Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction…
In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood.
The State of the Union should be an easy topic for a writer. It’s a televised event; you watch it; you react.
But it’s actually quite challenging to find anything non-obvious to say about it, especially in 2024. Suspense around the address used to derive from what the president might say. Now, given his age, it derives from whether he might expire before the speech ends.
Joe Biden did not expire last night. Read any analysis today and that’s the top-line takeaway.
…
Then came Sen. Katie Britt to deliver the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s speech. Of her performance, the less said, the better. Watching it, I found myself wondering whether she had seized the opportunity to deliberately sabotage her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, mindful of how close the last guy who held that position came to being murdered.
There isn’t much else to say about Thursday night. Biden is plainly too old to serve competently for another four years, one “fiery and confident” address notwithstanding, and his agenda is too liberal to make any conservative happy.
I’ll be at the polls early on Election Day to vote for him.
I’ve probably said this before, but I plan to vote for neither. Why? The Electoral College.
I fully expect the polls to show that my fair state is going, again, to deliver its Electors to Donald Trump. Therefore, I’m at liberty to write in the American Solidarity Party slate.
That’s how I’ve calculated whether to hold my nose and vote for one of the major party candidates starting in 2008, when I chose John McCain over Barack Obama (whose affect I liked almost as much as I abhorred his brief political policy record) because the polls said my state was a toss-up (Obama won). I may have voted for Romney without holding my nose; I honestly don’t remember. If I did, it wasn’t under the misimpression that he was a stellar conservative.
The corrosion of American character
[Emmanuel] Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine … He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.
In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.
…
As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.
…
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them.
Rod Dreher elaborates on how the US pushes dubious “universal human rights:”
Boy, do we ever see that in Hungary, and throughout Eastern Europe. The US and the EU are fanatical about promoting LGBT. I mean, truly fanatical. When the Hungarian parliament in 2021 passed a law forbidding what it (accurately, in my view) sees as LGBT propaganda for children and minors, European elites went berserk. Mark Rutte, at the time the prime minister of the Netherlands, said that Hungary ought to be kicked out of the European Union over it.
Mind you, it’s routine for European governments to ban information aimed at children, who are (correctly) believed to be incapable of discerning truth and falsehood in them. In 2021, for example, the European Parliament voted to ban online advertising aimed at kids. So you can’t sell kids candy bars online, but Hungary’s refusal to allow people to sell transgenderism and sodomy to children is thought so egregious by European elites that many of them want the country thrown out of Europe.
Readers of this newsletter are well aware of how passionate the US State Department is about shoving LGBT in the faces of the world. Much of the world hates this, and sees it as a vivid sign of US cultural imperialism. Hungary is fairly tolerant on LGBT matters; same-sex couples can have registered partnerships, and almost every time I go out on the street in Budapest, I see at least one same-sex couple holding hands. But as we all know, in the eyes of these elites, to decline to accept the full and ever-changing panoply of LGBT demands is to be a horrible bigot not fit for civilized society.
(Emphasis added)
I’ll put in my 2 cents’ worth. I thought that surely 9/11 would open our eyes to how odious we are to much of the world. It didn’t. I’ve felt since then that we’re past the point of no return (I should add “humanly speaking”) when that became apparent. It hasn’t been an entirely unbroken descent; people have occasionally been red-pilled on some minor issue or another while the major trends continue downward.
I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
I’d bet that if we are supernaturally spared the destruction I expect (which may be something like a definitive demotion from “indispensable nation” to “just another large chunk of geography” — “the end of a world,” not “the end of the world”), our supernatural saviors will make their activity deniable, so we can attribute it proximately to people who just faithfully kept on going, like humans rather than LARPing caricatures.
The One Phone of Power
I’ve been reading Tolkien again lately, and I’ve been struck by how easily one can substitute “smartphone” for “the Ring.” Take, for instance, this paragraph early on in which Gandalf invites Frodo to rid himself of the ring.
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk … every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Okay, I can’t resist a little comment. The three are grousing about the Colorado ballot exclusion case, Trump v. Anderson.
George Conway, author of the third listed column, sums up what I think happened:
It may be noble-minded for someone like me, sitting in the cheap seats, to incant my favorite Latin legal maxim, Fiat justitia ruat caelum—“Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.” But I don’t hold a lifetime appointment to decide how justice is to be done. And however much I’d like to think that judges really believe … that they “cannot allow [their] decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to [their] work,” the fact is that judges are human. Their decisions are affected at times by their perception of what the public reaction may be.
…
I could go on picking apart the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the Court’s opinion, and legions of law professors will do so for ages to come, but the Court’s lack of convincing reasoning is, frankly, beside the point. The Court’s decision wasn’t about law. It was about fear.
I think SCOTUS reached the right conclusion on the wrong rationale. You can make fun of me, but I think the theory is correct that the President is not an “officer” subject to section 3. I think that for having read some of the history around section 3, which I find more persuasive than one Senator’s (disingenuous?) assurance to another that the amendment indeed “hid an elephant (POTUS) in a mousehole” (“other officers”). And I return to that ideé fixe after feeling, as I recall, some passing doubt about it during the oral argument.
Well, at least SCOTUS was “unanimous.” Now I can only hope that never-Trump Republicans, who Trump has disinvited from his party, will oblige him in sufficient numbers to assure his defeat, fair and square, in the November balloting.
What worries me now, though, is not the Christian Nationalists themselves. Frankly, many of them are too reckless, undisciplined, and reactive to be able to accomplish the revolutionary change they seek. What worries me is that there are a great many socially conservative evangelical voters who love the democratic life who are constantly being called “Christian Nationalists” by the likes of Heidi Przybyla for believing things that are utterly unremarkable in Christian history. If our secular media outlets continue to tell them that “Christian Nationalism” is the belief in things virtually all Christians across history have believed, I fear they will listen. And they will find these ethno-nationalist totalitarian aspirants and, not realizing what they are doing, they will make common cause with them.
After all, they’ve already been told that they are ‘Christian Nationalists,’ haven’t they? They’ve been told that protecting the unborn makes them a Christian nationalist, that wishing to promote natural marriage makes them a Christian nationalist, that wanting men to support their children makes them a Christian nationalist. They’ve even been told that believing our rights come from God makes one a Christian nationalist.
Eventually they will start to believe it.
Here is my request: If you are a secular person who wants Christian Nationalism to lose, you should stop helping the Christian Nationalists win.
(One hyperlink added)
It was quite adolescent of me, with my actual adolescence a mitigating factor, but there were several times in my younger life when I was falsely accused of things and reacted by actually doing them.
So I hope you can forgive me for agreeing heartily with Jake Meador on this one.
White Rural Rage
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy By Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman Random House, 320 pages, $32
Why does a book like this exist? For one thing, it exists to serve the demand for books among people who lack the patience for reading literature. These books are some of the many consumer items that serve as tokens of college education. By visiting the front-most display table at Barnes & Noble and picking up a copy of The Sixth Extinction or Freakonomics, one affirms one’s place among the civilized few who “read.” With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller toss another forkful of silage into the troughs of the book-club class.
Of course, a book like this is also intended to provoke a reaction from its targets. The authors are counting on it, as they make clear when they predict that some will conclude that “as two coastal cosmopolitans, we have no right to offer this critique of White rural politics.” The anticipated backlash is an essential part of the marketing strategy.
…
It is the third part of their thesis on which I would like to raise some points of information. Waldman and Schaller assert that, despite their ruling stature, rural whites “paradoxically” fail to demand anything of their political leaders. The authors admit that rural whites have some legitimate sources of anger, particularly the economic hollowing out of their regions by “late-stage capitalism.” However, having despaired of correcting this, rural whites lend their electoral clout to Republicans, who offer a program of cultural vengeance without any redress of rural whites’ material grievances. There is a lot of truth to this. I would just add that pretty much all Americans have seen their communities hollowed out by capitalism, and pretty much all of them have despaired of receiving very much from their representatives. Those who plan to trudge submissively to the polls for President Biden in November are hardly more demanding subjects than those who will cast a vote for Donald Trump.
…
Consider this remark from the authors, in reference to a 2023 conference in Nebraska about preventing agricultural monopolies: “Rural folks are gradually realizing that corporate consolidation, not socialism, is destroying their economies.” Judging by the record of the Grangers, the People’s Party, William Jennings Bryan (who is briefly cited in the book as a typical rural bigot) the Non-Partisan League, the American Society of Equity, Robert LaFollette, the National Farmers’ Organization, Estes Kefauver, the American Agriculture Movement, the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, and others, I would suggest that rural people made some hesitant advances toward this insight before 2023. Indeed, a poll conducted by Open Markets Institute in 2018 showed that 54 percent of Trump voters favored the government breaking up monopolies, and only 28 percent were opposed. Moreover, some of the most visible MAGA firebrands are thoroughgoing antimonopolists. Perhaps some of the “gradual realization” Waldman and Schaller delight in when it is expressed in small activist conferences is also reflected in the far more formidable MAGA movement.
Not everyone was totally bowled over by Joe Biden’s Thursday SOTU. Andrew Sullivan had the most colorful, detailed neutral take I’ve seen:
Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.
He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.
And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.
Ouch!
Conservatives and Republicans
[T]he overlap in a Venn diagram of conservatism and capital-R Republicanism has never been smaller.
Nuland shows no sign of rethinking her ideological commitments, however. A few weeks ago, in a speech at the Center for Security and International Studies marking the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, she declared: “Our continued support for Ukraine tells tyrants and autocrats everywhere … that we will defend the rights of free people to determine their own future … and that the world’s democracies will defend the values and principles that keep us safe and strong.”
Such rhetoric shouldn’t be dismissed as pure posturing. Rather, proponents of realism and restraint in foreign policy must reckon with the fact that statements like these reflect the hawks’ deep-seated, immensely consequential convictions about America and its place in the world. Put another way: Nuland & Co. really do mean it when they say such things—and that lack of cynicism is precisely what makes them so terrifying. Their conception of foreign policy as an endless international crusade against ideological enemies, rather than a tool for realizing state interests, fails the American people and risks bringing the world to the precipice of catastrophe.
→ WPATH Files: This week, the leading organization for doctors who perform gender transitions on minors is reeling from a major leak of internal documents, emails, and conference calls. What the leak mostly shows: doctors really had no idea about a lot of the long-term impact of these interventions. Would the kids put on blockers and then cross-sex hormones ever be able to orgasm? Wow, we’re finding out that they can’t, because they’re saying they can’t. Will puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones (the yellow brick road of medical transition) stunt a kid’s growth, one clinician asks? Answer seems like yes: “Blockers, by suppressing puberty, keep growth plates open longer, so younger teens have a potential to grow longer, however their growth velocity is typically at prepubertal velocity, without typical growth spurt.” Or watch this video of clinicians trying to figure out how to get their 14-year-old patients to do informed consent to lifetime sterility (often starting at age 9 with puberty blockers). From the video: “It’s a real growing edge in our field to figure out how we can approach that. I’m definitely a little stumped on it.” I am also stumped on how to get gender-dysphoric children to consent to sterility—maybe we can wait till they’re 18? Just an idea. Just a thought. One practitioner talks about meeting former patients now in their 20s who want to start families, and he jokes that when they find him, he responds: “Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you?”
The biggest news is that these groups knew that the hormone therapies were causing cancer. I’ve said it before, but as a one-time butch teenager with rabid political opinions and the knowledge that I was Correct About Everything, now a happy gay adult with no political opinions and the knowledge that I am Usually Wrong: thank god this movement wasn’t around when I was 14. That said, when I’m done having kids, given the state of things post-breastfeeding, a double mastectomy sounds sort of nice.
I’ve downloaded the files but have only heard excerpts from critics of WPATH. The files are so damning that WPATH has not admitted their authenticity nor, to my knowledge, have they denied it. Since mainstream media don’t like to be shown up as gullible, they’ve embargoed stories on the WPATH files for now.
Andrew Sullivan, a gay writer, has an unusual beef with WPATH. It might be distilled thus: “Doctors who medically transition adolescents are doing so with disregard for autism, mental health comorbidities, and questionably “informed consent. The consequence is that countless kids who have translated their homosexual urges into ‘I’m in the wrong body’ are being sexually mutilated and rendered non-orgasmic.”
But that’s how I would have distilled it last week. Now, with the release of the WPATH files, he’s white-hot:
What does one say of medical professionals who experiment on children in this fashion, and then publicly lie about it? One thing we can say is that they are not medical professionals. And WPATH is not a medical professional outfit, like, say, the American Medical Association. It has many activists and nutballs as members who have no medical or mental health expertise. But in so far as its “guidelines” are used by real medical groups and real doctors, and taken as gospel by woke MSM hacks, it has huge influence and no guardrails. What we are discovering is a grotesquely unethical experiment on vulnerable gender-dysphoric (and often gay) children, performed without meaningful consent, based on manipulative lies (the suicide canard), and defended by a conscious campaign of rank misinformation and ideological bullying.
I used to think there was some good in some of this, and that these experiments were being conducted with entirely good intentions by ethical doctors, who would never violate the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.” We all know better now. These quacks treat informed consent as optional, deploy emotional blackmail to alter a child’s endocrine system for life, and care little about the long-term consequences for the victims of their lucrative craft. They have never seen a guardrail protecting children that they didn’t want to remove — and recently abolished any lower limits on the ages at which children can be transed.
At some point the perpetrators of this unethical abuse of vulnerable, troubled kids need to face consequences, and not just in the broken, mutilated bodies of the children they have so callously abused.
Lawyers with the balls to buck the narrative and sue these monsters for malpractice deserve the rich financial rewards they’ll work so very hard to get.
Lost in the Cosmos
Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
” How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”
There’s a reckoning coming for this — or so I hope. The alternative to a reckoning is people like assistant secretary for health Dr. Rachel Levine continuing to lie and cover up this scandal, and getting away with it.
Before I published, there were signs of a reckoning coming, from Senator Josh (“I used to be a conservative till I discovered the joy of demagoguery”) Hawley and the Missouri Attorney General.
Hold off on the funeral plans
Red states like Florida and Texas are growing at the expense of Blue states like New York and California. The main driver is said to be housing costs.
But beware jumping to a triumphalist conclusion, Red-staters:
Blue states aren’t doomed or dying. At any rate, high housing costs generally reflect very high demand from lots of people to live in a particular area; New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future. But even relatively small changes (minorities of workers working from home or moving away) can still lead to acute crises for cities ….
Stalinism made courage in thought especially dangerous, but the pressure to align one’s opinions with those of a favored group is universal. Solzhenitsyn detected this pressure even before the Revolution. Vorotyntsev, the hero of his novel November 1916, finds himself at a meeting of Kadets (the Russian liberal party). He listens as everyone voices the proper views they all already hold. He is struck that their confidence needs constant reinforcement and that those with progressive opinions regard it as “imperative . . . to meet and hear all over again what they collectively knew. They were all overpoweringly certain they were right, yet they needed these exchanges to reinforce their certainty.” An experienced colonel, Vorotyntsev knows that their opinions about common soldiers are absurd, but for a reason he cannot explain, he finds himself expressing agreement.
Age six, I once ruined Pass the Parcel at a schoolfriend’s birthday party, because I was distracted by a headline on a layer of discarded newspaper. MIND BOMBED BY THE MOONIES. I remember being intensely annoyed when it was taken off me before I could find out what that meant, and confused as to why all the adults thought my outrage was funny. It marked me out as one of those oddballs generally more interested in ideas than in who and what is immediately present. That trait has persisted: my mad professor streak is trying to friends and family, to this day.
I watched Harrington in a YouTube dialog, and her physical mannerisms were completely consistent with the “oddball” she describes.
They also reminded me of me.
IDW Alums
Interesting podcast about the Intellectual Dark Web (you remember that, don’t you?). It seems that if you put like-minded extremists in a room and close the door for a while (literally or by lumping them under a label like “IDW”), they emerge more extreme.
Still, I’m puzzled that so many of the IDW figures started on the Left but the whole thing now (apparently) codes Right.
Bingo
Now is not the time to discuss this is not an argument — it’s a derailing tactic.
You can say Mr. Biden fibbed, misled and exaggerated, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but in rope-a-doping Republicans on Medicare and Social Security he showed real mastery. “Some Republicans—some Republicans—want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority.” When they catcalled and booed he said he was glad to see it—“I enjoy conversion.”
I don’t care how planned that line was, it was good.
“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” He meant off the table. “All right. We’ve got unanimity.”
The Republicans, as we all know, made a mistake in taking his bait. They should have laughed. Instead, when he painted them as dogs they barked and snarled. Much has been made of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her grimacing and jeering. In her flamboyant fur-collared jacket she was compared, on social media, with Cruella de Vil and late-stage Sharon Stone in “Casino.” That was unkind. She seemed to me more like the colorful Belle Watling, although without the kindness and dignity.
“I thought [Sarah Huckabee Sanders’] speech was terrible. If you’re going to give a counter speech, you’ve got to talk about important issues. Don’t get me wrong, the wokeism is very important. But it’s not quite the heart of the matter right now, right? It’s not the heart of the matter. Let’s be blunt,” – Steve Bannon, via Andrew Sullivan.
SOTU 3
Biden was triangulating hard. Stylistically, this was not-Trump at all. Substantively, it was Trump all the way. If Trump were not mentally ill, he’d sit back and bask in his legacy of reorienting US politics — including the Democrats — toward all the themes he stressed from 2015 on. He’d be happy to go down in history as populism’s bipartisan legitimizer. (But of course he’s out of his mind.)
My own belief is that the senior figures in the Trump administration—Donald Trump himself, Mike Pence, the various Cabinet secretaries and agency chiefs, etc.—should never again hold any position of public trust—or, if not never again, at least not in the foreseeable future … The same is true for those in Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results and those who were otherwise involved with the attempted coup d’etat of 2020-2021. Trumpworld lawyers such as John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Cleta Mitchell should be disbarred.
…
I do not think that any of this should be done in a spirit of vengeance, nor do I believe that we should work to socially ostracize these people or go out of our way to ruin them financially, though, of course, their employment prospects would be narrowed in some cases. Rather, I think that we should think of them the way Marcus Aurelius thought about his hypothetical sparring partner: We have had a bad experience with them, and we should take such steps as are necessary to avoid repeating that experience. Once is enough.
Put another way: The point of keeping Trump administration veterans out of positions of public trust is not to punish them—it is to keep them out of positions of public trust.
…
I am not saying that Nikki Haley and other veterans of the Trump administration are necessarily villains or dishonorable people or anything like that. I am saying that they are an avoidable risk—and we should avoid them.
I shall do my part.
Russia, Ukraine, U.S.
Beyond a certain point, the United States is no longer “helping” or “advising” or “supplying” the Ukrainians, the way it did, say, the Afghan mujahedeen during the Cold War. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war — Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?
…
In an age of smart devices, robotics and remote control, the United States’ involvement in the war has always been greater than it appeared. The computer-guided rocket artillery that Ukraine has received from the United States may seem analogous to the horses and rifles that a government might have sent to back an insurgency in the old days. They look at first like traditional weapons, albeit advanced ones.
But there is an important difference. Most of the new weapons’ destructive power comes from their being bound into an American information network, a package of services that keeps working independently of the warrior and will not be fully shared with the warrior. So the United States is participating in these military operations at the moment they happen. It is fighting.
…
Russians say the war is about preventing the installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound implausible to a Russian.
…
We should not forget that, whatever values each side may bring to it, this war is not at heart a clash of values. It is a classic interstate war over territory and power, occurring at a border between empires. In this confrontation Mr. Putin and his Russia have fewer good options for backing down than American policymakers seem to realize, and more incentives to follow the United States all the way up the ladder of escalation.
Donald Trump’s detractors—including yours truly—would often make the mistake of downplaying his political effectiveness simply because we were utterly immune to his (alleged) charms.
I’m in that camp with Goldberg: utterly immune. I struggled to figure out his effectiveness even intellectually, but I’ve eventually settled on something like these:
When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have. (David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America)
Telling parents they’re bigots or are unenlightened for not embracing the latest faddish orthodoxy is not a winning message. (Pamela Paul, What Liberals Can Learn From Ron DeSantis)
Prudential calculation
[T]he classical statesman permits errors and vices, not because he believes in tolerance for its own sake, but because state action would, in his estimation, harm the common good of the polity more than the vices or errors do.
This very much was why I opposed criminal laws against sodomy 50+ years ago — not because I thought that vice was a virtue or even neutral.
It seems quaint even to mention that now, but my position remains substantially the same today.
Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
[I]n the area of historical consciousness [Donald Trump] is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.
Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.
Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious …
And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.
“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.
…
Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” …
The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute …
More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.
This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.
Peggy Noonan (emphasis added) Note that this is her blog, with no paywall (unlike the Wall Street Journal version).
I quote at length because this is the rare occasion when I was uncomfortable with her column. Apart from
the snooty liberals and progressives talking a far, far better “common man” game than they’ve played in decades,
that there is a realignment of parties still going on, and
that Trump is a bad man and half mad.
we were not seeing things alike.
But put those three bullet points together and subtract the Republican loyalty she retains but I’ve abandoned, and we are seeing things substantially alike! I just had to read more carefully and mull it a bit.
I try to avoid watching that man because I don’t enjoy feeling enraged. So I might conceivably have noticed “shrewd” or “astute” had I been watching. She is paid to watch things like that and to call them to others’ attention.
I thought it meet and right to share the impressions of someone shrewder and of cooler head than my own. You may enjoy the entirety, of course, by clicking the link, which I recommend.
* * * * *
Trump didn’t do the thing he’s accused of doing, but if he did it was fine, and in fact that’s exactly what he did, get over it, because it’s not only fine, it’s precisely what we want from a president, and can you believe that Biden did the same thing, shame on him.
The Commonwealth of Virginia … prides itself on being the mother of presidents (eight so far) and a place of profound political decorum. But suddenly we’re living in Dogpatch … How can we continue looking down on Arkansas and Mississippi with this sort of stuff going on?
[T]he laws of physics override the bright ideas of politicians. America has been … promoting oxymorons such as “green skyscrapers” and “clean energy,” but the truth is we’re not going to run WalMart, Suburbia, DisneyWorld, and the interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, recycled Fry-Max, and dark matter.
…
For all that, there are actually some sound proposals in the mostly delusional matrix of the Green New Deal promoted by foxy front-person AOC.
Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Right on, I say, though they have not quite articulated the argument which is that corporations, unlike persons, have no vested allegiance to the public interest, but rather a legal obligation solely to shareholders and their boards-of-directors.
Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions. A no-brainer.
Replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves. Quite cheap and worth every penny.
Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.” And while you’re at it, resume enforcement of the anti-trust laws.
Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks. Duh….
I suspect, after Citizens United, that public financing of elections to the exclusion of private contributions is unconstitutional. Other than that, I’m just trying to keep my head down while peeking regularly to see how this plays out.
Well, not really. I’m rooting for Tulsi Gabbard for her party’s nomination because she favors religious freedom and opposes stupid, counterproductive wars that make war criminals of us.
3
Both parties are beholden to extreme partisans in their bases. But President Trump has his base onside. The conventional wisdom in 2016 was that the Republicans had nominated someone so extreme that he couldn’t possibly win. Yet he did. You watch: the Democrats are going to nominate someone so extreme on economics and culture that they’re going to ensure Trump’s re-election.
I lack Rod Dreher’s fear of Democrat faux socialism (or maybe I just don’t understand what he’s talking about since “socialism” is pretty equivocal these days), but I suspect I’m an outlier on that.
4
“This is a fight that doesn’t need to happen. The status quo is, there’s a diversity of agencies. And it doesn’t make anything more available to close down religious agencies because they have the wrong beliefs. It just takes away an option,” said Mark Rienzi, the president of the Becket Fund. The law firm, which focuses on religious liberty, advocates for the faith-based agencies. “Sometimes the presentation of this issue can suggest that the religious agencies are stopping people from being adoptive and foster parents. It’s just not true. There are lots of agencies. There really is an easy live-and-let-live solution.”
And this kind of sober focus on religious freedom is why I’ve developed a preference for Becket Fund over the better-known (but less focused on religious freedom per se) Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
5
It’s no accident that some of the most homophobic societies, like Iran, for example, are big proponents of sex-reassignment surgery for gender-nonconforming kids and adults (the government even pays for it) while being homosexual warrants the death penalty. Assuming that a non-stereotypical kid is trans rather than gay is, in fact, dangerously close to this worldview.
Andrew Sullivan, reflecting on the appearance of radical feminist TERFs (“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” — women who recognized that calling men with gender dysphoria “women” isn’t a mere matter of good manners) on a Heritage Foundation panel.
If you’ve been waiting for the U.S. Senate to exercise its constitutional prerogatives in the era of Trump, you need wait no longer. A big bipartisan majority has finally stood up to Trump … by voting to advance an amendment in favor of continuing the 18-year occupation of Afghanistan and the ongoing intervention in Syria!
Mitch McConnell actually went on the Senate floor to argue that Trump’s proposed exit from Afghanistan, where no serious progress has been made for almost two decades, would be far too sudden. “The precipitous withdrawal of United States forces from either [Syria or Afghanistan] could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security,” he argued. “I believe the threats remain.” Precipitous!
In fact, the vote was — at 68-to-23 — veto-proof. Sure, 2,000 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan, and 20,000 seriously wounded or injured. But they’re all volunteers! ….
So go right ahead and hold me in Contempt of Congress — and all other minions of the military-industrial-journalistic complex. I can’t even make an exception for my own Senator any more.
7
During the Berlin airlift, thought at the time to be the height of the Cold War, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who’d been Army chief of staff during World War II, was asked how worried he was. “I’ve seen worse,” he replied. He had. No one around this president has seen worse. When Jim Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster left the administration, a cumulative 123 years of military and diplomatic experience left with them.
Toward the end, they played a fairly extended clip of the tail-end of SOTU, that “sounded deeply weird” to the host (beginning at 21:26):
You have come from the rocky shores of Maine and the volcanic peaks of Hawaii, from the snowy woods of Wisconsin and the red deserts of Arizona, from the green farms of Kentucky and the golden beaches of California ….
I agreed that it sounded deeply weird, but I was a little bit disappointed that neither Rich Lowry nor Elizabeth Breunig put their finger on it: there is no way that Donald Trump in a million years would say anything so poetic on his own. Monkeys banging on typewriters would stumble into the Corpus Shakespeareanis before that.
What torture it must be to serve as a speech-writer for a man whose native tongue is so base as to be unworthy of any solemn occasion! You can’t even take pleasure in the sheer craft of making some moderately lofty sentiment sound natural as it issues forth from the boss.
* * * * *
Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items. Frankly, it’s kind of becoming my main blog. If you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly.
Ms. Devi publicly defended Mr. Fryer. Since then, she says she’s struggled to find research collaborators and has lost nearly every female friend at Harvard: “Suddenly, I would find that my emails were going unanswered. People would avert their gaze from me walking down the hall. There was this culture of guilty until proven innocent and, if you’re defending him, guilt by association.”
Ms. Devi adds that every one of her remaining friends has advised her not to defend Mr. Fryer. One told her that “at a place like this, which is extremely progressive, it will only have a cost—it will have no benefit.” Ms. Devi says she knows of others who also wanted to defend Mr. Fryer but “don’t want to go against the social-media mob.”
An immigrant from India, Ms. Devi fears her outspokenness will limit her job prospects in the U.S. “It’s very, very high-risk to identify myself and defend an accused person,” Ms. Devi says. “Everyone protects the identity of the accuser. She gets to hide under the mask of anonymity, and we have to destroy our futures.”
This is the kind of toxic culture against which Betsy DeVos’s regulatory legal changes are powerless.
2
It’s nice to be Trump. His bragging is unencumbered by his past. His self-satisfaction crowds out any self-examination. What he needs isn’t a fact check. It’s a reality check, because his worst fictions aren’t statistical. They’re spiritual.
…
The State of the Union address was a herky-jerky testament to that. I say herky-jerky because it was six or eight or maybe 10 speeches in one, caroming without warning from a plea for unity to a tirade about the border; from some boast about American glory under Trump to some reverie about American glory before Trump (yes, it existed!); from a hurried legislative wish list to a final stretch of ersatz poetry that read like lines from a batch of defective or remaindered Hallmark cards. As much as Trump needed modesty, his paragraphs needed transitions.
…
“Don’t sit yet,” he told them when he feared that they would end their celebration too soon, before his next great pronouncement. “You’re going to like this.”
Even the newly, briefly, falsely sensitive version of Trump couldn’t lose his bossy streak — or stop hungering for, and predicting, the next round of applause.
I’m tempted to write “Democrats are reduced to pointless obstructionism,” but “obstructionism” implies the ability to obstruct. Senate Democrats lack that ability, having done away with the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominations when they were in control. Thus they are reduced even further, to “pointless mudslinging.”
Yet “pointless” doesn’t mean “harmless.” The Democratic senators’ juvenile tactics will not stop Rao’s confirmation, but they are lowering the already debased national discourse.
Rao is now 45 years old, solidly middle-aged. To reach middle age, one must first pass through an earlier stage of simultaneously knowing very little about the world while believing oneself to understand it completely. Youthful folly is particularly unfortunate in budding writers, who inevitably commit their stupidity to the page. If they write for publication — rather than privately composing the worst novel ever written in the English language, as I did at that age — their silliness will linger for posterity to sample.
… [F]rankly, Rao’s college writing wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. It wasn’t even as bad as I expected from early media coverage.
[F]rom the moment he announced his run for the presidency, I believed that Trump was intellectually, temperamentally, and psychologically unfit to be president. Indeed, I warned the GOP about Trump back in 2011, when I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal decrying his claim that Barack Obama was not born in America. From time to time, people emerge who are peddlers of paranoia and who violate unwritten codes that are vital to a self-governing society, I wrote, adding, “They delight in making our public discourse more childish and freakish, focusing attention on absurdities rather than substantive issues, and stirring up mistrust among citizens. When they do, those they claim to represent should speak out forcefully against them.”
…
Today I see the Republican Party through the clarifying prism of Donald Trump, who consistently appealed to the ugliest instincts and attitudes of the GOP base—in 2011, when he entered the political stage by promoting a racist conspiracy theory, and in 2016, when he won the GOP nomination. He’s done the same time and time again during his presidency—his attacks on the intelligence of black politicians, black journalists, and black athletes; his response to the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; and his closing argument during the midterm elections, when he retweeted a racist ad that even Fox News would not run.
Peter Wehner, on why he left the GOP and what he has gained thereby.
Apart from my having left the party earlier than Wehner, he captures my feelings very well.
In 1983, just before winning a third term as Louisiana’s governor, Edwin Edwards famously said that the only way he could lose the race was “if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
Presumably, no one checked his yearbook.
Parker must have tenure, a large 401k, and a looming retirement, because it is now forbidden, on pain of professional death, to forgive youth and foolishness.
6
Had you heard about Liam Neeson making terrible, racist comments? Did your source bother quoting what he actually said, in context, or was your source someone like the preening Peacock Piers Morgan (“so full of shit his breath makes acid rain,” as Bruce Cockburn sang of someone else), who tells you what to think before he tells you what Neeson said?
If you can’t multiply examples of that during the past week, you weren’t paying attention.
7
Of late, I’ve found a term for my political temperament: “trimmer” (second listed meaning). So I am today declaring myself a centrist non-candidate for POTUS. The toxicity of Left and Right, sampled above, have become intolerable.
8
My Church is the best Church because it never interferes with a man’s politics or his religion.
Because I find his droning, vulgar cadences intolerable, I did not listen to even to that portion of the President’s State of the Union address that may have been continuing as I left a musical rehearsal.
But it sounds as if I may have missed something even worse than the usual vulgarity: I may have missed a scripted approximation of normalcy, which would make the return to vulgar reality even more agonizing.
I’m too old for roller coasters, even if they’re just emotional.
10
A Canadian cryptocurrency exchange says about $140 million worth of customers’ holdings are stuck in an electronic vault because the company’s founder, and sole employee, died without sharing the password.
But two independent researchers say publicly available transaction records associated with QuadrigaCX suggest the money may be gone, not trapped.
They say it appears Quadriga transferred customer funds to other cryptocurrency exchanges, although it isn’t clear what might have happened to the money from there.
In a reflection on the Nashville Statement written a few years ago, I wrote:
Like me, Justin grew up Southern Baptist. Sometimes, someone will ask me why I think Justin “changed his theology” to support gay marriage, while I stuck with conservative theology. However, the question actually rests on a misunderstanding. I did not “hold onto” the theology of marriage I learned in Southern Baptist Churches growing up. If I had, I would support same-sex marriage.
When I listen to Justin’s presentations, what I hear in his arguments for same-sex marriage is simply the logical outworking of the theology of marriage we both grew up with. Many of his arguments are modified versions of the arguments which I heard to rationalize divorce and contraception in the Southern Baptist congregation I grew up in.
And because of the obvious prejudice of so many conservative Christians toward gay people, it’s easy for him to dismiss conservative exegesis as Pharisaical legalism.
Ron Belgau. This “alternate universe” argument, where one says “If I believed X, I would eventually come to believe Y,” is one that I have made, if only when arguing with myself about what I would believe today had I remained in the Christian Reformed Church.
12
Oh, how we miss the trolley problem .
There’s a runaway trolley plunging toward a widow and five orphans, but if you pull the lever to divert it, you’ll hit Elon Musk. Which do you choose?
Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items. Frankly, it’s kind of becoming my main blog. If you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 