Winter Olympics

We are not the first Americans who have had to wrestle with complex feelings about cheering for our nation in troubled times. In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympics. The towering figure of those games was the African American track and field athlete Jesse Owens. His own life epitomized the tension and potential of the Olympics. He proved that you can represent your country well even when you stand in stark opposition to its laws and the way it treats its people.

Born in my home state of Alabama, the child of sharecroppers, he won four gold medals — a feat that would not be equaled for nearly half a century. His wins served as a repudiation of Nazi myths about “Aryan” supremacy and revealed the power of sport to challenge ideologies that dehumanize, corrupt, and destroy.

And then that symbol of American resistance to Nazism returned home to a segregated United States.

Even though he’d become something of an American symbol, cheering for him, especially if you were African American, did not mean you were cheering all of America, including its legalized second-class citizenship for Black people or the lynchings that still plagued the country.

Owens’s gold medals, instead, challenged the American racist ideology of the time in much the same way he challenged Germany. Jesse didn’t represent what America was; he represented what it might yet be: a nation that values all its citizens and residents.

Esau McCaulley, Team U.S.A. Is Not Team White House

Keeping people ignorant

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Heda Margolius Kovaly and Helen Epstein, Under a Cruel Star

Is the public’s best interests one of those substitutes?

A majority of Americans (57%) express low confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative. This includes 40% who say they have not too much confidence and 17% who say they have none at all. By comparison, 43% of adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists. (Source: pewresearch.org)

John Ellis.

What in the world does it mean for a journalist to “act in the best interests of the public”? That sounds paternalistic to me, as, for example, “protect the public from unpleasant news.”

May I should start a regular section for unintelligible polling questions. I encounter them all the time.

“Gender confirmation” as lobotomy

It has been clear to me for some time that there are many clinicians working in the field of so-called “gender-affirming care” who deserve to lose their licenses, plus a few who deserve to go to prison. Try and forget, for the moment, the social whirlwind that has surrounded this area of medicine—the celebrity endorsements, the glossy TV portrayals, the craven journalists. All served to distract us from what has really been going on.

Think, instead, about what is actually involved in trying to make a person superficially look like a member of the opposite sex. Not only the off-label use of powerful drugs, but also the removal of perfectly healthy breasts and genitals, paired with procedures like colovaginoplasty and phalloplasty that attempt to create new organs out of the wrong tissue, sometimes leading to disastrous complications. Try googling “bottom surgery ruined my life,” and see how many horror stories emerge.

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It’s easy to look back at the uncritical acceptance of medical wrongdoing in the past and see what C.S. Lewis described as “chronological snobbery.” It seems obvious now that bloodletting and trepanning were acts of idiocy. But the widespread acceptance of “gender-affirming” medicine in our own time ought to cure us of this hubris.

Perhaps the closest historical analog to the emerging scandal around gender medicine is the practice of lobotomy, a type of brain surgery that doctors performed approximately 50,000 times in the U.S., most between 1949 and 1952, with the same goal: to relieve the symptoms of mental illness.

The most important figure in the rise of lobotomy in the U.S. was Walter Freeman, a talented surgeon who came from an esteemed medical family and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. This was an era when that kind of prestige conferred enormous power on doctors, and Freeman pursued his experiments with very little restriction, although plenty of his colleagues voiced concerns. As his biographer Jack El-Hai wrote, “Freeman made it plain that he found such ethical complaints a waste of time.” He refused to be deterred from his humanitarian mission.

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If our forebears were transfixed by Freeman’s status as an eminent WASP, we have been bewitched by the social-justice messaging around gender-affirming care. We have heard, like Fox Varian’s mother, that if patients aren’t given access to these treatments, they will surely kill themselves. We have heard, too, that a failure to endorse this area of medicine betrays a lack of empathy for suffering patients. Some who raised concerns have been socially ostracized or forced out of their jobs.

Louise Perry

Too full of themselves

The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane. The other day I remembered an old story about Muhammad Ali. The great boxer was flying to a championship bout, feeling on top of the world. As the plane taxied down the runway, a dutiful stewardess kept coming by: “Sir, please fasten your seat belt.” He smiled. “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.

Peggy Noonan, A Stiff Drink from the Trump Fire Hose

The duopoly

So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.

American politics is a war of attrition right now. The sooner Democrats learn to live with that fact, the better.

Damon Linker, The left just got crushed (11/4/24)

I don’t think the Democrats have learned to live with that yet. They’ll never say “open borders” out loud, but I think they’ll re-open them again — wide open — if elected again in 2028. And that’s exactly the reason I don’t expect them to win in 2028.

The insanity of this duopoly makes me queasy, yet people keep on eating the sh*t sandwiches.

Shorts

• There’s a kind of motion that passes for virtue now … We rarely admit how much of our “growth” is merely our ability to change surroundings faster than our interior life can catch us. (Steve Herrmann)
• The algorithm isn’t a devil, but it disciples the same impulse: never remain long enough for silence to become revelation. (Steve Herrmann)
• “Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.” Adam Mastroianni via Frank Bruni.
• Adjusting to retirement: “Am I lost, depressed or quietly content? Do I need to name what I feel or can I simply flow through these shifting states of emptiness and ease, confusion and calm, and call it life?” Mona Leano-Arindaeng via Frank Bruni.
• If a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs, and there is no quiet. (Prov. 29:9)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

• Trump Announces May Event to “Rededicate America as One Nation Under God”
• Trump ties Wilson for racism
• National Prayer Breakfast
• Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer
• The TPUSA Halftime Show (I knew next to nothing about Charlie Kirk before his murder. Would he have approved such an inchoate tribal gesture?)
• Truth-telling in Congress
• What’s Trump got over Gallup?
• A victory of sorts

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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.