guy.

What struck me in the initial interview was how insouciantly reckless the guy was as a business strategy. Essentially, if a business takes $20 million to launch, has a 99% chance of failure, but has a 1% chance of becoming worth $2 billion or more, it’s an okay business plan.

If it might hit $20 billion, it’s a great business plan because the guy will get stinkin’ rich and can pour some of his riches into transformative (i.e. hubristic) charitable projects. And because he promises transformative charitable donations, we’re supposed to admire him. The initial podcast was pretty admiring. And because he was a top-tier Democrat Party donor, he’s got substantial political cover.

If he was playing entirely with his own money, I could ignore him, but because he gets investors, and may even go public, I consider his gambling, as most or all gambling-as-livelihood, contemptible. His investors surely are not told they’re buying into a 100-to-1 shot, where the guy keeps most of the loot if the long-shot bet pays off.

I do not think he is alone. If I understand his thinking, it sounds to me pretty close to some of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s musings about unlikely but huge payoffs — only I don’t think Taleb has sucked investors into his risky, big-payoff plays.

That the guy’s plays are in crypto only raises my concerns exponentially, though it also tends to make me think of his investors as marks who were hoping to get something for nothing in an investment they don’t remotely understand.

“David Frenchism” Redux

It apparently is part of David French’s lot in life to become a walking, talking, breathing, living litmus test among “orthodox” Protestants: “What think ye of David French? Hath he sold out to secular elites?”

The latest entry (as of this writing and to the best of my knowledge) from a respectable source is Carl R. Trueman’s avid French and the Future of Orthodox Protestantism on the First Things website.

Trueman’s argument assumes, without discussing, the wrongness of French’s endorsement of the Senate version of the Respect for Marriage Act. As I have previously noted, French “showed his work,” walking any halfway attentive reader through the logic that led him to support the Act. Trueman, not a lawyer, does no such thing, but just assumes that French’s position is toxic because the Act accepts same-sex civil marriages, at least in the limited sense that he does not want to see existing same-sex headed families broken up should Obergefell be reversed.

Why would Trueman do such a thing? I have my suspicions, but do not want to add my ad hominem speculations to a discussion already too full of them. I invite you to critically read his piece and assess for yourself what it does, overall, besides slinging innuendo at French.

Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel pulls out all the stops, except for the “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness” stop, in his opposition to the Act. Staver was an instructor at the ADF National Litigation Academy I attended 20 years ago, and he’s a journeyman religious freedom litigator. That makes the misleading hyperbole more lamentable.
My current take on RFMA: proponents of Religious Freedom give up almost nothing but also get very little in exchange. I think we get more than we give up, but this Bill is not a hill I’m willing to die on. And it’s mostly moot as long as SCOTUS says same-sex marriage and fairly robust religious liberty are both the law of the land.

Encounters with unlikeness

I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead

Localism, f/k/a Distributism

In 1910, G. K. Chesterton wrote a book called What’s Wrong with the World. In it is found one of his most famous lines: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

But what did he say was wrong with the world? Four things: big government, big business, feminism, and public education. The first two, which he nicknamed Hudge and Gudge, were in cahoots with each other, and largely drove the other two. The feminists, while imagining themselves to be achieving freedom and independence, had merely abandoned their positions of power and influence in the most fundamental unit of society – the family – and become wage slaves in factories and offices. As Chesterton quipped, “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting ‘We will not be dictated to!’ and went off and became stenographers.” Gudge was only too happy to grant them their “liberation” from the home and use them for cheap labor.

… [T]]he state had less power over a man when it could send him to be burned at the stake than it does now when it sends him to public school.

…

While flirting with socialism as a young man (as so many young men do, being aghast at the inequity of wealth and the crassness of a commercially driven culture), Chesterton soon realized that capitalism and socialism were remarkably similar. Both involve the majority of people working as wage-earners and not owning their own land or source of living. There is little difference between a clerk sitting at a desk in a tall corporate building and a bureaucrat sitting at a desk in a tall government building.

…

The opposite of employment,” argues Chesterton, “is not unemployment. It is independence.

… Localism faces two major hurdles at present. First, people are not always allowed to do things for themselves. And second, people are not accustomed to doing things for themselves.

Dale Ahlquist, Distributism Needs a New Name

D.L. Schindler, RIP

[T]he judgments embedded in liberalism are lies about the human person—primarily because liberalism does not conceive of humans first as persons who receive their being from God but as individuals who are separated from the various relationships that are constitutive of the person.
[C]ontemplation and silence are not matters of inactivity. It is not as though contemplation signals a contrast with creative action, such that these are at root two different kinds of acts meant at best to alternate with one another. On the contrary, contemplative letting be is the inmost form of creaturely activity as such. Patience is not the absence of activity but, in the words of T.S. Eliot, the still point of the turning world, where the dance begins, and is.

D.L. Schindler, who died November 16, quoted by Conor B. Dugan.

Better late than never: I confirmed that there is a relationship between D.L. and D.C. Schindler, that of father and son. The legacy, or at least a part of it, lives on.

Pronouns

Displaying pronouns signals: I am part of the tribe and I know the rules.

Luke Burgis, Why Everyone Wants the Same Things.

This is a good reason for me to never display “my pronouns.” If people thought I was a member of the tribe, they’d be all the more furious when I expressed non-tribal thoughts.

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

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

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

Happy Birthday to Me

Social Media, Crypto, and such

Trump, Musk, Ye

When Jaron Lanier writes, I read:

I encountered Donald Trump a few times in the pre-social-media era, and he struck me as someone who was in on his own joke. He no longer does. Elon Musk used to be a serious person more concerned with engineering and building businesses than with petty name-calling. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to amplify a preposterous, sordid story about Paul Pelosi. Kanye West was once a thoughtful artist. Now known as Ye, he radiates antisemitism on top of his earlier slavery denialism.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (“Other social media” sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys on a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

…

I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.

The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.

…

Twitter poisoning is a little like alcoholism or gambling addiction, in that the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities. Little boys fantasize about energy beams shooting from their fingertips.

Jaron Lanier in the New York Times.

Tulip mania

I started to read a story on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX, his cryptocurrency venture. But I stopped when aI realized that I still don’t understand crypto, which I accordingly never trusted, and that I was reading the story mostly for the schadenfreude.

That I mention this, and allude to tulip mania, shows that I, a sinner, still take pleasure in being vindicated.

… an endless stream of content

Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers. A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

Ian Bogost via The Morning Dispatch

What a waste!

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

Data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher via Nellie Bowles

Please, God, let Twitter live!

The best argument I’ve heard for praying fervently that Twitter survives is this:

Just FYI if Twitter dies, TGIF goes with it. (Nellie Bowles)

Election 2022

The Democrats’ greatest electoral asset

What will Democrats do when Donald Trump isn’t around to lose elections? We have to wonder because on Tuesday Democrats succeeded again in making the former President a central campaign issue, and Mr. Trump helped them do it.

Trumpy Republican candidates failed at the ballot box in states that were clearly winnable …

…

Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat. The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr. Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat. That gave Democrats control of the Senate …

Now Mr. Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years. Mr. Trump had policy successes as President, including tax cuts and deregulation, but he has led Republicans into one political fiasco after another.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser

Smartest political money of 2022

The smartest money spent in this whole election was the tens of millions the Democratic party spent to help ensure Republicans picked the craziest candidates in nine different state primaries. It was a risky, cynical move for Dems to boost the most radical Republicans—and it paid off. The most effective (i.e.: dangerous) Republican candidate is someone reasonable like Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin. Trumpist Republicans reject these types as RINOs, and Dems were only too happy to help.

Americans also rejected the #resistance stars. Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams lost again. And Texas’s Beto O’Rourke lost, again again. Not that it will deter either of them from running for President (certainly not from fundraising at least). TGIF looks forward to the Abrams-O’Rourke ticket in 2024.

Nellie Bowles

Look for the Republicans to copy “back the Dems’ craziest primary candidates” to their own playbook.

A Teachable Moment

An esteemed Tory political figure summed it up succinctly in London in August: “Donald Trump ruined the Republican Party’s brand.”

It will now stick with him or not. It will live free or die.

If, in 2024, Republicans aren’t serious about policy—about what they claim to stand for—they will pick him as their nominee. And warm themselves in the glow of the fire as he goes down in flames. If they’re serious about the things they claim to care about—crime, wokeness, etc.—they’ll choose someone else and likely win.

…

[Of a Trump rally in Ohio:] What I am seeing is the end of something. I am seeing yesterday. This is a busted jalopy that runs on yesteryear’s resentments. A second term of this would be catastrophic, with him more bitter, less competent, surrounded by collapsed guardrails. He and his people once tried to stop the constitutionally mandated electoral vote certification by violently overrunning the U.S. Capitol. If America lets him back, he will do worse. And America knows.

… All About Me is a losing game, because politics is all about us …

The old saying is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. This is the third kick, after 2018 and 2020. Maybe they will learn now.

Peggy Noonan

The weakness of our major parties

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us. Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

According to a national exit poll, nearly 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump. Almost half of the voters who said they “somewhat disapprove” of Biden as president still voted for Democrats, presumably because they were not going to vote for Trumpianism.

…

The telling election results were at the secretary of state level. The America First Secretary of State Coalition features candidates who rejected the 2020 election results and who would have been a threat to election integrity if they had won Tuesday. Most either lost or seem on their way to losing. Meanwhile, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who stood up to Trump’s bullying, won by a wide margin.

…

There are two large truths I’ll leave you with. The first is that both parties are fundamentally weak. The Democrats are weak because they have become the party of the educated elite. The Republicans are weak because of Trump. The Republican weakness is easier to expunge. If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America. If they don’t, they will decline.

Second, the battle to preserve the liberal world order is fully underway. While populist authoritarianism remains a powerful force worldwide, people, from Kyiv to Kalamazoo, have risen up to push us toward a world in which rules matter, practicality matters, stability and character matter.

David Brooks

This is one of Brooks’ best in a while.

Why Biden should announce his 2024 retirement

By saying he would not run again, Mr Biden would not surrender political leverage so much as enhance his chance to reach at least some deals. And he would make any Republican investigations of him and his family seem like malicious irrelevancies.

Joe Biden should not seek re-election | The Economist

Freddie’s not-so-grand conclusions

Trumpism continues to define American politics in many ways. Trumpian candidates appeared to do not great – JD Vance won, but he has a relationship to Trump that’s more complicated than Oedipus’s with Jocasta – but every single Republican Senate candidate had to define him- (or her-, but really him-) self in relationship to Trump. He wasn’t on the ballot, but our country’s political gravity sucks toward him at all times. What’s scary about him is knowing that, for him, nothing else matters – I don’t think he gives a single merciful shit about passing a conservative agenda, so long as people are talking about him. Including – especially – the haters!
I think people continue to underestimate the downsides of Trump’s influence on American politics. Yes, he served as president for a term, and just about everyone in politics (if speaking honestly) would say that electing your guy to the presidency is worth any cost. But Trump’s benefits are in some tension – he famously refused to put Social Security or Medicare in harm’s way, defying Paul Ryan’s previous stewardship of the GOP; he made just enough substance-free waves at economic populism and trade protectionism to let some people look past the fact that he’s a lunatic who says wild shit about whatever he wants and appears to barely be holding it together, cognitively. That’s one set of advantages. The other advantage is that he’s a lunatic who says wild shit about whatever he wants and appears to barely be holding it together, cognitively. A lot of Republican primary voters loved him because he would say absolutely whatever it took to most insult his enemies.
Finally, I continue to think that the outlook can’t look too rosy for Democrats given a basic question: what happens if an actually-competent populist Republican rises out of the morass of the party? What happens if someone takes Trump’s refusal to threaten SS and Medicare, takes his populist feints, and keeps a little bit of the performative rudeness, but isn’t, you know, absolutely fucking nuts? What if we get a Trump that hasn’t admitted to sexual misconduct on video? What if we get a Trump who doesn’t mock disabled reporters? What if we get a Trump who doesn’t have a mountain of oppos sitting out in the open for any reporter to get a hold of? What happens if, instead, we get a Reaganite figure who preaches a small government gospel while being smart enough to leave entitlements for the elderly alone, can give a speech without telling a thousand lies, and who doesn’t appear seriously cognitively compromised? Hypothetically, that figure could win 40 states. I truly believe that.

Freddie deBoer’s modest post-election analysis. Oddly, Freddie doubts that Ron DeSantis is the hypothetical candidate in his third-quoted excerpt.

Attempted extortion

Ron DeSantis, a Republican, won re-election as governor of Florida by a whopping margin. He is now well placed to run for the presidency in 2024. Donald Trump warned “Mr DeSanctimonious” to stay out of that race, hinting that he might dish up dirt on him if he challenges Mr Trump for the Republican nomination.

True Leadership

The voters have spoken, and they’ve said that they want a different leader. And a true leader understands when they have become a liability.

Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears on why she will not support 45 if he tries to become 47.

Groveling businesses

In the Holy Land and Jordan in late-October, I encountered the occasional pay toilet (usually, an attendant outside).

Considering the direction of American business, and even my big-clinic doctor, I’m almost surprised I haven’t gotten texts asking me to “Rate you experience breaking wind in our loo” — with a followup robocall if I don’t take the original bait.

[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

Potpourri (Happy July)

Bravery and patriotism

"Her superiors — men many years older — are hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation," Cheney said. "Her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold. Little girls all across this great nation are seeing what it really means to love this country, what it really means to be a patriot."

Liz Cheney, speaking of Cassidy Hutchcinson’s, Tuesday’s blockbuster January 6 Committe witness.

Good news from North Korea

The cryptocurrency crash has likely depleted North Korean coffers full of stolen cryptocurrency. To raise revenue while skirting sanctions, the country has invested in bands of hackers to steal hundreds of millions in crypto heists in recent years, Josh Smith reports for Reuters. The U.S. Treasury put the value of one theft at nearly $615 million pre-crash. It’s hard to estimate how much of that haul the crash has wiped out. “If the same attack happened today, the Ether currency stolen would be worth a bit more than $230 million, but North Korea swapped nearly all of that for Bitcoin, which has had separate price movements,” Smith writes. $230 million is still nothing to sneeze at, but North Korea has some major expenses to cover. “One estimate from the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says North Korea spends about $640 million per year on its nuclear arsenal. The country’s gross domestic product was estimated in 2020 to be around $27.4 billion, according to South Korea’s central bank.”

The Morning Dispatch

Very bad news from the Texas GOP

The Texas GOP added some interesting planks to its platform this year—among them, a resolution declaring the 2020 presidential election fraudulent. Augustus Bayard breaks down what else you need to know about what Republican delegates got up to in Texas.

The Morning Dispatch. That may be the worst of the news, or it may not. The platform also calls for repeal of the 16th Amendment (authorizing federal income taxes) and a referendum on secession.

Bless their hearts!

Mission Creeps

Institutions sometimes don’t really want to win.

The "Human Rights Campaign" won big when Obergefell was decided, but instead of throwing a celebratory party and then closing up shop, it went looking for new issues, seemingly having settled on pushing transgender ideology even though T hasn’t got much to do with LGB. It’s only natural for people who’ve dined out on a now-resolved progressive issue to want another one in its place. (This is not unrelated to the Iron law of institutions)

Some pro-life organizations may now be in a similar position. If any of them had the mission of reversing Roe v. Wade, their mission is accomplished. Those whose mission was passage of a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution still have some legitimate mission. Those whose mission is to end abortion in America need never cease operation (because that will never happen).

But the specter of "mission creep" looms. How far can an organization go in supporting collateral projects to make society more hospitable to women, infants, and embryos in order to reduce the felt need for abortion? Are pro-life organizations now going to pivot to backing child tax credits, WIC, SCHIP, "artificial" contraception, and other collateral causes to show their compassion for women?

Of course they are, at least some of them. Should they? Where’s the line? Are supporters who drop away because of "conservative" opposition to such government programs to be excoriated as not really pro life?

By rights, pro-life people from the political side should consider pivoting the dollars and volunteer hours to the culture-building side. If they do, though, I suspect most of their Republican pals will put them on call-blocking.

The only party I know that’s both anti-abortion and friendly to building a more family-friendly culture is the American Solidarity Party.

Just sayin’.

A kind of genius, a kind of charlatan

Taubes soon achieved a kind of mocking multi-version notoriety as a kind of charlatan. On one occasion, some Harvard professors began a discussion about the theory of the soul of Bertram of Hildesheim, whose notions, they posited, were an intermediate form between the Thomistic and Scotist schools. After listening intently, Taubes went on to expound brilliantly and in detail about Bertram, astonishing all present with his profound and comprehensive knowledge — until he was informed that no such person existed. It is, of course, easy to ridicule such pretension, but Muller, while aware of Taubes’s many dubious qualities, is always at pains to point out as well his acumen and insight. The Bertram incident, Muller notes, “also reflects his talent for placing a book or thinker in a field of intellectual coordinates, and deducing what the key tenets ought to have been. To pull off the stunt he actually had to know a great deal about Thomism (i.e. the followers of Thomas Aquinas) and Scotism (i.e. the followers of Duns Scotus).”

Steven E. Aschheim, Brilliant Scholar or Predatory Charlatan?: On Jerry Z. Muller’s “Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes”

The Noble Cause

Are

the most vociferous supporters of Donald Trump [falling into] a determined repetition of assertions – especially that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, but also concerning COVID–19 and many other matters – that wouldn’t stand up even to casual scrutiny, and therefore don’t receive that scrutiny[?]

That sounds to Alan Jacobs uncomfortably like the Lost Cause/Noble Antebellum South lies with which the South has dispositionally flirted for 150 years now.

Why Jesse Singal remains a man of the left

Question: Where’s your red line with the left? You frequently criticize people who jump ship to the right out of disgust with the left, but for you personally, what would it take? —Keese

For every crazy story about something happening on the left, I promise you there is an equivalent one from the right. It happens to be that there are more liberals in media and academia, so there’s an endless supply of stories coming out of these places about various forms of overreach and radicalism, but that doesn’t mean the average journalist or academic is crazy. I mean, see above — most folks just want to do their jobs and not get fired by a psychotic 25-year-old.

More broadly, I think this is the wrong way to approach politics. I don’t see “the left” as a social club I’m a member of because I like the people in it and approve of their conduct. I see it as a loose set of beliefs about the way the world should work that I view as much better and more reasonable than what the right has on offer. I really think luck determines almost everything, and that society should be built in a way where rather than endlessly reward those who already have gotten lucky, we do what we can to lift up the unlucky to a decent standard of living. I think a lot of bootstraps discourse is nonsense, or close to it, when you look into the specifics.

I’m not laying out a particularly detailed or sophisticated philosophy here, and I’m of course going light on policy specifics, but the conservative movement is not a welcoming place for those who hold those beliefs. So I don’t think any number of insane blowups on the left would cause me to “switch” — it would have to be some sort of deeper ideological transformation that I don’t think is in the cards. I’m too old.

Jesse Singal

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

… But I won’t do that

Things I won’t do

Bari Weiss lends her Substack to a Bitcoin debate. Balaji S. Srinivasan says Bitcoin Is Civilization. Michael W. Green makes The Case Against Bitcoin.

I understand Bitcoin a bit better now. Still won’t go there.

I haven’t been willing to invest the time to gain pop-culture literacy, but the way Alan Jacobs uses Walter White’s decision to hold Krazy-8 captive in a basement, I kinda wish I knew more about Breaking Bad.

> I think I better understand the Republican capitulation to Donald Trump when I think of their decision to nominate him as the GOP Presidential candidate in 2016 as the equivalent of Walter White’s decision to hold Krazy-8 captive in a basement. > > Breaking bad walter and krazy 8 episode 3 > > I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time — it seemed like the only real option. But then, once you have him in the basement, what do you do with him? Until you decide, you are as much his prisoner as he is yours.

I’m still not going to pursue pop-culture literacy, though. My pop-culture literacy pretty much ceased when my son went off to college (though before that, I did listen to some Meatloaf, whence today’s title).

Something the New York Times won’t do

First, Bari Weiss, now Elizabeth Bruenig. It’s not good enough to be a center-left same-sex married bisexual (though Weiss shuns sexuality labels) or a progressive Catholic; if you’re not totally, unequivocally committed to the successor ideology, you’re not welcome in the trenches of the newspaper of record.

What will it take for New York Times’ management to wrest control back from the toxic Jacobins in the newsroom?

Artistic Directors are gods

One of two choirs I sing in, Lafayette Master Chorale, is announcing on Thursday our return and our concert schedule for 2021-22 — after abruptly ceasing rehearsals and concerts 14 months ago. We’ve missed singing. We believe and hope that our patrons have missed us.

We also just released our virtual recording As If We Never Said Goodbye, a piece we’ve never rehearsed or performed together:

> I dont know why I’m frightened
> I know my way around here
> The cardboard trees, the painted seas, the sound here
> Yes, a world to rediscover
> But I’m not in any hurry
> And I need a moment > > The whispered conversations
> In overcrowded hallways
> The atmosphere as thrilling here as always
> Feel the early morning madness
> Feel the magic in the making
> Why, everything’s as if we never said goodbye
> > I’ve spent so many mornings
> Just trying to resist you
> I’m trembling now, you can’t know how I’ve missed you
> Missed the fairy tale adventures
> In this ever-spinning playground
> We were young together
> I’m coming out of makeup
> The lights already burning
> Not long until the cameras will start turning
> And the early morning madness
> And the magic in the making
> Yes, everything’s as if we never said goodbye > > I don’t want to be alone
> That’s all in the past
> This world’s waited long enough
> I’ve come home at last > > And this time will be bigger
> And brighter than we knew it
> So watch me fly, we all know I can do it
> Could I stop my hand from shaking?
> Has there ever been a moment with so much to live for? > > The whispered conversations
> In overcrowded hallways
> So much to say, not just today, but always
> We’ll have early morning madness
> We’ll have magic in the making
> Yes, everything’s as if we never said goodbye

The conjunction is kinda magical.

Political Punditry

Peggy Noonan

> What is to become of the Republican Party? It will either break up or hold together. If the latter, it will require time to work through divisions; there will be state fights and losses as the party stumbles through cycle to cycle. But in time one side or general tendency will win and define the party. Splits get resolved when somebody wins big and nationally. Eisenhower’s landslides in 1952 and ’56 announced to the party that it was moderate. Reagan’s in 1980 and ’84 revealed it was conservative. The different factions get the message and follow the winner like metal filings to a magnet. > > The future, according to this space, is and should be economically populist and socially conservative. > > The future GOP, and the current one for that matter, is a party of conservatism with important Trumpian inflections. The great outstanding question: Will those inflections be those of attitude—wildness, garish personalities and conspiracy-mindedness? If so, the party will often lose. Or will the inflections be those of actual policy, in which case they will often win? > > … > > One of the scoops of the Cheney drama was when the Washington Post reported that in a briefing at an April GOP retreat the National Republican Congressional Committee hid from its members polling information on battleground districts. That information showed Mr. Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones: “Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.” Bad numbers had been covered up before. Ms. Cheney concluded party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid acknowledging the damage Trump could do to Republican candidates. ate Peggy Noonan (UPDATE: Link switched from WSJ to her blog, which doesn’t have a paywall.)

How the GOP Could, In A Parallel Universe, Deserve to Win

> The Tories now have a 15-point lead over Labour in the polls. Blair noted Boris Johnson’s achievement: “The Conservative parties of Western politics have adapted and adjusted. But by and large they’re finding a new economic and cultural coalition.” > > This too is in the GOP’s grasp. The party did much better in the last election than anyone thought in the House and would have held the Senate without Trump’s antics in Georgia. > > … > > And here’s how you get that to stick with Trump voters. Credit him for bringing some newly potent issues to the fore — mass immigration, trade, the culturally left-behind, woke authoritarianism, non-interventionism in foreign policy, new wariness of China. Thank him, but stress the need to move forward. The truth is: Trump may have been helpful in creating a new Republican politics, but he did so entirely in service to his own vainglory. There is, in fact, no future path forward for Trumpism if Trump sticks around. Absorbed entirely into one man’s ego, the GOP is simply a backward-looking grievance and conspiracy machine, driven not by policy but by Trump’s own psychological inability to concede defeat.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added). I had not thought about it, but it is becoming received wisdom among anti-Trump and NeverTrump Republicans that his undermining of the integrity of the electoral system suppressed Republican voting in Georgia enough to cost them the two Senate seats. Considering how close both races were, that’s very plausible.

And the GOP clings to him still.

Short-takes

“When Cheney’s liberal critics place her support for democracy alongside her other positions, they implicitly endorse the same calculation made by her conservative opponents: that the rule of law is just another issue,” – Jon Chait.
“According to the Club For Growth, which has the gold standard of scorecards in Washington for measuring conservatism, Ilhan Omar has a better score for fiscal conservatism than Elisa Stefanik,” – Erick Erickson.
“We did not immigrate to this country for our children to be taught in taxpayer-funded schools that punctuality and hard work are white values,” – an anonymous father quoted by Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach at Parents Defending Education.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Bulwark (Never-Trumpers)

> Here’s what this really comes down to. Cheney’s ouster is about one thing, and one thing only: Liddle Donny Trump’s feelings. Liddle Donny couldn’t take the fact that “Sleepy Joe” wiped the floor with him in November … Liddly Donny is throwing a tantrum down in South Florida, and all of his butt boys in Congress are rushing to coddle him.

Tim Miller

Wire Reports

Trump’s right. The election was fraudulent.

> DENVER – A Colorado man suspected in the death of his wife, who disappeared on Mother’s Day 2020, is also accused of submitting a fraudulent vote on her behalf for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, newly released court documents show. Barry Morphew told investigators he mailed the ballot on behalf of his wife, Suzanne Morphew, to help Trump win, saying “all these other guys are cheating,” and that he thought his wife would have voted for Trump, anyway, according to an arrest warrant affidavit signed Thursday.

Wire Reports in the Lafayette Journal & Courier, May 15.

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