rogerwmbennett

I do hope the Democrats listen to [David Shor] even if it means they do better in elections. Why? Well, for several reasons. First, because if they listened to him, the Democratic Party would move rightward. Second, I think the actual policies associated with “defund the police,” “birthing persons,” “Latinx,” etc. are profoundly bad for America. And third, because if the Democrats stopped talking about ridiculous things, it would deny many Republicans the psychological permission to behave like idiots or support demagogic buffoons.

Jonah Goldberg, That Shor Sounds Good

If you click on the word “idiot,” you’ll get a truly cringeworthy ad for a “gun-totin’ calendar girl” running for governor of Nevada. But bear in mind that “truly cringeworthy” is still far, far superior to anything touched by Matt Gaetz.

This is apparently real, not paroldy

Does Auto Insurance Policy Cover Spreading STD When Having Sex in a Car? — Reason.com

Some Commie on Twitter dissed strawberries. Alan Jacobs had the definitive response.

When David P. Goldman is in the mood to write grimly realistic assessments of our present difficulties, he adopts “Spengler” as his pen name, a hat tip to the German author of the early-twentieth-century apocalyptic best-seller The Decline of the West. And when Goldman feels the situation especially dire, Spengler consults the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu, one of history’s most thoroughgoing realists. Here is what the shrewd cardinal had to say about the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan:

America set out to create a modern democracy out of a tribal society, an enterprise as likely to succeed as the attempt to breed a griffin by mating a lion with an eagle. It poured US$2 trillion into Afghanistan, or one hundred times the country’s gross domestic product. It paid Afghani politicians, generals and warlords to play-act at democracy in a revolting, silly masquerade.

Whatever was not corrupt before America came in became corrupt in the maelstrom of American money. Meanwhile, American soldiers and bureaucrats made fortunes as consultants, contractors, sutlers and armorers to the dream palace of Afghan democracy.

Because the entire project was a monstrous hoax to begin with, everyone associated with the project lied—lied about the state of Afghan government forces, lied about the disposition of the Taliban, lied about the robustness of supplies to Afghan troops, lied about their dependence on airpower.

Afghan officials lied to their American paymasters, American commanders on the ground lied to their superiors and American generals lied to the politicians. The key to promotion, and to wealth, lay in perpetuating the ridiculous fiction that motivated the occupation of the country in the first place.

Where did $2 trillion go? The Taliban offensive began in April after the Americans announced their intent to depart. No one fought for Afghanistan because there was no Afghanistan to fight for. Within weeks the Afghan army had no ammunition, no food and no air support. Whoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Afghanistan government collapsed in a matter of days because it was never there to begin with.

The ghost of Richelieu gets it pretty much right.

R.R. Reno in First Things

Religion Clause: Russia Labels Church of Scientology As “Undesirable” Organization

If a government is to have a category of “undesirable organizations,” then Scientology should be a shoo-in.

Enid Futterman, a local journalist and Bernie Sanders supporter … told me she finds the idea that COVID is caused by 5G cellphone towers more believable than person-to-person transmission. “I’ve read both sides, and that’s what makes sense,” Futterman said ….

WSJ

She read a very credible article linking Covid and 5G.

Skewing too far toward a left-hemisphere view of the world

is ruling out so much. I can’t begin to tell you, but you can imagine, all the things that this very reduced, abstract, schematic, bureaucratic — essentially, it’s bureaucratic, you know, push something, it has an action on something else and we can predict the outcome, we can organize it — that’s the left hemisphere’s vision of the world: inanimate stuff that we can move about. Very much, the industrial revolution was a kind of acting out in the outer world of the world picture of the left hemisphere … It’s ruling out everything, really. It’s ruling out our ability to understand, to see, to see at all.

Iain McGilquist, interviewed by Jordan Peterson, shortly after 1 hour 19 minutes.

Seekers of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates demonstrate that there is literally no limit to what folly you can “prove” from motivated reasoning recast as “personal bible study.” Vaccine Resisters Seek Religious Exemptions. But What Counts as Religious?

POTUS Biden is mightily wroth at SCOTUS and Texas. Breathing threats of mayhem, he’s ordered the “whole-of-government” to respond.

I think the whole-of-government is going to find that it’s hard to find a fingerhold on Texas Law SB8.

Because the eye has a short shadow or it is hard to see over heads in the crowd?

If everyone else seems smarter but you need your own secret?

If mystery was never your friend?

If one way could satisfy the infinite heart of the heavens?

If you liked the king on his golden throne more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons?

If you wanted to be sure his guards would admit you to the party?

    The boy with the broken pencil
    scrapes his little knife against the lead
    turning and turning it as a point
    emerges from the wood again

    If he would believe his life is like that
    he would not follow his father into war

(Naomi Shihab Nye, Fundamentalism, via Poetry Foundation)

The Savage was silent for a little. “All the same,” he insisted obstinately, “Othello’s good, Othello’s better than those feelies.” “Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.” “But they don’t mean anything.” “They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.” “But they’re . . . they’re told by an idiot.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

You’ll have a hard time persuading me that Huxley wasn’t more prescient than Orwell.

So, a day after I sketched why I’m cooling on David French, he comes out with both a very solid book review of Andrew Sullivan’s Out on a Limb and a sketches a perceptive parallel between Jordan Peterson and scandal-plagued narcissist Pastor Mark Driscoll: both perceive the lostness of a generation of young men and helped a lot of them get their lives together.

Here’s French on Andrew Sullivan:

This world is almost impossibly complex. Conventional wisdom is frequently wrong. No partisan side has a monopoly on truth. In these circumstances, a nation needs writers and thinkers who will say hard things, whose fearlessness gives you confidence that you’re hearing their true thoughts.

As a regular reader of Sullivan, I think this does identify a major strength of Sullivan. But as a regular reader of French, I’d draw a contrast: With French, I too often get the impression that all I’m hearing is the strained “hot takes” of a guy who has committed to writing at a pace that outstrips his ability to be consistently thoughtful — somewhat as Sullivan may have done back in the days when he was a rising blogger with multiple posts every day.

I’m cooling rapidly on David French.

First, there is religion. He’s very Evangelical, a former tradition of mine from which I find myself gradually more and more alienated. His Evangelicalism shows up again and again, for no particular reason except to remind us of it.

But a bigger deal is the stuff he’ll watch on TV (or in movies) and gush about. He seems to have no idea that it’s important not to immerse our imaginations in, ummmmm, stuff with a stratospheric fecal coliform count.

Most notably, he got me watching Ted Lasso during season 1. Instantly, I was immersed in foul language and extreme sexual laxity, including from protagonists.

Season 2 episode 2 was, for me, the last straw: Protagonist Keely, live-in love interest of protagonist Roy Kent (recently retired from soccer) and former love interest of Jamie, a smug young lothario soccer star who constantly insulted Roy and cheated on Keely, is masturbating contentedly when Roy walks in on her in their bedroom. He’s fine with that, but wants to know what’s on her phone that turns her on that way. He finds that it’s a video of him weepily and vulnerably announcing his retirement from the game he loves.

Awwwww! How touching!

Keely’s worried about Roy being so separated from soccer, and suggests he try commentary. He goes on TV with two others on the panel and analyzes one team’s performance as “fucking incompetent” and “shitty.” He really got into it, and so do fans in pubs. So when he gets home, he takes Keely’s smartphone, pulls up the video of his retirement announcement, hands it back, thanks her for the suggestion that he try commentary, and performs cunnilingus on her in gratitude.

The End. How can one not be edified? Incomprehensibly, I’m not edified and will probably never follow one of French’s cultural recommendations again.

French’s counter-argument to Rod Dreher’s friendliness to Hungary and its president was formulaic, unpersuasive, and somewhat sub-Christian in its “we’re so much richer why would anyone even consider such a place as having any lessons for us?!” (That’s what I see as the gist, not a quote. I could misrepresent it as saying that Hungary is bad for not recognizing same-sex marriage and for forbidding propagandizing kids with gay and trans stuff, but his argument really seems to be “our courts wouldn’t allow such laws. Period. Full Stop.” Without a hint that our courts are out of bounds.)

Finally, he’s like a giddy schoolboy in his enthusiasm for interplanetary travel — as if we haven’t corrupted enough geography yet.

Thus my distillation of why I’m cooling on him. But he’s still a pretty sharp legal analyst.