Bon mots
- In another article in The Journal, [Kyle] Smith panned “The Roses,” about a miserably married couple: “People are going to want to walk out of this movie even when it is shown on airplanes.” (Ray Psonak, Tokyo)
- In his newsletter, Jim Acosta reacted to the labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, fawning over the president during that three-hour cabinet lovefest: “Get a room. Just not the cabinet room, please.” (Linda Hoffman, Georgetown, S.C.)
- In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi offered an explanation for what she sees as unusually conspicuous cosmetic surgery among the MAGA elite: “These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging.” (Chris McDonald, Gainesville, Va.)
- In Esquire, Dave Holmes contemplated the choice confronting young American scientists facing the Trump administration’s assault on research: “You could live in fear of being sent to the gulag for your frog embryos not having their citizenship papers in order, or you could go live in a place like Australia, where you’re valued and well compensated, where your lifesaving work is free of political manipulation and where Chris Hemsworth is a 6. Who wouldn’t take that deal?” (Dave Pramuk, Napa, Calif.)
Tyrannies
Among the most useful contrasts involves distinguishing the ancient form of tyranny from the modern variant.
The philosophers of classical Greece (Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) treated tyranny as a regime devoted to enabling the tyrant to fulfill his lust for the greatest possible pleasures. …
Modern tyranny is very different. Unlike the ancient form, modern tyranny is usually ideological, motivated by ideas, and it involves administration on a vast, national scale, which means it requires a popular movement to gain power and a party to hold it. …
The thing that’s interesting about Trump is that he has far more in common with ancient tyrants than he does with modern ones. …
[Trump is] a man who personalizes everything. It’s always about Trump—his ego, his power, his image, his accomplishments, his strength, his wealth. This is why Cabinet meetings quickly become cringe-inducing displays of obsequiousness on the part of senior members of his own administration, who trip over themselves to bestow ridiculously over-the-top praise on Dear Leader. It’s also why Trump is using the formal and informal powers of his office to punish his domestic political enemies, regardless of whether doing so violates longstanding norms restricting presidential behavior.
…
The pleasures he wants now are mainly the nation’s undivided attention and ever-greater quantities of money. He gets the first by weighing in on every controversy in the country, from crime and immigration to Sydney Sweeney’s ad campaign for American Eagle, a proposed change to the Cracker Barrel logo, and who will be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He gets the second by shamelessly extorting money from other governments and wealthy companies, universities, law firms, and individuals from around the world.
On that very last sentence, the extorted money is not really going into Trump’s pocket. It goes to the government, and typically is for specific purposes such as campus reforms or trade schools.
But it’s still extortionate.
Thinking outside the nativist box
On Saturday while grilling on his back porch, a friend of mine noted with disapproval how those of British nationality are now a minority in London (approximately 41 percent of Londoners were born outside of the UK according to the UK Office for National Statistics). He believes that native-born British aren’t permitted to object and that their capital is demographically no longer theirs.
This friend shares many of my core Christian convictions and was educated at a service academy and an Ivy League graduate school. He is intellectually curious and attends a large suburban megachurch. He also regularly engages with the podcast offerings of the New Right that have displaced legacy media. While he isn’t an Anglican, I’ve encountered similar talking points in the online fringes of my own church tradition, including discussion of “Heritage Americans.”
I don’t share my friend’s distress (possibly because I’m from Colorado which has a low percentage of native-born residents, and live outside Washington, D.C. where seemingly nearly everyone is from elsewhere). It’s preferable, in my viewpoint, to live in a place where many want to move to rather than a place many are relocating from. The capital of any large empire inevitably attracts diaspora populations from its far-flung territories ….
Dirty Harry
When Oxford University decided to give an honorary degree to former President Harry Truman, Elizabeth Anscombe objected:
Some things you simply cannot do, no matter the consequences. And for Anscombe, “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to an end is always murder.”
…
Consequences in ethical analysis are never as important as actions and intentions, and they can never justify doing something that is inherently wrong; to argue otherwise inevitably leads to an ethic in which moral absolutes wither away. (Humans will always be able to convince themselves that their circumstances are that dire.) If the intent behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to use civilians as means to that end, then no appeals to potential consequences could justify that decision. To do so, for Anscombe, was to rationalize murder.
Luis Parrales, Elizabeth Anscombe and the Bomb
Lie taxonomy
The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.
What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.
Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.
Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.
And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)
David French, Only the Church Can Truly Defeat a Christian Insurrection
Performative piety (on the campaign trail)
On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a press release recommending that schools adopt a policy that calls for recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The press release said in part:
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”…
… [Senate Bill 11] directs the Office of the Attorney General to defend any school district or charter school that adopts such a policy. In addition, the Attorney General is empowered to recommend best practices for implementation.
For Texas students considering how to best utilize this time, Attorney General Paxton encourages children to begin with the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ.
The press release then sets out the text of the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in the King James Version of Matthew 6:9-13.
Paxton is deeply corrupt and fighting for his political life through a divorce and a primary candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
The Ten Commandments don’t need friends like him, but he may need to bandy them about to burnish his image with low-information voters fond of performative piety.
Corrupt Todd Rokita take note.
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
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 social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 