26 potpourri

Technology and Humanity

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

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

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

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

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

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

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Of course it’s Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tariff Wars

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

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

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

David Frum.

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

Educated Exile

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

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

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

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

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

Without comment

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

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

C.S. Lewis on War

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

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

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

Shorts

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

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Thursday, 9/29/22

Today marks the 24th anniversary of my father’s death and 40 days since the death of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a titan in Anglophone Eastern Orthodoxy.

I’m surprised at how much I’ve aggregated. It definitely was time to get it out of draft and onto the internet.

Rightward swings in the Western World

When Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders

Rapid mass migration, we now know, is arsenic to egalitarian social democracy.

But why turn to the former neo-Nazis? You won’t find an answer to that in woke-captured media either. The answer is similar to the reason Americans turned to Trump: for a very long time, no one in the mainstream parties or media would acknowledge the reality of the migrant crisis or do anything about it, except call those asking questions racists and fascists.

… In the immortal words of David Frum: if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.

Andrew Sullivan on the roots of Sweden’s political swing to the hard right.

Italy’s rightward swing

We’re left with a picture of a country in which the center-left is supported mainly by the educated, secular, and professional classes, while the right appeals to a cross-section of the rest of the country—the working class as well as the middle and upper-middle classes, along with the religiously pious and the large numbers of Italians who treat religion as a symbol or identity-marker without actually believing in or practicing it.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because similar things have been happening in many places over the past decade. The precise political results of these shifts have varied from country to country as they’ve interacted with different electoral systems, but the underlying trends in public opinion can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in France, Great Britain, the U.S., and other countries. In each case, the center-left has gone into decline with the center-right and anti-liberal populist right rising to take its place.

Until the center-left figures out a way to win back the working- and middle-class, as well as the nominally religious, it will continue to lose precious political ground to the populist and nationalist right.

Damon Linker

I’m quite impressed with Linker’s still-newish Substack. He’s been writing almost daily, but I don’t recall any total duds yet, and that’s a bit of a rarity even with writers whose schedules are more relaxed.

Angry Incoherence from the 5th Circuit

“I think passing this law was so much fun for these [Texas] legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.

Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, via Charlie Warzel on NetChoice v. Paxton, a bizarre 5th Circuit opinion upholding a Texas law that, motivated by a perception of liberal bias in moderation, essentially forbade big internet platforms to moderate content — and forbade them from ceasing to do business in Texas to boot! Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?.

Domestic Politics

Proxy or Leader?

The flow-with-the-go model of politics is baked into representative democracy. Or, rather, representative democracy invariably is shaped by the tension between the conception of representative-as-proxy—“I’m just here to represent the Will of the People!”—and representative-as-leader, a role in which a representative will, from time to time, be obliged to ignore or overrule popular sentiment in service to prudence and justice. This is Edmund Burke 101: “Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Kevin D. Williamson, Grift 2.0

Burke’s has been my view of representative democracy for longer than I can remember. And his examples of "Grift 2.0" ring true.

Comparative hate

I don’t know a statement more indicative of the character of our moment than this by J. D. Vance: “I think our people hate the right people.”

Alan Jacobs. Sadly, Vance is quite public about his Christian faith. That he should consider hate-promotion a feature, not a bug, is jarring.

Powered by Pure Spite

The cardinal virtue of modern conservative populism is spite. Whatever gambit a populist is pursuing, whatever agenda he or she might be advancing, the more it offends the enemy the more likely it is to be received by the right adoringly. Ron DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard stunt is an efficient example. It accomplished nothing meaningful yet observers on both sides agree that he helped his 2024 chances by pulling it off. He made the right people mad. That’s more important than thoughtful policy solutions.

…

Why spite has become so important to the right-wing populist ethic is hard to say, as it’s not symmetrical between the parties. The most prominent left-wing populist in Congress is probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a politician who, despite her many faults, doesn’t want for policy ideas. Ask AOC what her top priority as a legislator is and she might say the Green New Deal or Medicare For All. The most prominent right-wing populist in Congress is likely Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ask Greene what she wants to do with her power as a legislator and she’s apt to say, “Impeach Joe Biden.”

“Impeach Joe Biden for what?” you might ask, as if that matters. …

Spite doesn’t need a reason.

Nick Catoggio (f/k/a Allahpundit), The Wild Ones

True Movements or Mostly Hype?

It is perfectly clear that there is a movement in America of people who call themselves evangelicals but have no properly theological commitments at all. But what’s not clear, to me anyway, is how many of them there are. Donald Trump can draw some big crowds, and those crowds often have a quasi-religious focus on him or anyway on what they believe he stands for — but those crowds are not large in the context of the entire American population. They’re very visible, because both Left and Right have reasons for wanting them to be visible, but how demographically significant are they really?

I have similar questions about, for instance, the “national conservatism” movement. Is this actually a movement? Or is it just a few guys who follow one another on Twitter and subscribe to one another’s Substacks?

Alan Jacobs

Culture

I dread our being too much dreaded

I must fairly say I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. . . . We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Edmund Burke via Michael Brendan Dougherty, defending himself and Christopher Hitchens against charges of being Putin apologists for long opposing our policies in Ukraine, almost none of which charges are made in good faith.

Dougherty continues:

To [Peter] Hitchens, whom I have admired greatly for some time, I say now is the time to apply realism to the trolls and demagogues and even to many of the think-tankers and mandarins on the other side. Our case is that they are mishandling grave matters, that they are hubristic and deluded about their own nations and about grand strategy. We think they are casting themselves, absurdly, as great statesmen like Churchill. You and I, having read just a little more history than can fit into a two-hour movie, don’t even belong to that cult in the same way they do. Why, then, should we ever have expected them to treat their powerless critics fairly?

Realism means admitting that our leadership is unworthy, deluded, and stupid. Really they are unprepared, or unfit for their roles. They have led us from one disaster to the next for over two decades. But we may avoid the worst calamity in spite of their failures. We may be saved the miscalculation of others. Or our salvation may be that the huge treasury of power and advantage bequeathed to our nations by previous generations cannot be wasted entirely, even by foolish heirs like these. Or it may be by pure dumb luck, or the grace of God.

White Liberals

I love WL’s [White Liberals], love ’em to death. They’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.

Paul Farmer via Alan Jacobs

Invisible infrastructure

Our immigration system is broken, and relies on the invisible infrastructure maintained by non-profits and religious groups.

Leah Libresco Sargeant (italics added).

I think everyone knows the system is broken, but I had not been award of the invisible infrastructure. Maybe Paul Farmer wasn’t completely right about white liberals.

Because I say so. That’s why.

Over two decades ago, when I was getting to know Eric [Metaxas], we had a friendly argument over something theological, as we walked around Manhattan. When I challenged something Eric said, he replied that God had told him it was the thing to do. “How do you know that?” I asked. Because he did. The argument went nowhere. I remember it so clearly because that was the first time I had ever had a conversation with someone who asserted that something was true not because God said it — all Christians must believe that, or throw out Scripture — but because God had said it to them personally.

Rod Dreher, What I Saw at the Jericho March (MAGA at prayer event a shocking display of apocalyptic faith and politics — and religious decadence)

Apple pulls back from China

Apple announced Monday it has already begun manufacturing its new iPhone 14 in India, just weeks after the updated product launched and months earlier than previously expected. Production of the company’s newest line of phones typically begins in Chinese factories because of existing supply-chain efficiencies, with some of it shifting to India after six to nine months. The move is likely indicative of Western companies’ newfound desire to limit reliance on China amid economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions.

The Morning Dispatch for Tuesday, 9/27/22

Battling Amazon in France

France introduces a delivery charge for books: The “minimum charge of €3 will help small independent booksellers struggling to compete with Amazon and other giant online retailers.”

Micah Mattix

The New Economy

Financialization itself, at the grand scale, was a racket—substituting swindles and frauds for the old economy of industrial production.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency

Journalism, traditional and new

Toxic News Swamp

[H]ow could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false?

Glenn Greenwald, How Do Big Media Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other’s Falsehoods?

Oases of Sanity

If you’re tired of tearing your hair out over political writing, Alan Jacobs has the cure: an array of sane writers who are not carrying water for anyone or any cause:

Leah Libresco Sargeant
Noah Millman
Damon Linker
Zeynep Tufecki
Yair Rosenberg
John McWhorter
Freddie deBoer
Jonathan Rauch
Jonathan Haidt
Jesse Singal
David French
Andrew Sullivan

Wordplay

Shameware

Software voluntarily installed on a smartphone to allow someone else to monitor, and challenge, one’s internet browsing. One group of Churches in particular is using it.

Similar to surveillance software like Bark or NetNanny, which is used to monitor children at home and school, “shameware” apps are lesser-known tools that are used to keep track of behaviors parents or religious organizations deem unhealthy or immoral. Fortify, for instance, was developed by the founder of an anti-pornography nonprofit called Fight the New Drug and tracks how often an individual masturbates in order to help them overcome “sexual compulsivity.” The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has thousands of reviews on the Google Play store.

Wired

My first reaction was “maybe some people really need this to straighten out.” But the security holes it creates are technically worrisome apart from spiritual or psychological concerns.

Mechanical Jacobins

Automobiles, in the lexicon of Russell Kirk

Fractally wrong

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick’s summary of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upholding Texas’ ban on big sites moderating content (see above). In greater detail…

made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.”

Via Charlie Warzel, Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People Redux

Swedish schools, religious as well as secular, distinguish between “education” and “learning,” as odd as that may sound. The former is the curriculum; the latter, the time spent, for example, at recess, lunch, or social gatherings — outside the context of teaching. Religious education and practice are allowed only outside the highly regulated curriculum. Even then, any religious activity, such as school prayer or the lighting of Shabbat candles, must be voluntarily undertaken. In each case, it is up to the parents either to include their children in the activity or to opt out.

This means that there is in fact no religious education in Swedish schools — it is legal only outside the state-mandated curriculum — and so there is no religious education to outlaw. What the state would now outlaw, however, should the proposed legislation pass, is the opportunity for Christian, Muslim, and Jewish children to feel part of a group they can identify with, to learn about their religious and cultural heritage, and to partake of a value system that isn’t built on a belief in the almighty state, blessed be its name.

… As we all know, it is much easier to outlaw liberty — that has always been Sweden’s default choice — than to struggle with the questions it raises and the perils it poses.

(Annika Henroth-Rostein, Sweden Aims to Outlaw Religious Education, Which Is — Already Illegal)

“The question” here is Muslim immigrants now 10% of the Swedish population, with 11 Islamic schools segregating boys and girls. My blog title is based on this book, which is on my bought-but-not-yet-read list.

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.