Friday, May 2, 2025

Why Trump, lamentably, wins

There aren’t many original insights or approaches to political topics, but there are a few. I commend to you David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. (Shared link)

I’ll single out what most grabbed my attention.

Of Trump:

He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.

Of his adversaries:

The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.

Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world …

Fatally, America now has an establishment that is ambivalent about being an establishment. Back in the day, those WASP blue bloods like Roosevelt were utterly confident in their right to rule, utterly confident they could handle whatever the future might throw at them. But since the 1960s, successive generations, raised on everything from Woodstock to hip-hop, have been taught that the establishment is bad. They have been taught, in the words of those famous Apple commercials, to celebrate “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.”

When those people grew up and became the establishment — holding senior posts in law, government, universities, media, nonprofits and boardrooms — they became the kind of ambivalent souls who are unwilling to take their own side in a fight. They refuse to accept the fact that every society has a leadership class and that if you find yourself in it, your primary job is to defend its institutions, like the Constitution, objective journalism and scientific research centers, when the big bad wolf comes to blow it all down.

Lots of food for thought. I fear the contrast between Trump and the meritocracy is accurate and that it bodes ill for us.

Man of Destiny

There’s a tendency, sometimes very explicit, to see Donald Trump as a world-historical figure, especially after last summer’s failed assassination attempt. Trump even alludes to his own changed self-perception.

But why should that man-of-destiny sense assume that the destiny is good, not merely consequential?

If you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America – that Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia, and the never-Trumpers, and all these groups that failed to govern America, but it doesn’t mean at the end of the day that he’s actually saving America. Sometimes it’s just a chastisement.

I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from the people that have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.

Ross Douthat, interviewing rightwing figure Jonathan Keeperman. (It was a very lively conversation; Keeperman’s no fool.)

I have felt, and said, that two of the past three Presidential elections “had the judgment of God” written all over it,” so it should come as no surprise that I felt more than a little kinship with Ross over his observation.

Americans Don’t Do This

I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole “belonging” and “inclusion” system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year’s encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.)

And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.

Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.

Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression.

Caitlin Flanagan, Americans Don’t Do This

Caution on transitioning

On January 28, Donald Trump issued one of his innumerable executive orders, provocatively Titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, providing among other things that “within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”

I heartily approve of this mandate for a review of existing literature on best practices. I disapprove of the President announcing his conclusions (with which i substantially agree, but I’m just some guy, not POTUS) before the reviews. That’s not the way it should be done and it provides instant fodder for undermining the report that arrived on Thursday.

I trust nobody on the transing-of-teens issue more than I trust Jesse Singal, who got an advance copy of the report and summarized his admiration, including of the high-caliber authors (officially undisclosed for now). Singal is, or at least was very recently, a man of the fairly hard left, but intellectually honest. That he’s broken with his tribe on this issue, and has published extensively on it, is reassuring, as I’m not so keen about topic this to read 409 pages myself.

Be careful what you wish for

I think I keep wallowing in the news because I’m still trying to get my head around what it means that my frequently expressed wish has been fulfilled.

That frequently expressed wish was that America could become just a regular country again and stop trying to be a crypto-imperial power. Like the jokes about genies who fulfill wishes painfully literally, too little did I appreciate what a tawdry and corrupt thing a regular country could be.

I guess I somehow thought we could be “regular” and “exceptional” at the same time. So very American of me.

How could anything possibly go wrong?

DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations | WIRED

If you think this is a plausible idea, you have a different experience with federal regulations or Artificial Intelligence than I do.

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

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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.

Ides of March

Simile of the week

[I] n The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus, who recently resigned from The Washington Post, explained that she and other columnists were confused by the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ new edict that the Opinions section write only in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”: “Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)

Via Frank Bruni

Justice Barrett

After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to stop $2 billion in foreign-aid spending, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Chief Justice John Roberts and all three Democratic-appointed justices to leave that order in place. The decision provoked a fiery and warranted dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, as well as some bitter complaints about Barrett from the right-leaning commentariat. It is understandable that conservatives might be nervous about the Supreme Court. For good reason, the names “Stevens,” “Souter,” “Kennedy,” and “O’Connor” echo eerily in the originalist mind. But while she was wrong in this particular case, there is no evidence that Barrett is at risk of joining their ranks. She concurred in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe; in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., the case that barred affirmative action; and in Bruen, the case that expanded the protections of the Second Amendment. More important than those outcomes is how she did so. Unlike the judicial nomads of the past, Barrett has a transparent and well-considered approach to the law that explains her actions even when she disappoints. In the case that prompted the criticisms, she was likely motivated by her mistrust of the shadow docket and her dislike of big cases built atop disputed facts. To conclude from this that Barrett was “a mistake”—or, worse, “a DEI hire”—is absurd. Judges are not supposed to play for a team.

National Review email for 3/14/25

Meritocracy is the death of noblesse oblige

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

Gold and Bitcoin

I’ve shunned Bitcoin as an investment because it’s useless other than for criming and speculation.

I’ve always shunned gold for similar reasons. Its industrial and jewelry uses are not the reason for it rising to more than $3,000 per troy ounce.

Regarding this Presidency

Trump censorship worse than cancel culture

I’ve been relegating most of my bile toward Trump and his goons to another blog, referenced in the footer below, but this is so patently un-American that it needs the widest exposure I can give it:

[T]his is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.

Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. …

…

JD Vance — who lectured Europeans on free speech online, while his own administration was using AI to police the web for dissent! — said on Fox that a green card holder “doesn’t have an indefinite right to stay in America.”

Andrew Sullivan

In a Feb. 6 editorial, [Purdue] Exponent editors wrote: “And don’t get it twisted: When letters of visa revocation arrive in these students’ mailboxes and federal agents come to Purdue’s campus, no distinction will be made between ‘pro-jihadist’ and pro-Palestinian. Pro-ceasefire will continue to be conflated with ‘antisemitic.’ Anti-war can only now mean ‘pro-Hamas.’ Such twisting of language to be used as a weapon is contrary to the First Amendment, which gives the Exponent its right to exist just as much as it gives the right to students to protest as they see fit. It is the opinion of the Exponent that standing back while our website is potentially used to identify the state’s enemies would be directly against those principles.”

Based in Lafayette, Indiana

The statute cited by the Trump administration for expelling Khalil is very broad — and vague. I don’t think it will be struck down in its entirety, but surely permanent residents are entitled to know with some clarity what behaviors could get them kicked out of the country.

So I think the likeliest outcome is “unconstitutional as applied” to Khalil.

Living in fear

I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

Patrick Healy, introducing a conversation with M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens.

Just sayin’

Narcissism has a very high correlation with conspicuous consumption in an effort to boost social status and self-esteem. Narcissists are focused on the symbolic, rather than functional, importance of commodities, and the symbolism of the products they purchase is often used to compensate for fragile egos and fluctuating self-esteem.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Re-assessing

As I have said any number of times, I have voted for the American Solidarity Party in each of the last three election cycles. But in the 2024 election, I was beginning to feel some sympathy for the people who thought Trump was less bad than Kamala Harris in the forced binary choice too many voters feel.

I no longer have any sympathy for that position, although I’m obviously working with the benefit of hindsight: Ready, Fire, Aim — over and over again ad infinitum. This is no way to run anything, quite apart from the autocracy.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Public Affairs

On the one hand, I express no profound personal opinions here; on the other, I have some smart and provocative “takes” from others and some comments on them.

Stupid opinions on why a Trump conviction will be reversed

Any conviction obtained at the so-called “trial” of former President Donald Trump’s alleged alteration of financial records will be reversed on appeal, if necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court, because altering financial records is only a crime in New York if you do it to conceal some other crime. Paying Stormy Daniels money is NOT a crime. …

Steven Calabresi (emphasis added).

I would wager a substantial sum that the U.S. Supreme Court will not reverse a New York conviction of Trump at all, let alone on the basis that New York Courts misapplied New York law.

If the law is as Calabresi says, State appeal courts should reverse, but state Courts have the last word on what state law is.

Steven Calabresi is not a stupid man. This outburst was an example of motivated reasoning.

It’s still quite possible that the Manhattan jury will convict Trump on the 34 felony charges Bragg has brought. But there is no chance the conviction will withstand appeal, particularly given that it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.

Eli Lake (emphasis added).

I would wager even more that a conviction will not be reversed because it relies too heavily on Michael Cohen’s testimony. No Courts will have any idea what the jury relied on. That’s not how jury trials work.

I cannot vouch for Elli Lake not being stupid on legal matters. It rather appears that he is.

Note: This is not to say that Courts won’t reverse because particular testimony of Cohen was admitted over timely objection. Nor am I saying that this prosecution is solid and will not be reversed. There’s a lot of non-dopey analysis that thinks if very shaky. I’m just faulting stupid arguments that mislead non-lawyer readers.

History Rhyming?

I’ve been surprised at the intensity of the electorate’s hostility to post-Roe restrictive abortion legislation. I thought public opinion was more closely divided.

As we think about why voters are so hostile, though, it may be illuminating to remember the Protestant landscape pre-Roe. For one common instance:

The great majority [of pre-Roe Southern Baptists] favored such “therapeutic” abortions, but a small minority objected that abortion was murder, and another small minority argued that it should be legal in all cases. The divide, however, did not fall along the usual conservative-moderate lines, but rather, it seems, along the spectrum of anti-Catholicism.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals. Voters may just be reverting to pre-Roe positions.

I care a bit about what the various states do. But I’m still committed to federalism, unconvinced that this is an appropriate topic for national legislation.

Commencement Addresses

It’s like the opening parable of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love

But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history — or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may — One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

Equality

In these powerfully written essays Oakeshott points to the damage done when politics is directed from above towards a goal – whether liberty, equality or fraternity – and where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism

We in the US are suffering from a putative commitment to the goal of equality, “where all policies and negotiations are formulated by reference to that goal.”

I say “putative” because we seem to have lost the ability to identify which things truly are alike, and so should be treated alike, the ability to recognize that not all discrimination is invidious. Sometimes “discrimination” is the necessary consequence of discernment.

If the preceding seems impenetrably opaque, think about the dogma “trans women are women.” If that makes perfect, incontestable sense to you, you probably are loving our present love affair with “equality.” If you hesitate or disagree with “trans women are women,” you may be on my wavelength.

Elites and normies

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions—on immigration, gender, and climate, for example—are not popular with the normies. By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left.” The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

It rarely works. The chaos and contingencies of the digital age allow the normies and their chosen tribunes, the populists, too much room to maneuver. Trump’s rise in the opinion polls would otherwise be inexplicable.

Martin Gurri

Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

One result is that we are deprived of a fundamental requirement of any polity: a ruling class that will be perceived as legitimate.

…

At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to LARP at the barricades.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

Why so few pro-Trump columnists

There aren’t many pro-Trump columnists at major papers because there aren’t many pro-Trump columnists anywhere.

In past years, it hardly seems possible that a major publication wouldn’t have a supporter of Ronald Reagan on George W. Bush on its staff. That is why in 2024, newspapers would love nothing more than to have an in-house columnist on Team Red Hat/Tie.

But Trumpism is a visual medium – it cannot withstand the scrutiny of a written column. Trump supporters can go on Fox News or Newsmax or OAN and say whatever they want in the moment without being fact-checked beforehand. But writing a column means having editors and fact checkers verify the claims you’re making.

And because no editor will rubber-stamp a claim like “the 2020 election was stolen,” someone who tries to argue Biden didn’t win the last election or that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were “political prisoners” will never be able to make their way to a legacy print outlet. A columnist that wanted to say, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence had the ability to choose his own electors in 2020 would be like a columnist earnestly arguing a woman is safer if she encounters a bear rather than a human man in the woods.

This phenomenon is glaringly obvious any time Trump goes on a network like CNN for a town hall or a debate. The falsehoods come so fast out of his mouth, the moderator can’t keep up, leaving 90 percent of his claims unchallenged. If the reporter stopped Trump to correct him on every lie he told, the event would be more moderator than candidate.

That is because being a Trumper is based almost solely on emotion and doesn’t rely on facts. Trumpism is a clenched fist, not an argument. And newspapers print arguments.

Christian Schneider, Where Are All the Pro-Trump Newspaper Columnists? (emphasis added; H/T The Morning Dispatch)

I am predisposed to credit Schneider’s argument because of people like Eric Metaxas.

Metaxas, a Yale grad, is an intellectual of sorts. He writes books. He hosts high-tone “Socrates in the City” conversations. I have it on fairly good authority that he’s genial and fun to talk to.

But he’s bereft of arguments for his election denialism. He has rock-solid certainty. As a word guy, he makes reductio ad Hitlerum analogies. He may have had mystical visions. But he has zero evidence. (Did I mention the rock-solid certainty?)

Checking in on the further-right

Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

… “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits … The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

…

Some of Kirk’s ads … sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.”

Ali Breland, Why Is Charlie Kirk Selling Me Food Rations?

Another Denialism

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Trust the science

The strong, as science had conclusively demonstrated, had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

Tom Holland, Dominion

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, 2/3/24

I have competing calendar events for this morning. One was the funeral of an acquaintance whose obituary suggested memorial gifts to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Read between those lines, though the toxicology report won’t be back for weeks. Lord have mercy!) The other was a baptism of a family of five, which family features spouses of dramatically different skin tones — a joyous first for our parish — and the reception by Chrismation (i.e., no baptism because of a prior valid baptism) of yet another Purdue student.

As a baptism is pretty obligatory for a Parish Cantor, I am glad to take that more joyous option.

The Gender Dysphoria beat

Toss the kids’ smart phones

Mark Zuckerberg would presumably have chosen a pummeling in the dojo over the grilling he endured on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Meta chief, along with executives from X, Snap, Discord, and TikTok (wait, didn’t we ban those guys?), was called to testify in a Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children. In a tussle with Senator Josh Hawley, Zuckerberg was cornered into turning to the families of children who were victims of online abuse and exploitation and apologizing for what their kids had been through. I mean, I guess the dressing-down of a new master of the universe scratches an itch. But did the hearing do anything to help those who want safer social media for kids?

Free Press contributor Abigail Shrier knows these issues better than most. She has a new book on the mental health of young Americans—Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up—out later this month. I asked Abigail for her thoughts on the hearing. Here’s what she told me:

Gender dysphoria, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourette syndrome: the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens.

Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association, quick to warn the public about the dangers of systemic racism, police tactics, and climate change, has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously. (See the APA’s belated, laughably weak, and equivocating health advisory.)

The simplest solution, Abigail says, is for parents to throw out their kids’ phones. But experts won’t suggest that because it will put them out of a job:

One of the best things mental health experts could have done to improve the mental health of teens would not grant them an ongoing role in kids’ lives. Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy.

In other words, parents: you’re on your own.

The Free Press

Conversion therapies

I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.

A detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, via Pamela Paul, As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do..

Culture

Perspective

Scruton once wrote about the moral philosopher Peter Singer: “It has been said of him, as he indelicately reminds us in the preface, that he is ‘the most influential living philosopher,’ and this is perhaps true. But the influence has been purchased at the cost of the philosophy. After all, there was a sense in which Mao was the most influential living poet, and Hitler the most influential living painter.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty, Rush’s Place

A promising new Substack

The founders of Poems Ancient and Modern are Joseph Bottum, a writer living in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina. Acutely sensitive to copyright (violated by far too many online postings), we will be limiting ourselves to works that are in the public domain (currently those from before 1929)

Here We Stand – Poems Ancient and Modern.

I have appreciated every issue so far.

The most successful counter-intuitive principle ever

The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history. Every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Playing by your own rules

Objectors may point out that this raises a coordination problem. If mainstream sexual culture now assumes that women will by default be sterile and sexually available, then how is any heterosexual woman who refuses this dynamic ever to find a partner? Won’t men simply pass them over for someone who plays by the usual rules? One of my interviewees doesn’t think so. Katie, 25, a researcher from Washington, DC, says that in her experience, dating while refusing birth control was ‘not at all awkward or weird’. Rather, in her view, it serves to filter out frivolous would-be partners: ‘If you’re serious about it, and they’re serious and thoughtful too, then it’s not an issue.’

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Why logorrhea?

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Eye for eye leaves the world blind

A conservative young man visited my office some years ago and recited a long list of illegitimate, dishonest, manipulatory techniques used by the left. I said words to the effect, “I know all this. Why are you telling me?” He replied “Because unless our side does the same things, we’ll lose the country.” I answered, “If you do what is evil so that good will result, you will destroy everything about your country worth saving, and you will be just like those whom you oppose.” I’m afraid he was very disappointed in me, and left my office in sorrow.

J Budziszewski, Conservative Judicial Activism?

A small parable

When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.

Alan Jacobs, a small parable

The parable is just three paragraphs and worth reading. It seems unfair for me to cut-and-paste it all.

The Education Hoax

Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell via The Economist

Why I still read legal blogs and listen to legal podcasts

I was prepared to blog my incredulity at E. Jean Carroll actually having suffered $83 million of financial harm at the ~~hands~~ mouth of you-know-who. David Lat does not hide the answer:

The big legal news of the week was the $83.3 million defamation verdict secured by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump, consisting of $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages. This trial was only on the issue of defamation damages for Trump’s continued public attacks on Carroll; in an earlier trial, a jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages.

(Emphasis added)

Doggerel Break

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

W.H. Auden, The More Loving One, via Alan Jacobs, Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition

From here, it’s all downhill, with politics and the most ridiculous conspiracy theory so far this year. On the other hand, the politics are

Politics generally

Nobles and Meritocrats

The nobleman may be contrasted with the meritocrat [the bourgeois], who occupies his station by virtue of his intelligence (as certified by gatekeeping institutions) and his hard work. He is emphatically an individual. Nobody handed him anything. He doesn’t own land and isn’t tied to any particular place; he may have been plucked from the hinterlands by the SAT test and groomed to enter the labor market of the global, managerial economy. He may or may not have children. If he does, he will try to pass on every advantage to them, but this is done primarily by accumulating enough money so his children will have a shot at entry to those same gatekeeping institutions. After that, they are on their own. He passes on to them an open-ended opportunity, not a definite form of life. The meritocrat owes nothing to those who came before, and likely finds it hard to imagine what shape his children’s lives will take. Living within the horizon of his own life, likely thousands of miles from the place of his birth, it is perfectly natural that he should not feel any special responsibility to sustain a culture. He may even work in the machinery of culture-replacement, as it pays well.

…

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

Matthew Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

The right’s new abnormal normal

[W]e now live in a political world oriented around the following two-step electoral process: First, the online right galvanizes and mobilizes a growing base of conspiracy-addled voters with chum, ranging from Twitter memes to QAnon to bullshit about Pentagon psyops, pop stars, football players, deadly vaccine mandates, and other paranoid nonsense; second, the GOP uses negative partisanship to keep more normie Republican and Republican-leaning voters on side when the time comes to cast ballots.

It barely worked in 2016. It nearly worked in 2020. How about in 2024? It’s much too early to know. I’ll simply say I wouldn’t be so sure the Swift-Kelce psychodrama that has obsessed the online right over the past week will do anything to make a Trump victory any less likely.

Welcome to the right’s new abnormal normal.

Damon Linker

Enacting indignation against one’s owner

Sen. Josh Hawley’s grilling of Mr. Zuckerberg made an impression. Mr. Hawley enjoys enacting indignation in hearings and is good at it.

…

It was satisfying. Why are we skeptical it will lead to helpful legislative action?

…

A friend who worked in Washington a few years ago was struck by the question he was asked at a lunch of think tankers and lobbyists: “Who owns you?” Not who do you work for, what do you believe, but who bought your loyalty? It is the Washington problem in three words.

The social-media companies have bought up Washington. They give money to politicians and political action committees, to think tanks and media shops; they hire the most influential and respected. They give the children of politicians jobs. They’ve got it wired. Mr. Kennedy mordantly joked about this at the hearings: “We know we’re in a recession when Google has to lay off 25 members of Congress.”

There’s reason to believe it’s all Kabuki. The CEOs show up for a day of ritual denunciation, then go on unbothered. It’s not a high price to pay for the lives they lead.

Peggy Noonan

Sauce for the Gander

From House Bill No. 1017, introduced in the Indiana Legislature Jan. 8 by Rep. Vernon Smith, a Gary Democrat:

Sec. 5. (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), a school, an employee or staff member of a school, or a third party vendor used by a school to provide instruction may not provide instruction to a student in kindergarten through grade 12 concerning:

(1) Christopher Columbus; or

(2) a President of the United States who owned an enslaved person.

(b) Instruction concerning a person described in subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2) is permitted if the instruction concerns the person’s involvement in the:

(1) institution of slavery;

(2) harmful effects of colonialism; or

(3) decimation of indigenous populations throughout the world.

Wall Street Journal’s Notable and Quotable

I suspect that Rep. Smith is trolling Republicans, who seemingly are forever (though less commonly in Indiana) are proposing reverse mirror images of such bans.

Do you think the mainstream media will howl about censoring history? Nah. Me either.

Brussels’ ultimatum to Budapest

Hungary is blocking 50 billion Euros of additional EU aid to Ukraine, and the EU leadership is threatening retaliation against Hungary:

Whatever his sins and failings may be, Viktor Orbán isn’t presiding over the decline of the West. It is, alas, true that Orbán stands naked before the mighty Brussels bureaucracy, determined to siphon off more taxpayer money to continue an unwinnable war, in the name of a pan-European fantasy, when they ought to be spending it on serious needs at home (for example, have you seen how feeble European militaries are?). They may, in the end, force him to capitulate. But if you look closely, it is Orbán, the despised outsider, who informs the Emperors of the Inner Ring, the embodiments of a failing imperial ideology, that they have no clothes.

Rod Dreher

Orbán did fold before the week was over. Ukraine is getting more money from the West.

From the Free Press

It has been nearly a month, but I don’t think I shared these yet:

What in heaven’s name was the point?

First the White House interns, now seventeen anonymous Biden campaign staffers have penned an open letter calling on Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. I’m all for open letters. But you must sign your name. And if you’re going to make it anonymous, and you were still only able to get seventeen people signed on, you sort of played yourself.

Nellie Bowles

Wages of disenfranchisement

The law exists to maintain order. It’s not for settling our political disputes. That’s the rule. When you criminalize dissent and equate nonconformity with terrorism, you have lost the thread of how this country works. When you joke about putting opponents in reeducation camps so they can be converted into loyal followers, you channel the regime in Cuba. When you prosecute an opposition presidential candidate, you practice the same style of mafia politics as Vladimir Putin in Russia. When you ban a candidate’s name from the ballot to preserve “our democracy,” you sound, frankly, like you have gone nuts. And believe me: it will come back to haunt you.

…

If your side loses, look in the mirror. You are the reason your side lost in 2016. A man like Trump can only get elected because he’s not you and there are few alternatives. Reflect on how you can win back those who feel so disenfranchised that they would vote for such a man over your choice.

Martin Gurri, Don’t Worry About Donald Trump. Worry About Yourself

This week’s Ezra Klein podcast features Democrat operative Ruy Teixeira, who goes on at some length about the Democrats losing the working class — the same folks I think Gurri was talking about.

Axios: Trump Campaign Donors Footed the Bill for More Than $50M in Legal Fees Last Year (H/T TMD)

The NFL/Tay-Tay/Biden/Psy-Op kerfuffle

I hate writing about this. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel after others have shot all the fish. But here goes.

Here’s all I know

The NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs—currently in the news for being Super Bowl–bound as well as for the fact that tight end Travis Kelce is dating musician Taylor Swift—are apparently participating in the most sinister conspiracy ever foisted upon an unwitting American public, if you believe social media’s least reputable yet highest-profile Trump-affiliated “influencers.” Many of them, including former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now pursuing his natural calling, argue in all purported sincerity that Taylor Swift is an “op.” Her success, apparently, is the product not of savvy branding and decades of work but rather of a series of shady agreements between her, the NFL, and George Soros to achieve peak crossover appeal right before she endorses Joe Biden in 2024.

National Review’s The Week for February 2.

But National Review’s readership may not be as high-caliber as once was rumored, because they then have to say the “needless to say” part:

Needless to say, the argument is absurd and reflects the combination of lunacy and cynicism of those promoting it. The response it has received among the grassroots, however—and, reportedly, among Trump’s staff—also reflects something much more consequential: Trumpworld’s well-founded anxiety that his unpopularity with young and even middle-aged women may be irreparable.

The underwhelming evidence

So far as I’ve heard (and I admit that I haven’t been paying very good attention), the only evidence that Taylor Swift is a liberal is that she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.

If it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could you turn your thoughts back to 2020 and try to remember who Joe Biden was running against?

Don’t you think it’s a stretch to think that one had to be a liberal to prefer Joe Biden over his 2020 presidential adversary?

At this point in the 2024 election, Republicans are running against themselves. Guys, the opponent is Biden, B-I-D-E-N. You have a really good chance against him. You will lose brutally against Taylor Swift.

Nellie Bowles
So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.

Star Wars Day 2023

The woke aren’t entirely wrong

The ‘woke’ lot are not wrong about standpoint epistemology, they’re just too reductive about it, and they use the wrong metrics. They’re not wrong that it’s impossible to detach yourself entirely from your own background and perspective. And this is a paradigm shift that’s been accelerated by the decentralisation of authority in digital culture: personal authority now counts for more, as does being reflexive about your personal biases. If you want to have an impact now, it’s widely considered good practice and due diligence to acknowledge your own standpoint. I broadly agree with that. I think it’s a basic principle of intellectual hygiene to say: “I can only see things from my perspective and that means that I may have some blind spots.” In that respect, I’m a paid-up postmodernist.

This is the post-liberal shift in a nutshell. It says that we’re all implicated in what we’re dealing with, all of the time, and it’s just not possible to have a neutral public space. It follows from this that you cannot simply privatise moral goods. That follows logically from the acknowledgment that we’re all implicated in the mess of our condition. You can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to worry about myself, for my life is my business.” No, your life is everybody’s business. The question, then, is: which aspects of my life are whose business? And how and why, and who gets to say so? So, the ‘woke’ crowd are not entirely wrong to say that much of the public debate should orbit around questions of power. To say that everything is a question of power is far too reductive. That quickly takes things in a very nihilistic direction.

The big problem with the ‘woke’ movement, in fact, is that it’s not really postmodern. It’s largely a last attempt at modernism. It says, “If we can’t have a neutral shared public square, we’re just going to destroy all remaining shared meaning because that’s the only way we can all be free.” ‘Wokeness’ is, if you like, modernism’s final temper tantrum. But this temper tantrum, unfortunately, is now being institutionalised by HR departments.

If Mary Harrington is right (not so much in my quote, but from other parts of the long interview from which I took it), I’ve largely escaped my Boomer generation’s biases and become Gen-X adjacent: I’m pretty sure liberalism is doomed. That’s a Gen-X type conviction. But I’m still committed to what likely is a lost/doomed cause.

Reformers and vandals

Chesterton wrote that “the more modern type of reformer,” encountering a fence across a road, “goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’” Our customs regarding sex and the family have been battered down without anyone’s caring about why they were there in the first place.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Race in historic perspective

If Cleopatra were asked whether she was white or ‘B’lack, she probably would have met the query with a blank stare. Projecting your confused ideas about race onto historical figures is political — but only in the most embarrassingly vain and trifling sense of the word ….

Kmele Foster via Andrew Sullivan.

Words

In the Pensées, Pascal observed that “there are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.” With regard to language, we might say that there are two analogous extremes: to exclude the possibility that language can adequately express something truthful about the world, to admit only the truths language can convey. I would assent to the claim that there are truths beyond language. There are inexpressible realities and ineffable experiences. But language is itself a miracle and a gift of extraordinary range, power, and beauty. It is one thing to reach the limits of language by testing its resources and searching its depths, and another thing altogether to mistake our own apathy and incuriosity for the inherent limits of speech.

L. M. Sacasas, Too Many Words, and Not Enough

This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.

Andrew Sullivan, We’re All Algorithms Now. (This is not a quote from a recent Sullivan post.)

Whither meritocracy?

[I]t seems pretty clear that many schools are really ditching the SAT in response to the following sequence of events: Asian American SAT scores rose to the point where elite colleges were accused of discriminating against Asian American applicants to maintain the racial balance they desired, this led to lawsuits, and those lawsuits seem poised to yield a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. So universities are pre-emptively abandoning a metric that might be used against them in future litigation, not for the sake of widening opportunity but just in the hopes of sustaining the admissions status quo.

Ross Douthat, Can the Meritocracy Survive Without the SAT?

Reactionary feminism

I’ve dubbed this fightback “reactionary feminism.” I use “reactionary” in recognition that “progress” in its contemporary form wages war on human nature. It views “freedom” as best served by reframing embodied men and women as atomized, de-sexed, fungible, and interchangeable “humans” composed of disembodied “identity” plus body parts that can be reordered at will, like meat LEGOs. And I use “feminism” in recognition of the fact that proposing to atomize, de-sex, and remodel “humans” has profound negative impacts on women.

Mary Harrington, The Three Principles of Reactionary Feminism

AI perspective

[A] new technology has emerged, and those who stand to make billions off of it are telling you: you will never be lonely again; the meaning you’ve always pined for will be provided for you by superintelligent beings; you will not die, but have eternal life. Or, alternatively, you are soon to witness the end of the world, which will free you from everything you don’t like about your life and yourself. Either way – people are telling you that something very, very important is happening, and right now is important, and you live now, so you’re important, and you want to believe, have to believe, are desperate to believe. And so you do believe, even though it isn’t true.

Freddie deBoer, monkeywrenching all the AI hype.

El Rushbo

At the end of his career, Limbaugh was defending—or allowing himself to be understood as defending—political violence, conspiracy theories, and even secessionism.

If you want to defend that by saying, “We’ll that’s what a lot of right-wingers believe today,” I won’t argue with you. I’m just not sure it’s the defense you think it is.

Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, RIP

Why one Florida Man isn’t on a roll

“This is f—ing madness!” [Tim] Miller exclaimed at one point in his piece.

Is it? It seems pretty rational to me.

It’s madness civically. No one who cares sincerely for this country would support returning a coup plotter to power. Every Trump endorsement is tantamount to the endorser declaring that they’re indifferent at best and hostile at worst to the project of American democracy.

But rationally? To behave rationally is to maximize one’s personal self-interest.

It seems to me Daines, Zeldin, and the rest have not only behaved rationally by endorsing Trump but that there’s no rational case—for now—for an influential Republican to endorse Ron DeSantis.

Nick Cattogio, Elected Republicans Have No Reason to Endorse DeSantis

Cautionary tale

Samsung Electronics told staff not to use generative AI tools because of security concerns. In a staff memo, the company said that confidential code was accidentally leaked after engineers uploaded it to ChatGPT in April. It is the latest setback to the rollout of such technology in the workplace: financial firms such as Goldman Sachs have restricted employees’ use of similar platforms.

The Economist

Rueful tech

[I]t is hard to avoid the sense that today’s “tech” is more often a tax on the real economy, inflicting costs that don’t show up in any ledger because they are paid by you and me in the coin of nuisance.

Matthew Crawford.

Case in point. On May Day, I tried to order a bottomless dark roast coffee at a coffee house where I was setting up office for a few hours. It involved scanning a QR code, loading the app, trying to figure out how to “go dutch” despite the app knowing someone else was at the table (because they’d scanned the code, too). (I eventually ordered, a bit sullenly at the counter, where I had to return for every refill.)

Advice in the Deathworks

As I said in the first item, “I’m pretty sure liberalism is doomed.” I’m inclined to think that out civilization is doomed, too, though by that I do not mean that humanity will go extinct.

One of my wise cyberfriends is perhaps even more pessimistic than I am, but pessimism isn’t incompatible with hope:

Meanwhile, I will keep my head down and live the best life I can for me and mine and my community, as the natural forces of our particular system of governance play themselves out.

…

[A]s we straddle the globe, Tom McTague again offers some sobering statistics: 3,000 people sleep homeless in the U.K., while 113,000 sleep homeless in California alone: we have 7 murders per 100,000 nationwide, while Western Europe has 1, the rise in mass shootings are simply too grim to note the number; we lost 58,000 to fentanyl overdoses in 2020, while the entire EU lost 97; and our life expectancy is collapsing across all socioeconomic groups.

And so, our problems are deep and wide, the American Dream has taken a nightmarish turn, and “the situation is hopeless, but not serious.” But, it is Spring and my oakleaf hydrangeas are blooming. I have passed the 42-year mark on our marriage, and it looks like it is going to hold. My dog remains ever faithful. And—I have found a solution to keeping the squirrels out of our bird feeder. (I did not , however, take the advice of the woman who made our acquaintance in Walmart. She suggested that we grease the pole with Vaseline, as she does every morning.) So, in all sincerity, I can say that life is good. What an exciting time to be alive!

Terry Cowan, whose Substack I most heartily recommend, though (indeed, probably because) politics is not his regular beat. He doesn’t post often, but what he posts is really sane.

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

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Newsfasting

We Orthodox Christians have just started Lent yesterday, and I’m already irritable from not being able to stuff my face promiscuously! Or from something.

There are always dozens of reasons for irritation.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW0Wq-t4kSQ

Ukraine

I find that some news just kind of splashes up onto my pants legs even when I’m limiting news consumption. Believe me that I’m limiting news:

Reading the Economist World in Brief and The Morning Dispatch for top news, but rarely click through the Economist.
Entirely skipping the Wall Street Journal.
Limiting New York Times to obituaries, religion (almost never anything good or even new there), a glance at the Opinions page, and maybe sports and travel.
Investigative reporting is higher-quality than regular news, but I still can’t do anything about most of what I see in The Intercept, ProPublica, and bellingcat, so I skip them most of the time.
When someone I respect recommends analysis by someone else that I respect, I’ll usually click through if the topic is of interest.

This is still a work in process. I may, at the risk of irritability, cut back further.

Ukraine sues Russia

Last week the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals, launched an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine. On Monday the International Court of Justice, which judges governments, hears allegations of genocide. But these are not accusations against Russia. Rather, Ukraine wants the court to rule that Russia’s own allegations of genocide against Ukraine in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk are false and contrary to international law.
Russia accepts the authority of the ICJ (unlike that of the ICC). But Ukraine does not expect its neighbour to bow to the court’s verdict. Russia did not even turn up to the court on Monday (their defence was due on Tuesday). Instead, Ukraine hopes that a verdict in its favour would strip Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, of any vestige of legal pretext for an invasion, which, he claims, was launched to stop the supposed genocide.

Economist World in Brief.

How interesting to ask a court to rule that your invader’s excuse for invasion is a lie — and the invader has no answer to your “put up or shut up” challenge.

How to Avoid Nuclear War With Russia

Ross Douthat, How to Avoid Nuclear War With Russia is a brilliant distillation of nuclear wisdom, it seems to me.

In short, our conventional forces are so vastly superior to those of Russia that if we directly engaged Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, we’d quickly put Putin’s back to the wall and he might, quite literally, go nuclear.

I guess not all problems are answerable with technology, huh? I’ll take a wise man over a technocrat (almost) any day.

Longfellow was right

A European war is unhelpful for Trump because it reminds voters that Longfellow was right: Life is real, life is earnest. Trump’s strut through presidential politics was made possible by an American reverie; war in Europe has reminded people that politics is serious.”

George Will via the Morning Dispatch

Private Sanctions and Cancel Culture

The Bulwark chronicles how private companies and other non-government actors are punishing Russia for the Ukraine invasion.

I am not entirely amused because this sort of private war is also being waged against Wrongthink in America. For instance, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin and her husband have been banned from AirBNB for associating with Nick Fuentes, of whom AirBNB (and almost everyone else, including me) does not approve.

It may come to the point that making “exercise of free association or free speech rights” protected classes will be a better choice than letting cancel culture commit a kind of economic terrorism.

Fourth Generation War

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, we face Fourth Generation war, not against state militaries similar to our own but non-state forces that fight very differently. While the next conservatism favors a strong defense, it should also question the hundreds of billions of dollars we pour annually into legacy forces and weapons suitable only for fighting other states. A strong defense requires military reform, not just heaps of money.

Andrew J. Bacevich, J. David Hoeveler, James Kurth, Dermot Quinn, Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind, et al., The Essence of Conservatism

Russia may be about to experience this in Ukraine if they seek to occupy.

(I’ll bet William Lind wrote this item. He’s always talking about Fourth Generation warfare.)

Gallows humor?

Olha Koba, a psychologist in Kyiv, said that “anger and hate in this situation is a normal reaction and important to validate.” But it is important to channel it into something useful, she said, such as making incendiary bombs out of empty bottles.

Maria Varenikova, ‌Hate for Putin’s Russia Consumes Ukraine, H/T Claire Berlinski via The Morning Dispatch

Patriotism in its purest, loveliest form

After more than 24 years away, Washington Post correspondent Isabelle Khurshudyan finally returned to Odessa, the city where she and her parents were born. “Now that I’m finally here, I wish I wasn’t,” she writes in her dispatch from the coastal city, where she’s been able to reconnect with her 81-year-old great aunt, Baba Zina, who refused to evacuate. “When I asked why that was, she scolded me, telling me to not get distracted from driving. Then she explained that she was born in this city. It’s her home. She visited the United States four times. Four of her siblings moved there, but she returned to Odessa each time. There’s something about this city—with its roots back in imperial Russia, its classic architecture, its appreciation for artists and its Black Sea beaches—that make people romantic about it. Peak Odessa: The opera and ballet theater is the most fortified building in town, surrounded by a wall of sandbags. ‘I visited the Vienna opera house just to see how it compared to ours. Ours is better,’ Zina said as we drove by the theater. ‘I went to the one in Paris, too. It was nice, of course. But ours is nicer.’”

via The Morning Dispatch

Three items from Protestants

Choosing a story

I haven’t quoted Jake Meador in a while because I stopped following him because I was too busy wallowing in “news.” because reasons.

The core problem facing the western church today is that virtually everyone, including many of us, believes that the most basic, elemental right a person has is the right to self-designate. This means that, as we are cast adrift in the world, trying to make sense of who we are, where we are, and what we ought to do, we mostly do not turn outward and allow the need of neighbor and nature to answer our questions. We do not look to culture for guidance or to family or to faith. In the words of Hauerwas, *“we have no story except the story we chose when we had no story.” And so to answer the question of who we are, we look inward toward our own ambition and aspiration, desire and need. We act according to that, with scant attention paid to the costs such action will have for the world or for our neighbors.

Jake Meador, touting his new book, What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World (emphasis added).

You could do much worse than Jake Meador on the internet.

Put on the whole snappy comebacks of God

[W]e’re not really after understanding, I [] think, but rather the maintenance of a certain way of life which is sustained not necessarily through ordering affections and desires toward good ends, but rather simply through a kind of automated acquiescence to authority figures.

One gets the idea from a fair bit of Christian worldview literature (especially when some conference or course is being advertised) that a worldview is almost like a set of categories you can download, and then march out into the world equipped with the right answers and knowing in advance how to refute the wrong answers. But this is not how people learn—not how they learn real meaningful knowledge and wisdom at any rate. This kind of pre-packaged knowledge turns out to be awfully flimsy and brittle when confronted with the complexities of the real world.

Jake Meador again (quoting Brad Littlejohn), but a different blog post.

I’ve been around smart Evangelicals who thought “Worldview camps” and such were really good and really cutting edge. I had figured out pretty early on that they were pretty much as Brad Littlejohn says. Plus you can’t overcome the effects of six daily hours of public school and three daily hours of television with a one- or two-week camp.

Grokking ‘Sin’

It wasn’t until college that I ever really thought about the Christian doctrine of sin. I had grown up in a Baptist church hearing about how Jesus *“died for our sins,” but it seemed that sin was the breaking of certain rules — drinking too much, sleeping around, lying, murder and stealing …
…
In college, through a string of failed relationships and theological questioning, I came to understand sin as something more fundamental than rule breaking, more subtle and *“under the hood” of my consciousness. It was the ways I would casually manipulate people to get my way. It was a hidden but obnoxious need for approval …
…
This is the slow dawning that I had about myself in college, and with it came liberation. Far from being a crushing blow of self-hatred, the realization of my actual, non-theoretical sinfulness came with something like a recognition of grace. I saw that I was worse than I’d thought I was, and that truth knocked me off the eternal treadmill of trying to be better and do better and get it all right. It allowed me to slowly (and continually) learn to receive love, atonement, forgiveness and mercy.

Tish Harrison Warren

Seeing sin as mere rule-breaking is, in my personal experience, the worst thing about Christian fundamentalist taboos (smoking, drinking, dancing, playing cards and secret societies) of the 50s and 60s, which my Evangelical boarding school aped. It certainly gave me a skewed view, which was harmful to me and others spiritually — even though 14-to-18 year-olds have no business smoking, drinking or joining oath-bound secret societies anyway.

Other stuff

SCOTUS Opposition failure

When Kevin Williamson, a bright guy, can do no better than this in opposing a Democrat SCOTUS nominee, you know you’ve got a pretty good nominee.

Summarizing:

She’s part of the meritocracy, the ruling class. (He’s convincing on that.)
Dick Durbin and his ilk insinuating that she’s got some hardscrabble backstory is bunk. (He’s got a point.)
She does not believe in the rule of law. (He doesn’t deliver one single iota of evidence for that. Not one. And that’s the only one he says should disqualify her.)

After watching one-after-another Republican-appointed justice disappoint, I’m done with making predictions about actual future performance of a nominee.

Truth in Journalism

The nonconformists over at The Postliberal Order set us straight on journalistic terminology:

Democracy and liberalism
The difference between American philanthropists and Russian Oligarchs
Fact-checks
The difference between military interventions and invasions
Propaganda in general

You’ll appreciate the next item even more if you read this one. It’s short.

This is not propaganda

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act

The Senate passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act by unanimous consent on Monday. Once signed into law by President Biden, the legislation will amend the U.S. Criminal Code to designate lynching as a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

The Morning Dispatch.

My immediate reaction was that lynching isn’t much of an issue today, and I think I was right, but there’s this so you can gauge the problem for yourself.

And if you think it’s enough that Ahmaud Arbery was “essentially” lynched, be advised that (a) you can’t prosecute for “essentially the same thing” and (b) his murderers got life without parole, which is longer than 30 years.

Buildings for nomads. This is how the late Sir Roger Scruton described “various financial district glass-pane shoeboxes—structures.” (H/T Anthony DiMauro). Some might consider that a commendation; I don’t.

Wordplay

United in diversity:

“The EU’s quite vapid motto.” (Ed West)

Ostpolitik

From the Economist:

Ostpolitik (noun): a decades-old strategy of dealing with Russia based in part on the hope that gas pipelines could promote mutual dependence and therefore peace. Read the full article.

Spelling bees

Congratulations to [Name], an [School] student, who is heading to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C., May 29 to June 3. [Name] won a 10-county regional bee Saturday at [Site] in [City]. His winning word: Archetype.

Spelling Bees aren’t what they used to be.

Simile of the day

One of the guests was a retired Hungarian art historian. She had the most delicate Old World accent. It was like listening to audible porcelain.

Rod Dreher

Mal mots

In a piece for National Review, John McCormack notes how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has diminished America’s already fledgling neo-isolationist movement even further.

The Morning Dispatch (italics added).

Someone at the Dispatch misapprehends “fledgling.”

(And once again, I’m glad I don’t write for a living and to deadline.)

Servants of their servants

For all drunkards and gluttons I weep and sigh, for they have become servants of their servants.

St. Nicholai of Zicha, Prayers by the Lake XXIX, via Fr. Stephen Freeman (italics added)

How we think

Intellect confuses intuition.
Piet Mondrian

The Economist World in Brief

Meritocracy & Sanity

When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They’ll stay married, cook organic family meals, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a highly rated school district, pay for music teachers and test-prep tutors, and donate repeatedly to overendowed alumni funds. The battle to get their children a place near the front of the line begins before conception and continues well into their kids’ adult lives. At the root of all this is inequality—and inequality produces a host of morbid symptoms, including a frantic scramble for status among members of a professional class whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara but an acceptance letter from a university with a top‑10 U.S. News & World Report ranking.

George Packer, New York City Public Schools Have Embraced the New Left

Whether it’s the resort town you vacation in or the private school you send your kids to, exclusivity is the pervasive ethos. The more the exclusivity, the thicker will be the coating of P.C. progressivism to show that we’re all good people.

David Brooks, The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart

I sought to understand, but it was too hard for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end.

(Psalm 72:15-17, Adapted from the Miles Coverdale Translation, from A Psalter for Prayer)

Be an ordinary person.

Maxim 18, 55 Maxims by Fr. Thomas Hopko

That is all.

* * * * *

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

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Tuesday, 5/26/15

American Meritocracy
Science is bunk
NPR’s low bar for scandal
Fundamentalism and the (other) forces of modernity
The business of America
Today’s Carrie Nation
Affirming the Body
The Moral Dimension of Democratic Capitalism

Continue reading “Tuesday, 5/26/15” →

Two bits 11/6/11

Rise, recklessness and ruin.
Reprise of great little video.

Continue reading “Two bits 11/6/11” →