The Republican Party is an irredeemable sewer

 I wanted so much to believe the South Carolina primary was going to turn out otherwise, but alas:

South Carolina Republican voters on Tuesday split on two US House incumbents who defied former President Donald Trump, renominating Rep. Nancy Mace but souring on Rep. Tom Rice, the first of the 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment last year to fall in a primary.

State Rep. Russell Fry, who was endorsed by Trump, will defeat Rice in the 7th District, CNN projects.

Despite facing a severe backlash over his impeachment vote, including death threats in its aftermath, Rice did not back off his criticism of Trump or decide, like some of his impeachment-backing GOP colleagues, to leave office at the end of his term rather than face voters again. A staunch conservative and Trump supporter before the insurrection, the five-term congressman instead took his case out on the campaign trail. Republicans in his 7th District rejected it – and delivered the nomination to Fry, who will clear the 50% mark to avoid a runoff.

Rice’s ouster underscores Trump’s enduring popularity with most Republicans, especially in conservative districts like the one Rice has represented since 2013. But results in the 1st District demonstrated that the former President’s hold is not entirely firm. 

What happened in Nevada bolsters the case made in the above paragraph:

Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker and leading proponent of Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, won the Republican primary for the Nevada secretary of state’s office Tuesday – adding the Silver State to the growing list of those where election deniers are positioning themselves to take over the election machinery ahead of the 2024 presidential race.

Marchant is seeking to replace Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican who has repeatedly said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, but who is barred by term limits from seeking reelection.

There are a few Republican office-holders - Asa Hutchinson, Ben Sasse, and, of course, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger - who are principled, admirable, and reliably conservative. Kinzinger's bowing out of government service at the end of his current term, and Cheney's in the fight of her life in Wyoming. As for the other two, it remains to be seen how they fare going into the future in a party that, as Cheney has said, has become a cult. At the moment, their having any influence and impact looks like a Sisyphean task.

I know there are still those arguing for staying within the party and striving to wrest it free from this infection and get it back to a path in keeping with its laudatory heritage.

I can't see it. Readers are invited to convince me otherwise, but your case had better be damn compelling. 

And this brings us to a very grim juncture, since the Democrats have utterly failed to provide us with an alternative.

 

 

 

 

This is some cold stuff

 Alexei Navalny can't be found:

Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is missing after being abruptly transferred out of his prison colony to an unknown location, a top aide said Tuesday.

“Where Alexei is now, and which colony he is being taken to, we don’t know,” Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, said in a statement on Telegram.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, had most recently been in custody at Correctional Colony No. 2, a prison camp in Pokrov, 74 miles east of Moscow.

But when Navalny’s lawyer arrived to visit him Tuesday, he was told, “There is no such convict here,” his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.

The Russian government has been making an example out of him to make other dissidents think twice about getting uppity for years. There were the trumped-up embezzlement charges against him and his brother in 2014, leading to his brother being jailed and Alexei being put on house arrest. There was the 2020 poisoning, which led to his current chain of troubles. He was taken to Germany to have the poisoning treated. Upon return to Russia, he was detained for parole violation for having been in Germany. He's been lingering in prison since early 2021, and authorities have menaced him with sleep deprivation and let a number of health issues go untreated.

He has the kind of steely courage that is a rare commodity in this world. 

 

More folks in Congress - including lotsa Democrats - are waking up to the realization that patty cake with Iran was always a bad idea

 The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka, writing at The Dispatch, says that the Biden-era push to revive a deal with Iran on its nuclear ambitions is running out of steam among members of Congress:

“It is time to tell the Europeans—who[m] we have shown good faith with, that we were willing to enter into what was hopefully a stronger and longer deal—that the Iranians are not there,” Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez told the AIPAC New Jersey spring leadership dinner last week. Sure, it was what his audience wanted to hear; AIPAC has been lobbying against Barack Obama’s Iran deal since it was first signed in 2015. But Menendez is not alone. A June 1 non-binding measure offered by Sen. Jim Lankford (R-Oklahoma) demanding that any nuclear agreement address Tehran-sponsored terrorism and opposing sanctions relief for the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps passed with every Republican but one, and 16 Democrats, including Menendez and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Lankford got a lot of support from across the aisle:

Democrats who voted with Lankford: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York ), Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire), Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), Angus King (I-Maine), Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Of the 16, five are up for re-election in 2022, three in tough races (Cortez Masto, Hassan, and Kelly).

And for good reason. Iran has once again been showing itself to bed a bad-faith negotiating partner:

The Board of Governors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution condemning (with only two nations opposing) Tehran’s failure to disclose requested information about nuclear activity at three previously undisclosed sites. While the work was alleged to have taken place prior to 2003, documents spirited from Iran by Israel reveal a complex effort (which included documents stolen from the IAEA itself) to hoodwink the international nuclear agency. Any steps to condemn Iran at the IAEA would follow a two-year hiatus during which European powers and (reportedly beginning in November 2020) the Biden administration tried their best to sweet talk, cajole, bribe, and threaten Tehran back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.

This whole undertaking was always a bad idea. Barack Obama and John Kerry pursed it so vigorously in the first place because they're both flaming narcissists who had some kind of idea that history would regard them as visionaries ushering in an unprecedented era of unicorns and rainbows. Kerry wanted it so badly he was willing to be publicly humiliated and insulted by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at the interminable meetings at which the JCPOA was hammered out. And the Obama administration and those shilling for it continued to offer up flimsy defense of it afterward, even as top Iranian officials continued to cal the US the Great Satan and Iran's number-one enemy, even as Iran continued to wage proxy war through terrorist groups, and even as it captured a US Navy crew - on the day of an Obama State of the Union address - and distributed photos world wide of the crewmen on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

Appeasing bad guys is always a bad idea.

 

 

 

Culture-war forces on both the left and right are bringing about the self-destruction of Institutional Christianity

 There's a Baptist church in Texas that is shoveling fodder to militant secularists with regard to human sexuality:

The pastor of a North Texas church evicted in February from its building for trying to incite violence against the LGBT community is facing protests again after calling for gay people to be executed.

 

“What does God say is the answer, is the solution for the homosexual in 2022, here in the New Testament, here in the book of Romans? That they are worthy of death,” preacher Dillon Awes of Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga said in a Sunday sermon.

“These people should be put to death,” Awes continued. “Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial, they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.”

The pastor isn't the only one in the congregation spewing this stuff:

Jonathan Shelley, another leader of Stedfast Baptist Church, two weeks ago went to an Arlington City Council meeting and said similarly that gays deserved to be killed. He advocated for enforcing an old Texas law outlawing “sodomy” that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003 in the Lawrence V. Texas case and did not carry a death penalty.

 

“What these people do is filthy,” Shelley said at the council meeting during its public comment section.

 

He also called gay people pedophiles and used part of the time addressing the council to plug a homophobic political movie he directed and released in 2021.

On the other hand, the most influential faction of one of post-America's most prominent mainline denominations acted in very bad faith in its dealings with another faction regarding what is indeed sound doctrine concerning human sexuality:

The last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back came this past Tuesday evening, June 7, 2022, when progressive and centrist signers and endorsers of the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation withdrew their support for it. They did so through publishing a website where they abandoned the hard work and hopes of so many. That didn’t prevent them, however, from picking and choosing where they think The United Methodist Church’s Book of Disciplineshould be followed and where it could be conveniently ignored. Their list even includes their take on how theologically conservative churches should be allowed to depart using the extremely expensive and punitive process enumerated in paragraph 2553. Their website was published within a few hours notice to the traditionalist organizations that endorsed and negotiated the Protocol, and there certainly was no consultation. This is duplicitous and done with bad faith. It also makes a mockery of the Book of Discipline, which is our connectional foundation.

The Wesleyan Covenant Association will not stand idly by as progressive and centrist bad actors work to further punish and harm theologically conservative United Methodist local churches who want nothing more than to live out the doctrinal stances that have been upheld by every single General Conference. Through this action, signers of the Protocol Response website including Protocol participants, Tom Berlin, Jun Equila, Jan Lawrence, David Meredith, and Randall Miller have shown their true colors. They believe that they should be able to violate the Discipline, but theological conservatives should be held to the extreme letter of the law. Organizations that have now withdrawn their support like UMCNext, Mainstream UMC, Affirmation, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and Reconciling Ministries Network have made it clear that they prefer lawlessness and complete dysfunction. I’m reminded of the adage, “Rules for thee, but not for me.”

Again, what I hang on to as a wobbly Christian feeling my way back to a life of faith is my core certainty that with all this dross there must be such a thing as real gold. 

 

 

Ed Kilgore is right and Jonathan V. Last wrong re: Pence being some kind of beacon of virtue in the January 6-and-aftermath situation

 There's some kind of political-cultural desperation that I see far too often from far too many people associated with The Bulwark in the tone that Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last's Atlantic piece  in which he strives to make the case that Democrats ought to get enthused about the way Mike Pence has carried himself from January 6, 2021 onward. 

Last just basically goes through what we all know that Pence did right that day, and, for good measure, he mentions Pence's February speech in which he says that Trump was wrong. 

Weak tea.

At this point, I'll cede the floor to Ed Kilgore of New York magazine:

But didn’t Pence show great courage in defying Trump to begin with? Well, that’s less clear. It seems everyone he consulted while he wavered (and he clearly wavered), including former Republican vice-president Dan Quayleand greatly respected conservative legal scholar J. Michael Luttig, told him that of course he had no authority, constitutional or statutory, to do what Trump was asking. The only person telling Pence he did have the authority was Trump’s attorney John Eastman, whose specious arguments would have probably gotten him bounced from a basic constitutional-law course. Indeed, you have to ask yourself whether Eastman would have made this plea to anyone with less than Pence’s long record of intensely, almost religiously obsequious conduct toward Trump. So the veep’s own craven history led to the order he so bravely denied, which means he would come to any Presidential Medal of Freedom award with unclean hands.

It’s also relevant that Pence’s revolt against Trump was and remains extremely limited, as I noted when he got a lot of praise for tough talk about the “un-American” nature of Trump’s demands of him on January 6:

Pence has a strong natural interest in limiting congressional or media scrutiny to the isolated events of January 6. Did he ever disagree publicly or privately with the foundation for an election coup that Trump laid for months and months by attacking voting by mail and claiming his ticket could lose only if the election were rigged? Did he remonstrate with Trump when he claimed an immensely premature victory on Election Night? Did he dissent from the strategy of frantically asserted and entirely bogus fraud charges by the campaign bearing his own name as well as Trump’s? Did he object to the self-certification of victory by fake Trump-Pence electors in December 2020? Indeed, did Pence do anything to get in the way of the attempted theft of the election until Trump called on him to accomplish it in a clearly unconstitutional coup with the whole world watching?

If so, we haven’t heard about it.

Last’s underlying pitch is that Democrats should be trying harder to separate Republican voters who don’t accept Trump’s authoritarian ways from the GOP he still dominates. That makes sense. Is Pence their beau ideal? I certainly hope not since he never repudiated many of the terrible policies the Trump-Pence administration promoted. And as my colleague Ross Barkan recently argued, Pence may be a greater threat than Trump going forward, given his rich history of atavistic cultural and economic positions married to the Hoosier respectability that supposedly saved him and his country from perdition on January 6.

I'll add a personal sentiment here, although it's not actually so personal, since I didn't avail myself of the opportunity to witness the substantiation for my position first-hand.

I live in Columbus, Indiana, the hometown to which Pence returned on the late afternoon of January 20, 2021, after attending Joe Biden's inauguration. Standing on the tarmac of the Columbus Municipal Airport, with his wife Karen at his side, the first damn thing out of his mouth was his wish to thank Donald Trump for four years of service to the nation. 

Seriously.

After the "Hang Mike Pence" chants. After the FBI agent's January 5 warning to Pence chief of staff Marc Short that the president would publicly turn on Pence the next day and pose a security risk to Pence.

I live about a mile and a half from the airport. I was sitting at my desk in my home office and it occurred to me in mid-afternoon that I could go over there and watch this "historic" event. 

I took a pass, and my reason for doing so was quickly validated.

But let's go further back into the Trump era, and let's look at another Hooiser connection. Let's look at what Bob Woodward reports in his book Rage about a particular state dinner at which Marilyn Coates, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates's wife, gave Pence a most intense facial expression conveying the message, "how can you continue to be part of this?", and how Pence shot her back a look conveying the message, "You and Dan need to please stay the course.' (I'm paraphrasing here.)

Mike Pence is no hero. He's doing his best to straddle. Lord only knows why. His goose is cooked politically. 

I guess none of us want posterity to have the chance at framing us as human beings who came up short when circumstances called upon us to do the hard but right thing.

Thursday roundup

 Joel Kotkin of Chapman University has an overarching-scope-type piece at Quillette on how cities got going early in human history, how they evolved, and how they reached their present state. He says people originally started coming together to live in dense population clusters to make and trade things. In the last century, the city's purpose - and he maintains it's true of cities worldwide - has morphed into their becoming places "dominated by elite business services operating out of high-rise towers - the commanding heights of the world economy, beneath which all others were relegated to subordinate roles." Now, in the late stage of this phase, inequality in cities is glaring and increasing. The class that is doing well has also to a considerable degree left those towers for a remote work style. Meanwhile, the class at the bottom of the hierarchy is increasingly living in desperation and despair. Where to go from here?

Meghan Murphy has a piece at Spiked entitled "Why I Left the Left," and she delivers on the title's promise. She began adult life with her leftist bona fides in impeccable order:

I have been dedicated to the left since I was a teenager. As a young woman, I identified as a Marxist, viewing even socialists as ‘not left enough’. I voted for Canada’s left-wing party, the New Democratic Party, in every provincial and federal election from the time I was 18 until a few years ago. I viewed anyone who voted for our centrist party – the Liberal Party, now led by Justin Trudeau – as right-wing. I was not just left, but left of the left, and proud of it.

But she came to see that, as identity politics took center stage, the Left was going to factionalize and eat its own:

In feminism, a lot of time is dedicated to asking why our movements, forums and activist groups quickly descend into infighting, drama and toxicity. During my time working with feminist collectives, it was always impossible to come to any decision. Meetings were often held hostage by narcissists who wished to make everything about their various afflictions and ‘trauma’, and who were willing to tear the group apart, seemingly just to test their power.

All this is ingrained in the leftist approach now, where ‘Safe Spaces’ are prioritised over getting things done, and where being an ‘ally’ means publicly proclaiming solidarity or condemnation, regardless of one’s individual thoughts or opinions. Independent thought is treated as a threat.

Any movement that treats those who achieve success, a platform or any form of power as traitors to be torn down and destroyed – or thinks that advocating for universal civil rights and liberties is ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’ or ‘transphobic’ – is not a movement ‘for the people’. 

Jonah Goldberg's latest makes the point I was making in a post here at LITD the other day - namely, that nothing good's going to come from Democrats on the House January 6 committee muddying the waters by calling for abolishing the Electoral College. He covers more considerations than I did, such as the fact that, in an at least somewhat more perfect world, there wouldn't be a need for a January 6 committee:

The January 6 committee shouldn’t be necessary because the proper response and remedy to the attack should have been a rapid impeachment and conviction. The defeated president suborned a mob to hector and harass Congress into invalidating a presidential election. A Congress with an iota of institutional and constitutional sense would have done so within a few days of the attack. All of the vital evidence and testimony sought by the committee should have been sought by a Senate trial.

Andrew Donaldson, writing at Spectator World, shows that Joe Biden has no one but himself to blame for the present morass in which he finds himself.

Monsignor James Shae's remarks upon receiving the 2022 Canterbury Medal from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty are priceless. Wherever you see yourself re: ideology, culture, or on the big questions of ultimate reality, this guy will explain to you, with appropriate portions of humility, humor and bedrock conviction in the rightness of what he believes, why Christians can’t maneuver through the modern world in any way other than the way they do.

 

 

 

The current narrative about why Ilya Shapiro's tweet was inartful is not why it was inartful

 He might have done a little better job explaining it himself, but perhaps he didn't want to make his situation any stickier than it already was. 

Let's review exactly what it was that he said:

[Now former] Georgetown University Law Center professor Ilya Shapiro . . . 

fac[ed] criticism for tweeting that Biden “doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman” . . . Following the tweet, Shapiro did apologize while under fire, calling his remarks “inartful.”

Now, it seems pretty obvious that he was saying that there are far more qualified black women than Ketanji Brown Jackson that Biden could have considered for a Supreme Court seat. Yes, there's a broader context, which is that he didn't much care for Biden using a demographic criterion in the first place for selecting a nominee.  But his specific remark was predicated on acknowledging that Biden was going to go forward with an identity-politics approach to the pick.

But such fine points of reality were of no help to the professor as the opprobrium came raining down on his head:

Outraged Georgetown students and faculty demanded his removal and ultimately, they got what they wanted. Shapiro was set to begin his job at the university this month after the investigation concluded but he decided to quit. He wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about his decision.

More on Shapiro’s decision from Insider:

Georgetown Law concluded its investigation and reappointed Shapiro to his role on June 2, but he ended up quitting on Monday, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing his resignation.

“Dean William Treanor cleared me on the technicality that I wasn’t an employee when I tweeted, but the [report’s findings] implicitly repealed Georgetown’s Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy,” he wrote.

“Instead of participating in that slow-motion firing, I’m resigning.”

Since this guy's career has been completely upended, keeping the record straight about this is kind of a big deal. Unaddressed misinterpretations can set precedents.  

Why post-America can't have nice things - today's edition

 This pattern recurs over and over these days. Some folks get together and start doing something good and right and then some idiot throws a wrench in the works, jeopardizing the entire undertaking. 

The January 6 investigative committee in the House is an excellent thing, and many of us have been looking forward to the upcoming public hearings.

But then this clown floats this garbage idea:

According to Axios, at least one Democrat on the committee — although maybe only one — is ready for that.

In multiple conversations among committee members,[Jamie] Raskin has argued that the Electoral College should be abolished — that if presidents were elected by a popular vote, this would protect future presidential elections against the subversion that Trump and his allies tried to pull off in 2020…

Cheney thinks the committee will burn its credibility if it pushes for radical changes like abolishing the Electoral College, according to a source with direct knowledge.

She also has joked to her colleagues on the committee that there’s no way the single at-large representative for the tiny state of Wyoming would support abolishing the Electoral College, according to another source with direct knowledge of the internal committee deliberations.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has spoken up in the committee to concur with Raskin on the problems with the Electoral College, that same source added. However, Schiff is far more focused on changes to the Electoral Count Act — a reform that is much more likely for the committee members to agree upon.

Just dandy. Thanks for nothin', pal.

That's all the drool-besotted throne sniffers who ostracized Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for being on the committee are going to need to do their "see-what-we-mean?" schtick:

. . . needless to say, the party that’s lost every national popular vote since 1992 save one isn’t going to receive Raskin’s recommendation fondly. On the contrary, Republican voters will conclude that the January 6 committee was never really about accountability for the 2020 coup attempt but just a trojan horse for advancing Democrats’ preexisting voting-reform priorities. The congressional GOP is already set to spend the next month grasping for ways to discredit and distract from the committee’s hearings; Raskin chattering about abolishing the electoral college is a gift-wrapped opportunity for them to change the subject.

Maybe some saner heads among the Dems - wait, are there any of those with any influence? - can prevail upon Representative Raskin to shut his pie hole and stick with the committee's core mission.  

Ben Sasse is of that endangered breed: the principled and visionary Republican

 I'm gonna have to avail myself of the entirety of the Senator's Reagan Foundation speech, either in transcript or video form. The excerpts from it that I'm coming across are like drops of spring water on a parched landscape.

About the current state of both of post-America's political parties, he says this:

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., lit into the “weirdos” that he said are tearing the United States apart, in a fiery speech at the Reagan Foundation that connected the hyperbolic political debates of the last few years with the global threats facing the nation.

The Nebraska Republican ripped into “performance artists” on the far left and far right who have dominated politics for close to a decade, saying they’re more focused on getting likes and retweets for themselves on social media than on preserving the United States’ standing as a global superpower amid new threats from adversaries like China.

“This is a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos and for the weirdos,” Sasse said Thursday night in California. “Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack — mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there.”

He says that in 2016, both parties appealed to the post-American public's inclination to find reasons to see itself as a bunch of victims:

[Sasse said] that in 2016, American voters were presented with two candidates whose "fundamental diagnosis was really the same" and that both sought to victimize voters.

"The system's rigged, you're getting screwed, you're a victim, the country's going down the tubes," Sasse said mockingly. "You're victims."

And he offered a pretty bold foreign-policy vision:

Sasse later laid out a list of specific policies to counter China, including a trillion-dollar U.S. defense budget and a “NATO for the Pacific”: 

• Let’s pass a trillion-dollar defense budget, but let’s radically cut the share that goes to legacy systems and platforms that employ an army of lobbyists. In a new era of cyber and asymmetric war, let’s make sure we’re getting maximum lethal capacity for every taxpayer dollar spent – by overhauling procurement policies that aren’t just too expensive but primarily way, way too slow.

• Let’s build a “NATO for the Pacific.” We need allies to get back on the offensive against the CCP, and those allies need US leadership. NATO in Europe has been the greatest treaty organization in history. It held the line against the Soviets, and it’s now holding the line against bloody Putin. But as Chairman Xi looks to expand his sphere of influence, we need a new military alliance centered far out into the Pacific. This is our main foreign policy work.

• Let’s streamline our intel agencies so we can win a shadow war with the Chinese Communist Party.

• Let’s arm the Taiwanese military to the teeth. Let’s amend the Taiwan Relations Act directly to make our security guarantee explicit. No more strategic ambiguity.

• Let’s pair military partnerships with economic partnerships and end the nonsense anti-trade policies of the last two administrations. Pacific NATO should be a free-trade zone, too. Trade is a win-win because when Americans compete, we win.

If the GOP has a future, it will be led by folks like this, not the current crop of sycophants, nuts and cowards steering its course. 

 

 

An appallingly amoral foreign policy framework

 ADA University professor Damjan Krnjevic Miskovic has a piece at The National Interest today the thrust of which is basically that he's in Henry Kissinger's corner with regard to Ukraine. He does offer his own elaboration of that position, and it's one I find icy in the extreme.

I have no problem, in and of itself, with an assertion he makes in the first paragraph:

Disorder cannot be transcended because human nature is not pliable like Play-Doh: we have deceived ourselves into confusing humanity’s indisputable technological progress with the illusion of our moral progression. 

But when he brings two of the most hardass historians of all time into the discussion, we get our first hint of where he's going with his argument:

 

Only in periods of history in which sophistry is mistaken for prudence and deliberation is permitted to atrophy into wishful thinking can there be a failure to understand that the teachings of thinkers like Thucydides and Machiavelli describe and explain the ways of the world better than any chiliastic alternative.

I really don't even have a problem with Miskovic's summation of the Kissinger view of what is possible regarding a sustainable world order in general:

As Kissinger has rightly underlined, no balance of power system has ever been designed to eliminate crises and conflicts. When functioning properly, such systems of international order are simply meant to limit the scope of domination and conflicts. Their aim is to foster both stability and moderation, not perpetual peace or other such nonsense. Optimally, a balance of power system keeps everyone’s dissatisfaction at a low enough level to not result in attempts to overthrow the basic tenets of the system.

That actually sounds about right. No world-stage arrangement can be expected to be permanent. 

I also think his point that the absence of an envisioned outcome in Ukraine, broadly agreed upon in the West, is going to have to be addressed pretty soon:

After one hundred days of driving, the destination remains unknown: the fundamental question of Western war aims in the conflict over Ukraine is simply not being answered—not just in public, which is fine, but most probably in private, too, which is not. Is the aim to engender regime change in the Kremlin? The destruction of Russia’s capability to fight and win wars? A return to Soviet-era living standards for the citizens of the Russian Federation? A war crimes tribunal? A ceasefire? A peace agreement? A territorial settlement? A new European security architecture?

But in the next paragraph, he employs the term "maximalist" to describe Kyiv's position - i.e., that it will not give up any territory that has been seized by Russia, certainly since February of this year, and, if possible, since 2014. As he pursues his argument, it becomes clear he means "maximalist" in a disparaging way.

And then he really get to the crux of his rationale, which is that, since Ukraine is not militarily powerful enough to qualify as a first-tier world power, its demand for justice amounts to nothing more than a ratcheting up of the danger level in relations between those first-tier powers:

. . . the truth is—however uncomfortable it may be to accept—that Ukraine was and remains an object of great power relations and not a subject of international order. Indeed, it would be hard to argue persuasively that a country that depends almost entirely on the free guns, ammo, and reconnaissance supplied by foreign powers is either fully sovereign or fully independent, regardless of its regime type.

Sounds harsh? Well, the support provided to Ukraine by the West comes in the form of arms sales and weapons transfers, military training, real-time intelligence sharing, direct cash grants and massive loan guarantees, an open-door refugee policy, and the threat of repurposing billions of U.S. dollars of seized Russian assets for reconstruction coupled with the promise of spending untold amounts of Western resources on the same. A report by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy indicates that between January 24 and May 10, 2022, the West (this includes Turkey) provided at least €64.6 billion worth of military, financial, and humanitarian commitments to the country, of which €42.9 billion (66 percent) came from the United States (more than half of the U.S. contribution is earmarked for military and weapons purchases). These staggeringly large figures appear to be conservative estimates, given that they neither include commitments by international financial institutions, philanthropies, and other non-governmental actors. And since the publication of that report, such unprecedented quantities may have already doubled.

It is thus becoming increasingly hard to disprove the Kremlin’s claim that the conflict over Ukraine amounts to a proxy war between the West and Russia—or at least that it has become one since the West realized that Moscow’s “special military operation” would not produce the rapid capitulation of the government in Kyiv. Consequently, the West was able to rally behind Kyiv’s “David versus Goliath” narrative, personified by its young and telegenic president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

A bit later, this disparaging use of the term "maximalist" shows up twice in one paragraph:

. . . one or another version of this maximalist posture is irresponsibly being encouraged by various Western leaders, as epitomized by the young and telegenic Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, whose position the New York Times characterizes as Russia “must be defeated at all costs, and without compromise.” Other members of this Western maximalist faction include some (but not all) leaders of former Warsaw Pact states (all of which are now NATO members, which means they’re armed with the near-certain knowledge that they will not have to suffer the consequences of their tough talk), the UK government, and some parts of the Biden administration, including (it sometimes seems) the president himself.

As he unfolds his argument some more, he brings up a point that let's-drop-Ukraine-like-a-hot-potato types of several stripes like to mention: that Ukraine in modern times has a history of instability and corruption.  I would offer the view that, even though the invasion by Russia is ongoing, we have already seen a dramatic shift in the political character of Ukraine. There is not only the resolve of President Zelenskyy, but that of the mayors of cities around the country, the clarity with which members of the Ukrainian parliament have spoken on Western media and to Western forums, and, finally, the deep humanity of the citizens-turned-refugees. It may seem like a small matter, but I've been impressed with the number of them who were unwilling to leave their pets behind as they fled their homes.

No, Professor Miskovic, while you may have a point that no one should expect that a Ukrainian victory would usher in an age of unicorns and rainbows, it is in the interest of the West to foster such an outcome because it is right. If you'd like me to put that in more pragmatic terms, letting an unjust outcome suffice sets a precedent of which other hegemonic powers will take note. Want an example? China's designs on Taiwan will be given encouragement.

Sorry, Professor, but what you're dishing up is a highbrow justification for appeasing the bad guy. 

 

 

 

The Navy secretary's dangerously skewed priorities

 He's basing policy direction for his branch of the military on the utter hooey about the global climate being in a dire situation:

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro just released “Climate Action 2030,” a 32-page report which identifies climate change as an “existential threat” to the U.S. Navy and the nation. In the report’s Foreword, Del Toro writes that climate is “the focal point” for his tenure as Navy Secretary, and notes that both President Biden and Defense Secretary Austin share that view. The Navy Department, Del Toro writes, will be an “environmental leader” that takes “bold climate action.” 

Here's how this will translate into actionable steps: 

The Navy Department report establishes two performance goals: to “build climate resilience” and “reduce climate threat.” Del Toro’s stated goal is to have the Navy Department “reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” “stabilize ecosystems,” and “achieve … net-zero emissions by 2050.” Compare that to the goal of our nation’s most threatening naval adversary — China’s PLA Navy — which is to become the world’s leading naval power by 2049.

The Navy Department report is filled with color photographs of hurricanes, floods, electric vehicles, military families participating in an “oyster castle installation,” naval installations with solar panels, naval officers helping with disaster relief efforts, employees at a naval base planting salt marsh plants, electric-powered amphibious assault ships, and naval officers helping to install “mosquito surveillance and control equipment.” 

With regard to Del Toro noting that his focus is shared by Lloyd Austin and Biden, that's true. It's one of two points of focus, the other being the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion push.  

You want to talk some real existential threats? Situations such as Russia loading cruise missiles onto its submarines in the Black Sea and China surrounding Taiwan on massive "invasion rehearsal" drills in early May qualify or at least approach that status, don't they?

If the secretary is looking for a scenario to get that alarmed about, there's one staring him in the face. He doesn't need to get own board with a transition to play-like energy forms, the real aim of which would be to halt human advancement. 

 

The burden of being male

 I found this a right-between-the-eyes piece about spree killers. I'll excerpt at length, but I have some thoughts of my own to add. 

It finds a common theme among such individuals, discussion of which is unavoidable:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge. “If I cannot rise above them,” he wrote, “I will destroy them.” When Rodger finally buys a handgun, he is happy for the first time since childhood. “I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”

We don’t know yet what motivated Salvador Ramos, the teenage gunman who killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, last week, but we do know that like most shooters, he was a misfit and social outcast. Early reporting suggests that he spent recent months harassing teen girls on social media, “repeating girls’ names until they paid attention to him”, and expressing to them his desire to get his “name out there” like the Canadian murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. The Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron, was also an oddball with a history of making threats, although his immediate motives seem to have been more ideological than social or sexual. Even so, in the course of his white supremacist diatribe, he blamed “weak” “European men” for the degeneracy of the West and concluded that “strong men are needed to fix it”.

Whatever the nominal motivations behind them, rampage shootings are nearly always a product of wounded masculinity. “They are the most masculine of crimes,” says Ralph Larkin, a criminologist at John Jay College who has studied mass shootings for decades. “Can you think of more than four or five female mass shooters? There aren’t any.” Shooters, Larkin says, are “marginal males who feel they have been wronged by society, and so they pick up a gun. There is always a sense of violated entitlement, and I don’t care whether it’s school shootings or racist shootings.”

The phenomenon has its origins in that fabled decade, the1960s.  The impact of the upheaval wrought by that ten-year period, while already written about seemingly exhaustively, is not going to be fully comprehended for some time, if ever.

Modern mass shootings, according to Larkin, began in 1966, when Charles Whitman, a former Marine with an undiagnosed brain tumour, murdered his wife and mother before climbing to the top of a tower in downtown Austin, Texas, and shooting 14 people to death. Larkin speculates that the sudden rise in these shootings was a reaction to the sexual liberation of the Sixties and the corresponding rise in the status of women — a point on which some of the more historically minded murderers would no doubt agree. “We’re talking about toxic masculinity here.”

The boldface in the following portion is mine:

Toxic masculinity, of course, is a somewhat slippery concept. Colloquially, it refers to the elements of traditional masculinity — competition, stoicism, aggressiveness, physical strength, a willingness to resort to violence — that fit awkwardly or not at all into modern liberal culture. A 2019 explainer in the New York Times defined it as “a set of behaviours and beliefs” that men are socialised into from a young age, including “suppressing emotions or masking distress”, “maintaining an appearance of hardness”, and “violence as an indicator of power”. More than a few articles have flagged toxic masculinity, combined with Americans’ easy access to guns, as one of the causes of mass shootings.

These elements of masculinity can no doubt be “toxic” in the wrong circumstances — the problem is with the assumption that they are purely a product of cultural scripts, rather than reflections of something inherent in men. Francis McAndrew, a psychologist who has studied mass shootings, told me that while socialisation plays a role in encouraging some forms of male violence, it does not create it out of thin air. This is particularly true for young men, who are ultra-sensitive to status competition, which historically would have determined their ability to attract women and form alliances with other men. Young men, McAndrew says, have been selected to regard adolescent social hierarchies as a matter of life and death.

“Today, you can go to college or move to a new city,” McAndrew says. “But when we were evolving, whatever happened during adolescence was a life sentence. And if you established yourself as a bad dude that nobody messed with, that could work to your advantage. Our minds are still stuck in that past of needing to be paid attention to. And the guys who don’t get that experience all kinds of dark emotions. They feel left out, they feel like losers, they feel desperate, and they need to make a statement.” 

Truth right there. Before I found my niches in writing and music, to which I was driven in no small part by this need to establish for myself some kind of substantive masculinity, I tried sports, specifically,  ninth-grade football and track. It went badly. It put me squarely into the most blatant pecking-order environment possible. 

But there's also a generational aspect to this, at least in a lot of cases. My relationship with my dad was fraught and complex, a subject into which I could be tempted to digress beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that raising a son was a task he undertook with the greatest intensity. When I started running in the evenings in late summer before football practice got underway, I remember him telling a neighbor - the father of two boys, who had very set notions of what a solid guy was - "That boy wants to play football so bad he can taste it." No, Dad, I was just looking for a way to get noticed by girls.

Macdougald, in this UnHerd piece, points out that there's irony in modern society's search for individuation, for its inclination to venerate the original. Our DNA winds up grouping us anyway:

Everyone is supposed to be an individual, and all individuals are respected equally. Yet beneath this injunction and guarantee are all the typical modes of conformity and hierarchy we would expect of a human society. The beautiful, the talented, the athletic, the funny, and the interesting rise above the ugly, the clumsy, the anxious, the introverted, the boring, and the resentful.

These relative statuses, for the losers, are all the more painful for being nothing other than a reflection of who and what they actually are. “Individuality” is wonderful when your true self is a tall and handsome swimmer with an unexpected love of classical cello, or a beautiful girl who likes to go backpacking with her friends. But who, really, is someone like Salvador Ramos, an odd-looking boy who disturbs nearly everyone he talks to, whose hobbies include shooting people with BB guns and throwing dead cats at strangers’ houses? Does anyone, really, want someone like that to be himself? I doubt it.

I'd already been thinking along these lines this morning when I ran across this piece, and I'll further flesh out those thoughts, probably in a piece over at Precipice. So many of us in modern society are clamoring for some way back to a time of stability and reliable norms. On the other hand, we disparage much about those times - before the above-mentioned  1960s - because there seems, from our twenty-first century perspective, much about life then that was stultifying and repressive and damping to the imagination. 

I'd wager that the situation is more complicated.

As I say, I think I'm going to have more to say about it.

For now, I'd just point out that exercising responsible stewardship over this thing called masculinity is both necessary and difficult.