Tag: Palestine

Tax Day

Last Branch Standing

When you go see an argument, you’ve been on the opposite side, you know that this court is an extremely well-prepared court, that the justices have read the briefs, that the justices know the case. And I think our conversation in conference reflects that. It’s substantive. It’s a conversation that only people who have really done the reading and done the thinking could have. And again, I think if you were a fly on the wall, you would be pretty proud of the institution.

Justice Elena Kagan (2019), via SCOTUSblog.

Yesterday was the release date of Sarah Isgur’s first book, Last Branch Standing.

Abandoning the modern altars

When Hurricane Hugo tore through Charleston in 1989, damaging 80% of the city’s homes and businesses, local leaders discovered that there were not enough traditional artisans in the nation, let alone the state, to make necessary repairs to historic properties. Industrialization, combined with a cultural shift toward white-collar work, had almost entirely erased the craft of building. As a result, efforts to reconstruct the city were delayed. Desperate homeowners commissioned tradesmen from outside the United States or otherwise relied on contractors who used modern construction methods that undermined the historic integrity of the buildings.

Farahn Morgan, Inside Charleston’s craft renaissance, about Charleston’s American College of Building Arts, which grew out of this 1989 wake-up call.

I’m handy (or at least used to be) at fixing things, but not “artistic,” so I don’t know what a young me would have made of the ACBA, which seems to require artistry in many or most of the crafts it teaches. Old me can hardly get enough of it. Maybe we’re repenting after a long haul of worshipping at the altars of growth and efficiency.

It’s over

Damon Linker, “raised as a secular Jew deeply attached to the state of Israel,” thinks that the “days when a unification of American and Israeli interests was even partially convincing are over and done”:

On Twitter/X, I’ve taken to calling events over the past five weeks Israel’s fantasy war. What I mean is that Israel appears to have concluded that the best (or only) way for it to protect itself (“re-establish deterrence”) is to “settle all family business” in the manner of Michael Corleone knocking off the heads of the competing mafia crime families in a series of bloody assassinations, even if those actions kill a bunch of innocent bystanders as collateral damage. So they spent roughly two years flattening much of Gaza, killing untold tens of thousands of civilians in the process, with the goal of ending Hamas’ control of the territory. (Measured by that standard, the operation has been a failure, since a greatly weakened Hamas continues to govern those parts of the strip Israel does not directly occupy.) It pulled off an impressive operation in September 2024, simultaneously blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah across Lebanon. (Twelve people died and thousands were injured, but since then missiles have continued to bombard the north of Israel.) In the so-called 12-Day War between Israel and Iran last June, the U.S. contributed to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. (This was so unsuccessful, or insufficient, that the current, longer, and vastly more ruinous war apparently became necessary just eight months later. Or so the Netanyahu government insisted.)

This war—or this succession of wars—is a fantasy because it seeks to enact the longstanding dream of securing the conditions for Jewish safety and security through brute force and the infliction of suffering alone …

…

Israel today is a country lashing out in multiple directions in often murderous rage at its enemies.

That even includes the largely powerless Palestinians of the West Bank, who increasingly endure pogroms at the hands of settlers apparently intent on enacting a barbaric policy of slow-motion ethnic cleansing that will eventually make it possible to establish Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea. (Yes, that’s the slogan advocates for a Palestinian state recite when they want to express a desire to wipe Israel off the map. When Israeli settlers direct it at Palestinians, the intent is no less genocidal.)

I have no particular horse in this race — yet, but I’m not sure my “having an opinion” matters much — but when someone like Linker counsels “divorce,” it carries some weight as an sort of declaration against interest.

The true scholar

Greek and Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Abandoned (not banned) Books

Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic writes about Why We Abandon Books. It may be worth your while, but my abandonment tends these days to involve just one decision:

You are 77 years old, sir, with no guarantee of hitting even 78 let alone getting through hundreds of backlogged books. Forget sunk costs. Is this book really worth the X days it looks as if it will take, or should you cut your losses and move on?

  • I slogged through Middlemarch for 22 days because of the voice of the narrator (though I did like Dorothea and eventually decided that Will and Fred were okay; I never did figure out the Doctor).
  • I abandoned A Box of Matches, even though it was 2-3 days tops.
  • If I still have an unread David Bentley Hart, I’ll give it to the library “used” book sale without cracking it. Fool me once (The Beauty of the Infinite), shame on you. Fool me twice, nah.
  • I may get back to The Matter With Things, of which I’ve finished one major section, but I kinda feel like I’ve either gotten McGilchrist’s gist or else I need more time to digest what I’ve gotten.

Introducing the Gentlemanosphere

As noted, I’m a geezer, feeling the cold breath on my neck all too often. I tend to reject some new things, especially if they remind me somehow of fads in my lifetime, like, for a non-random instance, “servant leadership.”

And the Gentlemanosphere is new to me. And it did evoke a sigh of “oh, servant leadership again!” But I guess there probably is a need in every generation to counter idjits Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes with something more wholesome. So here’s a table and a link if you’re interested. I’m probably too old for this.

AspectManosphereGentlemanosphere
Core BeliefsMen should dominate socially and control women; traditional gender roles enforced strictly.Men should protect, provide, procreate with kindness and strength; masculinity is positive and diverse.
View on WomenWomen belong in traditional roles (e.g., kitchen); often hostile or dismissive toward women’s advancement.Women’s advancement and men’s well-being are mutually reinforcing; equality supported alongside healthy masculinity.
Ideological ToneOften aggressive, hostile, sometimes racist, antisemitic, and exclusionary.Empathetic, inclusive, encourages emotional expression and community building.
Political AlignmentFar-right, reactionary, anti-feminist.Centrist or mainstream; bipartisan engagement, policy-driven advocacy.
Prominent FiguresAndrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Myron GainesScott Galloway, Richard Reeves, David French, Arthur Brooks, Chris Williamson, Jocko Willink
Approach to MasculinityDefined by dominance signals: physical strength, control, aggression.Defined by responsibility, emotional openness, personal growth, and legacy-building.
Communication StyleProvocative, confrontational, uses social media to spread ideology rapidly.Thoughtful, gentle messaging; uses podcasts, books, mainstream media for nuanced discussion.
Target AudienceYoung men attracted to clear dominance narratives and rebellion against modern social norms.Boys and men seeking practical advice, emotional support, and sustainable self-improvement.
View on Male StrugglesOften blames external forces (feminism, society) but offers simplistic “take back control” solutions.Recognizes complex causes of male struggles; advocates for empathy, new solutions beyond blame or pathologizing masculinity.
Gender PoliticsZero-sum: men’s gain seen as women’s loss; often opposes feminist progress.Non-zero-sum: advancing men’s well-being promotes stronger families and societies benefiting all genders.
Cultural ImpactPolarizing; often results in backlash and social division.Gaining mainstream attention; influencing policymakers and public discourse constructively.
Criticism FacedAccused of promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, extremism.Criticized for being vague or “soft,” sometimes accused unfairly of aligning with far-right views.
Mental and Emotional HealthOften dismissive of emotional vulnerability; promotes toughness at all costs.Encourages emotional expression and seeking help; supports mental health awareness for men.
Economic and Social AdviceFocuses on reclaiming traditional male roles; sometimes promotes controversial or harmful behavior (e.g., pickup artistry).Emphasizes economic security, community building, responsible fatherhood, and healthy relationships.

Shorts

  • Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Francis Bacon via Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
  • [I]t’s just not true that destroying a lot of Iranian bridges and power plants would kill Iranian civilization. It would do enormous economic and physical damage, to be sure. But it takes a real estate guy to think a civilization is no more than a collection of bridges and buildings. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • “I don’t know about you,” he wrote earlier this week, “but I think that if one of our war aims is to literally erase a civilization from the face of planet Earth, it probably qualifies as a ‘war,’ and that Congress, which has already signaled its willingness to spend lots of money on this, should have the decency to call it such, and give that dignity to our soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The people dying in this are dying in a war.” (Michael Brendan Dougherty via Jonah Goldberg)
  • I don’t play with betting markets, but if I did, I’d bet a tidy sum that Trump (with the help of J.D. Vance’s negotiating acumen) will deliver us a souped-up version of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal by a different name. Sort of like how Trump basically kept NAFTA in his first term but gave it a new name, we might get the JCPOA but rebranded as the MIRGA (Make Iran Great Again) deal. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • Damn, it’s expensive to steal oil. (P.J. O’Rourke via Kevin D. Williamson

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Tuesday, 9/24/24

We’re home at last from a vacation overshadowed by car damage from road debris encountered on the way north to vacation. Every fix revealed yet another problem. Every new problem required a wait for Allstate to approve the added work. We finally just drove our rental car home yesterday and are currently planning how most easily to retrieve our car when they finally fix the final problem.

I have nothing more to say on that, lest I add myself to the luckiest victims in the world (see below).

Not very political

The huge history of a little bit of geography

The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. I think I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Epistemic idiocy

A man who murdered dozens of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand was “steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet,” … His manifesto explained that he had done research and developed his racist worldview on “the internet, of course. . . . You will not find the truth anywhere else.”6 The latter assertion involves, alas, a rather serious mistake about epistemic authority.

Brian Leiter, Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority.

This is a flawed but important article I personally will revisit on the subject of legitimate epistemic authority. We’re not as adrift and it sometimes seems — or as the New Zealander fancied himself.

ProPublica

Having apparently run out of Supreme Court justices to attempt to drive from public life, the left-wing nonprofit journalistic outfit ProPublica has directed its attention to sullying one of their most notable achievements: the Dobbs decision, which returned the power to regulate abortion to the people and to the states. Georgia now has a heartbeat law, which outlaws abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health). A recent ProPublica article blamed the law for the deaths of two women who had taken chemical-abortion drugs (whose riskiness goes unremarked upon). The drugs killed the children but failed to expel all of their remains. One woman unsuccessfully sought treatment in a hospital, and the other feared it—both, supposedly, results of the law. But as our former colleague Isaac Schorr pointed out at Mediaite, the law does not forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child. No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise, which may be why ProPublica did not include the relevant portion. Even the argument that the doctors’ uncertainty about the law prevented treatment is unsubstantiated. The ProPublica article eventually admits that “it is not clear” why doctors waited to perform the necessary procedure. Laws against abortion haven’t caused any deaths, but ProPublica is doing its part to raise the death toll.

National Review email newsletter

The luckiest victims on earth

[E]ven as you push back against ideological bias and discrimination, remember that as a university student you are one of the luckiest — most privileged — people on the planet. So do not think of yourself as a victim. You can assert and defend your rights without building an identity around grievances, however justified those grievances may be.

…

Remember that the criticism of a belief (or a practice, faith or lifestyle) is not a personal attack, though the natural human tendency to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions can make it feel as if it is.

Robert P. George, A Princeton Professor’s Advice to Young Conservatives

Two bits of advice from a mensch

  • I don’t pin dreams on the rack of endless above-ground interpretation, but I do give them space and attention.
  • In myth, when you are facing a monster, look at its reflection on your shield, not the abyss of its face. That will quickly burn you to cinders. What is your shield? Well it’s something that shows you the general shape of your adversary but not to the degree it paralyses you.

Martin Shaw, We Need The Ancient Good

Hitchens’s Razor

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Via 17 useful concepts to survive the election

Political

Countercultural decency is exhausting

The yearslong elevation of figures like [North Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate] Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

… I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

David French

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

In a similar vein, albeit from someone who hasn’t been Republican:

There is no place for dissenters in the contemporary Republican Party. That is going to remain true whether or not Donald Trump prevails in November. It’s long past time those who reject the right-populist takeover of the party to cut themselves loose and stop pretending they will have a meaningful say in building its future. They will not. It would be far better for them, and for the Democrats, if they joined the Donkey Party outright and began fortifying the Harris-Walz campaign’s move toward the ideological center-left.

In a strong post late last week, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last took the occasion of the latest mind-boggling revelations about Mark Robinson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor of North Carolina, to make the point that the GOP is a “failed state.” The image comes from a 2016 Slate column by his Bulwark colleague Will Saletan. As Last explains, functional institutions “have power centers and interests. In a healthy institution, these power centers can unite to achieve shared interests, even in difficult moments which require sacrifice.” Over the last two decades, for example, Democratic Party has given us the following examples:

In 2008 Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the Democratic presidential nominee. But various Democratic power centers coordinated to elevate Barack Obama, who they believed was a better candidate.

In 2016, a democratic socialist tried to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The party coordinated to prevent him from doing so.

In 2020, the same democratic socialist made another attempt. The party coalesced around Joe Biden and got him elected president.

In 2023, as Republicans went through four nominees to find a speaker of the House, Democrats voted, unanimously, time after time, for Hakeem Jeffries.

And in 2024, when the Democratic Party realized that Joe Biden was compromised as a candidate by his health, they convinced him to step aside.

I want to underscore this: The Democratic Party was able to convince a sitting president to abandon his reelection attempt four months before November.

That’s a portrait of a party as an effective, functional institution.

The Republican Party, by way of sharpest contrast, cannot even get a man to step aside in a crucial statewide race when he’s caught (among other things) describing himself as a “Black Nazi” on a porn-focused chat forum. The party is being held hostage—by the candidate, yes, but his power is itself a function of his popularity among Republican voters in the state. They want him as their nominee, and the voters get whatever they want in the contemporary GOP. Which means the institution is a hollow shell—or the domestic equivalent of a failed state.

Damon Linker

Sorry, Damon, but I’m not going to be in the vanguard of any GOP migration, partly because I’m not exactly in the GOP, partly because of a few deal-killer Democrat policies.

The Bennet Inversion

Our best hope is to hasten a change in culture that reverses this effect. Call it the Bennet Inversion, for Senator Michael Bennet, who campaigned for president promising to govern so boringly that voters would go weeks without thinking about him. He was so successful that no one remembers his campaign at all. Biden accomplished a miniature version of this, by executing a Fabian strategy and defeating Trump without ever facing him directly on the field of meme battle.

Graeme Wood, Trumpism Is Harder to Fight Than Terrorism

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 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.

Flash! Sex Matters!

Health

Sex matters

The United Kingdom’s National Health Services (NHS) plans to propose changes to its constitution that would separate single-sex wards according to “biological sex,” Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins announced Tuesday. The new measure would mean that transgender individuals would be placed in wards with people of their biological sex or in a single-patient room when possible. “The government has been clear that biological sex matters,” Atkins said. “The constitution proposal makes clear what patients can expect from NHS services in meeting their needs, including the different biological needs of the sexes.” The NHS Constitution of England was last updated in 2015 and is required to be updated at least every ten years; there will now be an eight-week review of the proposal.

Via The Morning Dispatch

Judgment Day’s coming

[I]t won’t just be doctors and politicians whose actions will be judged in relation to the excesses surrounding the gender transition of young people, but also those many journalists who’ve chosen to prioritize ideological fashion over journalistic integrity. Singal stands out as one of the few honourable exceptions. Indeed, Bell’s case is exactly the sort of tragedy that he’s consistently warned about over the past five years. To a certain kind of ideologue, such prescience is unforgiveable.

The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal—And Why It Matters

Journalism

Keeping up appearances

Per Politico, Biden’s flacks are frustrated with the Times because it is “stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality.” Key word: appearance.

The Free Press

Wrinkles to iron out

No wonder American consumers are gloomier than they have been at any point in the last two years. The consumer confidence index dropped for the third straight month in April. (Axios)

The Free Press

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this confusing cause and effect?

Protest

Why are they saying this where they’re saying it?

National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke has a question for the pro-Palestinian student protesters continuing their encampment on Columbia University’s campus: “Why, exactly, are these protests happening at all?” he asked. “By this, I don’t mean, ‘What is it that the protesters are saying?’ I know that. By this, I mean, ‘Why is it that they are saying it where they are saying it?’ The faculty at Columbia is not in charge of Israel or the Israeli military; it does not set American foreign policy; and it did not contrive any of the historical or geopolitical questions that underpin the broader fight. I daresay that there are students at Columbia who, for whatever reason, are vexed by the state of the world, but to take this out on their fellow students and the staff at their school makes no more sense than to take it out on the staff at Pedro’s Deli. The two things do not, in any meaningful way, even come close to intersecting. … Sometimes, silence really is golden—even if you’re a discontented college student who has just discovered that life isn’t fair.”

The Morning Dispatch

I posted this on a social medium and got some friendly push-back to the effect that if you can’t protest where you are, where can you protest. Then a third person weighed in with something more helpful, I think, than my post or the first response:

Demands that Western institutions divest from South Africa (of which protests were a part) were successful enough to play a significant role in ending apartheid. So, no, you don’t have to go to Tel Aviv to camp out and yell. But I do think you ought to have a strategy, particularly if your protest is going to disrupt other people’s lives: by what process or mechanism do I hope that my actions (help to) effect the change I desire?

There is, somewhere around here, a sign, professionally constructed and publicly posted, demanding that the Raleigh City Council stop the genocide in Gaza. Not that the city council divest from Israel or condemn the actions of the Israeli government, but that they literally “stop the genocide.” I don’t think “self-indulgent” is necessarily the word, but the complete implausibility of the demand is certainly not a sign of a healthy democracy.

Enablers as “basic humanitarian aid”

At a press conference in front of the occupied academic building at Columbia University: 

Reporter: “Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?” 

Student protester: “To allow it to be brought in. Well, I mean, I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?”

Reporter: “But they did put themselves in that, very deliberately in that situation, in that position, so it seems like you’re saying, ‘We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over the building, now would you please bring us some food and water.’”

For the record, I don’t have strong feelings about this Spring’s demonstrations, nor do I want to have strong feelings.

Culture

Surveillance Capitalismn

When you first heard of the existence of an “internet-enabled rectal thermometer,” you might have thought to yourself, why does a rectal thermometer need enabling by the internet? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. But the internet needs to know the temperature inside your rectum. If you find this intrusive, or extraneous to the purpose for which you bought a thermometer, you may not be ready for an autonomous car. Give yourself an adjustment period. With time, your expectations will dilate to accommodate the probing style of your new friend.

Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive

Deschooling

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Governmental truth

Hobbes … believed that the state’s stability depended on uniformity of religious belief, or at least uniformity of religious expression. Locke, by contrast, argued that force cannot save souls because it cannot change hearts, and even if it could, governments cannot be relied upon to discern religious truth.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (emphasis added).

What government can be relied upon to do is to buttress itself with religion-like accoutrements.

Reassuring stories

Betrayed again — It hurts so good!

Having won the field, the Trumpists now are the Republican Party. Mike Johnson … is one of them. He may not be as dumb as Marjorie Taylor Greene or as likely to give you a handjob in public as Rep. Lauren Boebert, but he’s 100 percent organic, non-GMO Peckerwood. Nevertheless, according to the rules of the Peckerwood game, he’s structurally the enemy: Peckerwoods, once they achieve positions such as speaker of the House, cease to be Peckerwoods, and become the Establishment. Remember, this isn’t politics—this is therapeutic storytelling, and the Peckerwoods have only the one story: “We, the Real Americans, have been betrayed, once again, by the Establishment.” That’s their whole thing.

Kevin D. Williamson. Another one worth reading in full.

Dispossession

Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust. The collapse of trust, the rise of animosity — these are emotional, not intellectual problems. The real problem is in our system of producing shared stories. If a country can’t tell narratives in which everybody finds an honorable place, then righteous rage will drive people toward tribal narratives that tear it apart.

David Brooks, How to Destroy Truth

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.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Midweek dump (3/28/24)

Culture

The most gruesome conversion therapy

Discussing the new free documentary Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood, about boys who apparently were pressured toward “transitioning”:

The irony hasn’t gone unnoted that while trans activists position themselves in the same stream as gay and lesbian activists, this gruesome “treatment” functions as the most extreme form of “conversion therapy,” more nightmarish by far than the silliest South Park caricature of a “pray the gay away” evangelical …

For Alex, insight has gradually dawned that his more sensitive interests in poetry and music simply made him “a romantic type.” They didn’t make him “effeminate” per se. Nor, he adds, did they make him “gay.”

Bethel McGrew, The Island of Lost Boys

The insight behind that second paragraph has haunted me ever since “gender confirmation surgery” became a public phenomenon.

“Is there no room left for tomboys and sissies?”, asks the old cisgendered white guy (who isn’t exactly an exemplar of all manly stereotypes)? Who decided that tomboys are really boys and that sissies are really girls?

Not my kind of guy

The Journalism Herd seems to have decided it’s time for a reprise of Christine Blasey Ford, which reminds me that my lightly-held position at the time of the Ford-Kavanaugh face-off was that Brett Kavanaugh might have done what she said (tried to remove her swimsuit, as I recall) because he was drunk on beer as was so usual for him and his pals at the time. (I also read a high-level hatchet-job on Ford that made a decent case that she was lying.)

I didn’t consider a drunken adolescent mistake reason enough to disqualify him for SCOTUS after many years of responsible adulthood. But I made a mental note that he’s not my kind of guy.

(Side note: Parents winking at teen boozing is a major reason we didn’t send our son to a Catholic High School, and why he won’t send our grandchildren there, either.)

American multiculturalists

The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Restlessness

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

Flannery O’Connor, born on the Feast of Annunciation in 1925. Garrison Keillor has anecdotes.

Abroad

It’s barbaric — and it’s working

Before the war, Israelis estimated Hamas had dug around 100 miles of tunnels. Hamas leaders claimed they had a much more expansive network, and it turns out they were telling the truth. The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place … in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written, Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’ and more ruthlessly as ‘human ammunition.’” Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

David Brooks

Hate

When people say they want to ban hate speech, what they really mean is that they want to ban hate. And you may as well say that we should ban jealousy, or anger, or greed, or fear. Hate is an endemic part of the human experience and so hate speech always will be too, even after they implant behavior-modification chips in our brains. Ban all the words you like; people will find new ways to express hate.

Freddie deBoer, ‌You Can’t Censor Away Extremism. Scotland replies: Hold my beer.

Domestic Politics

Be it remembered …

In a court filing Tuesday, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake chose not to contest allegations that she defamed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer when she accused him of committing election fraud during the state’s 2022 elections. She had failed to file a response to Richer’s June lawsuit, which accused her of baselessly claiming Richer stuffed ballot boxes with fake ballots and intentionally made the ballot confusing for voters in an effort to “rig” the election. Lake has asked the court to convene a jury to decide the damages she owes Richer in the case.

The Morning Dispatch

Two from Thomas

Ban the Bland!

Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.

Thomas B. Edsall, Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War

What’s the point of electing Republicans if they’re not barbarians?

On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Trump’s 91 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency, can win in a battleground state.

Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary election on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”

As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.

In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”

In a March 2018 posting on Facebook, Robinson declared: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

In an October 2021 sermon in a North Carolina church, Robinson told parishioners, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”

There are many ways to express MAGA extremism.

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

In Morrow’s world, Obama would be unlikely to die alone. Morrow’s treason execution list, according to a report on CNN, includes North Carolina’s current governor, Roy Cooper, former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, Representative Ilhan Omar, Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates — and President Biden.

Thomas B. Edsall, One Purple State Is ‘Testing the Outer Limits of MAGAism’

  • [ ] Vulgar attacks? Check (“prosti-tots” and “rectal cranial inversion”)
  • [ ] Holocaust denial? Check
  • [ ] Crazed charges of “treason” with proposed mass public executions? Check

You know what North Carolina needs. It needs “bloodbath” of MAGA jackasses on November 5.

But truth told, I’m not sure that these freshly-minted MAGA/populist “Republicans” will care about a massive voter repudiation so long as meanwhile they performatively own the libs.

Explain this one away

Fuggedabout “bloodbath” blather:

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Those are Trump’s words, verbatim. He wasn’t talking about Chinese automotive imports.

Kevin D. Williamson, Giving Permission to Political Violence

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.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.