Tag: Politics

Almost all Politics, but not too nasty

With our off-year election so close, everyone seems to be waxing political. But there’s politics and then there elevated politics, like maybe at the 20,000-foot level if not 30,000 feet. I’m shooting for elevated politics or clever writing.

Politics

The politics of candor

Mr. Carter’s words were easy political pickings.

Mr. Reagan used Mr. Carter’s call for moderation as a kind of anvil to define the sitting president. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”

As Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best,” his excellent biography of Mr. Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”

Mr. Carter’s wise counsel made him an easy mark for anyone inclined to criticize him as a finger-wagging scold.

“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound moralizing and patronizing,” said Alison Hulme, associate professor of social and cultural change at the University of Northampton in England and the author of “A Brief History of Thrift.”

And so we got the opposite of what Mr. Carter wished for. Yuppies arrived in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought us Hummers to guzzle the gas that people had waited in line for 15 years earlier. In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted us to get back to our daily routines and fly to Disney World after the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Obama administration couldn’t bear to slice away at a whopping tax break that makes it much easier for affluent families to spend $400,000 per child on college.

Ron Lieber, Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us

On the future of third parties in America

I haven’t voted R or D for President since 2012, but for the American Solidarity Party candidate. If we don’t stop eating the shit sandwiches, they’ll keep serving them.

Coke versus Pepsi once seemed permanent. Today, Dr Pepper is second. In 1965, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler together had 92 percent of domestic auto sales. Then Toyota, Volkswagen and others arrived. By 2024, the “big three” had 38 percent. But foreign competition had improved their products.

George Will, calling the “Lincoln Party” candidacy of Greg Ballard for Indiana Secretary of State a promising debut.

George Will again:

A two-party system is best for producing broad, temperate coalitions. And when one of the parties fragments over an issue, or becomes strange by internal dynamics, it can be replaced in the duopoly. The Republican Party was born as a third party in 1854, as the slavery issue shattered the Whig Party, and six years later a Republican was elected president.

Today’s Republican Party has become weird, and most of its congressional members are embarrassingly incapable of embarrassment. A small Indiana event, unnoticed elsewhere, might someday be remembered as portentous.

Samuel Sey, chudbait

Here’s a thumbnail about Samuel Sey, in case you hadn’t heard of him and his situation.

His deportation by team Trump has been something of an apocalypse, in the historic sense.

“If you know Samuel, you know what a good man of character he is,” former Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry tweeted last week while setting up a crowdfunding page for the Seys to help pay for their legal battle with the administration. Last year the same Joel Berry sniffed that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.”

…

Sey is a Christian, and that’s what matters to some right-wingers. Berry explicitly used the language of tribalism to defend his friend on those grounds, in fact. “I do have a tribe. I am tribal. It’s a tribe Jesus described,” he wrote on Monday, going on to quote several passages from the gospels. “I just don’t classify my tribe by melanin count. Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American.”

⁠⁠For other MAGA devotees, Sey’s faith isn’t enough to earn tribal membership. Race trumps religion in this case: He’s black, African-born, married to a white woman, and “spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology,” per Salon. To a chud obsessed with the consequences of “importing the third world,” that’s all one needs to know to believe ICE did the right thing in moving to remove Sey from the United States. If the Somalis don’t belong here, surely the Ghanaians don’t either.

Berry sounded earnestly shocked this week to discover how many of those chuds are inside his tent. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life,” he remarked about the vicious backlash to his agitation on Sey’s behalf. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”⁠⁠

A political movement that openly celebrates ruthlessness toward undesirables has given itself over to Satan? The things you learn in the year of our lord 2026.

⁠⁠I wish Sey’s supporters luck in exorcising the demons 10 years too late, but two points shouldn’t be lost here. One is that their plea for mercy on his behalf seems conditioned on tribal membership. If Sey were merely a “good man of character” who would “make an excellent American,” presumably that wouldn’t suffice for immigration restrictionists like Berry to justify allowing him to remain legally in the U.S. After all, many illegal immigrants meet those criteria. Sey is worthy of mercy, it seems, because he’s a member of the “tribe Jesus described.” Berry doesn’t appear to disagree with the chuds that laws should apply differently to one’s “friends,” that is, only about who qualifies and who doesn’t.⁠⁠

Nick Catoggio (bold added)

Shorts

  • Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged right-wing activist James O’Keefe and content creator Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over a video filmed at a Minneapolis polling place during Minnesota’s August 11 primary.
  • Utah’s attorney general charged the prediction market Kalshi with 14 criminal counts, accusing it of illegally promoting online gambling, and named its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, as defendants.
  • Any discussion of power is now, ultimately, a conversation about attention and how we extract it, wield it, waste it, abuse it, sell it, lose it and profit from it. (Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age)
  • I think that if you put guns to their heads and told them to spell Machiavelli, you’d have to shoot a whole bunch of top campaign managers, many of whom are people who peaked in high school debate but don’t know it. (Kevin D. Williamson, on the dirty Democrat trickery in the Alaska Senate race.)
  • Americans do not have a great deal of republican self-respect, and some of them seem to enjoy being manipulated (it never seems to occur to anybody that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes) …. (Kevin D. Williamson, ibid.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Settle in: this one’s pretty long.

Hooboy! Did I ever let time get away from me as I collected items.

We’ve been getting it backward

I love this formulation: We’re not facing a blue wave on November 3; we’re facing a red undertow.

My own instinct is revulsion with Republican corruption, not enthusiasm for Democrats, who are pretty directionless. When Democrats do manifest a sense of direction, I’m generally inclined to disagree with them. I suspect I’m not alone. But I’ll be voting for a lot of them in five days.

The corruption of the Republicans needs a response outside the polls, too. Congresswoman Slotkin is directionally right about us needing deterring prosecutions (probably impeachments to avoid Trump’s pardons), but mustn’t make that our singular focus. Sarah Isgur suggests that a Democrat President in 2029 could help heal the land by naming a Republican Attorney General to focus on the worst of the worst corruption in the second Trump administration without the partisan taint.

If you think impeaching a Trump minion who’s no longer in power is a pointless gesture, you’re wrong: “conviction upon impeachment has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from ‘any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’” (David French)

Now, like Diogenes, we need to find among the Republicans, a man — a genuinely honest and virtuous person, to fill that role.

AI as God

[W]hat we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

Public-facing, our AI Titans spin stories of endless pleasurable leisure as our AI underlings do all the work for us. In their digital smoke-filled rooms, they wonder what to do with all us useless eaters in their tech paradise.

Meanwhile, with the Lewis quote in mind, I think about the crypto-religious devotion to, and the totalizing potential of, Artificial General Intelligence. If it is achieved. It bodes to make Sam Altman and/or Dario Amodei richer and more powerful than Bezos and Musk (he who already meddles in war policy and is also into the AI game with Grok).

Therefore, be it resolved that listening to or reading the transcript of The Zealousness of the New Tech Right, Charlie Warzel’s podcast with the authors of End-Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, be highly recommended.

(If you need more incentive, be advised that when I went to save End-Times Fascism to my wish list, the Amazon algorithm suggested that I consider also If Nobody Builds It, Everybody Dies: Why Pausing AI is the Real Existential Threat. The Author? Grok 4.2, Elon Musk’s AI platform.)

Killer of thousands of the poorest children in the world

We don’t know the extent of the damage Musk did to one of the most efficient aid programs in history, PEPFAR, but we can say with full certainty that the richest man in the world is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of the poorest children in the world — almost certainly more than those killed in Gaza. And he carries the weight of this like all sociopaths. He feels it not at all.

And now it appears he deliberately exposed Ukraine to Russian aggression by secretly hobbling Starlink, the satellite system critical to Ukraine’s defenses. That’s a direct intervention in a hot war to benefit America’s enemy in Moscow. According to the WSJ, he ran it by Trump first, who agreed, but not Zelensky, further destroying what little trust the US has in world affairs. This week, Trump said it was back to normal but the Ukrainians insist the slowdown is still in place. Worse: there’s a real lack of accountability in how this decision was made and who exactly can reverse it.

But let’s just say that delegating military strategy to a private individual is a new low for our increasingly banana republic. The Dems should not be discouraged from getting to the bottom of these scandals as soon as they are able.

Andrew Sullivan, My Musk Problem And Ours

“Teaching you how to think”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water

Unprecedented institutional threat

Hundreds of US lawyers have agreed to work for free on efforts to monitor next month’s midterm elections in what voting rights groups say is the biggest effort of its kind to prevent meddling at the polls. “I’ve been involved in election protection since 2004 [and] I’ve never seen anything remotely like this in the midterms before,” Seth Waxman, co-chair of WilmerHale’s Supreme Court practice and the former US solicitor-general, told the FT. “In the past there . . . wasn’t a widespread institutional threat. This year is categorically different.” (Source: ft.com)

John Ellis News Items citing and quoting Financial Times.

The threat, in my opinion, is mostly from Trump’s minions, who have internalized his bogus election fraud rhetoric by trying (and failing, I hope) to counterprogram some even bigger fraud.

I’ve read enough about election security to think that the most plausible way for Trump to sow distrust in the election is something like a declaration, ipse dixit, that there’s some lefty attack on some blue state elections and sending in goons to demand protective custody of the voting machines. (Oops! Apparently, Team MAGA has been thinking much harder than I about how to screw up an election).

If he doesn’t get them, MAGA America will say the election was corrupt and untrustworthy. If he does get them, sane America will say the election was corrupted by him and sub-optimal. Since he thrives on chaos, he wins either way.

What are they giving themselves permission to do?

I’m not convinced the people who need to undergo what Plato called a “turning around of the soul” (periagōgē) are reachable by moralistic appeals to Right and Wrong. In that respect, I think MAGA already resides far beyond good and evil, in a world of might makes right—and where the end (victory over the Enemy) justifies an ever-lengthening list of morally repulsive means.

…

The threat of imminent doom can excuse even the inexcusable.

That’s the logic of the end justifies any means. And that logic is a perennial aspect of politics. There are certain rare and extreme situations in which the end of bare survival (facing a genuine existential threat) does justify anything that can be done to protect against that threat being fulfilled. But what about engaging during an ordinary election campaign in absurd hyperbole, exaggeration, and outright lies to justify the judgment that we face an existential threat from them, which in turn is what justifies the anything-goes mentality? The Claremont faction has been engaged in just such threat inflation or expansion ever since Michael Anton published the “Flight 93 Election” essay (in September 2016), and now the entire leadership of the right, as well as its media echo chamber, is in on the game, giving itself one concocted extreme self-justification after another for a decade.

…

What are they giving themselves permission to do? The answer: Anything and everything necessary to protect themselves from suffering utter destruction at the hands of their mortal enemies (aka, losing an upcoming election).

Damon Linker

Are to classics too white?

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”…

Andrew Sullivan, The Unbearable Whiteness of the Classics

If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist …

… I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate. From one of his classics:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Flat-out fake polling

[B]efore you dye your hair blue, you should know that tons and tons of polling you read is fake. Like, literally just fake. The latest here is a public opinion polling shop called Wedgewood Polling, which was cited on MS NOW and in The New York Times (places that would never lead us astray). Wedgewood made this statement on their now-terminated X account:

WEDGEWOOD POLLING, an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry, makes this public statement. . . . Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.

Ha ha. Cool. You got us, Wedgewood! Why do I increasingly feel like we’re all a part of a YouTube prank show?

Nellie Bowles

Wish fulfilled

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.

Russell Vought, 2023

A hacking group leaked the names, phone numbers, and addresses of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and associates, including about 10,000 linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its investigative arm, some of them involved in undercover operations. DHS said it was aware of a “potential breach.”

TMD

Postliberalism

Readwise seems to have decided one recent day to give me a couple of postliberal-leaning “Daily Highlights” from my past reading:

Liberal democracy is more restrictive, being strongly correlated with egalitarian principles that are quite wrongly believed to generate diversity. The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are alike efforts to delineate the limits that nature—natural law—places upon human beings. Each seeks to educate man about how best to live within those limits through the practice of virtues, to achieve a condition of human flourishing. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation.

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

I am quite dubious about the concept of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong, we really are an exceptional nation; that’s even clearer to me from living abroad. But there’s a lot of hubris in that. We really believe somehow that we can defy the laws of history, that as long as we work hard and mean well, goodness will prevail.

Rod Dreher, Farewell to Hungary, And to Europe

For the record, I remain unconvinced that any of the postliberal or illiberal alternatives to liberal democracy would be an improvement. Insert your own criteria for the desiderata in relation to which “improvement” is measured. Mine are that Christians “may lead a calm and peaceful life in all godliness and sanctity.” But I’m trying to learn in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content..

October

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

Louise Gluck, October

Shorts

  • If the weirdest thing about you is that your booty turned Donald Trump gay, you’re doing well for yourself by GOP standards. (Nick Catoggio of Sen. Jon Husted)
  • It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. (The late Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
  • I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (Simone Weil, Love in the Void)
  • Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. (M. Gessen, Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. America’s Police State Has Arrived)
  • [I]f you see a man in skinny jeans and long necklaces leaping around with a light show behind him, well, that’s a man who wants to have sex with a lot of random people. It doesn’t matter if he’s in a rock band or talking about God. These are ancient mating dances. These are ancient male archetypes. (Nellie Bowles)
  • The Republicans have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat. (Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal)
  • Fundamentalist intellectual habits … have been more resilient than fundamentalism itself. (Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
  • Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
  • America’s wedded couples are far less likely to stay together than Sweden’s cohabiting couples are. (Gracy Olmstead, Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family)
  • We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes, or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs. (David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Rebarbarizing America

Nidal Malik Hasan

It’s always a pretty safe bet that anything Pete Hegseth does is performatively tough and morally indefensible. But my instant objection to livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan took the self-evident evil too much for granted.

And frankly, the evil has come into sharper focus for me since my first post. Not all of what I’m going to say now just was on my mind then.

I’m opposed to capital punishment, but I’m going to assume its permissibility for a moment. The evidence does not show that the death penalty deters others. (That is a more modest claim than “shows that it does not deter,” the claim I wanted to make before I did an AI fact-check.) Failure to deter — which presumably is the purpose to be enhanced by making it public — is my main reason for opposing streaming or broadcasting this execution. (That some sick-minded people will enjoy it, making themselves sicker for their enjoyment, is a second reason.)

Deterrence aside, the remaining purposes of criminal punishment usually cited are retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration/compensation. Capital punishment does not rehabilitate or restore, and it incapacitates whether or not it’s public. Finally, the retribution is equal whether the execution is public or hidden from public view.

I confess that I’ve said things against sanitizing capital punishment, and may have even spoken in favor of making it public. I’m definitely leaning the other way now, perhaps motivated by the very unsanitized feel of firing squads, or my general disgust with the calculated rebarbarization of America (see Damon Linker, below).

Self-parody in Christian Nationalist America

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the establishment of an Office of Religious Affairs to prioritize and improve “religious support” for the troops. The new office holds promise, but unfortunately it came wrapped in Hegseth’s typical Christian nationalist packaging. Can the Pentagon use the good idea while discarding its trappings?

The announcement was part of Hegseth’s “State of the Force” speech, which made headlines for other reasons. Hegseth promised to continue culling general officers, attacked the press as “anti-American losers,” and touted his elimination of diversity programs. He vowed that in his military, there would be “no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.”

That this sort of bombast has become par for the course in the Trump era is a large reason I simply stopped listening to official speeches and press conferences years ago. And I confess to having a specific allergy to Hegseth’s trademark delivery, every sentence delivered with maximal manly confidence and urgency. It’s easy to hear him saying something like: From now on every soldier will tie his shoelaces correctly in the United States military. We can no longer afford floppy laces that distract from maximum boot lethality.

…

None of this is unusual for Hegseth. A year ago, he released a short reel in which he prayed the Lord’s Prayer over a rapid-fire montage of American military heroism. He is quite comfortable merging the symbols and rhetoric of Christianity with the symbols and rhetoric of America. For him, the two naturally go together. That’s a pretty good shorthand definition of Christian nationalism.

Paul D. Miller, Blessed Is the Policymaker Who Quotes the Bible in Context

Rebarbarizing America

⁠⁠In a word, the United States is undergoing a process of rebarbarization—and the president, his team, and his party are actively encouraging it. Calling it a strategy to enhance thumos gives this process the appearance of something high-minded, but it isn’t. At bottom, it’s an effort to encourage Americans to think and act like brutes.⁠⁠

…

I honestly don’t have much more to say on this topic, but I thought returning to the theme of the previous post with additional examples would be a worthwhile exercise. Marco Rubio can advocate for more thumos all he wants. But the reality is that thumos usually takes care of itself. It emerges by nature from the depths of the human soul. That’s why the greatest political philosophers have treated thumos more as a problem that requires a response than as a virtue that needs to be cultivated.⁠⁠

…

⁠⁠I have a hard time imagining how anyone could have looked at America in the mid-2010s and decided that what the country really needed was a fresh injection of barbarism. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve failed to think my way fully into the MAGA mind.⁠⁠

Damon Linker, American Barbarism

You heard it here first

The Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News violated antitrust laws by suspending pool coverage of President Donald Trump. The networks collectively suspended pool video coverage of Trump for four days after the president banned journalists from CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds over what he called “fake news.” The pool has since gone dark again on days the White House has kept CNN out of the rotation. “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington said in a statement, referring to a law prohibiting anticompetitive business agreements. DOJ investigators on Friday demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool’s coverage of Trump and his decision to ban CNN from the White House.

The Morning Dispatch for October 12, but you heard it here first, on September 30.

The real mission of our universities

Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.

The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research.

Antón Barba-Kay, Havens for the Human.

I think they call that a “revealed preference.” And it’s a big part of why I prefer liberal arts colleges to universities for the promotion of full human thriving.

Winning every vertical with the content engines seized after launching a hostile

Maybe David Ellison is the unspoken telos of the university.

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

…

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

Ted Gioia, Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

Why we can’t have nice things

Building codes and zoning regulations have made it difficult, often illegal, to build houses that are worth caring about. Where I live, the building codes prohibit new houses in the old residential neighborhoods from exceeding thirty feet in height. Under that rule, my own 100-year-old house could not be legally built today. In effect, it is a law against houses more than two stories high. There are a great many fine examples of “Victorian” houses in Saratoga. These are the houses that wear the little brass plaques from the town historical society. These are the houses that tourists still come to see and enjoy, the houses that the community treasures, that give the town its character, its charm, that make the place worth caring about. None of them could be built legally under the present codes.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Shorts

  • [L]ocalism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (Roof Nails & Toothpicks)
  • Ken Paxton, the über-corrupt Texas attorney general in a tight race for the Senate, has launched statewide investigations into pediatricians who vaccinate children. (TMD)
  • If the liberal democratic nation state is government by consent, the artificial state is government by machine. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)
  • Liberal democratic states make citizens; the artificial state makes trolls. (Jill Lepore, Has Harvard Indeed Lost Its Mind?)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Keeping America safe from Christian pastors

Our bad-faith INS

My wife’s Church is trying to call a pastor from Indonesia (educated in the US and fluent in English) to fill their “vacant pulpit.”

I’m a sort of bystander, but it has become obvious to me that the Trump Immigration and Naturalization Service is acting in bad faith, obstructively demanding proof that her church is real (photos, financial records, etc.), then escalating their demands (e.g., independently audited financial records) when the church surprises them with compliance. (The list is much, much longer than this.)

The INS is betting that the Church won’t sue; that’s my take. I’d bet a substantial amount that they will not get this pastor unless they do sue or Trump has left office.

I suspect that there are a lot of Trump voters in that church (my wife not being one of them) because it’s chock-full of Republicans (many of them have been city and county officials).

Isn’t it swell having a jackboot in the White House to protect Christians?

Trump’s reverse Midas touch

I generally move short criticisms of Trump elsewhere, but this is so true, and so in accord with what I realized at the time Trump was doing it, that I’m promoting it to the premier blog:

If [Georgia Democrat Senator Jon] Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Michelle Cottle

So what’s the alternative?

As I wrote yesterday, quoting historian Jerry Z. Muller, there are two kinds of nationalism: civic nationalism, in which a country organizes around shared ideals, and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism makes far more sense in Europe, where each nation was founded by a people, a tribe, a large family, you might say. That’s not how it was with America. It is hard for me to believe that the Founders would have foreseen a future America with so many non-Europeans in it (except for the African descendants of slaves, of course), but that’s the actually existing America today. It’s not going away.

Rod Dreher.

Now I will “play[] the Donald Trump role here– which is somewhat rudely getting at an essential truth that the establishment refused to discuss”: if we don’t procreate our own ancestors, our future workers, the folks who will pay into the Ponzi scheme Social Security system, what alternative do we have to admitting smart, ambitious immigrants to the America Experiment?

Bo French gets his coveted 15 minutes of infamy

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.⁠⁠

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance ….

Nick Catoggio If you don’t know who Bo French is, check now because if there’s justice in the world, he’s soon to disappear.

The end of sclerotic liberal democracy?

[L]iberal democracy runs contrary to human nature in a significant way. It is natural, he says, for people to be more motivated to help their family and friends than they are inclined to help strangers.

…

Trump, like most other right-populists around the world, was and is responding to something real—namely, the sense that the institutions of the liberal state have grown too constraining. We can’t seem to respond decisively to our problems. Regulations and legal restrictions have gummed up the works, making it extremely difficult to get large, ambitious public projects done, to build much of anything, or to respond to challenges effectively or within a reasonable time horizon.

Fukuyama admits that this is a major problem plaguing liberal governments in our moment—and that the rise of both left- and right-wing populism (including Trump) is partly about a desire on the part of citizens to see this improve. And that’s in part what we see Trump doing: He just acts, ordering (to cite one of many examples) the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and the building of an enormous ballroom without waiting for any kind of regulatory process, external oversight, judicial review, or congressional authorization.

…

[T]he problem with Trump isn’t that he’s demonstrating that it’s possible to just do stuff, as the second administration’s defenders advocated and applauded in its opening weeks and months. Rather, the problem with Trump is that he’s doing stuff incompetently, sloppily, corruptly, and with his own narcissistic fixations setting priorities instead of the country’s most pressing needs. This implies that what the United States really needs is a president who will act with Trumpian boldness but with much greater competence, much less corruption, and a capacity to set national priorities and accomplish them quickly and efficiently. That this is where Fukuyama comes down is confirmed by his criticism, earlier in the conversation, of Barack Obama and his party for failing at the time to eliminate the filibuster so they could accomplish more goals for the American people.

…

I’m sure some of my readers will respond to this summation of Fukuyama’s position with enthusiasm. Eliminating the filibuster has been popular with lots of Democrats and leftists for a long time. I don’t have any principled or even pragmatic objections to doing it, provided Democrats make the change in full awareness that they will be just as disadvantaged as Republicans when they find themselves in the minority. Maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off, but it needs to be recognized as one: The Democrats will be buying greater power when they take majority control of the Senate in return for less power when Republicans preside over the upper chamber.

…

As I’ve argued on any number of past occasions, authoritarian overreach is a big problem and danger for us, but its underlying cause, and the deeper source of our political turbulence, is the depth and narrowness of our national divide. We both deeply disagree about ends and are quite evenly divided in our disagreement. That’s why, when each party is out of power, it uses every means it can (including institutional, legal, regulatory, and technological means) to thwart what the party in power wants to achieve—which, in turn, inspires the party in power to act boldly and with increasing disregard for constraints, even though it usually wins power quite narrowly.

Damon Linker (bold added) summarizing a point of Francis Fukuyama in his interview with Ezra Klein.

Trump’s corruption concerned me a great deal, but in the early days of the Trumposcene it became apparent that my countrymen had looked at it, shrugged, and voted for him anyway. So I shifted my attention to his narcissism, predicting that sooner or later, his narcissism would make him misunderstand something important that wasn’t all about him.

If “sooner” was Trump45, “later” seems to be Trump47, and those narcissistic chickens have come home to roost, emboldened by voter amnesia about January 6 and an intervening SCOTUS decision that, while it prevented him prosecuting Joe Biden for this and that, more importantly provides him with much assurance that he’ll never pay legally for his Presidential depredations.

Oh: and the corruption is on full display, too: for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Bold, perhaps …

Steven Calabresi, one of three (sigh!) cofounders of the Federalist Society, has taken up the futile cause of trying to defend most anything Donald Trump does. His latest was defending — no, extolling — the dumbass attack on Iran.

But his fellow-profs at the Volokh Conspiracy (where Calabresi posted the paean — they don’t have a very tight sanity filter) aren’t concurring:

I guess Prof. Calabresi doesn’t see the irony that the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 – President Trump called it a complete obliterat[ion]” – was so “wise” that by the immediately following winter Iran was closer than it had ever been – 2 weeks away! – to developing a nuclear weapon.

“President Trump faced the hardest and bravest decision of his life and of his two terms as President in February of 2026. Should he use the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, . . . [o]r  should President Trump follow the advice of almost all his top advisors and do nothing.”

That’s a very odd formulation of the decision Trump faced in February 2026. To begin with, does “destroy Iran’s nuclear program” just mean a “do-over” of what we did back in June?  And was his only option, other than “use of the military to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” to “do nothing”?

It was not.  Prof. Calabresi omits a very wide variety of alternative options that were on the table in February 2026, ranging from toughening the sanctions to diplomacy and negotiations.

Yes, diplomacy and negotiations.  The Soviet Union also wanted to destroy our way of life, and yet from Kennedy-Khrushchev to Reagan-Gorbachev, we found a way to negotiate with them, and the world was a lot better off for our having done so. If Trump was so convinced the Iran Accords were so terrible, perhaps he could have devoted some time to thinking about how a workable multi-lateral enforceable agreement might actually work.

Calabresi continues:

Young advisors like the naïve and inexperienced Vice President, J.D. Vance, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and most of the top generals in the Department of War took the wrong, over-cautious view. They quite rightly said that going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs would be hard, dangerous, and unpopular work. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, oil and natural gas prices would rise, and the world’s economy, including the U.S. economy, would take a hit. Such a war would be unpredictable, and our European allies would fecklessly decline to help. We would run out of weapons because stockpiles in the U.S. were dangerously low. The war would not be a quick victory like the kidnapping of Venezuelan Dictator Nicolas Maduro; it would instead drag on. Trump might even lose the 2026 midterm elections or fail to keep the presidency in Republican hands in 2028. The American people would never understand why war with Iran was necessary when the Afghan and Iraq Wars were not.

Just for the record, there is absolutely no credible evidence of which I am aware that any of these words were ever spoken in Trump’s presence, or that Trump ever weighed the options in front of him in this, or any other rational, way. None.

Calabresi applauds Trump’s decision to “launch[ ] a knock-out strike on February 28, 2026, that decapitated the Iranian leadership—civilian, theocratic, and military—in a bombing that killed the Supreme Iranian leader (the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), an avowed enemy of the U.S.”

How, exactly, did that bring us closer to the goal of a non-nuclear Iran?

David Post, Bold, perhaps; but not Brave and not Right

Shorts

  • Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought. (Andrew Sullivan who, exhausted with repetitive themes, is re-orienting toward podcasts with guests)
  • There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in Britain, as in America, but none gained widespread traction before reliable birth control became widely available. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties, and historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman. Under those conditions, societies maintained elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young men and women – and to channel sexual desire towards commitment and child-rearing. (Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress)
  • Would Roger Williams recognize Al Mohler as a Baptist now? Al Mohler signs on to Christian nationalism
  • When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location — it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place. (Tom Nichols via Frank Bruni)
  • ⁠⁠[A]t the gym … the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. (Kevin D. Williamson)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

What color is your church?

What color is your church?

For the last four years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe as “purple.” I don’t like this term because it suggests a blending that doesn’t accurately portray the relationships I experience there. Still, the faithful who gather in the pews and serve elbow to elbow do sit along the political spectrum. Even more curiously, the church itself is part of a denomination in which the clergy skews more politically progressive than the laity—by a wide margin. Despite these differences, I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced the kind of belonging I now experience in this church. I don’t think that is incidental.

Hannah Anderson, Will Politically Moderate Christians of Both Parties Work Together?

For the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe politically as … heck, I don’t know.

I’m not interested in my fellow-believers’ political leanings. Sitting in coffee hour, I just don’t hear people talking politics. I knew one Greek fellow who detested American gun culture, but he had a pretty good reason: a disgruntled graduate student hunted down his brother (a professor) at UCLA and shot him to death. I suspect that some of our Greeks, and Romanians, and Russians, and Ukrainians, and our Serb, may be somewhere to my left if only because their roots are in Europe and Europe is generally left of the USA. Heck, most of the developed world is to our left.

So what? Are you really going to let political differences trump Christian unity? The only reason I would consider bringing politics up is to hear how and why someone else perceives the “fit” between their politics and their faith in order to expand my own understanding. And that seems more like a topic for “would you like to meet up for coffee sometime this week?” than for church coffee hour.

I became particularly sensitive to this sort of question when someone pointed out the chronic tendency of the New York Times, which famously does not “get” religion, to treat religion (or at least Christianity) as crypto-politics. I’m not really thrilled with the Dispatch for following suit.

So I guess I won’t have Hal Lindsey to kick around any more

Following up a hunch, I posed to AI a question about whether dispensational premillennialism is on the wane (I’ve lost track because it was never a thing in Orthodox Christianity, my home for 29 years now). The answer was “yes, decisively,” explicitly citing Daniel Hummel’s 2023 book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which concludes that dispensationalism is no longer considered a viable option among most Christian leaders or institutions.

That’s intrinsically good because dispensationalism is a relative novelty (~200 years, not 2000) and leads people to focus on lurid speculations, not on Christ.

Better yet, AI tells me that younger evangelicals are increasingly embracing amillennialism and postmillennialism; amillennialism is where I arrived 20 years before discovering Orthodoxy, and it’s one aspect of my mental living space where I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture on becoming Orthodox.

Postmillennialism is a little iffier. It comes in at least two flavors:

  1. Christian Reconstructionist theocracy — Christians (usually Calvinists) ruling in accordance with God’s word. (Think of the “iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism” as described in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars)
  2. Social Justice ushering in the Kingdom.

Forced to choose between 1 (jackboots) and 2 (squishes), I’d take 2, but I’m glad there is no forced choice.

Blessing and curse

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.”

John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War

Unintended Reformation

The best known and most successful modern example is probably the American polygamist and putative prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in early nineteenth-century upstate New York. Smith’s assertions about the significance of the revelatory vision he claimed to receive … are strikingly similar to claims made by the Quaker George Fox: the confusing cacophony of competing Christian groups and their countervailing claims characterized New York’s “burned-over district” during the Second Great Awakening no less than it had England’s “world turned upside down,” in which Fox started preaching in 1647.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

I was taught to distrust a short list of putatively pseudo-Christian “cults” because of, among other things, their demonstrable novelty:

  1. Mormons
  2. Jehovah’s Witnesses
  3. Christian Scientists
  4. Seventh Day Adventists

But I was taught that as a 20th-century American Evangelical, whose departure from Reformation Protestantism (itself a departure from the Roman Catholic departure from the original undivided Church) dates to the same period and from some of the same sort of impulses, with an unhealthy democratic egalitarianism — heck, call it “populism” — thrown in. Their theorists would tell you they were recovering the uncorrupted early church.

But what if the faith of the early church was always maintained in a visible Church and didn’t need to be recovered?

History Rhymes, of course

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

A heartening convergence

Orthodox theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western [mindset] often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

One of the interesting convergences I’ve noticed is between Orthodox apophaticism and the importance of the right hemisphere (versus the more analytical left) as explicated by Iain McGilchrist. I feel affirmed.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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.

Yes, it’s the 25th anniversary of something horrible

I have nothing to add to what others have said about 9/11, but a few things to say anyway.

Dry Ice

Eric Hoffer wrote that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

For conservatism, that progression roughly tracks with the Reagan revolution, then the emergence of conservative talk radio, and ultimately the ascension of Fox News and online media as loyal partisan megaphones for whatever message the Republican Party needed amplified on a given day.

Trumpism is unusual in that I’m not sure that it ever had a “business” stage. It began as a movement against right-wing interventionism and corporatist support for soft borders. But because it’s led by a born racketeer who craves blind loyalty, it decayed straightaway into a racket in which its leader’s momentary preferences define its orthodoxy, its media heroes defame others wantonly to serve him, and its henchmen steal everything that isn’t nailed down.

It’s the dry ice of political causes. There was no intermediate phase between its original solid state and its dissolution into a gassy amoral racket.

Nick Catoggio

Hegemonic Suicide

If this isn’t the most humiliating spectacle in modern American military history, I’m unsure what would surpass it. Iran has us over a barrel. It knows Trump is an untrustworthy liar, a blustering bullshit artist, and a coward all at once. It also knows he’s growing more unpopular by the day (in part!) as a result of his decision to launch a war he can’t seem to end on anything close to face-saving terms, let alone with a convincing victory. His only option is to launch the repeatedly threatened apocalypse, hoping against hope that it changes the dynamic without sparking a region-wide conflagration we may prove incapable of fighting and winning—or else walk away, declaring yet another bankruptcy in his long history of doing precisely that. Only this time, what he will have bankrupted is American hegemony.

Damon Linker, America Commits Hegemonic Suicide

A world of difference

We now talk a great deal, and generally stupidly, about “unity,” but there was little of that commodity to be had in those remarkable postwar years, certainly not among such figures as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Sam Rayburn, and Barry Goldwater—every man on that list despised at least one of the others and had slight regard for most of the rest—but from the point of view of the degraded present, it is impossible not to see that each had more in common—a world more in common—with his most bitter political rival than any of them would have in common with such a contemptibly decadent figure as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer, or Ron DeSantis, each of whom is, in his own especial way, emblematic of the post-9/11 American condition. 

Kevin D. Williamson

Shorts

  • Our techno-economic order takes the shape of a great engine of desire, training us to want what it offers and encouraging us to forget our deep desire for that which cannot be bought. (L.M. Sacasas)
  • It’s worth rewinding your brain to the basic fact that as Mr. Trump whines and rails constantly about how Canada has taken such vicious advantage of the United States, he’s talking about the trade deal he negotiated in his first term. You know, the one he unveiled on a “very momentous, historic and joyous occasion” as “the largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.” That one. (Shannon Proudfoot in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, via Frank Bruni)
  • [I]t looked like any other construction site, unless you happened to know that the sunken space where the engineers were fretting about the slurry wall was the hole in our country where the twin towers used to be. (Megan McArdle, I worked at Ground Zero. This question still haunts me.)
  • If UATX officials want to prevent their school from operating merely as a high-concept redoubt for conservative culture warriors, they should re-commit to the school’s own founding principles, and leave the vitriolic “anti-wokeness” fusillades to podcasters and YouTubers. (Ellie Avishai, Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?)
  • Man’s conquest of nature … means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)
  • If you govern like an occupying power, don’t be surprised if those suffering under the occupation begin thinking like the members of a resistance movement. (Damon Linker)
  • To matter, they have to win, and winning can soon become the only thing that matters. (David French, Why Trump Is Mad at the ‘Sleazebag’ Leonard Leo)
  • Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis.

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Wednesday, 8/26/26 potpourri

Technology and Humanity

[T]he Amish are the truest geniuses of technology, for they understand the necessity of limiting it, and they know how to limit it. They have refused to see “technological innovation” as an end in itself.

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Americans once understood that, for all its blessings, any free-market system must account for the unfreedoms we are apt to run headlong into without due deliberation. They understood the essential role of law and society in preserving and protecting the human person against pimps and peddlers who sought to profit from our preference for ease. They understood that technology could either aid the human person in our labors and heal our hurts, or be deployed as a cheap substitute, degrading us. They understood that many technologies that look promising at the outset turn out to have unforeseen consequences and side effects, dealing out damage that then demands new technologies to repair or reverse. They understood the perverse incentives thus created, as innovators could make money first off the problem and then also off the solution. A society of people shelling out billions on junk food and also on gym memberships, diabetes treatments, and Ozempic is one that may well maximize its GDP, but not its human flourishing or happiness. Human beings have a nature: distinctive forms and pathways of flourishing that cannot easily be bypassed without causing harm. While many people still believe this, we have also been allowing technology to tell us a different story, a fairytale in which any craving can and should be met and any negative side effects are temporary — just new needs waiting for a new solution from the technological cornucopia.

Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters, Stop Hacking Humans

Technology does not drive history; rather, since the Middle Ages human desires have driven technological innovations, which in turn influence human desires.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

[T]echnology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Of course it’s Seattle

Calkins titled his column, “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”

He said he felt compelled to weigh in after meeting a 16-year-old who had lost a track and field race to a male student in eighth grade.

“I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in,” he said.

In the column, Calkins argued that, “Two things can be true at once. You can show compassion for people who feel trapped in the wrong body while acknowledging they have a biological advantage. After all, why do we separate males and females in sports in the first place?”

“It’s not due to the potential awkwardness of physical contact,” he added. 

“It’s because men have higher testosterone levels and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages. This isn’t something I bring up at dinner parties, but it’s undeniable. By every measurable metric in sports — whether it be 100-meter times, vertical leaps, weightlifting, yards off the tee, etc. — the top males substantially outperform the top females.”

Brittany Bernstein, Seattle Times Writer Resigns After Editors Spike Column Defending Fairness in Women’s Sports.

I wish people would just shut up and enjoy the game the WNBA is playing. It almost feels as if some misogynist trolls are trying to divert attention from how beautifully women can play. If you’ve missed most of the season, you can find highlights on YouTube (mixed with the trolls, of course). I’m not even tagging this post with any trigger words the trolls are throwing against the wall.

Tariff Wars

[W]ars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.

To read current Canadian polling is to see a country united under its political leadership—and energized by its dislike and distrust of Trump’s United States. A majority of Canadians view Trump’s America as a more immediate threat to their security than Russia or China. Two-thirds favor the government taking a hard line in trade talks; fewer than one-quarter regard the United States as trustworthy. Meanwhile, Carney is backed by the Canadian public, polling at about 60 percent approval, a remarkable figure in a multiparty political system.

David Frum.

I’m rooting for the Canadians on this. Trade war with Canada is one of Trump’s spastic depredations that I hope can be reversed on 1/20/29.

Educated Exile

I’ve noted how often I’m quoting Rod Dreher again, or crediting him as the source of a quote from someone else. I dropped his Substack for a while, then managed to re-up for a longer subscription than I intended. But I seem to have figured out how to sort through his logorrhea without resenting it this time around.

He recently posted with the main topic being Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Life…. It’s another “poor Appalachian makes it to the Ivy League” story, and Rod added something that haunts me:

Emilee Hackney is now in her late 20s, married, a mother of one, and working in the English department at the University of Virginia, on the administrative side. What she may not know fully — yet — is that her life will always be one of exile, wherever she lives. She can’t ever go Home, not really, yet she won’t ever feel entirely at home anywhere else. This is a burden that many, many people live with in our highly mobile society.

Rod speaks from deep experience, though his background was more insular than poor, and his life-changing experience was a state school for the gifted rather than an Ivy League college.

Education has costs that cannot be measured in money. Life is full of trade-offs.

Without comment

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

The Economist, How Sweden became a country of big-state libertarians.

C.S. Lewis on War

It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty. It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.

C.S. Lewis, Why I Am Not a Pacifist in The Weight of Glory.

I was with him up through “I do not think they are.” We venerate many saints because they would not deny their faith in the face of torture and martyrdom. My doubt, or desire for clarification, comes from the last sentence.

Shorts

  • In reality, the best way to understand Trumpism isn’t that it replaced one Republican ideology with another but rather that a cult of personality essentially destroyed Republican ideology altogether and we do not yet know what will take its place. (David French)
  • “When I see something that’s honestly badly written, it’s such a breath of fresh air now,” said Angeline Rodriguez, an agent at WME, noting that some of the submissions she’s getting now “make ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ look like Tolstoy.” (Anna Silman)
  • How Greek Farmers Milked EU Funds From Imaginary Cows Politico via the Morning Dispatch.
  • Trump styles himself as an heir to Theodore Roosevelt, but where Roosevelt said that America should speak softly and carry a big stick, Trump speaks loudly and carries a small one. Roosevelt’s bully pulpit has been reduced to a bullshit pulpit. (David Graham, Thank You for Your Inattention to This Matter)
  • Francis was a charming, foolish boy who grew into a charming, foolish man. He did no harm in the world except by being born into a role he could not fulfill. (Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz)
  • The passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength) (we could call it “Inner Circle.”)
  • Many of the findings of neuroscience simply offer us a description of the brain correlates of human experience. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things. I greatly admire the precision of that sentence. I could have taken several paragraphs to say it.)
  • When the little boy said the emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. But he added to their knowledge nonetheless. By blurting out what every onlooker could see within earshot of the others, he ensured that they now knew that everyone else knew what they knew, that everyone knew that everyone knew that, and so on. And that changed their relationship to the emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. (Steven Pinker, Why Authoritarians Fear Common Knowledge)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

SPLC

SPLC backgrounder (from a skeptical position I share)

The [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 to fight genuine white-supremacist terror in the American South. For almost two decades, it did necessary and often courageous work: bankrupting Klan chapters through civil litigation, winning judgments that shuttered paramilitary training camps, forcing accountability where local prosecutors had refused to. By the late 1980s, most of its original mission had been accomplished. The Klan was largely irrelevant. The overt neo-Nazi movement had been driven to the margins.

A healthy institution would have declared victory and wound itself down. Instead, roughly coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the SPLC began its transformation from a vessel of emancipation into a vessel of subversion. The legal work shrank. The direct-mail operation grew. The enemy was no longer the Klansman in the hood but the dissenter at the lectern—the Muslim reformer, the border-enforcement advocate, the Catholic theologian, the parents’ group. The SPLC became an institution that retained its old license while pivoting toward new, softer targets.

…

Consider allegations that “F-37,” an SPLC informant, helped plan the Charlottesville rally that killed Heather Heyer and traumatized a nation. According to the indictment, this individual actively coordinated transportation, participated in planning meetings, and posted racist content to maintain credibility within white supremacist circles. Moreover, it charges, the SPLC paid F-37 $270,000 over eight years to embed within the very movements it publicly condemned. When Americans witnessed the horror of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they were watching a performance partly choreographed by someone on a civil rights organization’s payroll, according to the indictment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come.

The SPLC thought, while there was a fatwa against her life, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had an Islamophobia problem. I don’t have much sympathy for SPLC’s legal problems now even if the prosecution’s motives are suspect (as is everything the Trump DOJ does; but “suspect” doesn’t mean “guilty.”)

SPLC Legal Update

A few months ago, I expressed some ambivalence about the Trump administration charging the Southern Poverty Law Center criminally:

Even more than two things can be true at the same time:

  1. Southern Poverty Law Center did good work on civil rights decades ago;
  2. Instead of declaring victory and closing up shop, SPLC became a grifting media darling with lazy leftwing slop like its “Hatewatch”;
  3. Had you asked me if SPLC used moles to infiltrate right-wing groups, I probably would have paused for a few seconds and then answered “Why, yes; I suppose they do.” Were I an SPLC donor, I don’t think that would have deterred me.
  4. To all appearances, the criminal indictment of SPLC is, if not garbage, at least garbage-adjacent. It looks like a typical Trump DoJ stunt.
  5. The criminal indictment will cost SPLC not just defense costs, but lost revenue: This week, Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable said they had paused grants from Donor-Advised Funds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
    …

Last week, Team Trump followed up with charges against a fairly high-ranking individual within the SPLC, and the Dispatch has weighed in with some analysis:

Approaching Beirich’s arraignment—which is scheduled for this Wednesday—and the jury selection and criminal trial set to take place in October, the Trump administration’s charge that the SPLC defrauded banks looks stronger than its claim that the organization defrauded its own donors….

[Analysis of the weak charges for “fraud” from paying informants to infiltrate groups omitted.]

The government’s allegations of bank fraud may prove stronger. After Beirich’s arrest, Blanche said that Beirich had helped open bank accounts in the names of fictitious companies. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told TMD that most lawyers he speaks to consider the bank counts “more likely to cause real trouble for the SPLC in court.”

“One of the reasons for that is that the laws on false statements to banks are drawn in a very pro-prosecution way,” he said. And the SPLC has few defenses on these counts, Olson explained, because the laws on bank fraud mean that “it doesn’t matter what the bank thinks of this—for example, it doesn’t matter if the bank doesn’t want you prosecuted.”

“If you have misstated things to a bank, and … if it passes a threshold of somehow being material or important, then tough penalties apply,” Olson said.

…

But even if the case is ultimately dismissed, the controversy is also drawing attention to larger questions about the SPLC’s use of its funds. CharityWatch, a nonpartisan nonprofit that rates charities, gives the organization an “F” rating for continuing to raise money while already holding large reserves—$787 million in net assets, according to the center’s most recent financial filing.

“They’re doing okay from a financial efficiency perspective, but we analyzed their assets, and what we determined is that this organization could continue to operate at 2024 spending levels for six years without raising another penny of revenue,” Laurie Styron, CharityWatch’s CEO and executive director, told TMD “So our criticism is, ‘Why are you continuing to fundraise when you have six years’ worth of money available to operate your organization that you haven’t spent?’”

Blowback from the Congress Hegseth holds in contempt

There is, in short, good reason Congress isn’t rushing to rubber-stamp the staggering defense budget. The House, by a narrow margin, passed a $1.15 trillion defense budget and a $73 billion supplemental to fund the Iran war. In addition to the money in the House bills, the White House wants another $350 billion via a reconciliation bill that can’t be filibustered by Democrats. But that measure appears to be DOA in the Senate. With time running out, the armed forces are likely to begin the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 under a “continuing resolution” that provides “only” $838 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has no one but himself to blame. He has been contemptuous of Congress, so it’s hardly surprising that its members are not rushing to hand him a massive pot of cash. If Hegseth wants to win bipartisan support for the defense budget — something that was taken for granted in years past — he needs to start briefing Senate Democrats, not just Republicans. And he needs to do a much better job of addressing lawmakers’ concerns about controversies such as the unexplained firings of general officers, the lawless attacks on alleged drug boats, the deteriorating conditions aboard an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East and the failed war with Iran.

…

Under Hegseth’s weak and woeful leadership, the defense budget has become a piggy bank not just for Trump’s impractical flights of fancy but also for Trump family members. The Washington Post reported that companies in which the president’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested have received at least $3.2 billion in defense contracts since the start of Trump’s second term.

Perhaps there’s a case for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, but, so far, Hegseth hasn’t made it, at least not convincingly. Indeed, The Post reported earlier this year that military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the “top line” arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs.

Trump, for his part, hasn’t given a single speech providing a detailed justification for the defense budget. His argument for it remains at the bumper-sticker level, claiming that all that extra spending will produce a “Dream Military.” But at what cost?

A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without “plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.”

Max Boot

I take every opportunity to say “I told you so,” but this is not a fair opportunity. It never occurred to me that we could attack Iran and not beat them. It never occurred to me that we could frightfully deplete vital munitions in a foolish war on Iran, imperiling our ability to honor other commitments around the world. I never thought about how Iran would strike back if we attacked.

But I think I can say that if I sat in the Oval Office, I’d have listened carefully to top military officials who could and probably would have told me those things – and that I consequently would not have started this stupid war.

No bail

The Tate brothers want bail pending their extradition proceedings to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for them, it’s very hard to get bail when you’re pending extradition, and also their social media is full of statements about how they are flight risks. “You can’t ban me from driving, I have nine drivers licenses. You can’t freeze my passport, I have four.” Yeah… they’re not going to be getting out anytime soon.

Josh Barro and Ken White

Postliberalism

Liberalism is the system of government most Americans recognize as legitimate: The rule of law, constitutionalism (written or unwritten), democratic accountability (i.e., politicians are accountable to voters), individual rights variously defined, and to one extent or another, commitment to the free market.

A postliberal is someone who believes that liberalism was either a mistake from the beginning (they heap a lot of scorn on poor John Locke), or—like Marx—argues as an objective observation that it is a spent force in need of replacement. The specifics of what that new replacement order should look like are often hard to find, and even when some give it a shot, I haven’t seen any that aren’t exceedingly vague, aspirational, platitudinous, or too narrow to be the basis of a consensus (I am open to correction).

Jonah Goldberg, Thank God the Constitution is Liberal

Legal Miscellany from the Short Circuits newsletter

  • Plaintiff: My gov’t employer cooked up baseless allegations to fire me in retaliation for my whistleblowing. State court (round one): Sounds like a claim that requires discovery, which means you should file a plenary proceeding. State court (round two): Whoops! Turns out that round-one decision precludes all your state-law claims in this here plenary proceeding. Federal district court: And that all looks like res judicata for your constitutional claims, too! Second Circuit: Guys. Guys. Calm down. Nothing has been judicataed, and somebody needs to listen to this lady’s claims. Case undismissed!
  • If a Fifth Circuit opinion considering a challenge to gas stove regulations begins, “The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” you probably know how it’s gonna turn out.
  • Sixth Circuit: Forcing a compliant suspect to pee in his front yard when there were plenty of officers on hand to supervise a trip to the toilet is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation. No qualified immunity. Case undismissed. Dissent: At the Founding, public urination was probably not a crime in these circumstances.
  • Minnesota Jane Doe, who was sexually assaulted at age 14, provides evidence for a rape kit. Anoka County police do not test the kit for over 16 years, then find it contains DNA implicating the assailant she identified. She sues the police for failure to investigate. Eighth Circuit: Crime victims have no standing for that sort of thing.
  • Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are sold as a targeted tool to catch dangerous criminals and find missing persons. And we like both of those things. But the frequency with which officers use ALPRs for non-law-enforcement purposes (chiefly stalking) or wind up tracking and detaining the wrong people (sometimes at gunpoint) is downright alarming. Officers rarely record specific reasons for ALPR searches, and even where they are supposed to, as we learned in litigation against Norfolk, Va., officers ignore those internal department requirements without consequence. (One officer repeatedly wrote “la la la la,” and no one noticed.) Which is all to say that constitutional safeguards are desperately needed, and we have a sensible proposal that we’re bringing to a courthouse near you: If the police want to track someone, they have to get a warrant. Click here to learn more.

Right hand, meet left hand

Religio-Legal from WaPo:

Virginia requires chaplains serving in the Virginia National Guard to obtain a theology-related master’s degree. Yet despite providing tuition assistance for other types of degrees, it recently denied tuition assistance to Trace Stevens, a National Guard member enrolled in a master’s program at Liberty University to pursue the type of theology degree necessary to become a chaplain. The state claimed that such degrees are too religious to receive state support.

Things I’d rather not talk about

Surrogacy is one of those issues that conservatives simply don’t want to talk about. It is often heart-wrenching when couples are not able to have children, and IVF and surrogacy are viewed as miracles to let these couples have children. To raise any moral or legal objections to this practice is sometimes seen as a third-rail, even in Republican pro-life circles …

Yes, this is true.

… And on the left, how many of the women who wore bonnets from the Handmaid’s Tale to protest Justice Barrett hired poor women in Eastern Europe to carry their children? This is an issue that needs to be discussed more on both sides of the spectrum.

Josh Blackman

I’m one of those muzzled conservatives. “I think IVF is dodgy” was the shorthand for IVF and for surrogacy that I put in my running list of unpopular opinions.

But I’m friends with people who have children via assisted reproductive technologies that I find “dodgy.” To discuss it risks the friendship. And their children are precious however conceived.

“Woke” (properly speaking)

“Woke” has come to be used as shorthand for anything that feels like an extremist position on the left: defunding the police, favoring open borders, supporting medically invasive “gender affirming care” for teens over the wishes of their parents, etc. But, rightly understood, none of those are woke. They are public policies favored by left-wing activists. Wokeness was (and is) something distinct: a method of leveraging cultural power to reshape public opinion, thereby creating an electorate more likely to embrace those and other progressive views in the future.

That reshaping takes place outside of the political sphere—in cultural institutions in the private sphere. It can be driven by grassroots agitation (from below) or by elite agenda-setting (from above).

Conservative pundit Kevin Williamson getting hired by The Atlantic and then fired two weeks later because junior staffers at the magazine demanded it was an example (one of many) of the first. Applicants and recent hires for teaching positions at universities across the country being forced to sign documents promising to teach a specific narrative about race and gender in all of their classes, regardless of their specialized fields or research and teaching interests, was (and is) an example of the second.

A mob of progressives on Twitter circa 2019 attempting to get a conservative or “reactionary centrist” fired for staking out the “wrong” position on this or that issue of the day is an example of the first. Millions of employees being forced to sit through DEI training sessions run by their employer’s department of human resources, which is in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion for the company, is an example of the second.

The problem with and novelty of these developments is not that they involve crowds and institutions imposing or enforcing certain norms. The problem and novelty is entirely a function of the fact that the norms they seek to impose or enforce are expressions of a moral vanguard.

Damon Linker, “looking left” as his Substack regularly and explicitly does.

But note that there are right-leaning versions of something very like “woke,” too. Does Linker’s definition of woke excludes them unnecessarily, or is there something distinctive about, say, Laura Loomer (right-coded grassroots agitator, whose McCarthyite lists got a whole lotta people fired in Trump 2.0) or Ron DeSantis (an elite right-wing agenda-setter for the state of Florida)?

Shorts

  • ‌If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He would have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.
  • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
  • Religion has declined in the West, but Taylor thinks the more interesting story is the explosion of different forms of religion in modernity, its fragmentation. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
  • If sex is just a social construct, or even if gender is just a social construct, why is there any need for medical “transitioning” starting with hormone injections? (Tipsy, H/T Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
  • How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” (Alan Jacobs)
  • Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates. (Julia Curlee, The Wrong Kind of American)
  • If this is Making America Great Again, I wish he’d stop. (Rod Dreher, who voted for Trump in 2024)
  • Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that “they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.” (Russell Moore)
  • While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar. (Sen. Jon Ossoff, in a remark that seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin)
  • Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat. (Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Farewell, Golden Rule; G’bye, Beatitudes

To hell with the Golden Rule (and the Beatitudes, too)

I don’t look to Ezra Klein for spiritual insight. He delivered anyway. Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul.

We’re not just teetering on postliberal; the GOP is emphatically post-Christian (or is it pre-Christian?), glorifying power and humiliation of foes. Paraphrasing the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, to hell with the Golden Rule:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. … [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

…

The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

…

We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries, but not to us, to hoard weapons from our adversaries, to be able to be positioned as an asset against the United States rather than on behalf of the United States.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen “Wormtongue” Miller to Jake Tapper

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern? I’m not sure we consider the same things sacred or sacred-adjacent.

Dare I suggest that the progressives today consider the feelings of certified victim groups (e.g., “sexual minorities”) sacred while that MAGA right increasingly considers “heritage America” so sacred that it’s sullied by the wrong sort of immigrant?

Trump Targets ‘Birth Tourism’ …

Speaking of “the wrong kind of immigrants”:

After the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration and Republican allies have focused their attention on ending “birth tourism” – that is, when “foreign nationals [travel] to the US with the purpose of giving birth.” “The Justice Department has told US attorneys’ offices and the Criminal Division to prioritize the prosecution of birth tourism schemes,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Stepped up enforcement could result in intense scrutiny of visa applicants and travelers to the US and charges for people facilitating birth tourism, former consular officials and federal prosecutors said.”

This push may reflect misplaced priorities (see below), but I have no principled problem with enforcing the law.

I just don’t think we’ve got a serious “birthright tourism” problem.

Let’s try a definition of birthright tourism: women traveling to the U.S. in order to give birth so that their child will be a U.S. citizen. Is that fair? Note that it excludes births to women who give birth while here on business, or as students, or for some other reason other than to have a citizen-child.

But Penn State researchers using comprehensive national birth data (2014-2024) calculated 5,000 to just under 10,000 births per year to women on tourist visas—which is 0.3% of all U.S. births, and surely not all women who gave birth while on tourist visas came here in order to give birth and secure birthright citizenship for their child — i.e., they weren’t “birth tourists.” Team Trump can counter with a figure of 33,000 per year, but not surprisingly, it’s a less credible figure.

Delegitimizing “legitimate politics”?

Illinois Democrat appeals corruption conviction to Supreme Court
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat, “ask[ed] the Supreme Court to review his corruption conviction,” according to The Hill. “The longest-serving legislative leader in U.S. history was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for using his position to financially reward himself and political associates.” “Madigan raised several arguments in his appeal, including that he didn’t act ‘corruptly,’ as is required by the federal program bribery statute.” “The novel bribery theories the government zealously pursued against Speaker Madigan stretch federal bribery law in ways that threaten to criminalize and chill lawful interactions between state and local officials and their constituents,” his lawyers wrote. The Hill noted that Madigan is “the latest in a line of elected leaders ensnared in corruption scandals who’ve taken claims to the nation’s highest court that they’re being criminally prosecuted over legitimate politics.”

Tough luck, kid

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O’Connor

Shorts

  • The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken. (Edward Feser, Aquinas)
  • Early in the war, the zoo had killed its poisonous snakes and spiders, anticipating that if their enclosures were destroyed, these creatures would pose a significantly greater hazard than, say, a fugitive koala bear. (Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile)
  • “It is a nasty game,” Mr. Smith said of politics. “But I figured out a long time ago that you’re either in the game or you’re out of the game, and I needed access for some of the industry issues.” (Sell the Company for $400 Million? He’s Giving It Away Instead. – The New York Times)
  • [T]here is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to call the [New York] Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper [as a successor to Ross Douthat]. It’s a bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop. (Jonah Goldberg)
  • [I]f you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations. (Ross Douthat)
  • Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. (James Baldwin)
  • Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
  • As far as the official version of events is concerned, Islamist terrorism is a response to a continuous crime against the Muslim community – a crime committed by everyone who notices that Muslim customs are in friction with the traditional social order of France. (Roger Scruton, Conservatism)
  • AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing. / That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket. (Joroen Sangers)
  • He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked. (Igor Stravinsky of W.H. Auden)
  • “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection.” (Ruy Teixeira describing DSA “sanewashing.”)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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 Noise Everywhere: Fauci, Punditry, and the Collapse of Public Authority

We’re on our own

The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Peggy Noonan

Dr. Fauci takes the fifth

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

…

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” …

Nick Catoggio

Explaining noise

As I am writing these lines I see the following headlines on my Bloomberg: →Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates. →Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus. and so on for an entire page. If I translate it well, the journalist claims to provide an explanation for something that amounts to perfect noise. A move of 1.03 with the Dow at 11,000 constitutes less than a 0.01% move. Such a move does not warrant an explanation. There is nothing there that an honest person can try to explain; there are no reasons to adduce. But like apprentice professors of comparative literature, journalists being paid to provide explanations will gladly and readily provide them. The only solution is for Michael Bloomberg to stop paying his journalists for providing commentary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.

This doesn’t seem unrelated to the two Covid-related items, above. The public wants explanations and reassurances. There’s some cynical benefit in giving the public what it wants as Fauci did and the financial press continues to do.

AI pundits?

And then, finally, there’s AI. My contempt for generative AI could not be more thorough. I’ve tried to withhold judgment about it while I wait to see what becomes of it. But I’ve now seen enough to conclude it really will strip away an essential element of our humanity if we let it. Writing is a quintessentially human activity; it’s how we communicate our thoughts with one another. It’s an art that takes considerable skill to do well. Why would we seek to relieve ourselves of it? Writing isn’t a burden, any more than thinking is. Yes, it can be hard, but most worthwhile endeavors are. Accomplishing it despite that challenge is part of the reward of undertaking it in the first place.

Yet at a formal level, writing an op-ed isn’t that difficult. Your thesis statement (or “nutgraf,” as editors call it) goes near the top, preceded by an introduction that frames it artfully. Then come the arguments and supporting evidence, plus some examination of contrary arguments (“to be sure” paragraphs), followed by a concession or two and lots of pushback designed to knock down the strawmen. And that’s assuming the writer even aims to do that thing I noted above, where he or she makes an effort to persuade. If the goal, instead, is to foster communal feeling, then there’s no need to look at or even acknowledge counterarguments. Just wield the sledgehammer point by obvious point, followed by a conclusion that says, in effect, as I told you at the start, I am right and everyone who disagrees is either operating in bad faith or a retard. (Have you noticed how many people online—usually on the right, but not always—use the epithet retard in their social-media posts now?)

Why can’t an LLM do that? Believe me, it can. If not flawlessly already, it will be up to the task very soon, I can assure you.

Damon Linker

I don’t want to think that AI punditry is what’s in store for us, but as Linker notes, the New York Times has made little effort to replace departing luminaries on the Opinions page.

Some smear

Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for Wisconsin governor, is smearing his opponent Francesca Hong, the progressive Democrat. Smears such as pointing out that she said she wants to abolish the Senate. Francesca’s team hit back hard: “Tom Tiffany is once again telling lies and inventing quotes, because he can’t run on his record. Rep. Hong has never called for abolishing the U.S. Senate. Tiffany cannot produce a single statement where she did, because it doesn’t exist.”

Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm. This post is still up, so, I think it’s safe to say it exists? That she pretty clearly made the statement?

Some Wisconsin fact-checkers are choosing to “pass” on it, though, with one writing in an email to Tiffany: “As always, thanks for the suggestion, but I think we’re going to pass on this one since it’s one tweet and this doesn’t seem to be her position.” Ohh, got it, so her position is just whatever she says, but the things she says aren’t relevant. Makes sense.

Nellie Bowles

Indiana’s Chud Lieutenant Governor stirs the pot

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — A late-night post on X by Indiana Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith took aim at the state’s public universities, specifically calling out Purdue after he read a message from a parent of a prospective Boilermaker.

In a post Wednesday night, Beckwith said he received a message from a parent who recently toured the West Lafayette campus. In the message, the parent took issue with the university’s marketing of cultural clubs, which included the “LGBTQ club,” in an informational video produced by the university.

“Then on tour had to point out their diversity tree. Then one of the Muslim guides made sure to proudly mention that she was part of the MSA Muslim student org,” Beckwith’s post said, quoting the parent. “Had to explain to my kid that’s the org that caused all of the violence and hate on campuses everywhere. I hate colleges altogether I think.”

…

In his post, Beckwith asked, “Why are state schools in Indiana the worst?”

”Do yourself a favor, send your kids to Hillsdale College where woke indoctrination won’t happen,” Beckwith said.

Jillian Ellison, Journal & Courier

I didn’t even need added context to see that the “parent of a prospective Boilermaker” was insular and hysterical, and that the Lt. Governor’s response was among his more troglodyte utterances.

But the reporter did provide some added context:

The Diversity Tree, outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall along Oval Drive, celebrates the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Multicultural Greek Council, according to the Purdue Arboretum website. The tree is frequently painted with the letters of those member organizations.

So the simple presence of the word “diversity” was enough to set off insular parent and Lt. Governor even though the substance was “lots of fraternities and sororities.”

That leaves two objections intact:

  1. Purdue doesn’t cover up the existence of an LGBTQ Club among its cultural clubs.
  2. Purdue allowed a Muslim to conduct a prospective student and parent around campus and did not forbid her to mention her religion and the existence of a Muslim Student Association on campus, even though some insular and hysterical folks idiots freak out at the mere mention of Islam.

There’s good news and bad news in the background to this story. The good news is that Governor Mike Braun backed another hopeful as his running-mate and reportedly is uneasy with Beckwith, whose public profile and exceedingly thin political resumé (from two years on a local library board to Lieutenant Governor) make him a total loose cannon. The bad news is that the GOP in solemn convention thrust this unqualified pentecostal preacher onto the slate anyway. I think his lack of qualification was a feature, not a bug.

I do hope that Hoosier Republicans are appropriately appalled at Beckwith’s poor choice of targets (Purdue is hardly woke; it’s a Land Grant college, strong on agriculture, engineering, veterinary medicine and such, with a culture about like what you’d expect from future farmers, engineers and animal docs) and at his appalling recommendation of a private college in Michigan over an Indiana public university.

Shorts

  • [T]he difference between Americans and Europeans: Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance. (Paul Kingsnorth, Zen and the Art of Bear Spotting)
  • It seems anyone who takes up the Cross, or even seeks to do so, hears pretty soon about “works righteousness.” (My cyberfriend John Brady on micro.blog)
  • “Fidel Castro was a billionaire. Putin is a billionaire. The leaders of communist regimes are always rich. They steal and rob from those they govern,” – Ted Cruz. And Trump? (Andrew Sullivan)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.