Sunday roundup

 If it's been a while since you considered the hard life of the man behind Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, check out Christopher Sandford's piece entitled "Two Centuries of Dostoevsky" on the website of the American Institute for Economic Research. After having already garnered some literary acclaim for some essays he'd had published, Dostoevsky participated in a protest against czarist policies in the 1840s and got in big trouble for it, including getting 50 lashes for complaining about prison food, an event that left him with a bad case of epilepsy for the rest of his life. Of course, he then went on to write his major works and enjoy some high regard.

Sandford's an interesting cat in his own right. He's kind of specialized in pop-culture history, writing biographies of Paul McCartney, Kurt Cobain and Steve McQueen, among others. 

Associate editor of New York magazine's Daily Intelligencer Eric Levitz ever so cautiously starts to reconsider a public-policy viewpoint he'd wholeheartedly embraced in a piece entitled "Does Pre-K Actually Hurt Kids?" It seems that findings indicating that any ground gained from pre-K is lost by the midway point through elementary school have had an impact on his thinking. Still, he's clearly keen to hold onto the idea that, with some tweaking of how it's implemented, pre-K can be basically beneficial. 

I found some of the comments on the article noteworthy, such as this one:

None of it matters a bit unless the things and habits these children are learning are reinforced in the home. If no one is responding to the kids’ needs appropriately during the times they aren’t in care, if no one is making them healthy meals and reading to them and caring how they do in school, none of it matters a bit. 

But we can’t say that. Which is a shame because it’s the truth. 

Above practically everything else, possibly with the exception of promptly and appropriately responding to a child’s needs, READING is where it all starts. Reading go a child from the time they’re very small helps them learn to pay attention and focus and start to comprehend. It gives them an almost undeniable edge. But so few people do it anymore, and it’s heartbreaking. 

And this:

“Public pre-K programs may not reliably improve enrollees’ long-term academic performance or social behavior. But they do reliably provide parents with a safe, somewhat stimulating place to put their children while they go earn money. And that’s an important service for parents and children alike.”

^ This.   I taught for 5 years, and by the end I realized that we were just free daycare.  

At the John Templeton Foundation website, Joshua Moritz asks, Is There A God-Shaped Hole at the Heart of Mathematics?  He examines the inquiries of Christian mathematicians and philosophers such as John Philoponus, Gottfried Leibniz and Kurt Godel into a rational basis for concluding that God must exist.

If you could use a good dose of encouragement to be content, check out "In Love With The Life You Don't Have" by Greg Morse at Desiring God.

Robert Tracinski, writing at Discourse, has an essay called "In Defense of 'Workism'": 

“Workism” was defined by Derek Thompson a few years ago in The Atlantic as “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose, and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

This last point, pushing back against encouraging work, is where the rubber really meets the road, because it is part of the push to un-reform the welfare reforms of the 1990s, on the grounds that it is cruel and unjust to restrict welfare in a way that requires its recipients to work.

The argument against this emphasis on work is that it is a puritanical moral “obsession” arbitrarily imposed on people, and also that it is all a lie concocted to serve our corporate masters, because the majority will never actually find personal fulfillment in their work. Here is Thompson again:

But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the US—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery.

So you start out thinking you’re going to work to “follow your bliss,” but you just end up working to line the pockets of The Man.

Similarly, Tablet recently carried a broadside against work and career as a source of meaning specifically for women, lamenting that “pop-feminism has continued to lean into the corporate system, devaluing any life choice for women that does not center on economic prosperity.” This is either a radical leftist perspective, with all its railing against “the corporate system,” or a traditionalist-conservative perspective, with its talk about the previous generations of women “who were raised to become mothers and wives.” But who can tell the difference between left and right anymore?

The wider complaint is that we may have greater prosperity and be building and making more things—in other words, we may enjoy material progress—but we face a growing “meaning crisis,” in which we have no clue what gives value and direction to our lives or what can produce a sense of personal fulfillment and happiness. There are various people you can find on YouTube who will tell us how to fill this void with Buddhism, or psychedelics or Stoic philosophy. The fact that none of these solutions is particularly new—the hippies tried two of the three a half century ago—might cast a little doubt on whether this “meaning crisis” is really anything new or whether it is just the human condition.

To state the dilemma: How can we continue to create new wealth, invent new technology and advance human material progress, while also finding something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives?

Put that way, the question kind of answers itself—and “workism” is the answer. Creating new wealth, inventing new technology and advancing human progress is something that gives purpose, direction and meaning to our lives. Or rather, “workism” is a pejorative term—an update of “workaholic”—used to dismiss what is actually a very compelling idea: that solving human problems, building the future and just plain getting things done is, in fact, an important and meaningful activity.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute is always good for a chill-your-bones update on how the malignancy of identity politics has further metastasized. In the current issue of City Journal, she looks at the ruination of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Western civilization is likely done for. 

Daren Jonescu is a blogger on whom I frequently check in. I don't always agree with him, and he probably wouldn't have it any other way, given the high priority he sets on the individual rigorously coming to his or her own conclusions about anything. I do find his post entitled "Reasons Not To Drink" worthy of consideration, even though I'm unlikely to cancel cocktail hour, at least presently.  

 

Mike's better-late-than-never "I had no right" declaration

 He delivered it in the context of a speech he gave yesterday to the Federalist Society, and he gave it the appropriate touch of thunderous forthrightness, so that the national media would not fail to see it as the money line of his address. That's one of the signature licks he's been honing since high school, when he made a name for himself on the Rotary Club speech circuit.

The Very Stable Genius has already weighed in, calling Pence weak - no, make that WEAK! I have a feeling the fallout from the entire drool-besotted VSG cult will begin today. 

It will be interesting to see where the fault lines appear as that process gains steam. The money right now would be on it ending his political career, but as they say, a day in that realm is an eternity. Variables abound. 

He's getting applause from folks on the non-Trumpist right, and I suppose I can contribute a clap or two. I'm certainly not going to rise from my seat with any kind of full-throated hurrah, however. If there's one thing I can't stand about politics, it's the way some - and you see this on both the right and the left - are willing to take whatever they can get, to get all excited about an apparent change of course on the part of a political figure without looking into what led to it, and how sincere and permanent it is or isn't. 

Let us not forget that, when the Hollywood Access tape surfaced mere days before the 2016 election, Pence's wife Karen strenuously encouraged him to drop off the ticket, and wouldn't give him a congratulatory kiss on election night. ("Well, Mike, you got what you wanted.") As the new administration got underway, Director of National Security Dan Coats was increasingly uneasy about Trump's behavior and utterances, as was his wife Marilyn. Like Pence, they are Hoosiers and Pence had known them for years. In the book Rage, Bob Woodward recounts a state dinner at which Marilyn Coats and Mike Pence had a brief exchange of a how-can-you-sleep-at-night nature, and then were seated next to each other. She continued the conversation non-verbally, via eye contact, and Pence replied with a your-husband-and-I-must-stay-the-course countenance. 

More recently, when the Pences arrived back home on the afternoon of January 20, 2020, fresh from attending Biden's inauguration, Mike's first words on the Columbus Municipal Airport tarmac were an expression of gratitude toward the Very Stable Genius and Melania for all they'd done for America over the past four years. This, two weeks after the Capitol mob had chanted "Hang Mike Pence!" as they made their way through the building.

And let's note that his gig over the last year has been as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which seems to be following the Claremont Institute down the Trumpist rabbit hole. 

So while yesterday's pronouncement was encouraging to a modest degree, I don't think it's time for any welcome-back-Mike gestures. And if he gets eaten alive before he has a chance to gain a foothold in his new landscape, well, that's how karma works, Mr. Vice President. 

NBC's Olympics opening-ceremony coverage was quite the soft-pedal

 Probably the most egregious portion of it came from Savannah Guthrie, in which she characterizes the co-lighting of the Olympic flame by Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier selected from the Uyghur population as "an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide and diplomatically boycotted those games."

But Andrew Browne's remarks were pretty rancid as well:

An NBC commentator offered what sounded like a defense of the Chinese Communist regime during the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday.

“It’s worth remembering that while Western countries may be boycotting these Olympics over human rights issues, China styles itself as a champion of the developing world, and it has plenty of support in countries from Africa to Latin America where its investments are building up local economies,” said former Wall Street Journal senior correspondent and columnist Andrew Browne, referring to China’s Belt and Road initiative.

Is this just a matter of a giddy response to the pageantry of the moment? Or were they keen to avoid the humiliation of being dragged by Chinese authorities away from giving a report like Dutch journalist Sjoerd den Haas?

In any event, this is the kind of awkwardness that results from participating in a Potemkin village-style dog and pony show by one of the world's cruelest and most ambitiously expansionist regimes on Earth.

 

The outsized influence of woke ideology

 Yes, the troglodytes of Trumpism/neo-Trumpism have had a field day with the fact that Joe Biden must make good on his campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, but he now has to act resolute in his determination to follow through, doesn't he? He can talk all he wants to about finding a rigorous Constitutional scholar who is also a black woman, but it sure looks like raw affirmative action to a lot of people.

As in across the board:

. . . just over three-quarters of Americans (76%) want Biden to consider "all possible nominees." Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through. At a ceremony honoring the retiring justice, Biden told reporters he is able to honor his promise without compromising on quality.

. . . Although the poll's sample size was not large enough to break out results for Black people, only a little more than 1 in 4 nonwhite Americans (28%) wish for Biden to consider only Black women for the vacancy. Democrats are more supportive of Biden's vow (46%) than Americans as a whole, but still a majority of Democrats (54%) also prefer that Biden consider all possible nominees.

Longtime Democratic apparatchik James Carville cites some statistics that his party would do well to consider:

Carville said in [an interview with Vox] that only 6 percent of adults and about 12 percent of Democrats identify as "progressive."

Why does identity-politics militancy and wokeness in general hold such sway over our culture and public policy, then? N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval explains that it is a matter of twenty factors. I won't excerpt from each one, but some of his discussions thereof merit a look:

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…

3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed. It sure seems like the kind of robust communities, civic associations, and “little platoons” which once served to fortify society against the revolutionary (per Burke) and totalitarian (per Arendt) forces that thrive on atomization haven’t suddenly been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact even the most basic such unit, family formation, appears to be continuing to declineprecipitously. And that may be because…

4. Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.

From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…

Most people being on board pales in impact to the fierce determination of an ate-up minority:

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

And when that fierce determination lands that minority in positions of societal leadership, the entrenchment is damn hard to reverse:

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. 

And the generation still getting its worldview formed is warped by being handled with kid gloves:

13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken. Back in 2015, when most people still thought of what is now referred to as Wokeness only as a bizarre and vaguely amusing phenomenon that was isolated to college campuses, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published an essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic (later to become a book of the same name) as an early hypothesis of what was happening. They advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile. By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These unhealthy beliefs included: always trusting your feelings, assuming disagreement is always a personal attack, and believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma. Normalization of these beliefs led to a “cult of safety” on campuses, with hyper-attention devoted to the prevention of offense (because it was now actual “violence”). Hence the emergence of such innovations as “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.”

I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy. But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation. Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…

But I digress. If we assume any of this may be causally related to the Revolution, the real question for us here is: has any of this gotten better? Of course not! The pandemic has had a devastating impact on Gen Z’s already fragile mental health. Up to seven in ten now report feeling depressed. Rates of severe depression rose to around 25%. Hospitalization for suicide attempts by girls in particular rose 51% from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, far from pulling back at all on the “cult of safety,” colleges have now expanded it to absolutely insane levels. So no, the situation has not improved. And from what we know about how totalitarian cults target and more easily exploit the lonely and vulnerable, we can probably safely assume the Revolutionaries will only have more material to work with moving forward, not less, as college graduates remain fragile and/or “entitled” for the foreseeable future. And speaking of anxious, entitled young people…

But perhaps there will be an insistence among the majority of voters and their Senators on someone who will show she's at least not too badly tainted by that my-experience-as-a-member-of-a-certain-demographic-is-definitely-going-to-influence-my-decisions stuff. And in the meantime, the court as currently comprised is not done with its current term. Also, keep in mind that replacing Breyer doesn't change the balance in terms of how justices are likely to vote on cases. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ascertaining Putin's aims

 The notion that he's bluffing is a soothing balm. It would indeed be comforting to think that some kind of deal can be worked out whereby some kind of language vaguely approximating an assurance that Ukraine wouldn't be joining NATO any time soon would be sufficient for Russia to climb down from the present brink.

That doesn't square with facts on the ground, however:

Russian mechanized forces now rolling into Belarus directly threaten NATO, not just Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies are rightly focused on obvious Russian preparations to invade Ukraine and on trying to deter Moscow. Russian troops moving into positions in southeastern Belarus could be preparing to invade, and the West must respond in that context. But Russian forces are also taking up positions on and near the Polish borderwithin about 100 miles of Warsaw and near the Lithuanian border as well. Deployments to these locations serve little purpose as part of a plan to invade Ukraine. They dramatically increase the Russian threat to Poland, however, and to NATO’s ability to defend its Baltic members even more. The U.S. and its Western European allies must respond to this threat to the alliance — whether or not the Russians attack Ukraine.

Seven to 10 mechanized battalions (equivalent to two-to-three brigades with 4,200-9,000 troops) have travelled from Russia’s Far East to Belarus. Two battalions of advanced Russian S-400 air defense systems as well as 12 Su-35 advanced fighters have also deployed to Belarus. Russia’s Defense Ministry claims these forces will remain in Belarus until mid-February for exercises. The exercises will supposedly occur primarily at training areas near Brest (on the Polish border), Baranovichi (northeast of Brest), Grodno (near the Lithuanian-Polish border), and Minsk. These are not the optimal locations from which to invade Ukraine, although Baranovichi is a good rear base from which Russian forces could stage for an attack. Some Russian troops, however, have already appeared in southeastern Belarus, far from any announced training area, and in one of the ideal locations from which to launch an invasion against Ukraine. The new Russian forces therefore threaten both Ukraine and NATO simultaneously.

The Russian move into Belarus is no spur-of-the-moment or opportunistic action. It is part of a long-term plan Vladimir Putin has been pursuing for years, which is why we have been forecasting it for many months. Putin has expressed his intent to open a military air base in Belarus since at least 2015. Russia has been preparing to project forces into Belarus since at least September 2020 through intensified combined exercises with Belarus. Russian troops have also been rehearsing logistics and command-and-control tasks necessary to deploy Russian forces into Belarus, including supplying fuel, ammunition, and other essentials closer to Belarus.

It sure looks like Poland and the Baltics are in Putin's crosshairs as well as Ukraine. 

And he's shoring up his support from a geographically close neighbor of the United States:

Following recent threats of a potential military deployment to Cuba earlier this month, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin discussed the “strategic partnership” and further coordination of “actions in the international arena” with Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel in a call disclosed Monday by the Kremlin.

In a tweet, Díaz-Canel said the two leaders held a “cordial and fruitful telephone conversation” about “the current international situation” and the development of “future links in different spheres.”

I realize that the US has sent Ukraine lethal munitions lately, and that Ukraine is determined to defend its sovereignty, but is 8,500 US troops being placed on "higher alert" for the time being sufficient US participation in that effort?  

Putin's a pretty astute cat. He saw that Germany was, in many ways, a wobbly member of the Western alliance, what with its rush to hobble its own energy independence and sign up for the Nordstream pipeline. That natural-gas delivery system is serving Putin's designs quite well at present:

An undersea pipeline set to deliver gas from Russia to Germany has become exactly what the two countries have always insisted it would never be: A weapon in a geopolitical crisis.

The United States, United Kingdom, Ukraine and several European Union member states have fiercely opposed the pipeline ever since it was first announced in 2015, warning the project would boost Moscow's influence in Europe.

The 1,200-km (750-mile) pipeline was completed in September and is now awaiting final certification. But even though the pipeline isn't operational yet, it has already acted as a huge wedge between the traditional allies at a time of huge tensions between Russia and the West.

According to experts, that on its own is a win for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonpartisan research center, said Moscow has benefited from the drama around the pipeline. "Everything about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been a victory for Russia," she told CNN.

"Given that Russia's aim is to split everybody, if they're seeking to break apart unity in the European Union and in NATO, this pipeline has been a wonderful vessel."

What this adds up to is not a mystery. Putin is not inscrutable. He's perfectly upfront in demonstrating his desire to see the US removed as a military, economic and cultural influence in Europe, and he's willing to risk conflagration on a level not seen since the 1940s to achieve it.  

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Michael Tolhurst of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writing at Discourse, says there are three values that, were we to embrace them, could lift our discussions about how to teach civics and history out of their present dismal state. They are optimism, inclusion and honesty.

Of optimism, he says

When the greatest generation—the generation that went on to lead America through World War II and the Cold War—was in school, the curriculum was very big on American potential and American freedoms. We do want people to feel good about the country and their community. We do not want people to feel alienated from their society. We also want Americans to feel hopeful about the future. A teaching of civics and history that paints our country as irredeemably bad is going to be rejected by citizens who like their country.

History’s Missing Players

Not surprisingly, these books don’t feature many Black people, and it is hard to feel good about your country and hopeful about the future when you’re left out of the picture. The photos in a civics textbook from the 1930s, for example, feature only white children exhibiting the virtues of daily exercise. Immigration is looked upon with suspicion. Native and Black Americans are treated at best with a stiff politeness or with demeaning compliments. A history of Virginia textbook from the 1890s clearly limns out the tropes of the Lost Cause, which rejected Reconstruction and obscured the causes of the Civil War. So, optimism alone can lead to an unthinking jingoism, and is not a sure guide for a better approach to education.

Inclusion - -real inclusion, not perfunctory demographic quota-filling - has to be part of the picture as well: 

Granted, what constitutes “people like me” is murky—it should not be restricted to the arbitrary categories of race, class or gender popular with some theorists, though these characteristics can’t be ignored either. 

And, lastly, we have to keep it real:

If what we are looking for is an inclusive and optimistic rendition of history, we also need one that is as close to true as possible, and we arrive at that truth by checking our interpretations with others. We arrive at that truth by comparing our perspective with the perspectives of others. This is not to say all perspectives are of equal weight—empirical facts put hard constraints on what is plausible to believe.

The recent passing of Joan Didion brought her husband, John Gregory Dunne, some momentary renewed attention. Kevin Mims, writing at Quillette, takes a fresh look at his brother, Dominique Dunne. The arc of his career and life are pretty remarkable in their own right.

David Rose, writing at UnHerd, sheds light on the degree of excuse-making Western climate activists indulge in for the Chinese Communist Party:

A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a reportfor Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

But they got the Western tree-huggers to sell them enough rope:

. . . Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

Recently, LITD has posted fairly frequently about the mounting threats to the US from China and Russia. Lest anyone forget that Iran is part of the mounting-threats club as well, its Quds Force head provides a bracing reminder:

Delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad marking the second anniversary of martyrdom of General Soleimani and remembering Martyrs of the "Resistance Front"Defending the Holy Shrines, The IRGC Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani underlined that the Islamic Republic will take revenge for General Soleimani’s assassination in its own way.

“We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere, wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes without our presence,” Commander Qaani said.

The senior Iranian commander highlighted that Iran will deal with the enemies and the people who committed the crime of assassinating General Soleimani with its own tactics, behavior, style and manner.

Qaani went on to say that it would be much wiser for the US to deal with the criminals who assassinated General Soleimani on their own, as it would be much costlier for the them if “the children of the Resistance Front” are to take the matter in their own hands and take revenge from the Americans by themselves.

“This revenge has begun. Americans will be uprooted from the region,” IRGC Quds Force Commander concluded.

 

Which is why, as Quin Hilyer explains at the Washington Examiner, the US had better take an unflinching look at its preparedness - or, rather, lack thereof - to deal with the mounting-threats club:

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no combination of foreign threats to the United States and the West has been as dangerous as that which we face in 2022 and immediately beyond. The Chinese designs on Latin America, part of which have been described as “buying an empire,” are just a small portion of leader Xi Jinping’s not-so-secret scheme for world domination. Russia’s Vladimir Putin not only continues to ramp up his anti-Western aggressiveness but also now works militarily with its onetime rival China. Iran moves ever and ever closer to nuclear-weapons capacity. 

Indeed, it is sobering to know that nonstate terrorism of the ISIS and al Qaeda variety, which the State Department still labels “a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide,” arguably is now just the fourth most pressing danger facing the West. This is only in small part because of the decline of terrorists’ capabilities, but in larger part a result of the growth in practical menace from China, Russia, and Iran. 

At times of such peril, domestic political crusading and hyper-partisanship ought to be shunned. Of course philosophical differences will always exist, but patriotic leaders should be stressing areas of unity rather than discord. A polity as bitterly divided as the United States is now will be hard to rally. And a nation as financially indebted as today’s U.S. will be hard-pressed to ramp up greater spending for security. 

Consider that in 1941, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, this nation was coming off three straight landslide presidential elections. There was no hint of democratic illegitimacy in the air. And despite nine years of New Deal spending, the ratio of U.S. debt to gross domestic product stood at an eminently manageable 44%, rather than today’s economically frightening, unsustainable 122% (not to mention a mind-boggling $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities). 

All of which is to say that political leaders for now should abjure grand, expensive visions and utopian dreams. Stop trying for “transformational,” systemic change and instead seek collaborative and bipartisan reform. Re-adopt “regular order” procedurally, embrace incrementalism (on all sides), seek consensus even amid philosophical tensions, and put country ahead of party.

A tall order given the shift in attitudes among a chillingly large swath of our populace. Tom Hogan at The Bulwark:

year after supporters of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat, a new survey has found that a small but significant portion of his devotees believes he should be reinstated by any means, including armed revolt.

More generally, the survey, which I sponsored, finds that, although Americans remain strong believers in liberty, there is a powerful undercurrent of potential support for authoritarianism.

The survey of 1,000 American voters was conducted online and by phone between Christmas and New Year’s by political scientist David B. Hill of Hill Research Consultants. Respondents were asked a battery of 21 agree-or-disagree questions—indicators of possible support for or opposition to authoritarianism. The results were then weighted to match national demographics. (The poll results and an explanation of the methodology can be found here.)

The responses showed solid majorities of support for liberty, democracy, and the rights of protesters.

However, nearly half the respondents (49 percent) agreed with the assertion that “Once our leaders give us the go-ahead, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the decay that is poisoning our country from within.”

More than half (56 percent) agreed with the sentiment that the “only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put a tough leader in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading radical ideas.”

Yeah, that's where we are. For real.

I highly recommend "In Defense of Elite Film Criticism" by Hannah Long at The Dispatch. It speaks to one of my preoccupations: standards:

Uncritical enthusiasm—and absolute insistence that lowbrow entertainment is high art—is the order of the day. We don’t just need to enjoy superhero movies, we need them to be up for Best Picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—flailing for relevance—floated a “popular film” category for the Oscars before outcry forced a reversal. Meanwhile, Black Panther and Joker both received Best Picture nominations. A ripoff of Taxi Driver about a comic book character’s antagonist isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, is it?

Look around you: We don’t need more subjectivism. We need more standards. Better standards. Good critics are necessary to help us achieve that. And yes, that means some elitism, because they’ll need to push back on the current populist cinema craze. It means standards.

But aren’t movies about making us feel good? Martin Scorsese may be a great director, but who really wants to rent a Fellini film when the new Spider-Man is playing at the multiplex? As someone with tastes that include plenty of populist pulp content, I’m sympathetic to that argument. And the viewing of art is inescapably an emotional experience, for beauty is not the same as an empirical formula. But it’s too easy to let our emotions run away with us here.

The late British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that beauty is something which engages both our heart and our mind—our passions and our intellect. Beauty, far from merely being “in the eye of the beholder,” is something which can bear objective analysis. Animals can only chase their appetites. We have the ability to remove our self-interest from the equation and appreciate a thing for itself—not for its “survival value” but because it gives survival value, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis.

I can't remember where I came across this piece at Plough by Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson.  It's a little over a year old. Maybe someone on social media referred to it. Anyway, it's entitled "In Search of Charitable Writing: Christian Authors Should Not Discard Christian Virtues In Their Political Writings" and it speaks to the harsh landscape of our political discourse and how it's reflective of our broader societal brittleness, and how there's no avoiding the fact that changing it starts with individual cultivation of traits that add to the light, not the darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can't foresee voting again until I have some kind of choice other than garbage

 The big question being bandied about on this first anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection is about the proper perspective in which to place it.

It is a tricky bit of business to avoid taking a position for opportunistic reasons. 

From the left comes the narrative that that day's events demonstrate that there is no substantive reason to oppose the collectivist, identity-politics-driven and climate-alarmist progressive agenda. In this telling, the fact that Trump supporters had to resort to the tactics they employed shows that they they had no policy proposals or well-thought-out vision of an American essence that withstands the push and pull of momentary shifts in the cultural winds. 

What the leftists have going for them is that theirs is the proper perspective on Trumpism - which, allow me to reiterate once again, is an entirely different animal from what was recognizable as conservatism prior to 2015. An ongoing offering of essays in American Greatness, The Federalist and the Claremont Review of Books notwithstanding, there is no consistent core to Trumpism. It's a hodgepodge of protectionist economics, world-stage swagger about nothing, complete disregard for the degree of character - or complete absence thereof - of its stars and icons, and use of actually pressing problems as tools for grift and brand reinforcement (witness the endless stream of fundraising emails with throbbing headlines about stopping socialism). 

Trumpists are approaching today's anniversary with the lamest sort of whataboutism, reaching back to Democratic attempts to perpetuate falsehoods about Russian collusion in the 2016 election cycle, or Stacey Abrams's unfounded whining about her 2018 Georgia governor's-race defeat. Mollie Hemingway is out with a piece today (look it up yourself; no linky love) that's preoccupied with the role of "powerful tech oligarchies" and states' attempts to compensate for the effects of an unprecedented pandemic as preparations were made for fair and efficient elections in 2020. Whether there's any appreciable degree of validity to anything she's bringing up, the fact remains that 60 courts, including a Supreme Court on which sit three Trump nominees, dismissed claims that the election process had been fishy anywhere in the country. (And this points up just how quick post-Americans in our day are to foul their own nests - that is, sully the validity of legitimate arguments they make by conflating those situations with their pet obsessions. For instance, Hemingway wrote a thoroughly researched and important book on how horribly Brett Kavanaugh was treated during his vetting for his SCOTUS seat. The public understandably has difficulty separating her defense of that good man's character from her out-to-lunch Trumpism.)

Then there's the historical-comparison angle. Was January 6 worse than, or not nearly as bad as, the 1812 British burning of the Capitol, the formation of a separate nation consisting of slaveholding states in 1860 for the purpose of waging war on the Union, the 1954 shoot-up of the House by Puerto Rican nationalists, the entire tumultuous year of 1968, or the racially charge civil unrest that has beset the country over the last eight years or so.

I don't much care for that way of approaching it. It's a lazy way to justify either dismissiveness or obsession. 

If we isolate January 6 in order to examine just what was awful about it, we see that Trump was orchestrating the climate needed for its occurrence. His 2:30 AM statement on November 4, the lawsuits, the hourlong January 2 I-need-you-to-find-11,000-votes call to Brad Raffensperger, the "be there, will be wild" tweet, and his speech to his followers on the Ellipse. And I'm not interested in any kind of smokescreen about how he used the term "peaceably." He told those people that the election had been stolen and that the prospects for the country's continued existence was on the line. He stoked that crowd to maximum frenzy. 

He also tried every trick in the book to pressure Mike Pence into behaving unconstitutionally. And pathetic lapdog that Pence had become, the Vice President had to hear from friend, mentor and veep predecessor Dan Quayle that avoiding his duty to oversee the electoral vote count was impossible. Pence just took it when Trump said that, if Pence didn't come around, Trump didn't want to be his friend anymore, and posed the choice of being a "patriot or pussy" as the one before Pence.

There's also the war room set up at the Willard Hotel and the Peter Navarro plan to keep Trump in office.

In this light, can there be any question that the select House committee looking into the events of a year ago is of supreme importance?

But I would not want to leave the discussion at the level of the facts herein presented. They can't be isolated from the larger problem that made this hot mess possible: Donald Trump's utter unfitness to be president. National Review sounded the alarm at the outset of 2016. In October of that year, the newly surfaced Access Hollywood tape came close to being a deal-breaker for Larry Kudlow, but he swallowed hard and stayed on the team. Karen Pence was so disgusted she tried to get Mike to withdraw his vice-presidential candidacy. On election night, she said, "Well, Mike, you got what you wanted" and refused to give him a congratulatory kiss, telling Mike to leave her alone.

Then the Trump presidency got underway, and along came the stream of outrages documented in the plethora of books written since: calling a roomful of generals dopes and babies, insulting leaders of allied nations to their faces and by phone, the utterly fruitless appeasement of Kim Jong-un, the imposition of tariffs on a wide range of goods the US buys from various trading partners, the kicking to the curb of any Republican political candidate who did not expressly declare unwavering personal loyalty to him. 

January 6 was the most effective shining of the spotlight of truth about people's character - or lack thereof- with regard to the Trump phenomenon to date. Lindsey Graham, who has honed expressions of righteous indignation to an art form, has gone from saying "enough is enough" about support for Trump to saying that he deals with Trump's 'dark side' because Trump has a 'magic' lacking in other Republicans.  It did not take even a month after Kevin McCarthy's January 6 call from the House floor to Trump, in which Trump, who, as we now know, was watching the insurrection live on TV and resisting pleas from family members to act decisively, toyed with McCarthy, casually telling him that maybe the insurrectionists were more upset about the election that McCarthy was, to which McCarthy had to respond by screaming, "Do you know who the fuck you're talking to?" for McCarthy to make the ring-kissing pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.

The binary-choice argument that the Republican Party has used to justify its pathetic existence keeps getting refined to fit the times. Republican activists, apparatchiks and politicians will tell us that the vast majority of party members are grown-up, sensible, policy-steeped citizens who comprise the party's real lifeblood. They're still the ones who give the keynote addresses at Lincoln-Reagan Day dinners, who tap precinct-committee talent from the ranks of loyalists with the pedigree of sometimes several generations of party involvement. They're the ones who are focused on their communities' economic development and basic good government. 

Oh, really? Is that how the likes of Liz Cheney in Wyoming, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Tom Rice in South Carolina, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, and Doug Ducey in Arizona came to be censured by their state parties?

The ones who most nakedly display their desperation to shore up this rotten party play the "move on" card. The American people expect their elected representatives to be about addressing the very real issues on the nation's plate and all that horses---. 

No, the Republican Party is not deserving of one American's vote for any office, federal, state or local, unless it eradicates every last vestige of Trumpism. Since that's an impossible task, the conservatives and moderates who have remained on board must have nothing to do with it.

And going over to the Democrat side is no answer. A party that demonizes the likes of Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema is as fatally infected with its own nihilism as the Republicans.

So, no, there will be no yard signs at my house this year. 

If your conclusion at this point is along the lines of "Wow, this guy has really given himself over to a sense of hopelessness about our political situation," you would not be wrong.

It is so very late in the day.