Tag: enemies

Keeping the United States united

The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs is a very dubious human

If Barack Obama or any other prominent black participant in the big leagues of American politics had 13 CHILDREN OUT OF WEDLOCK with 4 DIFFERENT WOMEN, it would be all anyone could ever talk about. Most conservatives seem not even to know this about [Elon] Musk.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Keeping the United States united

The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability and willingness of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves and restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their disagreements with their fellow Americans. You have to start from the position “no American is my enemy.” I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my enemy and I will impose restraints on myself.

…

Not much matters. The things that matter matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg, interviewed by David Brooks.

Corruption then and now

In aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. In democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. The consequence is that in aristocratic States the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; whilst the reverse is the case in democratic nations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s observation may be reaching its expiration date, with avarice having become, in some quarters, insatiable.

More and less respectable conspiracy theories

⁠⁠If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes … traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.⁠⁠

Kevin D. Williamson

Attention

Attention is an indicator of love.
Not attending to what merits our love is indifference.
Attending to what does not merit our love is idolatry.
When businesses work hard to commodify our attention, we should consider who and what actually deserves it.

David O’Hara (who disclaims both originality and remembering where it all came from).

Can you recite a 7-digit phone number backward?

As we get older, we’re all going to lose a few of our marbles. As the word gets out that Parkinson’s disease is not just a movement disorder, there will be people whose careers will be destroyed because, on a particular day at a particular time, they can’t recite a seven-digit telephone number backward. Allowing someone’s fate to depend on performance on some test that has nothing to do with the job in question is just the reductio ad absurdum of the meritocratic machinery that has been pretty good to me (and to you, I suspect) over most of a lifetime.

Michael E. Kinsley, For Those Who Grow Old (originally titled Old Age)

Readwise

I’m a highlighter, a clipper, a curator. Digital life is very congenial to me. My blog posts here are full of digital clippings from my storehouses.

The trick is knowing how to manage highlights, and also to be reminded of things I once thought worthy of curation.

I’ve tried a lot of tools over the years. There was a flat-file database manager for Mac, from the makers of Filemaker. I can’t even remember its name as I write. There was (and still is, I think) Evernote, which I suspect is a database manager with a diversionary user interface. Then there was DevonThink, another database manager. None of them gave me reminders of what I’d saved; nothing serendipitous ever happened. And then DevonThink crashed and made proprietary hash of much of my work.

I decided that I needed to keep things in plain text, or at least in Markdown (through which the target text would remain readily discernible in a worst-case app meltdown). On top of that text could live various tools. That led me to Obsidian, with which I’m pretty happy. I was on the path to Plaintextistan, I thought. But again, Obsidian didn’t give me surprising reminders of what I’d saved.

But darn it, a non-plaintext tool I had almost forgotten emerged from the mists: Readwise. Even worse, it’s web-based.

I’ve taken a little time to explore its nooks and crannies, and in recent months, it has become an integral part of my daily websurfing as well as a smart reminder of things I once noted but might forget. I’m pretty sure it has integrated AI so that the 15 daily highlights I’ve requested increasingly have a sort of theme woven through them (Tocqueville appeared in two of 15 items today). I find myself spending more time daily pondering the 15 items Readwise has surfaced and offered. My plain text commitment has faltered.

Readwise is not an instant panacea, but it’s not too time-consuming to set up.

  1. If you’ve highlighted your Kindle books and Apple Books, or if you’ve saved things to Instapaper (or maybe Pocket – I don’t recall if Pocket integrated), you’ve got a jump-start because it will import all that on request. It’s got a lot of other integrations.
  2. It also will do Optical Character Recognition on highlights from your paper books and put them in the system. This is through its smartphone app.
  3. It offers browser plugins to save web content; it’s gotten to the point that I put every interesting web item into it and read it there; if it seems upon reading to be ephemeral, I delete it then to avoid clutter; if it’s worthy, I’ll have highlighted along the way and can add tags quickly for future retrieval.

You might want to give it a look. Not surprisingly, Readwise describes itself better than my little endorsement.

Shorts

  • A society whose members know what is enough might be poor, but its members would be equally free. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality)
  • Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self. (Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos)
  • What I called “the master wish” in this religion of wishful thinking went something like this: Please, Lord, let us keep driving to Walmart forever. (James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency)
  • Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism Sometimes, I think Wendell Berry and his agrarian friends were 21st Century America’s only true conservatives — and although they have my admiration, through long habit I don’t live like them.
  • The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
  • The kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets. (Paul Kingsnorth, via Brady Bowman)
  • Money can buy the megaphone, but it really can’t buy the mood that we see in the country. (Henrik Schatzinger, a political scientist at Ripon College, about the massive spending on next month’s election)
  • Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse. (Emmanuel Macron on the French riots)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

If you wanted to have a meaningful impact, you didn’t want to waste your vote on the weak and incompetent center. The Social Democrats were not enough to hold back the communist menace. Only the Nazis proved capable of reversing the leftward slide. If you believed the communists were the greater evil, you felt a moral duty to vote for the Nazis.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Three especially for Churchmen

How should we live?

  • First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
  • Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
  • Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
  • Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
  • Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
  • Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
  • Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
  • Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
  • Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
  • Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Violence of Modernity

I’ve probably shared these before, but I review them monthly for my own sake, so I thought you might benefit, too. In fact, I just reviewed the full blog post and all of it is excellent.

Zero-sum church

From an institutional perspective [Pope Francis’] move [against the Latin Mass] arguably appears perverse: Here you have a Western church conspicuously lacking in public zeal, religious vocations, large families, liturgical seriousness … and yet the leaders of the church have decided to act punitively against a small minority that, whatever its highly-debated growth rate, clearly is a locus for intense forms of piety and practice. It’s as if a major auto manufacturer whose big brands were all struggling decided to kill off one of its few profitable lines of cars, because it only turned a profit in a niche market and wasn’t big enough to subsidize the whole. A strange decision …

… but under the psychological conditions created by decline also an understandable one. In a general corporate climate of diminishment and disappointment a small form of success invites resentment: If the small brand isn’t capable of subsidizing the whole, then why are its engineers and salesman wasting their talents on its niche market, when they should be contributing to saving the larger company? Shouldn’t they be expected to chip in where the need is greatest, in the main brands — by analogy, big, empty diocesan seminaries and struggling Novus Ordo parishes and schools — instead of concentrating their talents serving a more intense but (it’s assumed) self-limited market?

…

In the specific case of traditionalism, it was that sense of relative stability that helped pave the way for the Latin Mass’s return from its 1970s exile, for the permissions issued by first by John Paul and then more sweepingly by Benedict. And then it’s the subsequent weakening of both conservative and liberal Catholicism — the former pushing more right-wing Catholics tradward, the latter making tradness appear more of a threat to a necessary acceleration of the Vatican II revolution — that’s given us the sharpened conflicts between traditionalism and Pope Francis, and now the attempt at outright suppression.

Ross Douthat, ‌The Latin Mass in the Zero Sum Church (first two ellipses in original; hyperlink likely paywalled).

My reaction to Pope Francis’ suppression of the Latin Mass (after reading some articulate howls from its proponents) was "doesn’t Francis see that this move tends to eradicate the Catholicism of his own youth and tends to the schism of those who won’t give it up?!" After reading Douthat, my reaction is "Of course he knows that. He wants a Novus Ordo Catholicism purged of Latin Mass Catholicism. He even said the Novus Ordo is now the exclusive Lex Orandi of the Church, and that he may be remembered as the Pope who split the Church."

In retirement, I have little occasion to bump into highly traditionalist Catholics (and a round of well-warranted litigation by my firm on behalf of the siblings of one of them estranged us even before I retired). But I read a few of them, and with Covid and Afghanistan and seeming national collapse of the U.S., and now the suppression of the Mass they love by a Pope they are obliged to obey, this is not a happy time to to be an American Latin Mass Catholic.

Always in the wrong

Revolutionaries are always in the wrong, since, in their juvenile fervor for everything new, in their hopes for a better future, and a way of life built on justice, they always base themselves on theories that are abstract and artificial, making a clean sweep of living tradition which is, after all, founded on the experience of centuries.

Conservatives are always wrong, too, despite being rich in life experience, despite being shrewd and prudent, intelligent and skeptical. For, in their desire to preserve ancient institutions that have withstood the test of time, they decry the necessity of renewal, and man’s yearning for a better way of life.

Both attitudes carry within themselves the seeds of death. Is there, then, a third way? Another destiny for society than of always being subject to the threat of revolutions which destroy life, or reactionary attitudes which mummify it? Or is this the inevitable fate of all terrestrial cities, the natural law of their existence?

In fact, only in the Church can we find both a Tradition that knows no revolution and at the same time the impetus towards a new life that has no end. Her theory (understood in the true sense of the word, namely “vision”) is based on a constant experience of Truth. Which is why she is in possession of those infinite resources upon which may draw all who are called to govern the perishable cities of this world.

Vladimir Lossky in Seven Days on the Roads of France, his account of fleeing the Nazis from Paris as he and his father had previously fled the Bolsheviks. (Via Fr. Stephen Freeman). I’ve ordered the book.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.