Tag: Donald Trump

Settle in: this one’s pretty long.

Hooboy! Did I ever let time get away from me as I collected items.

We’ve been getting it backward

I love this formulation: We’re not facing a blue wave on November 3; we’re facing a red undertow.

My own instinct is revulsion with Republican corruption, not enthusiasm for Democrats, who are pretty directionless. When Democrats do manifest a sense of direction, I’m generally inclined to disagree with them. I suspect I’m not alone. But I’ll be voting for a lot of them in five days.

The corruption of the Republicans needs a response outside the polls, too. Congresswoman Slotkin is directionally right about us needing deterring prosecutions (probably impeachments to avoid Trump’s pardons), but mustn’t make that our singular focus. Sarah Isgur suggests that a Democrat President in 2029 could help heal the land by naming a Republican Attorney General to focus on the worst of the worst corruption in the second Trump administration without the partisan taint.

If you think impeaching a Trump minion who’s no longer in power is a pointless gesture, you’re wrong: “conviction upon impeachment has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from ‘any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’” (David French)

Now, like Diogenes, we need to find among the Republicans, a man — a genuinely honest and virtuous person, to fill that role.

AI as God

[W]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

Public-facing, our AI Titans spin stories of endless pleasurable leisure as our AI underlings do all the work for us. In their digital smoke-filled rooms, they wonder what to do with all us useless eaters in their tech paradise.

Meanwhile, with the Lewis quote in mind, I think about the crypto-religious devotion to, and the totalizing potential of, Artificial General Intelligence. If it is achieved. It bodes to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (he who already meddles in war policy and is also into the AI game with Grok).

Therefore, be it resolved that listening to or reading the transcript of The Zealousness of the New Tech Right, Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, be highly recommended.

(If you need more incentive, be advised that when I went to save End-Times Fascism to my wish list, the Amazon algorithm suggested that I consider also If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies: Why Pausing AI is the Real Existential Threat. The Author? Grok 4.2, Elon Musk’s AI platform.)

Killer of thousands of the poorest children in the world

We don’t know the extent of the damage Musk did to one of the most efficient aid programs in history, PEPFAR, but we can say with full certainty that the richest man in the world is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of the poorest children in the world — almost certainly more than those killed in Gaza. And he carries the weight of this like all sociopaths. He feels it not at all.

And now it appears he deliberately exposed Ukraine to Russian aggression by secretly hobbling Starlink, the satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defenses. That’s a direct intervention in a hot war to benefit America’s enemy in Moscow. According to the WSJ, he ran it by Trump first, who agreed, but not Zelensky, further destroying what little trust the US has in world affairs. This week, Trump said it was back to normal but the Ukrainians insist the slowdown is still in place. Worse: there’s a real lack of accountability in how this decision was made and who exactly can reverse it.

But let’s just say that delegating military strategy to a private individual is a new low for our increasingly banana republic. The Dems should not be discouraged from getting to the bottom of these scandals as soon as they are able.

Andrew Sullivan, My Musk Problem And Ours

“Teaching you how to think”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

Unprecedented institutional threat

Hundreds of US lawyers have agreed to work for free on efforts to monitor next month’s midterm elections in what voting rights groups say is the biggest effort of its kind to prevent meddling at the polls. “I’ve been involved in election protection since 2004 [and] I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in the midterms before,” Seth Waxman, co-chair of WilmerHale’s Supreme Court practice and the former US solicitor-general, told the FT. “In the past there . . . wasn’t a widespread institutional threat. This year is categorically different.” (Source: ft.com)

John Ellis News Items citing and quoting Financial Times.

The threat, in my opinion, is mostly from Trump’s minions, who have internalized his bogus election fraud rhetoric by trying (and failing, I hope) to counterprogram some even bigger fraud.

I’ve read enough about election security to think that the most plausible way for Trump to sow distrust in the election is something like a declaration, ipse dixit, that there’s some lefty attack on some blue state elections and sending in goons to demand protective custody of the voting machines. (Oops! Apparently, Team MAGA has been thinking much harder than I about how to screw up an election).

If he doesn’t get them, MAGA America will say the election was corrupt and untrustworthy. If he does get them, sane America will say the election was corrupted by him and sub-optimal. Since he thrives on chaos, he wins either way.

What are they giving themselves permission to do?

I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.

…

The threat of imminent doom can excuse even the inexcusable.

That’s the logic of the end justifies any means. And that logic is a perennial aspect of politics. There are certain rare and extreme situations in which the end of bare survival (facing a genuine existential threat) does justify anything that can be done to protect against that threat being fulfilled. But what about engaging during an ordinary election campaign in absurd hyperbole, exaggeration, and outright lies to justify the judgment that we face an existential threat from them, which in turn is what justifies the anything-goes mentality? The Claremont faction has been engaged in just such threat inflation or expansion ever since Michael Anton published the “Flight 93 Election” essay (in September 2016), and now the entire leadership of the right, as well as its media echo chamber, is in on the game, giving itself one concocted extreme self-justification after another for a decade.

…

What are they giving themselves permission to do? The answer: Anything and everything necessary to protect themselves from suffering utter destruction at the hands of their mortal enemies (aka, losing an upcoming election).

Damon Linker

Are to classics too white?

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”…

Andrew Sullivan, The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics

If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist …

… I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate. From one of his classics:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Flat-out fake polling

[B]efore you dye your hair blue, you should know that tons and tons of polling you read is fake. Like, literally just fake. The latest here is a public opinion polling shop called Wedgewood Polling, which was cited on MS NOW and in The New York Times (places that would never lead us astray). Wedgewood made this statement on their now-terminated X account:

WEDGEWOOD POLLING, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry, makes this public statement. . . . Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.

Ha ha. Cool. You got us, Wedgewood! Why do I increasingly feel like we’re all a part of a YouTube prank show?

Nellie Bowles

Wish fulfilled

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.

Russell Vought, 2023

A hacking group leaked the names, phone numbers, and addresses of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and associates, including about 10,000 linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigative arm, some of them involved in undercover operations. DHS said it was aware of a “potential breach.”

TMD

Postliberalism

Readwise seems to have decided one recent day to give me a couple of postliberal-leaning “Daily Highlights” from my past reading:

Liberal democracy is more restrictive, being strongly correlated with egalitarian principles that are quite wrongly believed to generate diversity. The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

I am quite dubious about the concept of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong, we really are an exceptional nation; that’s even clearer to me from living abroad. But there’s a lot of hubris in that. We really believe somehow that we can defy the laws of history, that as long as we work hard and mean well, goodness will prevail.

Rod Dreher, Farewell to Hungary, And to Europe

For the record, I remain unconvinced that any of the postliberal or illiberal alternatives to liberal democracy would be an improvement. Insert your own criteria for the desiderata in relation to which “improvement” is measured. Mine are that Christians “may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.” But I’m trying to learn in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content..

October

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

Louise Gluck, October

Shorts

  • If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards. (Nick Catoggio of Sen. Jon Husted)
  • It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. (The late Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
  • I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (Simone Weil, Love in the Void)
  • Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. (M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived)
  • [I]f you see a man in skinny jeans and long necklaces leaping around with a light show behind him, well, that’s a man who wants to have sex with a lot of random people. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a rock band or talking about God. These are ancient mating dances. These are ancient male archetypes. (Nellie Bowles)
  • The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. (Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal)
  • Fundamentalist intellectual habits … have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. (Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • America’s wedded couples are far less likely to stay together than Sweden’s cohabiting couples are. (Gracy Olmstead, Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family)
  • We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs. (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Rebarbarizing America

Nidal Malik Hasan

It’s always a pretty safe bet that anything Pete Hegseth does is performatively tough and morally indefensible. But my instant objection to livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan took the self-evident evil too much for granted.

And frankly, the evil has come into sharper focus for me since my first post. Not all of what I’m going to say now just was on my mind then.

I’m opposed to capital punishment, but I’m going to assume its permissibility for a moment. The evidence does not show that the death penalty deters others. (That is a more modest claim than “shows that it does not deter,” the claim I wanted to make before I did an AI fact-check.) Failure to deter — which presumably is the purpose to be enhanced by making it public — is my main reason for opposing streaming or broadcasting this execution. (That some sick-minded people will enjoy it, making themselves sicker for their enjoyment, is a second reason.)

Deterrence aside, the remaining purposes of criminal punishment usually cited are retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration/compensation. Capital punishment does not rehabilitate or restore, and it incapacitates whether or not it’s public. Finally, the retribution is equal whether the execution is public or hidden from public view.

I confess that I’ve said things against sanitizing capital punishment, and may have even spoken in favor of making it public. I’m definitely leaning the other way now, perhaps motivated by the very unsanitized feel of firing squads, or my general disgust with the calculated rebarbarization of America (see Damon Linker, below).

Self-parody in Christian Nationalist America

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the establishment of an Office of Religious Affairs to prioritize and improve “religious support” for the troops. The new office holds promise, but unfortunately it came wrapped in Hegseth’s typical Christian nationalist packaging. Can the Pentagon use the good idea while discarding its trappings?

The announcement was part of Hegseth’s “State of the Force” speech, which made headlines for other reasons. Hegseth promised to continue culling general officers, attacked the press as “anti-American losers,” and touted his elimination of diversity programs. He vowed that in his military, there would be “no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.”

That this sort of bombast has become par for the course in the Trump era is a large reason I simply stopped listening to official speeches and press conferences years ago. And I confess to having a specific allergy to Hegseth’s trademark delivery, every sentence delivered with maximal manly confidence and urgency. It’s easy to hear him saying something like: From now on every soldier will tie his shoelaces correctly in the United States military. We can no longer afford floppy laces that distract from maximum boot lethality.

…

None of this is unusual for Hegseth. A year ago, he released a short reel in which he prayed the Lord’s Prayer over a rapid-fire montage of American military heroism. He is quite comfortable merging the symbols and rhetoric of Christianity with the symbols and rhetoric of America. For him, the two naturally go together. That’s a pretty good shorthand definition of Christian nationalism.

Paul D. Miller, Blessed Is the Policymaker Who Quotes the Bible in Context

Rebarbarizing America

⁠⁠In a word, the United States is undergoing a process of rebarbarization—and the president, his team, and his party are actively encouraging it. Calling it a strategy to enhance thumos gives this process the appearance of something high-minded, but it isn’t. At bottom, it’s an effort to encourage Americans to think and act like brutes.⁠⁠

…

I honestly don’t have much more to say on this topic, but I thought returning to the theme of the previous post with additional examples would be a worthwhile exercise. Marco Rubio can advocate for more thumos all he wants. But the reality is that thumos usually takes care of itself. It emerges by nature from the depths of the human soul. That’s why the greatest political philosophers have treated thumos more as a problem that requires a response than as a virtue that needs to be cultivated.⁠⁠

…

⁠⁠I have a hard time imagining how anyone could have looked at America in the mid-2010s and decided that what the country really needed was a fresh injection of barbarism. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve failed to think my way fully into the MAGA mind.⁠⁠

Damon Linker, American Barbarism

You heard it here first

The Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News violated antitrust laws by suspending pool coverage of President Donald Trump. The networks collectively suspended pool video coverage of Trump for four days after the president banned journalists from CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds over what he called “fake news.” The pool has since gone dark again on days the White House has kept CNN out of the rotation. “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington said in a statement, referring to a law prohibiting anticompetitive business agreements. DOJ investigators on Friday demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool’s coverage of Trump and his decision to ban CNN from the White House.

The Morning Dispatch for October 12, but you heard it here first, on September 30.

The real mission of our universities

Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.

The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research.

Antón Barba-Kay, Havens for the Human.

I think they call that a “revealed preference.” And it’s a big part of why I prefer liberal arts colleges to universities for the promotion of full human thriving.

Winning every vertical with the content engines seized after launching a hostile

Maybe David Ellison is the unspoken telos of the university.

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

…

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

Ted Gioia, Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

Why we can’t have nice things

Building codes and zoning regulations have made it difficult, often illegal, to build houses that are worth caring about. Where I live, the building codes prohibit new houses in the old residential neighborhoods from exceeding thirty feet in height. Under that rule, my own 100-year-old house could not be legally built today. In effect, it is a law against houses more than two stories high. There are a great many fine examples of “Victorian” houses in Saratoga. These are the houses that wear the little brass plaques from the town historical society. These are the houses that tourists still come to see and enjoy, the houses that the community treasures, that give the town its character, its charm, that make the place worth caring about. None of them could be built legally under the present codes.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Shorts

  • [L]ocalism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (Roof Nails & Toothpicks)
  • Ken Paxton, the über-corrupt Texas attorney general in a tight race for the Senate, has launched statewide investigations into pediatricians who vaccinate children. (TMD)
  • If the liberal democratic nation state is government by consent, the artificial state is government by machine. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)
  • Liberal democratic states make citizens; the artificial state makes trolls. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Keeping America safe from Christian pastors

Our bad-faith INS

My wife’s Church is trying to call a pastor from Indonesia (educated in the US and fluent in English) to fill their “vacant pulpit.”

I’m a sort of bystander, but it has become obvious to me that the Trump Immigration and Naturalization Service is acting in bad faith, obstructively demanding proof that her church is real (photos, financial records, etc.), then escalating their demands (e.g., independently audited financial records) when the church surprises them with compliance. (The list is much, much longer than this.)

The INS is betting that the Church won’t sue; that’s my take. I’d bet a substantial amount that they will not get this pastor unless they do sue or Trump has left office.

I suspect that there are a lot of Trump voters in that church (my wife not being one of them) because it’s chock-full of Republicans (many of them have been city and county officials).

Isn’t it swell having a jackboot in the White House to protect Christians?

Trump’s reverse Midas touch

I generally move short criticisms of Trump elsewhere, but this is so true, and so in accord with what I realized at the time Trump was doing it, that I’m promoting it to the premier blog:

If [Georgia Democrat Senator Jon] Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Michelle Cottle

So what’s the alternative?

As I wrote yesterday, quoting historian Jerry Z. Muller, there are two kinds of nationalism: civic nationalism, in which a country organizes around shared ideals, and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism makes far more sense in Europe, where each nation was founded by a people, a tribe, a large family, you might say. That’s not how it was with America. It is hard for me to believe that the Founders would have foreseen a future America with so many non-Europeans in it (except for the African descendants of slaves, of course), but that’s the actually existing America today. It’s not going away.

Rod Dreher.

Now I will “play[] the Donald Trump role here– which is somewhat rudely getting at an essential truth that the establishment refused to discuss”: if we don’t procreate our own ancestors, our future workers, the folks who will pay into the Ponzi scheme Social Security system, what alternative do we have to admitting smart, ambitious immigrants to the America Experiment?

Bo French gets his coveted 15 minutes of infamy

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.⁠⁠

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance ….

Nick Catoggio If you don’t know who Bo French is, check now because if there’s justice in the world, he’s soon to disappear.

The end of sclerotic liberal democracy?

[L]iberal democracy runs contrary to human nature in a significant way. It is natural, he says, for people to be more motivated to help their family and friends than they are inclined to help strangers.

…

Trump, like most other right-populists around the world, was and is responding to something real—namely, the sense that the institutions of the liberal state have grown too constraining. We can’t seem to respond decisively to our problems. Regulations and legal restrictions have gummed up the works, making it extremely difficult to get large, ambitious public projects done, to build much of anything, or to respond to challenges effectively or within a reasonable time horizon.

Fukuyama admits that this is a major problem plaguing liberal governments in our moment—and that the rise of both left- and right-wing populism (including Trump) is partly about a desire on the part of citizens to see this improve. And that’s in part what we see Trump doing: He just acts, ordering (to cite one of many examples) the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the building of an enormous ballroom without waiting for any kind of regulatory process, external oversight, judicial review, or congressional authorization.

…

[T]he problem with Trump isn’t that he’s demonstrating that it’s possible to just do stuff, as the second administration’s defenders advocated and applauded in its opening weeks and months. Rather, the problem with Trump is that he’s doing stuff incompetently, sloppily, corruptly, and with his own narcissistic fixations setting priorities instead of the country’s most pressing needs. This implies that what the United States really needs is a president who will act with Trumpian boldness but with much greater competence, much less corruption, and a capacity to set national priorities and accomplish them quickly and efficiently. That this is where Fukuyama comes down is confirmed by his criticism, earlier in the conversation, of Barack Obama and his party for failing at the time to eliminate the filibuster so they could accomplish more goals for the American people.

…

I’m sure some of my readers will respond to this summation of Fukuyama’s position with enthusiasm. Eliminating the filibuster has been popular with lots of Democrats and leftists for a long time. I don’t have any principled or even pragmatic objections to doing it, provided Democrats make the change in full awareness that they will be just as disadvantaged as Republicans when they find themselves in the minority. Maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off, but it needs to be recognized as one: The Democrats will be buying greater power when they take majority control of the Senate in return for less power when Republicans preside over the upper chamber.

…

As I’ve argued on any number of past occasions, authoritarian overreach is a big problem and danger for us, but its underlying cause, and the deeper source of our political turbulence, is the depth and narrowness of our national divide. We both deeply disagree about ends and are quite evenly divided in our disagreement. That’s why, when each party is out of power, it uses every means it can (including institutional, legal, regulatory, and technological means) to thwart what the party in power wants to achieve—which, in turn, inspires the party in power to act boldly and with increasing disregard for constraints, even though it usually wins power quite narrowly.

Damon Linker (bold added) summarizing a point of Francis Fukuyama in his interview with Ezra Klein.

Trump’s corruption concerned me a great deal, but in the early days of the Trumposcene it became apparent that my countrymen had looked at it, shrugged, and voted for him anyway. So I shifted my attention to his narcissism, predicting that sooner or later, his narcissism would make him misunderstand something important that wasn’t all about him.

If “sooner” was Trump45, “later” seems to be Trump47, and those narcissistic chickens have come home to roost, emboldened by voter amnesia about January 6 and an intervening SCOTUS decision that, while it prevented him prosecuting Joe Biden for this and that, more importantly provides him with much assurance that he’ll never pay legally for his Presidential depredations.

Oh: and the corruption is on full display, too: for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Bold, perhaps …

Steven Calabresi, one of three (sigh!) cofounders of the Federalist Society, has taken up the futile cause of trying to defend most anything Donald Trump does. His latest was defending — no, extolling — the dumbass attack on Iran.

But his fellow-profs at the Volokh Conspiracy (where Calabresi posted the paean — they don’t have a very tight sanity filter) aren’t concurring:

I guess Prof. Calabresi doesn’t see the irony that the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 – President Trump called it a complete obliterat[ion]” – was so “wise” that by the immediately following winter Iran was closer than it had ever been – 2 weeks away! – to developing a nuclear weapon.

“President Trump faced the hardest and bravest decision of his life and of his two terms as President in February of 2026. Should he use the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, . . . [o]r  should President Trump follow the advice of almost all his top advisors and do nothing.”

That’s a very odd formulation of the decision Trump faced in February 2026. To begin with, does “destroy Iran’s nuclear program” just mean a “do-over” of what we did back in June?  And was his only option, other than “use of the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” to “do nothing”?

It was not.  Prof. Calabresi omits a very wide variety of alternative options that were on the table in February 2026, ranging from toughening the sanctions to diplomacy and negotiations.

Yes, diplomacy and negotiations.  The Soviet Union also wanted to destroy our way of life, and yet from Kennedy-Khrushchev to Reagan-Gorbachev, we found a way to negotiate with them, and the world was a lot better off for our having done so. If Trump was so convinced the Iran Accords were so terrible, perhaps he could have devoted some time to thinking about how a workable multi-lateral enforceable agreement might actually work.

Calabresi continues:

Young advisors like the naïve and inexperienced Vice President, J.D. Vance, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and most of the top generals in the Department of War took the wrong, over-cautious view. They quite rightly said that going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular work. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, oil and natural gas prices would rise, and the world’s economy, including the U.S. economy, would take a hit. Such a war would be unpredictable, and our European allies would fecklessly decline to help. We would run out of weapons because stockpiles in the U.S. were dangerously low. The war would not be a quick victory like the kidnapping of Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro; it would instead drag on. Trump might even lose the 2026 midterm elections or fail to keep the presidency in Republican hands in 2028. The American people would never understand why war with Iran was necessary when the Afghan and Iraq Wars were not.

Just for the record, there is absolutely no credible evidence of which I am aware that any of these words were ever spoken in Trump’s presence, or that Trump ever weighed the options in front of him in this, or any other rational, way. None.

Calabresi applauds Trump’s decision to “launch[ ] a knock-out strike on February 28, 2026, that decapitated the Iranian leadership—civilian, theocratic, and military—in a bombing that killed the Supreme Iranian leader (the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), an avowed enemy of the U.S.”

How, exactly, did that bring us closer to the goal of a non-nuclear Iran?

David Post, Bold, perhaps; but not Brave and not Right

Shorts

  • Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought. (Andrew Sullivan who, exhausted with repetitive themes, is re-orienting toward podcasts with guests)
  • There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in Britain, as in America, but none gained widespread traction before reliable birth control became widely available. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties, and historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman. Under those conditions, societies maintained elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young men and women – and to channel sexual desire towards commitment and child-rearing. (Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress)
  • Would Roger Williams recognize Al Mohler as a Baptist now? Al Mohler signs on to Christian nationalism
  • When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location — it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place. (Tom Nichols via Frank Bruni)
  • ⁠⁠[A]t the gym … the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. (Kevin D. Williamson)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
    …

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Sophie’s Choice

Sanity returns from exile

[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Kat Rosenfield.

There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”

And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!

I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.

I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.

Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.

[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]

Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!

An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”

As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

…

The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….

Douglas Murray.

I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.

I just don’t want to hang around people like that

In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.

And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.

David French

Stupid laws make stupid problems

Local news, mid-north Indiana: Recount Commission rejects Copenhaver’s demand to subpoena voters

I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:

No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.

I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”

The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.

What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.

The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.

I hate politics.

Spear Phishing

An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Richard Whaling, AI is gaining ability to personalize cyberattacks, enabling phishing at scale – Washington Post

Data Center Defamation

Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:

With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.

…

Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….

Joe Nocera in the Free Press.

(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)

Memento Vivere

The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.

…

If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.

…

It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.

Elizabeth Stice, Memento Vivere – Front Porch Republic

Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.

Shorts

  • [D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
  • [John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
  • All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
  • River Page, Welcome to Secular Sharia (The Free Press)
  • Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
  • [T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
  • I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
  • “We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
  • He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
  • The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
  • Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

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

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.

A little whataboutism (and more)

Whataboutism

The truths that must not be named

I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.

So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).

(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)

Who’s the more partisan Justice?

Who’s more partisan:

  • Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
  • Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?

Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)

Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP

The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated …

If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

David Frum, Trump Dooms His Own Party. See also Tom Nichols, Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China.

Someone wrote about this recently.

To every thing there is a season

If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?

Wilfred M. McClay, A Nation’s Birthday

The End of Reading

My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:

  • Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
  • [A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
  • Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
  • Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)

Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.

A linguistic curiosity

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.

Orhan Pamuk and Ara Guler, Istanbul

AI detection

Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).

I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.

This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.

Luigi: The Musical

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes. 

Kevin D. Williamson

How I use AI

AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.

I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:

  • Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
  • Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
  • Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
  • Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
  • Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.

(H/T Jordan, The AI Chatbot as Digital Oujia Board)

In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.

So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?

Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:

  • Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
  • Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
  • Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
  • Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
  • I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
  • How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
  • How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?

Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:

  • I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
  • My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.

My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.

Shorts on the Department of Justice

  • In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
  • With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)

Shorts

  • “It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • “14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
  • In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • … “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
  • These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).

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

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.

Friday, July 17 Political Potpourri

Department of Injustice

It’s over.

The Justice Department’s most significant case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far right Proud Boys — has officially been erased.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who presided over the six-month trial that led to the jury convictions, reluctantly granted a Justice Department motion to drop the case on Friday, concluding that he had no power to second-guess prosecutors once they decided to abandon it.

“In light of fundamental separation of powers principles … the proper course here is for the Court simply to grant the motion in full,” Kelly concluded, dismissing the case “with prejudice,” which means a future Justice Department is barred from revisiting the charges.

“No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” the judge added.

Politico (H/T John Ellis)

Grade inflation

Because I want my own students to stretch and because I want an A to make them robustly proud, I’m sparing with that mark, at least by today’s standards. I typically award A’s to no more than a quarter of the students in any class. But I give A- grades to too many of them, and I often feel obliged to tell students, at the start of the semester, that if they’re intent on a G.P.A. close to 4.0, I’m not a safe bet. A few drop the class, and I respect that. Most stay — but they stay knowing what’s what, which saves all of us awkwardness and bitterness.

I shouldn’t have to issue that warning. I shouldn’t be giving only a handful of B+ and B grades. I should be distributing a diversity of marks that speak to the many variations in student performance, even at Duke. It’s not that I want to be harsher; I want to be honest. Isn’t higher education about the pursuit of truth?

Frank Bruni

Ideology #FAIL (and success)

[Incorrigible narcissist and foulmouthed Pastor Douglas] Wilson has been hitting all these notes to a string of wide-eyed interviewers for some time now. But one point deserves scrutiny: his idea for household voting, in which the head of each household would be the sole voter. This is often characterized as the disenfranchisement of women because, for married couples, Wilson would have only the husband vote.

But here’s the funny thing: As marriage rates in America have declined, there are many single, female heads of households, and unmarried women lean ever more Democratic. If Wilson’s household voting plan were implemented, disenfranchising married women, it would empower the Democratic Party for decades and shut Republicans out of the White House.

Exit polling makes this unmistakable. In 2022, for example, scholars from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) summarize:

Fifty-eight percent of married voters supported GOP House candidates while 59 percent of unmarried respondents voted Democratic. Married men and women did not differ significantly from one another: 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women voted GOP. But there was a large gap in the unmarried category: A bare majority of unmarried men, 52 percent, voted for GOP candidates; only 31 percent of unmarried women did.

When the AEI scholars looked more closely at state-level races in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas, the same pattern held. In all four states, they reported, “non-married women were the most Democratic group and married men the most Republican.”

Bonnie Kristian, Doug Wilson’s Household Voting Plan Could Empower Democrats for Decades (Christianity Today).

I paid a little bit of not unfavorable attention to Wilson prior to my entry into Christian Orthodoxy because he passed for some kind of Calvinist and was amusing. I think he has shifted more extremely to the right since then; I know I’ve changed, so his only interest to me now is as the leader of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s chosen schismatic denomination and as having some affiliation with the current Christian-ish slice of the manosphere and other far-Right trollery.

Mainstream press has been giving a lot of “Be afraid. Be very afraid” attention to Wilson and his group. I don’t entirely buy it, but you really never know which crackpot cabals have the potential to take flight and which can be disregarded safely.

Sometimes, the press coverage itself helps launch things. Do you really think Donald Trump would be President if he hadn’t been broadcast into America’s living rooms as the masterful boss on Apprentice for a couple of decades?

Morally cleansing metal

Somehow, I gather, a $40K hybrid SUV getting 31 mpg, and the intercontinental energy and material flows that brought it into being, are more “green” than a ratty-looking old Volkswagen assembled from cast-off parts, foraged locally, that gets 32 mpg. There is a certain aesthetic of cleanliness that must be adhered to. Better yet, invisibility. To count as green, those ugly chunks of rusting 1970s steel would need to be removed and recycled: melted down in a coal-fired blast furnace and sent across an ocean to become raw material for, say, an electric (i.e., coal-powered) car, to be returned to the U.S. on a diesel-powered container ship. Such details are best kept out of mind; the main thing is that this journey accomplishes a moral cleansing of the metal.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive.

One of these ten is not like the others

  • A third man, 28, died Tuesday in St. Augustine, Florida, when a tractor-trailer struck him as he fled federal immigration agents.
  • Since Trump returned to office last year, at least 10 people have died during encounters with immigration agents.

The Morning Dispatch.

Please, Dispatch, do not confuse matters by including cases like the St. Augustine man in statistics about ICE lethality. It may be literally true that this was ”during” an encounter with ICE, but for once I’m having trouble seeing ICE culpability in that death.

The Game is Up

Dear MAGA America:

Just last night, your Lord, God and Savior Donald Trump made it clear yet again that the elections are rigged. He even released a tranche of documents that prove it.

So I don’t see much sense in you going out to vote any more.

Stay home, pop another cold one, turn on some Apprentice re-runs, and leave the voting to us fools who don’t know what time it is.

Yours,

Tipsy

Shorts

  • On Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory: “Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.” And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions. “The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time, or not happen at all. This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.” (Via Frank Bruni)
  • [F]or the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.” (Jeff Maurer, Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless?)
  • “Where is the line between opportunism and pragmatism? After January 6, 2021, Graham appeared to break with Trump, saying on the Senate floor, ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’ A few months later, he acknowledged Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party. ‘Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,’ he said. ‘I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.’” (Robert Reich)
  • “Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.” (Benjy Sarlin)
  • To call him “the quintessential politician of this era” is as much a compliment as an insult, recognizing his prodigious retail skill and genius for schmoozing. No wonder Donald Trump, a huckster’s huckster, liked him so much. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The New York Times noted that Trump held only 61 rallies before November 2024, about five times fewer than in 2016. (Persuasion) Grrrr! “five times fewer” is better than “five times less,” but it’s still innumerately incoherent.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.Frida

June 23, 2026

Hypocrisy pandemic

[W]e find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.

What Do Americans Think When No One Is Watching?

This paradox keeps popping up in my reading

We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul. See also The Abundance of Less and stories about AI like the one I referred to recently.

Free to say “no”

[I]f the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Brad East, You Don’t Have to Use AI.

I haven’t hidden that I use AI and rather enjoy it. But a lot of serious people are raising questions, not about complicity in a possible doomsday but about how AI shapes its users.

Learning from the Plain Folk

When the Amish see an interesting new technology, they discuss where to ban or allow it in terms of its effects, particularly on the community.

We’re doing something like that with AI. Mercifully, most of the voices are sober, respectful, even a bit tentative, because the potential benefits are widely appreciated among the chattering class. I don’t expect the conversation to end soon, by which point habit may carry the day.

Meanwhile, Anton Barba-Kay is calling for caution, in the context of comments about Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical:

The document takes issue with “the technocratic paradigm” as one of its main foils. It defines that paradigm as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”

…

The issue is not that these are evil thoughts to think; it is that we collectively don’t think and can’t agree on anything besides. The technocratic paradigm emerges as a background consensus for lack of other commitments held across institutions, markets, platforms, and nations. And yet this just is the transhumanist lingua franca of Babel: the very terms we all use to describe what we’re up to as we construct yonder tower.

For some reason, I find this formulation unusually clarifying, more helpful than most of what I’ve read on the subject.

Nailing Jello to the Wall

On imposing spurious rationality

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful: the people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That’s all there is to say — over and over. Anything else strains the truth. Now, I find that the illogic and stupidity actually make it more difficult to provide a commentary. Analysis must necessarily impose some rational pattern on the world, but it feels like a fool’s errand or even potentially misleading to seek the whys and wherefores of how this regime makes its decisions. The “4D chess” approach to Trump punditry once imposed a spurious rationality on what was self-evidently chaos; now it feels like any attempt to understand what’s going on risks the same.

…

There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch.

John Ganz

And he doesn’t even kick enemies in the teeth very well

Commenting on this John Ganz post, which I partially quote, above, Damon Linker writes:

It’s good stuff—not least because Ganz is gesturing toward something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around and write about since at least May 2023. That’s when I wrote a two-part post titled “The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right.” This was during the brief period when it looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might successfully challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In that context, I pointed out the primary thing that separated these GOP rivals: DeSantis was a candidate of a harder-edged post-Reaganite ideology, while Trump was a post-ideological figure who promised little beyond serving as a vehicle for the enactment of a revenge fantasy. DeSantis would pursue a muscular policy agenda, but Trump would kick the right’s enemies in the teeth.

…

Trump decided he wanted to try kicking the shit out of Iran. He made the decision for no coherent strategic reason. It was all about optics and the possibility of repeating his great “victory” in Venezuela on a larger stage. But it didn’t work out as he wanted, so, as Ganz put it, Trump wants to walk away. He can always lie and say he achieved victory knowing his most credulously cultish supporters will believe the moronic deception. So that’s what he’s going to try to do.

It then falls to journalists and intellectuals to make sense of it—and we seek to do so in rational terms. Trump did X because he wanted to achieve A, but that didn’t work out, so he shifted to Y, which entailed B, etc. But this isn’t a description of what actually happened, of the actual decision-making in Trump’s head and within the administration. It’s a description by baffled observers trying to discern something coherent in what is actually just some know-nothing doofus impulsively ordering this and then that and then some other thing, based on his own mercurial sense in the moment of what’s best for him and him alone.

J.D. Vance

Robert P. George and Caitlin Flanagan, both writing at the Free Press on Monday, strike me as complementary:

  • George: J.D. Vance had himself a conversion.
  • Flanagan: It may have been a Christian conversion, but it wasn’t a full conversion to Catholicism.

Russian Conservatism

Tsymbursky rejected the aggressive geopolitical ideas of the Eurasianists, and instead proposed the idea of “Island Russia.” In Tsymbursky’s view, Russia would not benefit from challenging the US-dominated world order, as the disintegration of that order would bring chaos in its wake. Instead Russia should focus on being a regional power, and ensure peace with the West by means of a buffer zone in the form of “limitrophe states,” such as Ukraine.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

The honored few

The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.

George Will

Shorts

  • “Second Circuit: FTX CEO SBF SOL.” That is an entire case summary from (Short Circuits). When it hit me, I couldn’t stop giggling.
  • He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. (George Will)
  • I feel obliged to point out that after several references to spiders in my homily I came home after Mass to find several spiders in our bathroom. My next homily will be featuring big piles of money. (James Quinby)
  • The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (Mashall McLuhan via L.M. Sacasas)
  • I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • We’ve turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC. (Rep. Mike Gallagher in 2024, resigning from the House)
  • When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. (Thomas Sowell)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Solstice Eve

The University As We Know It Is Finished

Nils Gilman, The University As We Know It Is Finished strikes me as a pretty good overview of what AI means to “the University as we know it.” I’ve been a bit disappointed with my subscription to Persuasion, but this makes up for a lot of boring articles.

I’ve long (always?) been ambivalent about the University as we know it. I’ve been under the impression that the “Oxbridge” way of educating surpasses even our most exclusive and competitive universities. I’ve lamented the tentacles of the military-industrial complex extending into our science and engineering colleges. I cynically am tempted to think of universities as nothing more than credential factories (except for the bit that’s drunken whorehouse).

The new reality surely will be different. I hope it will be better. If it is, I don’t see how it will avoid shrinking down to fit the relatively few young citizens who can actually knuckle down and grapple with the great and perennial issues of mankind. I’m kind of worried about the value of my fractional ownerships of student housing apartments.

But I’m kind of excited, despite my inner Eeyore, about what may emerge after what promises to be tumultuous and probably rapid change. Although I’m too conservative temperamentally to tear things down from any instinct that the replacement couldn’t be worse (see Damon Linker on that, in Shorts below), I can watch events beyond my control tear things down with equanimity if I catch a whiff of a better replacement.

A golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks

From Sara Hendren, writing about selective abortion — or is it about a “golden-handcuffs commitment to making a living via clicks”? You decide.

The occasion of Sara’s story is the pregnancy of an influencer couple, followed by selective abortion for Down syndrome, chronicled in real time as influencers are wont to do.

It has been said that the line between “influencer” and other people making money by writing on the internet is that the influencer is hawking brands.

I had internalized “influencer” as a pejorative for certain shallow content. But that just pushes the distinction question back another step — what kind of shallow content typifies the “influencer”? Maybe it really is brand-hawking.

“Turtles all the way down,” as they say.

Anyway, Sara is a smart lady, one of several super-smart cyberfriends on my cherished social medium, micro.blog. She writes frequently many places, but one of them is Comment, to which I subscribe but which I’ve been neglecting if favor of ephemera. I’m going to try to change that – and if I spend more time there, less in ephemera, that will change the tone of this blog as well.

A philosopher muses on his life thus far

Another regular at Comment is James K.A. Smith, a well-regarded philosopher about whom I’ve been somewhat ambivalent for reasons I needn’t go into. Suffice that it’s pretty stale, I’ve only heard the other side, he’s changed, and he may have outgrown my little beef with him, because he’s trying mightily to change:

Philosophy and the sort of faith that captivated my twentysomething self felt mutually reinforcing. Both were about knowing. Both were about winning—arguments and souls, hearts and minds. And both promised me security. I thought that security was protecting me from all sorts of things: ignorance, error, deception, but also temptation, seduction, hell. It would take me twenty-five years before I realized that the security they offered was its own sort of prison.

…

I organized my life around something like this vision. Coinciding with a religious conversion, my path to philosophy was paved with polemic and fuelled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosopher twenty-five years ago, I imagined the world’s problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. Grasping the world’s puzzles and problems with conceptual clarity would yield enlightenment, even a kind of salvation.

…

The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardour of the religious apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. I’m a philosopher and I’m here to help. Stand back: I know things. We can think our way out of this mess. Now here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, in the (late) middle of a life, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind. Or whether that’s even the point. As a philosopher, I’m learning how to wonder again. But before I could imagine another way to be a philosopher, I had to recognize that, first, a lot of change needed to take place in me.

James K.A. Smith, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

Some unexpected reality of working with AI

I recognize a lot of what Lila Shroff, America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek is talking about:

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

…

Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.”

…

The bot promised that the research would be easy. “Nothing for you to do,” it wrote. “Sit tight.” But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn’t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn’t very good, but neither was the paragraph I’d spent that time writing, because I’d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic’s policies on AI use, I didn’t use the tools to do any actual writing.)

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work.

The difference between my experience and these coders is that I was working on just a single project, in a chat, with no agents deployed to work in parallel (and nag me with questions). Nevertheless, I needed frequent breaks. That’s probably in part because of my age entering this strange new world.

And I’ve gotten the yellow flag, too – a reminder of AI’s limits. Not hallucinations, but “wasted” time.

The project that wore me down with Claude’s followup was some preliminary legal work for a nonprofit corporation that needs to reorganize because of exponentially increased assets. Because I relinquished my law license in 2018, and because corporate law was never my focus, I eventually called a CPA and a Lawyer about advising me (I was hoping my Claude work product might just need review), and basically learned that Claude and I collectively had missed some key distinctions, mostly on the accounting and tax status side (there are many different nonprofit tax statuses, all “tax exempt,” many “tax deductible,” but with differences that we need to nail down to do it the right way). Now maybe Claude asked questions about that, but I don’t think so.

I don’t really view my useless work product as wasted time: I’ve learned a fair amount about what AI is good for — and some of its limits.

Presidents

Overestimating the Boss

Last June, when Vice President JD Vance was defending Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s single-day strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Vance said, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East.”

“I understand the concern,” he continued, “but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”

Is that so?

The evidence of unreasonable pride is everywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had too much confidence in his ability to persuade Trump. For his part, Trump had too much confidence in his ability to bully Iran.

And so it turned out that the “dumb presidents” understood reality far better than Trump. There are no shortcuts. If you’re going to destroy your opponent, you’re going to have to use immense force. If you’re going to compromise with your opponent, it’s best not to lose a war (or blink in the face of adversity) as a prelude.

But Vance’s pride reveals a deeper problem. By scorning their predecessors, Vance and Trump are far too ready to reject their achievements. Trump was eager to withdraw troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and risk squandering victories against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and by tearing up the Iran deal without a viable replacement (and then launching an ineffective war), he may end up helping create a more radical, more powerful and more dangerous Iran.

In their arrogance, Trump and Netanyahu defied their predecessors in all the worst ways, and now they court a profound defeat when, not long ago, a meaningful victory, however partial, was well within their grasp.

David French

He thought he’d seen the ne plus ultra of demagoguery

After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word plan 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry’s pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan—nay, a promise-to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter.

Of course, this book was published two years before Trump rode down that escalator, and the columns collected there were earlier than that.

Re-evaluating 44

I never voted for him (his political record was far further left than his smooth speechifying would make you think), but I thought the election of Barack Obama said something good about America, and I appreciated the dignity he maintained in office (especially in retrospect).

But his execrable, brutalist Presidential Center makes me think he’s worse than I thought. The only thing that could make it worse would be gold leaf.

The Tell

9. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth berated NATO allies as “shameful” for their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting on Thursday that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result. He repeated President Trump’s previous description of the military alliance as a “paper tiger” and warned that U.S. support to NATO would not be “a one-way street.” Mr. Hegseth’s 12-minute lecture cast a chill over a meeting that had been designed to set a collaborative agenda for a summit of NATO leaders next month. He scolded allies whom he described as having failed to step up their defense spending, as the alliance agreed to do last summer, under pressure from Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hegseth reserved his harshest remarks for countries that had resisted letting American jets or ships use bases in Europe on their way to attack Iran during the war that the United States and Israel initiated Feb. 28. (Source: nytimes.com)

John Ellis News Items for June 19

Be it remembered that when we want to poo-poo Russian concerns about Ukraine getting too thick with Western Europe, and maybe even joining NATO, we insist that NATO is “purely defensive.” But under Trump, we’re treating NATO as our ally, obliged to aid us in the prosecution of a war he started without asking Congress, let alone our NATO partners, before commencing our attack.

Hungary under Orbán

Viktor Orban was not against liberal democracy; the Fidesz-drafted postcommunist constitution was and is a liberal democratic document. What Orban opposed was the post-national, post-Christian version of liberal democracy. Orban was able to do things politically that would not be constitutionally permitted in the US, in terms of promoting Christian values explicitly in law and policy. But he was able to do other things too, like offering super-generous subsidies to encourage Hungarians to have bigger families.

…

Hungary under Orban was an important experiment. Now Hungary is just one more small, godless European country.

Rod Dreher

Caveat: Dreher’s column starts with a different story than Orban and Hungary — the kind of story I wish he wouldn’t write since I really cannot do anything about Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Great Britain.

Shorts

  • [Trump] has now crested 80, and as our news-side colleague Katie Rogers wrote this week, that bothers him intensely. He may soon get a midterm comeuppance. Then the clock on his presidency starts ticking more and more loudly. Imagine the self-tributes he’ll need as medicine for all of that. We can file them under octogenarian onanism. (Frank Bruni)
  • “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” (Huck Finn via Bret Stephens)
  • Put it this way: Vance’s book is about how he finally decided that Catholicism met his exacting standards. (Alexandra Petri)
  • Even Jimmy Carter didn’t agree to be taken hostage. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • State Department official John Negroponte drolly observed after Richard Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign in North Vietnam that “we bombed them into accepting our concessions.” A similar verdict seems appropriate for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. (National Review Weekly Summary)
  • Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. (Graeme Wood on the Iran MOU)
  • It is simply not a reasonable thing to respond to disliking the government of Country A by proposing that we attempt to remove the government of Country A in the hopes that whatever government that follows will be more to our liking. (Damon Linker)
  • “It’s very funny that ten years ago beltway chickenhawks adopted an unachievable phony demand to justify opposing the JCPOA, Trump didn’t realize it was fake and fought a war to get it, discovered it was unachievable, and is now giving the chickenhawks the worst day of their lives,” – Max Fisher. Karma. (Via Andrew Sullivan
  • “FFS… please stop forcing professional athletes to wear rainbow hats and jerseys in June. It’s not helping,” – Dan Savage (via Andrew Sullivan. Bravo!
  • Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I’m doing the best I can here. If I could literally rub Trump voters’ noses in it while beating them with a rolled-up newspaper, I’d, ummmmm, consider it.

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

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.

Monday June 15

Dreher’s back (and the sky isn’t always falling)

I can’t remember how it happened. I think maybe I asked for a one-week trial so I could read a piece someone else had linked to. But anyhoo, I ended up with a subscription to Rod Dreher’s Diary, his Substack.

He’s back stateside, and although he hasn’t turned into a cockeyed optimist, his writing features a lot of human interest. You’ll probably encounter him here fairly often (I write, after noting that I’ve clipped excerpts from more than one of his posts this time).

Karma?

As we drove back out to the highway, my mother looked to the side at the end of our blacktop road, and exclaimed with horror, “Look at that! They put a trailer there! On top of a cemetery!”

“No, it’s next to the cemetery,” I said, referring to the Starhill Cemetery.

“No, that’s a cemetery. A black cemetery,” she said. “How could they put a trailer there?!”

She told me a story I didn’t know. Back in the 1970s, she said, that site had been a black graveyard. Whoever owned the land ordered the tombstones torn down so it could be developed.

“I was at Miss Lorena’s one day,” Mama said, referring to my dad’s mom, “when this elderly black couple showed up in tears. They asked for her help. They said a man with a bulldozer was over there knocking down the tombstones of their ancestors. Nobody could stop it, it turned out, but Miss Lorena did find a map of who was buried where, and shared it with them. Turns out at least some of those people were able to have their ancestors dug up and reburied elsewhere, even though the tombstones were gone. It wasn’t right, what they did to those poor people.”

Beat.

“Course Mr. ____, who was driving the bulldozer, drowned later up in Lake Mary, in his truck. They found him in the back cab. He was trying to get out.” She said it in a tone conveying the message: don’t mess with the dead.

I doubt the Bulldozer Man died because he disturbed the dead, but me being me, I don’t rule it out. Anyway, I had not known the story of the black cemetery, the memory of which will leave this world after my mom’s generation dies (though I’d guess that the black people around here won’t so quickly forget). It was a painful reminder of what black folks in this part of the world had to suffer, and within my lifetime. I hate DEI as much as any conservative, and believe it makes race relations worse. But you know, it came from somewhere.

Rod Dreher, Wednesday in the Country with Mama

Writing and gardening

A Substacker I follow (you’d recognize the name) has been pretty quiet lately. Some of the best writers are like that. He explains:

I deeply appreciate all those of you who continue as paid subscribers despite my lack of ‘content’ here at present. A writer can’t be on output all the time, which is a drawback of this kind of ‘platform’ for which readers pay a monthly fee. Quite rightly, a lot of people don’t want to pay for nothing, and yet if a writer just pumps out ‘content’ for the sake of it, he or she will soon be dead from the neck up. These days, in any case, an AI can do this job much better than we ever can, and it will provide all the accompanying pictures and films too.

I’ve long thought of writing in the same way I think of gardening. It’s a seasonal process. You need to manure the soil and prepare it in order to have a flourishing, fecund summer of words. Then you need a fallow period. Plants don’t grow in the winter. I’ve been wintering for the last six months or so. Ticking over. Keeping an eye on the green manure. You can’t do anything creative without rest.

For years, I blogged original content pretty regularly and frequently. Then I ran out of things to write like that without repeating myself unduly. Now I mostly curate. But I’m fortunate that I don’t do this to put food on the family table. I don’t have it in me to write interesting things on deadline.

Where I’ll lay my bet

AI is not just another tool (there is no such thing as “just a tool,” as [Anton Barba-Kay] points out, but let that pass). The problem is that AI — like the rest of the digital world, but most especially — changes how we think and who we are as humans. Remember Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago warning that AI is going to “hack our attachments”? This is the kind of thing Barba-Kay is talking about. We are being merged with the Machine, and don’t even realize it.

…

We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.

Rod Dreher, Sorry, Pope Leo, You Missed What AI Is (bold in original); block quote from Clare Coffey, The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.

I wouldn’t bet that Anton Barba-Kay and Rod Dreher have a better grasp of AI than the collective wisdom of the Pope and his advisers, but I appreciate their contribution to the back-and-forth that can’t happen too fast considering how fast the technology is coming on in the part of the population can influence the culture’s direction at a macro scale.

“Do you feel smart?”

For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step. 

There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy. 

Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist. 

The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.

And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.

Kevin D. Williamson

The even more corrupt return of “Sue and Settle”

Remember sue-and-settle? It’s coming soon to a dirtbag near you:

It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.

I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.

…

Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.

Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.

…

I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.

Nick Catoggio, Black Marks.

“Sue and settle” was a disreputable practice whereby the Obama administration made end-runs around Congress by settling lawsuits brought, almost collusively, be ideologically compatible “adversaries.” Apparently, if Catoggio’s right, Trump will wink and nod and settle when, say, January 6 rioters sue for getting their feelings hurt.

Mergers and acquisitions

I’m not breaking any new ground here, but just in case you’d overlooked this sort of pressure, let me be explicit:

  1. Newspapers and television networks increasingly are becoming part of multi-billionaire’s portfolios.
  2. Those billionaires do a lot of business with government, either as contractors or as suppliants.
  3. To an unprecedented extent, Donald Trump is openly transactional in his governance. People who aren’t nice to him don’t get any favors.
  4. Corporations whose media subsidiaries aren’t nice to Trump don’t get favors.
  5. Billionaires and corporations who depend on government for many of their billions therefore are careful to be (as) nice (as possible) to Trump.
  6. Therefore, many newspapers and television networks are relatively toothless.

This is one reason I read the New York Times: it has not been rolled into a larger portfolio, and is not obliged to be nice or even to pull punches. Yes, the owner’s are very rich, but their riches come from the newspaper.

And, of course, I selectively read in the wild, wild west of the internet, where investigative depth may be rare but great fortunes rarely compromise coverage.

Shorts

  • Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y. (David French)
  • There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. (Clare Coffey, italics added)
  • Incredulous at a “ceasefire” where the sides keep firing at each other, a New York Times writer (Scott Anderson, I think) referred to it as a “postmodern ceasefire.”
  • No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. (Fernando Pessoa)
  • [F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity. (Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies)
  • The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” (Carl R. Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld