Tag: writing

Whole lotta AI goin’ on

This oughta go in Frank Bruni’s “Love of Sentences”

“I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses.” Sam Anderson writes a wonderful little review of his fancy Meta glasses: “Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent sunglasses. Critiquing A.I. these days is like shooting fish in a barrel — and I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside a barrel that, as soon as you ask it a question or two, reveals itself to be a Nazi. Meta is investing heavily to promote its new product (a Super Bowl ad starring Spike Lee, a brick-and-mortar store on Fifth Avenue), which made me curious to take a peek through the eyes of the future. Yet A.I. glasses also feel so clearly unnecessary, so easily adaptable for malevolent ends. I was perfectly ready to hate them. Instead, very quickly, I started to feel sorry for my sunglasses. They were like a kid who hasn’t done any of the reading but keeps being called on in class — and who also can’t make friends, because all of his classmates think he’s a spy.”

Front Porch Republic

It’s not so much that I’m obsessed with AI as it is that the people I read with pleasure currently are obsessed with it.

How very, very ABA

The Wall Street Journal reveals/reminds that the American Bar Association has a DEI requirement for accreditation (and that ABA Accreditation is all but mandatory for a law school’s success).

It wasn’t this issue that caused me to drop ABA membership early in my law practice, but another where the bien pensants “think” one way, I another. The power levers in the ABA are, and long have been, controlled by people who feel like space aliens to me, and who probably think I’m a troglodyte.

Populist lessons

The lesson, as I see it, is that populism can never deliver on its fantastic promises: to insulate a national economy from the global one, while maintaining prosperity; to represent the will of the people, while persecuting a large share of the people who oppose populist policies; to champion “democracy” through illiberal means; to pretend you’re speaking for the forgotten man as you grow fat, rich, and arrogant in power. By the way, that’s as true of left-wing populism as it is of the populism of the right. As someone with some family ties to Hungary, I’m just glad to see Orban gone.

Bret Stephens

Pope versus an illiterate degenerate

Pope Leo is not likely to have the honor of going the way of my patron saint, Thomas Becket, that “turbulent priest” …

No, these are not those kinds of times. Pope Leo only has the American president, an illiterate and a degenerate, to snipe at him on social media. Trump is what you’d get if you’d given Benito Mussolini a frontal lobotomy and a double orchiectomy. He will order and exult in the mass murder of seagoing South Americans whose names nobody knows, but whatever else he may have in common with late-life King Henry VIII, the American president is not likely to make any martyrs in the classical sense.

…

One here recalls the famous words of Francis Cardinal George:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Prophetic? I think so–properly understood. 

The role of the prophet is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Christianity. A prophet may or may not foretell future events, but making predictions is not the prophet’s main business—his business very often is the here and now. The prophet is a kind of public prosecutor, speaking in an inspired way to the shortcomings of the people, of the state, and, especially, of government and religious leaders ….

Kevin D. Williamson, The Pope Against the Idolators

“Shorts” on AI as Christian Heresy

I stumbled onto a piece by L.M. Sacasas (I think his intimates call him Michael; I’m not his intimate) that warrants many “shorts” of its own:

  • [T]he narrative of technological inevitability … frames the development of technology as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt, and to do so on the terms dictated by the emerging technological apparatus.
  • [T]he victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological “paths not taken” are often suppressed or ignored.
  • The narrative is useful precisely to the degree that it is the rhetorical equivalent of washing one’s hands in the face of events you have the power to sway but would rather not.
  • Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.
  • We must at least entertain the possibility that the appropriate response to certain technologies at certain times is simply outright refusal. We do not need to water down our conviction with a myriad of qualifiers about how there are undoubtedly good and proper uses.
  • AI in its present mode can be understood as a fundamentally conservative rather than radically disruptive force to the degree that its function is to preserve modernity’s core commitments to scale, efficiency, rationality, control, and prediction.
  • [W]e continue to reap the consequences of a failure to address the problems of growth and complexity in a manner that would serve the human person and human communities.
  • We are discovering … that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (That last, bolded, sentence was a pull-quote and very apt.)
  • [W]e are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
  • Without suggesting that this is an exhaustive and definitive account of the human person, I would invite us to consider the possibility that what is distinctive about the human should be sought in the quality of our capacity to respond to our Creator, the Alpha and Omega of our existence.
  • [O]ur flourishing is conditioned not so much on the accomplishment of certain feats or tasks, many of which, in any case, exclude the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable among us. Rather, it is conditioned on our capacity to respond to the call of God on us as unique individuals made in his image and thus made to resonate with his presence as it is manifest to us throughout creation.
  • “[S]tillness … is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul’s power, as real, of responding to the real … has not yet descended into words.” (Quoting Josef Pieper, Leisure As the Basis of Culture)

L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy.

This is one to return to periodically until I’ve modified my DNA with it or found a fallacy and dumped it. I want to make sure I’m not acting like a machine.

Shorts (more generally)

  • Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
  • It was once the useful role of conservatives to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling “Stop”. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump. (Bret Stephens)
  • She says she has critiqued Trump for ten years so she should be trusted when she “defends” him thus: He is too stupid to realize that the même was sacrilegious.
  • The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un. (J Budziszewski)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

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

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.

Annunciation

This is the Feast of Annunciation (hint for low Protestant readers: subtract 9 months from December 25). I was struck by the hymn for the feast: Today is the beginning of our salvation … The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin (bold added). The hymn is ancient; life beginning at conception isn’t something a bunch of misogynists dreamed up quickly after Roe v. Wade.

Today, I moved the really spicy stuff elsewhere, but I do provide links.

Writing

Trapped in the bog of my worry and stuckness

I love writing under moonlight. I notice that if anyone remembers a line or two from my books they are often lines written at night, not day. The poetry tends to come at night, the lively turns of phrase. When I’m trapped in the bog of my worry and stuckness (working with metaphors from the story here), I like the notion that when an image presents itself it’s actually the moon shaking her hair free and illuminating my imagination.

Martin Shaw, unwinding from a book tour for Liturgies of the Wild

Screw-it-all freedom

Savage Gods is a crisis memoir: at least, that’s the closest I have ever come to describing it. It’s my weirdest book – my weirdest non-fiction book, anyway – and every time I look at it I have two simultaneous feelings: that I don’t ever want to go through that again; and that I wish I could write another book like this. Of course, there is a relationship between difficult times and good writing, just as there is a relationship between troubled authors and brilliant prose. Not always, of course, but often. There’s a reason so many of us end up divorced alcoholics, if we haven’t died of TB at 45.

Certainly the strangeness of what I was going through when I wrote that book – a spiritual crisis, essentially, which I was only able to fully understand in retrospect – created the form in which it was written. Savage Gods is so uncategorisable that I couldn’t get any of my previous publishers interested in the thing, and a few of them openly hated it. In the end, I found some small, more adventurous outfits to take it up. I now think it’s probably my best non-fiction book, even though I don’t particularly want to read it again, in the same way that Bob Dylan never wants to listen to Blood On The Tracks. But while I don’t want another spiritual crisis, I would like to access the kind of screw-it-all freedom I felt when I wrote like that. I’ve never managed another book like it.

Paul Kingsnorth

Legalia

What do parents have to do with it?

Here, then, are the decisive slam-dunk textual facts that doom Trump’s executive order 14160 in the pending birthright-citizenship case: The words “parent,” “parents,” “mother,” and “father” appear nowhere in the text of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. Nor do these words appear in the text of the landmark 1952 statutory provision defining birthright citizenship. Yet Trump’s made-up executive order uses the words “mother” and “father” a combined ten times.

Trump and his legal and academic defenders have simply fabricated a welter of detailed parental rules – about parental citizenship, parental legal status, parental domicile, and parental allegiance. Too many critics of Trump and his allies have taken the bait, themselves focusing rather too much attention on parents. To borrow a phrase, they have fallen into the “Parent Trap.” 

The text of the 14th Amendment, by contrast, focuses entirely on the baby – on the person born, not the persons giving birth: “All persons born . . . in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Akhil and Vikram Amar & Samarth Desai, Birthright citizenship: reading the text and sidestepping the parent trap

I’d be more inclined to agree with the phrase “slam-dunk textual facts” were it not for the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

(I’m happy to see the Amar brothers on SCOTUSblog.)

Will potential statesmen ever again step forward?

[Robert] Mueller’s passing should … prompt reflection on what has become of leaders in the legal community who have been widely thought able to transcend political differences, and help to resolve complex, divisive problems beyond the capacities of a polarized political class. Call them legal “notables,” or any other term you choose … After the Watergate scandal, Edward Levi was one such notable, chosen by President Gerald Ford to be the attorney general needed to repair a badly damaged Department of Justice. Levi took the job with the express intention of making “pervasive a certain sense of fairness and responsibility—and adherence to the law—and a clear denial of partisan political use” within DOJ. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded.

In our national politics, individuals possessing this standing across the political divide have begun to disappear from the public scene. Robert Mueller marked one moment in this trajectory of decline. When the acting attorney general in Trump 1.0 named Mueller as a special counsel in the Russia investigation, the press brimmed over with expressions of admiration for his professionalism and character. Democrats and Republicans alike applauded the choice. In fact, it was hard to imagine another choice that would have been as well received.

But the polarization of our politics overcame what Mueller had been appointed to offer …

…

Robert Mueller was committed to a system that would work if those responsible for it, or called to navigate it through difficult times, served with skill, experience, and integrity. We will soon find out whether American politics have, for the foreseeable future, driven devoted public servants like Bob Mueller from the frontlines in an era when they can expect their work to be derided, their motives questioned, and, eventually, their deaths to be celebrated.

Bob Bauer

P.R. is nothing new

A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass.

At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home ….

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Just one of those things

This Thursday, the fifth Thursday in Orthodox Lent, I will be helping to lead a service called the Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete combined, on this particular evening, with a complete reading Saint Sophronius’s Life of Saint Mary of Egypt.

That has a secular significance this year: I will be watching the Purdue-Texas men’s basketball tournament game on a YouTubeTV recording, not live, for alas, the game comes on at 7:10 pm and the service, beginning at 6:30, will barely be warming up.

Shorts

  • This political moment isn’t populists versus elitists; it is, as I’ve written before, like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids. (David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming)
  • The inexperienced man speaks of problems, which have answers; the experienced man speaks of temptations, which never go away. (Joshua Gibbs, The Experienced Man)
  • If the claim that Eastern theology tends to be more apophatic whereas Western theology tends to be more kataphatic causes you to lose your peace, you probably shouldn’t be on the internet. (Michael Warren Davis, Don’t Eff the Ineffable)
  • A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is “merely relative,” is asking you not to believe him.  So don’t. (Roger Scruton via J Budziszewski)
  • Can’t we do better than this, America?, I find myself thinking nearly every day now. And the answer appears to be a firm, unambiguous No, we cannot. (Damon Linker)
  • Trump’s vision of jurisprudence is: I gave you what you wanted—a seat on the Supreme Court—and now your job is to give me what I want. I don’t take my oath of office seriously, and if you do, I consider that a personal betrayal. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • His career is an exemplar of the sinister leading the credulous. (Jamie Kirchick, How Tucker Carlson instigated an inevitable war within MAGA)
  • The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes)
  • I am only unhappy when I don’t hear the sound of missiles. (Hassan, 32, pseudonymously through Arash Azizi, The Iranians Losing Faith in America)
  • When Khamenei died, I was happy, but only for a moment—like you get a hit from a drug. … It didn’t even last a day. After that I’ve only felt one thing: fear, fear, fear. (Melika, 21, pseudonymously through Arash Azizi, The Iranians Losing Faith in America)
  • It is surpassingly strange that a sane person cannot now take the word of the President of the United States for anything, so habitual and incessant is the lying. (Your estranged curator)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld (i.e., the really spicy stuff)

Res publicae tempore belli

At the waters’ edge

I’m surprised by my reaction to the war on Iran.

  • We are at war.
  • Everything about our entry into this war was wrong.
  • Articles of Impeachment should have been passed by now, with the Senate gearing up for trial.
  • Much as I detest Trump, I cannot root for America to lose.
  • But I can root for Americans, hurt in the pocketbook by his tariffs and the disruption of world oil flow (his general barbarity having passed without objection), to get furious and crush his bootlickers this Fall.

Mind you, this is reaction, not analysis. I have no qualifications to analyze the conduct of the war.

Liberating students from stultifying AI cheating

In his final year of teaching in Baylor’s Honors College, Alan Jacobs appears to be at the top of his game. He in particular has made me aware that there are, in theory, ways for conscientious profs to liberate their students from the stultifying pressure to let AI write their essays for them.

Now in his first column for the Dispatch, he gets a bit more concrete. For instance:

When I have talked with my fellow professors in the Great Texts program at Baylor’s Honors College, I have learned a few things. Some professors have for many years been giving oral examinations in the old Oxford and Cambridge tutorial style, where students read their papers aloud, and the professor interrupts to ask questions like “What do you mean by that word? What does that phrase mean?” This allows the professor to discover whether the student actually knows what he or she is talking about. In such situations, and in full oral exams, there are few ways to hide your ignorance. Professors who teach this way can largely (if not wholly) ignore the AI freakout.

…

Properly understood, the disruption of humanities teaching by AI is a gift, and I plan to receive it as such, rather than complain about a burden. As a teacher, I find these new conditions invigorating and refreshing. I feel like Charles Foster Kane when he started his career as a newspaper publisher: I don’t know how to teach masterpieces of literature and philosophy and theology, I just try everything I can think of. I find that my students—even if they’re not always as excited as I am—welcome these experiments and are quite willing to engage in them.

…

[F]or me, the rise of the chatbots has been an unexpected, late-career gift. It has made my teaching more fun for me, and I think more interesting for my students. And I believe the lessons I have learned can be generalized.

…

By depriving students of constant AI use—or, to put it more accurately, by allowing them some respite from the tyranny of the chatbots over their lives—we actually enable them to exercise their minds in unfamiliar, and for some unprecedented, ways. 

In short, there’s a great opportunity here for those who want to take it. Humanities professors of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our self-forged chains.

What AI Is Teaching Us About Humanities Education

What money is teaching us about education reform

Also in Texas, the private start-up University of Austin suffered an exodus of academic talent after its principal funder, Joe Lonsdale, strong-armed the institution into embracing “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti]-identity politics, and anti-Islamism.”

Len Gutkin, The Right’s Academic Civil War.

This is a bitter, bitter disappointment for me, as I suspect it is for Pano Kanelos, who left the Presidency of the estimable St. John’s College – Annapolis to become the Founding President of University of Austin.

Is the idea of starting a new, excellent and free university Quixotic in the 21st century? Will moneyed barbarians always be in the saddle?

Tu quoque

Every one of these ideas is terrible — because every one of them follows from a fundamental failure to grasp the character of political reality in the United States. Hauling members of the opposing party before state tribunals for official condemnation, packing the country’s highest court with judges guaranteed to hand down decisions favorable to progressives, or otherwise altering the rules of American politics to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents — none of that would move the country toward anything resembling “reconciliation.” On the contrary, it would move the country several steps closer to being torn apart.

Damon Linker (October 2020). Note the date.

The same observations apply to MAGA smashing norms in 2025-26 “to systematically enhance the power of one party while diminishing the power of its opponents.” The main difference is that MAGA is explicit about seeking to smash and humiliate, not reconcile.

Infantile rebellion

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity.

Carl Trueman, Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society – First Things

Wordplay

So many felicitous phrases to brighten my day (via Frank Bruni)!:

  • In The Guardian, Dave Schilling considered an icy spectacle that has received more attention than usual lately: “Ah, hockey. The most impish of sports. A bunch of blissfully beefy individuals wearing colorful sweaters zoom around in skates chasing a wee little object called, of all things, a ‘puck.’ It’s adorable. It’s like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for people missing teeth.”
  • In The Times, Wesley Morris argued that the real appeal of the hit television series “Heated Rivalry,” set in the world of professional hockey, isn’t the sex: “The talking is the strength of the show. On the one hand, big deal. Men have never been doing more talking. They’re talking so much that we now refer to that talking as the manosphere, meaning that the chat has achieved a degree of gaseousness that only earth science can name.”
  • W.J. Hennigan pondered the prickliness of a member of Trump’s cabinet: “For a guy who calls himself the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth sure is defensive.”
  • In a post on X, Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, made fun of many Republicans’ tortured efforts not to call the attack on Iran by a certain three-letter word: “It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling combat.”
  • In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wondered about Trump’s focus and coherence amid his shifting explanations for military strikes against Iran: “The president’s strategy seems more sundown than Sun Tzu.”

Shorts

  • …sexless epileptics jerking and lurching across a dance floor, lewd yet without the touch of a human hand. (Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes, describing school dances of the period)
  • … “Richard Cory,” that poem whose last line seems written expressly for the purpose of startling high-school students out of their first-period-English slumbers. (Poems Ancient and Modern)
  • Thomas B. Edsall, Trump’s Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights (bold added).
  • I recently heard of some new protein-heavy martini, which a comedian said tastes like a podcast. (My social medium friend Jeremy Abel, a fellow Hoosier.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Friday, 1/30/26

David Brooks bids the Gray Lady farewell

I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

…

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. …

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real … Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places …

Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. … As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his own continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

David Brooks’ farewell column for the New York Times (gift link) reprises the concerns about which he has been writing of late, which writing made him my favorite at the Times. (See below for an example.) I hope he won’t just disappear into some Yale classroom, never again to share his wisdom with the wider world.

The idea that “the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money” has outraged me for as long as I can remember — perhaps because I succumbed to it for what seemed like an adequate personal reason (an engagement to be married in a year when I was 19), but then never got back formally to the humanities when that reason vanished. I’ve been an autodidact ever since, envious of those who studied the humanities more formally, in the give-and-take of a well-run classroom.

Devouring “the news”

Something I still aspire to

One journalist I knew (who worked for a far bigger outlet as a political correspondent) once told me that the news was the first thing she read when she opened her eyes, and the last thing she saw before falling asleep.

Perhaps this is how some journalists need to live their lives. If reporting the daily news is their calling, they must be deeply aware of what is going on. Even if it means watching and reading all the time.

But it is not for you and me, friends. This sort of news consumption will reign your emotions: it will drive you to anger, terror, annoyance, and despair. It will make you feel helpless. It will divorce you from the daily, real things happening in your own home. Take it from someone who’s lived it: knowing absolutely everything that is happening right now—whether in Iran, or Ukraine, or Washington, D.C., or Minnesota—is not your calling. It can actually serve as a dangerous distraction from the vocations of your own life, neighborhood, and community.

…

Here are some boundaries I’ve set in place for my news consumption since 2020. They have been very helpful. I pray they are helpful to you.

  • Check one site, and check it once every couple days at most. If you can, check it once a week. That’s it. Find a reliable source that you trust—preferably a site that tries not to follow a party line. It is more likely to give you the nuance partisan news outlets neglect. If the events of the hour are truly and lastingly important, they will still be talked about a week later. If a credible news outlet, one you find trustworthy and careful, isn’t talking about it, there’s a good chance you should not worry about it. This filters out a lot of momentary “noise,” and allows you to attend to what truly matters.

Gracy Olmstead.

Olmstead is the second person who tacitly or explicitly recommends what strikes me, at the gut level, as excessive disengagement: once-weekly news exposure. Alan Jacobs, who only reads the Economist, and that only when it arrives at his home, is the other.

I was raised in such a way that, by precept or example (I don’t remember the precept being vocalized), I absorbed the message that “good citizens stay on top of the news.” I don’t know that it was ever right. Maybe it was in the 1950s. But “the news” is far vaster today than it was then, and more polarized, and frequently (especially if you get social media news) insane.

All that aside, I sense that I’m spending too much time on the news because, well, I sit down for morning devotions and news around 5:30 am and often am still sitting there at 10 am. Like today, for instance, he typed at 10:00 am.

I’m retired, so it’s not like I’m robbing from my employer. God, maybe, but not, god forbid, my employer.

I’m aware of this. I think I’m making progress.

Re-orientation

Alan Jacobs sympathizes with people who are tempted to give up reading the news because it’s too depressing. But that:

is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave you fretful and at loose ends. 

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics. 

This practice offers a threefold reorientation: 

  • Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; 
  • Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); 
  • Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Radicalization

Ambition versus lust for domination

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.”

The insatiable lust for domination, he continues “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant attaches himself only to those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”

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Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

David Brooks

History based on reality

I have suspected that part of the reason for a rightward swing in young people [blood-and-soil nationalism,, though] may be that the holocaust is not seared into their worldview and identity as it is in my generation. I was born after the war, but was acutely aware of its horrors. I specifically recall Life’s Picture History of World War II in my childhood home. A child who viewed that repeatedly, as I did, isn’t likely to forget.

When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream

No natural immunity

As Harvard professor Stephen Pinker once said:

A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

Aaron Renn, The Manosphere and the Church (September 2020)

Presumption of Regularity Redux

Early in Trump’s second administration, handwriting appeared on the walls of the Department of Justice and the offices Federal District Attorneys:

Integrity will not be tolerated if it requires candor to the court about weaknesses in the Administration’s position.

If you’ve ever been even a mediocre lawyer, you know that intransigence toward a judge who has figured out your case’s weakness is not wise even in the short term. In the longer term, it tells the court you can’t be trusted to be honest.

In Federal Courts, there was a longstanding “presumption of regularity” in the doings of government lawyers. That has been lost so completely that it’s no longer even talked about in the news, especially when there are new Administration theatrics to talk about.

But I’m going to talk about something related. Minneapolis is a “sanctuary city” of a fairly rigorous sort. It won’t cooperate with DHS/ICE even so modestly as to let them know when they have illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes in their custody. That’s part of Trump’s rationale, at least after-the-fact, for sending in 3000 ICE agents ostensibly to deal with welfare fraud that didn’t involve illegal immigrants but US Citizens who were once immigrants. So something smells fishy.

Those ICE agents are wearing masks. They’re behaving provocatively. The news has stories about them grabbing brown kids as they leave school, then returning them hours later because they’re here legally, and about American citizens of foreign origin being snatched and sent to hellhole foreign prisons.

The new guy in charge of ICE in Minneapolis says he’ll draw down his troops if Minneapolis will start cooperating on the transfer of immigrant prisoners to ICE control.

Can you, Minneapolis official, entertain any presumption of regularity on the part of ICE? Can you presume that American Citizens won’t be manhandled, tortured, deported by these masked goons?

iPhone, the Kleenex for wiping up ICE

The iPhone [note iPhone standing in for all smartphones, like Kleenex=facial tissue] seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.

So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”

…

We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed.

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In a country with a fascistic government that disseminates massive lies — ours — iPhone videos become essential to keep democracy and objective truth on life support. There are dangers, of course. Lack of context can deceive; AI has made every video’s authenticity suspect; people can subjectively interpret things any way they want. But what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.

Andrew Sullivan, Can the iPhone Save Our Democracy?

Civic hygiene: another reason to hold onto my phone while many around me are (vocally) giving up theirs. I don’t struggle with compulsive smartphone use; if you do, your mileage may vary.

Really, the only qualms I have about my phone are about the Chinese factory workers who make them — and that’s always a tough call because some jobs just are hard or boring, and the line between that and metaphorical slavery is indistinct.

The death of the magazine

But a magazine I always thought of as a relatively small group of identifiable writers, connected with some broad themes. They could disagree with each other. They had some broad agreements, creating this little thing that would have a variety of their views.

The Atlantic is now just now a machine. I mean, it has hundreds of staffers. It has hundreds of writers. … The magazine itself, of course, was directly challenged by the internet in ways that probably impossible to recreate. The fact that you had to have these writers stapled together with paper really did create a particular cultural product that cannot be done anymore.

Kevin D. Williamson

It’s not easy being a lawyer in this DoJ

Throughout the extensive litigation over the [Alien Enemies Act], in this case and others, the Trump Administration has claimed the president deserves absolute deference when he claims that an “invasion” exists. The absurd implications of this position were highlighted in yesterday’s argument, when Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod (appointed by George W. Bush) asked whether the president could invoke the AEA in response to the “British Invasion” of rock stars, like the Beatles. “What if,” she asked “the [President’s] proclamation said ‘we’re having a British invasion.’ They’re sending all these musicians over to corrupt young minds…. They’re coming over and they’re taking over all kinds of establishments.” Could courts then rule the president’s invocation of the AEA was illegal? In response, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign admitted the government’s position would require courts to still defer to the president, and allow him to wield the extraordinary emergency powers that can only be triggered by an actual “invasion.”

Ilya Somin, Could the President Invoke the Alien Enemies Act in Response to the “British Invasion” of Rock Stars Like the Beatles?

Felicitous sentences

  • Rachel Louise Snyder appraised the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Renee Good: “The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.” (Karla Holomon, Cary, N.C., and Molly Gaffga, Sanatoga, Pa., among many others)
  • Maureen Dowd parsed this cursed second term of Trump’s: “Trump Redux is infatuated with drone strikes and airstrikes, tumescent with the power of the world’s greatest military, hungry to devour the hemisphere in one imperialistic gulp.” (Ellen Casey, Hope, R.I., and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

Via Frank Bruni.

Shorts

  • I’ve always been kind of anti-populist because I know people. And the more people you know, the less of a populist you are, I think. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • From the perspective of political theory, my argument falls within the category of “political indifferentism”–that is, the notion that politics is mostly a matter “indifferent” to core human interests. (Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods)
  • [T]he world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing …. [from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in aid of the aforementioned re-orientation].
  • There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes. (Ernest Hemingway via Kevin D. Williamson)
  • Of all his weaknesses that is one of his greatest, that he’d rather hurt himself than not fight. He’d rather hurt the country than not fight. The fight is all. (Peggy Noonan)
  • Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. (Andrew Davison, likely channeling Henri de Lubac)
  • “Today,” says de Lubac, “when the essential doctrine of the unity of the human race is attacked, mocked by racism,” we should feel anguish that it is so weakly defended by Christian leaders. (James R. Wood)
  • Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. (David Brooks in his farewell NYT column)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Saturday, 2/3/24

I have competing calendar events for this morning. One was the funeral of an acquaintance whose obituary suggested memorial gifts to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Read between those lines, though the toxicology report won’t be back for weeks. Lord have mercy!) The other was a baptism of a family of five, which family features spouses of dramatically different skin tones — a joyous first for our parish — and the reception by Chrismation (i.e., no baptism because of a prior valid baptism) of yet another Purdue student.

As a baptism is pretty obligatory for a Parish Cantor, I am glad to take that more joyous option.

The Gender Dysphoria beat

Toss the kids’ smart phones

Mark Zuckerberg would presumably have chosen a pummeling in the dojo over the grilling he endured on Capitol Hill yesterday. The Meta chief, along with executives from X, Snap, Discord, and TikTok (wait, didn’t we ban those guys?), was called to testify in a Senate judiciary hearing on social media’s impact on children. In a tussle with Senator Josh Hawley, Zuckerberg was cornered into turning to the families of children who were victims of online abuse and exploitation and apologizing for what their kids had been through. I mean, I guess the dressing-down of a new master of the universe scratches an itch. But did the hearing do anything to help those who want safer social media for kids? 

Free Press contributor Abigail Shrier knows these issues better than most. She has a new book on the mental health of young Americans—Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up—out later this month. I asked Abigail for her thoughts on the hearing. Here’s what she told me: 

Gender dysphoria, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourette syndrome: the number of social contagions spread by social media could fill a diagnostic manual all its own. And yet, in the eight years since academic psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt first warned the world about the dangers of social media, the mental health expert complex has done nothing to curtail its use by teens and tweens. 

Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg feel no pressure to take responsibility for the damage their products cause. And why would they? The American Psychological Association, quick to warn the public about the dangers of systemic racism, police tactics, and climate change, has utterly failed to take the dangers of social media to teens seriously. (See the APA’s belated, laughably weak, and equivocating health advisory.) 

The simplest solution, Abigail says, is for parents to throw out their kids’ phones. But experts won’t suggest that because it will put them out of a job:

One of the best things mental health experts could have done to improve the mental health of teens would not grant them an ongoing role in kids’ lives. Any parent can take away a cell phone. But only mental health experts can dispense “wellness tips,” diagnoses, psych meds, and therapy. They march into schools and lecture teens about the responsible uses of social media, which is a little like school nurses advising kids about the prudent uses of Ecstasy. 

In other words, parents: you’re on your own.

The Free Press

Conversion therapies

I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.

A detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, via Pamela Paul, As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do..

More from the article:

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

I have obsessed enough over the madness of the gender-affirming approach to gender dysphoric kids that nothing Pamela Paul said was new to me. Nothing.

But her piece is still huge because I’ve previously heard all this only from publications at or beyond the edges of the Overton Window, whereas this Pamela Paul piece is in the New York Times, fer cryin’ out loud, (which is a sure sign that the pendulum has begun swinging back from the furthest left/progressive extremes – or maybe of the end of the world).

One of the reasons I’m not in favor of blowing up the incorrigibly corrupt “system” (by electing some chaos-monkey to the Presidency, for instance) is that the system, screwed up though it be, is not incorrigible. There are people of good will who are mistaken but persuadable.

Culture

Perspective

Scruton once wrote about the moral philosopher Peter Singer: “It has been said of him, as he indelicately reminds us in the preface, that he is ‘the most influential living philosopher,’ and this is perhaps true. But the influence has been purchased at the cost of the philosophy. After all, there was a sense in which Mao was the most influential living poet, and Hitler the most influential living painter.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty, Rush’s Place

A promising new Substack

The founders of Poems Ancient and Modern are Joseph Bottum, a writer living in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina. Acutely sensitive to copyright (violated by far too many online postings), we will be limiting ourselves to works that are in the public domain (currently those from before 1929)

Here We Stand – Poems Ancient and Modern.

I have appreciated every issue so far.

The most successful counter-intuitive principle ever

The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history. Every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Playing by your own rules

Objectors may point out that this raises a coordination problem. If mainstream sexual culture now assumes that women will by default be sterile and sexually available, then how is any heterosexual woman who refuses this dynamic ever to find a partner? Won’t men simply pass them over for someone who plays by the usual rules? One of my interviewees doesn’t think so. Katie, 25, a researcher from Washington, DC, says that in her experience, dating while refusing birth control was ‘not at all awkward or weird’. Rather, in her view, it serves to filter out frivolous would-be partners: ‘If you’re serious about it, and they’re serious and thoughtful too, then it’s not an issue.’

Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress

Why logorrhea?

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Eye for eye leaves the world blind

A conservative young man visited my office some years ago and recited a long list of illegitimate, dishonest, manipulatory techniques used by the left.  I said words to the effect, “I know all this.  Why are you telling me?”  He replied “Because unless our side does the same things, we’ll lose the country.”  I answered, “If you do what is evil so that good will result, you will destroy everything about your country worth saving, and you will be just like those whom you oppose.”  I’m afraid he was very disappointed in me, and left my office in sorrow.

J Budziszewski, Conservative Judicial Activism?

A small parable

When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.

Alan Jacobs, a small parable

The parable is just three paragraphs and worth reading. It seems unfair for me to cut-and-paste it all.

The Education Hoax

Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell via The Economist

Why I still read legal blogs and listen to legal podcasts

I was prepared to blog my incredulity at E. Jean Carroll actually having suffered $83 million of financial harm at the hands mouth of you-know-who. David Lat does not hide the answer:

The big legal news of the week was the $83.3 million defamation verdict secured by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump, consisting of $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages. This trial was only on the issue of defamation damages for Trump’s continued public attacks on Carroll; in an earlier trial, a jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages.

(Emphasis added)

Doggerel Break

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

W.H. Auden, The More Loving One, via Alan Jacobs, Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition

From here, it’s all downhill, with politics and the most ridiculous conspiracy theory so far this year. On the other hand, the politics are

Politics generally

Nobles and Meritocrats

The nobleman may be contrasted with the meritocrat [the bourgeois], who occupies his station by virtue of his intelligence (as certified by gatekeeping institutions) and his hard work. He is emphatically an individual. Nobody handed him anything. He doesn’t own land and isn’t tied to any particular place; he may have been plucked from the hinterlands by the SAT test and groomed to enter the labor market of the global, managerial economy. He may or may not have children. If he does, he will try to pass on every advantage to them, but this is done primarily by accumulating enough money so his children will have a shot at entry to those same gatekeeping institutions. After that, they are on their own. He passes on to them an open-ended opportunity, not a definite form of life. The meritocrat owes nothing to those who came before, and likely finds it hard to imagine what shape his children’s lives will take. Living within the horizon of his own life, likely thousands of miles from the place of his birth, it is perfectly natural that he should not feel any special responsibility to sustain a culture. He may even work in the machinery of culture-replacement, as it pays well.

…

Now comes the kicker. By the competition it unleashes, bourgeois society creates unprecedented wealth, but also unprecedented inequality of wealth. It does so even while proclaiming equality to be its great insight, innovation and foundation, an inalienable right of man. The contradiction of bourgeois society is such that “its development belies its principle, and its dynamic undercuts its legitimacy.”

In earlier societies, inequality held a legitimate status, assigned by nature, tradition, or providence. In bourgeois society, inequality is an idea that circulates sub rosa in contradiction with the way individuals view themselves; it nevertheless pervades the environment in which they live…. The bourgeoisie did not invent the division of society into classes, but by cloaking that division in an ideology that renders it illegitimate, they tinged it with suffering.

Matthew Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class

The right’s new abnormal normal

[W]e now live in a political world oriented around the following two-step electoral process: First, the online right galvanizes and mobilizes a growing base of conspiracy-addled voters with chum, ranging from Twitter memes to QAnon to bullshit about Pentagon psyops, pop stars, football players, deadly vaccine mandates, and other paranoid nonsense; second, the GOP uses negative partisanship to keep more normie Republican and Republican-leaning voters on side when the time comes to cast ballots.

It barely worked in 2016. It nearly worked in 2020. How about in 2024? It’s much too early to know. I’ll simply say I wouldn’t be so sure the Swift-Kelce psychodrama that has obsessed the online right over the past week will do anything to make a Trump victory any less likely.

Welcome to the right’s new abnormal normal.

Damon Linker

Enacting indignation against one’s owner

Sen. Josh Hawley’s grilling of Mr. Zuckerberg made an impression. Mr. Hawley enjoys enacting indignation in hearings and is good at it.

…

It was satisfying. Why are we skeptical it will lead to helpful legislative action?

…

A friend who worked in Washington a few years ago was struck by the question he was asked at a lunch of think tankers and lobbyists: “Who owns you?” Not who do you work for, what do you believe, but who bought your loyalty? It is the Washington problem in three words.

The social-media companies have bought up Washington. They give money to politicians and political action committees, to think tanks and media shops; they hire the most influential and respected. They give the children of politicians jobs. They’ve got it wired. Mr. Kennedy mordantly joked about this at the hearings: “We know we’re in a recession when Google has to lay off 25 members of Congress.”

There’s reason to believe it’s all Kabuki. The CEOs show up for a day of ritual denunciation, then go on unbothered. It’s not a high price to pay for the lives they lead.

Peggy Noonan

Sauce for the Gander

From House Bill No. 1017, introduced in the Indiana Legislature Jan. 8 by Rep. Vernon Smith, a Gary Democrat:

Sec. 5. (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), a school, an employee or staff member of a school, or a third party vendor used by a school to provide instruction may not provide instruction to a student in kindergarten through grade 12 concerning:

(1) Christopher Columbus; or

(2) a President of the United States who owned an enslaved person.

(b) Instruction concerning a person described in subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2) is permitted if the instruction concerns the person’s involvement in the:

(1) institution of slavery;

(2) harmful effects of colonialism; or

(3) decimation of indigenous populations throughout the world.

Wall Street Journal’s Notable and Quotable

I suspect that Rep. Smith is trolling Republicans, who seemingly are forever (though less commonly in Indiana) are proposing reverse mirror images of such bans.

Do you think the mainstream media will howl about censoring history? Nah. Me either.

Brussels’ ultimatum to Budapest

Hungary is blocking 50 billion Euros of additional EU aid to Ukraine, and the EU leadership is threatening retaliation against Hungary:

Whatever his sins and failings may be, Viktor Orbán isn’t presiding over the decline of the West. It is, alas, true that Orbán stands naked before the mighty Brussels bureaucracy, determined to siphon off more taxpayer money to continue an unwinnable war, in the name of a pan-European fantasy, when they ought to be spending it on serious needs at home (for example, have you seen how feeble European militaries are?). They may, in the end, force him to capitulate. But if you look closely, it is Orbán, the despised outsider, who informs the Emperors of the Inner Ring, the embodiments of a failing imperial ideology, that they have no clothes.

Rod Dreher

Orbán did fold before the week was over. Ukraine is getting more money from the West.

From the Free Press

It has been nearly a month, but I don’t think I shared these yet:

What in heaven’s name was the point?

First the White House interns, now seventeen anonymous Biden campaign staffers have penned an open letter calling on Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. I’m all for open letters. But you must sign your name. And if you’re going to make it anonymous, and you were still only able to get seventeen people signed on, you sort of played yourself.

Nellie Bowles

Wages of disenfranchisement

The law exists to maintain order. It’s not for settling our political disputes. That’s the rule. When you criminalize dissent and equate nonconformity with terrorism, you have lost the thread of how this country works. When you joke about putting opponents in reeducation camps so they can be converted into loyal followers, you channel the regime in Cuba. When you prosecute an opposition presidential candidate, you practice the same style of mafia politics as Vladimir Putin in Russia. When you ban a candidate’s name from the ballot to preserve “our democracy,” you sound, frankly, like you have gone nuts. And believe me: it will come back to haunt you.

…

If your side loses, look in the mirror. You are the reason your side lost in 2016. A man like Trump can only get elected because he’s not you and there are few alternatives. Reflect on how you can win back those who feel so disenfranchised that they would vote for such a man over your choice.

Martin Gurri, Don’t Worry About Donald Trump. Worry About Yourself

This week’s Ezra Klein podcast features Democrat operative Ruy Teixeira, who goes on at some length about the Democrats losing the working class — the same folks I think Gurri was talking about.

Axios: Trump Campaign Donors Footed the Bill for More Than $50M in Legal Fees Last Year (H/T TMD)

The NFL/Tay-Tay/Biden/Psy-Op kerfuffle

I hate writing about this. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel after others have shot all the fish. But here goes.

Here’s all I know

The NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs—currently in the news for being Super Bowl–bound as well as for the fact that tight end Travis Kelce is dating musician Taylor Swift—are apparently participating in the most sinister conspiracy ever foisted upon an unwitting American public, if you believe social media’s least reputable yet highest-profile Trump-affiliated “influencers.” Many of them, including former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now pursuing his natural calling, argue in all purported sincerity that Taylor Swift is an “op.” Her success, apparently, is the product not of savvy branding and decades of work but rather of a series of shady agreements between her, the NFL, and George Soros to achieve peak crossover appeal right before she endorses Joe Biden in 2024.

National Review’s The Week for February 2.

But National Review’s readership may not be as high-caliber as once was rumored, because they then have to say the “needless to say” part:

Needless to say, the argument is absurd and reflects the combination of lunacy and cynicism of those promoting it. The response it has received among the grassroots, however—and, reportedly, among Trump’s staff—also reflects something much more consequential: Trumpworld’s well-founded anxiety that his unpopularity with young and even middle-aged women may be irreparable.

The underwhelming evidence

So far as I’ve heard (and I admit that I haven’t been paying very good attention), the only evidence that Taylor Swift is a liberal is that she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.

If it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could you turn your thoughts back to 2020 and try to remember who Joe Biden was running against?

Don’t you think it’s a stretch to think that one had to be a liberal to prefer Joe Biden over his 2020 presidential adversary?

At this point in the 2024 election, Republicans are running against themselves. Guys, the opponent is Biden, B-I-D-E-N. You have a really good chance against him. You will lose brutally against Taylor Swift.

Nellie Bowles
So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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.