D Day’s 82nd Anniversary

Douthat

Is secular critique of AI adequate?

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>

If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.

Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.

Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.

Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.

Ross Douthat’s (further?) thoughts on the Pope’s AI encyclical.

Douthat is onto something, I think

We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.

Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.

[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.

…

In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …

I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.

But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.

…

if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.

This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.

Ross Douthat, Graham Platner and the Amoral Center, 6/3/26

Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):

“… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
“… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.

“Finishing the job” in Iran

I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.

Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.

Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

…

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

M. Gessen, New York Times.

Again, this merde is on a White House webpage.

Who is the real radical?

I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.

Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:

Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”

Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.

Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.

How much of what will focus your attention?

The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love.

But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”

(Kevin D. Williamson)

Shorts

I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
… LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?

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.

A Family Saturday

Today is an important one in our family’s life. Sunday, too. I wish life weren’t too hectic to figure out how we’re celebrating.

America’s war on traditional cultures

When it comes to culture, America and Western NGOs are global aggressors. For a long time, we’ve been promoting contraception and abortion throughout the world. More recently, we’ve promoted gay rights as well. The U.S. Department of State’s Global Equality Fund, dedicated to advancing LGBT rights, is one among many initiatives, some government sponsored, others carried forward by international organizations. In these and in other ways, progressives in the West are carrying the war on traditional culture to the rest of the world. Reproductive rights, gay rights—they’re the new White Man’s Burden.

R.R. Reno, Global Culture War

I believe this, and it humiliates me as an American.

What could possibly go wrong?

President Biden announced Wednesday the cancellation of $1.2 billion in student loans for about 153,000 borrowers, affecting individuals enrolled in the income-based repayment program called Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) who have been in repayment for 10 years and took out $12,000 or less. “If you qualify, you’ll be hearing from me shortly,” Biden said Wednesday, referring to an email selected borrowers would receive alerting them that their loans had been canceled. “The Biden-Harris Administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions,” a White House fact sheet said.

The Morning Dispatch (emphasis added).

First Joe trolls them, soon (if not already) bad actors will phish them. Has the President no tech-literate advisors?

Four norms to delay children’s immersion in the virtual world

Jon Haidt (I don’t know when he dropped “Jonathan” in favor of “Jon”) has a new book coming out, and he’s on a crusade to curtain children’s a tweens’ suffering from social media:

A theme of the book is that we are stuck in a series of collective action traps, and the only way to break out of them is with collective action, such as coordinating with the parents of your kids’ friends to all agree to give smartphones later (not before high school) and independence earlier (starting in elementary school). We must stop overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online.

…

“How can you do this to our children?” the senators asked, in a variety of ways. The response from the social media executives was usually some version of “But Senator, we spend X billion dollars each year to create industry-leading tools to find and remove such content.” That phrase, “industry-leading,” was used six times during the hearing; five times by Mark Zuckerberg, and once by Shou Chew from TikTok.

But as I watched the hearing, I kept thinking about how content moderation is to some extent a red herring, a distraction from larger issues. Yes, it must be done and done better, but even if these platforms could someday remove 95% of harmful content, the platforms will still be harmful to kids. The discussion of online harms can’t just be about making an adolescent’s time on Instagram safer, not even 95% safer, because so many of the harms I describe in The Anxious Generation are not caused by bad content. They are caused by a change in the nature of childhood when kids begin to spend many hours each day scrolling, posting, and commenting. Even if Instagram could remove 100% of harmful content and leave only photos of happy girls and young women enjoying their beautiful lives, the effect on adolescent girls would still be devastating from the chronic social comparison, loss of sleep, addiction, perfectionism, and decline of time spent with their real friends in the real world. Even if social media companies currently enjoy protection from lawsuits based on the content that other people have posted (Section 230), they absolutely must be held legally responsible for the hundreds of design choices and marketing strategies they have used to hook tens of millions of children.

… [T]he medium is the message …

This is why two of the four norms I propose for solving our collective action problems are about delaying children’s complete immersion in the virtual world. Here are those four norms:

1) No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)
2) No Social Media Before 16
3) Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)
4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, at an earlier age

Jon Haidt, Marshall McLuhan on Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring. This presumably is a public posting since Haidt asked readers to share it. I’m past the child state, but my grandchildren are in the creeps’ targeted group.

Coincidentally, the New York Times has articles here and here that illustrate how stupid parents can be about social media.

Every time I see pre-teen girls tarted up for beauty contests I imagine a mom who needs to be [graphic punishment details omitted]. I didn’t know until now about mom-run tarts-for-pedophiles Instagram accounts.

Dr. Phil, transphobe?

Dr Phil, America’s controversial prime-time TV psychologist, slammed the medical community this week for rushing to put gender-confused children on hormonal therapy or give them reassignment surgery.

Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Dr Phillip McGraw, 73, said he was shocked that America’s leading child doctor group had endorsed the treatments despite countries like the UK and swathes of Europe restricting them due to fears about long-term side effects.

He said: ‘It’s interesting they choose words like gender-affirming care. That’s interesting that they call it that but really what they’re talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children.

‘All of the major American medical associations have signed off on this… and I have never seen those organizations sign off on anything with less information as to whether or not it does long-term harm of anything in my life.’

Alexa Lardieri, Dr Phil slams US doctors for performing sex-change surgeries on hundreds of trans children a year during Joe Rogan podcast: ‘It’s a social contagion’

Pere la Chaise

One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own energy and their own genius.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

I’m with Twain. I only regret that I got to Pere la Chaise late in the day, and was run out at closure long before I was satisfied.

A taste.

Henhouse

There is a henhouse of fashion editors who gate-keep and are still living their Sex and the City ‘best life,’ who moved to New York to pursue their dream of being a snob.

Designer Elena Velez

It’s not just “fashion editors.” It’s the Economist, too

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s cantankerous prime minister, will strike a note of triumph in his state-of-the-nation address on Saturday. He always does. Last year he boasted of his Fidesz party’s huge win in the election of 2022. This year he has a tougher job. Two of his party’s bigwigs—Hungary’s president, Katalin Novak, and the former justice minister turned MP, Judit Varga—recently quit over their roles in pardoning an orphanage official who covered up sexual abuse.

That scandal stained Mr Orban’s image as an exponent of Christian values and a hero of the international “national conservative” movement Mr Orban likes to brag about standing up to Brussels. In December the EU let him have €10bn ($10.8bn) in aid it had blocked over his rule-of-law violations. But earlier this month, under pressure, he dropped his veto of EU aid to Ukraine. He has since returned to form, holding up sanctions on Chinese firms that have aided Russia’s war effort. No doubt his audience will lap it up.

The Economist World in Brief for 2/17/24

Multiculturalism

The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

A realistic precis of realingment

The fact is that over the past few decades, and across Western democracies, we’ve been in the middle of a seismic political realignment — with more-educated voters swinging left and less-educated voters swinging right. This realignment is more about culture and identity than it is about economics.

College-educated voters have tended to congregate in big cities and lead very different lives than voters without a college degree. College-educated voters are also much more likely to focus their attention on cultural issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and they are much more socially liberal than noncollege-educated voters.

David Brooks, The Political Failure of Bidenomics

A local story

My fair county made national news, sort of.

Somehow, we managed to get two wonky Township Trustees, a sensitive position that exists for poor relief. One of them squandered money on nonsense, spa trips, and such. She was recently sentenced on criminal charges.

The other became something of a nomad while insisting that her fixed residence was appropriately local. I thought it wasn’t possible to do the job remotely, but she apparently disagreed.

The prosecutor charged her criminally. She was convicted, but the Court of Appeals and now the state Supreme Court reversed (the Supreme Court’s logic differed from the Court of Appeals; that’s probably why they took it.)

A Quo Warranto action, saith the Supreme Court, might well have succeeded, but not a criminal case for theft when every indication was that the peripatetic Trustee sincerely thought she was doing her job and earning her paycheck. Quo Warranto is kind of obscure, but knowing obscure remedies is part of what we go to law school for.

So an embarrassment for the prosecutor and a win for the Trustee who the prosecutor came at too aggressively. There’s typically no love lost between Prosecutors and private practitioners (like me, though I’ve retired), so I find this a suitable outcome.

Automation

Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Aphorism du jour

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

Louise Perry.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.

Mostly abortion-related

David French, Cassandra

I follow David French in podcasts and blogs because:

He’s a seasoned litigator aligned with me on abortion, free speech, and religious freedom; and
I have to put up with hearing him to hear the amazing Sarah Isgur.

But Sunday, I think his reflexive religious provincialism got the better of him in Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready.

He starts off well enough:

I’ve been a pro-life advocate and activist for more than 30 years …

…

Through it all, I was guided by two burning convictions—that Roe represented a grave moral and constitutional wrong and that I belonged to a national Christian community that loved its fellow citizens, believed in a holistic ethic of life, and was ready, willing, and able to rise to the challenge of creating a truly pro-life culture.

I believe only one of those things today.

My feelings about Roe are unchanged. …

But then he paints a very bleak picture of the right generally and more specifically his corner of the religious right, which he reflexively equates with "the Church" (it’s one of his most annoying verbal tics, another is hyperbolicic use of "tremendous, tremendous"):

The two sides of the great American divide are now staring at each other and asking, “Now what?” The answer from pro-life America should be clear and resounding—the commitment to life carries with it a commitment to love, to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.

But life and love are countercultural on too many parts of the right. In a time of hate and death, too many members of pro-life America are contributing to both phenomena. Is that too much to say? Is that too strong? I don’t think so.

In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is sweeping the land. …

… The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies.

…

In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement.

(Emphasis added)

Now I suppose there are at least three possibilities here:

He’s right about pro-life America, period, full stop.
He’s right about Evangelicalism.
He’s engaged in hyperbole to get Evangelicals to to better than settling for liberal tears.

I reject the first possibility. I’ve been pro-life a decade longer than French (mostly because I’m two decades older). I broke markedly, if not completely, with Evangelicism shortly before I became actively pro-life, and left Protestantism entirely a about a decade-and-a-half later.

I do not believe that lib-trolling and vindictiveness is any significant part of Orthodox Christianity, though Orthodoxy is anti-abortion (as the historic church always has been — i.e., before American Evangelicals got recruited to the cause by C. Everett Koop, Francis Schaeffer, and less principled actors).

I also don’t believe that it is a significant factor among observant Roman Catholics, "observant" being measured by adherence to Catholic Social Teaching as well as participation in their Church’s sacramental life. Indeed, Catholic Social Teaching (Christian Democracy) is the North Star of the American Solidarity Party, which party alone I support these days.

Bottom line: I believe French is wrong about the Church because his provincialism blinds him to the bigger picture. I certainly hope he’s wrong.

And French’s turn to anti-vaxx sentiment a red prolife America seems like totally gratuitous grievance-airing.

I suggest to David French that if he’s all that down on Calvinist-tinged Evangelicalism, he step out for a breath of incense-tinged air at one of the Anglophone Orthodox Churches in his area.

Come and see, David. Give it a month or two of Sundays.

Douthat on the risk of toxic response

Observant Catholic (see above) Ross Douthat puts French’s point less apocalyptically (I’m being very selective; read the whole column if you can):

While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support … [T]he vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

… But among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.

…

To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents … need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with … the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.

These issues … are essential to the holistic aspects of political and ideological debate. In any great controversy, people are swayed to one side or another not just by the rightness of a particular position, but by whether that position is embedded in a social vision that seems generally attractive, desirable, worth siding with and fighting for.

Here some of the pathologies of right-wing governance could pave a path to failure for the pro-life movement. You can imagine a future in which anti-abortion laws are permanently linked to a punitive and stingy politics, in which women in difficulties can face police scrutiny for a suspicious miscarriage but receive little in the way of prenatal guidance or postnatal support. In that world, serious abortion restrictions would be sustainable in the most conservative parts of the country, but probably nowhere else, and the long-term prospects for national abortion rights legislation would be bright.

In a part of French’s column, he quoted this Douthat column but said it didn’t go far enough. I think it does — because Douthat’s vision is more Catholic (and more catholic).

Making abortion unthinkable

Even in the Evangelical world, there are sane people wanting actually to make things better:

Roe was an unjust ruling. I have always believed it would be overturned, as other unjust decisions by the court were, although I thought it would take longer. I rejoice that it did not. But of course it will take longer for abortion to become unthinkable, which is the real goal of the pro-life movement.

Karen Swallow Prior

Prior continues:

Still, I was, like my fellow evangelicals, a Johnny-come-lately in a long line of people who have opposed abortion and infanticide and tried to defend vulnerable life.

Members of the early Christian church within the ancient Roman world rescued abandoned infants (often those who were female or otherwise deemed inferior) from certain death ….

I always appreciate it when Evangelicals admit, even if tacitly, that Evangelicalism is so unlike the earliest church that it cannot claim vicarious credit for what the earliest church did.

Orthodoxy (and even Catholicism) can.

Still more:

The judicial fiat of Roe v. Wade jump-started the culture wars that have poisoned our political process and brought us to a place of polarization and unbridgeable division. Indeed, this division has been capitalized on by far too many pundits and politicians, for whom a position on abortion does not appear to be a sincerely held belief, but merely an issue they can (and do) leverage for votes or monetize for financial gain. Such betrayal casts a shadow on the overturning of Roe, which has been for me and many others a long-awaited event.

Even so, making abortion unthinkable might start with the law, but it won’t end there. For it is not only the supply of abortion that matters but also the demand. I lament the impoverishment of a social imagination that cannot conceive of a world in which women can flourish without abortion.

Nat Henthoff

On this day, I remember with fondness the late Nat Hentoff, a Jewish atheist who nevertheless believed in the right to life of the unborn, and said so in a time and place where that cost him something. Here is a column Hentoff wrote after he hosted pro-life liberal Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Bob Casey at Cooper Union in downtown Manhattan.

Rod Dreher.

Henthoff was a fierce member of the ACLU back when the ACLU was actually about civil liberties, and was one of the preeminent jazz critics of his age.

I wish he had lived to see last Friday.

He really didn’t need the Committee’s help …

This just seems to make Donald Trump look awful, just awful."

Neil Cavuto, Fox News, on the latest revelations from the January 6 Committee.

You’re surprised that Trump is awful, Neil?

Terrorist wishcasting

I note, with raised eyebrow, the terrorist plans underway to set about attacking Catholic churches and pregnancy resource centers. As someone put it in a dark joke-tweet, this is the state of the discourse in 2022: “You don’t care about pregnant women!” “Well no, we have numerous buildings and institutions expressly set up for that purpose actually, how can we help you?” “Oh really, where? Let’s go firebomb them!”

Bethel McGrew

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

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.

Taking the bait

Some people are taking Farhad Manjoo’s slow-day op-ed exscrecence more seriously than I did.

Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That’s very much the case with Farhad Manjoo’s op-ed column in Thursday’s New York Times, “The Perfect Pronoun: Singular ‘They’.”

Little in the column is original to Manjoo. In 2019, one encounters similar arguments, assertions, and assumptions every day in published essays, on social media, in lavish advertising campaigns, and increasingly in the literature produced and enforced by corporate HR departments. Yet Manjoo’s column is worth focusing on because it presents such a concise and cogent statement of the emerging elite-progressive consensus.

… There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to “him” as “he.” That’s because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as “he” was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that “gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind” — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

…

[A]ll societies — as collectivities of individuals sharing a common culture as well as common laws, rules, and norms (including linguistic rules and norms) — invariably constrain individuals more than they would be if they lived in absolute isolation from others. Any one of those limits on the individual will can feel as if it’s an intolerable constraint, and the principle of individual freedom can always be invoked in order to combat it.

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man’s love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian’s love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can’t just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we’re treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that’s changed is the object of rebellion.

Damon Linker.

See Alan Jacobs, too.

UPDATE:

And see Michael Brendan Dougherty and Rod Dreher and who knows how many more before it’s over.

Dreher:

Does this seem overwrought to you? After all, we’re just talking about a dopey column by a sweet, nerdy Millennial NYT columnist, right? See, though, this is exactly how this stuff gets institutionalized. As Linker points out, four years ago, what Manjoo claims in his piece is arbitrary and oppressive was so normal that nobody even thought about it. Now this kind of thing is quickly becoming orthodoxy within ~~the Inner Party~~ leading progressive circles.

Manjoo engages in a classic piece of left-liberal rhetoric here, saying he wishes that our world were one

… in which we were not all so irredeemably obsessed by the particulars of the parts dangling between our fellow humans’ legs

See what he does here? The people who object to his absolutely radical proposal to alter English as it has been spoken for centuries, so that it can fit a bizarre model of biology that only a relative tiny elite of progressives accepts — hey, they’re the ones who are “obsessed” by meaningless flesh in people’s crotches. Fifteen years ago, progressives taunted those who questioned the wisdom of smashing the traditional model of marriage as being “obsessed” with what other people did behind closed doors, etc. The idea is to stigmatize norms as being arbitrary, irrational, and even immoral, as a way to pave the way for the uncompromising introduction of new norms … which are presented as obviously true and good.

(Emphasis added)

Dougherty:

Writing in the New York Times, tech writer Farhad Manjoo says that we ought to eliminate “gendered” pronouns. Manjoo wants to eighty-six “he” and “she”; “him” and “her.” Our techie isn’t for some of the newly proposed pronouns like “ze,” because studies have shown people don’t know what or who ze is. Perhaps ze should be left to gender nonconforming people. That’s ze truth.

Manjoo’s truth is that he wants us to use “they” as a singular pronoun. “It’s flexible, inclusive, unobtrusive and obviates the risk of inadvertent misgendering.” Manjoo personally wants to be referred to as “they.”

Well, here goes.

Only two types of people object to Farhad’s proposal, they (Manjoo) writes. They (the types) are the grammarians and “the plainly intolerant.” They (Manjoo) has two children, a boy and a girl. They (Manjoo) says they (Manjoo) has been watching them (their’s children) grow up and adapt themselves (their’s children) to roles prescribed by their (all of the above) society. This horrifies them.

By “them” I mean them (Manjoo).

Okay, I can’t do this anymore …

Manjoo writes of his children:

From their very earliest days, my kids, fed by marketing and entertainment and (surely) their parents’ modeling, seemed to hem themselves into silly gender norms. They gravitated to boy toys and girl toys, boy colors and girl colors, boy TV shows and girl TV shows. This was all so sad to me: I see them limiting their thoughts and their ambitions, their preferences and their identity, their very liberty, only to satisfy some collective abstraction.

To Manjoo, this looks like oppression. To conservatives, it looks like the joyful early days of assimilation and appropriation ….

This led to a Twitter exchange:

FM: “This @michaelbd criticism of my column has this interesting bit. personally I can’t understand anyone who doesn’t question every inherited part of the culture and seek to justify it. That’s the point of reason, I feel ”

MBD: You can’t understand *anyone* who doesn’t question *everything?* Maybe other people are both more humble about their reasoning ability, and more grateful that hundreds or thousands of years of human practical experience supplies answers where individual abstract reasoning fails.

Dreher weighs in:

Manjoo seems oblivious to the ideological privilege he has. Try questioning publicly “every inherited part of the culture and seek to justify it” when the inherited part of the office culture is the standard progressive roster of Thou Shalt Nots — including questioning the abandonment of the gender binary.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Zombie Analysis

Zombie analysis of Supreme Court nominees is my topic today.

Iconic radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has often said that liberals “always let us know who they fear” through their unhinged attacks. Among all the potential nominees mentioned a little over a week ago, Amy Coney Barrett immediately attracted the most flak from the left.

And so, of course, the preferred nominee of Doug Mainwaring at brain-dead website LifeSiteNews.com, is Amy Coney Barrett. Not because dispassionate conservative analysis commends her (a topic entirely ignored), but because she triggers the enemy:

NARAL
Planned Parenthood
Seasoned Democrat politicians
Dick Durbin
Chuck Shumer
New York Times
MSNBC
Ruth Marcus
Chris Cillizza
Slate.com
Washington Post
Ivy League law school hegemony

I am not making this up or exaggerating. Literally the first ten reasons given for supporting her are the identies of ten opponents. The last two are my interpretations of less straightforwardly identified bogeymen.

The article, by the way, bears the unironic title “12 reasons Amy Coney Barrett should be on the Supreme Court.”

I have nothing against Amy Coney Barrett except that this kind of trolling is the commonest artument for her. That’s not her fault. It’s just the times we live in.

And it’s contemptible. It doesn’t even do justice to the qualifications of Judge Barrett, who is reduced to a piece of red meat.

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The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving.