An aspect of the modern conservative disposition is that we like the arts, culture and technology to be interesting and exciting, but we prefer government be boring, a stabilizing force while we act up in other areas. But it’s never boring now and likely won’t be in this century. Too bad.
[F]or the anti-Trump right (insofar as such a thing exists outside the Dispatch break room), Pelosi’s departure is a grim symbol of the Duma-fication of Congress. It’s fitting that the most formidable Democratic legislator in modern U.S. history will leave office in 2027 on the same day as the most formidable Republican legislator in modern U.S. history. Serious institutionalists like Pelosi and Mitch McConnell have no business in a branch of government that no longer exists as a serious institution.
I could probably rank this list, but I fear I’d see it misrepresented as “my constituents’ most important issue is …”, whereas my real most important issue is the impeachment and conviction of Donald J. Trump, who defiles everything he touches.
Remember: the theory behind Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution was “that’s what impeachment is for.” Well, put on your big-boy pants and take out the trash.
(I was reminded yesterday that my sanctimony toward sleazy politicians is a persistent feature. I voted for McGovern because Nixon was a crook, McGovern an honorable guy I disagreed with on just about everything. I don’t vote for Democrats often, but I’ve found creative ways not to vote for Trump’s corruption and rapacity nonetheless.)
Clueless
A driver smashed into pedestrians and bikers on the beautiful French island of Île d’Oléron.
I’m so excited for the investigation to reveal the motive behind someone driving their car into random French cyclists and screaming “Allahu Akbar.” I don’t know about you, but he sounds like a Christian nationalist to me. Anyone else smell a fresh pine and cinnamon Bath & Body Works candle? This guy is all in on Replacement Theory, I just know it.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
This is the first Joan Didion I’ve read. I’m told that it’s not her best, but it was plenty good enough for me.
Me, too
(Yes, I know it’s more than a little absurd that I’m writing a post about a TV show that ended its run eight years in the past. The thing is, I almost never watch series when they first appear. I usually turn to them, instead, years later, after I’ve heard enough praise that I feel like their quality has been adequately verified to justify my time and attention. This way of proceeding has never let me down. And anyway, in an era of streaming, there’s nothing to keep a decade-old show from becoming someone’s big new discovery years after it drops.)
I’m with him on not rushing to watch a new series. Most of them are trash – precisely as most of all art, music and literature are trash. It was ever so. What’s good will endure.
Well, I didn’t know them, and much as I love big words this may be the last time I ever use them.
Snippets
Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. (Flannery O’Connor)
Foul is fair and fair is foul. (Shakespeare, though I was thinking of John Maynard Keynes’ distillation of his case for temporary rapacity.)
What Stephen A. Smith is to sports talk, Tucker Carlson is to obsessive anti-Zionism. Rich Lowry
All civilizations are as transitory as the people now in cemeteries. And just as we must die, so too must we accept that there is no return to a civilization whose time has come and gone. (Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar via Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul)
The people [Trump] picks tend to be a grab bag of personality disorders who squabble and fight for power, he tends to screw them over when they annoy him, and they’re all quite annoying. (Ken White, Refuge in Kakistocracy, Popehat)
The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of a person, but that it shows far too little. Pope John Paul II via Isabel Hogben
Populism is fundamentally a form of suspicion. Yuval Levin on the Remnant podcast.
We need to be a big tent so as to include neo-Nazi and Nazi-adjacent people, [and] if you have a problem with that, you need to get out of the tent. Jonah Golberg on the Remnant podcast criticizing the “popular front mind” on the Right.
Dick Cheney couldn’t get over Jan. 6. Ramesh Ponnuru (That’s got to be among the most understated things I’ve seen this week.)
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?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
“The Campaign to Re-Educate Jordan Peterson” reminds me of how little written about Peterson. That isn’t likely to change because I just can’t take the time to get more than a smattering of the Jordan Peterson content available, and I don’t want to write in ignorance.
I like what I’ve heard and read and seen, but I was making my bed before Jordan Peterson was out of diapers, and I don’t personally need his coaching on how to do life. If a lot of younger (mostly-)men find it beneficial, I’m sure they could do far worse than taking advice from him.
In recognition of his influence, though, I pray for him daily.
AI’s limits
I have been an AI skeptic, which extended to Chat GPT. Ezra Klein has a fantastic podcast on the topic, which I haven’t even finished yet.
My fundamental instinct was right: AI is closely akin to bullshit in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense that it bears no relationship to truth. What AI does — so far at least if not ever and always — is basically pastiche of things that it has read and stored in its memory banks.
But my skepticism overlooked the harm AI can do. To make a long story short, I don’t think I can ever trust the internet again for important research; it’s too easy for a single AI “clickfarms” to create a web of websites all pointing in the wrong direction, or pointing aimlessly, with alluring headlines and reciprocal hyperlinks to reinforce the bullshit.
And of course our enemies will be using AI in elections to make any Russian interference in the 2016 election negligible in comparison.
Conservatism and Woke Capital
When I see stories about how Indiana’s conservatism makes it hard to recruit and retain tech workers, I detect a PR campaign at work.
Big Business has been a solvent dissolving families and communities for at least a century, and the press increasingly is a lazy accomplice.
Launch credentials
Aaron Renn has moved to Substack, and The Masculinist is no more. I’m not shedding many tears over that, but I endorse this from #48:
I have a three-year-old, and my ambition for him is that he will not have to go to college. I hope that by the time he turns 18, there will be alternative paths for him to launch himself into life without having to spend the time and money that were previously expended to obtain these “launch” credentials.
Let’s be honest, for 95% of people, college is purely about vocational credentialing. They go to college so they can get a good job coming out of it. For most high paying positions today, a college degree is still the price of entry. In some professions, the amount of formal education required to practice is still going up.
But in others it’s changing in the opposite direction. And that change is a good thing, though we need a lot more of it.
Nellie Bowles excerpts
Red-letter day
I almost never agree with Josh Hawley since he re-invented himself as a populist pugilist, but he hit a right note here:
Standing with me is Josh Hawley, who this month encouraged young men to “log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date.”
Nellie Bowles, TGIF. All subsequent Nellie Bowles excerpts from the same January 6 post.
Enforcing a dubious orthodoxy
A new law in California paves the way for doctors to lose their license for “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.” That sort of behavior is now considered “unprofessional conduct.”
Longtime TGIF readers know my stance, but for all the newcomers: Misinformation and disinformation are real phenomena. But most of the time these days the words are political terms applied to any information a ruling clique doesn’t like. Often, it’s used by progressive journalists who want to see various voices censored on social media.
In the case of Covid, many, many very real facts were considered mis-and-disinfo. Like: The vaccine does not prevent transmission of Covid. That was considered fake news, verboten. Had this law been in place you would have lost your medical license for saying it. In that case, people saw with their own bodies that, although vaccinated, they were very much coughing. But thanks to this new law that muffles doctors, who knows what we won’t know going forward.
Pretendians
Another fantastically insane fake Native American: I’m beginning to think that any high profile Native American influencer should be assumed to be a white girl with a spray tan. The latest Pretendian, who is quite literally a white girl with a spray tan: Kay LeClaire. A major leader in the Indigenous movement, LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. She was a co-owner of giige, a “Queer and Native American-owned tattoo shop and artist collective in Madison, WI.” She was a community leader-in-Residence at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and was part of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force. She has had copious speaking engagements, and she even led a name-change-mob, forcing the local music venue Winnebego to change its name for Indigenous sensitivity (it was named after its street). She sold crafts and clothes, all while pretending to be a Native American (that’s a federal crime, by the way). Obviously she also claims to be Two-Spirit, a sort of nonbinary identification long-practiced in Native cultures.
She is in fact German, Swedish and French Canadian. An anonymous blogger identified the fraud.
On a related note, it’s a good time to read this article about how the official “Native American” population in the U.S. between the years 2010 and 2020 . . . doubled. Pretty soon every high school senior will be Native American. Little Harrison and Haisley will be touring the Princeton campus like, “why, yes, this is my ancestral feathered headdress, thanks for asking.”
Governors putting immigrants on buses to NYC
Wait . . . now Democrats are busing migrants to New York? Gov. Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, is busing migrants to New York City. And New York mayor Eric Adams is not happy about it, saying: “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation.”
Recall not three months ago, when busing migrants to New York was considered outrageous, potentially human trafficking, worthy of huge splashy headlines and endless features about the suffering these trips were causing. When the buses come from Colorado, surely the response will be the same? Of course not.
I just checked, and there is not a single story on The New York Times homepage right now. Polis describes his busing program to NYC versus the essentially identical Republican busing program to NYC as “night and day.” Because, Polis says: “We are respecting the agency and the desires of migrants who are passing through Colorado. We want to help them reach their final destination, wherever that is.”
In 1992 [David Letterman] was famously passed over to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show” in favor of Jay Leno. Months passed, Mr. Leno’s ratings wobbled, NBC offered Mr. Letterman a second chance. And even though he was now fielding better offers from other networks and syndicators, he still had to have Carson—it was his dream from childhood to succeed that brilliant performer, have that show. He couldn’t give it up.
His advisers, in the crunch, told him a truth that is said to have released him from his idée fixe. There is no Johnny Carson show anymore, they said, it’s gone. It’s the Jay Leno show now, and you never wanted to inherit that.
Soon after, Mr. Letterman accepted the CBS show where he finally became what he wanted to be, No. 1 in late night.
Sometimes you have to realize a dream is a fixation, its object no longer achievable because it doesn’t exist.
…
Some of the [House Speaker election] spectacle connects in my mind to the fact that Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a longtime idea that he must be speaker, and would do anything for it, and left his colleagues thinking eh, he just wants to be speaker—he’s two-faced, believes in little, blows with the wind. So they enjoyed torturing him. And in the end he made the kind of concessions that make a speakership hardly worth having.
This introduced an unusually white-hot Peggy Noonan column, and her no-holds barred take-down of the Freedom Caucus (“stupid,” “highly emotional,” “nihilis[ts],” no “historical depth”) is spot-on.
Remembering January 6
At 6:01 p.m. on January 6, with the day’s carnage behind him, Trump issued his last tweet of that day.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he wrote. “Go home with love & in peace.” Trump ended with this admonition: “Remember this day forever!”
We will, just not in the way Trump and his party want us to.
… The House inquiry into Hunter Biden damages him but not his father ….
One of Karl Rove’s predictions for 2023. I have no opinion on most of them, but this one’s spot on, and the obsession of the GOP Congress-in-Waiting (there is no Congress until a Speaker is elected, which hasn’t happened as I write) is contemptible.
Speaker Pelosi
I know Nancy Pelosi was (is?) almost as hated by Republicans as Hillary Clinton. In reaction, I was inclined to praise her effectiveness as Speaker of the House.
But I must admit that her effectiveness was purchased at the cost if further infantilizing our feckless Congress. Pelosi was effective at advancing Democratic goals not purely by management and persuasion. She tended to formulate massive omnibus bills in secret and then introduce them at the last minute before something dreadful like a government shutdown would arrive. Last year’s $1.7 trillion year-end bill was a classic example.
Her sobriquet probably should be “Take It or Leave It Nancy.”
To believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
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]n the area of historical consciousness [Donald Trump] is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.
Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.
Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious …
And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.
“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.
…
Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” …
The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute …
More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.
This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.
Peggy Noonan (emphasis added) Note that this is her blog, with no paywall (unlike the Wall Street Journal version).
I quote at length because this is the rare occasion when I was uncomfortable with her column. Apart from
the snooty liberals and progressives talking a far, far better “common man” game than they’ve played in decades,
that there is a realignment of parties still going on, and
that Trump is a bad man and half mad.
we were not seeing things alike.
But put those three bullet points together and subtract the Republican loyalty she retains but I’ve abandoned, and we are seeing things substantially alike! I just had to read more carefully and mull it a bit.
I try to avoid watching that man because I don’t enjoy feeling enraged. So I might conceivably have noticed “shrewd” or “astute” had I been watching. She is paid to watch things like that and to call them to others’ attention.
I thought it meet and right to share the impressions of someone shrewder and of cooler head than my own. You may enjoy the entirety, of course, by clicking the link, which I recommend.
* * * * *
Trump didn’t do the thing he’s accused of doing, but if he did it was fine, and in fact that’s exactly what he did, get over it, because it’s not only fine, it’s precisely what we want from a president, and can you believe that Biden did the same thing, shame on him.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 