26 potpourri

Technology and Humanity

[T]he Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it, and they know how to limit it. They have refused to see “technological innovation” as an end in itself.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness. Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.

Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters, Stop Hacking Humans

Technology does not drive history; rather, since the Middle Ages human desires have driven technological innovations, which in turn influence human desires.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

[T]echnology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Of course it’s Seattle

Calkins titled his column, “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”

He said he felt compelled to weigh in after meeting a 16-year-old who had lost a track and field race to a male student in eighth grade.

“I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in,” he said.

In the column, Calkins argued that, “Two things can be true at once. You can show compassion for people who feel trapped in the wrong body while acknowledging they have a biological advantage. After all, why do we separate males and females in sports in the first place?”

“It’s not due to the potential awkwardness of physical contact,” he added.

“It’s because men have higher testosterone levels and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages. This isn’t something I bring up at dinner parties, but it’s undeniable. By every measurable metric in sports — whether it be 100-meter times, vertical leaps, weightlifting, yards off the tee, etc. — the top males substantially outperform the top females.”

Brittany Bernstein, Seattle Times Writer Resigns After Editors Spike Column Defending Fairness in Women’s Sports.

I wish people would just shut up and enjoy the game the WNBA is playing. It almost feels as if some misogynist trolls are trying to divert attention from how beautifully women can play. If you’ve missed most of the season, you can find highlights on YouTube (mixed with the trolls, of course). I’m not even tagging this post with any trigger words the trolls are throwing against the wall.

Tariff Wars

[W]ars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

David Frum.

I’m rooting for the Canadians on this. Trade war with Canada is one of Trump’s spastic depredations that I hope can be reversed on 1/20/29.

Educated Exile

I’ve noted how often I’m quoting Rod Dreher again, or crediting him as the source of a quote from someone else. I dropped his Substack for a while, then managed to re-up for a longer subscription than I intended. But I seem to have figured out how to sort through his logorrhea without resenting it this time around.

He recently posted with the main topic being Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Life…. It’s another “poor Appalachian makes it to the Ivy League” story, and Rod added something that haunts me:

Emilee Hackney is now in her late 20s, married, a mother of one, and working in the English department at the University of Virginia, on the administrative side. What she may not know fully — yet — is that her life will always be one of exile, wherever she lives. She can’t ever go Home, not really, yet she won’t ever feel entirely at home anywhere else. This is a burden that many, many people live with in our highly mobile society.

Rod speaks from deep experience, though his background was more insular than poor, and his life-changing experience was a state school for the gifted rather than an Ivy League college.

Education has costs that cannot be measured in money. Life is full of trade-offs.

Without comment

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

The Economist, How Sweden became a country of big-state libertarians.

C.S. Lewis on War

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.

C.S. Lewis, Why I Am Not a Pacifist in The Weight of Glory.

I was with him up through “I do not think they are.” We venerate many saints because they would not deny their faith in the face of torture and martyrdom. My doubt, or desire for clarification, comes from the last sentence.

Shorts

In reality, the best way to understand Trumpism isn’t that it replaced one Republican ideology with another but rather that a cult of personality essentially destroyed Republican ideology altogether and we do not yet know what will take its place. (David French)
“When I see something that’s honestly badly written, it’s such a breath of fresh air now,” said Angeline Rodriguez, an agent at WME, noting that some of the submissions she’s getting now “make ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ look like Tolstoy.” (Anna Silman)
How Greek Farmers Milked EU Funds From Imaginary Cows Politico via the Morning Dispatch.
Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit. (David Graham, Thank You for Your Inattention to This Matter)
Francis was a charming, foolish boy who grew into a charming, foolish man. He did no harm in the world except by being born into a role he could not fulfill. (Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz)
The passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength) (we could call it “Inner Circle.”)
Many of the findings of neuroscience simply offer us a description of the brain correlates of human experience. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things. I greatly admire the precision of that sentence. I could have taken several paragraphs to say it.)
When the little boy said the emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. But he added to their knowledge nonetheless. By blurting out what every onlooker could see within earshot of the others, he ensured that they now knew that everyone else knew what they knew, that everyone knew that everyone knew that, and so on. And that changed their relationship to the emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. (Steven Pinker, Why Authoritarians Fear Common Knowledge)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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

Summer Solstice

Israeli ingenuity

As news circulated about the stupendous success of Israel’s attack on Iran, my first thought was that if you told me Mossad had figured out a way to part the Red Sea, at this point I’d believe you. The feats of intelligence and ingenuity that Israel has managed over the past year at the expense of Iran and its proxies would seem far-fetched as fiction, but here we are. It’s reassuring to see a Western nation demonstrate such competence as the United States descends into malevolent dark-age populist anarchy.

Nick Catoggio

Speed-reading

60 or so years ago, I took “Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics” (a current version here) to increase my reading speed. After teaching us a technique for dragging our eyes down a page via a hand movement, they said “Resolve that from now on you’ll never read without this.”

I said to myself “The day I speed-read the Psalms that way would be a very sad day.”

I recently installed a browser extension to generate AI summaries of the current browser tab. It is saving me quite a bit of time on humdrum news and opinion.

But the day I settle for a structured outline of Nick Catoggio (or Kevin D. Williamson) instead of reading their own sprightly writing will be pretty sad, too.

Skrmetti

Experts

The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise. The United States asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Government’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be medically necessary. … The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus.

There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.” … Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.

Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.” … By correctly concluding that SB1 warrants the “paradigm of judicial restraint,” … the Court reserves to the people of Tennessee the right to decide for themselves.

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in U.S. v. Skrmetti, via Eugene Volokh (citations omitted).

Strategic error

Representative Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride (D., Del.), the first transgender member of Congress, has admitted that the Democratic Party moved too quickly on pushing transgender issues. The lawmaker believes the left “went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.” Yet the representative still fails to understand the root of the problem: The left’s strategy on transgenderism failed because the left is wrong on transgenderism. Men cannot become women. Pretending like accepting the most outré claims of transgenderism is achievable through taking higher-level classes won’t change that. Besides, Americans are increasingly uninterested in enrolling in such courses. Polls show that support for so-called gender-transition procedures for children has declined, and Americans believe that trans people should use the bathroom that matches their sex, not their “gender identity.” The activists’ problem isn’t that they have failed to finesse their message; it’s that they have failed biology.

National Review Weekly email

The Barbarian Right

For many of the conservatives who embraced it—myself included—the Trumpian moment promised a more populist, pro-worker GOP. Yet the latest iteration of Donald Trump has dashed these hopes, playing down the themes that propelled his 2016 campaign, and sounding more and more like a conventional Republican nominee—only more erratic.

In the realm of right-wing ideas, meanwhile, something far grimmer is afoot: the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought, including the idolatry of strength (as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate); the notion of supposedly “natural” hierarchies; IQ-based eugenics; overt racism and antisemitism.

Call them the Barbarian Right: The master subject of this worldview is the Nietzschean barbarian or “aristocrat of the spirit” who overthrows the egalitarian—and essentially feminine—structures that have long shackled him, restraining his yearning for adventure and excellence. Nazi apologia is par for the course.

Sohrab Ahmari

Christian Nationalist crackup

“Political idolatry,” he observes, “assumes worship, and worship assumes some kind of confidence in the thing being worshiped,” but few of the people obsessively following politics have much real faith in it anymore. It has become for many a kind of spectator sport, or live-action role-playing, far easier to participate through digital media, yet harder to take seriously. There is a performativity to our culture wars now that I suspect was not there in the 90s.

…

Over the past six months, I have observed two communities of discourse. One, which I’ve observed as a bemused spectator, is the increasingly inane conversation of Very Online Christian Nationalism. Much of this discourse had long since descended into self-parody, but the loss of a clear and present common enemy after Trump’s victory swiftly accelerated the splintering of the movement. At time of writing, many of the movements principles were publicly devouring one another over whether, and to what extent, one should blame the Jews for the moral rot of modernity.

Brad Littlejohn, The Resilience of America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment, Mere Orthodoxy (magazine) Winter 2025.

I’m reminded of how the New Atheists, having gathered around the non-existence of God, found that they had nothing else in common and dispersed again. I suspect the MAGA Right has nothing in common beyond worship of our Orange Sun King.

Golden Age

Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation, Project 2025) and Kellyanne Conway went north to Canada to take the affirmative on the debate question “Is this America’s Golden Age?.” It was shared with permission on the Ezra Klein show because Ezra was one of the debaters taking the negative.

Roberts and Conway beclowned themselves and offended the audience (e.g., mentioning Canada’s possible status as a 51st state) and then complained that the debate was rigged when they drew audible disapproval and contempt.

In my estimation, the negative side “chewed them up and spit them out,” but I grew too impatient and mortified at our national debasement to wait for the audience’s verdict.

Whence innovation?

Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.

The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.

You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.

…

Because of the internet, every place is now a port city.

Ted Gioia. So Ted thinks the venture capitalists in entertainment are at a dead end with sequels, prequels, and every other “do-it-again-and-again” strategy.

The slippery euthanasia slope

[A] justification for suicide that emphasizes the cry for help that medicine can’t answer, the need for control over the uncontrollable, the desire to cure suffering that doctors can’t relieve, will struggle to maintain terminal illness as a special category. There are just too many people in this exceptional position but with no endpoint to their pain.

Ross Douthat, Why the Euthanasia Slope is Slippery

Nellie snippets

Meanwhile, in the U.S. of A., Whoopi Goldberg says that being black in America is worse than being a woman in Iran. Here was The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin: “I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is to live in Iran.” Whoopi retorted: “Not if you’re black.” Alyssa, have you possibly considered sitting your ass down and letting Whoopi speak her truth? The only place worse than Iran to be a woman might well be the panel on The View. I’ll take the veil over fighting with Joy Behar about DEI any day of the week.
Asked about Tulsi’s earlier testimony on Iran, Trump said simply: “I don’t care what she said.” All jobs under Trump are fake. All titles are fake. He makes decisions alone, meditating in the comforting glow of Fox News, turned up to the highest volume. He gets vibes off Truth Social. He asks an empty Diet Coke can if she ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon. He throws a groundhog in the air and sees if it lands on the bunker buster button. He shakes Marco Rubio and turns him upside down, and if the coins that fall out of his pockets land on heads, we’re going in.
Fascinating new scams: The Trump Organization announced it plans to sell a $499 smartphone, with a gold-colored, T-engraved case, set to be released this year. Trump Mobile will also offer a phone plan for $47.45 per month. The 47 Plan. What will the Golden Trump phone do? How bad will reception be? Who will it call? Will it automatically block my lib friends (Bari)? When it comes out, we’ll do an unboxing just for TGIF. In some ways, the Trump family are artists, true creatives. Week after week they come up with scams I’ve never imagined.
Obsessed with this mysterious Trump aide: Sergio Gor, director of presidential personnel, is one of the most powerful figures in the White House, responsible for vetting all potential employees—around 4,000 executive branch staff. But a recent report found that he himself was never vetted. Gor has not submitted Standard Form 86, or SF-86, a set of questions required of all those government employees who, like him, need security clearances. The form inquires into foreign connections and birth countries—and Gor, who claims to be from Malta (though Maltese officials could not confirm this), has mysterious origins and declined to provide his birthplace when the New York Post asked, which is apparently something people working in government can do. He also advocated to end the use of the SF-86 when hiring government employees. The man in charge of vetting new Trump admin employees is not vetted (poetic, isn’t it?). And he’s in the job now, specifically campaigning against vetting government employees. I desperately need to know more about Sergio. I need a movie about Sergio (which is absolutely not his real name).

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Miscellany

Prerequisite

In order for a boy to believe he is a girl, he must first be taught that there is a wrong way to be a boy.

Sam Morgan via Andrew Sullivan

Schooling

In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Obsessives

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks