I for one welcome our new insect overlords

Someone used that on micro.blog this week. I liked it. But it was in quotes, so I think he stole it, too. I think that may be a line from a movie.

The pollsters blow it again

So: the pollsters blew it again. They underestimated Trump support. I should be sitting here in suspense as counts continue; instead, I’m blogging about the soothsayers who couldn’t brace me for what happened Tuesday.

What’s the problem:

They don’t know how to count to 270? In other words, they do polling of the (meaningless) national popular vote but don’t get granular, state-by-state?
Many respondents lie because they’re shy (embarrassed? shamefaced? guilt-wracked?) Trump voters?
Has the historic script flipped so that higher voter turnout benefits Team Red?
Some other durned thing?

No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters

Ever since Donald J. Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015, elites have claimed his rise signals the last gasp of a dying white-majority America alarmed by cultural and demographic shifts. This was always a kind of security blanket—an excuse to ignore uncomfortable truths.

If Tuesday’s election results do not demolish that cope once and for all, we’re not sure what will …

The only group Kamala Harris made gains with was white college-educated women and those over 65.

…

Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:

On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”

We could go on, but you get the point. And their point is: Don’t blame Harris, blame the voters.

…

But you don’t succeed in an election by calling the common people racist or sexist or stupid. You win by listening to them.

And our media elite have put their heads in the sand. Again. They seem to think that if they keep calling Americans knuckle-dragging bigots, one day they’ll get the message.

That’s why you’ll get more insight from our nine-year-old election-night livestream star Josie Savodnik than from some of the best-paid cable hosts on TV. Josie’s take on why Kamala lost? “Maybe because of the border. Maybe it’s because of Kamala’s personality. And she also did kind of a terrible job at being vice president.”

She’s not wrong.

Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman, No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters

Wall Street has rarely been more excited by an election.

U.S. stocks’ capitalization rose by $1.62 trillion on Wednesday, their fifth-best one-day showing ever, following Donald Trump’s decisive election victory. The surge highlights the opportunity that investors, bankers and others in finance are hoping to embrace over four years of tax cuts, deregulation and economic expansion. “Investors are celebrating,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Capital in Chicago. He was among those buying shares of smaller companies, on the bet that Trump’s policies will rev up the economy. The enthusiasm is especially heated in a few areas, investors and bankers said. Banks and other financial companies climbed, with the KBW Bank Index rising 11%. Investors expect regulatory scrutiny will ease in a Trump administration. Some also expect more dealmaking, potentially among smaller and midsize banks. The expected departure of Lina Khan, who leads the Federal Trade Commission and has been a thorn in the side of executives hoping to work out tech acquisitions, was cheered by investors and bankers. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis

The point is, in Germany, if you didn’t go along with the party line, you would be demonized. You would get in trouble. People just think, I hope I don’t get in trouble, so what do I have to say or not say to get in trouble? At that moment, you cease to be free.

We’re kind of getting there. Even a millimeter in that direction is too close for comfort for me.

Emma Green, quoting the execrable Eric Metaxas.

Metaxas is not entirely wrong about this, but it’s on both sides, albeit asymmetrically.

If you dissent from “liberal” orthodoxy, you may get censored by the Assistant Executive Supernumerary of the Department of Truth whispering in the ears of social media, who then block you in one of several available ways available to them.

If you dissent from the MAGA right, you’ll get death threats. Ask David French about that.

I voted against both.

Nicholas Kristof Manifests

Nicholas Kristof issues a Manifesto for Despairing Democrats, and it’s not all bad:

My country has elected a felon whose former top aides have described him as a fascist and “the most dangerous person to this country.” Yet in an election that wasn’t even close, voters not only chose him but also picked a Republican Senate to empower him further.

This will be a test of our country and of each of us, so let me offer a manifesto for how ordinary Americans of my ilk can respond.

1. I accept Donald Trump’s victory. …

2. I will be a watchdog, not a lap dog. …

3. I will back organizations fighting to uphold human values. …

…

5. I will try to understand why so many Americans disagree with me. Too many Democrats reflexively assume that any person backing Trump must be a bigot or an idiot. But let’s beware of invidious stereotypes, for finger-wagging condescension alienates centrist voters; it’s difficult to win support from people you’re calling idiots and racists. Many working-class Americans have been left behind economically and have reason to feel angry. And Democrats aren’t going to win elections as long as they seethe at a majority of voters.

…

7. I will care for my mental health. There’ll be many, many times in the next four years when we’ll be irritated, anxious and alarmed, probably with good reason, so we need to find a way to relax and mellow out. For me, that’s backpacking and wine- and cider-making. In my day job, I shout at the world, and it pays no attention, so it’s a relief to raise grapes and apples and have them listen to me. And remember that sometimes the best therapist has four legs. A few years ago, many families got a pandemic dog, and for some this may be time to get a Trump dog.

…

12. I will temper my strong views with humility. The challenge is to unflinchingly proclaim our values even as we appreciate that we are fallible and may eventually be proven wrong. Accepting that contradiction curbs the tendency toward arrogance and self-righteousness, which in any case are utterly unhelpful in promoting those values.

13. I will share Thanksgiving with relatives, even if I think they’re nuts. There’s too much division in America, and we hang out too much with people who think just as we do. So if you’re debating whether to break bread with family members whose politics you can’t stand, go for it. Don’t let Trump get between you and your family or friendships.

Loss of faith

[W]e must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote.

David Frum, Trump Won. Now What?

From across the pond

Why did he win? There might be a thousand particular answers, but the broader reason seems clear: a lot of people are sick of the political-media-cultural establishment, and they want to blow it up. This is the same reason people voted for Brexit in 2016 and continue voting for ‘populist’ parties across Europe today. People feel – correctly – that this establishment serves the elite but not the masses. Worse: it has become so self-referential that it barely even knows who the masses are. I have been writing about how this establishment developed, and about the people opposing it, for thirty years. I can say with some confidence that this is not over yet.

Given all this, I thought it might be useful to reprint this essay, which first appeared here with the title Down the River in April 2022, and will also appear in my forthcoming book. It attempts to understand this moment by exploring how progressive leftism and corporate capitalism, once supposedly sworn enemies, ended up marching in lockstep to build the world we now inhabit. Those who are swept to power on the back of the rejection of that world do not necessarily have any better alternatives – and this post is not an endorsement of Trump or anyone else. The great saviours of the moment often end up making things worse. But they have walked into history for a reason. Maybe this essay will help dig into it.

Paul Kingsnorth

Counting Chickens (and more)

In The Washington Post on the eve of Election Day, Monica Hesse imagined Harris winning in spite of many American men’s desires and on the strength of the gender gap: “Their sense of world order is about to be undone by the women in their lives grabbing democracy by the ballot box. (When you’re a registered voter, they let you do it.)” (Douglas Steffes, Madison, Wis., and Stephanie Logan, Centennial, Colo., among others)
In The New Yorker, Bruce Handy detailed the stylist Michelle Côté’s ministrations to give Sebastian Stan, the star of the new movie “The Apprentice,” the Trump coiffure: “Stan’s real hair was covered in part by a fake scalp, which was covered in turn by a wig — a tonsorial turducken.” (Betsy Frank, Mattituck, N.Y., and Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)
And in a less hairy New Yorker essay, Sloane Crosley revisited Dorothy Parker’s book reviews and remarked on how much less efficient critics’ pans are today. “It takes us four times as long to kill our prey,” Crosley wrote, adding: “Our literary criticism features a great deal of ‘I,’ the pronoun most likely to overstay its welcome. In the right hands, this conflation of narrative and critique can have dazzling results. But on the whole? Imagine waiting 20 minutes for a medical diagnosis while your doctor walks you through her commute.” (Nancy Chek, Silver Spring, Md.)

Via Frank Bruni

The Perfectly Blank Face for the Democrats

A very elegant concession from Kamala: For a few hours on Wednesday, her campaign was silent. They didn’t play games and pretend they were winning. They didn’t give comment to the press. They collected themselves. They grabbed the screw cap Oyster Bay out of the fridge and considered it hard before saying, “It’s a gin night, girls.” And then the next day Kamala Harris delivered a beautiful concession speech, which you can read here. It gave me goosebumps and also made me furious, because she’s a good and fine person who ran a truly terrible campaign. It was a campaign that exemplified all of the delusions of the modern Democrats: that you never need to say what you stand for (because people should just assume you know what’s best for them), that you should never answer hard questions or appear with questionable figures, and that the only issue any American woman should care about is abortion.

Nellie Bowles at the Free Press. Nellie’s weekly TGIF is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn’t keep her from telling the truth.

Peggy Noonan’s debriefing

What are the Democrats? What’s that party for? When I was a kid they were the party of the working man, the little guy. That’s the Trumpian GOP now. When I was a young woman they were the antiwar party. That’s the Trumpian GOP. The party of generous spending? The Trumpian party says hold my beer. What belief do the Democrats hold that distinguishes them? LGBTQ, woke, gender theory, teachers unions, higher taxes? Why not throw in cholera and chlamydia?

The party has lost its specific character and nature; it’s no longer a thing you can name. Democrats have to sit down with a yellow legal pad and figure themselves out. All defeat carries a gift: You get to figure out what you’re getting wrong.

…

As for me, I don’t like the SOB [Trump], I think him a bad man who’ll cause and bungle crises almost from day one, but he’ll be the American president, and we all deserve grace. I will pray for him, support what I think constructive and oppose what I think destructive, call it straight as I can and take whatever follows. As someone once said, the real story of American life is where you stand and the price you’ll pay to stand there.

Peggy Noonan

Ruy Teixeira maps a route forward

Ruy Teixeira is a wise Democrat:

The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep-blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are those of educated, liberal America. They only partially overlap with those of ordinary Americans.

He suggests a list of “principles” Democrat leaders should endorse to win back the eyes, ears, and eventually the votes of voters they’ve lost. Most of them are anodyne. Some are too equivocal to be true “principles” (trying to have it both ways through smooth words). But it looks like a good start.

(Selected) Money Quotes for the Week

“To all who celebrate, happy third consecutive Last Election Ever!” – Seth Mandel.
“You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians,” – Freddie deBoer.
“Dem-friendly pundits said one reason for picking Tim Walz was that he’d appeal to blue-collar guys in the industrial Midwest because they’d identify so much with him. He wears flannel shirts and everything. Kamala lost his home county,” – Glenn Greenwald.
“[T]he federal government that only got seven electric vehicle charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for illegal immigrants but doesn’t deliver them,” – Josh Barro.
“Turns out no one likes neocons. Who knew?” – Ana Kasparian.
“Democrats spent the final weeks of the campaign browbeating and shaming black and brown voters and telling them basically that they were stupid to even consider voting for Trump. This is what they got in return,” – Shadi Hamid.
“Kamala Harris will fall without a trace, just as she rose without a trace, but she’s nevertheless worth studying, in all her hollowness and banality, as an example of what has gone wrong with modern liberalism,” – Adrian Wooldridge.

Andrew Sullivan

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Election draweth near

Culture

Bad Religion

More than three decades ago, Nathan Hatch published The Democratization of American Christianity, a history of the Second Great Awakening, arguably the most important religious episode in American history. At the recent Intercollegiate Studies Institute annual homecoming, I served on a panel that discussed the award-winning book. It was a pleasure to do so. Hatch gives a magisterial account of the upsurge of religious populism that shaped the new American republic in decisive ways. Anyone who wants to understand the last ten years of American politics should read The Democratization of American Christianity.

Denunciations of the “swamp” echo the Second Great Awakening’s polemics against the clerical establishment of its day, which itinerate preachers derided as complacent, more interested in high salaries and comfortable parsonages than in gospel preaching. Trump rallies follow in the tradition of raucous, call-and-response camp meetings. Commentators wonder at the fact that respectable people support Trump, not knowing that some of the most important leaders of the religious populism of the early 1800s were elites such as Barton Stone, who embraced the new, raw, and uncouth style of religious revival.

Elias Smith was a renegade preacher and journalist who, in 1808, launched America’s first religious newspaper, Herald of Gospel Liberty. He mocked and abused the Calvinist grandees, the “clerical hierarchy” that dominated Protestantism at that time. Establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher raged against preachers like Smith who were disturbing the religious landscape. It does not take much imagination to cast Tucker Carlson in the role of a latter-day Elias Smith. He thrills his populist devotees and outrages the guardians of political respectability such as George Will, a Lyman Beecher of our time.

Hatch raises larger themes. The Second Great Awakening took place during a time of rapid social change. The new republic gave rise to radicalisms of many sorts. People were on the move, as territories west of the Appalachian Mountains were settled. Old institutions and authorities lost their power. As I note above, recent decades have seen similar changes. Globalization, demographic change, the sexual revolution, social media, and other factors have precipitated a quite different but equally significant crisis of authority. We should not be surprised, therefore, that populism has returned, as it did in the late 1800s, when America was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and swelling waves of immigrants.

Hatch documents that revivalist preachers were confident that their individualist, evangelical Christianity would fulfill the sacred mission of America. In their sermons and broadsides, populist religion mixed freely with populist politics, as was the case for William Jennings Bryan and subsequent American populists. Today’s Trumpian populism is different. To be sure, many pious people support Trump and other populist politicians. Avatars of popular religion like Paula White lurk on the peripheries. But the movement lacks an explicitly religious dimension, which is striking when we compare it to the administration of George W. Bush, an establishment figure who was not shy about his evangelical convictions.

Which makes me wonder: In spite of fascinating parallels to the outpouring of Christian enthusiasm and political radicalism in the Second Great Awakening, does today’s populism ironically contribute to an important elite ambition, the establishment of a post-Christian, entirely secular political culture in America? I hope not.

R.R. Reno

After several readings, I’m not sure what Reno is trying to say here. My impression until that penultimate paragraph was that he though our last decade’s populism just fine and dandy, as was the ferment of the 19th century; then he raises the possibility that the lack of a “religious dimension” is at least a bit worrisome.

But what an odd thing for a Catholic (or Orthodox) to believe. In case after case, the wake of the Great Awakenings was destructive of the Christian institutions that evidenced stability and left us, in the characterization of Ross Douthat, A Nation of Heretics.

Slinging slurs, pitching pity parties

I have no idea how one is supposed to respond to polling questions about the morality of changing one’s gender.

That’s mostly because I don’t think changing gender is possible. How can an impossible thing be immoral?

It’s also partly because I hold open the possibility that presenting as the opposite sex, with or without surgery and hormonal interventions, may for some individuals be the optimal way to quiet intractable gender dysphoria. (Who am I to condemn cosplaying in the cause of lessening psychic pain?)

But I’ll tell you something that is immoral. This kind of un-empathetic poor-mouthing about people disapproving (or denying the reality of) “trans lives”:

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.

Gina Chua. Nothing in the Gallup poll in question suggests that anyone disapproves the existence of people who’ve carried through on the putatively immoral decision to transition.

We are a low-down, debased people who have made ourselves indisposed toward intelligent discussion of issues. We sling slurs and pitch pity parties.

Journalistic murmurations

World Ends in Nuclear conflagration. Women and children most affected.

Something like this was an old jab at the New York Times’s stylistic preoccupations.

New era, new media, new preoccupations:

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

H/T Nellie Bowles, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd that 404 Media’s fears turned immediately to red states tracking their handmaidens to blue state abortuaries.

Politics

MVP of Election 2024?

Bret Stephens hits back-to-back homeruns.

With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance

Tucker Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA Trump rally this week and gave the absolute best anti-Trump speech I’ve ever heard. Tucker’s speech is here and excerpted below, somehow kinky and alarming and rousing at the same time:

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home [crowd cheers]. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children,” said Tucker Carlson, a grown man and a major respected figure on the right. “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.’ ”

If someone spoke like this to me on the street, I would pepper spray them. If I heard someone speak like this to someone else, I would pepper spray them and myself. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of Trump makes me want to mainline MSNBC. Tucker’s endorsement makes me think Democracy Is On the Line, and Christopher Steele is a respected member of the intelligence community, and I heard there was a box of White House stationery at Mar-a-Lago illegally. Tucker’s endorsement just made me start knitting a pussy hat. Trump is not daddy. America is not his little girl. I believe in free speech except when a grown man is saying the words bad little girl. And Tucker Carlson needs to keep his kinks private and shameful like the rest of us.

Nellie Bowles

Nonsequiturland

Also from the echo chamber of Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller:

Democrats have continued to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler and assert he poses a grave “danger” to the planet if he is reelected, even after two recent assassination attempts against him.

(Jason Cohen)

How pray tell, Mr. Cohen, do two assassination attempts disprove Trump being a grave danger (or require suppression of the truth)? Do you tacitly call on Trump to cool it when his rhetoric generates death threats to election officials?

(Note that all the hyperlinks in my quote are to other Daily Caller stories; that’s why I thought “echo chamber” was apt.)

Would it help if it were done by image rather than words?

(If you don’t get the allusion, search for “distracted boyfriend même.)

Kamala F.B. Harris

In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last thanked the vice president for taking on Trump: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle-earth from a dark fate.” (Sally McDonald, Cairns, Australia)

Frank Bruni‌

Narcissism from a slightly different angle

I find his immodesty not only a serious character flaw but a danger to his governing ability. I don’t believe he wishes to abolish the Constitution, undermine our democracy, set himself up as dictator. But such full-court immodesty has to work against one’s perspective, make impossible anything resembling a sense of history, allow for necessary accommodations with reality. A man who sees no other picture but those with himself in the center is not a man you want to run your nation.

Joseph Epstein

I quote this not to beat a dead horse, but because it is almost identical in its insight to one of the points I made long ago: Trump’a narcissism distorts his vision of the world, and that kind of distortion is intolerable in a POTUS. It’s so disqualifying that I don’t care what his “positions” are on “the issues.”

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.

I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.

In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.

But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.

And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.

But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:

I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5.
I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!

(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)

Gratitude Grievance

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.

But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.

…

Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part,
and would have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …

…

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”

…

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

“Charismatics” didn’t used to be “Evangelicals”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.

Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.

Politics

New Nadir

The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.

Via The Dispatch.

Militants hunting for FEMA workers in hurricane devastation because — why, in God’s name!? Can we sink any lower?

Kamala’s best case?

Bret Stephens, Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. is very appealing.

With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.

Poetic justice

Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.

The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.

The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….

William McGurn

This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.

But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.

Russian 1988, China 2024

So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?

Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.

Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.

Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.

“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.

Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.

Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.

China seems to be in similar bind as Gorbachev: economic dysfunction, the cure of which might bring down the CCP.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 9/7/24

Revisionist History

Tucker Carlson’s interview with some doofus named Darryl Cooper has gone viral in the world of Carlson-skepticism, which world I now whole-heartedly join, no looking back:

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites …

Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses …

Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.

Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”

“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”

Michelle Goldberg, who rarely writes things I want to pass along.

Tucker Carlson—who spoke prominently at the Republican National Convention, advises Trump’s campaign, and is scheduled to appear on stage with J. D. Vance later this month—has made himself famous in recent years for “just asking questions.” Carlson hosted revisionist-history podcaster Darryl Cooper on his interview show on Twitter/X, saying he “may be the best and most honest popular historian” in America. Cooper went on to expound his view that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, primarily on the basis of the fact that Churchill rejected Adolf Hitler’s peace feelers and kept Britain fighting the Nazi tyranny even after the fall of France. And Churchill, wouldn’t you know, was motivated to fight Germany not to protect British liberty but because he was a “psychopath” and perhaps even bought off by Zionist financiers. After an uproar, Cooper doubled down in a long, rambling tweet storm in which he insisted that Hitler had only wanted peace with Britain and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” The interview has rocketed Cooper’s formerly obscure podcast to the top of the charts. Is Carlson off his rocker, seeking the viewership of those who are, or both? Just asking.

National Review’s weekly news summary email

Free speech update

→ Iranian writer sentenced to prison over dot: Hossein Shanbehzadeh, an Iranian writer and activist, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court after he tweeted a period at the Supreme Leader. Officially, NPR reports, “Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.” Suspicious. . . this was my exact penalty in college for attending Shabbat services.

Shanbehzadeh’s one-character tweet, which was in response to a photo posted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of himself with the national volleyball team, received more likes than the Ayatollah’s post. He basically got 12 years for ratioing. Which, if that’s a crime, I guess I’ll be going in for twenty to life any day now.

→ Now, maybe you’re telling yourself: This could never happen in the U.S. Thank Allah and the Founding Fathers for the First Amendment! And you’re probably right: Tweeting a period at President Harris and/or Trump is unlikely to get you thrown in jail, and American citizens enjoy more speech protections than probably any other people on Earth. But don’t let your Bill of Rights throw pillow woo you into complacency. I mean, we’re not some tyrannical shit hole like the UK, where people are being charged for mean tweets, but government censorship does exist here. The last few years has seen huge surges in book banning and protest crackdowns, and just last week, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Meta caved to Biden administration pressure to censor content posted by users on Facebook.

This week, Reason reported on the case of a “citizen journalist” who goes by the name Lagordiloca, or “the fat, crazy lady” (catchy), who was arrested by police in Laredo, Texas, after she broke stories obtained by a confidential source from within that same department. And vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz said in a recently resurfaced interview that misinformation and hate speech aren’t protected by the First Amendment. Now, he’s wrong about that, which you’d think a former high school social studies teacher would know (you actually are allowed to be a prick and a liar in America, thank God), but it’s a troubling statement from someone who could soon occupy the little closet down the hall from the Oval Office where they stow the VP.

Katie Herzog, filling in for Nellie Bowles.

Oh, Texas!

Speaking of things that could never happen here, in the US of A, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton keeps making a liar of me for my “calm down, that will never happen” assurances about what conservatives want.

Possibilities, two of which carry the “No True Scotsman” gene:

He’s not really a conservative.
I’m not really a conservative.
Conservatives are frightfully heterogenous.

Mike Gallagher …

… is the kind of politician the Republican Party, or any party, should prize: bright, earnest, conscientious, etc. For seven years, he served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps. He was twice deployed to Iraq. A conservative Republican from Wisconsin, he served four terms in the U.S. House, or just short of that. He resigned in April. He had been the chairman of the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a committee devoted to an extremely important subject. He stayed in Congress just long enough to vote for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. He bowed out at age 39. Why? Gallagher has talked to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, in a series of interviews. The long and the short of it: the threat of violence—against him and his family—from people angered at his deviations from a Trump line. There is a sickness in our politics, one that the decisions to depart of Gallagher and his like will only worsen.

National Review’s weekly news summary email.

That MAGA is shading into extortion is yet another reason to vote against Trump.

Oh, Russia!

(Charlie Warzel)

Holding two adverse opinions at once

As I continue to parse Kamala Harris’ contradictions, and rhetorical blather, and refusal to explain all her sudden alleged policy switches from four years ago, I don’t mean to elide the fact that her opponent is out of his mind.

…

Some are incensed that after (much delayed) scrutiny of Biden’s mental deterioration, Trump still gets a pass for what in anyone else would be regarded as utter derangement. The trouble with this argument — see Jim Fallows’ Twitter feed for the full huff-and-puff — is that Biden was clearly declining fast because of incipient dementia and physical frailty, which is a story; and Trump has always been nuts, is not appreciably nuttier than he ever was, and, in stark contrast with Biden, seems physically robust.

…

This deranged con-man was president for four years — with of all this plain to see — and is still the likeliest winner of this election. Half the country takes him seriously, and they think — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that he is mentally fit to perform the most powerful job in the world.

It’s merely our job, as citizens and voters, to note that we have one mentally ill candidate in this race and one mediocre but sane one. And to vote accordingly.

Andrew Sullivan, The Sane-Washing of Donald Trump

Sullivan also shared (embedded, but I won’t) a video of some impressive and even baffling ping-pong.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.

Culture

America the unadorned ugly

While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.

Chris Arnade

Changing from Häftlinge to men again

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

My pet peeve

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….

James Kirchick, How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”

I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.

Politics generally

BOTS

Blunt talk:

[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

David Samuels, The march of Kamala’s brides

Fundamentalist America at Defcon 2

What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”

David French

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.

Political violence and threats of violence

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.

David French, To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.

(For the record, though, some Trump supporters allegedly fear the consequence of letting it be known that they support Trump)

French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.

“Caring” politicians

About 4 in 10 say Harris is someone who “cares about people like you” while about 3 in 10 say that about Trump.

Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.

Trump in particular

On message?

The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.

He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.

The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.

One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”

Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.

Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.

Nick Catoggio

Ominous words, especially from this quarter

“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

Charles Sykes, Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election. The only steal of the 2024 Election is the one Trump and his minions are planning — and strategically placed to advance.

Not the unity they craved

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

Jonah Goldberg

A Political Fat Elvis

The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

Peter Wehner, Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Lazy, stupid, childish

Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish.

I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.

… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.

… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.

…

His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.

Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.

I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Monday, 7/29/24

From nobody’s Synaxarion except mine: On this, the 29th day of July, we commemorate the chastening of Tipsy the not-yet-Orthodox, who was wounded in a stupid motorcycle accident in Lafayette in the year 1965.

Politics

Be it remembered

The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Liz Cheney via Peggy Noonan, Liz Cheney Shows What Leadership Looks Like, January 14, 2021.

If only the GOP had more persons with balls like Liz Cheney’s! Speaking of which …

Toxic Masculinity rightly so called

The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men … Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. [Admiral William] McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

There’s a seductive quality to Trump’s masculinity. Grievance is a form of counterfeit purpose, and anger is a form of counterfeit courage. For a time, your grievance can give you a mission — fighting the hated foe. And when you’re in the midst of an online temper tantrum, taking on all comers in your social media feed, you can feel a little bit brave, even if all you’re doing is tapping out vitriolic posts from the safety and comfort of your couch.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like [VP Candidate JD] Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boys. And if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

David French, Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

So what?

It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.

A “dissent” to something Andrew Sullivan said.

Hyperbole aside, I don’t much care if Trump does say that. There’s no way a constitutional amendment to that effect would pass within 3 years or so (i.e., in time for him to run again) — if ever.

Kamala

I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

Kamala Harris (via Andrew Sullivan)

What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey.

…

Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.

Andrew Sullivan

JD Vance has said some things he needs to explain or walk back. But so has Kamala Harris — at least when she’s not utterly vacuous in a pseudo-smart sort of way.

Public Affairs

Beacon of hope

Matthew Crawford is a guy with a PhD who still, compulsively, does things with his hands. Thus, he sometimes needs tools — like an “indicator base.”

The one from Harbor Freight was a real POS, as apparently are most things from there, their “thing” being selling really cheap Chinese stuff. He went to Grainger for a replacement:

The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones. The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto.

…

My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe.

And so forth and so on. But there’s a better alternative, with some trade-offs:

I could end on this gloomy note. But let me tell you about another industrial supply house, McMaster-Carr, because the difference is remarkable. (They are my go-to source, but they have no storefronts as Grainger does, and I wanted my indicator base immediately.)

…

My point is that the catalogue [“3,592 pages of dense type”] is written as though it matters, by people involved with material things. They want to sell stuff that enables people to do things. How is this allowed in 2024?!

The answer is surely connected to the fact that this family business, with 1,000 employees, which opened in the Chicago Loop in 1901, remains private, while Grainger is publicly traded. McMaster is said to be “secretive”, but a business intelligence site says the company “has historically raised $0 in funding,” meaning it has no debt. Meaning, it isn’t subject to the imperatives of what I like to call “systematized irrationality.” Global capital isn’t just impatient for returns, it is invested in models of reality that offer portability and scalability, allowing metrics to be applied across sectors and industries and communicated to people sitting in high-rise office buildings. Legibility-from-afar always means partial and hence fake legibility. It can be achieved by substituting representations for reality, but representations of a particular kind: they must be emptied of rich layers of content derived from the situated knowledge of particular practices – the very practices in which you might use the tool or material in question. This entails the destruction of knowledge, for the sake of uniformity and financial abstraction.

By contrast, the McMaster-Carr catalogue is like a modern-day version of Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If the final cataclysm were to happen, but you somehow had access to the catalogue and everything in it, you would be able to reconstruct the modern world. They have kept finance and IT in their proper place.

I decidedly do not work with my hands (unless you count typing). I used to be pretty handy in a general sort of way, but it’s gone away from decades of disuse. (My son must have picked up his dual mind-hand propensities from his maternal grandfather. His musical keyboard abilities are a total mystery. Milkman?)

But I can appreciate Crawford, and his story, and a privately-held company that does things right.

No storefronts? No problem!

Irish microcosm

Ardnacrusha was a revolutionary piece of technology in its time, enabling the newly-independent Irish state to provide huge amounts of electricity for a nation for which it was still a rarity (you can see fascinating photos and accounts of its construction here and here.) But the march of the Machine has consequences. In this case, those consequences included a 90% collapse in the salmon population of the Shannon, which previously had been world-famous for its salmon runs, along with the mass death of trout and eels, the silting up of parts of the waterway, an increase in flooding and the raising of the water level of Lough Derg.

Still at least Ireland now has a carbon-free electricity supply, right? Well, no. When it was built, Ardnacrusha was the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world, until it was beaten to that title by America’s Hoover Dam. On completion, it produced enough power to meet the electricity demand of the whole of Ireland. Today it produces just 2% of it. That’s how much the thirst for electricity has increased in one short century. An astonishing seventy per cent of all that electricity will be swallowed by Internet server farms by the end of this decade.

Behold! Sustainability!

…

The giant wind turbines – subject to similar local protests across the land – are the latest Big Tech solution to the power ‘needs’ of the country: ‘needs’ which have accelerated a thousandfold in a century, and will continue to do so. Everybody wants insta-access to the shiny flicky pictures on the little Satanic Rectangle in their back pockets, but nobody wants to live in the middle of the power station needed to supply it. Well, get used to it, people, because the whole landscape will be a power station soon. Then there’ll be nowhere to hide except inside your VR headsets. Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!

Paul Kingsnorth

Music today

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world—namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms—are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.

We can’t afford to let that happen. So, as you might guess, I have an easy time picking (2) above as my chosen pathway.

And it’s not just my opinion. Plato and Socrates finally came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. Is it too much to hope that the people who control our music economy will eventually make that same discovery?

Ted Gioia

“Private” matters

Remembering Crunchy Rod

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right

Crunchy Cons was my introduction to Rod Dreher, and I liked it very much. “Beauty is more important than efficiency”? now that is counter-cultural!

I rather miss that sunnier, more optimistic version of him — which I did not read as a way forward for the GOP so much as a way forward for the culture. Speaking of which …

Living decently

What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does—can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, and honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization.

— Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return,” in A Continuous Harmony (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), page 51, via Gracy Olmstead

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Pre-Olympic notebook dump

Public Affairs

Everybody wants everything

Quite recently, I quoted Zaid Jilani:

In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

I responded that perhaps my rejection of the duopoly is because I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive” politically.

I stand by that, and I’m now reinforced by Isaiah Berlin via Alan Jacobs. Berlin:

[I]t is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.

Jacobs adds:

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both!

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything.

If you are fearful about condemning yourself “to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men,” David Brooks has some help to offer: Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms

America’s world mission

After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration imposed “super sanctions,” promising that such measures would bring the Russian economy to its knees. These measures, and the confidence with which they were imposed, reflected the old consensus, which presupposed the end-of-history dream world. But the outcomes contradict that fantasy. Countries commanding nearly half of global GDP refused to join our sanctions regime, exposing the obvious fact that the “rules-based international order” is not international and never has been. It has always been an instrument of American power.

I’m reluctant to use the word “empire.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States did not establish colonies. But the term has become unavoidable. The international order was made in our image, an ersatz empire, as recent events have revealed. Faced with the prospect of Russian aggression, the demilitarized nations of Europe are forced to operate as American vassal states.

…

I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I venture to guess that the combined military firepower of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and its proxies) is substantial, perhaps equal to any force that the United States and its allies can bring to bear on short notice. How is it that we have allowed such a coalition to emerge? The Journal reports this expert opinion: “Russia and the other nations have set aside historic frictions to collectively counter what they regard as a U.S.-dominated global system.” I marvel at the formulation, “what they regard.” In effect, our policymakers suggest that the Russia-China-Iran-North Korea alliance rests on a misconception. Putin and Xi need to wake up to the truth. The “global system” is not U.S. dominated but U.S. sponsored—for the sake of world peace, prosperity, and the triumph of abortion and gay rights . . . er, human rights. It is nothing so narrow and parochial as the imposition of America’s national interests or our activist ideologies.

Maybe the Great and the Good in Washington recognize reality, and they mouth the old pieties out of habit; or perhaps they sense (accurately) the political danger of being the first to break with established orthodoxies. Can you imagine the domestic furor that would be visited upon a Secretary of State who suggested (again, accurately) that a foreign policy promoting gay rights and other progressive causes is a virtue-signaling luxury we can’t afford in an era of great-power competition? But I worry that we are led by true believers. Some imagine that the United States has been ordained by God to defend “democracy.” Others think that we have a secular mission to promote “reproductive freedom” and LGBTQ rights around the world (the arc of history, and so on).

R.R. Reno

Blaming the messenger

In 2023 Christopher Rufo exposed the fact that Texas Children’s Hospital was maiming minors in the service of transgender ideology. The Texas Legislature passed a bill prohibiting transgender medical procedures for minors. Now Rufo reports that the Texas Children’s Hospital has persisted in practicing “gender-affirming care,” committing Medicaid fraud in order to fund the prohibited procedures (“The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine,” City Journal). Federal officials have not stood idle. As the controversy became public in 2023, they were “busy assembling information.” The target? The whistleblowers! “A federal prosecutor, Tina Ansari, threatened the original whistleblower [Eithan] Haim with prosecution.” Then, in early June, “the stakes intensified. Three heavily armed federal agents knocked on Haim’s door and gave him a summons. According to the documents, he had been indicted on four felony counts of violating medical privacy laws. If convicted, Haim faces the possibility of ten years in federal prison.” A sadly familiar story. The rule of law turned into an ideological weapon.

R.R. Reno

Trade-offs

Writing for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle explored the questions posed by the CrowdStrike IT meltdown. “It’s quite efficient for one firm to serve a large number of important customers, as CrowdStrike does,” she wrote. “In some ways, these concentrated players might provide greater reliability, because they develop a lot of expertise by serving many users, and they can invest more in R&D and security than Bob’s Friendly Local Software Co. can. But when outages happen, they happen to seemingly everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving users no alternatives. How best to try to manage the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy is a hard question for another day. For the moment, the important thing is to recognize that it exists, and that there’s no easy way around it. We probably should have thought more about such trade-offs when the Great Efficiency Drive was underway. We’ll have to think even harder about them now.”

The Morning Dispatch

Model collapse

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise, “things will always, provably, go wrong”. he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI. (Source: nature.com)

John Ellis News Items

Luxury Beliefs

Young Rob Henderson has been deservedly dining out on his memoir Troubled and his coinage of “luxury beliefs.” But once you enter public debates, you not only attract crazies and trolls, but solid critics as well.

Yasha Mounk finds Henderson’s definition of luxury beliefs wanting:

Ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. There is this kind of element of duplicity, whether conscious or not.

He offers a substitute:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

The differences aren’t just semantic, and between the two of them, I agree with Mounk.

Now I await Mounk’s critics to further refine the definition.

Partisan politics

The Populist id weighs in on Harris

I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this, but Nick Catoggio has some pointed thoughts on GOP reactions to de facto Democrat nominee Kamala Harris:

I don’t believe the jabs about her being a “DEI hire” are part of a strategic calculus. I think they’re a matter of the populist id flaring at the thought of being governed by a black woman who’s not part of the ideological tribe.

It’s a preview of the next four years if Kamala Harris figures out a way to beat Trump this fall, I suspect. Unlike any presidency in my lifetime, her term would be wracked by obstruction, paralysis, and public disillusionment.

If you thought congressional Republicans were reluctant to compromise with Barack Obama, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Gaslighted about the border

Remember when Joe Biden made Kamala Harris his border czar? Well, bunky, that’s no longer operative. All the cool kids agree that it never happened. Do you want to be know for cooties? C’mon, man!

At this stage of things, perhaps it’s not surprising that reporters aren’t scrutinizing Harris’s record with the same zeal with which they dove into “Russiagate,” but this marks a new low. We told you she was this thing that we’re now telling you she never was. What’s the word for that again? Right. Gaslighting.

…

We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating “The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.”

Peter Savodnik, Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar’

I understood — indeed, sympathized with — the desperation to keep Trump from the Presidency in 2016. But a lie is a lie, and they’re lying to us again.

It’s not that “they must think we’re stupid.” They do think that we’re stupid, and we give them grounds to think that day after day.

Is this half-apology better than none?

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

…

My judgment of colleagues and of various conservatives who opposed Trump was privately severe. On the surface, I fully granted the strength of their concerns. But in the confines of my mind, I concluded that they were moral free riders. They wouldn’t sully themselves by voting for Donald Trump, but they would benefit from many of his policies. I have been asked why I voted for him when I live in Tennessee where my vote was not necessary. I voted for him exactly because of my determination not to be a free rider. I would bear the weight of the decision.

…

I knew I was wrong as January 6 approached and the president started calling for Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the electoral college results. This, of course, was on top of his disturbing phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State urging him to “find” additional votes. At the same time, he encouraged Americans to mass at the Capitol to support his cause.

I do not suggest that the Americans who went to the Capitol, the great majority of them peaceful, bore ill intent, but I do think that the president intended to create a spectacle that would put pressure on Mike Pence to take a dramatic and extra-legal step that would fundamentally betray the American political order and its traditions.

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

This column is ever-so-timely again. I say that not to praise the de facto Democrat nominee, nor even to imply that she’s a “lesser evil.” I say it, first, as a call to repentance from the behavior that got us into this awful mess. Insanity, by one pop-definition, is doing what you’ve always done and expecting a different result.

For me, part of repentance is rejecting “lesser-of-two-evils” voting calculus. Two parties of some sort were (inadvertently?) in our national DNA from the start; if one must win a majority (not plurality) of electors to gain the Presidency, then third parties are overwhelmingly “spoilers” (though not quite inevitably). I nevertheless will spoil my heart out again this quadrennium — taking care not to despise those who make the “binary” choice.

For any Christian Trump voter in 2024 (I suspect Baker will be in that camp in a few months unless he’s changed a lot since 1/21/21, when his apology was dated) whose head or heart is not dead must extend a bit of grace to those who can’t bring themselves to vote for him.

Trump as media favorite

Be at remembered that the media gave Donald Trump so much Free Press in 2016 that they virtually elected him. And while they clearly wanted to be coded as anti-Trump (their “stated preference”), the attention they gave him smells like revealed preference to me. A lot of people do like to watch him — a preference I never understood from the day a friend of mine went gaga over The Art of the Deal.

Adiaphora

Dinosaur

I like technology. I was, for my generation, an early adopter of computers and I spend (too) many hours per day on my MacBook.

But after a few years on Facebook, I dropped it. I got on it to communicate among my high school classmates, but most of them weren’t on it. And it got kind of overwhelmed with commercialism. Maybe there were plugins or something to suppress all that, but I dropped it anyway.

I dropped my Twitter account, too, unable to bear a 1/100 signal-to-noise ratio. I eventually signed up again, for some incomprehensible reason, only to find that the ratio is now 1/10000. I haven’t logged on in months. Is there any more enervating activity in the world than doom-scrolling?

I thought those were two pretty solid decisions. But now I constantly hear things on podcasts like “You can find it on our Facebook page.” (Oof! No I cannot! Why don’t you have a page on the open web?) And yesterday, the President of the United States announced on Twitter/X that he’s ending his campaign for re-election. (Mercifully, professional doomscrollers quickly surface major news like this.)

I still think those were solid decisions, but they seem pretty tame compared friends flirting with stuff like this and repeating mêmes like “be the friction you want to see in the world.”

A blast from the Covid past

I am radically testing the limits of what it fundamentally means to be outdoors by erecting walls, putting a roof on top of those walls, and then insisting that it is still outdoors. This bold subversion of commonly accepted norms challenges and deconstructs “outdoorsness” as we know it. Moreover, by performing this act of deconstruction through a literal act of construction, I am illuminating the contradictory double nature of the mere act of existing. To this end, I search for the strange within the familiar, the indoors within the outdoors, the technically compliant within the clearly unsafe.

Simon Henriques, I Am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement

Why resign on August 20?

After half a century in politics, Senator Bob Menendez, found guilty of all 16 counts in his corruption trial, will resign, effective August 20. Why then? Well, as Katherine Tully-McManus notes, senators get paid on the 5th and 20th of each month. Trust old “Gold Bar Bob” to check out after payday. (Politico)

The Free Press

Technology will never end work (at least until we re-jigger our mimesis)

Futurists and their ilk keep predicting the elimination of work by technology, but it never arrives. By some reckonings, we’re working more than ever; we’re certainly not approaching zero work, not even asymptotically.

What gives? We give. We keep working because we want more. We want everything. (See Alan Jacobs, above)

Disciples of René Girard make careers out of analyzing such things, so I’ll dabbling lest I make a fool of myself.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 7/13/24

Democrats’ “revealed preference”

[I]t’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.
…
Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.
…
I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.
…
The idea of an anti-Trump “coalition of all democratic forces” has been prominent in the media and the commentariat, and there you have seen big shifts and concessions. But these have mostly been made by anti-Trump conservatives and ex-conservatives moving leftward, not by the political coalition that they’re joining.

Ross Douthat

Douthat goes on to concede some ways in which the Democrats’ approach may not be cynical and deceptive, but I’ve quoted enough. For the rest, my link gets you past the paywall.

Smart people swapping stupid barbs?

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is so transgressive as to demand the immediate intervention of the Supreme Court.

Jamelle Bouie, proving that smart people with blind spots can write stupid things.

If only Bouie had written

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, combined with Trump’s pledge to prosecute Joe Biden and lower court rulings that President’s have no immunity from criminal prosecution, are so transgressive as to demand intervention of the Supreme Court

I wouldn’t have bothered writing my own stupid things.

Lies in service of “higher truths”

This past week, a Pennsylvania man was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old boy. The man allegedly lured the boy to his death through Grindr, a gay hookup app. The boy’s last Snapchat image was posted at 2:30 in the morning, on a dark road, with the comment that he was just out for a late-night walk. Nobody ever heard from him again.

Several grim and (one would think) obvious lessons should immediately present themselves to all concerned adults here. However, it appears that the adults are determined not to learn them, because this particular boy believed he was a girl. Consequently, all their energy has been spent on making sure nobody “misgenders” him in death, using him as a mascot of “anti-trans” violence, and taking the opportunity to lobby for new “hate-crime” legislation.

…

[The Free Press sent Ben Kawaller to Laramie, Wyoming, to talk to people about Matthew Shepard, murdered there in 1998 and lionized ever since.]

One resistant young gay man asks Ben what’s to be gained by reassessing the crime. Ben asks whether he would agree that it’s worthwhile simply because the reassessment might be true. The young man pauses for a moment, then stutters a bit, casting about. “There’s a point when you as a person should look around and see, like…read the room. And what has happened, this is really important, the, the…understanding of what happened to Matthew means a lot to a lot of people. So just leave it alone.”

Notice that this young man isn’t even bothering to debate the history or discredit Jimenez. He is saying that even if Jimenez were right, it wouldn’t matter. The truth wouldn’t matter.

Bethel McGrew, What is Truth?

After careful consideration, I decided last fall not to sit out a performance of Considering Matthew Shepard by a chorus I’ve been in for more than two decades now.

Considering Matthew Shepard is a sort of cantata on the murder of young Shepard. I carefully scrutinized the libretto for any explicit perpetuation of the Matthew Shepard myth (i.e., that it was the quintessential anti-gay hate crime) and found none. I considered the feelings of my fellow-choristers and the Artistic Director who programmed it. I also considered the “meta” point that the piece never would have been composed (and nobody would attend if it had been composed) were it not for the prevalence of the myth, and that performing it probably perpetuates the myth tacitly. My decision to go ahead and sing may have been sub-optimal. I’m still not sure.

But I want people to know that there’s almost zero truth to the myth — the standard Matthew Shepard narrative that gave us the federal “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes” law — and almost no poetry to the truth. If you want to know the grimier and better-substantiated counter-narrative, it’s readily available.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Friday, 6/7/24

Legalia

Musical rackets

Copyright law is just a big steaming mess. Whenever you think it can’t get crazier, it always does.

YouTube is the ultimate battlefield for copyright claims gone wild. Even when I do a short YouTube video about music, I can never play examples from actual recordings. (That’s why I’ve never given an online course on music history. Corporate lawyers would shut me down in a New York minute.)

Consider the case of the YouTuber whose video got demonetized because his “Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.”

How is that even possible? But it gets even stranger.

Ashley Belanger reports in Ars Technica:

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”…[but it] actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.

I’m not sure what Schubert would make of all this. But I can assure you that none of his heirs will get a penny from this. That’s not the purpose of song copyrights anymore.

Ted Gioia, in a thoroughly disheartening chronicle of where AI appears to be taking us.

See also James O’Malley, Music Just Changed Forever

One crime with 34 cooties

I have added a P.S. to my recent post “34 Counts!”:

I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Politics

Sheep

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I heard David French tell a story about masculinity today that was very David Frenchy in that it was based on a movie, American Assassin:

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been (sic), because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

On that same podcast, Jamelle Bouie, riffing on Trump’s first post-conviction public appearance being UFC (Universal Fight Club), quipped that “Professional wrestling is camp for straight men..”

Not a referendum on Trump?!

I believe I recently passed on an opinion that both Trump and Biden want this election to be a referendum on Trump. Now I pass along the opinion that it’s a referendum on Biden:

[Y]ou can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.

Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.

…

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.

Andrew Sullivan

Loser Trump

Trump’s base does not win elections outside of party primaries. It did not win the midterms for the Republican Party in 2018, it did not win re-election for the Trump in 2020, and it did not win a red wave for Republicans in 2022. The signature Republican victory of the last four years, the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia race for governor, rested on an effort to marginalize the Trump base so that party leaders could engineer a nominee with the ability to distance himself from the former president and his movement.

Jamelle Bouie.

And true to form, the RNC’s Lara Trump has issued a fatwa against Larry Hogan, Republican candidate from U.S. Senate from Maryland, for saying the public should respect the process and the verdict in the Trump felony trial. Kiss that seat goodbye, GOP.

Chicken Littles of the Left

Some people reportedly (I haven’t met one outside of click-bait stories) are worked up that some Trump supporters want to ban IVF, contraception, and recreational sex. Though I know some arguments against each of those sacred cows, this strikes me as a reverse mirror-image of QAnon.

I would welcome more careful thought about IVF, but I’m an outlier. Anyone who thinks that a lame duck Donald Trump is going to pander to a very small group of ideologues who are seriously out of step with 90%+ of their countrymen needs to take a deep breath. Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump (who probably has frequent sperm donor perks at the fertility clinics of Manhattan) is personally opposed to IVF, contraception and recreational sex (“I never did anything that needed forgiveness” or something like that, he said) needs inpatient psych care.

Culture

Defining deviancy down … and up

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Presented without express comment

A new poll from Ipsos has found that support for same-sex marriage among Americans has fallen to just 51% approval.

…

Following a years-long rise in support for gay marriage, a groundswell of anti-woke sentiment emerged around 2021, much of it directed at LGBT activism as parents gained a new window into their children’s curriculum when schooling went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic …

Gay rights have since been lumped in with trans rights in the popular imagination, which may have chipped away some public support for gay marriage at the margins. …

Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the decline in support for same-sex marriage had causes on both the Left and the Right. “Blame for the fall in US support for gay marriage lies partly with the homophobic religious Right. But equally to blame are treacherous organisations like GLAAD and the ACLU which promote insane, deeply unpopular concepts such as gender self-ID and child ‘transition’,” she said. “Gender identity ideologues have been riding on LGB’s coattails for too long, and they’re helping to destroy support for the rights we fought for decades to win.”

Laurel Duggan

Junk info

Junk info is often false info, but it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it has no practical use; it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.

Gurwinder

Privileging victims, real and imagined

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence.

Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Safetyism today

They want revolutionary ends, but they want to hide behind establishment credibility.

Jonah Goldberg, describing the successor ideology, which has famously “march[ed] through the institutions.”

Tipsy the squish

I finally had to replace the color toner cartridges on my laser printer. I opened the red-and-white Canon box I’d ordered months ago. I found unfamiliar packaging of the cartridges and unfamiliar cartridge configuration. I figured out how to install them and then looked for the instructions on recycling them (back to Canon). It was nowhere to be found.

Having seen the word “compatible” a few times, I looked more closely at the box. Where the word Canon should have been, the word “Cartridge” appeared.

I remembered when I purchased them my shock at the low price, but I double- and triple-checked. I thought I was getting an inexplicable price on Canon goods. They still conned me with the Canon-looking box.

Now I’ve got three laser cartridges I can’t recycle, and it bothers me more than such a thing is supposed to bother a conservative.

Which reminds me again of how close “conservative” today is to “barbarian.” My gut-identification today remains “conservative,” but my considered identification is center-right.

Progress

Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.

Ted Gioia, I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

GD Misinformation

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

What the Media Gets Wrong on Gender Reassignment. This is from 2021 when the elites were uniformly purveying lies about Covid, gender dysphoria and who knows what all else. Things have gotten markedly better in recent months on adolescent gender dysphoria.

Capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball

For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of ‘relevance,’ the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul H/T Frank Bruni (who led me to actually read a piece I’d only skimmed). Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan, practiced it before Deresiewicz preached it.

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday 5-18-24

Single Father repatriates

For several years, I’ve been reading the blog of Hal Freeman, an American who was living in Russia with his younger Russian wife and their children.

But then his wife, Oksana, died, leaving him a single father in a land whose language he hadn’t mastered. His lack of mastery made daily life difficult, and to an extent left him at the mercy of his late wife’s family. And with them, the clash of cultures, American versus Russian, became a big problem.

So he and his youngest daughter returned to the U.S., leaving some sons in Russia. After a month or so of visiting his U.S. sons from a prior marriage, he posted again, including this touching passage:

It has been very hard moving without a wife. I am not just talking about the help in getting things packed and unpacked. It is hard not having someone so close with whom I can discuss what is going on and what we are going through. I have appealed more than once to C.S. Lewis’ book, “A Grief Observed,” and the analogy he used of a man who had a leg amputated. At first the pain can be sharp and overwhelming when touched. Over time, there is healing. The sharp pain and the extreme sensitivity fades. He learns to get around much easier over time. Nevertheless, when he gets into a car or the bath, he remembers that he is an amputee.

It has been well over two and a half years since Oksana departed this life. I don’t have those times of sharp, excruciating pain in my soul anymore. I have learned to move on and accept that I am a single father. Yet, the move has made the memory of her departure more difficult again. And, I am facing the reality that at my age and with my rather different circumstances, I probably will never have the joy and contentment of a life companion again. And I can honestly say–and I believe I speak for many others who have lost their spouse–it really isn’t so much about missing what she could do for me. I miss doing things for her. There is great emotional reward in caring for and doing things for the one you love. As someone else who had gone through the grief said to me, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go.”

Life Begins Again in America

Barring simultaneous death in an accident or something, my wife and I face that prospect sooner rather than later, both of us having attained our allotted threescore and ten. She, having kept up roughly four close friendships, probably would cope better than I would.

Transing the gay away

At the risk of being accused of concern-trolling, I’m passing this along because it really does bother me.

[T]he entire category of gay kids has been abolished by, yes, gay groups. Gay kids are now conflated with entirely different groups: children who believe they are the opposite sex, straight kids who call themselves “queer,” an entirely new category of human beings called “nonbinaries,” and a few hundred new “orientations” and “genders” — including eunuchs! All of these kids are now deemed “gender diverse,” essentially living the same “LGBTQIA+” life, defined as being queer and subverting any and all cultural and social norms. Homosexuality? It has effectively evaporated into “gender diversity.”

…

The last thing a gay boy needs to be told is that he might actually be a girl inside — and that might be the source of all his troubles. It’s psychologically brutalizing and scarring.

… It’s the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys. And it is now being deployed by gender theorists as gleefully as it once was by bigots.

… The overwhelming majority of detransitioners are gay men and lesbians who were persuaded they were trans in childhood. In the old days, sorting through these feelings just required growing up — no need to make a decision until you’re an adult — and every decision was reversible. In the age of “affirmation-only” and “gender-affirming care,” all this becomes ever more fraught as kids are required to make a decision against a pubertal clock. And this is not a hypothetical. We know it has happened; we know it is happening. For many gender-dysphoric children, there is no doubt that “gender-affirming care” is literally transing the gay away.

Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added).

What greater manifestation of “internalized homophobia” could there be than deciding that my attraction toward boys must mean I’m a girl (or vice-versa)? Yet, valorizing this madness has become “progressive” dogma.

Presidential “debates”

The first televised presidential debates were between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. The contrast between them and the last debates between Trump and Biden is striking—and appalling. The 1960 candidates soberly aired their views on issues of the day, differing with one another firmly but in a civil manner. The events were reasoned, mature, and valuable. There were reasons Nixon’s sobriquet was “Tricky Dick” and they were widely known. But on camera in those debates he, from today’s vantage-point, seems almost professorial, measuring his words and tackling serious issues.

Donald Trump is incapable of meaningful participation in such an event. Only in the sense that “match” can apply to both chess and mud wrestling could the word “debate” apply both to the Kennedy-Nixon event and to Trump’s on-stage behavior. Trump cannot help but distort a debate into a cage-fight. He will, again, shamelessly lie and endlessly interrupt.

This is especially problematic because Trump’s behavior during such events can be misleadingly seductive … To many, Trump’s unplugged alpha splatter lends an enticing sense of vigor, strength, and even leadership quality … Trump’s verbal towel-snapping is extreme—he is now renowned for the ability to entrance an audience while communicating all but nothing of importance.

John McWhorter

I not infrequently post provocative things I may not agree with. This is not one of those posts. There are other ways Biden could have declined “debate” (e.g., “I will not debase the office of the Presidency by engaging with a man under 91 criminal indictments”), but he’s made that harder by getting his Irish up and smack-talking Trump.

Body-snatched?

It seems that the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew and upside-down American flag for as many as several days shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Justice Alito attributes that to his wife’s response to a pissing contest with progressive neighbors.

Nick Cattogio isn’t unequivocally buying that explanation. After a trip into the weeds, he ascends to a higher-level overview:

Our friend David French reminded his readers today of one of Jonah Goldberg’s most famous columns, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers piece from March 2016. It was written just as Trump was locking up the Republican presidential nomination for the first time. The influence of ascendant MAGA populism on conservatives whom he’d known for years wasn’t merely profound, Jonah wrote. It was eerie.

He described the change his way: “Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew … Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care about the same things they used to.”

That was eight years ago. By now, every person reading this has had extensive personal experience with the phenomenon he observed. It’s happened again and again, in plain sight.

That experience is inescapable context for the reaction to the Times’ story. Maybe the Alitos are getting a bad rap about the flag. Maybe the justice is prepared to thwart Trump’s unconstitutional ambitions in a second term.

Or maybe another body is on its way to being snatched. Why should the Supreme Court be immune from to an ideological virus that’s convinced right-wingers that vindicating America’s constitutional vision requires empowering Donald Trump?

Until the body-snatcher era ends, no one who shows evidence of having been snatched gets the benefit of the doubt. Not at the bottom of the conservative movement and not at the top either.

Culture war debt forgiveness

You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites. They don’t.

National Review, The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

When theology fails

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me. That may be one great part of what I fear, now that I think of it.

Marilynne Robinson (one of her Gilead novels)

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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