I grew up on “March 21 is the start of Spring,” but we’re not there yet and it nevertheless has been Spring for going on a day.

A trained physicist of my social media acquaintance explains:

Sunrise and sunset are defined as the time when the sun’s upper edge crosses the horizon; if you timed them from the crossing of the sun’s center, day and night should be equal today. Astronomical calculations equinoxes go by the center. Also, in practical terms, the atmosphere refracts light, so you can see the sun when it’s actually a little bit below the horizon. I believe most posted sunrise/sunset times take refraction into account? though refraction angle varies with air pressure. Anyhow, enjoy your extra 6 or 7 minutes!

So now you know until we both forget again.

Political

Too political

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

Josh Barro in the Atlantic

I generally like Josh Barro, and this misguided piece won’t make me hate him. But it’s fraught with problems, starting with how it encourages a starkly partisan politicization of the Supreme Court — a politicization that Barro regularly exhibits on his Serious Trouble podcast with his snotty and unjustified treatment of Trump appointees as servile to Trump.

The “Trump Court” isn’t all that Trumpy? They’re conservatives, but not partisan Republican hacks. For that matter, the three “liberals” are not partisan Democrat hacks, witness the 14th Amendment Section 3 decision of a few weeks ago. A Biden “reliably liberal” Justice will disappoint the Democrats periodically because the Justices are, first of all, Judges, with a weighty sense of their importance at the top of that co-equal branch. Republicans learned that for decades under Eisenhower’s appointments.

But you wouldn’t know that from press coverage. The press feeds an unrealistic narrative of slavish partisanship on the bench, especially about Republican nominees. A Sotomayor resignation in the next few months, after public calls like Barro’s, will justify this heretofore largely unjustified narrative. (Maybe that’s why actual politicians, who Barro calls “gutless,” are importuning Sotomayor privately, not loudly and openly.)

And, of course, it invites tit-for-tat response. If Donald Trump wins the election, there would be calls for Clarence Thomas to retire. Never mind that Donald Trump will not be working off a Federalist Society-type* list because his first-term nominees have not been servile, as he expects everyone to be. I suspect that Thomas would resist such calls, but since he seems to enjoy real life, he might succumb.

I used to say “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait ’till you see the Irreligious Right.” I think I’ve been largely vindicated in that, but it’s hard to prove my vindication because Irreligious Right barbarians these days often adopt an “evangelical” label, so their lack of Christian bona fides is harder to demonstrate than I care to undertake. (If you deny that someone who calls himself “Christian” really is Christian, you’re being mean in today’s muddled minds.)

But I’d now add, fully aware that it fuels calls like Barro’s, “If you don’t like FedSoc-type* justices, just wait ‘till you see who Trump nominates if he gets a second term.”

(* Re: “FedSoc-type”: The 2016-2020 list, which Trump campaigned on, was from John Leo, a FedSoc Founder, but not from FedSoc itself, as it doesn’t do that sort of thing institutionally.)

The hidden costs

I wrote here recently to the effect that the dollar amounts of our military aid the Ukraine should be deeply discounted, since Ukraine turns around and buys from us (insofar as the aid is not “in kind” weaponry). I fear I was too superficial, and the all-in cost is potentially greater than the nominal amount:

When the Pentagon decided to send weapons to Kyiv, these were mostly taken from already existing stocks. This was unavoidable, for at least two reasons. First, US munitions production was wildly inadequate to cover wartime demands. Second, the lead time for new production was simply too long: many of the weapons ordered for Ukraine in 2022 would realistically only be ready for use after the war had concluded. And so, the United States stripped its own warehouses of equipment — and it didn’t stop there. In some cases, it looted ammunition and weapons from its own combat formations. In others, it stripped many of its allies, such as South Korea, of a large amount of their equipment, too.

Malcom Kyeyune, The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine

I guess focusing on dollars misses the full picture, huh?

GOP’s conscientious objectors to Trump

A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence refusing to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure”) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, William Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, John Coats, John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional Cabinet members, present and former GOP members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps to guarantee his loss in November.

…

But it’s also possible that the refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party Trump and Bannon originally hoped to build eight years ago—a “workers party” that’s actually (or more precisely described as) a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.

… The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer especially popular with less-educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old-guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.

Damon Linker

I have a blog category for “Zombie Reaganism.” If you think about it for a moment, you’ll be unsurprised that it has fallen into disuse.

TikTok

I have zero firsthand experience with TikTok, but you may have noticed that it’s in the news.

[I]n one of the more astonishing public relations blunders in modern memory, TikTok made its critics’ case for them when it urged users to contact Congress to save the app. The resulting flood of angry calls demonstrated exactly how TikTok can trigger a public response and gave the lie to the idea that the app did not have clear (and essentially instantaneous) political influence.

…

Trump’s flip-flop demonstrates once again the futility of ascribing any kind of coherent ideology to the former president. Before Trump’s change of heart, one could argue that being “tough on China” was one of the fixed stars of his MAGA policy constellation …

Second, the flip-flop indicates that Trump’s positions may well be for sale, even when they threaten national security …

Finally, Trump’s reversal reveals that his real enemy is always the domestic enemy. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote last Thursday: “Populist-nationalism is about asserting tribal preeminence over other domestic tribes. And so it prioritizes fighting the enemy within.” In this context, the “enemy within” is Mark Zuckerberg and the “deep state.”

…

Catoggio correctly observed, “It speaks volumes” that “Trump felt safe politically allying himself with China on a pressing issue in an election year so long as he framed his position in terms of greater antipathy to one of the right’s domestic enemies, Big Tech.”

…

Last week, I wrote a column urging Reagan conservatives and Haley Republicans to vote for Joe Biden. The withering reaction from some on the right demonstrated the extent to which many Republicans still possess the mistaken belief that Trump possesses conservative convictions. How many times does he have to demonstrate that his personal grievances and perceived self-interest will always override ideology or policy?

David French

As I’ve written before, I think I’ll again be spared the indignity of having to vote for either of the major-party candidates, but French has made a fairly good case for Republicans and conservatives holding their noses and crossing over this year.

Conservatism

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right – Front Porch Republic

I doubt that the GOP could have more completely rejected this advice than it has since, say, 2005.

The biggest threat to traditional values

Last night I was having drinks with a Catholic friend visiting the city from western Europe. He is pretty demoralized about politics and everything else. He told me how pathetic the institutional church is in his country, as well as the political parties his side usually votes for. He complained that it is so difficult to rouse the conservatives in his country to recognize how insane the situation is. They want desperately to pretend that everything’s fine, that if they just keep voting for the mainstream conservative party, it’s all going to work out in the end.

He told me that one of the most difficult things for him to come to terms with is how his view on America has changed. He said he has no love for Russia or China, but it was a bitter red pill for him to swallow to realize that as bad as those countries’ governments are, they aren’t the biggest threat to him. No, he said, the forces that are destroying the things I cherish most in the world — faith, family, nation, tradition — all originate in the United States.

Rod Dreher, Revolution & The Call To Bravery

I initially found the second paragraph more arresting; now I’m not so sure that the first isn’t just as salient.

(Note: I’m unsubscribed from Rod Dreher’s Substack in the sense that I no longer pay. I believe I wrote about why I unsubscribed at the time of the decision. But he still has many public posts that get mailed to me.)

Cultural

Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber Hothouse

In August 2017, James Damore, then a twentysomething Google software engineer, sent a memo to all employees called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Damore argued that the company’s political bias toward the left “has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.” Damore suggested, among other things, that “discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech” was “misguided and biased.” Within a month, Google fired him for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes.” 

Google has long been a progressive company—in 2020, for example, 88 percent of donations by Google employees went to Democrats (almost $5.5 million) while only 12 percent (some $766,000) went to Republicans. But after Damore was ousted, Google’s corporate culture became even more radical, according to Maguire. “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more open ideological agenda,” he said.

Francesca Block, Olivia Reingold, Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.

Ban the “book banning” grift!

The ALA releases its annual report every April (which is common enough) in which it releases figures on how many challenges to library holdings were made the preceding year. But it runs its “Banned Books Week” every October, which gives it two instances every year to issue a press release lamenting the grave danger to democracy that these challenges pose. Almost every major media outlet—and I do mean almost every single one—follows suit, wondering how long American democracy will last if elementary students can’t continue to check out Gender Queer.  

What’s the problem with the ALA’s report on “challenges”? As I argued here last year, the numbers are misleading …

This year, the ALA is highlighting the total number of books challenged whereas last year they were highlighting the total number of unique challenges. Why? Because the number of single challenges has actually gone down from 1269 in 2022 to 1247 in 2023. (The ALA notes that several challenges contained as many as a hundred books.) That doesn’t help advance the narrative that right-wing parents are a serious threat to democracy, so the ALA is touting the 4,240 figure.

At root, my problem with the ALA is the lack of transparency. They leave out important contextual information in order to raise money by fear-mongering (there is always a link to give to the ALA’s supposed defense of free speech with every press release). How many libraries reported challenges? How many books were actually removed from shelves? Were these at city libraries or school libraries (the ALA doesn’t distinguish between the two)?

Micah Mattix

Andrea Long Chu’s says the quiet part out loud

Spending even one minute responding to Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation feels like a defeat. It is such an ill-conceived, careless piece of writing, and one that exhibits so little genuine concern for the group it is supposedly written on behalf of — trans kids — that its own thesis statement is basically self-debunking: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” argues Chu. 

Alas, this argument wasn’t printed on some random blog, but as a cover story in New York magazine, where I worked as an online editor and writer-at-large from 2014 to 2017. Chu is given almost 8,000 words to defend her radical argument, but she just. . . doesn’t. I don’t quite understand why this article was printed, in this form, in the pages of a great magazine staffed by some of the best editors in the country. The counterarguments to her position are so blazingly obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a child or a teenager that it’s an act of willful editorial neglect to simply ignore them entirely. The whole thing comes across much more as an act of high-profile trolling than a meaningful contribution to the discourse about trans kids. Along the way, as is Chu’s habit, she smears the work of a bunch of journalists, myself included, by cherry-picking quotes, sleazily writing that things we have written could be seen as arguing X, where X is something offensive we never would endorse, and so on. 

Andrea Long Chu won a Pulitzer for her literary criticism. Maybe she’s brilliant at it. But her attempts at actual real-world policy arguments are remarkably lazy. Her editors let her down here.

Jesse Singal.

I’m nearing the end of a one-month paid subscription to New York. Even apart from Chu’s piece (which I skipped when I saw how insane his/her thesis was), I’ve been too unimpressed to continue.

Impervious to the Evidence

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

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So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.