There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.
But why should any gay, lesbian, or trans child be afraid for their lives? Who is trying to kill them? No one. The only reason some kids are scared is because the adults who have been brainwashing them in critical gender theory are scaring them, and Budde is joining in. If anything, a pause on medical experiments on children should be a cause for relief, not fear. And fear-mongering, in any case, is not a Christian message.
The spirit of Voltaire lives!
Voltaire, according to whom “the people is between man and beast,” wrote that “I want my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that I shall then be robbed and cuckolded less often.
Here is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries this week with aBraveheartcry for DEI initiatives: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion are American values. . . . Never surrender.” Right. Never surrender. Technically, you didn’t surrender, you just lost every major election and the popular vote. But I guess we can blame Liz Cheney, which, fair.
Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project guys are still just going on about January 6: “What happened to the Republicans? They once stood for law and order. But today, the party has taken their position: standing with violent insurrectionists over the people who keep us safe from them.” Please, I beg you, move on from January 6. It’s been done! Democrats see themselves as the January 6 Remembrance Party. And I’m telling you, that’s cool, but it can’t be the whole thing. You have to have one other thing! Many people (me) want to be proud Dems. Just give us one policy. Do one infrastructure bill. And no, it cannot be January 6–related.
New Yorkmag crops out all the black MAGA folks:New York magazine covered MAGA inauguration parties and mentioned more than once that almost everyone at the party was white. And I’m sure that’s true-ish, truth-adjacent. But to get that to be Fully True, the magazine cropped out all the black attendees from their own picture of one of the parties, and the magazine neglected to mention the host of the party was black. There’s certainly a neo-racist, neo-Nazi scene coming up on the right, but when you’re trying to say an event was a white supremacy rally, well, you gotta shoot to kill.
We try in vain to teach our children love of the true, the good and the beautiful if our actions reward bullshit, transgression and power.
Weird things: the little homily before protestant baptisms explaining to people that baptism doesn’t actually do anything.
Political fundamentals: don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. (Allan Watts)
What if they gave a war and nobody came? (A favorite bumper sticker from my youth.)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. (Mis-attributed to Albert Einstein; probably from a French equivalent by Alexandre Dumas)
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. (Susan Sontag via The Economist)
You truly possess only what you cannot lose in a shipwreck.(Sufi saying via Pico Iyer)
The Episcopal Church used to be “the Republican Party at Prayer.” Now it’s NPR at Prayer.
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. (George Orwell)
Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left. (Muriel Spark via the Economist)
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
I’m leading with Trump because his coronation is imminent and I’ve encountered a few unfamiliar worthy “takes” on him.
The Solzhenitsyn test
In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.
To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election. These are not merely matters that might be disputed, or on which reasonable people can disagree, or of which citizens in the public square can claim ignorance. They are lies, big, consequential lies that strike at the heart of the American system of government, that deny the history through which we have all lived, that reject the unambiguous facts that are in front of our noses. They are lies that require exceptional brazenness, or exceptional cowardice, or a break with reality to assert.
…
Whatever the defenses they come up with, however, the senior appointees of the Trump administration will have to enter public service having affirmed an ugly lie, or several. No matter what other qualities they have to their credit, that will remain with them. That, in turns, means that we can never really trust them: We must always suppose that, having told an egregious lie to get their positions, they will be willing to tell others to hold on to them. They can have no presumption of truthfulness in their government service.
That in turn will change them fundamentally. In Robert Bolt’s marvelous A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains to his daughter why he cannot yield to Henry VIII’s demand that he declare the king’s first marriage invalid, allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, and hopefully get the male heir the kingdom desperately needs. More knows that that declaration is in the public interest. He also knows that his refusal will sooner or later lead him to the execution block.
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.
To land a top job with Donald Trump, you have to open your fingers. It is, as Solzhenitsyn suggested, the end of your integrity.
The imbecilic clown show 1/6/21 was the least of it
We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
John Adams knew the secret in the heart of democracy: a death wish. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote. And so the American people, in their belligerent stupidity, have again given the awesome power of the presidency to the man who attempted to overthrow the government the last time he was entrusted with that power. Trump has, of course, promised to pardon those who carried out the violence and chaos of January 6, which is no surprise: The riot was conducted on his behalf, and that is the kind of riot he likes. His contempt for the law is utter and complete, and the only law that he honors is the one inscribed on his heart: “I should get whatever I want.”
Trump is the CCP’s cheapest date: Trump is scrambling to save TikTok. He’s filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to treat him like he’s already president and to stop this terrible ban of his favorite piece of Chinese spyware. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board puts it: “The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good.”
As background, Trump was against TikTok until. . . TikTok investor Jeff Yass and his wife Janine dropped about $100 million into Republicans in recent years. And then, what do you know, he’s all in for TikTok! Trump asked the Supreme Court not to act all sus on TikTok’s rizz.
Shadow president Elon Musk has deep business entanglements with China, so it’s a given he’s going to be compromised on this. But Trumpo—Mr. CHYNA—made nationalism his whole thing. And all it took was one Republican donor with cash, but not even that much for China, to continue the colonization of teenage American minds through the infectious disease known as TikTok. Democrats at least genuinely believe in the CCP. Like, they prefer it on an intellectual level. Republicans don’t; they’re just for sale, and cheap.
Meanwhile, the White House confirmed this week that a ninth American telecommunications firm has been hacked by China. Per the AP: “Though the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose communications were accessed.” China just reads all our texts and no one even cares. To explain this in a way you TikTok-addled people might understand: America is the unconscious patient in surgery, and our lawmakers are the surgeons and nurses doing a viral dance around our slack-jawed body.
Nellie Bowles. Remember: This is part of Bowles’ weekly sardonic news wrap-up. Take it seriously, not literally.
Simon won his bet with Ehrlich
Be it remembered that Julian (“The Ultimate Resource Simon, in my younger lifetime, made a wager with Paul (“The Population Bomb”) Ehrlich about what would happen to five key commodity prices over the period of the wager. Ehrich predicted that the prices would rise, Simon that they would fall.
As I read The Ultimate Resource, I thought “surely this is some very clever sophistry.” But Simon won the wager. All five commodities fell in real price.
Infinite growth in a finite world still seems impossible (though Simon probably would say the world isn’t finite in any economically significant way because of human ingenuity). There’s also the matter of externalities, about which “human ingenuity” seems kind of cavalier.
But Simon won the wager. That’s not nothing, and it doesn’t fit the left narrative.
Northstar
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.
This is the version of Rod Dreher that first caught my so favorable attention. I’m keeping a wary eye on the current version.
UBI
→ UBI really doesn’t work: It pains me to write this. But yet another study was published that shows universal basic income (UBI) doesn’t work.
Researchers gave $500 a month to a group of California households and compared them to a control group who received no money—quite the short straw to draw. The households that received the stipend ended up only $100 richer and actually purchased more cigarettes. So basically, UBI makes people French. They found that UBI had no positive effect on psychological or financial well-being. It didn’t even improve food security. Except that cigarettes make it so you don’t need lunch, so I guess food security is relative.
I was hoping universal basic income would become a reality nationwide. Then I could pursue my true passions: horseback riding, debutante balls, and cyberbullying.
The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.
Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky, rejecting the Biden administration’s novel interpretation of Title IX through federal rule-making.
First-world problems
The FBI has issued a formal warning to sports leagues about organized robberies of professional athletes. Since September, nine pro athletes have had their homes broken into, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Dončić, and Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. According to the FBI, organized crime groups from South America have used high-tech surveillance and hacking methods to spy on athletes and disable their security systems. (It also helps to know when a team is playing an away game.)
What answer did writer Fyodor Dostoevsky give a concerned mother about how to teach her son the difference between good and evil? “His answer both eased my anxiety and terrified me,” Vika Pechersky wrote for Christianity Today. “On the one hand, Dostoevsky gives simple advice to a set of very complex questions. There is no need to master elaborate philosophical systems and social theories to teach my children the meaning of good and evil. According to Dostoevsky, people have a natural yearning for truth, and this yearning comes to our aid in the work of parenting. Herein lies the terrifying part, for the work of parenting starts with my own self—my love of truth, rectitude, goodness of heart, freedom from false shame, and constant reluctance to deceive. I have to embody the love of truth and goodness and live them out in my daily life if I want to teach my children to love what is good.”
Looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.
Oh, and of course, they don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don’t give a single flying fuck… [about making] my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.
I guess this is the new role for human beings in the digital economy. We teach the bots how to replace us.
Those greedy bots will come back again in a few hours—they always do. So get busy and start posting.
AI F1 A -FRIEND of mine who sings the praises of AI has suggested that I might farm out Touchstone fundraising letters to Al or perhaps even have it write an article or two for the magazine. What could I say? I shook my head in silence. Failing to catch my meaning, he assured me that improvements to Al over the past year have it writing at a professional level.
“So what?” I said. “Why would anyone want to read it?”
“Because,” he said, “it writes well.”
Again I said, “So what?”
I have all but given up trying to explain my opposition to Al to those who seem to think that, if Al can be programmed to mimic the best writing of which men are capable, then why wouldn’t I want to use it? I tell them that I presume Al is now every bit as capable as they say and will be doubly so six months from now. And still I say, “So what?” And still they earnestly try to convince me that Al writes every bit as well as I just conceded it does.
My friend is a Formula 1 racing fan, so I tried a new angle: “I am certain that if they took the men out of the cars (and the pit crews out of the pits), Al drivers could churn out better lap times than their human counterparts every time.”
He found my suggestion ridiculous. “Who would want to watch that?”
-J. Douglas Johnson, Touchstone magazine, January/February 2025
Patience takes a lot out of you
His father said, “Kindness takes more strength than I have now. I didn’t realize how much effort I used to put into it. It’s like everything else that way, I guess.” … “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength—patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Marilynne Robinson, The Gilead Novels (I can’t way which Gilead novel; I have a Kindle version including all three.)
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
From nobody’s Synaxarion except mine: On this, the 29th day of July, we commemorate the chastening of Tipsy the not-yet-Orthodox, who was wounded in a stupid motorcycle accident in Lafayette in the year 1965.
Politics
Be it remembered
The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.
If only the GOP had more persons with balls like Liz Cheney’s! Speaking of which …
Toxic Masculinity rightly so called
The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men … Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. [Admiral William] McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.
There’s a seductive quality to Trump’s masculinity. Grievance is a form of counterfeit purpose, and anger is a form of counterfeit courage. For a time, your grievance can give you a mission — fighting the hated foe. And when you’re in the midst of an online temper tantrum, taking on all comers in your social media feed, you can feel a little bit brave, even if all you’re doing is tapping out vitriolic posts from the safety and comfort of your couch.
When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like [VP Candidate JD] Vance.
Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boys. And if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.
It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.
Hyperbole aside, I don’t much care if Trump does say that. There’s no way a constitutional amendment to that effect would pass within 3 years or so (i.e., in time for him to run again) — if ever.
Kamala
I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.
What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey.
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Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.
JD Vance has said some things he needs to explain or walk back. But so has Kamala Harris — at least when she’s not utterly vacuous in a pseudo-smart sort of way.
Public Affairs
Beacon of hope
Matthew Crawford is a guy with a PhD who still, compulsively, does things with his hands. Thus, he sometimes needs tools — like an “indicator base.”
The one from Harbor Freight was a real POS, as apparently are most things from there, their “thing” being selling really cheap Chinese stuff. He went to Grainger for a replacement:
The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones. The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto.
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My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe.
And so forth and so on. But there’s a better alternative, with some trade-offs:
I could end on this gloomy note. But let me tell you about another industrial supply house, McMaster-Carr, because the difference is remarkable. (They are my go-to source, but they have no storefronts as Grainger does, and I wanted my indicator base immediately.)
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My point is that the catalogue [“3,592 pages of dense type”] is written as though it matters, by people involved with material things. They want to sell stuff that enables people to do things. How is this allowed in 2024?!
The answer is surely connected to the fact that this family business, with 1,000 employees, which opened in the Chicago Loop in 1901, remains private, while Grainger is publicly traded. McMaster is said to be “secretive”, but a business intelligence site says the company “has historically raised $0 in funding,” meaning it has no debt. Meaning, it isn’t subject to the imperatives of what I like to call “systematized irrationality.” Global capital isn’t just impatient for returns, it is invested in models of reality that offer portability and scalability, allowing metrics to be applied across sectors and industries and communicated to people sitting in high-rise office buildings. Legibility-from-afar always means partial and hence fake legibility. It can be achieved by substituting representations for reality, but representations of a particular kind: they must be emptied of rich layers of content derived from the situated knowledge of particular practices – the very practices in which you might use the tool or material in question. This entails the destruction of knowledge, for the sake of uniformity and financial abstraction.
By contrast, the McMaster-Carr catalogue is like a modern-day version of Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If the final cataclysm were to happen, but you somehow had access to the catalogue and everything in it, you would be able to reconstruct the modern world. They have kept finance and IT in their proper place.
I decidedly do not work with my hands (unless you count typing). I used to be pretty handy in a general sort of way, but it’s gone away from decades of disuse. (My son must have picked up his dual mind-hand propensities from his maternal grandfather. His musical keyboard abilities are a total mystery. Milkman?)
But I can appreciate Crawford, and his story, and a privately-held company that does things right.
No storefronts? No problem!
Irish microcosm
Ardnacrusha was a revolutionary piece of technology in its time, enabling the newly-independent Irish state to provide huge amounts of electricity for a nation for which it was still a rarity (you can see fascinating photos and accounts of its construction here and here.) But the march of the Machine has consequences. In this case, those consequences included a 90% collapse in the salmon population of the Shannon, which previously had been world-famous for its salmon runs, along with the mass death of trout and eels, the silting up of parts of the waterway, an increase in flooding and the raising of the water level of Lough Derg.
Still at least Ireland now has a carbon-free electricity supply, right? Well, no. When it was built, Ardnacrusha was the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world, until it was beaten to that title by America’s Hoover Dam. On completion, it produced enough power to meet the electricity demand of the whole of Ireland. Today it produces just 2% of it. That’s how much the thirst for electricity has increased in one short century. An astonishing seventy per cent of all that electricity will be swallowed by Internet server farms by the end of this decade.
Behold! Sustainability!
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The giant wind turbines – subject to similar local protests across the land – are the latest Big Tech solution to the power ‘needs’ of the country: ‘needs’ which have accelerated a thousandfold in a century, and will continue to do so. Everybody wants insta-access to the shiny flicky pictures on the little Satanic Rectangle in their back pockets, but nobody wants to live in the middle of the power station needed to supply it. Well, get used to it, people, because the whole landscape will be a power station soon. Then there’ll be nowhere to hide except inside your VR headsets. Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!
We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:
(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.
Or you can align yourself with the other view:
(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.
Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world—namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms—are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.
We can’t afford to let that happen. So, as you might guess, I have an easy time picking (2) above as my chosen pathway.
And it’s not just my opinion. Plato and Socrates finally came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. Is it too much to hope that the people who control our music economy will eventually make that same discovery?
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.
Crunchy Cons was my introduction to Rod Dreher, and I liked it very much. “Beauty is more important than efficiency”? now that is counter-cultural!
I rather miss that sunnier, more optimistic version of him — which I did not read as a way forward for the GOP so much as a way forward for the culture. Speaking of which …
Living decently
What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does—can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, and honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization.
— Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return,” in A Continuous Harmony (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), page 51, via Gracy Olmstead
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces …?
On January 6, 2021, from a parking garage under the Capitol Visitor Center, then–Vice President Mike Pence ordered the military to defend the Capitol against a violent insurrection. According to a taped deposition of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pence “issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders” to him and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller: “Get the military down here. Get the Guard here. Put down this situation.”
…
In ordinary circumstances, Pence’s actions would be unconstitutional. Indeed, a vice president who usurped the president’s constitutional authority, and the Cabinet and military officers who followed his orders, could be committing an impeachable offense. …
…
Jefferson also insisted, the officer who exercises emergency power must justify his actions to “his fellow citizens generally.” For Jefferson, “the good officer” must throw “himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.”
From his title (Mike Pence Owes the Country an Explanation) and the first paragraph, I easily figured out where George Thomas was headed and why: he wants Pence to say he perceived an emergency if only because Donald Trump was failing to put down the rump insurrection.
What I didn’t expect was that he would bring Jefferson and Lincoln into it and would persuade me of his case — and by inference to repent of my former judgment on Lincoln for his ultra vires acts.
Yup, the world is messy sometimes. This once was one of my favorite quotes, in part because it challenged my purity fetish:
Purity … is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience Lectures 14 and 15, via here.
Sorting out a jumble
[W]e have no ideal path forward. We’re damned if Attorney General Merrick Garland goes forward with a Trump prosecution and damned if Garland holds off. But the latter path should nonetheless be treated as a viable Plan B because it permits the Democrats to continue beating Trump in the political arena by the widest possible margin. That involves all kinds of risks as well, but it’s less risky than the legal option.
Damon Linker, summarizing the case against prosecution that he’s been trying to make.
More:
To use the full powers of federal law enforcement during a Democratic administration to indict, try, convict, and punish this man would drive large numbers of Republicans even further into Trump’s arms …
The goal should be his political defeat—turning him into a loser in the court of public opinion—not using an extra-political workaround to try and exile him from political competition. If you think making Hitler and Chamberlain analogies clarifies these issues, good for you. I think it’s pretty idiotic.
For the sake of argument, I’ve been happy to concede the point and assume Trump is guilty of … something. But is it true? [] After reading a highly illuminating exchange between widely respected legal scholar Jack Goldsmith and journalist Josh Marshall, I’m honestly not sure.
Could it be that all of the sound and fury I’ve seen online from the left about the imperative of punishing Trump’s self-evident criminality is based on nothing more than a feeling, a conviction, a moral certainty that he simply must be guilty of something? If so, that would be a further sign that loathing for the former president is a fundamentally political impulse, not a legal one.
Maybe I’ll take a position on “prosecute or nolle prosequi” when someone convincingly shows that Trump committed an actual crime, and that prosecution will be a slam-dunk. Considering the proportion of Trumpists in the land, I’m not sure you’ll ever impanel a jury without one or with one that will vote to convict.
Why colleges are failing
The present model of colleges and universities is failing, for in the first place they have forgotten or even turned against their original mission; in the second, they have picked up a whole lot of unrelated sidelines, none of which they do very well, such as universal job certification; and in the third, the public is beginning to catch on that they cost far too much, and that other institutions can usually do each of these sidelines better. Barring root and branch reform – for which we must never give up hope — it’s entirely possible that in the not-so-distant future, serious humanities teaching will have to migrate to other settings than colleges and universities.
History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo…
Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump seemed like some kind of nadir, but the Florida panhandle is showing that we can go even lower: Matt Gaetz versus Rebekah Jones
Institutions trumping instinct
But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
One thing leads to another …
I was good at menial jobs like parking cars but went into radio because it was Minnesota and vacuum tubes give off heat. It was public radio where all the announcers sound like Methodist ministers except not as friendly and there is no Jesus, and I distinguished myself by telling jokes and stem-winding stories about a small town. People liked it; go figure.
It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.
Maybe a bit harsh, but then it’s dated 1/19/21, the day before Joe Biden officially became President despite Trump’s lawless efforts to retain the Presidency.
[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.
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.
My older brother and I had lunch Thursday. We commiserated over the unintended consequence of party primaries producing extremist and jackass candidates. And now, the Democrats are spending unprecedented amounts to boost the craziest, least-electible Republicans in the primary elections — hardball at a level never before seen (the tactic isn’t new, or a Democrat specialty, but the amounts are eye-popping).
Why should the state prop up this destructive and preposterous system by running primaries, at taxpayer expense, for the Democrat and Republican parties, private entities that can nominate candidates in just about whatever manner they wish? Those parties have no rightful claim to my tax dollars; I increasingly avoid both of them, but to add insult to injury, the states promote their toxic duopoly by excluding most other parties from having state-funded primary races. Some of the arguments trotted out in church/state cases come to mind — you know, the ones about how tyrannical it is to force support of odious opinions via taxation.
Maybe if we abolished state-financed primaries, the major parties would return to the "smoke-filled rooms" — which we admittedly thought toxic until we saw that the alternative was worse.
(Abolishing the military draft is another bright idea I’m not so sure about any more.)
Another detransitioner, another lawsuit
The Sunday Times in London this week brings a devastating account from a young detransitioner, Ritchie Herron, who is suing the National Health Service after having his penis removed. He claims he was fast-tracked into a surgery that made him infertile and incontinent. It seems obvious to say that doctors ought to pause and try to understand what issues a patient may be facing beyond gender dysphoria before immediately removing someone’s penis. The only way the shoddy medical care around this is going to stop is through lawsuits.
For me, June mercifully past was the most obnoxiously in-your-face Pride Month yet, and that’s saying a lot. Two examples that I mercifully missed (though I saw plenty more):
On his website, the activist who came up with the rainbow tree logo to signify “outdoor safe spaces” in the National Parks gives some chilling insight as to why so many things from the Grand Canyon to Oreos are covered in the rainbow flag: “Have you ever asked yourself, ‘Is it safe to hold my significant other’s hand here?’ LGBTQ+ people are regularly assessing if spaces are welcoming. Even more so in outdoor and rural places that have traditionally been less-so than urban bubbles.”
Here’s another way to say the same thing: “Have you ever been troubled by the fact that when you go into public places some of the people you see don’t hold the same beliefs as you? Does it bother you that anyone would have the audacity to disagree with you or to believe that you’re not behaving as you should? Here’s a pin you can wear on your jacket or backpack to let people know that they should never be allowed to disagree with your beliefs about human sexuality.”
I do disagree with prevalent beliefs about human sexuality and I see no reason why that might ever change.
Meanwhile, are we clear, "conservatives," that corporate America is not our friend? <begin hyperbole>Give me the powder and the map and I’ll blow up corporate America.<end hyperbole>
Have you figured out yet, liberals, that you’re being played? That it’s easier and more profitable for corporate America to give you Rainbow Oreos and performative threats to boycott states in Jesusland than to actually stop being evil?
Case in point:
Several American companies responded to a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the ruling that declared abortion a constitutional right in 1973. Amazon, Apple, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and Nike were among those that pledged to cover travel costs for employees seeking abortions and other medical care not available in their state.
(The Economist) Note that this faux-generous offer is cheaper than family leave for employees who choose life.
I don’t think it contradicts anything I wrote, but it goes deeper.
Opinion that has held up well
Impeachment and removal with less than two weeks to go in this presidency may seem like a waste of time and energy. And the president, through a spokesman, has committed to an orderly transfer of power. But we think it would be an important act of civic hygiene, sending an important message to future would-be Trumps as well as to the rest of the world. Our image as a shining example of democracy and the rule of law has been covered in filth since the election. Republicans especially have an obligation to make a clear break with this man and this behavior for the good of the country, their historic reputations, and for the viability of a Grand Old Party that has shed any claim to grandness under this president.
If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
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.
[A]fter a runoff and a recount, Rep. Henry Cuellar—the last pro-life Democrat in the House—narrowly edged out progressive attorney Jessica Cisneros to win the Democratic primary in Texas’ 28th District.
Four hearings in, the overall purpose of the public hearings of the House January 6 Committee is clear: to remind you how much more outrageous and unforgivable former President Donald Trump’s brazen attempt to steal the 2020 election was than how you remember it. In that respect, Tuesday’s hearing, featuring the testimony of state and local officials the president’s team tried to malign or manipulate, might have been the most successful one yet.
Here are the texts the Jan 6 Cmte just showed of @RonJohnsonWI’s chief of staff asking how he can give VP Pence alternate slates of electors for WI and MI on Jan 6th —>
As the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language …
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describ[ed] the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.
And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son.
…
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.
If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
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 have long said that when a denomination forms a committee to study whether they’ve been wrong about something that puts them at odds with the culture (and in recent years that almost always involves homosexuality), it invariably leads the denomination to capitulate to the culture.
I was wrong. Wrong about "invariably." Such studies are usually charades, but not, apparently, always.
The Christian Reformed Church in North America (the denomination in which I was an Elder until I left to become Orthodox, and in which my wife so far remains) studied sexuality from 2016 until last week. Then it "voted Wednesday at its annual synod to codify its opposition to homosexual sex by elevating it to the status of confession, or declaration of faith."
The vote, after two long days of debate, approves a list of what the denomination calls sexual immorality it won’t tolerate, including “adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography, and homosexual sex.”
Note that homosexual sex is not singled out, though it leaps out on its own to everyone who knows what specific sexuality triggered the six-year study.
The reactions from the dissenters so far have run along predictable lines, which I resist critiquing except to say "It is not compassionate to affirm people’s sins." If you think "homosexual sex" is not a sin, and should be affirmed, then we do not agree.
(I do not mean by "sin" what most western people mean by "sin." Sin is "missing the mark." Deciding on the eternal consequences of particular sins, including the sin of the dissenters from the CRC synod’s decision, is infinitely above my pay-grade.)
The heaviest price the CRC will pay will almost certainly be at its highly-regarded Calvin University, a third of whose faculty publicly voiced opposition to the report from which the synod’s decision flowed:
What’s going to happen to Calvin? It’s going to lose its rock star faculty. But it’s probably going to remain Christian. These liberal faculty are going to go on to greater things, professionally, and be able to dine out on how they were badly treated by the homo-hating fundagelicals at Calvin. But the CRC has taken a brave and unpopular stand for the Gospel. God sees.
Rod Dreher. Most gay-affirming faculty will leave because they will no longer be able to subscribe (literally, as in "sign below" — I signed something analogous as an Elder) the denomination’s fortified faith statement; it would mark them as not among the cool kids to relent now by subscribing The Loathsome Thing, especially if they earlier subscribed the pre-emptive dissent.
Rod’s reader Andrew S. comments:
The momentary rush of conservative enthusiasm for this move will please Rod’s readers, but the fury of the left will be in full force over the next several weeks and months. Any university board contemplating a similar move better should study what will likely happen, and plan accordingly for a media siege of their institution. Watch for the following:
a sudden drop in college rankings, unattributable to any objective criterion currently used by the major ranking media;
a tsunami of requests, using already existing anonymous online reporting portals, for Biden’s Department of Education to open Title IX investigations at the universities in question;
calls by social media talking heads to blacklist graduates of the schools;
a sudden mysterious dearth of available federal and private grant money for faculty at these schools, along with the denial of conference platforms for faculty members.
Financial pressures are such that many if not most religiously-affiliated schools will quickly develop new “insights” into the Bible that permit them to cave in to the left, if they haven’t already. Board members sticking to Christian principles better raise prodigious sums of cash to plow into their endowments and strengthen ties with allied Christian schools to bolster their financial self-sufficiency. Woke winter is coming, and Calvin will provide an example of what other colleges should expect.
Do you doubt this? This manifests the "soft tyranny" that a few on the center-right ridicule, but which I take quite seriously, as recently as Tuesday morning:
It has now become indisputable that the liberal order not only uses a variety of quasi coercive legal instruments such as bureaucratic guidances, selective funding of NGOs, and so forth, but it also exploits the liberal version of the public-private distinction to full advantage. It deploys selective enforcement of the law against “private violence” and takes political advantage of background conditions of economic necessity (“the market”) and of the radical conformity of public opinion under liberalism, instigated by the media. It controls its subjects with mobs both virtual and real, threats of ostracism, loss of employment, and a sort of reputational death (the dreaded state of being “out of the mainstream,” enforced politically by a cordon sanitaire).
I have said at least once before and will say it again: the Christian Reformed Church was a very good place from which to come to Orthodoxy. It never dove into the zaniness of broader evangelicalism (thought many parishes and individuals have dipped their toes, or even waded in up to the knees). Rather, from my earliest arrival struck me as sober and serious-minded.
Yet I expected it to cave in, because I do not trust Protestantism over the long haul to interpret their touchstone, their scriptures, in any seriously countercultural way.
I’m heartened that this was not the CRC’s year to swallow the zeitgeist. And they set such a firm precedent that it will be hard to backslide very soon. By then, the zeitgeist may have moved on, as zeitgeists are wont to do.
Why the rule remains generally valid
We are not in a post-Christian age, but in a post-Enlightenment age. The reason why these Christianities are collapsing is that they were rationalized.
Calvinism ("the Reformed faith") is surely among the most rationalized. Its system fails, in my opinion, not for lack of rationality, but for lack of humanity: it’s hard to see daylight between Reformed predestination and simple fatalism, hard to see room for meaningful human agency.
Denialisms
I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this—the Chinese aren’t going to do it, the Indians aren’t going to do it—and that the best we can do is adapt. I disagree with that, but I accept that it’s a coherent argument. I don’t know what to say if you simply say, “This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books. And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica and Greenland are all phony.” Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?
You can swap "climate change" with a lot of other issues, most famously Alex Jones’ claim that Sandy Hook was a hoax, the bereaved parents "crisis actors." On second thought, "the Democrats stole the 2020 Election" may be more famous.
Hard words
A. G. Sertillanges wrote in The Intellectual Life: “The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production…. Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.”
Another excellent article read, on the perils of too much reading.
Babylon, not Israel
[S]ome see America as a new Israel, God’s chosen country that’s now being taken over by His enemies, rather than a new Babylon in which Jesus-followers are mixed in with many others.
The cities lie. Their radical chic is stretched tight over the bare lust for money. Their cosmopolitan diversity hides the uniformity of clawing ambition. Their youth is stolen from elsewhere, used for a time, and discarded when its looks and gullibility begin to fade. They grow little food and make fewer objects every year. They offer only services no one needs and knowledge no one believes. A blustering businessman sinks deeper into debt; but, risking it all again and again, he’ll keep up his pretence until the bailiffs arrive. That is the soul of the city.
FFatalism, The dishonest land The whole short posting was excellent in a bleak sort of way.
And, God help me, I love cities anyway.
Dad theory
My kids—if I can even use the possessive—are a part of me, but I cannot see them if I reduce them to my own reflection. Parenthood entails limitless closeness; all parents see more of their very young children than their kids can see of themselves. Being a dad, though, means perceiving this intimacy from a distance and working to make it outwardly manifest through awkward, conscious effort. This dialectical relationship resembles good thinking, which brings us to the first moment of Dad Theory. Dads guard against losing themselves in particularity, on one hand, and losing themselves in abstraction, on the other. Being a dad means being neither too attached to one’s own concerns to see things clearly, nor too impressed by speculation to see the messiness of real life. To practice Dad Theory is to negotiate with the known unknowns—and to trust that love is a stable point you can use to navigate through ambiguity to reach something solid and sure.
The American Conservative‘s Peter Van Buren looks at January 6 and concludes that the coup attempt was so stupid and so deficient in his post-hoc markers of coup attempts (he sets a remarkably high bar) that it couldn’t possibly have been a coup attempt at all.
I’m so glad he cleared that up. It will be a relief when my subscription expires and I no longer feel duty-bound to rummage through such garbage in search of nourishment.
Word of the day:
Portent. Since portents don’t come with Divinely-inscribed subtitles, I’ll leave it to you to decide what this means.
But if you want to call it "mere coincidence," note that your case is no stronger than mine for "portent."
To the woke, discernment is discrimination and boundaries are oppression.
Richard Abbot, who I don’t know from Adam but who responded to this.
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.
Oliver Traldi helps answer “How are those without expertise to determine who has it?”:
Yet another problem for our experts is that the source, nature, and relevance of their expertise is often ill-defined. A degreed professional like First Lady Jill Biden might want to be called “Doctor,” but even those who accede will struggle to articulate just what kind of knowledge she has that the rest of us lack. What is the knowledge-how or knowledge-that accompanying a doctorate degree in educational leadership? Or take the world’s most famous diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D., whose degree is in “Multicultural Education” and whose “area of research” is “Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis.” On what field of propositions would we expect her to be an authoritative source and ask the typical non-expert to defer, setting aside his own judgment for hers?
Even when expertise is genuine, disciplines and professions, along with their practitioners, seem determined to overextend its breadth for purposes of laundering their personal, non-expert opinions under their expert brand. In the summer of 2020, over a thousand public-health researchers signed a letter expressing their support for mass public protests in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they insisted that in all other contexts the COVID-19 threat weighed against such gatherings. In TheAtlantic, under the headline “Public Health Experts are Not Hypocrites,” Harvard Medical School professor Julia Marcus and Yale School of Public Health professor and MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Gregg Gonsalves proposed that “systemic racism” was itself “a pervasive and long-standing public-health crisis.” By expanding the reach of the term “health,” the authors seemed to think they could also expand, as though by linguistic fiat, the breadth of their knowledge about the world, and demand new deference on matters of morality and politics. The signatories were public health experts, and systemic racism was a public health crisis, ergo the signatories were systemic racism experts.
…
Of course, such justification by stipulation is no justification at all. Marcus and Gonsalves never managed to explain what special insight a public health expert might have on the benefits of nationwide protests, or why anyone should defer to their conclusion that “the health implications of maintaining the status quo of white supremacy are too great to ignore, even with the potential for an increase in coronavirus transmission from the protest.” Making matters worse, they warned that even asking, “How many new infections from the protests will public health experts tolerate?” is an impermissible “call to color blindness, to stop seeing the health effects of systemic racism as something worthy of attention during the pandemic.” Now they were self-declared moral experts in two ways: qualified to adjudicate a divisive political debate, and further qualified to scold those who might question that initial qualification. They didn’t just know better than us; they were better than us.
Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
In keeping with their field’s tolerance for acronyms, they called it AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques). They’ve identified more than 60 techniques so far, mapping them onto the phases of an attack. Technique 49 is flooding, using bots or trolls to overtake a conversation by posting so much material it drowns out other ideas. Technique 18 is paid targeted ads. Technique 54 is amplification by Twitter bots. But the database is just getting started.
Wired.com, One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation
There’s gold in that there discourse!
Freddie deBoer finally said what I’ve wanted to say, and says it at length, with appropriate contempt, and with contemporary illustrations that I couldn’t have produced because I’m now culturally illiterate as to anything in popular culture. F’rinstance:
[S]ome of the most successful self-marketers of the 21st century are white men. They are, in fact, Good White Men.
…
These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.
… Good White Males think whiteness and maleness are problems to be solved. The trouble here is twofold. First, simply by nature of being Good White Men, by the very act of endlessly talking about the sinful nature of other white men, the Good White Men exonerate themselves from the very critique they advance. Constantly complaining about the evil done by white men inherently and invariably functions to contrast themselves with other, worse white men. Being the white man who talks about the poor character of most white men cannot help but shine your own character. No matter how reflexively you chant that you realize that you yourself are part of the problem, no matter how insistently you say that you’re included in your own critique, you aren’t. You can’t be. To be the one who makes the critique inevitably elevates you above it.
He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.
Second, standing up and demanding that everyone pay attention to someone else sure is a good way to monopolize attention for yourself. If you go on your podcast, blog, cable news show, or social network as a white man and tell other white men they need to shut up and listen, you are definitionally not shutting up and listening – and, of course, doing so in such a way as to receive credit for doing it. Put another way, Good White Men constantly tell other men and white people to step back and listen but absolutely never shut the fuck up themselves. Each of these guys could walk the talk by just unplugging and no longer filling the airwaves with their opinions, and in so doing cede space to POC and women and whoever else. That they don’t is the most damning indictment of their project.
N.S. Lyons: when he/she is good, he/she is very, very good. The latest is a review essay, mostly of Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents, but with a quarter or so on Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony.
This is a long read. The tl;dr is that Fukuyama’s modest introductory definition of liberalism is tacitly abandoned for most of the rest of the book. I think Lyons is in the camp that liberalism (i.e., classical liberalism, which comes in left and right flavors) is incoherent — and that today’s conservatism is really right liberalism and therefore also incoherent. Hazony’s thicker conservatism fares better.
The preceding paragraph is my next-day-from-memory summary. Your mileage may vary.
Motivated reasoning
Republicans are gloating over the Maya Flores winning election to Congress in a blue Latino pocket in Texas:
The most recent margin in Texas’s 34th congressional district was five points for the Democrats. Flores beat Sanchez by eight points. That’s a 13-point swing toward the Republican Party. And the Texas special election followed similar elections in California and Alaska where Republicans also over-performed.
National Review. Their point is that the GOP is going to slaughter the Democrats in the Fall mid-terms.
That may be true, but Maya Flores isn’t really a good sign of it, as I’ve learned from the Dispatch’s Sara Isgur and nowhere else:
This was a special election to fill a vacancy; Flores will serve only until January unless elected again in the Fall.
Flores raised something like $700,000; her Democrat opponent more like $46,000.
I’m not even sure the Democrat spent all his money; Flores winning doesn’t shift the balance of Congress and is only for about 7 months.
A congressional district now has more than 700,000 people in it. Only something like 14,000 voted in Tuesday’s election.
If Flores wins in the Fall, that will be a bigger deal. Meanwhile, the Republicans really aren’t delusional about Latino gains.
(If “Latino” is not currently the preferred word, sorry/not sorry. I can’t keep up. I originally said “hispanic,” but that didn’t sound au courant.)
Structural disadvantage
Monisms are tweetable and retweetable, compressible into soundbites; pluralisms are not. Therefore in our current media environment, all versions of pluralism are structurally disadvantaged.
What distinguishes conspiracy theorists from the rest of us is their inability or unwillingness to believe that big consequences can flow from small, accidental, disorganized, even ludicrous causes.
All I will say is I think that would be very good for the country.
I take that back: we also should consider electoral reforms (ranked-choice voting? open primaries?) that give saner candidates a better chance.
January 6
Side shows and main events
As I have argued at some length, the invasion of the Capitol and the vandalism and violence associated with it were a sideshow, and should be understood as such. The main event was Donald Trump’s attempt to find some legal or procedural fig leaf for invalidating the 2020 presidential election, and by that means to remain in power — a coup d’état under color of law …
The fact that Republicans have cynical, self-serving reasons for not taking the Democrats seriously does not erase the fact that there are excellent reasons for not taking the Democrats seriously — contempt for what the Democratic Party embodies and stands for is in fact a moral necessity.
On both sides of the aisle, there is increasing acceptance of the idea that our political institutions are illegitimate, which while it isn’t in itself a call to violence effectively disarms the strongest argument against violence. This is most obvious on the Republican side, something the ongoing January 6th hearings have provided a powerful reminder of. A huge percentage of the GOP rank and file believe that the last election was stolen and therefore that the current government is illegitimate, and while only a tiny minority participated in violence in response on that fatal day, it’s difficult in practice to convincingly disavow that response without forcefully rejecting the premise that justified it.
As he sheltered with Mike Pence from the January 6 rioters, Pence’s legal counsel Greg Jacob
emailed constitutional law professor John Eastman, architect of the plan for Pence to reject the electoral votes Congress certified. “Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” he wrote.
“The siege is because you and your boss did not do what was necessary,” Eastman replied.
Throughout the day yesterday, witnesses—including Jacob—eviscerated the legal arguments underpinning Eastman’s plan, while lawmakers laid out evidence that Eastman and other Trump allies knew full well the flaws in their strategy—but forged ahead with a pressure campaign urging Pence to go along anyway. After the riot, Eastman was so fearful of legal consequences he emailed Rudy Giuliani that he’d “decided that [he] should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” Trump never gave him one, and according to committee members, he’s pleaded the Fifth Amendment 100 times in his testimony before them.
“Soft Totalitarianism” captures something no other term seems to
I know some good people who scoff that “soft totalitarianism” is an oxymoron, but I haven’t seen a better term for this kind of just-making-shit-up coordinated suppression of unfashionable ideastruths while tolerating truly vile behavior by preferred ideologies:
Not to be outdone, this week, PayPal and Etsy shut down the accounts of biological realist and writer Colin Wright for his persistence in arguing that there are only two sexes. Etsy permanently disabled Wright’s account – where he sold his “Reality’s Last Stand” merch promoting his newsletter – on the grounds that Wright “glorif[ied] hatred or violence toward protected groups.” That’s a lie; Wright never did.
Wright is a biologist who made the grievous error of knowing a thing or two about biology and refusing to genuflect before the Torquemadas who insist he parrot their phony gender science. But of course, while Wright pays this price for his harmless (and, honestly, inoffensive) t-shirts and mugs, Etsy continues to list for sale stickers and pins and other bric-a-brac emblazoned with messages like “Fuck TERFs,” “TERFs can choke,” and “Shut the Fuck up TERF” with an anime creature pointing a semiautomatic handgun at its presumably female interlocutor.
The salacious details can’t really be avoided if I want to illustrate how transgender ideology is intruding on the most intimate realms (and I do):
A natal female who had sex with three women using a specially-made prosthetic has been convicted of assault. Tarjit Singh, born Hannah Walters, met women via online dating, and kept clothes on during intimacy in the dark to avoid being revealed as a natal female. It was only several months into one relationship, on discovery of the prosthetic, that Singh’s natal sex was revealed.
This story reads very differently depending on where you’re standing. Is it a case of sexual assault, with a victim tricked into intimate contact she wouldn’t have accepted if she’d known the sex of the individual she was dating? Or is it evidence of our transphobic society, where stigma forced “Tarjit Singh” first to conceal “his” true self only subsequently to be punished for this with the full force of the law?
Similar cases are happening and, dare I suggest, increasing;
A recent US case, with similarities to that of ‘Tarjit Singh’, resulted in murder … Ismiemen Etute, a Virginia college athlete, beat Jerry Smith to death after discovering he’d posed as “Angie Renee” online to obtain sexual contact with Etute.
Lesbians are being called transphobes for wanting sexual contact only with natalreal women. Sexual louts like Etute commit murder when tricked by a man pretending to be a horny woman.
It appears that sexual liberation has not produced utopia, no?
Old man led by zealots
Nevertheless, our President thinks we need more of what ails us — the veritable definition of insanity:
Biden has never seemed more like an old man being led by zealots than on the topic of medical interventions for gender dysphoric children, where he is deeply radical. Biden this week is signing an executive order banning any federal funds from “conversion therapy,” which is what activists call it when teen girls go to a therapist for a couple visits before getting a mastectomy. His policies are putting America’s approach to this complex topic far to the left of European nations (some of which are pulling away from under-18 medical interventions altogether) and far to the left even of where many trans leaders think we should be.
A Psalm for anxiety over “cancel culture,” “soft tyranny” and some other insanities.
Miscellany
Time-wasters
Although federal, state, and local fair housing laws generally permit discrimination in selecting roommates or housemates, they still prohibit advertisers from mentioning their discriminatory preferences, except for specifying gender. The result is that persons who place classified ads for roommates waste their time, as well as the time of many of those who respond to their ads, by inviting and dealing with inquiries from persons who fail to meet the actual “discriminatory” criteria.
If you liked the All the President’s Lawyers podcast, you are almost certain to like Serious Trouble.
Potty Humor
As long as I’m (uncharacteristically) embedding images, this favorite from the nation of Georgia. There was much, much beauty there, but this gritty, grimy vista along the road from Tbilisi to Stepantsminda was unique:
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.
After Mr. Pence was hustled to safety, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, is reported to have told colleagues that Mr. Trump said that perhaps Mr. Pence should have been hanged.
That’s at least triple hearsay (someone says that Mark Meadows told colleagues that Trump said) plus a "perhaps," but with Trump, it seems sufficiently credible — and yes, I’ll plead guilty to confirmation bias if you can get an indictment.
The most astonishing part of this whole story is that Mike Pence finally said "no" to the Orange God. I thought he’d taken leave of his senses when he agreed to run with Trump, but it was only his principles that he was abandoning.
I’m assuming that the public "hearings" that begin this evening will be agitprop. I assume that it will be the kind of anti-Trump agitprop that I’m predisposed to believe. But the very fact that they brought in a storied documentary producer to help stage it counsels that I avoid it and rely on multiple secondary sources (probably WSJ, NYT and the Dispatch — which culpably leaves out stellar sources like Alex Jones, Breitbart Steve Bannon’s War Room "television show," Think Progress or other emetic productions).
Surely the gist will be something like this:
This was a violent assault on the United States Capitol, and it was provoked by a sitting president of the United States,” Cheney said. “He oversaw a multipart plan, [the] objective of which was for him to stay in power, to overturn the results of an election and stay in power. And I would say to people, as you’re listening to some of my colleagues and others who think that the way to respond to this investigation is with politics and partisanship—those people are not acting in a way that is healthy for the country.
Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the “tactical” or “black gun” lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the “daily gunfight.” It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real.
Something has changed in the streets as well. It’s now common to see men and women armed to the teeth, open-carrying during anti-lockdown protests and even outside public officials’ homes. This is when the gun is used to menace and intimidate. It’s displayed not as a matter of defense but rather as an open act of defiance. It’s meant to make people uncomfortable. It’s meant to make them feel unsafe.
I’ve noticed increasingly that I "learn" things by reading other than what the author directly intended. In this case, French helped me put my finger on what I, an enthusiast neither for guns nor for gun bans, find obnoxious about open carry regimes: they enable performative assholery and political intimidation.
Knock-on celebrity
Some individuals reach the unfortunate but not entirely irrational conclusion that the best way to be remembered is by assassinating somebody whose long-lasting fame is guaranteed. There is something very modern about this approach. In the celebrity culture where we all live, nothing is worse to some people than the idea of dying unknown and staying that way. Shooting your way out of this box is a method of leeching off of someone else’s celebrity. In the celebrity culture, a negative reputation for all times is better than no reputation at all. John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln because he (Booth) was a Southern partisan. John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan because he wanted fame, like Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver—or at least an opportunity to touch fame.
Somehow, this seems related to the preceding item:
[I]t is difficult for me not to have some level of sympathy for [Amber] Heard. She has not only been found by the jury to have testified falsely as to critical issues of fact—to have lied—but been so pilloried throughout the nation that she has become a public face of falsehood. We have had public figures at the highest level of national authority who have routinely lied about far more important matters and have never been subjected to anything like the level of opprobrium she is now enduring.”
The rage against her—and the worship of him—has been primal. And there was no escaping it. Over the course of the trial, it felt like the algorithms that drive social media were programmed to stoke hatred of Heard.
The delusion of quantification, mastery and management
You likely read or heard about Jonathan Haidt’s big April essay in the Atlantic, “After Babel: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” The thesis is pretty straightforward: social media is ruining America. In the New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus takes an admirably fair and honest look at Haidt’s claims. Frankly, Lewis-Kraus is to be commended not only for his analysis but for the spirit in which it was presented. Basically, he found that it is difficult to support Haidt’s most dire claims with existing data.
Lewis-Kraus, and the scholars he consulted, are probably right. Haidt’s case is difficult to defend given existing research. Interestingly, however, they all seem to approach this in similar fashion: they grant that Haidt is right to be concerned, but they’re simply not sure if he is concerned about the right things and in the right measure. Lewis-Kraus is also to be commended for the running acknowledgement that it may be difficult to measure and quantify the kind of effects we’re looking for. I remain skeptical that we can rely merely on social scientific data to ground our action. That may very well be a symptom of the deeper (Babel-like!) delusion of mastery and management. But along those lines, this was a particularly interesting observation:
“Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. ‘But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,’ he said. ‘Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.’”
Well, that’s kind of the point isn’t it? I mean, that consequence Gentzkow describes is a consequence of social media, which acts as a massive assortment of feedback loops from the social body to the collective consciousness, such that it generates all manner of distorted and disordered actions.
Finally, on this score, I’ll say that the allusion to the Babel narrative amounts to little more than window dressing (curiously, the Atlantic seems to have removed the reference from the title). When Haidt writes, with reference to the tower, that social media platforms “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together,” he seems to be overlooking the fact that in the Hebrew story the destruction of the tower was not something to be lamented. The destruction of the tower was an act of judgment on the hubris of the builders. I think there was an interesting direction in which to take that story, but I’m not sure this was it.
L.M. Sacasas, Readings and Resources (emphasis added because I share his skepticism about our collective delusion).
Writers shouldn’t talk
Who in their right mind would want to talk, much less listen, to a person who has contrived to spend as much of her life as possible crouched over her computer in isolation, deleting unsatisfactory variants of a single sentence for upwards of an hour? Nothing in my daily practice has prepared me for the gauntlet of a tête-à-tête. Writing is an antidote to the immediacy and inexactitude of speech, and I resent any attempt to drag me back into the sludge of dialogue …
Books and essays are the product of long bouts of thinking, which makes writers fantastically ill-suited to summoning opinions instantaneously …
To be adept at honing sentences for weeks or months is no guarantee of any aptitude for improvisation. Nor does skill at fictionalizing life or theorizing about it correlate with any facility for entering into the thick of things.
From my subjective core, this is almost too obvious to saywrite. I’m myself in Rothfeld’s camp. I’ve labored way too long over relatively short speeches I was expected to give, and then delivered them as closely to the written text as I could manage while maintaining reasonable eye contact. I don’t trust my spontaneous utterances to be worth the attention of assembled auditors. Obviously, I’m less inhibited about the written word.
Celebrate the First Amendment
An Australian court on Monday ordered Google to pay $515,000 to former Australian politician John Barilaro for failing to take down from YouTube a campaign of “relentless, racist, vilificatory, abusive, and defamatory” videos attacking him, which the court ruled “drove Mr. Barilaro prematurely from his chosen service in public life and traumatized him significantly.”
TMD. I do not know the details behind this, so I won’t call Mr. Barilaro a snowflake, but I’m having trouble imagining any possible details that would support liability in U.S. Courts. And with due allowance for familiarity, I like it that way.
Dreherisms
America has many virtues, but with a few exceptions — parts of New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, and other East Coast sites — beautiful cities aren’t among them. (Writing from beautiful Vienna).
The business rationale for the smart home is to bring the intimate patterns of life into the fold of the surveillance economy, which has a one-way mirror quality.
I’m tired of hearing about supposed book bannings in the U.S.
Deleting a book from a curriculum while leaving it in the school library is not a book banning.
Someone trying to get a book removed from a public library, which tells that someone to go take a hike, is not a book banning.
What’s going on, I think, is bored librarians (is there another kind?) engaging in ritual cosplay ("You can have To Kill a Mockingbird when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!").
Wordplay
From the Economist:
Word of the Week:écoponts, “wildlife bridges” in French. France is building overpasses for animals to reduce roadkill and help them roam more freely. Read the full story.
You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer.
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.
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, on a network news show, responded to a question about January 6 thusly:
“As a part of our due diligence, we looked at over 60 different accusations made in multiple states,” Rounds said, noting that none of the irregularities brought to his attention would’ve changed the outcome in any state. “The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency.”
45 did not appreciate that:
Trump, who in a statement Monday morning accused Rounds of going “woke” on the “fraudulent” 2020 election. “Is he crazy or just stupid? The numbers are conclusive, and the fraudulent and irregular votes are massive,” Trump continued, lying. “Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again.”
I could not comprehend how any sensible person, whatever his grievances against our traditional political elites, can think that this vengeful narcissist is a suitable Presidential candidate. But Damon Linker has now explained it:
By the time Trump burst on the scene in the summer of 2015, the traditionalist right had nearly given in to outright despair, even in public, with many moving into a purely defensive position. No longer hoping to reverse the direction of the culture, they now hoped they might merely receive modest federal protection from persecution at the hands of emboldened secular liberals.
At first Trump’s campaign didn’t inspire much cause for optimism among disaffected traditionalist conservatives. He was, after all, a personal paragon of moral decadence. Yet once Trump seized the GOP nomination, and then the presidency itself, a rethinking began among the most pessimistic conservatives. Might his unexpected triumph open other, more radical options for the future? Could his aggressive, unapologetic hostility to liberal norms and institutions signal an openness among American voters to a fundamental rethinking of ideological premises, cultural limits, and the range of political possibilities?
For a series of pessimistic conservatives — especially the "integralist" Catholics (Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Chad Pecknold) and the philosophically anti-liberal and anti-progressive writers at the Claremont Institute and the American Greatness website — Trump came to represent a new way to achieve old ends. Instead of encouraging Republican presidents to struggle within a liberal framework against the inexorable drift of the country, including its government and its culture, toward the secular left, conservatives could cheer on a political and cultural demolition project that would seek to destroy the liberal framework itself.
"A political and cultural demolition project that would seek to destroy the liberal framework itself." That’s fancy-talk for what I feared was the motivation in 2016 — "To hell with it! Let’s tear it all down!" — which is notably nihilistic rather than conservative.
These traditionalist Christian "conservatives" might justify that as desperate measures for desperate times (responding to an existential threat, another Flight 93 Election, but one mark of conservatism has been sober recognition that bountiful crops don’t grow in the scorched earth of revolution.
What a difference a day makes
My Friday reaction
Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, has been arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, authorities said Thursday.
Ten other people also were charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, when authorities said members of the extremist group came to Washington intent on stopping the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
AP Report.
That’s close enough to a domestic terrorism charge to satisfy my curiosity (and desire for retribution) about why nobody had been charged with terrorism in the January 6 whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
My Saturday course correction
We have an adversarial legal system because there are often two plausible sides to a case.
Did the Oath Keepers commit seditious conspiracy? I thought so, and so did a law prof. An ex-prosecutor, who has actually convicted seditious conspirators, says not so fast, pal.
I’m with the second now. And the reason why, in a nutshell, is that the President of the United States sent them off to "stop the steal" — ritually disavowing violence but almost assuring it by his inflammatory "fight like hell" and "stop the steal" rhetoric. To those foolish enough to believe Trump, the notion that if we don’t stop the steal, we won’t have America any more is a potent incitement to "any means necessary."
This all matters because unless the prosecutors have filed multiple counts, including counts that don’t require proving that the Oath Keepers consciously were trying to overrule a legitimate election rather than gullibly trying to stop the nonexistent steal, they could well be acquitted. Since they are dangerous fiends or fools who need to be out of circulation for a good long time, both for safety and to deter others, I don’t want that.
Go for the easy single, guys, not the home run.
No particular place to be
I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.
When Covid hit, we were knee-deep in spoofed phone numbers slamming our cellphones about fake car warranties. We were wading through emails trying to steal our identities. We were triangulating Yelp reviews and Consumer Reports summaries with testimonials and marketing research just to buy a new mattress or an air fryer. We were checking out our own purchases at the grocery store and waiting on hold to replace the credit card that got hacked for the umpteenth time. We were staring, bleary-eyed, into apps that promised less “friction” in our everyday lives if we would just consent to tracking — not that we had a clue as to what exactly we were consenting to. The tiny boxes to “sign up” are labeled “terms and conditions,” after all, and not “Here is how we are going to farm your personal data for profit.” And when we complained — to a manager, to a clerk, to our spouses, to the internet — someone was all too glad to tell us how we could have prevented all of this if we had just become an expert in everything.
It is no wonder that so many of us think that we can parse vaccine trial data, compare personal protective equipment, write school policy and call career scientists idiots on Facebook. We are know-it-alls because we are responsible for knowing everything. And God forbid we should not know something and get scammed. If that happens, it is definitely our fault.
I have friends who, based on doing their own research, skipped vaccine and treated with Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquine when they contracted Covid.
I have friends who, based on doing their own research, are convinced that the CDC is sluggish and wimpy and that it’s vitally important that we get vaccinated, boosted, and put on our N95 masks and quarantine until the end of January.
I value my friends, but having fallen for pseudoscience more than once in my long life, I’m trying to trust the CDC directionally, titrating with common sense. I’m 73, and I’m going to die of something some day. Meanwhile, I don’t want to live in irrational fear or with irrational exuberance.
Trafficking in racial animosities
There are strong incentives to provoke the left on race, and that provocation can often take the form of rhetoric that looks a lot like outright racism. Take, for example, this comment from Tucker Carlson regarding immigration and the alleged Democratic effort to “replace” the American electorate with immigrants:
I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the Third World. But, they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.
Carlson says his comments have nothing to do with race—with the so-called Great Replacement theory (a white-supremacist theory that, in its current American incarnation, holds that Democrats—often led by Jews—are trying to replace white voters with nonwhite immigrants). “This is a voting-rights question,” says Carlson. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he claims.
David French, How the Right’s Rules of Rhetoric Create Racial Provocateurs . If you can show me a meaningful difference between "new people, more obedient voters, from the Third World" and "nonwhite immigrants," I’ll buy you a burger at your favorite burger joint.
Tucker Carlson is definitely trafficking in racial animosities.
Hospitalized with Covid or hospitalized because of Covid?
New data published by New York’s Department of Health show that, although the state’s topline COVID-19 hospitalization numbers are near record highs, 43 percent of COVID-positive patients currently hospitalized were admitted for another reason, and only tested positive for COVID-19 incidentally.
"Admission changes to [Loudon County Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High] were driven by jealously infused xenophobia and racism against the Asian community,” says Mr. Jackson. “Most of the internal deliberations focused on a tailored solution to get just enough black and Hispanic kids in to open the floodgates for rich white affluent families, the primary beneficiaries."
William McGurn, quoting Harry Jackson, former president of the Thomas Jefferson PTA.
Worthy new center-left Substack
I believe it was on this blog that I solicited suggestions for left-leaning honest brokers on the internet, since so much of my reading has become, at least in popular parlance, right-leaning, Several of the writers still identify as liberals or even, in one case, communist — but their honest brokerage gets them branded otherwise. I read them more for the delight and reassurance that I and other conservatives aren’t the only ones who "get it."
Well, the center-right Dispatch recommended a new Substack from Josh Barro, Very Serious, just such a center-left figure, as a likely counterpart to the Dispatch. And the introduction is promising:
The conversation that gets erroneously called a “national conversation” — conducted among select journalists, operatives, activists and academics — is essentially a conversation by and for people who supported Elizabeth Warren. It reflects the values and preferences and linguistic quirks of one minority part of one political party’s coalition. And sure, I am contrarian in relation to that subculture, but not to our overall politics or society, within which I sit closer to the median than most other people you will hear from in the press.
Dissenting from and complaining about this subculture is not novel; it’s become a cliché to jump to Substack and complain about it. But my beef with this subculture isn’t quite the usual one, and that’s why this newsletter is going to be different. I don’t feel oppressed by the subculture. But I do think it has caused certain influential people to become badly misinformed in ways that have been damaging to the interests of both the press and the Democratic Party.
Josh Barro, in his introductory post in his new Very Serious.
(I believe his is a Substack blog — it certainly looks like one in the invitation to paid subscription — but the domain is Barro’s own, which presumably gives him control of the content should he ever leave Substack.)
Riddle solved
[T]here’s a simple solution to the seemingly complicated riddle of Hawley, Cruz and Pompeo. And Marche provides it: Right now their surest path to power, or firmest grip on it, involves the theatrical trashing of their own trappings, the reinvention of themselves as characters in a story other than their own. They haven’t had some post-Ivy moral or philosophical epiphany. Their makeovers are fundamentally commercial: They sized up the current marketplace and manufactured what sells best.
And for them — as for too many people in this age of runaway vanity — brand dictates belief.
This week, the writer Colin Wright posed on Twitter the following question: “What rights do trans people currently not have but want that don’t involve replacing biological sex with one’s subjective ‘gender identity’?” And the response was, of course, crickets. The truth is: the 6-3 Bostock decision places trans people in every state under the protection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the sturdy prohibition on sex discrimination. A Trump nominee wrote the ruling.
What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.
The appeal of Biden was that he understood the Senate, represented a moderate middle, and wouldn’t polarize the country with divisive, incendiary rhetoric, as his predecessor had. The reality of Biden is that he has lost the Senate’s trust, has been an enabler of the far left, and is now seeking to call all those who object to a Democratic wishlist of electoral reforms the modern equivalents of the KKK. The speech was disgusting. It will do nothing but further alienate the Senators he needs. It sure alienated me. It could have been written by a Vox intern on Adderall.
I’d wax more eloquently on this but don’t feel I can best either Jonah Goldberg or Peggy Noonan. I voted and supported Biden as the least worst option — in the primaries and general election. I favor an urgent reform of the Electoral Count Act — to avoid a 2020 scenario next time. I’d be open to some of the Democratic proposals. So I should be the kind of voter Biden is appealing to.
But Biden’s polarizing rhetoric, as McConnell made clear, has made compromise on any of this toxic.
It’s important to recognize that what I went through in both of the circumstances did not result from bugs in the systems, but from features — from purposeful design. The goal of all our contemporary Departments of Circumlocution is simply this: To make us give up. To bring us to the point of shrugging our shoulders and crossing our fingers in the hope that whatever illness we have will somehow get better; or to the point that we pay for medicine ourselves because we can’t figure out how to get the insurance we pay for to cover it, and don’t dare try to get by without it. The object of these systems is the generation of despair. Because if the systems make us despair then the companies that deploy them can boast of the money they have saved the organizations that purchase their services.
Wherein I brand myself
J Budziszewski chose an unusually provocative title: Novelists as Pimps. That I agree with him enthusiasticly no doubt brands me as some sort of comic caricature.
Pretty good book
I’m not going to oversell it, but this was a book I felt well warranted the time to read it:
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.”
…
To put it bluntly: we are all expressive individuals now. Just as some choose to identify themselves by their sexual orientation, so the religious person chooses to be a Christian or a Muslim. And this raises the question of why society finds some choices to be legitimate and others to be irrelevant or even unacceptable.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. If you are comprehensively familiar with Philip Rieff, you can skip it.
Worthy book, but I passed up a favorite annual conference this weekend even though Trueman was one of three keynoters.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 