This was my week that was

Priorities

Rs are gonna lose a consequential Supreme Court race in WI and watch the soft defund candidate win the mayoralty in Chicago tonight, and they’ll spend all day tomorrow talking about Trump. And no one will see the problem.

Noah Rothman on the evening of 4/4.

I’m no longer an R, and not even sure I lean that way any more. But I’m going to try to be less obsessive in my denunciations of Orange Man. In fact, I’ll let him speak for himself. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ERUngQUCsyE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Gun culture

I think I’ve said, maybe even recently, that the 2nd Amendment is no special preoccupation for me. I just accept what the Supreme Court says about it.

But that’s not the end of the topic. There are cultural questions, too. And I think Matthew Walther’s voice is valuable:

The AR-15 is situated at the intersection of a relatively innocent hobbyism and the sinister mainstreaming of features of the militia culture of the 1990s, even among people who lead law-abiding lives. The primary selling point of the AR-15 is that it can be endlessly modified, configured, reimagined. It can become louder or quieter, easier to carry, wield, fire and reload, or more lethal. It is meant to be combined with a seemingly endless array of customizable stocks and grips, blast mitigation devices, piston uppers and conversion kits. These components are themselves paired with a vast assortment of accessories — vests, helmets, straps and other gear unfailingly designated as “tactical.”

It is this adjective, and the ubiquity of references to “tacticians” in advertising copy, review sites and hobby forums, that suggests the baleful aspect of AR-15 culture. Who exactly is practicing these tactics, and where and for what purpose? What this “tactics” business signals is not so much a commitment to action (the overwhelming majority of those who own AR-15s are law-abiding) as a general frame of mind. To the would-be tactician, every place that humans inhabit — housing developments, apartment complexes, stores, strip malls, hotels, churches, hospitals and, yes, schools — is another opportunity to imagine oneself taking part in military-style maneuvers. Where would you go for cover if you were here? How would you hold this position? What weapons and gear would you use?

… For AR-15 enthusiasts, the gun is not a means to an end — a tool with which you hunt, a weapon with which you protect your family and property — but rather the end itself, a site of fantasy and meaning making.

I suspect that part of the reason for the rise of AR-15 fandom is the decline of other American hobby cultures …

But for all the amateur tinkering, the reality is that these fetishized murder weapons, so often treated by their owners as if they were indistinguishable from model ships or Pokémon cards, have been used repeatedly in incidents like the recent one in Nashville. …

… My opposition to what the AR-15 represents is not a methodologically rigorous attempt to identify the primary cause of what social scientists call mass shootings. In some ways it is simply an expression of hope for a saner culture, a plea for something other than hypothetical terrorism to form the basis of our leisure time and family memories.

Interesting hypothesis about American hobby cultures, too. The link, above, should get you through the Times paywall.

I’m broadly supportive of a saner culture. If my Congressman posed with his family armed with AR-15s on his Christmas card, I’d never again vote for him, much as I’ve never voted for the current Indiana Attorney General, who early in his very first campaign did something (the specific having been lost to memory) that showed him a base and demagogic liar.

Ephemeral “growth”

Sometimes growth is an accounting artifact, with work formerly done in the home moving into the market. For example, two mothers who would prefer to take care of their own children would create GDP growth by hiring each other as nannies instead, because unpaid work for one’s own family goes uncounted but paid work for someone else’s represents new economic activity.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

I felt just covered with dirt afterwards

Auden experienced some of the complexities of this situation in early 1939, soon after his arrival in the United States. He gave a speech at a dinner in New York convened to raise money for refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and, as he later reported to an English friend, “I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring. So exciting but so absolutely degrading. I felt just covered with dirt afterwards.”

Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943

I experienced that thrill once as Emcee, warming up a crowd. It took some years for the shame to sink in with me, though, and that the demagoguery was in a “good cause” doesn’t much help.

She made her bed …

Wisconsin has elected to its Supreme Court a candidate who has all but promised how she would vote on issues including abortion and redistricting. The way she campaigned is a huge breach of how judicial candidates are supposed to behave.

Her breach will open her up to many recusal motions. I cannot explain it better than Josh Blackman did in Justice Janet Protasiewicz, Say Hello To Caperton v. Massey. Short version: there’s an ill-reasoned Supreme Court precedent (by Anthony Kennedy, king of ill-reasoned precedents) that denial of a motion to recuse can violate the federal due process clause.

Meanwhile, the prominence of abortion in that election further confirms my suspicion that most states are going to end up with European-type laws, permitting abortion for roughly one trimester, than generally banning it, in order to lay the issue more or less to rest. Specifically, the total bans (not even exceptions for the life of the mother) enacted in several red states are unsustainably unpopular.

Rhetorical escalation

I have complained more than once that is one (I have in mind a pompadoured southern pastor preaching in demagogic tones) calls Playboy “hard core pornography,” he’s limited his options for describing Hustler (and even worse publications).

It dawns on my that our current demagogues of the press have done something similar in describing Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as “authoritarian.” Yes, they’ve left room for “totalitarian” to describe Russia, but what then do we call North Korea?

How about acknowledging that Hungary is a kind of democracy — an illiberal one — and that an electoral majority seems to like it that way?

Child and Adolescent Gender Transitioning

On different sides of the Atlantic, medical experts have weighed the evidence for the treatment of gender-dysphoric children and teenagers, those who feel intense discomfort with their biological sex. This treatment is life-changing and can lead to infertility. Broadly speaking, the consensus in America is that medical intervention and gender affirmation are beneficial and should be more accessible. Across Europe several countries now believe that the evidence is lacking and such interventions should be used sparingly and need further study. The Europeans are right.

…

Proponents say that the care is vital to the well-being of dysphoric children. Failure to provide it, they say, is transphobic, and risks patients killing themselves. The affirmative approach is supported by the American Academy of Paediatrics, and by most of the country’s main medical bodies.

Arrayed against those supporters are the medical systems of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden, all of which have raised the alarm, describing treatments as “experimental” and urging doctors to proceed with “great medical caution”. There is growing concern that, if teenagers are offered this care too widely, the harms will outweigh the benefits.

The Economist, What America has got wrong about gender medicine

A Finnish review, published in 2020, concluded that gender reassignment in children is “experimental” and that treatment should seldom proceed beyond talking therapy. Swedish authorities found that the risks of physical interventions “currently outweigh the possible benefits” and should only be offered in “exceptional cases”. In Britain a review led by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician, found that gender-affirming care had developed without “some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced”. In 2022 France’s National Academy of Medicine advised doctors to proceed with drugs and surgery only with “great medical caution” and “the greatest reserve”.

The Economist, The evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak

Humanities murdered?

The end of the humanities: Fewer and fewer college students are choosing to study the humanities.

I will say the very best place to hide something interesting is inside a 10,000-word New Yorker story on the crisis. Thankfully, Blaise Lucey at Litverse read the whole thing and pulled the numbers.

“From 2012 to 2020:

Tufts lost ~50% of humanities majors

Boston University lost 42% of humanities majors

Notre Dame lost 50% of humanities majors

The study of English and history at the college-level dropped by 33%

More than 60% of Harvard’s class of 2020 planned to enter tech, finance, and consulting jobs”

The crash makes sense. How much do you really want to pay for a semester on the white supremacy of Jane Austen, the blinding cis-ness of Homer, the anti-lesbianism of Gilgamesh? More efficient just to burn the books and major in statistics. According to a new WSJ poll, the majority of Americans, especially young Americans, now say a college degree isn’t worth the money.

Nellie Bowles

If that last paragraph really reflects how humanities are taught today, it’s no wonder — though it remains a tragedy — that enrollments are dropping.

Soros: Now you see him, Now they mustn’t

It is sometimes allowed to be said that Alvin Bragg was funded by George Soros, but only when New York mag Soros want it to be noted in a positive way, but if it’s said with a vaguely negative tone then it’s a Fact Check: False.

Nellie Bowles

Hate to say it …

[S]ometimes you come across certain places, and even certain countries, that are clean and well-lighted. They are pleasant and harmonious. They work. …

What strikes me today is how impossible it is to feel this about the United States. As Robin Williams joked, Canada is like a nice loft apartment, but America is the party raging underneath. That party, though, is turning sour; something is rotten in the state of America. Even Williams later changed his analogy. Canada was still a nice apartment, but America had turned into the nightmare meth lab below.

Tom McTague, America’s desperate dysfunction

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

Potpourri, 12/11/18

1

The most common explanation for France’s gilets jaunes protests against fuel-tax hikes is that they arise from too little democracy … The opposite is true. The protests are happening because France has too much democracy. What it’s lacking is politics.

Mr. Macron’s political movement was born of the notion that France needed to become more democratic …

As Economist correspondent Sophie Pedder notes in her illuminating biography of the president, the premise is that as a numerical matter there are enough actual or potential winners from economic reform and globalization that a leader could cull those voters from the old parties and unite them under a new banner. It would then be possible to steamroll minority opposition.

…

[T]he widespread rioting in France shows the dangers of allowing a healthy dose of democracy to transmogrify into a brutal majoritarianism. Majority rule has its place, but it’s no way to knit together a diverse society …

… A center-right Republican Party under its failed 2017 candidate, François Fillon, would have effected some labor-law and civil-service reforms for which there is now broad support, but that party’s rural base would have precluded the green-energy follies that are sinking Mr. Macron.

The other word for this is “politics,” whose practitioners delicately trade interests and strike compromises to make majority rule more palatable to the minority.

Joseph Sternberg, Macron’s Warning to America’s Ascendant Left (WSJ, hyperlink and emphasis added)

This does, however, cut both ways. Trump and his supporters are playing a very dangerous game trying to force their kind of (invidious adjectives omitted) change with less than a “democratic” majority in 2016 and even a smaller minority now. (GOP offenses against good civic manners appear to have enough “legs” that I’m adding the category “democracy” today.)

Those coastal elites could punish the heartland, too, and not just politically. The heartland is lucky they haven’t figured out how to live without the food the breadbasket provides. (The GOP is misbehaving even worse in the states.)

It’s time for our incoming divided Congress to stop sheer pissing on each other and engage in frustrating, productive politics. (But I don’t know of a magic bullet for all the states except to hope for some constitutional theory to void the worst of the high-handedness.)

2

Cognate commentary:

Let us stipulate it’s foolish to pretend the market is without its costs. A 57-year-old General Motors worker in Ohio who will be laid off as his company expands production in Mexico may understandably balk at the argument that, in the larger scheme of things, it’s all for the best.

Yet the recent protests across France ought to remind us that market decisions aren’t the only ones that can make life difficult for those trying to get by on their paychecks …

Today, however, the crisis of good intentions is manifested most dramatically in the green movement, particularly in California … California now has the highest overall poverty rate in the nation … and suffers from a level of inequality “closer to that of Central American banana republics.”

… [T]he upward mobility of any family that isn’t part of Hollywood or Silicon Valley or doesn’t already own their own home is being killed by the state’s climate regime.

…

So maybe what’s going on in France isn’t as foreign as it may seem. When a once-thriving manufacturing town loses jobs to China, we hear all about the crisis of capitalism. But when progressives squeeze the American worker with high taxes, green agendas and failed government programs, where are the headlines about the crisis of good intentions?

William McGurn, The Crisis of Good Intentions (WSJ)

3

[T]he elite globalist consensus [is] that China can be China and India can be India but Europe can be turned into a repository for anyone in the world who can get there ….

Scott McConnell.

The elite consensus is personified by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, with “open society” including open borders. It is against this vision that elite media’s villain du jour, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, pushes back. My sympathies, guardedly (I have no crystal ball, after all), are with Orban, though I do not see Soros as consciously evil, as some seem to.

I’m actually more sympathetic with the anti-immigration right in Europe than I am with the anti-immigration American right.

The common factor is wealthy destinations who need (some) immigrants to replace the children they’re not bearing, in order to maintain a simulacrum of normalcy as their traditional populations die off.

But while the people coming north to North America are mostly Christians of some sort, those coming north to Europe include many Muslims, who will be harder to assimilate than Christian refugees.

Plus, our idiotic American subversion of (or warfare against) middle east “strong men” leaders has contributed mightily to the breakdown of public order that facilitates persecution of Christians by their Muslim neighbors, driving them northward.

Will Europe die for our sins?

4

After agreeing that religious arguments should not be front and center in debates about transgenderism, a caution for those who think science is unequivocally on the side of the sexual binary:

There are solid scientific reasons to resist the claim that biological males and females who consider themselves to be of the other gender, and who demand that everyone else recognize that, should be accommodated. Unfortunately, science itself is being coopted by the cultural revolution. The authoritative science magazine Nature published an editorial in October strongly denouncing a reported initiative by the Department of HHS to define male and female by biological characteristics. The editorial takes the line that people ought to be defined by the gender they choose. Nature is a very big deal.

We should by no means assume that science is immune from politicization. In the Soviet Union, as in our own materialist order, Science is considered to be the greatest authority. Science was corrupted by the communists as a matter of course, made to serve the revolution’s ends. The same thing is happening here.

Rod Dreher.

5

[T]here are good Catholics and bad Catholics and … the [New York] Times team gets to decide who is who.

Terry Mattingly, Tale of two New York Times stories: Seeking links in ultimate anti-Pope Francis conspiracy (Get Religion)

6

Now, a story you may not want to know about. I’ll introduce it elliptically, since this is a family blog (or something):

“My dad asked me if I were allowed to wear pants, if I would do it. I said, ‘I don’t know’ — as a kid you’re terrified — I don’t know. He said, ‘Because you can’t tell me right now, that means you are not a Christian. You are not going to heaven because a Christian would never hesitate at that question.’ ”

— Leah Elliott, Indiana

…

“I was nursing, but the pastor outlawed nursing. No women were allowed to nurse because it kept them from church. I went to the bathroom to cry, and I’m getting engorged — you have to nurse, you get in a lot of pain if you don’t. I’m in the bathroom, and the nursery worker came into the stall with me. I think I was just grabbing toilet paper to blow my nose, she barged in and said, ‘The devil wants you to miss this sermon that’s happening right now. You get back in there.’ ”

— Kara Blocker, Oregon

…

“I have so few memories of my cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles that it scares me. We were allowed to see them about once a year, until the church decided that the ‘good church members’ shouldn’t fellowship with their non-believing relatives. We were pretty much cut off after that. My grandparents still don’t understand why we were withheld from them.”

— Anonymous, Ohio

Former independent fundamental Baptists share their stories, part of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram series on clergy sexual (mostly) abuse in “Independent Fundamental Baptist” churches.

As I was growing up, some fundamentalist (who probably knew my father from the Gideons) made sure that our family always had a subscription to Sword of the Lord, a very explicitly and unapologetically fundamentalist tabloid out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. My parents were unenthusiastic about it, but didn’t seem to think it fit only for the bottom of the bird cage. As a teenager and college student, I generally read each issue for entertainment.

Pastor Jack Hybels of Hammond, Indiana was one of Publisher John R. Rice‘s favorites, and he fits prominently in this hot-off-the-presses series both as the father of one of the chief IFB perverts, Dave Hybels, and as proprietor of a reliable refuge (his Hammond Church) for IFB pastors who needed to be—ahem!—rotated out of their current role due to—ahem! again—accusations by some of the many brazen 14-year-old tarts that kept seducing defenseless IFB pastors.

When I was a young Evangelical, I was quite obsessed with cults — you know, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, (Herbert W. Armstrong’s) Worldwide Church of God, maybe even the Seventh Day Adventists. Though I knew from the Sword of the Lord that these IFB-types were fundamentalists and thus disreputable (they thought we were to be shunned, too; it was reciprocal), I never would have though of Independent Fundamental Baptists as a cult that would shelter perverts in the pulpit.

My bad. The problem is too widespread in this denomination-in-disguise to pretend that “Independent” is more than a legal fiction, that the unthinkability of police reports isn’t symptomatic of a sick system, or that the pastoral reassignments are not all too familiar.

I must henceforth think of IFB churches as cults.

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