Universities

There is a difference between an understandable overreaction to a real problem and derangement, pure and simple. The Manhattan Institute’s statement, with the incendiary, idiotic, and dangerous suggestion that “the universities” have “declared war” on Americans is the latter, not the former. And there is no arguing with derangement. There are plenty of conservative thinkers out there, in places like Compact magazine, who have made serious and sensible and often deservedly harsh critiques of tendencies within the American university system. With them, I’m happy to talk. With a ranting deranged person (and I’m a New Yorker—I have plenty of experience in this department), you need just to walk away.

David A. Bell, Derangement. I quote this not because I think all is well, or even that the Manhattan Institute got this all wrong, but because I appreciate that there’s just no arguing with some people over their obsessions.

Fairness

I and my colleagues at YourMorals.org had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality. People should get what they deserve, based on what they have done. We had assumed that equality and proportionality were both part of the Fairness foundation, but the questions we used to measure this foundation were mostly about equality and equal rights. We therefore found that liberals cared more about fairness, and that’s what had made these economic conservatives so angry at me. They believed that liberals don’t give a damn about fairness (as proportionality).

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

The exaggerated Rule of Law

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address (A World Split Apart)

Traditional Catholics versus tradCaths

Matthew Schmitz suggests in the Washington Post (The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics), among other things, that a new Religious Right (e.g., Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, Florida Gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback) are “tradCaths,” “drawn to the traditional Latin mass and alienated from the church hierarchy.”

1. Sometimes, it helps for someone to point out the obvious. This helpfully fits part of my picture of the current Religious Right.
2. At least two of Schmitz’s three examples lean heavily antisemitic, unlike the dispensational premillenialists in a big chunk of the Protestant Religious Right; that could play out weirdly.
3. As an Orthodox Christian, I’ve generally felt closer to Catholics than to Protestants these past few decades, and I have much sympathy for traditional Catholics pushing back against their Church becoming crypto-Protestant.^*** But I’m not sure that these “tradCaths” are the same as traditional Catholics or that they’re an improvement over a dispensational premillenialist Religious Right.

That’s all I have to say for now, since I haven’t fully digested this new “data.”

SAVE Act

By itself, the SAVE Act seems likely to hurt Republicans more than Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. (The Republicans seem not to have grasped the demographic shifts that have made them the party of the less-than-fully-diligent.) Because it’s likely to backfire, I’m disinclined to lose much sleep over the fate of that devious law.

But the SAVE Act doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of a multifront Republican plan to corrupt future elections.

In a February podcast with Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the FBI, Trump urged that “Republicans should say … we should take over the voting … nationalize the voting,” because of what he claimed were “crooked” state-run elections. Trump has suggested the federal restrictions he wants can guarantee victory for his party. “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race,” he said in a Feb. 19 speech in Rome, Georgia.

David Ignatius

So because I think SAVE is a bad law, constitutionally dubious even if the supposed problem it addresses were real instead of a Trump invention,^** I’m opposing it.

Coincidence?

The Wall Street Journal investigates The Well-Timed Trades Made Moments Before Trump’s Policy Surprises. This table is synthesized from that article.

Make of it what you will. My Hypothesis: All the crazy stuff Donald Trump does, especially reversing course repeatedly, is to allow his friends collectively (possibly including family, though probably not directly because of the risk) to make billions of dollars on this kind of “insider trading.”

Shorts

• Our culture’s true religion is the Second World War, a faith centered not on the positive moral example of Jesus Christ but the negative one of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good, but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.^* (Alec Ryrie via Christopher Gehrz)
• Trump in a nutshell (even if it is fake)
• In order to conduct fair elections, the county elections board must have members who are willing to accept the basic proposition of any democracy: that in a given election, their party can lose. (Dana Barrett and Mo Ivory, of Fulton County Georgia, How We Stopped a Bid to Seat Election Deniers in Fulton County)
• Self-driving cars must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and monetize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head space. (Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive)
• NOMINEE, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office. (Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” via George Will)
• Liberals are people who would like to see things improved, and conservatives are people who would like to see things not worsened. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan via George Will)
• “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. (Of the Iran war via Michelle Goldberg)
• The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it. (Jonathan V. Last)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld (the real spicy stuff)

• Throwing up in my mouth a little
• New Zealand Crossword Puzzle – rogerwmbennett relatively unfiltered — Original profile

Notes

• ^* In case you’re unaware, there are heretics who think Winston Churchill was the baddie in World War II, and they may be multiplying in internet petri dishes.
• ^** “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof ….” But there’s a second clause that casts shade on the absoluteness of state power. See this annotation from Cornell Law School.
• ^*** I probably should note that my closest traditional Catholic acquaintance turned out to be a pretty sick puppy, and we’re estranged now. Maybe my admiration-in-theory should take a closer look at how traditional Catholics trend in practice.

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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