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.
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.” …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Purdue doesn’t cover up the existence of an LGBTQ Club among its cultural clubs.
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 folksidiots 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)
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?”
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.
[Indiana Fever’s Sophie] Cunningham doesn’t hate trans people, she said, but “I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
There was a half-hearted effort to cancel Cunningham over this. It seems to have flopped, though perhaps it still has a spasm or two left. But not only did she get away with this commonsensical opinion, she got away with the truth of “biological men” instead of the shibboleth “trans women.”
And when two girls showed up at the Fever-Storm game in Seattle Tuesday, sporting “Thank you Sophie” signs, and the Storm’ co-owner called them “f*****g insane,” the co-owner got fined and banned from the next five Storm games!
I wouldn’t mention all this but for one thing that I can only reluctantly acknowledge: a lot of stupid taboos have fallen, a lot of euphemisms are barely murmured any more, since Donald Trump took occupancy in the White House. I guess there’s too little energy left for fussing about shibboleths when there’s a genuine menace reigning in the Oval Office.
I’m nowhere near prepared to excuse Trump for his transgressions because of that, but I’m prepared to recognize a correlation that feels even to hostile, never-Trump me, like causation.
Read the whole Rosenfield piece if you want to see how things have turned right-side-up again.
[UPDATE: This was first published calling the Seattle team the “Aces.” I think that’s the Las Vegas franchise. I’m enjoying the WNBA, but I don’t have all the franchise names down pat.]
Oh, damn! We were hoping the maniac was a white Christian!
An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. The white van “didn’t exactly hit the parade,” one typical report went, but as it drove through the parade it “attacked the people who were going away from the parade.”
As I have had cause to say too many times, this is something which, from Stockholm to Nice, is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.
…
The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man ….
I read the other day that something like 58% of Muslims in America disapprove of Islamoterrorism. That was supposed to reassure me, but I wondered why it wasn’t 98%. And it didn’t help that the 58% is inert because they are threatened by the terrorists.
I just don’t want to hang around people like that
In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.
And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.
I am pleased. District 23 is, I believe, pretty solidly “red.” If I were a Democrat (and lived in that District), I likely would have reasoned:
No way is a Democrat getting elected in my district. The best I can do is pull a Republican primary ballot and vote for the less objectionable Republican, the one not backed by Trump because he stood up to Trump.
I’m given to understand that such a vote is against Indiana law. A stupid law: “Don’t register by party but don’t you dare pull the ballot of the party we don’t think you really in your heart-of-hearts belong to.”
The Indiana GOP, however, appears prepared to require registration by party instead of sensibly abolishing the ban on crossover voting.
What Team Copenaver should have done was deploy poll-watchers to challenge those wicked, wicked Democrats who want to be represented by the less bad Republican if they can’t have a Democrat. Then the voters could have pulled a Democrat primary ballot. But no, Team Copenhaver assumed that Trump would carry their gal over the finish line first, and decided only after a narrow loss that the VAR refs shouldn’t count the only vote those wicked Democrat cross-overs cast, disenfranchising them utterly.
The campaign was dirty on both sides, and Deery’s ads were dirtier than Copenhaver’s by my lights.
I hate politics.
Spear Phishing
An AI model doesn’t need to breach a hardened network to do catastrophic damage. It only needs to talk an employee into opening the door. And the victims won’t be only governments and businesses. They will be ordinary people — the elderly, yes, but also anyone busy enough to answer an email or a message on Slack or WhatsApp on autopilot. Many have learned to spot the tells of a mass-produced scam. Few are ready to spot an attack written for an audience of one.
Some billionaire named Kevin O’Leary (I guess if you watched Shark Tank you may know of him) announced his plan to build a 40,000 acre data center in a remote part of Utah. Opposition predictably arose:
With the controversy heating up, O’Leary and Palandjian had a choice. They could have offered to meet with the project’s opponents and laid out for them the various ways their data center would mitigate their fears. They could have stated publicly something Palandjian told me when I spoke to him—that the permitting process was just in its beginning stages. “Our permit applications will all be a matter of public record, and in some instances, we’ll have hearings that will be open to the public, where the public will have a voice. We welcome a healthy dialogue and a healthy debate,” he added.
But they didn’t do that. Instead, O’Leary went on Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s podcast and accused Kanter and Finlayson, both of whom have deep roots in Utah, of working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. O’Leary is convinced—and he’s hardly alone—that China is funding data center opponents, hoping to slow down the U.S. while it tries to catch up in the race for AI supremacy. There was no publicly available evidence, however, that Kanter and Finlayson were doing China’s bidding. That didn’t stop O’Leary. During one of his appearances on Fox, he said, “They should rename this thing ‘Alliance for a Better China in Utah’ after you look at how much money is coming out of China pouring into this organization.” It wasn’t until Kanter and Finlayson threatened to sue for defamation (which they ultimately did) that O’Leary and Fox acknowledged that they had no proof for this allegation, and issued an apology.
…
Is it any wonder that people are up in arms about all the data centers that are proliferating around the country? Big Tech has never been known for its transparency and accountability, and that is especially true as they rush to build multibillion-dollar data centers to satisfy the voracious needs of AI. Data center developers have bought up land in secret, forced local politicians to sign nondisclosure agreements, and then steamrolled their way to permits and zoning changes ….
(The idea of public officials entering into nondisclosure agreements with billionaire developers gives me a major case of the willies, by the way. Leave it to a retired lawyer to pick that out for highlighting.)
Memento Vivere
The most obvious threat of further confusion about what it means to be alive is posed by artificial intelligence. We often describe AI tools as “thinking.” Some of the advocates and enthusiasts of AI suggest that it is conscious. And we know that people can easily become convinced that it is “alive” in some meaningful way. The famously skeptical atheist Richard Dawkins believes that AI is conscious, capable of complex thought, and alive enough to experience death. What it means to be alive is clearly less obvious to people than it used to be.
…
If a machine is better at “caring” than we are, we are bad at caring. If robots can cure our loneliness, we have more problems than loneliness. If we think AI will improve aspects of our humanity, we do not understand humanity very well. In this context, memento mori is not useless, but it would be more useful to bring memento vivere into the conversation.
…
It’s very possible that if we cannot distinguish between what is alive and what is not, or understand why someone would want to use the good silver, we are not doing much better than unlimited pancakes.
Having been drawn in by the title and that gorgeous illustration at the top, I almost didn’t read this. Shift your mental gears, or suspend incredulity, and savor it.
Shorts
[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief …. (Marilynne Robinson in one of the Gilead novels)
[John Williamson] Nevin … depicted Winebrenner as a religious entrepreneur, daring to invent a new and competing church: “It is felt to be as easy to start a new Church, as it is to get up a new moral or political association under any other (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity)
All power tends to coopt and absolute power coopts absolutely. (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue)
Tact is to lie about others as you would have them lie about you. (Oliver Herford)
[T]he last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out. (Faith Hill, The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police. For the record, I don’t think she made her case.)
I’m telling you, most Protestants or Catholics today, if they were to time-travel back to [western Europe, 1450-1650], would be tempted to run into the arms of Voltaire. (Rod Dreher, singing the praises of Carlos Eire, Reformations)
“We spent $3,000 or $4,000 an acre on the Old Vineyard,” Mr. Hirsch recalled in 2005. “That wouldn’t get you through the paperwork today.” (Quoting David Hirsch, vineyard pioneer of California’s Sonoma coast, who died Tuesday at 81)
He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring. (Katie Kingsbury, NYT opinion editor, of Ross Douthat, who’s leaving the Times after 17 years to join CBS 60 Minutes)
The problem today is we value what’s countable rather than what’s important. (David Brooks)
Americans of all political stripes are sick and tired of pretending they can’t see the emperor’s whole entire ass. (Kat Rosenfield)
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?”
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.
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?”
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.
I find right now it can be hard to speak about anything going on in the world: it’s all moving so fast, very little seems clear, and there is a strange indefinable sense that we are all somehow waiting for something.
I suggest we’re waiting for two tangled somethings:
See whether, and how, and how radically, AI shakes up the world as we’ve known it.
See if the tech sector bubble (AI market valuation collectively has reached $27 trillion) bursts and worry #1 flees like a dream in the night.
With all the buzz and confidently-voiced narratives, it’s easy to forget that AI has not yet been profitable, and may never be profitable, but is up to its eyeballs in debt or in equity that likely never will generate enough free cash flow to justify it.
Running on steroids
It was on Wall Street that Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old co-founder of Kalshi, was inspired to start a prediction-markets exchange. As an intern at hedge funds such as Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, she was baffled to find fund managers building elaborate portfolios to take positions on forthcoming elections and interest-rate decisions. Kalshi’s users bet directly on events instead. “What we are building is a financial exchange where anyone from a Robin Hood trader to Goldman Sachs to someone in an MIT dorm could trade directly in what their thesis was about the future,” Ms Lopes Lara says.
Among amateur traders, prediction markets have taken off. Everyone from students to delivery drivers seems to be having a flutter. Kalshi processed $33bn of trades in June, according to the Block, a data provider. Its main rival, Polymarket, did $10.7bn on its crypto-based international exchange, plus $3.3bn on its regulated American version. These are tiny sums next to those on big derivatives exchanges. But they are growing fast (see chart). Kalshi and Polymarket are reportedly fundraising at valuations of $40bn and $15bn.
The Economist. I’m pretty certain I’ve voiced by hatred of gambling, and gambling apps, and perhaps even Kalshi and Polymarket by name. But I confess to not having connected them to what was already going on at hedge funds.
Our “healthy” economy is running on steroids and crack even beyond what I thought. For “hedge funds” are available only to accredited and institutional investors (who can afford getting hosed) while Kalshi and Polymarket are available to any random chud. That democratic gesture bodes ill for just about everyone but the owners of Kalshi and Polymarket.
Barbarian art-destroyers
Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment; it was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country. “Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.
I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?
Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.
The adults were more impressive than the college students.
Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.
Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.
Kevin D. Williamson, who I’ll read even when he’s writing about a movie I don’t plan to see.
Elena Kagan
I keep and regularly review a list of my truly unpopular opinions — not the edgy things one says or write in hopes of being thought courageous, but the things one dare not say or write in the current milieu.
This is not one of them, though it may be a bit edgy in “conservative” (whatever that term means after ten years in the Trumposcene) circles: Justice Elena Kagan is more than just one of three “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court. She is a diplomat, with stratospheric emotional intelligence, who managed to make conservative students feel welcome at Harvard Law and not infrequently attended Federalist Society meetings. When I hear discussions of SCOTUS decisions, I frequently wonder how Justice Kagan shaped them behind the scenes.
I’ll likely be gone before she is, but I suspect she will go down in history as one of the most consequential justices of the court — top decile at least.
UPDATE: On Tuesday the 28th, Josh Blackmun conveniently published this brief piece on Justice Kagan, which harmonizes well with my view of her.
The report branded more than 100 groups as “anti-rights,” including 51 that are dedicated to protecting the freedoms of women and gay people but are dismissed as “gender critical.” The common characteristic of these organizations is that they acknowledge the fact that human beings cannot change sex and that the rights of women and gay people are underpinned by a recognition of biological sex differences. This is apparently sufficient to see them condemned.
The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel criticized Vice President JD Vance’s absenteeism from the Senate, where he is ex officio Senate president. His enforcers came down hard on her:
uniparty mouthpiece
billionaire lackey
corrupt
liberal
Marxist
deep state
captive tool
liar
establishment
RINO
She responds:
Can Mr. Vance possibly think this is smart? Successful politicians seek to find new allies, not to alienate longstanding ones, whether elected colleagues, interest groups, the entrepreneurial class or conservative media. Winning is hard enough without a right-on-right cage match. One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. If he wants to be president, he’ll need to get over that.
But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his “national conservative” ambitions for the GOP aren’t landing. Republicans are increasingly up in arms over a Vance agenda that sounds like Bernie Sanders. Hence his Vance team’s need to invalidate anyone who disagrees as a “RINO” or a “tool” of special interests or an “elite”—the better to allow them to define what counts as a “real” Republican. A Vance Republican.
Here’s an idea: Make the argument instead. And maybe let others make theirs, too—free of the gaslighting.
I was reading Rod Dreher when he “catapulted JD Vance into fame.” Understandably, considering what followed, Dreher and Vance remain close. But even Rod, because he actually cares for Vance, with skin in the game, has written some critical things.
I once cared moderately for Vance, thinking he might reprise the role of Mike Pence. I care for him a little less every week.
Shorts
From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. … In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed. (The Economist)
It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. (David Brooks)
Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (L.M. Sacasas. This is a periodic, pithy gut-check. It evokes a lot.)
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?”
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.
I’m not sure there’s anybody in the second Trump administration, save Marco Rubio, to which I would extend a defense on almost anything. But whataboutism isn’t a defense.
So long as Democrat nominees to high office cannot affirm that men do not become pregnant (a stock Republican gotcha question), they lack standing to criticize Trump nominees’ refusal to affirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (a stock Democrat gotcha question).
(Heck, in one sense, the Democrats are worse. I’m not sure I, who detest Trump, could affirm Biden’s victory in terms stronger than “I believe he won because it has been reported so, and certified so, and I know no credible evidence to the contrary.”)
Who’s the more partisan Justice?
Who’s more partisan:
Justice Samuel Alito, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes with him 87% of the time? Or maybe it’s …
Ketanji Brown Jackson, who on questions of central importance to Trump, votes against him 98% of the time?
Somehow, the press just isn’t interested in the KBJ side of that. (H/T Sara Isgur)
Trump doesn’t give a rip about the GOP
The only thing good things to say about Trump’s speech Thursday night were that he reportedly kept it down to 25 minutes and didn’t harp on the supposed theft of the 2020 Election. Other than that, his party was almost certainly damaged badly:
In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate … All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.
Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. TheAtlanta Journal-Constitutionreported the effect of this talk in Georgia … Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.
Tonight, Trump repeated …
If … you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?
… Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.
That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.
… among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?
Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.
If there is a season to everything, and a time to every purpose under heaven (Eccles. 3:1), then there are right and wrong ways to observe the landmarks of life. It simply does not make sense for secular authorities to use this extraordinary national birthday as the vehicle for eliciting waves of national guilt and launching a search for means of atonement. Compare this to, say, the way we characteristically observe a human birthday. When someone turns one hundred years old, do we see it as the opportunity for a struggle session, in which we browbeat that person into confessing the many misdeeds that have accumulated over the course of a long life? Or do we instead use it as an opportunity for the expression of love, and of our gratitude for the remarkable fact that this person is still among us? To what season does this occasion belong?
My avoidance of reading The End of Reading is Here despite repeated recommendations (it’s so looooong!) reflected that even geezers can fall prey to the malady. Excerpts:
Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
[A]s writing eroded individuals’ memories, the media theorist Andrey Mir has observed, it improved society’s collective memory.
Trump is our first postliterate president. It is difficult to imagine him being elected leader of a country where information is primarily spread through text. Ahead of the 2024 election, an NBC News poll of 1,000 voters found that Joe Biden had a 49-point lead among respondents who read newspapers. Trump has pioneered a style of communication that exploits our distracted, disputatious age.
Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me how this plays out. “You name an enemy and you polarize the public,” he said. “You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.” (Ironically, Salam is the boss of Christopher Rufo, who calculatedly used exactly this strategy to attack “critical race theory”.)
Don’t be like me. Read it. Reading something that long by itself begins the cure.
A linguistic curiosity
In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.
Freddie de Boer has an interesting piece on the brittleness of AI-detector Pangram (which I hadn’t heard of by name, though I knew the concept).
I’m fortunate to be able to subscribe to many interesting things. But I still have only 24 hours in my day, like everyone else. I’m just not that interested in whether a human or a machine wrote a logical, even persuasive, argument; what matters is the truth, falsity, or fruitfulness of it in my situation. Only if I’m trying to decide whether the putative author is trustworthy would the AI question come up.
This is not to indict as foolish those who are interested in things like Pangram. I’m only saying that given my situation in life and reading habits, it’s not of interest to me — and that some of my readers might similarly be in a situation where the human or cyber source of a writing is irrelevant.
Luigi: The Musical
The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations. (Kevin D. Williamson)
I recently reviewedLuigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes.
AI is controversial in many ways, and I know a few people who consciously shun it completely. I, in contrast, use it while continuing to read about the dangers, horror stories, and other things to hone discernment.
I came across a list of recommendations for AI use that I agree with completely:
Avoid using AI chatbots for personal, spiritual, or emotional matters.
Restrict use strictly to non-personal tasks (e.g., recipes, summaries).
Do not seek consciousness, spiritual counsel, or relationship advice from AI.
Those with mental health issues or in vulnerable states should be warned against AI chatbot use.
Recognize that while most chatbot interactions are neutral, there is an elevated risk for spiritual deception.
In addition, I just haven’t been comfortable with the thought of speaking directly to a chatbot. I’ll dictate questions, then cut-and-paste into it instead. I think I’m trying to avoid any faux-personal relationship.
So how does this cash out? Of what use is AI if those things are out of bounds?
Maybe this will help. Here are some questions I’ve posed to it or some requests I’ve made over about 14 months:
Why do so many organizations I give to send me membership cards? Is that supposed to create some special bond?
Is there any evidence that any of the Minneapolis protesters of ICE immigration enforcement were “paid agitators”?
Please compare English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, ranking them if there is a critical consensus.
Can you please summarize, in 1000 words or less, the change from Second-Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism?
I’m trying first to recall and then to flesh out an assertion I heard or read in podcast, print or another “public-like” forum./The assertion was something along the lines that whether extraterrestrial intelligent life exists will never be definitively answered because it is impossible (as a matter of physics?) for such life to travel inter-galactically (or was it impossible from one solar system to another?)/Can you help me pin it down, and give a simplified not-too-scientifically-sophisticated explanation, not just the conclusion some have reached?
How prevalent is “birth tourism” in the United States?
How is the post-flood restoration of Asheville, NC coming along?
Then there were a couple of dialogs to get things done. Omitting those related to my work with some Boards of Directors, these include:
I used Claude AI to help me dress up my micro.blog posts with a custom CSS (since I don’t understand CSS it’s not worth the time it would take to learn).
My most ambitious use of an AI agent was to migrate a couple of years of Common Place Book entries from a run-on Markdown file, with date and time metadata for each separate entry, to DayOne, a Mac journaling app that just looks way nicer. I did the same with a run-on Markdown file of Diary entries.
My commonest AI use by far is a separate service, a browser plug-in called Voilá. I think it’s built on Chat GPT, and it has capabilities beyond my humble but time-saving use: Unless I know a writer as someone I read for the writing skill, not just for the opinion or other content, I repeatedly, multiple times per day, have Voilá summarize webpages for me to see if they’re worth reading. If I save the article, I typically prepend the Voilá summary to orient me if and when I come back to it.
Shorts on the Department of Justice
In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr Trump’s pick for attorney-general, said that Americans “have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law—not politics—holds sway” and that the Department of Justice “must be such a place”. Mr Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DoJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency.(The Economist)
With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. (The Economist again)
Shorts
“It’s sad for Senator Lindsey Graham that the last person he spoke to on this earth was the president who stole his soul,” – Tina Brown. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
“14,000 Europeans died due to heat in June. This is the same continent that doesn’t believe in installing air-conditioning. For context, [14,000] is over 10 times the number of people who get murdered in America with a gun,” – Steve Guest. (Via Andrew Sullivan)
In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.) (Via Frank Bruni)
… “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston ) (Via Frank Bruni)
And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.) (Via Frank Bruni)
These are just horrible people, doing horrible things, on purpose. (David French regarding the Trump administration siccing their attack dogs on federal judges, and even on their law clerks).
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?”
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 Justice Department’s most significant case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far right Proud Boys — has officially been erased.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who presided over the six-month trial that led to the jury convictions, reluctantly granted a Justice Department motion to drop the case on Friday, concluding that he had no power to second-guess prosecutors once they decided to abandon it.
“In light of fundamental separation of powers principles … the proper course here is for the Court simply to grant the motion in full,” Kelly concluded, dismissing the case “with prejudice,” which means a future Justice Department is barred from revisiting the charges.
“No one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” the judge added.
Because I want my own students to stretch and because I want an A to make them robustly proud, I’m sparing with that mark, at least by today’s standards. I typically award A’s to no more than a quarter of the students in any class. But I give A- grades to too many of them, and I often feel obliged to tell students, at the start of the semester, that if they’re intent on a G.P.A. close to 4.0, I’m not a safe bet. A few drop the class, and I respect that. Most stay — but they stay knowing what’s what, which saves all of us awkwardness and bitterness.
I shouldn’t have to issue that warning. I shouldn’t be giving only a handful of B+ and B grades. I should be distributing a diversity of marks that speak to the many variations in student performance, even at Duke. It’s not that I want to be harsher; I want to be honest. Isn’t higher education about the pursuit of truth?
[Incorrigible narcissist and foulmouthed Pastor Douglas] Wilson has been hitting all these notes to a string of wide-eyed interviewers for some time now. But one point deserves scrutiny: his idea for household voting, in which the head of each household would be the sole voter. This is often characterized as the disenfranchisement of women because, for married couples, Wilson would have only the husband vote.
But here’s the funny thing: As marriage rates in America have declined, there are many single, female heads of households, and unmarried women lean ever more Democratic. If Wilson’s household voting plan were implemented, disenfranchising married women, it would empower the Democratic Party for decades and shut Republicans out of the White House.
Exit polling makes this unmistakable. In 2022, for example, scholars from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) summarize:
Fifty-eight percent of married voters supported GOP House candidates while 59 percent of unmarried respondents voted Democratic. Married men and women did not differ significantly from one another: 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women voted GOP. But there was a large gap in the unmarried category: A bare majority of unmarried men, 52 percent, voted for GOP candidates; only 31 percent of unmarried women did.
When the AEI scholars looked more closely at state-level races in Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas, the same pattern held. In all four states, they reported, “non-married women were the most Democratic group and married men the most Republican.”
I paid a little bit of not unfavorable attention to Wilson prior to my entry into Christian Orthodoxy because he passed for some kind of Calvinist and was amusing. I think he has shifted more extremely to the right since then; I know I’ve changed, so his only interest to me now is as the leader of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s chosen schismatic denomination and as having some affiliation with the current Christian-ish slice of the manosphere and other far-Right trollery.
Mainstream press has been giving a lot of “Be afraid. Be very afraid” attention to Wilson and his group. I don’t entirely buy it, but you really never know which crackpot cabals have the potential to take flight and which can be disregarded safely.
Sometimes, the press coverage itself helps launch things. Do you really think Donald Trump would be President if he hadn’t been broadcast into America’s living rooms as the masterful boss on Apprentice for a couple of decades?
Morally cleansing metal
Somehow, I gather, a $40K hybrid SUV getting 31 mpg, and the intercontinental energy and material flows that brought it into being, are more “green” than a ratty-looking old Volkswagen assembled from cast-off parts, foraged locally, that gets 32 mpg. There is a certain aesthetic of cleanliness that must be adhered to. Better yet, invisibility. To count as green, those ugly chunks of rusting 1970s steel would need to be removed and recycled: melted down in a coal-fired blast furnace and sent across an ocean to become raw material for, say, an electric (i.e., coal-powered) car, to be returned to the U.S. on a diesel-powered container ship. Such details are best kept out of mind; the main thing is that this journey accomplishes a moral cleansing of the metal.
Please, Dispatch, do not confuse matters by including cases like the St. Augustine man in statistics about ICE lethality. It may be literally true that this was ”during” an encounter with ICE, but for once I’m having trouble seeing ICE culpability in that death.
The Game is Up
Dear MAGA America:
Just last night, your Lord, God and Savior Donald Trump made it clear yet again that the elections are rigged. He even released a tranche of documents that prove it.
So I don’t see much sense in you going out to vote any more.
Stay home, pop another cold one, turn on some Apprentice re-runs, and leave the voting to us fools who don’t know what time it is.
Yours,
Tipsy
Shorts
On Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory: “Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.” And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions. “The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time, or not happen at all. This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.” (Via Frank Bruni)
[F]or the first time, I’m contemplating the possibility of a Democratic Party that shares none of my values, which include empiricism, free speech, and being able to say words other than “oligarchy,” “Zionist,” and “don’t judge me by my old tweets.” (Jeff Maurer, Any Advice for the Soon-To-Be Politically Homeless?)
“Where is the line between opportunism and pragmatism? After January 6, 2021, Graham appeared to break with Trump, saying on the Senate floor, ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’ A few months later, he acknowledged Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party. ‘Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,’ he said. ‘I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.’” (Robert Reich)
“Graham’s career arc also showed why so many Republicans of so many different stripes were tempted to embrace Trump. The senator ultimately succeeded in steering an inexperienced, ideologically malleable, and easily flattered president toward many of his own lifelong priorities.” (Benjy Sarlin)
To call him “the quintessential politician of this era” is as much a compliment as an insult, recognizing his prodigious retail skill and genius for schmoozing. No wonder Donald Trump, a huckster’s huckster, liked him so much. (Nick Catoggio)
The New York Times noted that Trump held only 61 rallies before November 2024, about five times fewer than in 2016. (Persuasion) Grrrr! “five times fewer” is better than “five times less,” but it’s still innumerately incoherent.
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?”
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.Frida
It seems to me that the most sinister and calculated thing Trump is doing this time around is trying to override the constitutional control of elections by the states. I have little doubt that he’s trying to wring out more wins for MAGA candidates, starting this Fall and continuing to 2028.
But I hadn’t seen much evidence that there were court challenges or any other opposition to such dubious efforts.
Because he’s a stupid and impetuous man 99% of the time, Trump is getting some pushback from Republicans, especially in the Senate, at least partly on grounds that Trump’s shenanigans might actually suppress Republican voters as much or more than Democrats. The SAVE Act just may not make it across the finish line (the “prediction markets” say it won’t) despite Trump flogging Congress to get it there.
I don’t know where the FBI got authority to impound anyone’s voting records, but the federal courts are (now?) virtually unanimous in knocking down such efforts — including federal courts presided over by Trump appointees.
I’m troubled by legal whores in the administration (e.g., John Eastman), but the larger story has been one of the legal profession’s steadfastness:
Heavy downpours, not just scattered showers, of principled resignations from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys’ offices, whenever Trump demanded something unethical. Trump has has to staff up with unprincipled Chuds who make fools of themselves — and of him — in court.
Judges insisting on being impartial and following the law despite appointment by Trump.
It makes me proud of my former profession and delighted that we have a judiciary, unlike Congress, that’s still functioning.
“Sports Diplomacy”
The American government is giving its imprimatur — perhaps I should say lending its muscle — to the international expansion of human cockfighting. An earlier generation had the Marshall Plan. Ours has mixed martial arts.
The administration is calling the arrangement “sports diplomacy,” and there are images of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive officer, holding up a memorandum of understanding at the State Department on June 11. They’re smiling, as if they accomplished something important. As if there were a global barbarism deficit and the United States is nobly stepping up to fill the void. As if an important emblem of human civilization and expression of human culture will finally get the recognition it deserves. As if the torch of liberty can now shine brighter than ever, because it will be carried by warriors of such vision and valor that one of them, upon winning his South Lawn brawl, used his moment at the mic to crow a cuckoo credo: “Michelle Obama is a man!”
…
I cringe at our government’s advancement of such savagery while we’re retreating from the kinds of engagements that lessen hardship and relieve misery.
Our Crypto President is fighting for the right of Americans to piss their retirement accounts away on stuff like, well, crypto:
Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. The Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan. Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments. Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by. (Source: propublica.org)
John Ellis News Items. I’m glad to see this mentioned, but I wish that it was more prominent than ProPublica and the world’s greatest newsletter. This is the risk I immediately saw when Trump touted allowing private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement plans, though it gets a little further into the weeds than I did since I’m no expert on retirement plan law.
Mustafa Mond knew the score
I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t heard people talking about how artificial intelligence will give us a four day work week. That’s the kind of prattle that usually accompanies labor-saving innovations.
But it’s just as well that people haven’t been saying that, because it isn’t going to happen this time just like it hasn’t happened the other times. Not in the USA anyway. Maybe in Europe, where they tend to see living as worthier than ever-rising “standard of living.”
The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Cicero Society
The occasion was the monthly meeting of the Cicero Society, a parliamentary debating club committed, according to its terse website, to “developing excellence, preserving the Western intellectual tradition, and forming young leaders” — which in Washington is usually code for conservative job placement.
…
The evening’s debate was “Is Christianity Conservative?” I assumed the answer would be “Of course it is.” Conservatism is the political instinct that guards “permanent things” against the progressive urge to remake the world from scratch, to paraphrase one debater. But after several hours, the opposition carried the night with a different argument: Until Christian beliefs are fully enshrined in public policy, Christians will need to be radicals. One of the speakers on the winning side put the matter pithily: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” If the existing order is decadent, corrupt, or hostile to Christian life, then conserving it is no virtue.
…
According to the Catholic writer and Vance-whisperer Sohrab Ahmari, Evangelical Protestantism may be more powerful as a mass political force, but Catholicism has “a deep theory of the world.”
I have never heard of the Cicero Society before. Although I care for the irreligious right even less, I’ll pass on Catholic Integralism’s right as well. I’m not yet to the point of choosing lesser evils with enthusiasm.
Genealogy by Bill of Sale
Carolyn Haliburton Carter, a descendant of slaves and a professional genealogist, tells of meeting with descendants of the people who had owned her ancestors, still living on the plantation where her family was enslaved:
What was clear is that absence exists on both sides of enslavement. My family inherited silence where records should have been. Their family inherited stories shaped by omission. Neither lineage was whole.
Scripture tells us that truth sets people free – but it does not promise comfort in the telling. Witness, too, is costly. But it remains the only ground on which reconciliation can stand.
I wanted them to know that I had no animosity towards them. I was grateful for the opportunity, and felt compelled to say aloud what seemed necessary: “We cannot change the past, and neither you nor I were there, but we can tell the truth about it – for the future.”
Carolyn Haliburton Carter,The Price of a Name. That’s the kind of article I really value at Plough.
Shorts
Sonofagun! It’s true. I configured a 16” MacBook Pro with everything, and everything super-sized, and it priced out at $10,149.00! AI farms are buying so many processors and memory chips (terminology may be outdated) that the price is soaring and Apple has raised prices accordingly.
[A] nation united in pabulum is better than one divided into two tribal camps waging an “uncivil war” against each other about everything. (Andrew Sullivan, Biden’s Culture War Aggression)
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them. (@jabel on micro.blog)
In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
In a policy analysis on the Brookings Institution’s website, Fiona Hill contrasted two world leaders: “Putin believes that things will go wrong in military and other operations — based on his own experience in the security services — but he also believes he will always find a way to fix them. Trump believes nothing will go wrong, and if it does, someone else is to blame.” (Via Frank Bruni)
[I]n The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri sought a final word on those iconically foul waters, which may bear some blame for a fowl fatality: “The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Block that metaphor! Of Graham Platner: “The red flag that led to his implosion was hiding in plain sight.” (Emma Tucker at the Wall Street Journal)
“Synergies is Latin for layoffs.” (Scott Galloway H/T John Ellis)
Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition. / Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it. (Jonathan Chait)
I thought it would be nice to limit this post to observations on the Semiquicentennial but, alas, it was not to be. Only this item and the next are so timely.
I’ve read quite a lot of religious history, including (maybe even disproportionately) the religious history of this nation of heretics. Among the most important influences of American religion is the revivalism and religious ferment of the so-called burnt-over district in New York state, where revival followed revival and where many of our most marginal Christian-ish groups, like Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, were born amidst a seemingly unchallenged conviction that real Christianity had been lost and needed to be “restored.”
But my focus was on the ferment and spawning of group after group of restorationists. I sort of ignored that “burnt-over district” implies exhaustion of fuel with little left but ashes:
Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) popularized the term: his posthumous 1876 book Autobiography of Charles G. Finney referred to a “burnt district” to denote an area in central and western New York State during the Second Awakening:
I found that region of country what, in the western phrase, would be called, a “burnt district.” There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious. … It was reported as having been a very extravagant excitement; and resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion. A great many men seemed to be settled in that conviction. Taking what they had seen as a specimen of a revival of religion, they felt justified in opposing anything looking toward the promoting of a revival.
And indeed, I understand that the former burnt-over district is uncommonly disinterested in religion still today.
Leave it to David French to see this as metaphor for America as a political burnt-over district. People are so much of the mind “I just can’t even” that Trump is getting away with corruption on a scale unprecedented in our history. Meanwhile, antisemitic crypto-communists are ascendent in the Democrat party.
I can scarcely bear to bear to look any more, but through long habit (and a desire for topics readers might find interesting) it’s hard to look away, too.
I personally can’t imagine voting for the party of MAGA or the Democrats, who just when we need them most seem to be succumbing to extremely radical Democratic Socialists of America (i.e., they despise AOC, for instance, as too mainstream) that founder Michael Harrington wouldn’t recognize.
And I don’t even care that I don’t care. I’ve heard that I’m not alone in feeling that way.
In January the president was asked why members of his family had begun doing business overseas during his second term when they had sworn off doing so during his first. If perceptions of influence-peddling were enough to put them off the practice once before, why would he and they engage in it orgiastically now?
“I found out that nobody cared,” he replied, matter-of-factly.
That’s classic Trump. On the one hand, it’s a pristine vista onto a criminal mind. Moral misgivings about monetizing one’s public office are nowhere in sight, nor is there any interest in setting a good example or anxiety about the civic consequences of letting an appearance of impropriety go uncorrected. To him, the question is simply whether the crime, once committed, is likely to go unpunished. If so, proceed.
On the other hand, he’s right. For all intents and purposes, nobody cares.
Nick Catoggio, who first turned my mind to this morose thought. Then French added the metaphor and cemented it.
I’m burnt over on politics. Maybe you are, too.
Pray for America. I do so daily — not that God would Make America Great Again, but more along the lines that we’d repent, and become good for the long run.
Vive la France!
This is a time for thinking about the things we like and love best about these United States but there is a national shortcoming weighing on me that I feel compelled to mention: Of all the many regrettable political developments of the past dozen years, the most regrettable is the fact that the United States has become such a poor friend and a shabby ally, and not only to the French. Americans sneer at NATO, an alliance organized around a collective-defense provision that has been invoked precisely once in its history: rallying to the defense of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans lament—not without reason—the expense of what seems to many to have been a pointless war in Afghanistan, and we mourn the loss of American lives there. We are less likely to mention the 457 British soldiers who gave their lives in that conflict, the 159 Canadians, the 90 French, the 62 Germans, the 53 Italians, the 44 Poles, the 44 Danes, and the Australians, Spanish, Georgians, Romanians, Dutch, Turks, Czechs, New Zealanders, and Norwegians. When the United States under Joe Biden decided to suddenly quit Afghanistan, our government did so with hardly any consultation with the allies who had fought and died beside us there. It was a blunder and an insult. The same administration blindsided the French with the AUKUS agreement that, among other things, torpedoed a French-Australian submarine project–another blunder, another insult. The succeeding administration, it goes without saying, has done everything within its considerable power to make things worse with its childish displays of incompetence, ingratitude, and resentment. There is a certain horrifying symmetry at work: Donald Trump, a man without friends, presides over a nation without allies–or one that will be without allies if we continue on our current course.
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We didn’t get to 250 by ourselves. There have been times when the United States has carried the world on its back—and times when the United States has been borne up by our friends and allies. We never forget when it’s been us doing the heavy lifting—but we are, at times, shamefully forgetful of what others have done for us.
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God bless America, yes. We will need His blessing.
But, also: God bless the friends and allies who have invested their own blood and treasure in the extraordinary project of liberty that we took up 250 years ago. Vive la France!
It was a grievous disappointment to the sort of person whose interest in Republican politics is coextensive with their interest in “the Great Replacement,” which describes a lot of Trump voters. And it’s no answer to tell them that the decision did nothing more than uphold the law as it’s stood for ages. The point of the revolution is to overturn the law as it’s stood for ages. What do you think the word “postliberal” means, exactly?
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Jonah Goldberg is correct that the new right’s difficulty with that language resembles the left’s difficulty with the Second Amendment more so than conservatives’ difficulty with abortion: “It can’t mean what it says because I really don’t want it to!”
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Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results … Conservatives wouldn’t want a court full of hacks and chuds but postliberals would welcome it.
Because I’m a conservative (i.e., a “right-liberal”) who cares about process, I’m going to eat my words about a result I liked. I wrote: “I’m glad SCOTUS decided the birthright citizenship case as it did because I think the language of the citizenship clause is clear” (italics added). I now, reluctantly, retract that.
I’m reluctant because I think that the Citizenship clause of the 14th amendment is clear enough that we don’t need to look at its “legislative history.”
But there’s a canon besides that “textualist” one: avoid constitutional decisions if there’s a narrower basis. In this case, one or two twentieth-century statutes recognizing birthright citizenship would have trumped Trump’s Executive Order and disposed of the case, leaving the constitutional question for another day should our MAGA Congress repeal those statutes. This narrower statutory basis was what Justice Kavanaugh advocated in his concurrence.
My only excuses for this error are: (1) all the buzz was about the 14th amendment; (2) my perception of the clarity of that amendment’s citizenship clause riveted my attention.
I’m pretty happy with Justice Kavanaugh. I deplore his underage binge-drinking, but he’s not underage any more, and as another underappreciated public figure (not to mention sundry songsters) once said when asked to explain a blemish on his youthful record, “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.”
Speaking of SCOTUS decisions, I’ve lamented that the “Unitary Executive” theory is being so vigorously exercised by this particularly corrupt and personalist administration, but I sort of assumed the theory simpliciter was correct, probably because it’s pretty easy to understand and apply, partly because it has been supported even by my (non-MAGA) conservative tribe.
Now that it’s 11:59 on the Unitary Executive doomsday clock, I’m reconsidering my position.
[T]here is no question that the federal government needs to delegate authority to officials with the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to run a complex modern state, and that Congress ought to be able to play a role in protecting that delegated authority.
Donald Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t really care about running our complex modern state so long as he’s serviced by Cabinet members and agency heads who will tongue-shine his shoes and he can line his pockets with impunity. Even if SCOTUS is right about this, the timing could hardly be worse.
Why the carve-out for the Fed?
For my money, one of the worst decisions of the term came (fittingly) on the same day as Slaughter, and it nicely illustrates the difference between ad hoc, bad-faith reasoning and its opposite. That was Trump v. Cook, the 5-4 decision in which Roberts, along with Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals, held that Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors could remain in her position while she fights Trump’s attempt to fire her. This, in effect, creates a carve out for the Federal Reserve from the presidential firing power enhanced by Slaughter. Why does the Fed alone receive such special protection? Because, Roberts argued, “the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design.” That’s true. But then how is an independent Fed compatible with the Constitution when the ostensible independence of other agencies is supposedly incompatible with the Constitution?
The argument appears to be that the consequences of undermining the appearance of Fed independence would be bad for American monetary policy and stability. No doubt it would be. But if it’s legitimate to think in terms of the consequences in the case of denying Fed independence, why not when it comes to denying the independence of other federal agencies? The distinction sounds arbitrary to me—unless one grants the Marxist premise that it’s perfectly “normal” for capital to warp the rules of the capitalist system around itself. (I hate granting Marxist premises, but when reality vindicates them, what else am I supposed to do?)
It’s hard to argue with Linker on this. “Just an eensy-weensy fourth branch to protect money” has a foul odor to it.
Wooden Ships
(Song of my youth that I love)
If you smile at me, I will understand
'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
In the same language
I can see by your coat, my friend
You're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please, who won?
Say, can I have some of your purple berries?
Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now
Haven't got sick once
Probably keep us both alive
Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy
Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries
Stare as all human feelings die
We are leaving, you don't need us
Go, take your sister then, by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away, where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don't need us
And it's a fair wind blowin' warm
Out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go
Crosby, Stills & Nash, or one of its reshufflings, Wooden Ships. Sorry that my stylesheet renders the lyrics monospaced, like a typewriter.
Buy Me a Coffee or Substack? Well, it depends.
I have never quite brought myself to the point of saying I will never move to Substack. The reason? Because I know I could make a lot more money on Substack than I make by using Buy Me a Coffee. Indeed, people remind me of this! My friend Freddie deBoer wrote to me recently to say that a post of mine would have done gangbusters on Substack — which would have meant a lot of people impulse-buying subscriptions. That’s the thing about being in that platform ecosystem: thanks to network effects, you get the impulse buyers. That does not happen on Buy Me a Coffee. You all have had to be really intentional about supporting me, which is a great thing.
Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.
Well, every reason but one, anyway. Why haven’t I forsworn Substack? Simple: I’m afraid that when I retire next year and take a big financial hit, I’ll be poor, or significantly poorer anyway, unless I hawk my wares on that platform. Which is pathetic. That attitude is unworthy of a mature Christian man.
So — taking a deep breath here — I solemnly affirm before God and my fellow humans that I will never write on Substack. There, I said it. If no one supports my writing I’ll work as a greeter at Walmart — but as for my personal online writing, I pledge my troth to the open web! You heard it here first.
Alan Jacobs. I’m glad I can write as I wish, not as readers might wish, and not for money.
Secularization ——> Anxious Religiosity
Whatever you heard in the early 2000s, reports of the death of transcendence have been greatly exaggerated. Secularization seems instead to provoke anxious religiosity, like a bird with no place to land. The hallowing of the sacred flame at Gettysburg is matched by an equally intense desacralizing instinct, yet even that zealous iconoclasm has a mystic quality of its own.
When I visited the Hudson Valley School painter Thomas Cole’s house in upstate New York, I noticed a tag informing me that an object had been “owned by an enslaver” (or words to that effect). I was struck by the implication that the object was stained somehow. We might not use the word “sin” anymore, but the concept is still there. The extreme scrupulosity, combined – naturally – with an Indigenous land acknowledgment, wasn’t even for Thomas Cole, but for the people who had owned the house before him. My goodness, I thought, how stressful it must be to live in a constant state of confession of an ancestor’s sins. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
The Republican Party worshiped the god of political expediency. Once political power became their idol, they lost control. (Nancy French, Ghosted)
I got a head start because my ancestors started practicing miscegenation before it was fashionable … In my symbolic family tree there’s a place for Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Akhmatova, Duke Ellington, Mister Rogers, Sappho, Anthony Bourdain, Julian of Norwich, Virginia Woolf, Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audrey Hepburn, Willa Cather, Cary Grant, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Arendt, and many others. (Ted Gioia, reflecting on his identity as an American both in terms of physical inheritance and of chosen influences.)
“If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today. You lost everything. He made half a billion,” – Chris Mowrey via Andrew Sullivan.
“[Trump has] made more money in one year than his entire life combined. That’s not business, it’s corruption,” – Fred Wellman via Andrew Sullivan.
“Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company,’” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
Facebook, Fox and MSNBC have done to our parents what they warned computer gaming would do to us. (Jonah Goldberg)
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?”
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.
UPDATE: Boy, that’s kind of embarrassing. I thought I had finally figured out what this big birthday was called, and I published this using the term “semisesquicentennial.” That was so wrong that I couldn’t bear leaving it – or pretending it never happened.
[W]e find that Republicans who question the integrity of elections may not be doing so sincerely. In public, only 40 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of conservatives agree that U.S. elections are free and fair. Yet in private, the share rises to 61 percent among Republicans and 57 percent for conservatives.
We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.
[I]f the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”
The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.
I haven’t hidden that I use AI and rather enjoy it. But a lot of serious people are raising questions, not about complicity in a possible doomsday but about how AI shapes its users.
Learning from the Plain Folk
When the Amish see an interesting new technology, they discuss where to ban or allow it in terms of its effects, particularly on the community.
We’re doing something like that with AI. Mercifully, most of the voices are sober, respectful, even a bit tentative, because the potential benefits are widely appreciated among the chattering class. I don’t expect the conversation to end soon, by which point habit may carry the day.
The document takes issue with “the technocratic paradigm” as one of its main foils. It defines that paradigm as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.”
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The issue is not that these are evil thoughts to think; it is that we collectively don’t think and can’t agree on anything besides. The technocratic paradigm emerges as a background consensus for lack of other commitments held across institutions, markets, platforms, and nations. And yet this just is the transhumanist lingua franca of Babel: the very terms we all use to describe what we’re up to as we construct yonder tower.
For some reason, I find this formulation unusually clarifying, more helpful than most of what I’ve read on the subject.
Nailing Jello to the Wall
On imposing spurious rationality
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn’t enjoying my job anymore, because it was at once too easy and too awful: the people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both. That’s all there is to say — over and over. Anything else strains the truth. Now, I find that the illogic and stupidity actually make it more difficult to provide a commentary. Analysis must necessarily impose some rational pattern on the world, but it feels like a fool’s errand or even potentially misleading to seek the whys and wherefores of how this regime makes its decisions. The “4D chess” approach to Trump punditry once imposed a spurious rationality on what was self-evidently chaos; now it feels like any attempt to understand what’s going on risks the same.
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There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch.
It’s good stuff—not least because Ganz is gesturing toward something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around and write about since at least May 2023. That’s when I wrote a two-part post titled “The Rise of the Anti-Ideological Right.” This was during the brief period when it looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might successfully challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In that context, I pointed out the primary thing that separated these GOP rivals: DeSantis was a candidate of a harder-edged post-Reaganite ideology, while Trump was a post-ideological figure who promised little beyond serving as a vehicle for the enactment of a revenge fantasy. DeSantis would pursue a muscular policy agenda, but Trump would kick the right’s enemies in the teeth.
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Trump decided he wanted to try kicking the shit out of Iran. He made the decision for no coherent strategic reason. It was all about optics and the possibility of repeating his great “victory” in Venezuela on a larger stage. But it didn’t work out as he wanted, so, as Ganz put it, Trump wants to walk away. He can always lie and say he achieved victory knowing his most credulously cultish supporters will believe the moronic deception. So that’s what he’s going to try to do.
It then falls to journalists and intellectuals to make sense of it—and we seek to do so in rational terms. Trump did X because he wanted to achieve A, but that didn’t work out, so he shifted to Y, which entailed B, etc. But this isn’t a description of what actually happened, of the actual decision-making in Trump’s head and within the administration. It’s a description by baffled observers trying to discern something coherent in what is actually just some know-nothing doofus impulsively ordering this and then that and then some other thing, based on his own mercurial sense in the moment of what’s best for him and him alone.
Flanagan: It may have been a Christian conversion, but it wasn’t a full conversion to Catholicism.
Russian Conservatism
Tsymbursky rejected the aggressive geopolitical ideas of the Eurasianists, and instead proposed the idea of “Island Russia.” In Tsymbursky’s view, Russia would not benefit from challenging the US-dominated world order, as the disintegration of that order would bring chaos in its wake. Instead Russia should focus on being a regional power, and ensure peace with the West by means of a buffer zone in the form of “limitrophe states,” such as Ukraine.
The Kennedy Center’s name reminds Americans that honors are bestowed on those whom the nation believes especially worth remembering. By elevating an honored few, this egalitarian nation reminds itself that excellence is both real and rare. By slathering the building with the stench of self-praise, Trump proclaimed that honor is a mere bauble, a prerogative of power.
“Second Circuit: FTX CEO SBF SOL.” That is an entire case summary from (Short Circuits). When it hit me, I couldn’t stop giggling.
He is willing to sacrifice national security in order to get a voting-security law that is intended to prevent a repeat of what did not happen in 2020. (George Will)
I feel obliged to point out that after several references to spiders in my homily I came home after Mass to find several spiders in our bathroom. My next homily will be featuring big piles of money. (James Quinby)
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. (Mashall McLuhan via L.M. Sacasas)
I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. (L.M. Sacasas)
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?”
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.
I can’t remember how it happened. I think maybe I asked for a one-week trial so I could read a piece someone else had linked to. But anyhoo, I ended up with a subscription to Rod Dreher’s Diary, his Substack.
He’s back stateside, and although he hasn’t turned into a cockeyed optimist, his writing features a lot of human interest. You’ll probably encounter him here fairly often (I write, after noting that I’ve clipped excerpts from more than one of his posts this time).
Karma?
As we drove back out to the highway, my mother looked to the side at the end of our blacktop road, and exclaimed with horror, “Look at that! They put a trailer there! On top of a cemetery!”
“No, it’s next to the cemetery,” I said, referring to the Starhill Cemetery.
“No, that’s a cemetery. A black cemetery,” she said. “How could they put a trailer there?!”
She told me a story I didn’t know. Back in the 1970s, she said, that site had been a black graveyard. Whoever owned the land ordered the tombstones torn down so it could be developed.
“I was at Miss Lorena’s one day,” Mama said, referring to my dad’s mom, “when this elderly black couple showed up in tears. They asked for her help. They said a man with a bulldozer was over there knocking down the tombstones of their ancestors. Nobody could stop it, it turned out, but Miss Lorena did find a map of who was buried where, and shared it with them. Turns out at least some of those people were able to have their ancestors dug up and reburied elsewhere, even though the tombstones were gone. It wasn’t right, what they did to those poor people.”
Beat.
“Course Mr. ____, who was driving the bulldozer, drowned later up in Lake Mary, in his truck. They found him in the back cab. He was trying to get out.” She said it in a tone conveying the message: don’t mess with the dead.
I doubt the Bulldozer Man died because he disturbed the dead, but me being me, I don’t rule it out. Anyway, I had not known the story of the black cemetery, the memory of which will leave this world after my mom’s generation dies (though I’d guess that the black people around here won’t so quickly forget). It was a painful reminder of what black folks in this part of the world had to suffer, and within my lifetime. I hate DEI as much as any conservative, and believe it makes race relations worse. But you know, it came from somewhere.
A Substacker I follow (you’d recognize the name) has been pretty quiet lately. Some of the best writers are like that. He explains:
I deeply appreciate all those of you who continue as paid subscribers despite my lack of ‘content’ here at present. A writer can’t be on output all the time, which is a drawback of this kind of ‘platform’ for which readers pay a monthly fee. Quite rightly, a lot of people don’t want to pay for nothing, and yet if a writer just pumps out ‘content’ for the sake of it, he or she will soon be dead from the neck up. These days, in any case, an AI can do this job much better than we ever can, and it will provide all the accompanying pictures and films too.
I’ve long thought of writing in the same way I think of gardening. It’s a seasonal process. You need to manure the soil and prepare it in order to have a flourishing, fecund summer of words. Then you need a fallow period. Plants don’t grow in the winter. I’ve been wintering for the last six months or so. Ticking over. Keeping an eye on the green manure. You can’t do anything creative without rest.
For years, I blogged original content pretty regularly and frequently. Then I ran out of things to write like that without repeating myself unduly. Now I mostly curate. But I’m fortunate that I don’t do this to put food on the family table. I don’t have it in me to write interesting things on deadline.
Where I’ll lay my bet
AI is not just another tool (there is no such thing as “just a tool,” as [Anton Barba-Kay] points out, but let that pass). The problem is that AI — like the rest of the digital world, but most especially — changes how we think and who we are as humans. Remember Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago warning that AI is going to “hack our attachments”? This is the kind of thing Barba-Kay is talking about. We are being merged with the Machine, and don’t even realize it.
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We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.
I wouldn’t bet that Anton Barba-Kay and Rod Dreher have a better grasp of AI than the collective wisdom of the Pope and his advisers, but I appreciate their contribution to the back-and-forth that can’t happen too fast considering how fast the technology is coming on in the part of the population can influence the culture’s direction at a macro scale.
“Do you feel smart?”
For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.
There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.
Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.
The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.
And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.
Remember sue-and-settle? It’s coming soon to a dirtbag near you:
It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.
I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.
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Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.
Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.
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I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.
“Sue and settle” was a disreputable practice whereby the Obama administration made end-runs around Congress by settling lawsuits brought, almost collusively, be ideologically compatible “adversaries.” Apparently, if Catoggio’s right, Trump will wink and nod and settle when, say, January 6 rioters sue for getting their feelings hurt.
Mergers and acquisitions
I’m not breaking any new ground here, but just in case you’d overlooked this sort of pressure, let me be explicit:
Newspapers and television networks increasingly are becoming part of multi-billionaire’s portfolios.
Those billionaires do a lot of business with government, either as contractors or as suppliants.
To an unprecedented extent, Donald Trump is openly transactional in his governance. People who aren’t nice to him don’t get any favors.
Corporations whose media subsidiaries aren’t nice to Trump don’t get favors.
Billionaires and corporations who depend on government for many of their billions therefore are careful to be (as) nice (as possible) to Trump.
Therefore, many newspapers and television networks are relatively toothless.
This is one reason I read the New York Times: it has not been rolled into a larger portfolio, and is not obliged to be nice or even to pull punches. Yes, the owner’s are very rich, but their riches come from the newspaper.
And, of course, I selectively read in the wild, wild west of the internet, where investigative depth may be rare but great fortunes rarely compromise coverage.
Shorts
Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y. (David French)
There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. (Clare Coffey, italics added)
Incredulous at a “ceasefire” where the sides keep firing at each other, a New York Times writer (Scott Anderson, I think) referred to it as a “postmodern ceasefire.”
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. (Fernando Pessoa)
[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity. (Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies)
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” (Carl R. Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
It’s the 59th anniversary of my high school graduation. Maybe if you went off to boarding school at 14, you’d remember the date of your graduation, too. After that warmup, I was the most grounded college freshman you ever saw.
Nth Thoughts on Charlie Kirk
I didn’t really know much about Charlie Kirk, but since his death, the more I’ve gotten to know about him, … the more it has become clear to me that Charlie’s personality, and especially his Christianity, was what held back the tide of darkness that is now rolling across the young Right like a tsunami. My general thesis — subject to change once I go even deeper into my investigation — is that active, serious Christianity is the only barrier that will keep this from happening to the Right, and the country.
Charlie Kirk was way too Trumpy/MAGA for my pure (Pharisaic?) tastes. For instance, he was complicit in some of the 2020 Election subversion:
Several people affiliated with the Falkirk Center [Namesakes: Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Charlie Kirk] were among the most prominent supporters of the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the election, including Falkirk fellows Jenna Ellis, a central member of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, and Eric Metaxas, who literally called for “fight[ing] to the death, to the last drop of blood” over the election.
But I’ve got to admit that I had forgotten one of my own frequent barbs: If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the irreligious Right.
If Charlie Kirk helped hold back the tide of that darkness, bless him. I increasingly am persuaded in my pessimistic gut that there is no “that” that “can’t happen here.” We’re well down some treacherous paths already. Co-belligerent bringers-of-light-to-darkness may have to bracket some disagreements.
I appreciate stumbling onto this observation by Dreher.
First they came for the preening, powdered popinjays of television news, but I did not speak out because I am not a popinjay.
Forgive the sarcasm. Perhaps Mr. Pelley and his long career deserve more respect. But can we at least be proportionate and, unlike much of what he and his colleagues have been for so long, objective for a moment?
Mr. Pelley’s hysterical reaction—and that of many of his friends in the media—came in response to some editorial changes made by a new team at CBS News led by Bari Weiss, its president, whose sin is to want a different sort of journalism from that practiced at CBS and almost all other traditional media organizations for decades.
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[I]f you think the traditional news networks have anything like the role they had 50 years ago, you’re living in a fantasy. The reasons for that decline are the whole point that the media people themselves miss. (Gerard Baker)
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I’m not crazy about corporate bosses cringing before political power to advance their own interests, as may be happening with CBS. It is a further sign of America’s rapid slide into banana-republic territory, as a creeping crony capitalism favors those who can get closest to the government. But again, have a sense of proportion about the reality of our media landscape. You may not like the method, but any obeisance to President Trump is producing only incremental shifts in the wider media picture. The American news environment is vast and expanding. If viewers think they can no longer trust CBS News, they can read, watch or listen to literally thousands of other TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, social-media influencers and more. It is vanity in every sense of the term to think they are somehow less trustworthy than a superannuated news organization dominated by one political viewpoint.
Mr. Pelley was still at it this weekend, expanding his weird homicide analogy. In an interview with the New York Times, he described the firing of some of his colleagues as being like the murder of close family members. It was another example of the solipsistic specialness these media panjandrums possess. Millions of Americans lose their jobs every year because of corporate decisions, and most of them don’t provoke it by criticizing their employer. When it’s a TV personality, it’s a crime scene.
There was something unconsciously fitting about it all: the spectacle of one old media company offering a platform to an icon of another to say something unhinged, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.
I was a big fan of The Free Press when Bari Weiss left the New York Times and started it. I’m less enamored today, and I certainly assume no infallibility about Bari’s decisions at CBS.
But Baker is right that CBS has lost much relevance in today’s chaotic internet media environment, when even a distractible autodidact can put his opinions out there for anyone in the world to see. Heck, I don’t even write letters to the editor of our local Gannet rag any more, and they don’t really publish them.
War crimes in our name
In none of the [Caribbean and eastern Pacific] boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”
Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total.
A jilted lover’s wish for the sweet bluebird of happiness to crap all over the GOP’s birthday cake
Every once in a while, Kevin D. Williamson lets it all hang out:
Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry … splash!
… As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.
And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.
How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.
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Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids.
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Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence.
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If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing.
… Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony.
Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits.
In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party.
After such lascivious quotation, I think I owe y’all a gift link.
[M]y preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.
My feelings almost exactly.
For the record
I have noted the re-emergence of preventable diseases like measles due to vaccine opposition.
I have nothing to say except What is wrong with you people?!
Although I have never understood generalized objections to vaccines (sometimes justified by “religion” of some vague sort), I tolerated a very low level of it. But the higher levels of vaccine objection are leading to systemic stresses. This may be a case, like motorcycle helmets, where we’re just going to have to say “sorry about your baffling conscience, mate” and make something mandatory. (But then my religious freedom lawyer instincts kick in, and I see some legal timebombs if they try to forbid religious objections while exempting for medical contraindications. It’s complicated.)
Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.
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But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.
Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and then, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.
Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.
The good news:
The MAGA list of 14 is now down to 11 because 3 of the people they listed didn’t live or vote in the district.
There are reports that something like 7 of the 11 remaining challenged crossover voters have been crossing over (and back) repeatedly over many election cycles.
It appears to me clearer than before that there is no Indiana legal precedent for challenging crossover votes after the election; as I wrote, “the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers [on election day] to challenge voters they think are not qualified.”
A lot of conscientious local Democrats are reporting that they regularly cross over because this is a sufficiently Red part of the state that the GOP primary is, for practical purposes, the election.
It doesn’t appear to me that public outrage over this stunt is waning any when the topic comes up.
Finally, the Recount Commission is going to finish the recount before they officially consider the MAGA ploy.
Finally, on that 4th point, I’m going to retreat a bit from my opposition to the state conducting partisan primaries. I’ve learned, quite coincidentally, that deeming party primaries purely “private” was one of the Jim Crow-related ploys to deprive black voters of an effective voice in heavily-partisan areas where the primary election effectively was the real election. Perhaps a deep dive into history (or a focused dive into an AI chatbot) would have told me that, but I think I got it from a reliable person on a podcast.
Shorts
Universities have started to treat education like a designer handbag: you claim it is valuable because it is scarce, not because a lot of really meaningful stuff happens in the eight semesters you’re there. (Walter Russell Meade on Ben Sasse’s Not Dead Yet podcast)
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, formally known as the Secretary of Defense, warned on June 6 that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy. (Ummmm. Like, Normandy is in Europe, right? But I suppose Hegseth arrived by air, so it’s okay.)
Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair. (Bret Stephens via Frank Bruni)
Mary Geddry rolled her eyes at one of the president’s favorite boasts: “Trump has been posting and ranting about the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MoCA … In his telling, passing a basic cognitive screening is proof of ‘extreme intelligence,’ because nothing says genius like repeatedly announcing that you successfully identified a camel and drew a clock.” (Frank Bruni)
Grace Dent appraised the diners at the exclusive, expensive restaurant Skof in Manchester, England: “The crowd, during this particular service, at least, was older, possibly retired, and wantonly spending their children’s inheritance on compressed malwina strawberries with jasmine cream and amasake sorbet with milk oolong tea. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that millennials stand to inherit nothing more than a pile of Michelin-starred restaurant receipts and gout medication.”(Frank Bruni)
I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
He wrote poems and threw them away the moment they were finished, because to keep them would have been to take them seriously, and to take them seriously would have been to betray them. The one thing he feared was the doctor who wanted to cure him of being himself. (Idle News Pantheon)
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?”
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 