Tag: grifters

Wednesday, 3/20/24

I grew up on “March 21 is the start of Spring,” but we’re not there yet and it nevertheless has been Spring for going on a day.

A trained physicist of my social media acquaintance explains:

Sunrise and sunset are defined as the time when the sun’s upper edge crosses the horizon; if you timed them from the crossing of the sun’s center, day and night should be equal today. Astronomical calculations equinoxes go by the center. Also, in practical terms, the atmosphere refracts light, so you can see the sun when it’s actually a little bit below the horizon. I believe most posted sunrise/sunset times take refraction into account? though refraction angle varies with air pressure. Anyhow, enjoy your extra 6 or 7 minutes!

So now you know until we both forget again.

Political

Too political

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

Josh Barro in the Atlantic

I generally like Josh Barro, and this misguided piece won’t make me hate him. But it’s fraught with problems, starting with how it encourages a starkly partisan politicization of the Supreme Court — a politicization that Barro regularly exhibits on his Serious Trouble podcast with his snotty and unjustified treatment of Trump appointees as servile to Trump.

The “Trump Court” isn’t all that Trumpy? They’re conservatives, but not partisan Republican hacks. For that matter, the three “liberals” are not partisan Democrat hacks, witness the 14th Amendment Section 3 decision of a few weeks ago. A Biden “reliably liberal” Justice will disappoint the Democrats periodically because the Justices are, first of all, Judges, with a weighty sense of their importance at the top of that co-equal branch. Republicans learned that for decades under Eisenhower’s appointments.

But you wouldn’t know that from press coverage. The press feeds an unrealistic narrative of slavish partisanship on the bench, especially about Republican nominees. A Sotomayor resignation in the next few months, after public calls like Barro’s, will justify this heretofore largely unjustified narrative. (Maybe that’s why actual politicians, who Barro calls “gutless,” are importuning Sotomayor privately, not loudly and openly.)

And, of course, it invites tit-for-tat response. If Donald Trump wins the election, there would be calls for Clarence Thomas to retire. Never mind that Donald Trump will not be working off a Federalist Society-type* list because his first-term nominees have not been servile, as he expects everyone to be. I suspect that Thomas would resist such calls, but since he seems to enjoy real life, he might succumb.

I used to say “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right.” I think I’ve been largely vindicated in that, but it’s hard to prove my vindication because Irreligious Right barbarians these days often adopt an “evangelical” label, so their lack of Christian bona fides is harder to demonstrate than I care to undertake. (If you deny that someone who calls himself “Christian” really is Christian, you’re being mean in today’s muddled minds.)

But I’d now add, fully aware that it fuels calls like Barro’s, “If you don’t like FedSoc-type* justices, just wait ‘till you see who Trump nominates if he gets a second term.”

(* Re: “FedSoc-type”: The 2016-2020 list, which Trump campaigned on, was from John Leo, a FedSoc Founder, but not from FedSoc itself, as it doesn’t do that sort of thing institutionally.)

The hidden costs

I wrote here recently to the effect that the dollar amounts of our military aid the Ukraine should be deeply discounted, since Ukraine turns around and buys from us (insofar as the aid is not “in kind” weaponry). I fear I was too superficial, and the all-in cost is potentially greater than the nominal amount:

When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.

Malcom Kyeyune, The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine

I guess focusing on dollars misses the full picture, huh?

GOP’s conscientious objectors to Trump

A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence refusing to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure”) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, William Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, John Coats, John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional Cabinet members, present and former GOP members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps to guarantee his loss in November.

…

But it’s also possible that the refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party Trump and Bannon originally hoped to build eight years ago—a “workers party” that’s actually (or more precisely described as) a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.

… The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer especially popular with less-educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old-guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.

Damon Linker

I have a blog category for “Zombie Reaganism.” If you think about it for a moment, you’ll be unsurprised that it has fallen into disuse.

TikTok

I have zero firsthand experience with TikTok, but you may have noticed that it’s in the news.

[I]n one of the more astonishing public relations blunders in modern memory, TikTok made its critics’ case for them when it urged users to contact Congress to save the app. The resulting flood of angry calls demonstrated exactly how TikTok can trigger a public response and gave the lie to the idea that the app did not have clear (and essentially instantaneous) political influence.

…

Trump’s flip-flop demonstrates once again the futility of ascribing any kind of coherent ideology to the former president. Before Trump’s change of heart, one could argue that being “tough on China” was one of the fixed stars of his MAGA policy constellation …

Second, the flip-flop indicates that Trump’s positions may well be for sale, even when they threaten national security …

Finally, Trump’s reversal reveals that his real enemy is always the domestic enemy. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote last Thursday: “Populist-nationalism is about asserting tribal preeminence over other domestic tribes. And so it prioritizes fighting the enemy within.” In this context, the “enemy within” is Mark Zuckerberg and the “deep state.”

…

Catoggio correctly observed, “It speaks volumes” that “Trump felt safe politically allying himself with China on a pressing issue in an election year so long as he framed his position in terms of greater antipathy to one of the right’s domestic enemies, Big Tech.”

…

Last week, I wrote a column urging Reagan conservatives and Haley Republicans to vote for Joe Biden. The withering reaction from some on the right demonstrated the extent to which many Republicans still possess the mistaken belief that Trump possesses conservative convictions. How many times does he have to demonstrate that his personal grievances and perceived self-interest will always override ideology or policy?

David French

As I’ve written before, I think I’ll again be spared the indignity of having to vote for either of the major-party candidates, but French has made a fairly good case for Republicans and conservatives holding their noses and crossing over this year.

Conservatism

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 – Front Porch Republic

I doubt that the GOP could have more completely rejected this advice than it has since, say, 2005.

The biggest threat to traditional values

Last night I was having drinks with a Catholic friend visiting the city from western Europe. He is pretty demoralized about politics and everything else. He told me how pathetic the institutional church is in his country, as well as the political parties his side usually votes for. He complained that it is so difficult to rouse the conservatives in his country to recognize how insane the situation is. They want desperately to pretend that everything’s fine, that if they just keep voting for the mainstream conservative party, it’s all going to work out in the end.

He told me that one of the most difficult things for him to come to terms with is how his view on America has changed. He said he has no love for Russia or China, but it was a bitter red pill for him to swallow to realize that as bad as those countries’ governments are, they aren’t the biggest threat to him. No, he said, the forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

Rod Dreher, Revolution & The Call To Bravery

I initially found the second paragraph more arresting; now I’m not so sure that the first isn’t just as salient.

(Note: I’m unsubscribed from Rod Dreher’s Substack in the sense that I no longer pay. I believe I wrote about why I unsubscribed at the time of the decision. But he still has many public posts that get mailed to me.)

Cultural

Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber Hothouse

In August 2017, James Damore, then a twentysomething Google software engineer, sent a memo to all employees called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Damore argued that the company’s political bias toward the left “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” Damore suggested, among other things, that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” was “misguided and biased.” Within a month, Google fired him for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.” 

Google has long been a progressive company—in 2020, for example, 88 percent of donations by Google employees went to Democrats (almost $5.5 million) while only 12 percent (some $766,000) went to Republicans. But after Damore was ousted, Google’s corporate culture became even more radical, according to Maguire. “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more open ideological agenda,” he said.

Francesca Block, Olivia Reingold, Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

Ban the “book banning” grift!

The ALA releases its annual report every April (which is common enough) in which it releases figures on how many challenges to library holdings were made the preceding year. But it runs its “Banned Books Week” every October, which gives it two instances every year to issue a press release lamenting the grave danger to democracy that these challenges pose. Almost every major media outlet—and I do mean almost every single one—follows suit, wondering how long American democracy will last if elementary students can’t continue to check out Gender Queer.  

What’s the problem with the ALA’s report on “challenges”? As I argued here last year, the numbers are misleading …

This year, the ALA is highlighting the total number of books challenged whereas last year they were highlighting the total number of unique challenges. Why? Because the number of single challenges has actually gone down from 1269 in 2022 to 1247 in 2023. (The ALA notes that several challenges contained as many as a hundred books.) That doesn’t help advance the narrative that right-wing parents are a serious threat to democracy, so the ALA is touting the 4,240 figure.

At root, my problem with the ALA is the lack of transparency. They leave out important contextual information in order to raise money by fear-mongering (there is always a link to give to the ALA’s supposed defense of free speech with every press release). How many libraries reported challenges? How many books were actually removed from shelves? Were these at city libraries or school libraries (the ALA doesn’t distinguish between the two)?

Micah Mattix

Andrea Long Chu’s says the quiet part out loud

Spending even one minute responding to Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation feels like a defeat. It is such an ill-conceived, careless piece of writing, and one that exhibits so little genuine concern for the group it is supposedly written on behalf of — trans kids — that its own thesis statement is basically self-debunking: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” argues Chu. 

Alas, this argument wasn’t printed on some random blog, but as a cover story in New York magazine, where I worked as an online editor and writer-at-large from 2014 to 2017. Chu is given almost 8,000 words to defend her radical argument, but she just. . . doesn’t. I don’t quite understand why this article was printed, in this form, in the pages of a great magazine staffed by some of the best editors in the country. The counterarguments to her position are so blazingly obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a child or a teenager that it’s an act of willful editorial neglect to simply ignore them entirely. The whole thing comes across much more as an act of high-profile trolling than a meaningful contribution to the discourse about trans kids. Along the way, as is Chu’s habit, she smears the work of a bunch of journalists, myself included, by cherry-picking quotes, sleazily writing that things we have written could be seen as arguing X, where X is something offensive we never would endorse, and so on. 

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer for her literary criticism. Maybe she’s brilliant at it. But her attempts at actual real-world policy arguments are remarkably lazy. Her editors let her down here.

Jesse Singal.

I’m nearing the end of a one-month paid subscription to New York. Even apart from Chu’s piece (which I skipped when I saw how insane his/her thesis was), I’ve been too unimpressed to continue.

Impervious to the Evidence

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

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.

Tuesday, 10/3/23

Culture

NETTRs and NETTLs

[Charles] Haywood says that if you want to call out someone on the Right, you should do it privately, not publicly. Sometimes, yes. But this is the exact same line of thinking that allowed the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal to metastasize. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the enemies of the Church. Secrecy about evil — not moral misdemeanors, but evil — allowed it to grow in the darkened networks within the Church, until it was eventually exposed, and all but destroyed the Church’s moral authority. Don’t talk about it publicly, you’ll only help the Left. Yeah, well, screw that.

Rod Dreher after playing a role in exposing a white-supremacist headmaster and teacher in a Classical Christian School, via Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve read enough to know that Charles Haywood personally adheres to No Enemies to the Right — i.e., he was not just assigned that side by the debate organizers.

I’m with Rod on NETTR (he’s against it), which has gotten me crosswise with Rightwing cranks occasionally. Lacking any notable national platform, the worst I’ve gotten was Judas accusations — nary a death threat. And since I was defending the truth rather than trolling anyone, that’s as it should be.

Odder than the Judas accusation, though, was a comment by a Jewish colleague suggesting that it took special courage to diss some outsider Klansmen (or was it Nazis?) who were planning a big demonstration downtown, as if I were breaking ranks and burning bridges. Sheesh! That sad misimpression illustrates why we need to rebuke the reprobate Right more regularly: so nobody will think it’s courageous for someone on the Right to repudiate racist terrorists and neo-Nazis.

The worst of the right wingnuts are those who wear a cross on their sleeves but prove by their commission of (or cooperation with) evil that it’s really about political power, not Christ.

We live in culture war hell. The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can’t stand. In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose. And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to “the other side” at all is to admit defeat. Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they’re so extreme as to be ridiculous. They’ll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right. 

I promise: you don’t have to do that.

For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.

…

As I write this, a minor controversy has erupted of just the kind that I’m talking about here: the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has recently banned the use of the word field to refer to an academic discipline, as in the field of history. This is ostensibly because the word field might make black students and staff think of slavery. What black person could ever avoid hearing talk about fields, real or metaphorical? 

When nonsense goes unchallenged because it’s perceived to be “on our side,” it metastasizes and spreads until suddenly, the majority of left-leaning people feel compelled to defend it. And ordinary people (that is, people not marinating in Twitter every day) will rightfully recognize the absurdity when they see it. 

I’m not interested in spending a lot of time chewing through social justice language or norms. But I do want to say this: It’s okay to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your side. I promise. You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice, and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The is the Left equivalent of No Enemies to the Right. I confess that for some reason I find it easier to spot NETTR than NETTL; maybe because that’s because I spend more time contemplating thought on the Right half of the spectrum than on the Left half, or maybe it’s because NETTL is no longer notable.

(Of course, I should note that the French may have gotten here first with pas d’ennemis au gauche and pas d’ennemis au droite.)

Yes, there are enemies to the Right

I will not let some redpill pick-up artist pimp become a role model to my sons or to other young men in my church because I refuse to rebuke them publicly.

Neil Shenvi, making the case against NETTR. Anyone tempted by the NETTR nuttiness should read the whole piece. He’s quite disturbed that young Christian men may be looking to filthy reprobates like Andrew Tate or Bronze Age Pervert for lessons on how to combat the woke Left, and I am too.

Flannery’s violence and grotesqueries

Her fiction, which employed violence and the grotesque, horrified her mother. “Why can’t you write something uplifting,” Regina would say, “like the folks at Reader’s Digest?” As [Flannery] O’Connor confided in a letter to a friend: “This always leaves me shaking and speechless, raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc. All I can say is, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

Food culture

[E]veryone knows that old joke,

“Heaven is where the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the cooks are British, the police are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

It doesn’t matter that America is not part of Europe, because to Europeans America is worse at everything (except war), especially food.

Chris Arnade, America does not have a good food culture

Guarantors of tranquillity and happiness

In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

High-Toned Gobbledygook

[I]t’s not anti-intellectual to say that the left desperately needs to lose its academic vocabulary, which is overwhelmingly influenced by trends in humanities departments at elite universities. 

That’s because it is incomprehensible to ordinary Americans. 

Students go through those programs and absorb a certain vocabulary, they graduate and go to work at nonprofits and in media and in Hollywood, and from there they spread the terminology. Social media, especially Tumblr and Twitter, helps ensure that this fancy vocabulary colonizes left-leaning spaces. Nobody wants to sound unsophisticated, so everyone adopts these terms even if they’re not particularly comfortable with them. Like seemingly everything in the internet age, it’s mimetic. And that’s how you get people talking about the role of Latinx intersectionality in queering BIPOC spaces in the Global South.

Freddie de Boer, excerpted in The Free Press

The Texas Pander Bear

Texas AG Ken Paxton, having dodged conviction in the Texas Senate after impeachment by the Texas House, is tacitly appealing to the Texas GOP base by filing a red-meat lawsuit.

Dump on Trump

On the off chance that one reader is MAGA but persuadable, I shall continue to dump on Trump for the foreseeable future.

Bankrupt Donnie from Queens

Trump’s business—as we New Yorkers always knew—was bilking people. Oh, he had a few slam-dunk construction projects early on, using his daddy’s money. And he did prove himself more competent than the City of New York when it came to completing the Wollman Rink in Central Park. But almost everything else crashed. He declared bankruptcy four times. He stiffed the small contractors who built his casinos. He stiffed his lawyers. The real property developers in New York—no shrinking violets themselves—told jokes about what an egomaniacal phony he was.

Trump only began to make money when he signed on as an actor playing a billionaire in a reality TV series. This enabled him to take the grift to new levels: he sold his name to overseas developers who slapped it on apartment buildings, he sold steaks and wine and bottled water; he used the money to buy golf resorts and a few buildings.

…

Trump is a fraud and also a traitor. He tried to overthrow our government. But he persists, an icon, because he doesn’t “sound like a politician.” Nice work if you can get it. And the Democrats can’t seem to understand that they will make little progress against him if they don’t address the issues that built his brand—the crisis at the Southern Border and the refugees in Northern cities, crime (Target is closing nine stores, including one in Harlem, because of rampaging hordes of shoplifters), the false pomposities of identity politics…and, of course, the fact that Joe Biden seems to be doddering.

Joe Klein, The Art of the Fraudster

Donnie from Queens is boring

Four years into his presidency, Trump isn’t boring in the way a dull, empty afternoon is boring. Trump is boring in the way that the seventh season of a reality-television show is boring: A lot is happening, but there’s nothing to say about it. The president is a man without depths to plumb. What you see is what you get, and what you get is the same mix of venality, solipsism, and racial hatred that has long been obvious. Trump’s abuses of the presidency are often compared to those of Richard Nixon, but Nixon had a deep, if troubled, interior life; one biographer characterized Nixon as struggling with “tragic flaws,” a description hard to imagine any credible biographer using to describe Trump.

Quinta Jurecic, The Tedium of Trump

There’s quite an illustration at the top of Jurecic’s article, too.

Flaunt/Flout

Donald Trump does not flaunt the rules of golf—that is a vicious lie.

He flouts the rules of golf—just as he flouts good taste, common decency, the Constitution, etc.

To flaunt something is to show it off: A rich man might flaunt his wealth, a beautiful woman might flaunt her beauty, one of those younger Kardashians I can’t tell apart might very well flaunt both. To flout something is to disregard it: Rolling Stone writers routinely flout English grammar and usage both.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Lapped by Trump

Poor Mike Pence. For one brief shining moment back in January 2021, standing in marbled majesty, gavel in hand, he did the Right Thing and refused to turn the Republic into a Fiefdom, which caused a mob of knuckleheads to storm the Capitol and send Pence running to an undisclosed location, but he stood tall for Rectitude and Devotion to Duty, and now here he is on the campaign trail making small talk in a Dunkin’ Donut shop with a couple of truckers trying to decide between the Caramel Crème and the Pumpkin Peppermint.

Poor Chris Christie. Once the Emperor’s Boon Companion, now his lone accuser, the former governor does his spiel for a crowd of six Starbucks sales associates on their vaping break who haven’t the ghost of an idea who this porky guy is.

Garrison Keillor

Wordplay

Banned Books Week

a cloying festival of liberal self-aggrandizement

Matthew Walther’s description of Banned Books Week

Confabulation

Confabulation is subtly different than I’d thought. I considered it casual, habitual lying about trivial stuff; apparently, it’s not considered lying at all.

So much for Joe “The Confabulator” Biden.

#Fail

She “sought forms that give shape to the infinite and spiritual dimensions ….”

A poet (Major Jackson) trying to describe the work of a thesophist artist.

The next GOP Vice-Presidency

like taking a job as cleaning lady in the Elephant Pavilion …

Garrison Keillor on Nikki Haley’s prospective Vice-Presidency.

Breaking butterflies on the wheel

breaking every butterfly on a wheel of confrontational rhetoric …

Rod Dreher (hyperlink added)

Jest

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Francis Bacon via Hedgehog Review 24.3, p. 9

Theo

The problem with a theocracy is everyone wants to be Theo

James Dunn via @ChrisJWilson on micro.blog

Philo T. Farnsworth

Tonight Show host Johnny Carson once quipped, “If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Hermit kingdom

Hermit kingdom: a characterization of North Korea in the Economist. It may not be novel, but it had fallen off my radar.

Undecided

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

Laurence Peter, via The Economist World in Brief

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

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.

Amazon Prime Day 1

Having dated other blogs according to the Christian calendar, it seems only fair to date one according to the Consumerist calendar. I’m debating whether next June I should date things Pride 1, Pride 2, etc.

Okay, the debate’s over: I’ll do that only if I can figure out how to make it clear that I’m being a sarcastic dissenter.

Public affairs

Toward a better understanding of MAGA America

I’ve been trying to understand Trumpworld since Trump started winning GOP primaries in 2016. Really I have. I don’t want to think that almost 50% of this country just raised a middle finger in November 2016 and said “Just watch us blow up your precious nation!”

It has been slow going, but I have made some progress. First was remembering that the alternative was HRC, and that most Americans can’t bear the thought of voting other than for a major party. Second, was appreciating the legitimacy of some of Trumpworld’s grievances, which appreciation began in the run-up to the 2016 election as I left the main highway in eastern Ohio and found Trump signs everywhere in the sorry little town where I re-fueled.

But why Donald Trump felt like the solution to those grievances has eluded me — at least until late last week.

I won’t even try to capture the essence of David French’s The Rage and Joy of MAGA America, published Thursday. It’s David French at his best, as he writes from his home county, just 15% Democrat.

If you want to go deeper into the mindset of what 7 years ago proved to be an electoral majority of your countrymen, I urge you to read it, carefully and sympathetically, bearing in mind the categorical contempt felt toward “flyover country” by our national elites. The link I’ve provided should get you to it even if you’re not a New York Times subscriber.

But Paul A. Djupe in We Should Probably Stop Thinking Religion is a Solution to MAGA specifically faults any implication that MAGA evangelicals would be less MAGA if they attended church more regularly.

Parenthetical

Nick Cattogio feels his own kind of “joy” less by understanding Trump sellouts — the public-figure Never Trumpers who folded for a bit of power — than by something more primal:

The dirty little secret about being an anti-Trump conservative is that it too is often joyous.

In this case the joy derives not from belonging but from not belonging. Many times I’ve heard Jonah Goldberg say on The Remnant how his position on Trump has cost him friendships on the right, and I always sympathize—but cannot empathize. My contempt for those who traded their commitment to classical liberalism to protect their status within a Trumpifying right is so boundless that I’ve never stopped feeling grateful to be rid of them. If ever I should return to their good graces somehow, they’ll discover that they haven’t returned to mine.

It’s an almost spiritual pleasure to find yourself surrounded by people without dignity and to know that you don’t belong. 

The other joy of opposing Trump from the right is the satisfaction one gets from speaking one’s mind when others fear speaking their own. The happiest character in literature must be the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who shouted the truth about the sovereign’s attire as the adults around him bit their tongues and kept up a silly pretense so as not to cause themselves trouble.

The emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Trump is a criminal reprobate who’s morally and intellectually unfit to wield any sort of power. These are simple truths, acknowledged privately by all but the most devout loyalists. But to say them aloud, in public, when others don’t dare is liberating in a way that’s difficult to describe. If you know, you know. Dispatch readers know.

Chris Christie, very much a latecomer to the practice, knows too.

About saying the truth out loud, see Orange Man Bad in my July 7 post. Want to wager whether Cattogio read that?

Now, though the writing is entertaining, I am conscience-bound to note that the “almost spiritual pleasure” of “find[ing] yourself surrounded by people without dignity and [knowing] that you don’t belong” has a name, Pharisaism, and a “spiritual” pedigree of the diabolical sort. I can only hope Cattagio is exercising artistic license.

Deep-state BlackOps

In The Bourne Supremacy all a journalist had to do is say “Blackbriar” into a cell phone and minutes later, vans full of hyper-efficient assassins scrambled to snatch him up. Jack Bauer could not only direct phone taps and hack security cameras with a few keystrokes on his Blackberry, he could weave through miles of LA traffic in a few minutes. When he calls various government agencies, including after hours, he always gets them on the phone and not some, “Our offices are currently closed. Press 1 for English” message.

That’s all fine for escapist fare. But if you think real life works remotely like that, your assumptions about a lot of politics are going to be really stupid and maybe dangerous.

Jonah Goldberg, who 13 years ago imprudently asked “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?” — his point being that our BlackOps aren’t as omnipotent as the Left thought.

Now he’s asking a different question, and asking it of a different delusional demographic:

No, the reason I’m going down memory lane is I want to ask a similar question: Why hasn’t the deep state gotten rid of Donald Trump yet? … If the deep state were remotely as powerful, wicked, and skilled as many claim, why let Trump live?

It’s a fair question, with a lot more colorful detail than I’m quoting.

Which brings me to the second problem: A lot of idiots and unwell people don’t realize that a lot of the deep state stuff is a grift. Devin Nunes used to sell deep state collectibles. There are no end of books claiming to expose the deep state and the cabal running our country. Here’s the description of The Deep State Encyclopedia: Exposing the Cabal’s Playbook:

Our country is being attacked from within. The past several years showed us that the shadow government seeks to assert absolute control over the human cattle, but what if we could stop them? What if we could take away the cabal’s power by exposing their entire playbook?

If this was their playbook, it wouldn’t be on Amazon.

And the pseudonymous author, “Grace Reallygraceful,” would be dead, too.

Tribal identity, fluid identity

In Hungarian, the word for their country is “Magyarország” — Land of the Magyars. Russia, in the Hungarian language, is “Oroszország” — Land of the Russians. Unlike the USA, where identity is fluid and contractual, these nations are tribes with flags. In Hungary, for example, they were occupied for 150 years by the Ottoman Empire, which, as you know, was Islamic. These things matter to them — and who are we Americans to say it shouldn’t? … I feel at home here in Hungary, in most respects, as I would in any other country of Europe. But whatever my migration status, I will never allow myself to think of myself as European, because that’s just not how it works. We Americans tend to assume that our openness and fluidity of identity is a natural stance. In fact, we are far outliers on national experience around the world.

Rod Dreher, who has some other worthwhile comments on immigration as well. I am encouraged. Rod has been far too often unreadable for a long time now.

NATO

Oh, my! The Nato mindset leads to war pulls a lot of threads together, and it doesn’t make me like post-cold war NATO any better than I did before. That it is purely defensive and that Russia therefore had nothing to fear from its expansion is a tale told by liars and believed by amnesiacs.

Conservatives today

If conservatism is support of the status quo, then the Democrat Party is today’s conservative party. So argues David Graham.

Homefront

We’ve had a run of cool days, and particularly of cool mornings. I’ve enjoyed sitting in my east-facing sunroom with windows open, sun streaming in, and I have been surprised how quiet my neighborhood is in the morning.

Not today, though. The sound of heavy equipment engines has begun. They are swarming my neighborhood for the next few days (or weeks) with those mechanical monsters that eat up the top few inches of pavement to permit new pavement to be laid without raising the street too high. Then we’ll get some shiny new asphalt. It will, no doubt, look very spiffy.

I have said, and probably have written, before, that I have the good fortune of living in a place that can still afford to repair its infrastructure. But I question why they are repairing in my neighborhood, and I’m not questioning just because I don’t like the noise.

I’m questioning because our streets have no potholes, cracks, irregularities, or other compelling reasons for repair. What they do have is a lot of fading and some tar strips running like spider veins where small cracks have been repaired over the years.

I’ve driven in enough neighborhoods to know that ours are not the city’s worst streets. But we are a wealthy neighborhood, and I suppose that explains much more than I wish it did.

(If I were king of the world, they’d be narrowing the streets by half and repairing the sidewalks. It would still be about as unpleasant to walk as Tokyo, but it would be a step in the right direction.)

Legalia

Consequentialism in jurisprudence

One of the really knotty problems with our public debates is that we often are having two or three debates at the same time, and it is easy to get confused about which question is actually in dispute at any given moment. 

Take, for example, the recent debate about racial preferences in college admissions: The question before the Supreme Court was only a legal one—not that you’d know it from the campaign-style rhetoric of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor!—to wit, whether the law permits what Harvard and the University of North Carolina were doing, or whether that amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. The majority of the Supreme Court rightly found that this racial discrimination was unlawful. A second question—an unrelated question from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice who is actually doing his or her job instead of trying to act as an unelected legislator—is whether racial-preference policies such as those that had been implemented at Harvard are good policies. A third question—never quite explicitly discussed—has to do with “legal consequentialism,” the notion (which has official legal standing in some countries, such as Brazil) that legal questions per se should be made subordinate to utilitarian calculation. As the Brazilian statute puts it, “a decision shall not be made based on abstract legal values without considering the practical consequences of the decision.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Qualified Immunity hits a wall — finally

Seventeen-year-old student is required to participate in police ride-along for a class, and the Hammond, Ind. officer she shadows spends the day groping her, making lewd remarks, and even taking her to a remote location where he offers her to another officer for sex. Officer: This mere “boorish flirtation” was just “making for an exciting ride along.” District court: Qualified immunity. Seventh Circuit: Reversed. “Sexual assault is an intentional act that never serves a legitimate governmental purpose.”

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions.

It’s actually a bit surprising, not to mention heartening, that the 7th Circuit reversed this. “Qualified immunity” has become the monster that devoured 42 USC §1983 (the post-Civil War law that gives a remedy for deprivation of rights under color of law).

More:

It is obviously unreasonable for an off-duty, out-of-uniform police officer to lose his temper on the road, follow another motorist home, box him in his driveway, scream profanities, and point a gun at him when the other motorist is nonthreatening. So says the Tenth Circuit, reversing a grant of qualified immunity to a (now-former) Chaves County, N.M. sheriff’s deputy. Claims against the county, which hired him in spite of his history of volatile behavior, are on the table, too.

Purging an evil

A District of Columbia-based disciplinary panel has recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his “frivolous” efforts on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The committee, an arm of the District of Columbia Bar, found in a report released on Friday that Giuliani had undermined trust in federal elections by directing Trump’s legal challenge to the presidential vote count in Pennsylvania and promoting unfounded theories of fraud in court.

“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

Wall Street Journal

Culture

AI wins where people have been deskilled

My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.

L.M. Sacasas, Render Unto the Machine. This is an idea I keep running into. It was a thread through Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive

Wordplay

1

trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity

Sven R. Larson This seems to be a more refined version of “nailing jello to the wall” or even my father’s favorite, “goosing butterflies.” I assume the metaphor hitch-hikes on the further metaphor of “getting no traction” (in an argument, in this case).

2

As ever more laity, especially young people, seek out the ancient liturgy of the Church, the Eye of Sauron in Rome has turned towards these congregations …

Sebastian Morello, The Tragedy of the Sarum Rite (The European Conservative)

3

[T]he difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother.

Simon Fanshawe

4

[Great Britain’s National Health Service] looms so large in our politics as to wholly justify the sardonic description of Britain as “a health service with a country attached”.

Mary Harrington

5

Mountebank: A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; A flamboyant charlatan. (Wordnik)

I’m shocked that his was not already in my vocabulary. Maybe I couldn’t decide on pronunciation, since it was fairly obviously of foreign (Italian, apparently) origin.

6

Insufficient nihilism: David Graham’s characterization of the real reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from the House Freedom Caucus. (That she had called fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” was just a plausible excuse.)

7

“Tact” is insulting a man without his knowing it

John “Jackie” Fisher via the Economist

8

… he’s 22, and like many intelligent and loquacious 22-year-olds, quickly got out far over his skis.

Rod Dreher, on a recent conversation

9

Alethic commitment: Committing and belonging because of considered belief that a thing is true. (J Budziszewski)

I no longer believe that the essence, the sina qua non, of authentic Christian life is alethic commitment. I don’t even believe that it’s the proper goal of a Christian life.

Those possibilities seems too left-brain for me, and too culture-bound. Fr. Stephen DeYoung describes it as “checkbox religion.” “Jesus is God?” Check. “Bible miracles were miraculous?” Check. Etc

Experience or immersion might count for as much as considered belief.

By some combination of nature and nurture, I’m an alethic commitment kind of guy, but on entering Orthodoxy, I had a few stumbling blocks — boxes I couldn’t check yet. Because I’d seen enough of the Church to trust it, and to even assume that where I demurred I was wrong, I immersed.

10

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

John Quincy Adams via the Economist

11

Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.

Garrison Keillor on the social effects of Covid.

12

My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.”

Garrison Keillor

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Wednesday, 5/17/23

Politics

Gentle Persuastion

Let’s start with something nice.

Peter Wehner recounts an anecdote from a 1985 gathering of the South African National Initiative for Reconciliation, where the Dutch Reformed were guardedly present:

Bishop [Desmond] Tutu was one of the last people to speak; as he was preparing to do so, the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church were uneasy, visibly stiffening. Tutu addressed his remarks directly to them.

“I just want to thank God that he brought you, my white brothers, here to South Africa,” the Anglican bishop told the Dutch Reformed Church leaders, as best Haugen recalls his words decades later. “I thank God that you came because you brought the mission hospitals, and I was born in a mission hospital. I thank God you brought the mission schools, and I went to a mission school. But most of all, my brothers, I thank God that he brought you because you brought the word of God. But now I’m going to have to open up that word of God and show you why your apartheid system is a sin.”

Tutu proceeded to do just that.

Causation isn’t always obvious in human affairs, but according to Wehner “The following year, the Dutch Reformed Church declared that South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule was morally wrong and had done the country and its people grievous harm.”

My recollection is that they declared it a heresy, which meant a lot to me since I was then a member of the Christian Reformed Church, historically Dutch and quite thoroughly “adjacent” to South Africa’s Dutch Reformed in many ways, and its defense of apartheid was an embarrassment — embarrassing like the Russian Orthodox Patriarch blessing the invasion of Ukraine.

What pluralism is and isn’t

Pluralism is an irreducible, sociological fact of American life. It is not a set of norms that requires perfect neutrality in public spaces; instead, it creates parameters around what’s politically possible amid profoundly diverse views about first principles.

Elayne Allen, Sensible Politics Can’t Ignore Religion.

That may be a sleeper. You might want to read it again.

Harder questions for The Man Who Would Be King

What the TV professionals should learn is that they have two choices in dealing with another Trump primary campaign. They can take the kind of this-is-an-emergency path urged on them by some press critics and anti-Trump writers: Don’t platform him or normalize his campaign in any way, don’t let him speak on live TV, cover him only within a set framework that constantly emphasizes his authoritarian tendencies and attempts to overturn the last election. I don’t believe this path is wise or workable, but it at least has a moral consistency lacking in the “democracy is in danger and tune in tonight for an hour with the demagogue!” approach that we already watched play out in 2016.

Alternatively, if the press intends to conduct interviews and run debates as normal, then in preparing for them they need to try to think a little bit more like Republican voters as opposed to center-left journalists. Not in the sense of behaving slavishly toward the former president, but in the sense of writing the kinds of questions that a right-leaning American primed to dislike the media might actually find illuminating.

In part, as Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, that means drilling into Trump’s presidential record on conservative terms rather than liberal ones — asking about, for instance, the failure to complete the border wall or the surge in crime in the last year of his administration. In part, as Erick Erickson writes, it means asking obvious questions that follow from his stolen-election narrative rather than just attacking it head-on — as in, if the Democrats really stole the election, why did your administration, your chosen attorney general and your appointed judges basically just let them do it?

Ross Douthat, Trump’s Lesson for the Media and Ron DeSantis

Sounds about right

Special Counsel John Durham—appointed during former President Donald Trump’s administration—issued a 306-page report criticizing the FBI’s investigation into allegations linking the Trump campaign and Russia ahead of the 2016 election. Durham found the collusion probe was opened based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” and that investigators placed too much stock in supposed evidence provided by Trump’s political rivals. The report also alleges the FBI was far more hesitant to investigate claims Hillary Clinton’s campaign had similar foreign ties. GOP Rep. Jim Jordan—chair of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—said yesterday he’d invited Durham to testify next week.

Via The Morning Dispatch for 5/16/23

Once again, I’m in the position of holding two truths in tension:

  1. The Media, the FBI, and who knows who all else, will do just about anything, including dirty, sleazy tricks, to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
  2. Donald Trump nevertheless is deeply unqualified for the Presidency of this troubled nation-state I live in.

The Biden Family Grift

“I don’t see any direct evidence of misconduct in the memo or reports about it,” Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who worked on government fraud and public corruption, told TMD. “When it rises to the level of an official doing things because of payments to a family member, or paying money with the specific intent to change an official’s decision, that’s illegal. But hiring a public official’s idiot brother-in-law for your board of directors generally isn’t.”

…

“There’s a vast amount of activity that’s sleazy but legal in American politics,” White told TMD. “It’s reasonable to make inquiries about why a vice president’s relatives are getting big payments from foreign countries. But so far it’s smoke, not fire.”

…

The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees released a joint staff report last week claiming a letter signed by former intelligence officials during the 2020 election discounting the legitimacy of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was coordinated with the Biden campaign and exploited the national security credentials of former officials.

Via The Morning Dispatch for 5/16/23

Point Well Made

President Biden says he will not negotiate with congressional Republicans over a bill to increase the debt ceiling. This is preposterous and indefensible, for several reasons: For one thing, taxing, spending, and borrowing are inherently congressional powers, not presidential powers. For another thing, Joe Biden is president—not king. The idea that a president would refuse to negotiate with Congress over congressional action is nonsensical from a constitutional point of view and autocratic from a political point of view. Congress is not there to do the president’s bidding—if anything, it is the other way around: The president is charged with the faithful execution of the laws Congress passes, not with barking orders at the branch of government that is actually charged by the Constitution with responsibility for this issue.

Kevin D. Williamson, Emperor Malarkey I.

I’m pleased to report that Biden was lying/bluffing/bloviating and is indeed talking with congressional Republicans — talks that cynics might even call “negotiations.”

Christian Nationalisms

Michelle Goldberg, who I don’t usually read, caught my attention with this one:

A major question for Republicans in 2024 is whether this militant version of Christian nationalism — one often rooted in Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on prophecy and revelation — can overcome the qualms of more mainstream evangelicals. The issue isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist, meaning someone who rejects the separation of church and state and treats Christianity as the foundation of American identity and law. That’s a foregone conclusion in a party whose state lawmakers are falling over themselves to pass book bans, abortion prohibitions, anti-trans laws, and, in Texas, bills authorizing school prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

What’s not yet clear, though, is what sort of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire variety of candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or the violently messianic version embodied by Flynn and Trump.

…

If DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” even as he wraps his own campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The question is whether that person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.

What a hell of a state we’re in when Donald Trump, with zero Christian bona fides, is considered the avatar of one variety of “Christian Nationalism.” And while I question the use of “Christian Nationalism” to describe MAGAworld, he’s definitely the avatar of something that thinks it’s Christian. So too may be DeSantis, this time with some bona fides.

It’s shaping up once again that I’ll be unable to vote in good conscience for either major party candidate next fall.

Legalia

How much menace can we be required to tolerate?

Today, Kat Rosenfeld of UnHerd gained the coveted status of “Writers the Tipsy Teetotaler intends henceforth to pay closer attention to.”

Her topic is the subway death of Jordan Neely at the hands of Daniel Penny with the approbation of some other passengers. It’s so rich that I commend the whole essay to you at UnHerd though it was reprinted at Bari Weiss’s Free Press behind a paywall:

During the 2017 peak of the #MeToo movement, the conversation about sexual harassment came down to two related but ultimately separate questions. On the one hand, there was the question of what men shouldn’t do; on the other, there was the question of what women could be expected to tolerate.

…

For [Jordan Neeliy] to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.

…

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo … would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit …

But, no: instead, many of the people who once insisted that men who slid into DMs deserved the complete destruction of their professional reputations became passionate advocates for toughening up when it came to dealing with volatile people on public transit.

…

To sum up: a man who reposts an off-colour joke is advertising his innate misogyny, to the point where women should feel uncomfortable sharing a workplace with him. But an agitated and clearly unstable man announcing to a crowded subway car — as Neely reportedly did — that he’s been pushed to the brink and is ready to die, or go to prison for life: why in the world would you find that menacing?

…

Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly. This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behaviour of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinised in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming”, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.

…

That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.

(Italics added)

One cavil: Maybe Rosenfeld has been frequenting further-Right sites than I do, but “singing ‘He Had It Coming’, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness” strikes me, for once, as hyperbolic bothsiderism.

There definitely is a reflex to defend Daniel Penny, but the Right-coded commentary I’ve seen appreciates that Jordan Neely was non compos mentos and didn’t “deserve” to die. Were it clear that Daniel Penny intended his death, a lot of his support would disappear.

Meanwhile, I’m at least glad that there’s a generous legal defense fund for Penny — some of it probably ill-motivated, but the shade of green is the same regardless of motive — so he can mount a proper fight against dubious criminal charges.

Abortion extremism

North Carolina state lawmakers voted Tuesday to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that prohibits most abortions after 12 weeks of gestation, with exceptions for rape and incest (up to 20 weeks of gestation), “life-limiting anomalies” (up to 24 weeks), and life of the mother (no limit). The bill also appropriates money for child and foster care programs, contraception, and paid parental leave for teachers and government employees. North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers have pitched the legislation as a model for states around the country.

TMD.

I said previously that Governor Cooper’s veto should brand him as an absolutist and his party’s position on abortion as extreme.

I know I am well out of the mainstream, but this Bill strikes me as being about where the country is likely to end up on average, for the foreseeable future, with a few solid blue states echoing Gov. Cooper’s absolutism in favor of any and all abortions.

And if accepting that reality offends you, I commend The Truth of Sensible Politics at The Public Discourse.

Culture

A Cold Splash of Reality

A few years before his death in 1972, [C.] Day Lewis was made Poet Laureate of the UK—which is generally a mixed blessing of an honor, tending to mean that the poet in question has their best work behind them and now must try to summon the muses to celebrate the wedding of someone sixth in line to the throne.

Things Worth Remembering: A Poem for Parents | The Free Press

Fun fact 1: C. Day Lewis was father of Daniel Day Lewis.

Fun fact 2: Although I recognize the name as that of an actor, I probably could not pick Daniel Day Lewis out of a police lineup of famous middle-age, caucasian (whatever that means), dark-haired actors. I’m just not a movie groupie.

Embrace of Vigilantism

Jamelle Bouie, who I probably should watch more closely, echoes my distress over the Right-wing valorization of white males who arguably acted as vigilantes. (The Republican Embrace of Vigilantism Is No Accident).

He might have mentioned Left-wing valorization of the victims, who generally were not without fault in the lethal incidents, but if I’m going to complain about bothsiderism, I shouldn’t fault writers who don’t practice it — even if it’s because they see no enemies or toxic extremists on their side of the spectrum.

Companion Piece: Recommended: Firearms Classes Taught Me, and America, a Very Dangerous Lesson

Companion Piece to the Companion Piece: B. D. McClay, Phenomenology of the Gun (Recommended by an acquaintance on micro.blog)

The Good Life

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

More, from elsewhere:

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence.

If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society? Perhaps we can sum it up thusly: What does it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his soul? If America has gained the world but lost its soul, we should be anxious indeed.

Jon D. Schaff, Are Americans Better Off?

Parity

Ultimately, the education system should commit to spending at least as much on a fifteen-year-old whose next seven years will be spent in a combination of school, apprenticeship, and employment as it spends on one headed to a four-year public university.

Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker

Micro.blog

In the footer of each blog post, I mention my presence on micro.blog and blot.im for shorter items or outbursts, respectively. Now Alan Jacobs has written a neat summary of micro.blog, the three paths of micro.blog.

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

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

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.

Saturday, 5/13/23

Rank Politics

More on the CNN forum

If I were the president of CNN I’d feel like the Alec Guinness character at the end of “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Suddenly he realizes that all his work, his entire mission, only helped the bad people he meant to oppose. “What have I done?”

…

Ramesh Ponnuru in the Washington Post offered the kind of questions he wished had been asked: Why have so many high-level officials of your own administration, including an attorney general, national security adviser, defense secretary and two communications directors, turned against you? Are you bad at hiring people? With Republicans holding both the House and Senate in the first two years of your presidency, why didn’t you get funding for the border wall? Were you rolled by Speaker Paul Ryan, or did you just drop the ball?

Mr. Trump’s critics, foes and competitors will say that he often lied. Of course he did, over and over. It’s what he does. Dogs bark, bears relieve themselves in the woods; we can’t keep “discovering” this.

…

His special talent, his truest superpower, is seeming to believe whatever pops out of his mouth, and sticking to it. Observers shake their heads despairingly: “He lies and people believe him.” I think it’s worse than that. He lies and a lot of supporters can tell it’s a lie—they know from their own memory it’s a lie, that, say, Jan. 6 wasn’t a “beautiful day” of “patriots” full of “love”—but they don’t mind. They admire his sheer ability to spin it out.

Peggy Noonan, CNN Brings Donald Trump Back

One of my two Senators shows some balls

U.S. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, was a bit salty the morning after Donald Trump’s Wednesday night town hall on CNN, telling reporters that he didn’t plan to support the former president for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Why?, he was asked. “Where do I begin?” Based on video collected in social media posts, Young disagreed with Trump’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That was for starters, when it came to Young’s impression of a Trump for ’24 run. According to HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic’s social media feed, Young said: “You want a nominee to win the general election. As President Trump says, I prefer winners. He just consistently loses. In fact, he has a habit of losing not just his own elections, but losing elections for others. … I don’t think conservatives would be well-served by electing someone whose core competency seems to be owning someone on Twitter.”

Via Dave Bangert, Based in Lafayette, a Substack from a retired local newspaper guy who’s entering his third year of doing an awfully good job as his former employer fades away.

Indiana Sen. Todd Young made no bones about his opposition to Trump the day after the town hall. Asked to list his reasons, Young replied, “Where do I begin?” And others may soon be so emboldened.

If the point of lying down is to avoid the fight, including Trump pushing another raft of low-quality Senate candidates in key races, how does it look if it’s not a one-time decision but a daily struggle? What if, like Mike Pence, you do everything you can to serve Trump and he still ends up sending a murderous mob after you?

If you have to take a beating either way, there’s got to be some appeal to starting on your own two feet instead of flat on your back.

Chris Stirewalt

Sen. Young has finally done something that might just persuade me to vote for him. (We live in an age where the bar for statesmanship is tragically low.)

The tragedy of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a very successful sociopath … [His] tantrums and threats stem entirely from a narcissistic grandiosity and sense of entitlement only possible for someone who has made a lifetime of immoral choices and has either come out the better for it or simply paid no discernable price …

… Barring some last-minute conversion, his soul is lost. But the compulsion to defend Trump is doing damage to the souls of his defenders.

Jonah Goldberg

I hope for the salvation of everyone, no exceptions. But the hope is thinner for some than for others.

But maybe prosperity gospel heretic Paula White (who was his adviser and now identifies as his pastor) gave Trump some magic salvation words to say back in 2015-16, and that’s why partisan Evangelical hacks were assuring America’s most gullible voters that Trump was now “a baby Christian.”

Less rank politics

Not holding my breath

Mainstream media really should put a hold on Harlan Crowe and Clarence Thomas so it can give the Biden family grift the attention it deserves.

Why does public safety “code Right” in the US?

We have an Englishman staying with us right now, and it’s funny talking to someone from a country where liberals want, fight for, and actually expect clean, safe subways and clean, safe parks. In England and much of Europe, these aren’t controversial goals. Public transit is a point of pride, a brilliant use of public funds. Here in the US of A, for some godforsaken reason, the good liberals who run cities have decided that wanting safe subways and clean, fentanyl-free parks is right-wing and lame. Which leads us to Emma Vigeland, an influential leftist media personality, co-host of The Majority Report, a perfect representative of the movement, so here’s her full quote this week:

“I was hit, at one point, sitting on the subway by a man who was having a mental health episode. . . hit me in the face and body and it was jarring, right?” Vigeland says. “Every one of us who’s taken public transit has had this kind of situation happen. . . . And I was scared, I was hit. But my fear is not the primary object of what we should be focusing on right now; it’s the fact that this person is in pain. The politics of dehumanization privileges the bourgeois concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow, narrow instance.”

Like me, Emma went to fancy private schools before she became a socialist and I became. . .  whatever this is. Anyway, I love her private school-meets-American-socialism dig at the people who want safe subways: She calls it “bridge-and-tunneler anti-homeless hysteria.” Emma, I agree there are some bridge-and-tunnel vibes going on in the subway conversation. Like ugh, all these women who don’t want to be punched in the face, wandering around with ugly purses. It’s jarring!

Nellie Bowles

Not politics

Central Park

I’ve moved away from mass media and the megaworld and simply go walk in the park and admire the nameless walkers. benchwarmers, birdwatchers, ballplayers, and realize that celebrity being so widespread, it is anonymity that is special. Fame is an old story and the nameless are a delightful mystery.

It’s Central Park, 840 acres in the middle of Manhattan, land bought by the state legislature in 1856 at the urging of idealists like the poet William Cullen Bryant, designed by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and the work was completed in 1876, a peaceful paradise where a person can move at a stately pace or perch in a peaceful spot and observe vegetation, wildlife, humanity, or consult the heart, whatever appeals at the moment.

Timing is everything. In 1856, the tract was rocky, swampy, unurbanized, and had the legislature not moved promptly, developers would’ve figured out how to drain and level the land and the grid would’ve swallowed it and today it would be blocks and blocks of rectangles. Instead we enjoy this fabulous gift from the 19th century.

That the seed was sown by a famous poet is astonishing. Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” was his big hit; my grandma Dora knew passages of it by heart, especially his admonition to go to your grave unafraid, with unfailing trust, as one wraps a blanket around himself and lies down to sleep.

Well, they didn’t have TikTok back then so they had to do their best with what they had, such as poetry.

Garrison Keillor, A day in May sitting in the Park

I remain grateful

It seems I’m one of few college graduates in my age cohort that has never tried marijuana — not even without inhaling. Vacationing in states that have legalized it, and driving past all the dispensaries cashing in, I’ve had fleeting thoughts of “what the heck, should I see what all the buzz is about?” and then answered “Nah.”

Seems that this has been a good life choice. Apart from never gaining even more weight that would have come with heavy use (and the consequent appetite stimulation), I may have avoided worse:

Heavy marijuana use increases the rate of schizophrenia: A new analysis of nearly 7 million Danish health records found that heavy marijuana use correlates with schizophrenia. The study claims that marijuana played a role in 15 percent of schizophrenia cases. And that “one-fifth of cases of schizophrenia among young males might be prevented” by avoiding heavy marijuana use. One new problem is that weed has gotten too good (i.e., too strong). The study was published in Psychological Medicine, and its authors are clearly super lame and total narcs.

Via Nellie Bowles

Wordplay, aphorisms and memorables

I’ve left Twitter now — as so many of you regularly lobbied me to, and it does indeed feel better. But I still look at it, the way you look at your own poo before flushing.

Andrew Sullivan, The Intermission Is Over

It’s the damnedest thing, but a race to the bottom does produce a winner.

Chris Stirewalt quoting Sen. Kevin Cramer on the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024.

If Trump was back in his old fighting form, congressional Republicans were back in their old roles too: a broom and shovel brigade cleaning up behind him.

Chris Stirewalt

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.

Thursday, 9/29/22

Today marks the 24th anniversary of my father’s death and 40 days since the death of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a titan in Anglophone Eastern Orthodoxy.

I’m surprised at how much I’ve aggregated. It definitely was time to get it out of draft and onto the internet.

Rightward swings in the Western World

When Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders

Rapid mass migration, we now know, is arsenic to egalitarian social democracy.

But why turn to the former neo-Nazis? You won’t find an answer to that in woke-captured media either. The answer is similar to the reason Americans turned to Trump: for a very long time, no one in the mainstream parties or media would acknowledge the reality of the migrant crisis or do anything about it, except call those asking questions racists and fascists.

… In the immortal words of David Frum: if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.

Andrew Sullivan on the roots of Sweden’s political swing to the hard right.

Italy’s rightward swing

We’re left with a picture of a country in which the center-left is supported mainly by the educated, secular, and professional classes, while the right appeals to a cross-section of the rest of the country—the working class as well as the middle and upper-middle classes, along with the religiously pious and the large numbers of Italians who treat religion as a symbol or identity-marker without actually believing in or practicing it.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because similar things have been happening in many places over the past decade. The precise political results of these shifts have varied from country to country as they’ve interacted with different electoral systems, but the underlying trends in public opinion can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in France, Great Britain, the U.S., and other countries. In each case, the center-left has gone into decline with the center-right and anti-liberal populist right rising to take its place.

Until the center-left figures out a way to win back the working- and middle-class, as well as the nominally religious, it will continue to lose precious political ground to the populist and nationalist right.

Damon Linker

I’m quite impressed with Linker’s still-newish Substack. He’s been writing almost daily, but I don’t recall any total duds yet, and that’s a bit of a rarity even with writers whose schedules are more relaxed.

Angry Incoherence from the 5th Circuit

“I think passing this law was so much fun for these [Texas] legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.

Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, via Charlie Warzel on NetChoice v. Paxton, a bizarre 5th Circuit opinion upholding a Texas law that, motivated by a perception of liberal bias in moderation, essentially forbade big internet platforms to moderate content — and forbade them from ceasing to do business in Texas to boot! Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?.

Domestic Politics

Proxy or Leader?

The flow-with-the-go model of politics is baked into representative democracy. Or, rather, representative democracy invariably is shaped by the tension between the conception of representative-as-proxy—“I’m just here to represent the Will of the People!”—and representative-as-leader, a  role in which a representative will, from time to time, be obliged to ignore or overrule popular sentiment in service to prudence and justice. This is Edmund Burke 101: “Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Kevin D. Williamson, Grift 2.0

Burke’s has been my view of representative democracy for longer than I can remember. And his examples of "Grift 2.0" ring true.

Comparative hate

I don’t know a statement more indicative of the character of our moment than this by J. D. Vance: “I think our people hate the right people.”

Alan Jacobs. Sadly, Vance is quite public about his Christian faith. That he should consider hate-promotion a feature, not a bug, is jarring.

Powered by Pure Spite

The cardinal virtue of modern conservative populism is spite. Whatever gambit a populist is pursuing, whatever agenda he or she might be advancing, the more it offends the enemy the more likely it is to be received by the right adoringly. Ron DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard stunt is an efficient example. It accomplished nothing meaningful yet observers on both sides agree that he helped his 2024 chances by pulling it off. He made the right people mad. That’s more important than thoughtful policy solutions.

…

Why spite has become so important to the right-wing populist ethic is hard to say, as it’s not symmetrical between the parties. The most prominent left-wing populist in Congress is probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a politician who, despite her many faults, doesn’t want for policy ideas. Ask AOC what her top priority as a legislator is and she might say the Green New Deal or Medicare For All. The most prominent right-wing populist in Congress is likely Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ask Greene what she wants to do with her power as a legislator and she’s apt to say, “Impeach Joe Biden.”

“Impeach Joe Biden for what?” you might ask, as if that matters. …

Spite doesn’t need a reason.

Nick Catoggio (f/k/a Allahpundit), The Wild Ones

True Movements or Mostly Hype?

It is perfectly clear that there is a movement in America of people who call themselves evangelicals but have no properly theological commitments at all. But what’s not clear, to me anyway, is how many of them there are. Donald Trump can draw some big crowds, and those crowds often have a quasi-religious focus on him or anyway on what they believe he stands for — but those crowds are not large in the context of the entire American population. They’re very visible, because both Left and Right have reasons for wanting them to be visible, but how demographically significant are they really?

I have similar questions about, for instance, the “national conservatism” movement. Is this actually a movement? Or is it just a few guys who follow one another on Twitter and subscribe to one another’s Substacks?

Alan Jacobs

Culture

I dread our being too much dreaded

I must fairly say I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. . . . We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Edmund Burke via Michael Brendan Dougherty, defending himself and Christopher Hitchens against charges of being Putin apologists for long opposing our policies in Ukraine, almost none of which charges are made in good faith.

Dougherty continues:

To [Peter] Hitchens, whom I have admired greatly for some time, I say now is the time to apply realism to the trolls and demagogues and even to many of the think-tankers and mandarins on the other side. Our case is that they are mishandling grave matters, that they are hubristic and deluded about their own nations and about grand strategy. We think they are casting themselves, absurdly, as great statesmen like Churchill. You and I, having read just a little more history than can fit into a two-hour movie, don’t even belong to that cult in the same way they do. Why, then, should we ever have expected them to treat their powerless critics fairly?

Realism means admitting that our leadership is unworthy, deluded, and stupid. Really they are unprepared, or unfit for their roles. They have led us from one disaster to the next for over two decades. But we may avoid the worst calamity in spite of their failures. We may be saved the miscalculation of others. Or our salvation may be that the huge treasury of power and advantage bequeathed to our nations by previous generations cannot be wasted entirely, even by foolish heirs like these. Or it may be by pure dumb luck, or the grace of God.

White Liberals

I love WL’s [White Liberals], love ’em to death. They’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.

Paul Farmer via Alan Jacobs

Invisible infrastructure

Our immigration system is broken, and relies on the invisible infrastructure maintained by non-profits and religious groups.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (italics added).

I think everyone knows the system is broken, but I had not been award of the invisible infrastructure. Maybe Paul Farmer wasn’t completely right about white liberals.

Because I say so. That’s why.

Over two decades ago, when I was getting to know Eric [Metaxas], we had a friendly argument over something theological, as we walked around Manhattan. When I challenged something Eric said, he replied that God had told him it was the thing to do. “How do you know that?” I asked. Because he did. The argument went nowhere. I remember it so clearly because that was the first time I had ever had a conversation with someone who asserted that something was true not because God said it — all Christians must believe that, or throw out Scripture — but because God had said it to them personally.

Rod Dreher, What I Saw at the Jericho March (MAGA at prayer event a shocking display of apocalyptic faith and politics — and religious decadence)

Apple pulls back from China

Apple announced Monday it has already begun manufacturing its new iPhone 14 in India, just weeks after the updated product launched and months earlier than previously expected. Production of the company’s newest line of phones typically begins in Chinese factories because of existing supply-chain efficiencies, with some of it shifting to India after six to nine months. The move is likely indicative of Western companies’ newfound desire to limit reliance on China amid economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions.

The Morning Dispatch for Tuesday, 9/27/22

Battling Amazon in France

France introduces a delivery charge for books: The “minimum charge of €3 will help small independent booksellers struggling to compete with Amazon and other giant online retailers.”

Micah Mattix

The New Economy

Financialization itself, at the grand scale, was a racket—substituting swindles and frauds for the old economy of industrial production.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

Journalism, traditional and new

Toxic News Swamp

[H]ow could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false?

Glenn Greenwald, How Do Big Media Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other’s Falsehoods?

Oases of Sanity

If you’re tired of tearing your hair out over political writing, Alan Jacobs has the cure: an array of sane writers who are not carrying water for anyone or any cause:

  • Leah Libresco Sargeant
  • Noah Millman
  • Damon Linker
  • Zeynep Tufecki
  • Yair Rosenberg
  • John McWhorter
  • Freddie deBoer
  • Jonathan Rauch
  • Jonathan Haidt
  • Jesse Singal
  • David French
  • Andrew Sullivan

Wordplay

Shameware

Software voluntarily installed on a smartphone to allow someone else to monitor, and challenge, one’s internet browsing. One group of Churches in particular is using it.

Similar to surveillance software like Bark or NetNanny, which is used to monitor children at home and school, “shameware” apps are lesser-known tools that are used to keep track of behaviors parents or religious organizations deem unhealthy or immoral. Fortify, for instance, was developed by the founder of an anti-pornography nonprofit called Fight the New Drug and tracks how often an individual masturbates in order to help them overcome “sexual compulsivity.” The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has thousands of reviews on the Google Play store.

Wired

My first reaction was “maybe some people really need this to straighten out.” But the security holes it creates are technically worrisome apart from spiritual or psychological concerns.

Mechanical Jacobins

Automobiles, in the lexicon of Russell Kirk

Fractally wrong

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick’s summary of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upholding Texas’ ban on big sites moderating content (see above). In greater detail…

made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.”

Via Charlie Warzel, Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?.

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

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

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

Miscellany, 4/23/21

For many years now it has been crystal clear to me that the shape of reality is the shape of a myth, not a hard drive, and that the path back to understanding it – the way out of the cul de sac of Machine modernity – is a spiritual one.

Paul Kingsnorth, Intermission: The Empty Throne (The Abbey of Misrule)

First, I’d like to say I’m not surprised by much today, but I was taken aback by the rage in some parts of the right at the conviction of Derek Chauvin …

I could fill an entire newsletter with strange and dangerous reactions from prominent right-wing voices after the Chauvin verdict. The pathologies of right-wing infotainment are one reason why I have so little patience for most of the right’s relentless criticism of the mainstream media. Somehow, in all their rage and fury, they’ve created a competing media ecosystem that’s actually worse than the institutions they hate. Take the log out of your own eye.

But then, over in Ohio, many of the biggest public figures and news outlets in America got busy reminding us exactly why so many in the right feel such deep frustration. They reminded us why it’s often accurate to critique left-wing media narratives, especially when it’s obvious that those narratives will force people to deny or to ignore the witness of their eyes just as thoroughly as the far-right ignored the witness of their own eyes in the Chauvin trial.

The police shooting of 15-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was tragic and deeply, deeply sad. It was also nothing like the police murder of George Floyd. Yet immediately important voices tied the deaths together ….

David French, Don’t Create False Villains To Serve a Greater Good. I boldfaced the part that made me want to stand up and cheer, but felt obliged to provide the context, too.

… the Politician’s Fallacy: we need to do something; this is something; therefore we need to do this. There’s lots of racism in the workplace, no doubt. So the answer is to… pay businesses millions of dollars to come and preemptively scold bored employees who are only attending these workshops out of coercion? That’s the solution? Seems like a great way for a few people to get rich, but sure doesn’t seem like it’ll do jack shit to actually reduce workplace racism. Also… you get that employers pay for these things purely because they can use them as evidence that they have not created a racially discriminatory workplace in the event that they get sued, right? So Robin Diangelo’s business is literally making it harder for employees of color to get financial compensation for being the victims of discrimination. Cool, cool, cool. Anti-racism!

Ah, but I’m questioning a progressive and anti-racist and her worldview (and hustle), so I am surely just a classic Substack guy. When you can’t object to anything at all, lest you be consigned to the list of “anti-cancel culture guys,” you can’t ask if things make sense, if the tactics people in the social justice world endorse actually do what they’re meant to do. The point is to build an actually-more just world, right? So we have to figure out what actually works. I don’t begrudge people who are casting around for solutions to entrenched problems. But it’s not enough for a solution to have good intentions. It has to actually be a solution. To figure out if something actually is a solution you have to have an internal debate. You have to ask tough questions – not “just asking questions” but actual hard questions that stem from the world being a complicated place. But you can’t do that if you insist that any internal criticism is a con or a way to show allegiance to the alt-right.

This is the culture that liberals have created: asking “is this really going to make the world more just?” is itself impermissible. You aren’t allowed to ask if tactics work anymore! Ask David Shor. Do riots help Black people? We’ll never know. Racist even to ask, I’m told. Hard questions are not permitted ….

Freddie deBoer, Cynical Motives for a Cynical Time.

The Maxine Waters Problem
When America’s officials desert any standards for public or personal behavior, expect violence.

Those were the un-ironic headline and sub headline for a Daniel Heninger editorial in the Wall Street Journal on April 22. There was no mention in the editorial of Donald Trump or the violent storming of the U.S. Capital on January 6.

A strange thing has happened: I no longer enjoy the Wall Street Journal Opinion page. I still enjoy the Journal, though, for straight reporting — just about the straightest major newspaper reporting available today.

I only regret that WSJ mostly finds "newsworthy" stories about business and finance.

No, that’s not true. I even more regret that it dare not notice the signs that we’re headed for another bubble burst. Irrational optimism is more marketable.

Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

…

The fact that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and other institutions.

Rod Dreher, after long block-quote of David Brooks

Providing poor and minority families the same choice of schools that their wealthier neighbors enjoy is the purest example of ‘social justice’ in our society today.

Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, quoted by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.

When I was a Calvinist, I had a young friend who was working on his PhD and then went on to become an academic in a well-regarded Christian college. So even though I had become Orthodox in the meantime, I eagerly bought a book he co-authored — a book about "Church."

What a revelation! It was difficult to find any common ground with this, for instance:

There is no single correct way of doing and being church. Trying not to be like other churches is, of course, just another conception and idealization, albeit a pathological one. While our prophetic visions of church should help us see where churches are not boasting solely in Jesus, they too often boast in themselves, and they justify their “correctness” by letting others know how they are not like “incorrect” models of church.

Thinking one has a "prophetic vision[] of church" according to which the church should be re-fashioned is just not on my radar any more — not as friendly forces, at least.

Luther once declared from the pulpit that he could commit adultery one hundred times in a day and it would not affect his justification before God.

Kimberly Hahn and Scott Hahn, Rome Sweet Home

I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer.

Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome!

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.

I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer. I do not need another computer.

Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome! Darn, that new iMac looks awesome!

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.