On the elites. Anybody see this on X yesterday. Spencer Klavan posted it, and adds that it's going to ensure that Trump wins good and hard. My comment was that half the audience for this thinks Sheen was actually President.
I think I recognized Stanley Tucci, maybe, and I know I have seen the red-headed woman but I can't think of her name. The rest - I have no notion I have ever seen any of them before. But I have facial recognition problems: Prosopagnosia.
The redhead was in Boogie Nights. Julia something? I think the black guy was too. Was that Woody Allen at the end, maybe? And the drunk guy - Freddy Prinz Jr? I think he was a superhero in something.
I did a re-watch. I'm pretty sure the 2nd guy is Robert Downey Jr. The red-headed woman is Julianne Moore. And is the grey-haired guy without glasses (there is another with them) Martin Sheen? The guy at the end is definitely Stanley Tucci, not Woody Allen. Best I can do, I think.
"My money is worth less than my diploma, I'll have a roommate until I'm 40, the guys I meet are porn-addled castrates who say they're into anal sex, the block I can afford to live on is populated by brown guys who want to rape me, my brother may be sent off to Ukraine for I can't tell you what reason, but it's really important for me that Mark Ruffalo likes me."
The professor was entirely unprepared to deal with them. They need confrontation, not placation, and I don't mean dismissing them or demeaning them, but a serious challenge. One of them was saying that a university is not a place to be challenged by opposing ideas, it is about building a home. Someone needed to tell her, if that is why you are here, your parents and the endowment and your loan sources could buy you a home for less than what four years tuition, room and board will cost, and you could get on with it, not forgetting to pay your mortgage of course. Then you could skip pretending to take classes and try to learn something. The only reason to some to a college is because people there can teach you things you don't know, and challenge you to justify your own existence. That's what you're paying for. Or someone is.
I was disappointed (but not surprised) by a couple of those, but I'm happy that I don't know who most of those "famous people" are. Though it makes me laugh that of course the Illusive Man would be on the side of the globalists! 😄
Well, some of them are good actors, but I’ve always thought that the old French Church had them sized up as a group pretty well: burying them in hallowed ground was prohibited.
I live in Canada Rod, and tragically, the country is pretty much a lost cause. With the exception of Post Media, the landscape is very much "far left". The state broadcaster (the CBC) is the worst offender.
Don’t despair, Eastern Rebellion, you’re not alone: “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”
There are many examples of males in politics who are not one tenth the man their father's were: Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Justin Trudeau...
I am a conservative because it has become clear to me that some things are timeless. There are things that remain true, regardless of what time and place you examine them. That both the eternal nature of God and Truth and the unchanging facts of human nature make this so. And it becomes more and more obvious as those who decide to oppose those givens are shown to be corrupt, petty, venal, degenerate and gross. That those who abandon the essential truths become the monsters they say they are fighting. And that becomes more apparent every day.
That is why I am a "conservative," for want of a better word.
If that is what you believe -- and there is a lot of truth in what you say -- then you certainly won't consider voting for corrupt, petty, venal, degenerate, gross excuse for a human being like Donald Trump. (I'm not saying you should vote for Biden).
Yes, I will. One of those two will be elected. Fact. One of those two weighs closer to conservative principles (hint NOT BIDEN). One of those two drives the woke left insane. Guess which one?
I will vote for TRump. Gladly. Not perfect, but here in the real world, the perfect does not have to be the enemy of good enough for now.
That's the reality.
Trump's "grossness" is personal. And I could not care less about that. I care about policy. The Woke Left want to make their grossness policy. Trump does not, and we've seen his policy to know that as well.
The Nellie Bowles TGIF is particularly good today. I’ll force myself to read David Brookes piece but it’s a struggle. I’ve always been skeptical of him. I think he used to babble about great nation conservatism and glorify Teddy Roosevelt as a model conservative.I thought that was ridiculous at the time. Now he babbles about being a moderate Democrat. Conceptually in the present, that’s absurd.But I suppose even a blind hog gets an acorn now and again.
The American and European elites used to be self-confident and wanted to build on what was built for centuries. But the wealth accumulated since World War Two spoiled the elites. They felt guilty. And they were bored. Standards were relaxed. Think about Claudine Gay, the Harvard President who was exposed as an academic fraud but an exemplar of the new woke standards. "Baldy" would have never been considered even for a professorship seventy-five years ago because she was not qualified and her "expertise" would have been considered irrelevant. But a wealthy country and wealthy university can afford someone like Baldy because of all the superfluous wealth. Western Civilization is dying from within due to too much wealth. It is soft. And it is dying.
It reminds me of old money families. They get soft, the blood gets thin in a way. There is no vigor left and sometimes they forget how to make babies. It is all very odd. The men get very effeminate. Sometimes a family bounces back or never gets that way but it takes purpose and when you get very rich you often lose purpose.
Look at the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. None have had to work a day in their lives. What little work they do is dabbling as a sort of amusement. When one of them wants to take two weeks at St. Kitts in February, all they have to do is have a lackey make a phone call to make a reservation. When it is hot in the Summer, there's always Maine or Prince Edward Island or Norway.
The very rich live vastly different lives. My brother-in-law is a pilot for a charter jet firm and he flies many of the very rich around America. About twelve years ago, my family and I visited him in Easton, Maryland. He had just flown one elderly woman in from Martha's Vineyard so that she could get home to tony St. Michael's, MD. Her cost was something like $6000.
Pete Ricketts (of the family that created Ameritade and owns the Chicago Cubs) kept running for office in Nebraska until he finally won something. JB Pritzker of the Chicago billionaire family got bored one day and became Illinois governor, his first elective office. Each needed something to do and they had the money to do it.
Which is why we should tax them out of existence after the $10-12 million mark. For every kid you have, max they can inherit is around $10-12 million, all the rest is taxed to pay for social programs. Create laws that make it impossible for people to hide their money from these laws. Old money families having “family trusts” run by finance bros who are useless outside of their ability to use Excel that turn the equally useless children and their MBA counterparts into generational multimillionaires who end up running everything (ie Trump, Britzker, etc) is what’s ruined this country.
Great idea! Hopefully that will increase funding for hormone blockers and DEI. Speaking more seriously that’s a recipe for wholesale corruption and authoritarianism .I could care less about rich playboys and dilettantes. The threat comes from rich people who want to use their money to reorder society.
“Western Civilization is dying from within due to too much wealth. It is soft. And it is dying.”
What you say echoes the response that Cyrus gave to the Persian lords when they advocated moving to conquered lands where life would be easier (from Book IX of the Histories, AD Godley’s translation, HUP, 1920):
“Seeing that Zeus grants lordship to the Persian people, and to you, Cyrus, among them, let us, after reducing Astyages, depart from the little and rugged land which we possess and occupy one that is better. There are many such lands on our borders, and many further distant. If we take one of these, we will all have more reasons for renown. It is only reasonable that a ruling people should act in this way, for when will we have a better opportunity than now, when we are lords of so many men and of all Asia?” Cyrus heard them, and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.” The Persians now realized that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than dwelling in tilled valleys to be slaves to others.”
I don’t much care for labels anymore. I oppose the death penalty and accept that global warming is real, but I also don’t care for the lgbtq agenda, abortion, and other woke gods. I don’t know what that makes me. Above all, I am still Christian. The social issues of the day, and how they line up to my thinking, are only relevant through that lens. Liberals are dying out, conservatives are the equivalent of American Indians being pushed onto the reservation. The whole system is rotten and in danger of failing completely, but people would rather wave pride flags than figure out how to fix the nation. Trump appealed to people because he at least hinted at an understanding of what affected real people and was important to them. They are ignored, if not actually hated, by the elites. Anyone who appeals to them, it doesn’t matter the baggage that person comes with, or their ultimate aims, they are going to have the ear of the people and their votes. Maybe that is the real danger here. The elites of the early 1900s at least paid some attention to the real issues of the day. Now…they only care about what virtues they can signal. Such dysfunction can only go on so long.
I still consider myself an anarchist, and yeah, that's probably revealing. I am an anarchist because I hate the Ring. Or alternatively, I'm a monarchist because I believe in the Lord—same difference. Take it away, Tolkien:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people."
I guess. And at that level, I'm just sort of a pragmatist. I don't really give a damn whether the policy is called right or left or ambidextrous. Just tell me in plain language what the problem is, what the proposed policy is supposed to do about it, and whether said policy can reasonably be expected to do what it's supposed to do.
The problem with government is that we forget that it is simply a bunch of humans telling other humans what to do. There is an assumption that there is an elite class of people who are capable of doing so, when it basically consists of people whose primary skill is getting elected, and a professional class of self-interested mandarins.
I find it interesting that Tolkien expressed those views, given that he idealized monarchy in his works, but also explored the question of the legitimacy of the monarch. I suppose, in many ways, he encapsulated a very Catholic way of looking at leadership, both as a monarch related to the people and the world, but also the relationship between monarchs and God. In a sense, I think he saw that monarchy could fit within a framework of devolution from God, while a secularized and bureaucratized government, focused on deriving authority strictly from the people, could not.
Or maybe he just thought that the hobbits already had it all figured out.
I think there's also the aspect of personal relations as opposed to impersonal institutions: the way that Tolkien has it, the monarch is not an office, he's a person. Part of the point may be to resist the abstraction away from humanity and relationship—and likewise, to resist the reification of concepts such as "government", to not fall for the illusion that these things are actually real.
And oh, of course the hobbits already had it all figured out.
That's super interesting, I've been exploring the idea of seeing things as relationship between persons and playing with the limits of that idea. For example, I've been playing with the idea that what we tend to think of as physical laws are actually patterns held in place by entities that are persons and there's a relationship aspect there with God and humanity. It's interesting here to see that idea drawn to governments. I think in our machine age we tend to mechanize everything, and our governments are seen as machines. Voting, judicial systems, and bureaucracies are just computational processes at which the machine of government come up with as optimal solution as the "technology" allows. These computational processes can also have the variables changed, but at no point are we dealing with individual named humans. The scale of the thing is too large. The exception may be the office of president, since that tends to be a named single person, and may help explain why the office has grown in power over the years.
"I've been playing with the idea that what we tend to think of as physical laws are actually patterns held in place by entities that are persons"
Yes—absolutely. We could say that gravity doesn't just "go" on its own, it happens because of an archangel continually doing his job and holding the pattern in place. I think the medievals understood the world in this way.
You cannot love monarchy and hate the Ring. Not in this world. As James Otis, an ideologist of the early development of the American revolution said, "Only God is entitled to omnipotence, because only God is omniscient."
I love God’s monarchy; I didn’t say I want one in this world with a mere human in charge (although sometimes I look at what we’ve got and think: would a monarchy really be worse?).
I wish Brooks were more original. Here's Eliot, unforgettably, all the way back in 1930:
"When, for instance, I brought out a small book of essays, several years ago, called For Lancelot Andrewes the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement made it the occasion for what I can only describe as a flattering obituary notice. In words of great seriousness and manifest sincerity, he pointed out that I had suddenly arrested my progress—whither he had supposed me to be moving I do not know—and that to his distress I was unmistakably making off in the wrong direction. Somehow I had failed, and had admitted my failure; if not a lost leader, at least a lost sheep; what is more, I was a kind of traitor; and those who were to find their way to the promised land beyond the waste, might drop a tear at my absence from the roll-call of the new saints. I suppose that the curiosity of this point of view will be apparent to only a few people. But its appearance in what is not only the best but the most respected and most respectable of our literary periodicals, came home to me as a hopeful sign of the times. For it meant that the orthodox faith of England is at last relieved from its burden of respectability. A new respectability has arisen to assume the burden; and those who would once have been considered intellectual vagrants are now pious pilgrims, cheerfully plodding the road from nowhere to nowhere, trolling their hymns, satisfied so long as they may be 'on the march.'”
I think it's important to add that Francis, Father Martin, Ivereigh, Roche, etc., etc., are doing themselves no favors trying to look respectable for the Davos crowd. Not in the long run.
Totally agree with your assessment of how the elites turned progressive and woke out of guilt over their privilege. It was true for me, prior to my conversion experience in 2020. And it is true for all of my close friends from my elite university, who now in their mid 40s occupy positions of the utmost prestige. Medical school professors, managing directors at investment banks, Obama's press secretary, etc.
I suspect none of them will change. And they are raising their children firmly in the woke Marxist ideology. However they have far fewer children than the conservative religious families that I know. So there's that.
This is the part of the article that’s definitely true. I grew up with these types, their progressivism is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most of them are multigenerational multimillionaires who run everything in our society while being practically useless themselves as all of their wealth is inherited.
I say enough with this denigration of privilege. We can ALL be privileged! God has given us the divine privilege to become his son or daughter (Romans 8:14 “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”). We have the divine command and privilege to become like Him (1 Peter 1:15 “according to the Holy One who called you, become holy yourselves”). And best of all, we have the divine privilege to become God's delight (Proverbs 8:30 “I - wisdom - was His delight every day”).
Let's celebrate what God has done for us. Let's all recognize our potential to be truly privileged!
LGBTQ: it's more than just the Woke. The center right is full of it.
Yesterday The Spectator published a piece, like, you know, it was news to the scholars out there who have watched The Longest Day once, that the poem broadcast to France on the night of June 5 was the Verlaine Chanson d'Automne. But here's the thing. For some reason it was incredibly important that Verlaine was "gay"--hardly news, he died in 1896, and indeed went to jail for shooting his boyfriend, Arthur Rimbaud. But you see the choice of "gay" poet was somehow. Golly. You fill in the blanks.
I'm conservative because I fold my own laundry. Does a real man fold his own laundry? If there's no one else to do it for him does he simply neglect to fold? No, if there's laundry to be folded and ain't nobody else gonna do it for him a conservative folds his own laundry. Now the conservative liberals in power, they'll hold that against you because they've never had to fold their own laundry and there's nothing wrong with them. They've always had the Mexicans to do it for them.
Why do the Mexicans not fold your laundry, what's wrong with you, lowly folder of socks?
I just looked it up. Wow. I can see how this would make it easier to put the shirts in drawers, as they are much more uniform in size, but I find that folding shirts the way they do for display in stores (sleeves across the back, fold in thirds lengthwise, then fold in half twice to shorten the length) is almost as good and one can still put them in drawers vertically, rather than on top of each other.
I usually hang them up. In order by type. I've spent too much time studying inventory to do otherwise. The Kondo Method. Could be theraputic? White or beige. Oh dear.
I'd iron my husband's shirts and slacks for work, but then he moved on to offices where the dress code was more lax, and it wasn't necessary anymore. As for me, in places where there was a dress code, we were also doing work moving around (and moving things) so ironing wouldn't have really mattered anyway. And there's also the silly way a lot of women's clothes are meant to be "snug" in the first place. Annoying, but it pulled out a lot of wrinkles naturally.
I just about fell over seeing Germans ironing T-shirts and the like. However, considering that many people have washing machines but no dryers, I suppose some of this makes more sense in that context.
You can add not ironing my husband's shirts and slacks to my long list of marital shortcomings: not sending thank you and Christmas cards, not remembering birthdays, and so on... I don't know why he puts up with me 😂
There's a 'sport' called Extreme Ironing. It's "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt."
How odd. My very German wife hates ironing, whereas I will iron any amount of clothing you care to throw in my direction. I find it very soothing, almost in a Zen sort of way.
I'm kind of the exact opposite of being all pressed and perfect in personality.
Broomstick skirts started to get really popular about the time I was a senior in high school, and these were right up my alley. Not only did they not have to be ironed, but the wrinkles were encouraged. I got one from Walmart back in '99 or 2000 that was absolutely gorgeous - kind of a patchwork-y thing with black velvet, green panels, and touches of cream and wine (the colors, not the stains). It's very hard to describe. I've never gotten so many compliments on a single piece of clothing as with that skirt. I probably still have it tucked away in a closet, but the elastic in the waistband disintegrated a long time ago.
I can't stand polyester (plastic) clothes on my body. If I want clothes without wrinkles, especially in the summer, I must iron. I like it. It was the first "grownup"thing my mother taught me to do. I set up the ironing board in the living room and iron while I watch TV, or listen to a lecture on YouTube.
I can handle some polyester blends, but hate the feel of pure polyester. I also can't stand all the very thin and sheer materials. It's like they expect no one to have kids!
Well, yes; but the idea of ironing a shirt with such zeal as to doom it to destruction... "am Samstag hat er sein teuerstes Hemd aus lauter Zorn zerbügelt" would be a pretty dramatic weekend incident.
I don't iron. Fortunately, the Winchester dry cleaner is right next to an Italian Restaurant where I just had red clam sauce and a glass of merlot. A double play.
I'll tell you what's wrong with me: I get the gray socks mismatched sometimes. There is, you see, more than one pair, so to speak, in the mix; and they have, look you, a very similar appearance, length, stitch pattern, and what have you. Practically the only distinguishing trait is the degree of tension or give in the calves.
I have taken the decision to receive a loud round of “boo’s” here and use a word that has been ruined. Do hold onto your lunch, my brothers and sisters, and prepare for my first sentence.
I am a conservative because of compassion.
Yes, I know, Bush ruined the word for almost everyone. Please try to think of what it really means, however.
Is it compassionate to try to do away with families? To let children be brainwashed and ruin and castrate themselves? Is it compassionate to “print money” and give it away to those not really in need, only to cause price rises that they cannot afford? Is it compassionate to tell pregnant women they don’t have another living being within them? Is it compassionate to forgive loans given the top learners which will be paid for by taxes on all workers?
My compassion is the compassion of the long term, and the compassion of reason. It does indeed have an intellectual basis. Read Scruton, Hayek, Burke and so many others. Or simply look around. What does left wing economics accomplish? Far-left communist economics, we have seen the results. Democrat leftist economics we also see in high inflation, the ruin of small business, the poor, especially the minority poor, stuck forever, dependent on the party that never really helps.
My Conservative compassion is for youth. To teach youth the beauty of marriage and family. These are the keys to a happy life.
My compassion is for those who are “different”. First, I’ve spent my life amongst various cultures, with people whose first language is not English, with people of various races. But also, it is for those who are “different from me” politically. When someone tells me they are a progressive, they must prove malice to me because I will not assume it. I will assume they are not well educated, that they are conformist when it comes to major media hypnosis, and that they think they are being compassionate. Would that they could know they are not.
Segregationist Democrats we’re progressives. They voted for the New Deal, believed in eugenics, government by experts, stuff like that. They weren’t “conservative”. Wilson, for example, was a hard progressive and a racist
You’re partially on to something. The segregationists were a mixed bag. Some were what we call conservative but others were not.Theodore Bilbo and Tom Watson were not conservatives.Orval Faubus came from a socialist background and was originally considered a liberal Democrat.
Why I am a conservative? Simply, because I believe in Western Civilization rooted in Christianity. I believe in Western Civilization, warts and all. Shakespeare. St. Francis. Dickens. Austen. Jefferson. Churchill. Orwell. Hemingway. Washington. Lee. Grant. Stonewall Jackson. Andrew Jackson.
Columbus. Galileo. Copernicus. Newton. The men who died at The Alamo. Henry Ford. John Ford. John Wayne. Jesus Christ. I could go on.
I am not a conservative for the same reasons that Douthat mentions in the text you quoted: conservatism, in the American context, is basically a slower form of liberalism. The “liberals”/“propgressives” are the ones driving the bus and setting the direction, and the “conservatives” simply get the pace of the bus to modulate every now and then when they happen to win an election. They do not have a different direction than the progressives do, they want the bus to go to the same place, they just want it to be less speedy because they think a slower bus does less collateral damage, or that the inevitable displacement associated with ongoing progressive change can be better ameliorated if you moderate the pace of change. It’s a positioning that is primarily about the pace of change — it more or less agrees with the same basic progressive idea of an unending arc of further perfection, in social terms, as being the goal. It’s true that the retail political right in the US has a different emphasis in its liberalism than the retail political left does (the right emphasizing the economic aspects of liberalism and the left emphasizing the personal/sexual elements of liberalism), but together they ensure a system that is generally economically, sexually and personally liberal — which is not what I agree with, from a philosophical point of view (see next paragraph).
I also do not identify with the progressives, whom I also see, like you, as being lacking in their basic understanding of human nature, and in that sense far too idealistic. I also disagree with the general idea that human society can be technocratically directed to overcome basic aspects of human nature. I see this as a problem even with “mild” forms of left politics, as they are all mostly based on the same false premise about the perfectibility of human nature.
This leaves me politically homeless in the US, which is fine. There are plenty of people like me. A problem of our system is that it lacks real alternatives. Two modestly different liberal parties are not real alternatives. But I do think that the system we have more or less reflects the tendencies of the United States as a society, with its overwhelming (and, admittedly often pathological) emphasis on individualism above all else, the enduring popularity of a kind of vapid “pop libertarianism” that arises from this toxic individualism, coupled with the dangerous crusading spirit that we see doing so much damage culturally in the world today. I this underlying base gives natural rise to the limited scope of realistic political options in our country, and I doubt that will change soon.
Honestly what happens next, I think, is that we need to see what happens on the right, after Trump is no longer eligible (ie, dead, wins a second term etc) and the right is de facto post Trump the person at least in terms of retail politics of that specific individual as a live candidate for office. There will be a scrum between the populist MAGA disciples, the warmed-over Zombie Reaganites like David French, the neoconservatives like David Frum, the emergent “national conservatives” and so on.
Who wins that scrum, eventually, will determine what happens on the left, because if the right goes definitively populist or national conservative, I am pretty sure that many of the Reaganites and Neo-cons will reform into a new party, and that the existing Democratic coalition will break as well, so that you have an alignment with (1) a centrist party (representing the current center-left) that has in it what is currently the Democratic centrists or center-left, the ex-Reaganites and the ex-Neocons, (2) a left party comprised of the current left of the Democratic Party, the DSA, and some of the more left-oriented populists (Bernie Bros and similar) and (3) a right populist party comprised of MAGAs, some national conservatives, and others who are mostly discontented with the status quo but which, like most populist parties, lacks a consistent ideological program other than anti-elitism. On the other hand, if the old school Republican establishment succeeds in reasserting control over the GOP after Trump exits, then the alignment will be more like the one we see today, with two different versions of liberalism (with different emphases, and different timing preferences), but with much louder and more aggressive right and left flanks, respectively, than has historically been the case. So a lot hangs on what happens in the Republican Party after Trump.
For me, I don’t see a political home in either of those arrangements any more than I do in the current one. And so I suspect that I will remain more unaligned and mostly an observer.
——-
On the percentage of students at elite universities who identify as LGBTQ, I’d only add that much of this results from female undergraduates identifying as “B” or “Q”, although they only date men and appear conventionally feminine. Labeling is cost-free, requires no accompanying behavioral manifestation, and has many social benefits in the context of the communities at these universities. Of course that doesn’t mean that it isn’t troubling (the fact that so many up and coming elites are so eager to mislabel themselves as they are doing is a concern in itself), but I don’t think anyone should look at those figures and think that it is actually the case that 38% of the undergraduates at Brown are LGBTQ in terms of how they actually live and present themselves.
Yes, and also, regarding near-40% LGBTQ+: We could have what I shall dub "The Elizabeth Warren Syndrome". Some progressive kids may be smart enough to know they need an advantage in the hiring pool. Maybe they decide they are "Bi", somehow, magically.
Also, you can be "popular" with your friends if you are a minority.
Not saying that is the whole near-40%, but I imagine it is some.
I had si,illiar thoughs about the numbers being pumped up by anybody, girls in particular, whoever experienced same sex attraction, or even the "I kissed a girl and I liked it" experience claiming to be bi.
Exactly. I think that sort of thing must be common. Obama was ahead of the curb in the letter that he wrote about his desires for males.
But it appears to be much more common with women. I note Princeton is high in numbers. I had a friend who lived in Princeton town while I taught in New Jersey. Once, at a restaurant, he started into this little talk of some sort - about how I should open myself up and discover that I could desire any human. "mean - they are human." Argh. Well, I semi-let-him-have-it. "How dare you? You don't expect gay men to desire women, but you expect me to?"
So, now I'm not open because I only desire men.? I can see having to say you are "bi", especially as a woman, or face social disapproval. I don't think a straight man would pressure a straight man the way this gay friend pressured me. I even faced it on that one occasion and I'm not a youth.
Indeed it is very odd. Similar kinds of “discussions” (often in the form of taunts coming from trans people) are taking place every day on X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere on the internet about how lesbian identifying women are bigots for refusing to date trans women, or, conversely, about how men who say they are open to dating trans women because they, themselves, are bisexual being insulting and bigoted towards trans women because, of course, “trans women are women”, and therefore a man doesn’t need to be bi to date one of them!
Andrew Sullivan has written a lot in the past year or two about how this kind of thing basically erases gay and lesbian people (and straight people, too, as an orientation) because it insists that “sexual orientation” is really “gender orientation”, when the people who are actually gay and lesbian experience it as *sexual* orientation, whereby the sexual bits and pieces of the target of attraction are not irrelevant. As Sullivan has pointed out, if you follow this to its conclusion, it eliminates gays and lesbians, because attraction to others on the basis of their sex is replaced with “gender orientation”, while the behavior of people who continue to discriminate against potential partners on the basis of their “mere” sex will be progressively marginalized.
Needless to say, that isn’t really happening (although Sullivan is right to point out the risk), for obvious reasons, and I think it’s one reason, of many, that the trans movement is hitting some serious speed bumps in much of the rest of the world outside the US.
It’s therefore quite odd for a gay man in particular to be taking the position that this guy in Princeton did, but we live in odd times. I suppose the one way one could rationalize that perspective is if one takes the view that “compulsory heterosexuality” means that more people think they are heterosexual than is actually the case, due to pressures including internalized ones, and that the world would be better if fewer straight people in particular were so attached to their perceived heterosexuality, in terms of being more open and “fair”. In other words, the idea is that “heteronormalivity” can’t really be conquered unless actual “heterosexuality” is reduced, because when 90%+ of the population considers itself heterosexuality, heternormativity, as a practical matter, is virtually ensured because of course the society will reflect more closely the behaviors of that 90% of people. So I guess there’s the activist’s angle of flipping more straight people into being bi, which then makes it easier to undermine heteronormativity. Obviously that is coming from a very different place than Andrew Sullivan is (who was always interested in being just like straight people, except gay), but as I have mentioned in other recent comments, there are many gays (and some lesbians too) who disagree with Andrew Sullivan’s kind of approach, and think normative heterosexuality is itself problematic and something that should be undermined in the service of quality, freedom and equity. Or something like that.
A very good posts, and with something I'd never thought of, though I should have. How comforting it would be if heterosexual were not "normal" as a one reason for heavy recruitment. I think one reason that thought was blocked from my mind was the same reason I don't often fancy I'll become Queen of England. That was impossible, and it seemed impossible so many would "converf". But yes, hope springs eternal, you are right.
I follow Sullivan and other's reasoning that gay is being hurt by trans because many young people who would grow up to be gay are encouraged to think they are trans, have treatments, hormones, surgeries, etc. It is awful. I do not follow how sexual orientation would be completely replaced with gender identity - they seem non-interchangeable to me.
On my Princeton friend "Mike"- I purposely did write that he was "gay" out of strict honesty. He has always said he is "bi". Truth is, I doubt this, however. He has never expressed any attraction to any women, though he expresses a lot of attraction to men. He had a (male) partner for nine years but that ended. Anyway, my theory: Mike tells himself that same thing he told me (women are human, you can be attracted to them). Because in his mind, he will face less dislike from people if he can say he is "bi" than if he says he is "gay".
But though I think MIke had his own reasons for this speech, I think others give it merely to be fashionable.. And like you, I would be quite surprise if a person saying they were gay (rather than bi) said such things.
You did the right thing to challenge him on that. For a few decades now, we have seen the idea of sexual orientation as an immutable characteristic be entrenched in our legal system. More and more frequently, we are seeing heterosexuality being treated as the one exception. Most dangerously when activists push this in public schools, confusing and pressuring vulnerable kids. Any attempts to actually convert people away from being normal or developing normally, need to be thrown back in the faces of these predators. For the ones who mean well, they need reminding--without heteronormativity, society eventually collapses. Do they desire such an outcome? No need to belabor the point too long, but some can be helped to really think through the consequences of attempting to create a queer utopia from which there is no escape, no alternatives.
We are at the point that ancient Rome was when the book of Romans said: "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves... For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."
I am convinced, and so was CS Lewis, that some cannot change their homosexuality, and I'm sorry for them. But this "recruiting" and trying to get people to have sex with their own gender is just sick. Some people can do it if they try, I guess (I certainly could not) but it is so wrong to encourage it. The idea of telling 4 year olds "you might be a girl or a boy" is also horrible.
Your point is well taken about how we would not ask homosexual to change their orientation but we would ask heterosexuals to somehow discover that they have suppressed their desires for the same sex (I guess that is what they are saying - either that or everybody can desire everything if they try.)
Young women tend to be trendy. Look at all the silly young women and girls going about with deliberately made holes in their jeans. Claiming to be a bisexual is also a trend. Queers are cool!
I made a hole in my jeans deliberately in the 90s just below the knee. Then I went travelling around Ireland. People would call out "Ijeet, there's a hole in y'r jeans!".
Billboard Chris told me that this entire trans movement is being driven by liberal white women. He said the most vicious attacks he gets when he's out on the streets almost always come from young white women.
I’ll bet. And ironically they are also many of the ones who are going to lose out the most to the gains of the trans movement — eg, Biden’s extension of Title IX to trans people, which will eat into women’s Title IX benefits greatly. I guess that’s another example of virtue signaling or the kind of flex Rob Henderson refers to as a “luxury belief”: namely that these young women feel so secure in their “privilege” that supporting causes that are very detrimental to themselves and their female peers is like proverbial rain off the duck’s back.
Bostock was a Title VII case — in other words trans can’t be discriminated against in employment decisions. It has nothing to do with Title IX, which remained unaffected by Bostock. Various lower federal courts have said that Title IX requires trans to be protected, but these are not nationally binding in the way that Bostock is for Title VII matters.
In fact this is precisely *why* the Biden administration passed the rule making to “clarify” that Title IX extends to trans. It wasn’t covered by Bostock.
I’m probably going to botch this but I’ll give it a shot. A liberal political order is the best you’re going to get and the progressives know it which is why they want something different. Years ago it would have been socialism but they’re too invested in capitalist privilege or rentier crony capitalist subsidies to be for a radical egalitarian system where the state creates a command economy. A right wing response is to say the state must foster justice- social justice- which can take us into Peronism(not really a left wing movement) or to Salazar Portugal. These proved problematic but if it doesn’t occur personally, everything recurs eternally. It all comes back. On this thread you see an endless lust for a just order that will limit wealth and create justice by enforcing left wing economic norms that somehow promote Christian ideas of social justice.Give the state which you don’t control the power to create a just order and you will wake up in a nightmare. A state that you think will give you justice will give it to you, good and hard.You want a moral order, You have hope in a genuinely liberal regime. Oh the liberals don’t want what you want, but even if laughing, they’ll let you do it. But a leviathan, jacobin state will not.Oh that means on a national level- you’ll have abortion, marijuana, etc etc . But in a genuine liberal regime, it may at least be optional. When the leviathan state extends its tentacles everywhere the options end.Perhaps it is also worthwhile talking about liberalism and teleology. Historical liberalism does have teleological tendencies Mill got wrapped up with Comte and even worse Harriet Taylor. But that’s not necessary.Liberalism can and I think should be seen as a limited philosophy of government that accepts limits. An epistemological modesty is called for . We can only do so much.There is no preordained end here. We are not and can not get better and better each and every day.We muddle through and we die and try to minimize harm. No shining future awaits!Some would say that a kind of conservatism, maybe . But if it is it’s a conservative liberalism. It’s not about slowing the bus down. It doesn’t even accept the ride.
The way I see that framework is that, today, the real danger is not the emergence of a state leviathan. That’s in part because the state has largely been captured by non-state interests and, in part, because much of the coercive power operating in our context today is non-state in nature. These include the familiar ones of the educational and cultural/opinion establishments, but it increasingly consists of the exceptionally powerful tech companies that are exercising tremendous coercive power in ways that do not require the “hard” force of the state. The entrenched nature of all of these non-state power wielding entities virtually ensures that the bugbear of a state leviathan will not come about: what has come about, and what will become even more entrenched, is a system where much of the power is held by non-state actors, who use that power to coerce behavior largely (although not exclusively) through non-state means, which are therefore means that are not “reachable” by classical liberalism’s limited state. In fact, as you note, many of today’s real power actors are quite happy to have a relatively minimal state, because this makes it easier for them to retain the massive power they wield outside the state.
What this means is that while classical liberalism talks about the danger of a coercive state leviathan, its vision of a limited state simply acts as the midwife to the birth of an immensely powerful collection of non-state actors who can wield their power in a more or less unlimited way under classical liberal principles due to the latter’s vision of a limited state and its related preference for very limited regulation. It’s true that this is different from the state throwing you in jail for dissenting, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind. Not all coercion relates to the risk of state-imposed penalties or restrictions — privately-imposed penalties and restrictions that are set by non-state actors are meaningfully coercive, and are completely unaddressed by the concept of the limited state. The idea that the classically liberal state preserves your freedom by simply refraining from throwing you in jail, when the entirety of the economic and social order exerts tremendous coercive power on everyone’s day to day lives, reflects a mis-emphasis: what classical liberalism is really frightened about is not the main danger today, and that is why it is proving to be hopelessly inadequate in responding to the dramatic rise of non-state coercive power in our societies.
I understand that many disagree with this and see state coercion as being a difference in kind, but, to me, this misunderstands the present danger. We are more at risk, today, of non-state tyranny exercised by exceptionally powerful, globally active, non-state actors and entities that is, in effect, enabled by the minimalist idea of the state as championed by classical liberalism. Classical liberalism was a good solution to the problems of state leviathan, but its creators could not foresee the emergence of the kind of non-state power we have in force today — classical liberalism provides no protection from this danger, and, in effect, by emphasizing the need for a limited (and therefore weak) state, only serves to enhance this non-state power, and thereby increase the danger — at least in my view.
No I think you profoundly misunderstand many things. Of course classical liberals could understand the force of non state coercion. Mill who I took a shot at earlier clearly did.He talked about the force of custom. The non state power you talk about, can’t get too far without a state that can be manipulated to enforce their desires. On the Right there’s this big thrust towards , let’s have a powerful state to enforce our vision of virtue. Thats whistling pass the graveyard. Who is going to control this state that will control language and history, not you ! More likely the women on the view.
As I noted above, the state is captured by non-state actors already. These non-state actors set boundaries on the actions of the state more than vice versa. Surely the state isn’t gong to be gotten rid of, but rather obviously the non-state power wielders much prefer the current arrangement of a largely captive state with limited powers, because this both allows the non-state actors to effectively control what the limited state does while at the same time wielding themselves, an increasing share of the power that actually matters, which is now largely outside the state.
In any case yes we have a basic disagreement. I do not believe that the emphasis on having a small state is in any way adequate to protect people from actual tyranny in our current environment where we have massively powerful non-state actors who wield so much daily power of everyone’s lives with no accountability at all. Focusing on being worried that a strong state will be controlled by people you don’t like doesn’t change that, because even if you keep a small classically liberal state the people we don’t like will be wielding massive tyrannical authority over everyone’s lives in ways that lie outside political accountability altogether, as they do in many ways already today. This is the main threat of tyranny today in our society, and it can’t be addressed by a classically liberal small/limited state pretty much at all.
And in any case, the state is not small today, anyway. It’s massive. And it has been massive for many decades, and has grown under the right liberals as well as the left liberals. So it’s kind of a sideshow argument in any case.
It’s fine, there are disagreements like this right now on the right. As I have written elsewhere, the big unknown in the next 10 years or so is what argument prevails on the right. I wouldn’t personally bet on the classical liberal argument winning, but it’s possible.
I'm a conservative, in large part, because I saw first-hand how liberal and progressive "values" destroy people over multiple generations. I believe that despite our recent leadership, there are very good things about the US and being American. I try to be someone who lets faith in God guide me, and on the liberal side, there's almost no space left for people whose god is anything but political power. I believe that there is value in tradition, and that the idea that all cultures/religions/whathaveyou are all the same is asinine. I believe that there is a difference (and should be a difference) between legality and morality.
Well stated. The only caution I would put here is that economic conservatism with its emphasis on greed and its deorgation of the poor cannot be squared with a Christian ethic either.
On the elites. Anybody see this on X yesterday. Spencer Klavan posted it, and adds that it's going to ensure that Trump wins good and hard. My comment was that half the audience for this thinks Sheen was actually President.
https://x.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1798736935307063762
Repulsive creatures. Makes you want to smack them all.
First, point and laugh. Then start smacking.
I'd like to clonk all their heads together like Moe.
Hey, kids, do some work.
It's sort of adorable how these people imagine that anyone cares about their opinions. The fantasy is almost touching in how infantile it is.
Who's the one who is about to cry?
No idea.
I don't know who 90% of them are.
I think I recognized Stanley Tucci, maybe, and I know I have seen the red-headed woman but I can't think of her name. The rest - I have no notion I have ever seen any of them before. But I have facial recognition problems: Prosopagnosia.
The redhead was in Boogie Nights. Julia something? I think the black guy was too. Was that Woody Allen at the end, maybe? And the drunk guy - Freddy Prinz Jr? I think he was a superhero in something.
I thought Woody Allen is still persona non grata.
I did a re-watch. I'm pretty sure the 2nd guy is Robert Downey Jr. The red-headed woman is Julianne Moore. And is the grey-haired guy without glasses (there is another with them) Martin Sheen? The guy at the end is definitely Stanley Tucci, not Woody Allen. Best I can do, I think.
Julianne Moore is the redhead.
And at the start they yammer about fame, and how it’s legitimate to deploy ( their fame, presumably). Ha, ha,
I even looked at some of the comments. Best one:
"My understanding is this video came out very shortly after Trump announced he would declassify the Epstein client list."
I know I had seen it before.
The only one I recognized was Charlie Sheen.
Me too. I'm 64 and abandoned popular culture decades ago.
I don't know but I chuckled.
I was wondering if she has some sort of condition and her voice is always like that.
Saorise Ronan.
The purview of an actress, any actress, is to cry at will.
"My money is worth less than my diploma, I'll have a roommate until I'm 40, the guys I meet are porn-addled castrates who say they're into anal sex, the block I can afford to live on is populated by brown guys who want to rape me, my brother may be sent off to Ukraine for I can't tell you what reason, but it's really important for me that Mark Ruffalo likes me."
Sounds like we've got ourselves a winner!
The professor was entirely unprepared to deal with them. They need confrontation, not placation, and I don't mean dismissing them or demeaning them, but a serious challenge. One of them was saying that a university is not a place to be challenged by opposing ideas, it is about building a home. Someone needed to tell her, if that is why you are here, your parents and the endowment and your loan sources could buy you a home for less than what four years tuition, room and board will cost, and you could get on with it, not forgetting to pay your mortgage of course. Then you could skip pretending to take classes and try to learn something. The only reason to some to a college is because people there can teach you things you don't know, and challenge you to justify your own existence. That's what you're paying for. Or someone is.
I agree with all of that, but wait, who are you talking about? I meant the movie stars.
I was looking at the picture on the campus of Yale.
I was disappointed (but not surprised) by a couple of those, but I'm happy that I don't know who most of those "famous people" are. Though it makes me laugh that of course the Illusive Man would be on the side of the globalists! 😄
Well, some of them are good actors, but I’ve always thought that the old French Church had them sized up as a group pretty well: burying them in hallowed ground was prohibited.
So badly edited it looks like AI (but I don't think it is)
Funny, the only one I recognized was Martin Sheen. That's how far out of touch I am with modern popular culture.
Poor Saorise Ronan.She can really act.
I live in Canada Rod, and tragically, the country is pretty much a lost cause. With the exception of Post Media, the landscape is very much "far left". The state broadcaster (the CBC) is the worst offender.
Don’t despair, Eastern Rebellion, you’re not alone: “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”
Alas, it seems to me that the other big broadcasters, CTV and Global, are just as (if not in CTV’s case more) woke as CBC.
There are many examples of males in politics who are not one tenth the man their father's were: Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Justin Trudeau...
Alright.
I am a conservative because it has become clear to me that some things are timeless. There are things that remain true, regardless of what time and place you examine them. That both the eternal nature of God and Truth and the unchanging facts of human nature make this so. And it becomes more and more obvious as those who decide to oppose those givens are shown to be corrupt, petty, venal, degenerate and gross. That those who abandon the essential truths become the monsters they say they are fighting. And that becomes more apparent every day.
That is why I am a "conservative," for want of a better word.
They are indeed gross.
If that is what you believe -- and there is a lot of truth in what you say -- then you certainly won't consider voting for corrupt, petty, venal, degenerate, gross excuse for a human being like Donald Trump. (I'm not saying you should vote for Biden).
Yes, I will. One of those two will be elected. Fact. One of those two weighs closer to conservative principles (hint NOT BIDEN). One of those two drives the woke left insane. Guess which one?
I will vote for TRump. Gladly. Not perfect, but here in the real world, the perfect does not have to be the enemy of good enough for now.
That's the reality.
Trump's "grossness" is personal. And I could not care less about that. I care about policy. The Woke Left want to make their grossness policy. Trump does not, and we've seen his policy to know that as well.
There are only two choices that can win.
That's a bug, not a feature.
In American politics you don't have non-binary.
Well, there was a third party that came out of nowhere and in less than ten years took control of the White House and both houses of congress...
And how long ago was that and didn’t we then have a Civil War?
It's simply a fact.
Its not a natural condition, its political gerrymandering and mental conditioning.
The Nellie Bowles TGIF is particularly good today. I’ll force myself to read David Brookes piece but it’s a struggle. I’ve always been skeptical of him. I think he used to babble about great nation conservatism and glorify Teddy Roosevelt as a model conservative.I thought that was ridiculous at the time. Now he babbles about being a moderate Democrat. Conceptually in the present, that’s absurd.But I suppose even a blind hog gets an acorn now and again.
Do hogs eat acorns?
https://www.redondousa.com/products/jamon-iberico-de-bellota-dry-cured-acorn-fed-100-pure-bred-iberico-ham-18-to-20-lb
I’m hungry! Also broke - $819 for a ham?
There's a Spanish speciality store down the street from me where you can buy a whole on for 1/10 the price. Prosciutto is vastly superior anyway.
The American and European elites used to be self-confident and wanted to build on what was built for centuries. But the wealth accumulated since World War Two spoiled the elites. They felt guilty. And they were bored. Standards were relaxed. Think about Claudine Gay, the Harvard President who was exposed as an academic fraud but an exemplar of the new woke standards. "Baldy" would have never been considered even for a professorship seventy-five years ago because she was not qualified and her "expertise" would have been considered irrelevant. But a wealthy country and wealthy university can afford someone like Baldy because of all the superfluous wealth. Western Civilization is dying from within due to too much wealth. It is soft. And it is dying.
It reminds me of old money families. They get soft, the blood gets thin in a way. There is no vigor left and sometimes they forget how to make babies. It is all very odd. The men get very effeminate. Sometimes a family bounces back or never gets that way but it takes purpose and when you get very rich you often lose purpose.
Look at the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. None have had to work a day in their lives. What little work they do is dabbling as a sort of amusement. When one of them wants to take two weeks at St. Kitts in February, all they have to do is have a lackey make a phone call to make a reservation. When it is hot in the Summer, there's always Maine or Prince Edward Island or Norway.
The very rich live vastly different lives. My brother-in-law is a pilot for a charter jet firm and he flies many of the very rich around America. About twelve years ago, my family and I visited him in Easton, Maryland. He had just flown one elderly woman in from Martha's Vineyard so that she could get home to tony St. Michael's, MD. Her cost was something like $6000.
Pete Ricketts (of the family that created Ameritade and owns the Chicago Cubs) kept running for office in Nebraska until he finally won something. JB Pritzker of the Chicago billionaire family got bored one day and became Illinois governor, his first elective office. Each needed something to do and they had the money to do it.
Which is why we should tax them out of existence after the $10-12 million mark. For every kid you have, max they can inherit is around $10-12 million, all the rest is taxed to pay for social programs. Create laws that make it impossible for people to hide their money from these laws. Old money families having “family trusts” run by finance bros who are useless outside of their ability to use Excel that turn the equally useless children and their MBA counterparts into generational multimillionaires who end up running everything (ie Trump, Britzker, etc) is what’s ruined this country.
Great idea! Hopefully that will increase funding for hormone blockers and DEI. Speaking more seriously that’s a recipe for wholesale corruption and authoritarianism .I could care less about rich playboys and dilettantes. The threat comes from rich people who want to use their money to reorder society.
And what the above poster suggested would take care of that problem.
“Western Civilization is dying from within due to too much wealth. It is soft. And it is dying.”
What you say echoes the response that Cyrus gave to the Persian lords when they advocated moving to conquered lands where life would be easier (from Book IX of the Histories, AD Godley’s translation, HUP, 1920):
“Seeing that Zeus grants lordship to the Persian people, and to you, Cyrus, among them, let us, after reducing Astyages, depart from the little and rugged land which we possess and occupy one that is better. There are many such lands on our borders, and many further distant. If we take one of these, we will all have more reasons for renown. It is only reasonable that a ruling people should act in this way, for when will we have a better opportunity than now, when we are lords of so many men and of all Asia?” Cyrus heard them, and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.” The Persians now realized that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than dwelling in tilled valleys to be slaves to others.”
"Hard times makes strong men. Strong men bring good times. Good times makes weak men. Weak men bring hard times."
Yeah, that quote keeps me up at night wondering where we are in the progression... somewhere between weak men and hard times? 😬
Nailed it.
I don’t much care for labels anymore. I oppose the death penalty and accept that global warming is real, but I also don’t care for the lgbtq agenda, abortion, and other woke gods. I don’t know what that makes me. Above all, I am still Christian. The social issues of the day, and how they line up to my thinking, are only relevant through that lens. Liberals are dying out, conservatives are the equivalent of American Indians being pushed onto the reservation. The whole system is rotten and in danger of failing completely, but people would rather wave pride flags than figure out how to fix the nation. Trump appealed to people because he at least hinted at an understanding of what affected real people and was important to them. They are ignored, if not actually hated, by the elites. Anyone who appeals to them, it doesn’t matter the baggage that person comes with, or their ultimate aims, they are going to have the ear of the people and their votes. Maybe that is the real danger here. The elites of the early 1900s at least paid some attention to the real issues of the day. Now…they only care about what virtues they can signal. Such dysfunction can only go on so long.
Labels can be profoundly misleading particularly those that other people impose on you. But the labels you give yourself are revealing.
I still consider myself an anarchist, and yeah, that's probably revealing. I am an anarchist because I hate the Ring. Or alternatively, I'm a monarchist because I believe in the Lord—same difference. Take it away, Tolkien:
"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people."
Hmmmm... I see a good heart and mind and love of freedom. But I know a place with no government to speak of. It is called San Francisco.
Must we not have government whilst we are yet sinners? It is an evil, but it it not the lesser of evils?
Oh San Francisco very much has a government that’s aided and abetted and probably created the craziness.
I guess. And at that level, I'm just sort of a pragmatist. I don't really give a damn whether the policy is called right or left or ambidextrous. Just tell me in plain language what the problem is, what the proposed policy is supposed to do about it, and whether said policy can reasonably be expected to do what it's supposed to do.
It’s only way to be!
LMFAO dude! We are waaay too much on the same page! On the bright side, you spared me the need to comment!
The problem with government is that we forget that it is simply a bunch of humans telling other humans what to do. There is an assumption that there is an elite class of people who are capable of doing so, when it basically consists of people whose primary skill is getting elected, and a professional class of self-interested mandarins.
I find it interesting that Tolkien expressed those views, given that he idealized monarchy in his works, but also explored the question of the legitimacy of the monarch. I suppose, in many ways, he encapsulated a very Catholic way of looking at leadership, both as a monarch related to the people and the world, but also the relationship between monarchs and God. In a sense, I think he saw that monarchy could fit within a framework of devolution from God, while a secularized and bureaucratized government, focused on deriving authority strictly from the people, could not.
Or maybe he just thought that the hobbits already had it all figured out.
I think there's also the aspect of personal relations as opposed to impersonal institutions: the way that Tolkien has it, the monarch is not an office, he's a person. Part of the point may be to resist the abstraction away from humanity and relationship—and likewise, to resist the reification of concepts such as "government", to not fall for the illusion that these things are actually real.
And oh, of course the hobbits already had it all figured out.
That's super interesting, I've been exploring the idea of seeing things as relationship between persons and playing with the limits of that idea. For example, I've been playing with the idea that what we tend to think of as physical laws are actually patterns held in place by entities that are persons and there's a relationship aspect there with God and humanity. It's interesting here to see that idea drawn to governments. I think in our machine age we tend to mechanize everything, and our governments are seen as machines. Voting, judicial systems, and bureaucracies are just computational processes at which the machine of government come up with as optimal solution as the "technology" allows. These computational processes can also have the variables changed, but at no point are we dealing with individual named humans. The scale of the thing is too large. The exception may be the office of president, since that tends to be a named single person, and may help explain why the office has grown in power over the years.
"I've been playing with the idea that what we tend to think of as physical laws are actually patterns held in place by entities that are persons"
Yes—absolutely. We could say that gravity doesn't just "go" on its own, it happens because of an archangel continually doing his job and holding the pattern in place. I think the medievals understood the world in this way.
You cannot love monarchy and hate the Ring. Not in this world. As James Otis, an ideologist of the early development of the American revolution said, "Only God is entitled to omnipotence, because only God is omniscient."
I love God’s monarchy; I didn’t say I want one in this world with a mere human in charge (although sometimes I look at what we’ve got and think: would a monarchy really be worse?).
Speak, citizen!
You sound like a pelican.
https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform
I wish Brooks were more original. Here's Eliot, unforgettably, all the way back in 1930:
"When, for instance, I brought out a small book of essays, several years ago, called For Lancelot Andrewes the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement made it the occasion for what I can only describe as a flattering obituary notice. In words of great seriousness and manifest sincerity, he pointed out that I had suddenly arrested my progress—whither he had supposed me to be moving I do not know—and that to his distress I was unmistakably making off in the wrong direction. Somehow I had failed, and had admitted my failure; if not a lost leader, at least a lost sheep; what is more, I was a kind of traitor; and those who were to find their way to the promised land beyond the waste, might drop a tear at my absence from the roll-call of the new saints. I suppose that the curiosity of this point of view will be apparent to only a few people. But its appearance in what is not only the best but the most respected and most respectable of our literary periodicals, came home to me as a hopeful sign of the times. For it meant that the orthodox faith of England is at last relieved from its burden of respectability. A new respectability has arisen to assume the burden; and those who would once have been considered intellectual vagrants are now pious pilgrims, cheerfully plodding the road from nowhere to nowhere, trolling their hymns, satisfied so long as they may be 'on the march.'”
I think it's important to add that Francis, Father Martin, Ivereigh, Roche, etc., etc., are doing themselves no favors trying to look respectable for the Davos crowd. Not in the long run.
Totally agree with your assessment of how the elites turned progressive and woke out of guilt over their privilege. It was true for me, prior to my conversion experience in 2020. And it is true for all of my close friends from my elite university, who now in their mid 40s occupy positions of the utmost prestige. Medical school professors, managing directors at investment banks, Obama's press secretary, etc.
I suspect none of them will change. And they are raising their children firmly in the woke Marxist ideology. However they have far fewer children than the conservative religious families that I know. So there's that.
This is the part of the article that’s definitely true. I grew up with these types, their progressivism is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most of them are multigenerational multimillionaires who run everything in our society while being practically useless themselves as all of their wealth is inherited.
I say enough with this denigration of privilege. We can ALL be privileged! God has given us the divine privilege to become his son or daughter (Romans 8:14 “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”). We have the divine command and privilege to become like Him (1 Peter 1:15 “according to the Holy One who called you, become holy yourselves”). And best of all, we have the divine privilege to become God's delight (Proverbs 8:30 “I - wisdom - was His delight every day”).
Let's celebrate what God has done for us. Let's all recognize our potential to be truly privileged!
It's called "Devine Privilege".
LGBTQ: it's more than just the Woke. The center right is full of it.
Yesterday The Spectator published a piece, like, you know, it was news to the scholars out there who have watched The Longest Day once, that the poem broadcast to France on the night of June 5 was the Verlaine Chanson d'Automne. But here's the thing. For some reason it was incredibly important that Verlaine was "gay"--hardly news, he died in 1896, and indeed went to jail for shooting his boyfriend, Arthur Rimbaud. But you see the choice of "gay" poet was somehow. Golly. You fill in the blanks.
Paul and Arthur, that “enfant terrible” if ever there was one, were quite the item, weren’t they?
I didn’t see that article. Who knew Verlaine was Gay! A shocker that one. Next we may even hear that
Rimbaud was a gun and slave runner.
I'm conservative because I fold my own laundry. Does a real man fold his own laundry? If there's no one else to do it for him does he simply neglect to fold? No, if there's laundry to be folded and ain't nobody else gonna do it for him a conservative folds his own laundry. Now the conservative liberals in power, they'll hold that against you because they've never had to fold their own laundry and there's nothing wrong with them. They've always had the Mexicans to do it for them.
Why do the Mexicans not fold your laundry, what's wrong with you, lowly folder of socks?
I just learned how to fold short sleeve shirts using the Marie Kondo method, and it makes me so happy.
There's more than one way to fold a shirt?
Look up Marie Kondo shirt folding on YouTube. I get better results than with my old method. Confession: I will never win any origami contests.
I just looked it up. Wow. I can see how this would make it easier to put the shirts in drawers, as they are much more uniform in size, but I find that folding shirts the way they do for display in stores (sleeves across the back, fold in thirds lengthwise, then fold in half twice to shorten the length) is almost as good and one can still put them in drawers vertically, rather than on top of each other.
I usually hang them up. In order by type. I've spent too much time studying inventory to do otherwise. The Kondo Method. Could be theraputic? White or beige. Oh dear.
That was oddly soothing.
I hang my shirts in the closet. Folding is for things that go in drawers.
Yeah—I fold up my shirts and put them in a drawer.
Huh. well, takes all kinds I guess :)
Don’t you iron?
No. I've discovered that Germans are obsessed with ironing, but that genetic thing missed me apparently. Maybe that's a result of my non-German side.
I can iron a dress shirt, but, then, my grandfather was av tailor. When we were poor I had no choice.
I can’t imagine not ironing shirts
I can’t imagine ironing shirts!
I don't think I've seen an iron since I was a child.
I'd iron my husband's shirts and slacks for work, but then he moved on to offices where the dress code was more lax, and it wasn't necessary anymore. As for me, in places where there was a dress code, we were also doing work moving around (and moving things) so ironing wouldn't have really mattered anyway. And there's also the silly way a lot of women's clothes are meant to be "snug" in the first place. Annoying, but it pulled out a lot of wrinkles naturally.
I just about fell over seeing Germans ironing T-shirts and the like. However, considering that many people have washing machines but no dryers, I suppose some of this makes more sense in that context.
Makes sense. Permanent Press doesn't really work without a dryer, does it?
You can add not ironing my husband's shirts and slacks to my long list of marital shortcomings: not sending thank you and Christmas cards, not remembering birthdays, and so on... I don't know why he puts up with me 😂
When I lived on the upper West Side I went to a Chinese laundry that still wrapped the shirts up in brown paper tied with twine.
There's a 'sport' called Extreme Ironing. It's "the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt."
Shockingly not invented by Germans! :)
How odd. My very German wife hates ironing, whereas I will iron any amount of clothing you care to throw in my direction. I find it very soothing, almost in a Zen sort of way.
As somebody who was required to iron my dad's slacks and dress shirts, I didn't iron for many years. Now about all I will iron is quilting fabric.
I'm kind of the exact opposite of being all pressed and perfect in personality.
Broomstick skirts started to get really popular about the time I was a senior in high school, and these were right up my alley. Not only did they not have to be ironed, but the wrinkles were encouraged. I got one from Walmart back in '99 or 2000 that was absolutely gorgeous - kind of a patchwork-y thing with black velvet, green panels, and touches of cream and wine (the colors, not the stains). It's very hard to describe. I've never gotten so many compliments on a single piece of clothing as with that skirt. I probably still have it tucked away in a closet, but the elastic in the waistband disintegrated a long time ago.
I can't stand polyester (plastic) clothes on my body. If I want clothes without wrinkles, especially in the summer, I must iron. I like it. It was the first "grownup"thing my mother taught me to do. I set up the ironing board in the living room and iron while I watch TV, or listen to a lecture on YouTube.
Dana
That's me. I hate synthetic fibres.
I can handle some polyester blends, but hate the feel of pure polyester. I also can't stand all the very thin and sheer materials. It's like they expect no one to have kids!
I wonder if there's a verb 'zerbügeln'! That would be great.
That would certainly be interesting, to be sure!
(Though grammatically, I think you'd end up with "zerbügelt" more commonly.)
Well, yes; but the idea of ironing a shirt with such zeal as to doom it to destruction... "am Samstag hat er sein teuerstes Hemd aus lauter Zorn zerbügelt" would be a pretty dramatic weekend incident.
I don't iron. Fortunately, the Winchester dry cleaner is right next to an Italian Restaurant where I just had red clam sauce and a glass of merlot. A double play.
Iron? Fe(h).
"Ranger rolling" your tshirts and socks is also life changing. Particular when packing for travel.
I'll tell you what's wrong with me: I get the gray socks mismatched sometimes. There is, you see, more than one pair, so to speak, in the mix; and they have, look you, a very similar appearance, length, stitch pattern, and what have you. Practically the only distinguishing trait is the degree of tension or give in the calves.
“Why I am a Conservative”
I have taken the decision to receive a loud round of “boo’s” here and use a word that has been ruined. Do hold onto your lunch, my brothers and sisters, and prepare for my first sentence.
I am a conservative because of compassion.
Yes, I know, Bush ruined the word for almost everyone. Please try to think of what it really means, however.
Is it compassionate to try to do away with families? To let children be brainwashed and ruin and castrate themselves? Is it compassionate to “print money” and give it away to those not really in need, only to cause price rises that they cannot afford? Is it compassionate to tell pregnant women they don’t have another living being within them? Is it compassionate to forgive loans given the top learners which will be paid for by taxes on all workers?
My compassion is the compassion of the long term, and the compassion of reason. It does indeed have an intellectual basis. Read Scruton, Hayek, Burke and so many others. Or simply look around. What does left wing economics accomplish? Far-left communist economics, we have seen the results. Democrat leftist economics we also see in high inflation, the ruin of small business, the poor, especially the minority poor, stuck forever, dependent on the party that never really helps.
My Conservative compassion is for youth. To teach youth the beauty of marriage and family. These are the keys to a happy life.
My compassion is for those who are “different”. First, I’ve spent my life amongst various cultures, with people whose first language is not English, with people of various races. But also, it is for those who are “different from me” politically. When someone tells me they are a progressive, they must prove malice to me because I will not assume it. I will assume they are not well educated, that they are conformist when it comes to major media hypnosis, and that they think they are being compassionate. Would that they could know they are not.
No boos from me on your comments! Consider me to be standing and applauding!
Oh, thank you so much. And wait until you get to Pariah's essay. She puts mine to shame, hers is so good.
Ahh, I was just thinking the same about yours!
I salute your efforts to reclaim the word "compassion" for conservatives.
It is absolutely not compassionate to allow a person to kill themselves (slowly on the streets with drugs or quickly via euthanasia).
I heartily agree. Kudos!
I dispute your 13-year-old notion that conservatives were wrong on segregation. The segregationists were all progressives.
What? You gotta explain this.
Segregationist Democrats we’re progressives. They voted for the New Deal, believed in eugenics, government by experts, stuff like that. They weren’t “conservative”. Wilson, for example, was a hard progressive and a racist
You’re partially on to something. The segregationists were a mixed bag. Some were what we call conservative but others were not.Theodore Bilbo and Tom Watson were not conservatives.Orval Faubus came from a socialist background and was originally considered a liberal Democrat.
Why I am a conservative? Simply, because I believe in Western Civilization rooted in Christianity. I believe in Western Civilization, warts and all. Shakespeare. St. Francis. Dickens. Austen. Jefferson. Churchill. Orwell. Hemingway. Washington. Lee. Grant. Stonewall Jackson. Andrew Jackson.
Columbus. Galileo. Copernicus. Newton. The men who died at The Alamo. Henry Ford. John Ford. John Wayne. Jesus Christ. I could go on.
You should make a song along the lines of "We Didn't Start the Fire".
I am not a conservative for the same reasons that Douthat mentions in the text you quoted: conservatism, in the American context, is basically a slower form of liberalism. The “liberals”/“propgressives” are the ones driving the bus and setting the direction, and the “conservatives” simply get the pace of the bus to modulate every now and then when they happen to win an election. They do not have a different direction than the progressives do, they want the bus to go to the same place, they just want it to be less speedy because they think a slower bus does less collateral damage, or that the inevitable displacement associated with ongoing progressive change can be better ameliorated if you moderate the pace of change. It’s a positioning that is primarily about the pace of change — it more or less agrees with the same basic progressive idea of an unending arc of further perfection, in social terms, as being the goal. It’s true that the retail political right in the US has a different emphasis in its liberalism than the retail political left does (the right emphasizing the economic aspects of liberalism and the left emphasizing the personal/sexual elements of liberalism), but together they ensure a system that is generally economically, sexually and personally liberal — which is not what I agree with, from a philosophical point of view (see next paragraph).
I also do not identify with the progressives, whom I also see, like you, as being lacking in their basic understanding of human nature, and in that sense far too idealistic. I also disagree with the general idea that human society can be technocratically directed to overcome basic aspects of human nature. I see this as a problem even with “mild” forms of left politics, as they are all mostly based on the same false premise about the perfectibility of human nature.
This leaves me politically homeless in the US, which is fine. There are plenty of people like me. A problem of our system is that it lacks real alternatives. Two modestly different liberal parties are not real alternatives. But I do think that the system we have more or less reflects the tendencies of the United States as a society, with its overwhelming (and, admittedly often pathological) emphasis on individualism above all else, the enduring popularity of a kind of vapid “pop libertarianism” that arises from this toxic individualism, coupled with the dangerous crusading spirit that we see doing so much damage culturally in the world today. I this underlying base gives natural rise to the limited scope of realistic political options in our country, and I doubt that will change soon.
Honestly what happens next, I think, is that we need to see what happens on the right, after Trump is no longer eligible (ie, dead, wins a second term etc) and the right is de facto post Trump the person at least in terms of retail politics of that specific individual as a live candidate for office. There will be a scrum between the populist MAGA disciples, the warmed-over Zombie Reaganites like David French, the neoconservatives like David Frum, the emergent “national conservatives” and so on.
Who wins that scrum, eventually, will determine what happens on the left, because if the right goes definitively populist or national conservative, I am pretty sure that many of the Reaganites and Neo-cons will reform into a new party, and that the existing Democratic coalition will break as well, so that you have an alignment with (1) a centrist party (representing the current center-left) that has in it what is currently the Democratic centrists or center-left, the ex-Reaganites and the ex-Neocons, (2) a left party comprised of the current left of the Democratic Party, the DSA, and some of the more left-oriented populists (Bernie Bros and similar) and (3) a right populist party comprised of MAGAs, some national conservatives, and others who are mostly discontented with the status quo but which, like most populist parties, lacks a consistent ideological program other than anti-elitism. On the other hand, if the old school Republican establishment succeeds in reasserting control over the GOP after Trump exits, then the alignment will be more like the one we see today, with two different versions of liberalism (with different emphases, and different timing preferences), but with much louder and more aggressive right and left flanks, respectively, than has historically been the case. So a lot hangs on what happens in the Republican Party after Trump.
For me, I don’t see a political home in either of those arrangements any more than I do in the current one. And so I suspect that I will remain more unaligned and mostly an observer.
——-
On the percentage of students at elite universities who identify as LGBTQ, I’d only add that much of this results from female undergraduates identifying as “B” or “Q”, although they only date men and appear conventionally feminine. Labeling is cost-free, requires no accompanying behavioral manifestation, and has many social benefits in the context of the communities at these universities. Of course that doesn’t mean that it isn’t troubling (the fact that so many up and coming elites are so eager to mislabel themselves as they are doing is a concern in itself), but I don’t think anyone should look at those figures and think that it is actually the case that 38% of the undergraduates at Brown are LGBTQ in terms of how they actually live and present themselves.
Yes, and also, regarding near-40% LGBTQ+: We could have what I shall dub "The Elizabeth Warren Syndrome". Some progressive kids may be smart enough to know they need an advantage in the hiring pool. Maybe they decide they are "Bi", somehow, magically.
Also, you can be "popular" with your friends if you are a minority.
Not saying that is the whole near-40%, but I imagine it is some.
I had si,illiar thoughs about the numbers being pumped up by anybody, girls in particular, whoever experienced same sex attraction, or even the "I kissed a girl and I liked it" experience claiming to be bi.
Exactly. I think that sort of thing must be common. Obama was ahead of the curb in the letter that he wrote about his desires for males.
But it appears to be much more common with women. I note Princeton is high in numbers. I had a friend who lived in Princeton town while I taught in New Jersey. Once, at a restaurant, he started into this little talk of some sort - about how I should open myself up and discover that I could desire any human. "mean - they are human." Argh. Well, I semi-let-him-have-it. "How dare you? You don't expect gay men to desire women, but you expect me to?"
So, now I'm not open because I only desire men.? I can see having to say you are "bi", especially as a woman, or face social disapproval. I don't think a straight man would pressure a straight man the way this gay friend pressured me. I even faced it on that one occasion and I'm not a youth.
Indeed it is very odd. Similar kinds of “discussions” (often in the form of taunts coming from trans people) are taking place every day on X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere on the internet about how lesbian identifying women are bigots for refusing to date trans women, or, conversely, about how men who say they are open to dating trans women because they, themselves, are bisexual being insulting and bigoted towards trans women because, of course, “trans women are women”, and therefore a man doesn’t need to be bi to date one of them!
Andrew Sullivan has written a lot in the past year or two about how this kind of thing basically erases gay and lesbian people (and straight people, too, as an orientation) because it insists that “sexual orientation” is really “gender orientation”, when the people who are actually gay and lesbian experience it as *sexual* orientation, whereby the sexual bits and pieces of the target of attraction are not irrelevant. As Sullivan has pointed out, if you follow this to its conclusion, it eliminates gays and lesbians, because attraction to others on the basis of their sex is replaced with “gender orientation”, while the behavior of people who continue to discriminate against potential partners on the basis of their “mere” sex will be progressively marginalized.
Needless to say, that isn’t really happening (although Sullivan is right to point out the risk), for obvious reasons, and I think it’s one reason, of many, that the trans movement is hitting some serious speed bumps in much of the rest of the world outside the US.
It’s therefore quite odd for a gay man in particular to be taking the position that this guy in Princeton did, but we live in odd times. I suppose the one way one could rationalize that perspective is if one takes the view that “compulsory heterosexuality” means that more people think they are heterosexual than is actually the case, due to pressures including internalized ones, and that the world would be better if fewer straight people in particular were so attached to their perceived heterosexuality, in terms of being more open and “fair”. In other words, the idea is that “heteronormalivity” can’t really be conquered unless actual “heterosexuality” is reduced, because when 90%+ of the population considers itself heterosexuality, heternormativity, as a practical matter, is virtually ensured because of course the society will reflect more closely the behaviors of that 90% of people. So I guess there’s the activist’s angle of flipping more straight people into being bi, which then makes it easier to undermine heteronormativity. Obviously that is coming from a very different place than Andrew Sullivan is (who was always interested in being just like straight people, except gay), but as I have mentioned in other recent comments, there are many gays (and some lesbians too) who disagree with Andrew Sullivan’s kind of approach, and think normative heterosexuality is itself problematic and something that should be undermined in the service of quality, freedom and equity. Or something like that.
A very good posts, and with something I'd never thought of, though I should have. How comforting it would be if heterosexual were not "normal" as a one reason for heavy recruitment. I think one reason that thought was blocked from my mind was the same reason I don't often fancy I'll become Queen of England. That was impossible, and it seemed impossible so many would "converf". But yes, hope springs eternal, you are right.
I follow Sullivan and other's reasoning that gay is being hurt by trans because many young people who would grow up to be gay are encouraged to think they are trans, have treatments, hormones, surgeries, etc. It is awful. I do not follow how sexual orientation would be completely replaced with gender identity - they seem non-interchangeable to me.
On my Princeton friend "Mike"- I purposely did write that he was "gay" out of strict honesty. He has always said he is "bi". Truth is, I doubt this, however. He has never expressed any attraction to any women, though he expresses a lot of attraction to men. He had a (male) partner for nine years but that ended. Anyway, my theory: Mike tells himself that same thing he told me (women are human, you can be attracted to them). Because in his mind, he will face less dislike from people if he can say he is "bi" than if he says he is "gay".
But though I think MIke had his own reasons for this speech, I think others give it merely to be fashionable.. And like you, I would be quite surprise if a person saying they were gay (rather than bi) said such things.
You did the right thing to challenge him on that. For a few decades now, we have seen the idea of sexual orientation as an immutable characteristic be entrenched in our legal system. More and more frequently, we are seeing heterosexuality being treated as the one exception. Most dangerously when activists push this in public schools, confusing and pressuring vulnerable kids. Any attempts to actually convert people away from being normal or developing normally, need to be thrown back in the faces of these predators. For the ones who mean well, they need reminding--without heteronormativity, society eventually collapses. Do they desire such an outcome? No need to belabor the point too long, but some can be helped to really think through the consequences of attempting to create a queer utopia from which there is no escape, no alternatives.
We are at the point that ancient Rome was when the book of Romans said: "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves... For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet."
I am convinced, and so was CS Lewis, that some cannot change their homosexuality, and I'm sorry for them. But this "recruiting" and trying to get people to have sex with their own gender is just sick. Some people can do it if they try, I guess (I certainly could not) but it is so wrong to encourage it. The idea of telling 4 year olds "you might be a girl or a boy" is also horrible.
Your point is well taken about how we would not ask homosexual to change their orientation but we would ask heterosexuals to somehow discover that they have suppressed their desires for the same sex (I guess that is what they are saying - either that or everybody can desire everything if they try.)
Young women tend to be trendy. Look at all the silly young women and girls going about with deliberately made holes in their jeans. Claiming to be a bisexual is also a trend. Queers are cool!
I made a hole in my jeans deliberately in the 90s just below the knee. Then I went travelling around Ireland. People would call out "Ijeet, there's a hole in y'r jeans!".
Billboard Chris told me that this entire trans movement is being driven by liberal white women. He said the most vicious attacks he gets when he's out on the streets almost always come from young white women.
I’ll bet. And ironically they are also many of the ones who are going to lose out the most to the gains of the trans movement — eg, Biden’s extension of Title IX to trans people, which will eat into women’s Title IX benefits greatly. I guess that’s another example of virtue signaling or the kind of flex Rob Henderson refers to as a “luxury belief”: namely that these young women feel so secure in their “privilege” that supporting causes that are very detrimental to themselves and their female peers is like proverbial rain off the duck’s back.
Re: Biden’s extension of Title IX to trans people
Wasn't that due to a Supreme Court decision,. one authored by Gorsuch no less?
Nope.
Bostock was a Title VII case — in other words trans can’t be discriminated against in employment decisions. It has nothing to do with Title IX, which remained unaffected by Bostock. Various lower federal courts have said that Title IX requires trans to be protected, but these are not nationally binding in the way that Bostock is for Title VII matters.
In fact this is precisely *why* the Biden administration passed the rule making to “clarify” that Title IX extends to trans. It wasn’t covered by Bostock.
I would say a combination of liberal white women and white male transwomen. Especially the wealthy ones.
I’m probably going to botch this but I’ll give it a shot. A liberal political order is the best you’re going to get and the progressives know it which is why they want something different. Years ago it would have been socialism but they’re too invested in capitalist privilege or rentier crony capitalist subsidies to be for a radical egalitarian system where the state creates a command economy. A right wing response is to say the state must foster justice- social justice- which can take us into Peronism(not really a left wing movement) or to Salazar Portugal. These proved problematic but if it doesn’t occur personally, everything recurs eternally. It all comes back. On this thread you see an endless lust for a just order that will limit wealth and create justice by enforcing left wing economic norms that somehow promote Christian ideas of social justice.Give the state which you don’t control the power to create a just order and you will wake up in a nightmare. A state that you think will give you justice will give it to you, good and hard.You want a moral order, You have hope in a genuinely liberal regime. Oh the liberals don’t want what you want, but even if laughing, they’ll let you do it. But a leviathan, jacobin state will not.Oh that means on a national level- you’ll have abortion, marijuana, etc etc . But in a genuine liberal regime, it may at least be optional. When the leviathan state extends its tentacles everywhere the options end.Perhaps it is also worthwhile talking about liberalism and teleology. Historical liberalism does have teleological tendencies Mill got wrapped up with Comte and even worse Harriet Taylor. But that’s not necessary.Liberalism can and I think should be seen as a limited philosophy of government that accepts limits. An epistemological modesty is called for . We can only do so much.There is no preordained end here. We are not and can not get better and better each and every day.We muddle through and we die and try to minimize harm. No shining future awaits!Some would say that a kind of conservatism, maybe . But if it is it’s a conservative liberalism. It’s not about slowing the bus down. It doesn’t even accept the ride.
The way I see that framework is that, today, the real danger is not the emergence of a state leviathan. That’s in part because the state has largely been captured by non-state interests and, in part, because much of the coercive power operating in our context today is non-state in nature. These include the familiar ones of the educational and cultural/opinion establishments, but it increasingly consists of the exceptionally powerful tech companies that are exercising tremendous coercive power in ways that do not require the “hard” force of the state. The entrenched nature of all of these non-state power wielding entities virtually ensures that the bugbear of a state leviathan will not come about: what has come about, and what will become even more entrenched, is a system where much of the power is held by non-state actors, who use that power to coerce behavior largely (although not exclusively) through non-state means, which are therefore means that are not “reachable” by classical liberalism’s limited state. In fact, as you note, many of today’s real power actors are quite happy to have a relatively minimal state, because this makes it easier for them to retain the massive power they wield outside the state.
What this means is that while classical liberalism talks about the danger of a coercive state leviathan, its vision of a limited state simply acts as the midwife to the birth of an immensely powerful collection of non-state actors who can wield their power in a more or less unlimited way under classical liberal principles due to the latter’s vision of a limited state and its related preference for very limited regulation. It’s true that this is different from the state throwing you in jail for dissenting, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind. Not all coercion relates to the risk of state-imposed penalties or restrictions — privately-imposed penalties and restrictions that are set by non-state actors are meaningfully coercive, and are completely unaddressed by the concept of the limited state. The idea that the classically liberal state preserves your freedom by simply refraining from throwing you in jail, when the entirety of the economic and social order exerts tremendous coercive power on everyone’s day to day lives, reflects a mis-emphasis: what classical liberalism is really frightened about is not the main danger today, and that is why it is proving to be hopelessly inadequate in responding to the dramatic rise of non-state coercive power in our societies.
I understand that many disagree with this and see state coercion as being a difference in kind, but, to me, this misunderstands the present danger. We are more at risk, today, of non-state tyranny exercised by exceptionally powerful, globally active, non-state actors and entities that is, in effect, enabled by the minimalist idea of the state as championed by classical liberalism. Classical liberalism was a good solution to the problems of state leviathan, but its creators could not foresee the emergence of the kind of non-state power we have in force today — classical liberalism provides no protection from this danger, and, in effect, by emphasizing the need for a limited (and therefore weak) state, only serves to enhance this non-state power, and thereby increase the danger — at least in my view.
No I think you profoundly misunderstand many things. Of course classical liberals could understand the force of non state coercion. Mill who I took a shot at earlier clearly did.He talked about the force of custom. The non state power you talk about, can’t get too far without a state that can be manipulated to enforce their desires. On the Right there’s this big thrust towards , let’s have a powerful state to enforce our vision of virtue. Thats whistling pass the graveyard. Who is going to control this state that will control language and history, not you ! More likely the women on the view.
As I noted above, the state is captured by non-state actors already. These non-state actors set boundaries on the actions of the state more than vice versa. Surely the state isn’t gong to be gotten rid of, but rather obviously the non-state power wielders much prefer the current arrangement of a largely captive state with limited powers, because this both allows the non-state actors to effectively control what the limited state does while at the same time wielding themselves, an increasing share of the power that actually matters, which is now largely outside the state.
In any case yes we have a basic disagreement. I do not believe that the emphasis on having a small state is in any way adequate to protect people from actual tyranny in our current environment where we have massively powerful non-state actors who wield so much daily power of everyone’s lives with no accountability at all. Focusing on being worried that a strong state will be controlled by people you don’t like doesn’t change that, because even if you keep a small classically liberal state the people we don’t like will be wielding massive tyrannical authority over everyone’s lives in ways that lie outside political accountability altogether, as they do in many ways already today. This is the main threat of tyranny today in our society, and it can’t be addressed by a classically liberal small/limited state pretty much at all.
And in any case, the state is not small today, anyway. It’s massive. And it has been massive for many decades, and has grown under the right liberals as well as the left liberals. So it’s kind of a sideshow argument in any case.
It’s fine, there are disagreements like this right now on the right. As I have written elsewhere, the big unknown in the next 10 years or so is what argument prevails on the right. I wouldn’t personally bet on the classical liberal argument winning, but it’s possible.
I'm a conservative, in large part, because I saw first-hand how liberal and progressive "values" destroy people over multiple generations. I believe that despite our recent leadership, there are very good things about the US and being American. I try to be someone who lets faith in God guide me, and on the liberal side, there's almost no space left for people whose god is anything but political power. I believe that there is value in tradition, and that the idea that all cultures/religions/whathaveyou are all the same is asinine. I believe that there is a difference (and should be a difference) between legality and morality.
This.
Well stated. The only caution I would put here is that economic conservatism with its emphasis on greed and its deorgation of the poor cannot be squared with a Christian ethic either.