Easter weekend Saturday roundup

 

It would be interesting to see a comment thread get going here about a piece by Julie Mastrine at Evie entitled "Did Millenials Kill Flirting?"

In a piece at Quillette, Ron Radosh looks at what an unwieldy and unlikely project the founders of a new magazine called Compact are trying to get off the ground. The initial group of contributors includes writers ranging from "Against David Frenchism" author Sohrab Ahmari to David Reiff, a contributor to The Guardian and The Nation, and a board member of the arms division of Human Rights Watch. The founders have this idea that there is a Venn diagram overlap in the views of participants:

Compact [was] established as a rallying point for writers and thinkers from Left and Right fed up with the prevailing liberal consensus. “Our editorial choices,” explain the founders, “are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.”

Who are the founders?

Compact is the political project of two religious traditionalists and a left-wing populist. Matthew Schmitz is a Catholic convert who was, until recently, senior editor at the conservative religious magazine, First Things. Edwin Aponte was previously the founder and editor of the Bellows, a Marxist webzine that stands for “working-class populism for the future.” Sohrab Ahmari is perhaps the most prominent of the three, having worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, then senior writer at Commentary, and finally as opinion editor at the New York Post from 2018.

Just who do they think they're going to attract as faithful readers of issue after issue, with positions like this?

The Nation’s editors and readers, after all, are overwhelmingly feminist, and are unlikely to be overjoyed by articles like Nina Power’s essay, “Why We Need the Patriarchy.”

There are some very kinky stakings-out of terrain out there. 

I've seen some pieces that critique certain perceived shortcomings of "Why The Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" by Jonathan Haidt, published in The Atlantic, but I think it stands as an important analysis of the effects of social media, and a great starting point for a general conversation about the stupidity topic:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Park MacDougald's UnHerd piece "Joe Biden's Gender Agenda" is about how the president has gotten over his skis in terms of where the nation is regarding transgenderism.

If I may toot my own horn a bit, I cover similar territory in my Precipice piece, "Disney." 

While we're on this subject, there was an interesting story at the New York Post today about a - well, let's say person - who "transitioned" from one sex to the other and also practices psychology and who thinks our society's zeal for letting people with the slightest inclination to resent their DNA carve their crotches up and pump themselves full of hormones and puberty blockers may have gotten out of hand:

A transgender psychologist who has helped hundreds of teens transition has warned that it has “gone too far” — and fears many are making life-changing decisions because it’s “trendy” and pushed on social media.

Erica Anderson, 71 — who is transgender herself — told the Los Angeles Times that she is horrified that even 13-year-old kids are now getting hormone treatment without even meeting with psychologists.

“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the US professional society at the forefront of transgender care.

Susan Bagwell, who wrote for RedState back when it was an important conservative organ and then got kicked out when a new editorial team took it in a Trumpist direction, has one of those man-I-wish-I'd-written-that pieces at The Racket News called "What Have We Become?" A taste:

While I walked away from the Republican Party because of Trump, I never abandoned my conservatism. I never abandoned my values. I’m no “blue waver.” I think it’s just as idiotic to make a hard swing from the right, to the left. You think it makes you “virtuous” and more anti-Trump than the rest of us, just because you wear a Beto hat in Texas, or suddenly start using cuss words and touting your newly found appreciation for socialism.

What are you trying to prove? Either those values you once claimed were always with you, or they never were.

My point – and I do have one – is that tribalism and personality cults have damaged this nation beyond measure. We need to reassess and find ground that will strengthen us, not tear us further apart.

Richard M. Reinsch II, writing at Law & Liberty in a piece entitled "Finding The Constitution's Common Good," clarifies what that phrase does and does not mean.