In response to 上油管挂什么加速器 I have heard from a few (white) people who say something like this: Nothing we can do is right. If we speak, we’re wrong to speak; if we’re silent, we’re wrong to be silent. What are we supposed to do??

If you feel that people are treating you unfairly … well, to this at least there’s a straightforward answer for Christians:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

And like the commandment to forgive, this one doesn’t come with exceptions.

Easier said than done, right? Much easier. (I speak to you as the all-time grandmaster of Talking A Good Game.) And yet there’s a simplicity about this that’s immensely liberating. Just knowing what I’m supposed to relieves me of the burden of worrying about other people’s intentions, other people’s morals. 求上油管的加速器 what their intentions and their morals are: my job is precisely the same whatever the state of their souls.

These are the words I’ve decided to spend the next month meditating on: Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Rod Dreher has a post today about 用户共享脚本 | X浏览器:YouTube 视频下载手机版 下载 YouTube 视频手机版 1 7 0 sl00p 网页限制解除 ... 浏览 器 无 5 3 0 me 知乎网页辅助 去强制下载链接 6 4 2 ZH-TX .... Rod’s post turned up a day after I got an email from a woman whose daughter is thinking of applying to Baylor — she had seen President Livingstone’s letter and wondered whether it constitutes Baylor’s official policy on race now. My correspondent expressed her conviction that racism is deeply embedded in American society and, tragically, in the Christian church also, but then asked: “Is it possible for a student to thrive at Baylor if she doesn’t think white people are evil and the source of everything bad in the world?”

I don’t think that anything in Baylor’s statements about race in America, and at Baylor,  indicates hatred of white people, nor claims that everything bad in the world is perpetrated by us. But the sins of white people are certainly the focus. There’s justification for that. We’re going through a nationwide reckoning on race that is long overdue. The problem is that it is not a very good or constructive reckoning. Baylor could help with that, if it wanted to. But I’m not sure Baylor wants to.

The problem doesn’t really lie with what Baylor says, even though most of Baylor’s public statements paint the situation with far too broad and coarse a brush. For instance, consider the several statements that denounce white supremacy. I think white supremacy exists and is 海外加速器YouTube, but there’s a big difference between white supremacy and  garden-variety racial prejudice — which is more destructive, overall, but less wicked. White people who are bigoted against black people aren’t on those grounds white supremacists, any more than Christians who sin habitually are on those grounds Satanists.

But any quibbles I have about what’s included in Baylor’s statements are insignificant in comparison to my concern about what’s not in them. There is quite a lot about repentance, but I have yet to find one single word about forgiveness, or reconciliation, or hope.

Christianity has a lot to say about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. It tells us that we all sin. It tells us that when we sin against a sister or brother, in thought, word, or deed, we must seek to make it right, and to ask that person’s forgiveness. And if we feel that someone has sinned against us, we are to tell that person so, to give them the opportunity to repent. The New Testament authors go on and on about these matters. 1 John 1: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; but also we should take care to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3) — we must do more than speak words of penitence, but also pay our debt to our neighbor, the debt of love (Romans 13). And our overall daily approach to one another is prescribed by St. Paul in Ephesians 4: “So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another…. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Also in Colossians 3: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.”

If you’re not a Christian, this stuff probably looks like a way to let people off easy. And in one sense it is. As Hamlet says, “Treat every man according to his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Christianity is all about people not getting what they deserve, and genuine repentance + the grace of forgiveness is the engine that makes this happen. And, for Christians, them’s the universal rules: there are no exceptions.

It’s become fashionable, in some circles, to denounce calls for reconciliation. Some say, “We don’t want reconciliation, we want justice.” But to Christians, reconciliation is what justice is for. When injustice marks our relations, then what is unjust must be repaired or healed in some way, insofar as that is possible, so that we may live peaceably and lovingly with one another. Walking away from one another is not, for Christians, an option. Forgiveness must be asked for and granted, ordered and received.

In my judgment, it is the opportunity to receive and extend forgiveness that is the greatest possible inducement to repentance and amendment of life, and — I cannot stress this too strongly — a shared repentance and amendment of life make genuine community possible. I have many colleagues who believe the same, and students at Baylor can find us. We will join the prophets and cry out for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. But we will also echo St. Paul and tell you that we Christians forgive others because God in Christ has forgiven us. We will tell you that your shortcomings and failures can never outpace the mercy of God, who loves his wayward children, all of them, and will someday wipe from their eyes every tear. This is the great hope of those who wound as well as those who are wounded. And all of us sometimes wound and sometimes are wounded.

(And then we will sit down at a table and strive better to understand, and better to pursue, the good, the true, and the beautiful.)

But does Baylor University, as an institution, believe in any of this? If so, why is none of it ever mentioned in our administration’s public statements about race and racism?  Why do we strive to build an entire system of dealing with racism that doesn’t touch on the Christian Gospel at any point? Why don’t we offer a word of hope? President Livingstone likes to say, “The world needs a Baylor.” If Baylor simply echoes the language and the policies of other institutions, then no, the world really doesn’t need a Baylor. But if we think and speak and act out of a deep commitment to the Gospel of the Crucified and Risen One, then we can make a difference indeed.

---

(This is an updated and significantly revised version of the post I wrote yesterday.)

It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve moved from a situation in which people wanted to punish athletes for kneeling before a game to one in which other people want to punish athletes for not kneeling before a game. But there is at least a consistency of principle, one articulated by T. H. White in The Once and Future King: “The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.”

I was pretty excited when I learned about HEY, because it’s been a long time since anyone did any real innovation in email, even though email remains a major part of our lives. Gmail was the last innovator, and I put that in the past tense because that service has received only minor tweaks in the past decade, and its really significant ideas were implemented fifteen years ago. I decided to drop the hundred bucks necessary for a HEY account, and since then I’ve continued to work in my existing email setup while forwarding all my mail to HEY, just to give it a corpus to work on.

You need to do that because HEY requires some training to learn your email needs. Whenever an email comes in from a new sender, HEY doesn’t put it in your inbox — which it, rather unfortunately, calls your Imbox — but rather asks you what you want to do with emails from that sender: decline to receive it (at which point it disappears), file it along with receipts and other businessy things in what HEY calls the Paper Trail, move it with newsletters and the like into the Feed, or send it to the Imbox. HEY remembers your decisions for each sender and in the future follows your instructions. So there’s a good deal of training to be done at first, but over time that lessens. I’ve been dropping in a couple of times a week to work through the arriving mail, so if I do decide that I want to employ it full-time it will already be largely usable.

It’s a brilliantly designed service, I think, elegant and attractive and efficient, and I think the appeal increases in proportion to how badly you feel punished by your email. HEY basically says, “Throw out everything you have ever thought about email and do things our way.” It offers very few options to customize the service, and it can only be accessed through its website or its apps: basically you can follow the HEY way or there’s no HEY for you at all. And that’s not a criticism! — a controlled, uniform experience is really the whole point of the service. If like me you have worked hard over the years to develop a system for managing email, and that system works reasonably well, then you might not want to discard all that work to embrace a different system. But if you’re feeling defeated by email, then HEY is likely to be a really good answer.

There’s one main reason why I can’t now use HEY: All of my email, from all the accounts I have, are channeled into Gmail: from there I can reply to messages using the address to which they were sent. When I get a message at my Baylor address, especially if it’s internal, I need to be able to reply from my that address, and Gmail spoofs that address adequately. That allows me to have all my messages from all accounts in one place, organized using the same set of rules — rules which are also, by the way, applied equally on all my devices, which is not true of, say, Apple’s Mail app. (Even after more than a decade, you can’t set any rules at all in iOS, which is frankly ridiculous.) If I were to shift from Gmail to HEY, I’d have to go back and forth between HEY and another email client, which would be annoying. But if HEY ever implements the reply-from-the-account-to-which-the-message-was-sent option (RFTATWTMWS, as I like to call it), then it might be a real option for me.

Since I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s renewed Dish, Andrew has reported that subscriptions are near 60,000 — probably over that mark by now — and David Brooks has weighed in with a smart take. As always, David is hopeful:

Mostly I’m hopeful that the long history of intellectual exclusion and segregation will seem disgraceful. It will seem disgraceful if you’re at a university and only 1.5 percent of the faculty members are conservative. (I’m looking at you, Harvard). A person who ideologically self-segregates will seem pathetic. I’m hoping the definition of a pundit changes — not a foot soldier out for power, but a person who argues in order to come closer to understanding.

And as always, I’m a little less hopeful than David — or maybe I place my hope in slightly different places — in ways that I can explain by quoting another passage from his column:

Other heterodox writers are already on Substack. Matt Taibbi and Judd Legum are iconoclastic left-wing writers with large subscriber bases. The Dispatch is a conservative publication featuring Jonah Goldberg, David French and Stephen F. Hayes, superb writers but too critical of Trump for the orthodox right. The Dispatch is reportedly making about $2 million a year on Substack.

The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling. A young, talented heterodox thinker doesn’t have to worry that less talented conformists in his or her organization will use ideology as an outlet for their resentments. The next good thing is there are no ads, just subscription revenue. Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.

Is it really true that there’s “no canceling” on Substack? I think we’ll only know that in time. We’re about two weeks, by my reckoning, from #BoycottSubstack becoming a prominent hashtag on Woke Twitter. It would be stupid for Substack to care. But in the past year or two a whole lot of organizations have been stupid enough to fold in the face of a few red-faced social-media scolds.

So maybe there will be canceling on Substack — but there are many alternatives to Substack. And the really good thing about all this is that newsletters are built on 求上油管的加速器, and email is transmitted through a series of open protocols that no one controls. It would be perfectly possible for people like Andrew and Matt Taibbi and other independent thinkers, if they got canceled by Substack, to hire someone to build out their own distribution system and continue as though nothing had ever happened.

The woke mobs are apoplectic, but not always stupid: they have reliably gone straight at the gatekeepers of culture, and the gatekeepers of culture, faced with a handful of people with plenty of spare time and no rhetorical restraint, have reliably folded like a cheap tent. So what’s the point of reading, much less paying for, a magazine or newspaper where, as Bari Weiss has rightly said of the NYT, “Twitter is the ultimate editor”? You know that almost everything you read will have been vetted to ensure that it conforms to the Authorized Narrative, so why bother? Even if you actually believe in the Authorized Narrative, do you really need to pay money to have your opinions confirmed, day after day?

No; I think even some of the woke, or at least the wokish, will send their money to venues,and writers, who say what they actually think. What a concept! And what makes this possible is the open web and the pre-web internet. How cool is that?

One of the greatest things about the open web and the pre-web internet is that they work at any scale. There is no difference, from the reader’s perspective, between reading a newsletter with 250,000 subscribers and reading one with ten subscribers. As I wrote a while back,

Facebook is the Sauron of the online world, Twitter the Saruman. Let’s rather live in Tom Bombadil’s world, where we can be eccentric, peculiar perhaps, without ambition, content to tend our little corner of Middle Earth with charity and grace…. Whether what I’m doing ultimately matters or not, I’m finding it helpful to work away in this little highland garden, above the turmoil of the social-media sea, finding small beautiful things and caring for them and sharing them with a few friends. One could do worse.

And in case you don’t know, my own little contribution to the Republic of Newsletters may be found here.

Jill Lepore wrote, “One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.” In fact, the actual percentage is not 66% but something closer to 0.2%.

Estimate subject to further correction, of course, but there’s no question that Lepore misread the relevant study and misread it very badly indeed. The sentence I quoted has now been changed, with an acknowledgement of error at the bottom of the article.

The interesting thing to me here is that Lepore seems not to have been skeptical about what anyone who thought about the matter for two seconds would surely have seen as a bizarrely high number. I’ve been an American “between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms,” indeed this happened to me several times, and in every case except one I was there because of a sports injury. Two broken arms, a badly sprained ankle, a couple of dislocated or broken fingers, an eye that had had someone else’s finger jammed into it … these are my emergency room stories, and they are very common indeed. (The one exception was a car accident that left me with whiplash.) Then there are the young people who have bicycle or motorcycle crashes, falls while drunk, accidents at work, appendicitis attacks … and Jill Lepore, one of our most distinguished historians, thought it was perfectly plausible that if you took every single one of those causes of ER visits, plus every other cause of an ER visit, and then doubled them — you’d have the number of ER visits for “injuries inflicted by police and security guards.”

How could Lepore ever have thought that was plausible? I can only think of one explanation: Because she unconsciously assumed that what she reads in the papers, what she sees on TV, what gets tweeted about on Twitter, is not only important but YouTube免费加速器 of what happens in the world. Maybe there’s a lesson here for all of us.

In this essay from a couple of years ago and today’s post at the Hog Blog — the first for a Christian audience, the second for a general one — I’m trying to think through what I’m calling plurality without pluralism. I take it that pluralism is a preferential option for a diversity of human ends, as well as the means by which to pursue those ends. I also take it that Christians cannot affirm such pluralism. Christians believe that “the chief end of man is to glory God and enjoy him forever,” or, if they would not put it precisely that way, perhaps they would say, with St. Augustine in the final chapter of the 求上油管的加速器 that our end is the Great Sabbath of God:

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However we choose to put it, it is surely clear that there is no diffuse plurality of ends for human beings, but rather one great one. In Revelation 7, we see “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” but they are all “standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and singing the same hymn: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Jesus commands us to be one as he and the Father are one.

There’s no need to belabor the point — nothing could be more foundational to the Christian faith. So why, then, do I think I have cause to give at least one cheer, maybe two, for plurality?

1) The diversity of callings in the church, and of charisms, which it seems we always struggle to acknowledge and accept, though Catholics do a much better job of it than Protestants, at least in my experience. These callings and charisms, when rightly exercised, all tend towards the one 能上facebook的加速器 of Christians, but they often don’t look that way. The teacher leading students in conversation, the contemplative in ecstasy, the hospice worker cleaning the body of a dying woman, seem to be following wholly different models of the conduct of life, and indeed can themselves be tempted to think that way. People called to any active form of life always tend to suspect the contemplative of not really doing anything. Examples could be multiplied endlessly.

2) The double character, immediate and eschatological, of Jesus’s commandments. We are commanded to be One even as the Father and the Son are one, but this does not give us license to enforce a merely visible oneness — this is what Simone Weil calls “spiritual totalitarianism” and Charles Williams “the method of imposition of belief.” (In The Year of Our Lord 1943 I explore this theme in more detail.) Just as there is an idolatry of experience that drives us apart, there is also an idolatry of order that unwisely strives to force us together. The commandments must be pursued immediately but will only be fully realized eschatologically. “Be perfect, even as my Father in heaven is perfect” is not something I will do today.

3) The need, resulting from the former two points, for humility. We must be constantly aware of the self-blinding nature of sin, yes, and that should be enough to guarantee at least a measure of humility. But more than that, we need to remember the 求上油管的加速器 character of revelation about both human and cosmic teleology. “No man knows the hour” and all that. And still more we must acknowledge the imperfect knowledge that comes from being simply finite creatures. Even the wisdom of the unfallen Adam was a human and thus a finite wisdom. I’m not a fan of Schleiermacher, but every Christian needs a theology of finitude.

A few years ago I would have said that the greatest danger facing the Christians I know was a kind of carelessness about the truth, a shrugging at difference and disagreement; now I think it’s the opposite, a kind of premature foreclosure, which is a way of immanentizing the eschaton. Obviously in any group of people we will find both intellectual flaccidity and intellectual rigidity present, but I do think that rigidity is now in the ascendent, simply because it is in the ascendent in our ambient culture and Christians, for the most part, behave as their ambient culture behaves.

In a recent conversation with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum, I recommended what I called — then half-jokingly, and now that I think about it more seriously — the Gandalf Option. I take that phrase from something Galdalf says to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who believes that Gandalf is plotting to rule that kingdom:

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I think we Christians today have become so exercised by the felt need to sniff out and banish disagreement and difference that we are forgetting to nurture the worthy things in this world that are now in peril. Thus I said, in a recent post, that “pure critique is a high-demand, low-reward kind of work. It can be helpful if you want to rally your base, but I find it more useful to celebrate what I believe to be true, and true, and beautiful, and embed critique in a larger, more constructive enterprise.” We are called to be gardeners, but it often seems that 能上油管的网络加速器.

We need to remember that — to cite Gandalf again! — that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” and that we are just a handful of people in the great procession of Christ’s saints. That’s why I think I can, with a bit of adaptation, be comforted by some words that Tom Stoppard gives to Alexander Herzen, which I discuss in today’s post — words that call us to work patiently towards oneness without demanding, or even expecting, that in this vale of tears we will come into the full inheritance of it: The Gospel of Jesus Christ “will not perish. What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. I can hear their childish voices on the hill.”

I am grieved to hear today of the death of J. I. Packer, a great evangelical Christian and a great saint. He had been failing for some time but I did not know that the end was near.

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The last time I saw Jim, some years ago, we ate fajitas and drank margaritas together at Joe T. Garcia’s in Forth Worth. (Service to the Lord can take a boy from Gloucester to some peculiar places.) The next time I’m there, I’ll lift a glass to you, Jim, in gratitude for all you did — and more, all you are. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Very well done indeed.

I’m really glad to learn that The Dish is returning — especially in a form that will allow Andrew to write fewer but longer pieces than he did in the old days, and, I trust, by such means to retain his sanity. The former Dish was pedal-to-the-metal every single day, and even Andrew, the hack than whom no sharper can be conceived, couldn’t over the long term flourish at that pace, either emotionally or intellectually.

A slower-paced Dish of his own is surely the best venue for Andrew, who is the most independent of thinkers and therefore a constant threat to the “safety” of any colleagues whose mental cabinets have just two pigeonholes, Correct people and Evil people. (Apparently at New York most of his colleagues were two-pigeonholers.) I subscribed instantly, and I know I won’t regret it.

But Andrew is not the only thoughtful and unclubbable journalist who’s going indie these days, and that poses a problem for me. In that introductory message I linked to above, Andrew mentions the similar Substack-based endeavors of Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi, and while I think both of those guy as are superb journalists, if I were to subscribe to their work as well as Andrew’s that would cost me 150 bucks a year. I still might do it — but that’s a lot of coin for three voices.

There’s an economies-of-scale problem here. At a newspaper or magazine, writers share an editorial and technical infrastructure, so costs of production are distributed. Those who go it alone don’t get to benefit from that, and neither do their readers. So the cash outlay for those readers can escalate in a hurry.

On the other hand, it’s nice when the money you send to pay the writer actually pays the writer (minus Substack’s cut, of course). I have long wished that places like the New York Times and Washington Post had tip jars for the good writers — if I subscribed to the damned things I would have to subsidize the clueless, pompous, self-righteous, yappy-dog incompetents who dominate those once-distinguished institutions.

One hand, other hand, one hand, other hand. The work of the subscriber-supported solo practitioner doesn’t get seen by nearly as many people as something on the open web — but maybe that’s a feature rather than a bug! Fewer morons to insult you without reading what you write.

Given the hostility of our major media venues to anything that even resembles thinking, there’s no easy solution to this problem. Perhaps some kind of non-partisan, non-ideological journal of ideas will eventually emerge — Lord knows there are enough tech zillionaires to fund one — but in the meantime what does a reader do? This reader is gonna look for some fat to cut from his media budget and pay one or two more writers.

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Last year, when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, expressed support for democracy in Hong Kong and thereby brought the wrath of the CCP down upon him, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver mumbled a bit about free speech — but since then, as far as I can tell, the only person associated with the NBA who has expressed support for Morey is Shaquille O’Neal — and even Shaq acknowledged the need to “tiptoe around things” when commerce is involved. What are the chances that anyone employed by the NBA says a critical word about China from now on?

Senator Josh Hawley’s suggestion that ESPN — as a theoretically journalistic enterprise, at least sometimes, though the “E” in ESPN stands for “entertainment” — ought to cover the NBA’s Chinese entanglements received a now-notorious two-word response from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. Which was interesting, if readily comprehensible. Woj gets paid by ESPN, ESPN gets paid by the NBA, the NBA gets paid by China; Woj was outraged by the merest hint that his own personal gravy train should be looked into. But the fact that he made that response using his ESPN email account suggests how invulnerable he thinks he is, and he has been proven correct. ESPN “suspended” him, which only means that they gave him a few days of vacation. Meanwhile, the league has decided that it’s better to disallow any custom text on the jerseys they sell rather than allow someone to have “FreeHongKong.”

As I said in the first paragraph of this post: this is all par for the course. And yet for some reason, some reason I can’t quite grasp, it has stuck in my craw, and I have decided — or rather, I haven’t 什么加速器可伍看油管, I just feel — that I don’t want to have anything to do with either ESPN or the NBA. Is it the brazenness of Woj’s contempt for elementary journalistic ethics? Is it Adam Silver’s jaw-droppingly hypocritical simultaneous embrace of (a) racial justice and (b) “mutual respect” with China? (As Garry Kasparov noted, “China has Uyghur concentration camps and is preparing to crush Hong Kong and he talks of ‘mutual respect’? What a joke.”) Could be either, or both. But is the NBA any more brazen or hypocritical than Manchester City’s petrodollar-laden ownership group and the system that enables them? I think not.

And yet I expect to keep watching the Premier League — even Manchester City. And I think the real reason for that decision is this: right now Premier League soccer 什么加速器可伍看油管 than NBA basketball. It may be as simple as that.

In any case, I am writing this post not to complain about corruption but rather to point to this curious trait I have — one I am sure I share with you, dear reader: extreme moral inconsistency. Continuing to watch the Premier League while turning up my exquisitely sensitive olfactory organ at the NBA makes no moral sense. Yet it looks like that’s what I’m going to do. I suppose I should think of it this way: One step at a time. Make a tiny and mostly insignificant moral stand today, and maybe that will enable me to make another one next month. And then I’ll progress from strength to strength, and by the time I’m 275 years old I might be a decent person.

I’ve prepared two critical editions of long poems by Auden: The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (originally published in 1947) and For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (originally published in 1944). I love this kind of job.

It requires patient and thorough archival work — Auden’s notebooks and manuscripts are scattered in several locations, but the work he did after his move to America is largely held in the YouTube免费加速器 of the New York Public Library and in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas — and meticulous attentiveness to variations in published work. This latter is especially important for Auden, who was an inveterate reviser.

Then, once you have established the text, you have to annotate it carefully — not the easiest thing with a poet as learnedly allusive as Auden — and provide a synoptic introduction that will make difficult poetry comprehensible to its readers without inserting your own personality and preferences.

And maybe that’s what I like best about textual editing, and especially the preparation of a critical edition: Not one element of the job is about me. It’s completely focused on Auden, and on connecting him to his readers and potential readers. And then there’s this: Not one of the monographs I have written will last nearly as long as these editions will.

So I am extremely pleased to say that I am going to be editing another book of Auden’s — though this one will be a rather different enterprise. This time it’s not a long poem, but, in a first for the Auden Critical Editions series, a collection of lyric poems, The Shield of Achilles (1955). This is worth doing because of all Auden’s collections — counting them is complicated, but there are around ten — The Shield of Achilles is the most carefully organized and internally coherent. Individual lyrics, including the great title poem, sit in the middle of the collection, bookended by two magnificent sequences, “Bucolics” and “能上油管的网络加速器.” Teasing out the complex relations among these texts, and understanding the whole that they make, will be challenging but deeply enjoyable.

I am able to commence this task thanks to the invitation of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s best critic, literary executor, and editor of his complete works, and to the agreement of the fine folks at Princeton University Press. This will be my fourth time working with PUP, and the previous projects have been the best publishing experiences of my life, so I am looking forward to this more than I can easily say.

Reading this for reasons unrelated to our current kerfuffles, I came across an interesting passage:

As it turns out, scientific research bears out this Confucian insight: “One thing is certain: Emotional intelligence increases with age.” Fredda Blanchard-Field’s research compares the way young adults and older adults respond to situations of stress and “her results show that older adults are more socially astute than younger people when it comes to sizing up an emotionally conflicting situation. They are better able to make decisions that preserve an interpersonal relationship…. And she has found that as we grow older, we grow more emotionally supple — we are able to adjust to changing situations on the basis of our emotional intelligence and prior experience, and therefore make better decisions (on average) than do young people.” Other research shows that older adults seem particularly good at quickly letting go of negative emotions because they value social relationships more than the ego satisfaction that comes from rupturing them. In short, we have good reason to empower elderly parents in the family context — to give them more voice, and let them decide in moments of emotional conflict — because they are more likely to have superior social skills.

This may help to explain why cancel culture is driven by the young: perhaps they don’t have enough life experience to understand the long-term costs of “rupturing” relationships. Maybe not even the short-term costs either.

Samuel Johnson had a young friend named George Strahan, who at one point thought he had said something to offend Johnson. The older man’s reply is one of the most glorious things he ever wrote:

You are not to imagine that my friendship is light enough to be blown away by the first cross blast, or that my regard or kindness hangs by so slender a hair, as to be broken off by the unfelt weight of a petty offence. I love you, and hope to love you long. You have hitherto done nothing to diminish my goodwill, and though you had done much more than you have supposed imputed to you my goodwill would not have been diminished.

I write thus largely on this suspicion which you have suffered to enter your mind, because in youth we are apt to be too rigorous in our expectations, and to suppose that the duties of life are to be performed with unfailing exactness and regularity, but in our progress through life we are forced to abate much of our demands, and to take friends such as we can find them, not as we would make them.

These concessions every wise man is more ready to make to others as he knows that he shall often want them for himself; and when he remembers how often he fails in the observance or cultivation of his best friends, is willing to suppose that his friends may in their turn neglect him without any intention to offend him.

When therefore it shall happen, as happen it will, that you or I have disappointed the expectation of the other, you are not to suppose that you have lost me or that I intended to lose you; nothing will remain but to repair the fault, and to go on as if it never had been committed.

Maybe something of this wisdom applies not just to friends, but to fellow citizens, co-workers — in short, our fellow human beings.

Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (delivered as a lecture in 1958) begins with a meditation on political ends and means. “Where ends are agreed,” he writes, “the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming phenomenon, like the final triumph of reason or the proletarian revolution, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into technological ones.” It is simply a matter of political engineering. This is of course what Oakeshott calls “rationalism in politics.”

Berlin then comments that if a stranger visited a British of American university, he would surely think that all the questions of ends has been settled, “for all the serious attention that is paid to fundamental problems of politics by professional philosophers.” That is, our professoriat act as though they believe that all the old debates about the social and political order, debates that go back in the West at least to Socrates and in the East at least to Confucius, have been decided. In Berlin’s view, this habit of mind “is both surprising and dangerous.”

Surprising because there has, perhaps, been no time in modern history when so large a number of human beings, in both the East and the West, have had their notions, and indeed their lives, so deeply altered, and in some cases violently upset, by fanatically held social and political doctrines. Dangerous, because when ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them – that is to say, those who have been trained to think critically about ideas – they sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism.

I think it was an awareness of just this danger that made the great historian Robert Conquest write, in one of his last books, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000), that in an age dominated by what he calls “mindslaughter” — the destruction of intellect by ideas that have “grown too violent to be affected by rational criticism” — Yeats’s description of the state of affairs just before the Second Coming might not be right. When Yeats wrote that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” he implied that the best needed to acquire a “passionate intensity” of their own — but Conquest isn’t so sure. Maybe what the world needs is more people who are skeptical by temperament, inclined to suspect certainty, wary of passions and their resulting intensities.

Conquest says, citing Orwell, that he wants to resist “the lure of the profound.” I have not been able to find that Orwell ever wrote that, though perhaps he said it to Conquest — I believe they knew each other, and Conquest wrote an incisive poem about Orwell. Why resist profundity, or at least the quest for it? There’s a hint at the beginning of Christopher Hitchens’s book Why Orwell Matters, which is dedicated to Conquest with these words: “premature anti-fascist, premature anti-Stalinist, poet and mentor, and founder of ‘the united front against bullshit.’” What the desire for profundity lures us into is bullshit.

Maybe we don’t need any more passionate intensity for a while. Maybe we need to revivify the United Front Against Bullshit.

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go! 

— Oliver Cromwell to Parliament (1653), also me to the GOP (2023)

A friend kindly explained to me that this post was quite badly written, so I have fixed it. Sort of. 

Perhaps the most tiresome — not the worst, probably, but the most tiresome — feature of journalistic/social-media discourse today is its fervent belief in the near-universality of dog whistles. Consider, for example, the convulsive and dyspeptic responses to the letter on justice and open debate recently posted by Harper’s. No reasonable person could object to the letter’s actual statements, and so those who pretend to be reasonable don’t even try. They ignore what the letter says in order to focus on what it really and secretly means, its inner and essential nastiness and cruelty so carefully concealed by a thin veneer of decent common sense. As Sam Kriss says, this kind of exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion is “a virulent form of paranoid signification.”

You adopt the ugliest possible interpretation of something, and then you convince yourself that it’s true. In fact, it’s not just true, it’s so shiningly, obviously true that anyone who doesn’t have your particular psychotic read on events is immediately suspect. Don’t believe Corbyn was activating secret Nazi programming implanted in people’s brains? Well, then you’re probably an antisemite yourself. Bad-faith positions are never cautious or provisional. You scream them loud to drown out the doubt inside your own head. And because the other side is screaming too, you have to pump up your agony to match their pitch. The thing spirals faster with every improvement in our communications infrastructure.

Everyone is furious and nobody really cares. Emphasis mine. Because if you really cared you’d understand that there are differences between good-faith disagreement and malicious hatred and you’d try to read carefully enough to discern those differences. I mean, there are certainly plenty of dog-whistly statements out there — POTUS specializes in them to a perhaps unprecedented degree — but there is something perverse about people who make it their default reading stance to presume hidden malice in any old text.

Reading these people puts me in mind of a sadly funny passage in C. S. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy in which he’s describing one of the strongest features of his father’s personality:

It was axiomatic to my father (in theory) that nothing was said or done from an obvious motive. Hence he who in his real life was the most honorable and impulsive of men, and the easiest victim that any knave or imposter could hope to meet, became a positive Machiavel when he knitted his brows and applied to the behavior of people he had never seen the spectral and labyrinthine operation which he called “reading between the lines.” Once embarked upon that, he might make his landfall anywhere in the wide world: and always with unshakable conviction. “I see it all” — “I understand it perfectly” — “It’s as plain as a pikestaff,” he would say; and then, as we soon learned, he would believe till his dying day in some deadly quarrel, some slight, some secret sorrow or some immensely complex machination, which was not only improbable but impossible. Dissent on our part was attributed, with kindly laughter, to our innocence, gullibility, and general ignorance of life.

We can only hope that the Machiavels of this moment are even a fraction as honorable as Lewis’s father was. Not much hope of that, I fear. Albert Lewis’s practice of “reading between the lines” wasn’t founded on an unshakeable faith in his own perfect righteousness.

The point of the reading-between-the-lines is usually to discover the hidden bad motives of the people who hold a particular position — but once you have done that … so? Let’s suppose that you are absolutely correct, that you, with your profound insight and utter purity of soul, have peered into the hearts of the people who hold Position X and have genuinely discerned impurities there. Now what? Every good thing in this world, without exception, is commended by at least some people of impure motive and gross sin. Love is celebrated by the cruel, justice by the misogynist, kindness by the rapacious. No virtue or good deed is exempt from this taint, not free inquiry or free speech or free beer. Only a dimwit would think that the patronage of Bad People discredits justice or kindness or free beer themselves.

So even on its own terms, presuming bad faith is a useless exercise that typically disables you from reflecting on the validity, or otherwise, of stated claims. It shits down your own intellectual equipment. So as for me, I’ll keep trying to respond to what people actually say as opposed to what reading between the lines, AKA listening for the dog whistles, might lead me to suspect. I mean, probably Salman Rushdie signed that Harper’s letter because he just wants to protect his great fame and privilege, but there’s the tiniest sliver of possibility that he signed it because he prefers living in a society that responds to offensive speech by argument to living in one that responds by offering a rich bounty to anyone who murders him.

In 2017, I was interviewed by Emma Green of the Atlantic about my book How To Think. Here’s an excerpt:

Green: Ideologically speaking, people are often stuck in their own “truths” — they’re like circles in Venn diagrams that don’t necessarily overlap. Your proposal of generous listening and consideration is almost impossible to imagine.

Jacobs: You’re right that it is hard to envision. What I’m trying to do is slow people down. One of the most important passages in the book is where the software developer Jason Fried is wanting to argue with a guy who is giving a talk, and the guy says, “Just give it five minutes.” If we could just give it five minutes — even five minutes — we might be able to cool down enough to say, “Maybe this is different than what I first thought,” or “Maybe there’s a point here. Maybe this isn’t completely insane.”

Green: Is the right or the left more to blame for this fracture?

Jacobs: They’re bad in different ways. There’s a smugness on both sides. But I am more worried about the condition of the right in America right now. I think the primary moral fault of the left is a kind of smug contemptuousness toward people who don’t agree. And I think that’s a bad fault. But the primary fault of the right at this moment in America is wrath. I worry about the consequences of wrath more than I worry about the consequences of contemptuous smugness.

After re-reading this today, I have two thoughts. First, things have gotten worse. Second, the Left now our-wraths the Right.

Freddie deBoer:

So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because [教程] 解决 Google Chrome 浏览器跳出「有老鼠！WebGL ...:2021-4-3 · 最近这阵子使用GoogleChrome浏览器，逛网页的时候会无预警跳出「有老鼠！WebGL碰上麻烦了。」错误信息，尤其是Facebook脸书与苹果Apple网页发生机率特高，有些时候画面还会变全黑或灰色情况，页面整个卡住无法浏览情况，虽然说按忽略或 .... That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe out political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion?

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

People often talk about the death of the humanities, or hard times for the humanities, but when they do what they really mean is the death of or hard times for humanities departments in universities. But humanities departments in universities are not the humanities. There’s a really interesting passage in Leszek Kołakowski’s book Metaphysical Horror in which he discusses the many times that philosophers have made a “farewell to philosophy,” have declared philosophy dead or finished. Kołakowski says that when all of the “issues that once formed the kernel of philosophical reflection” have been dismissed by professional philosophers, that doesn’t actually silence the ancient questions that once defined philosophy.

But such things, although we may shunt them aside, ban them from acceptable discourse and declare them shameful, do not simply go away, for they are an ineradicable part of culture. Either they survive, temporarily silent, in the underground of civilization, or they find an outlet in distorted forms of expression.… Excommunications do not necessarily kill. Our sensibility to the traditional worries of philosophy has not weathered away; it survives subcutaneously, as it were, ready to reveal its presence at the slightest accidental provocation.

I believe this to be true, and therefore, while I am concerned by the likely fate of our universities and by the ways that so many professors in the humanities have been stupidly complicit in their own demise, I don’t worry about the death of the humanities. Though I don’t agree with Philip Larkin’s view that people will eventually stop worshipping in churches, I think he’s right when he says, near the end of “Church Going,” that ”someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious,” and when that happens such a person will gravitate towards all the great works of the past — and of the present too, though that will feel less necessary — even though the whole of society heaps scorn on all that our ancestors have done.

Here’s how we’ll know that things have gotten really bad in our society: People will start turning to Homer and Dante and Bach and Mozart. Czeslaw Milosz — like Kołakowski, a Pole, perhaps not a trivial correspondence — wrote that “when an entire community is struck by misfortune, for instance, the Nazi occupation of Poland, the ‘schism between the poet and the great human family’ disappears and poetry becomes as essential as bread.”

I think often, those days, of Emily St. John Mandel’s haunting novel 能上油管的网络加速器, in which the great majority of human beings have been killed by a deadly plague, and those who remain live at a near-subsistence level. Even so, some musicians and actors have banded together to form an itinerant troupe, the Travelling Symphony.

The Symphony performed music — classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements of pre-collapse pop songs — and Shakespeare. They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.

“People want what was best about the world,” Dieter said.

Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon is a remarkable book, beautifully written and narrated with great verve. However, I do not find its argument persuasive. You can only find the argument persuasive if you accept the book’s two key axioms, and I don’t. I say “axioms” because McCarraher doesn’t argue either of them, he takes them as … well, axiomatic.

The first axiom is that the Middle Ages in Europe, especially western Europe, constituted a great coherent sacramental order — McCarraher loves the word “sacramental” and uses it to designate pretty much everything he approves of — a “moral economy,” a “theological economy,” in which “preparation for [God’s] kingdom was the point of economic life.” Even the vast waves of rebellion and protest that occurred throughout the Middle Ages weren’t protests against that order as such, only complaints that the political and ecclesial authorities weren’t properly fulfilling their duties. McCarraher cites rebellions (e.g. Wat Tyler’s) of which this could plausibly be said as characteristic, and ignores all the more radical protests. (See Chapter 3 of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium for examples.) Similarly, he presents the political-eschatological vision of Piers Plowman as though it’s typical of its age, when it isn’t typical at all, any more than William Blake’s poems are typical of England circa 1800. A fair look at what we know suggests that the Middle Ages was as governed by greed and lust and the 海外加速器YouTube as any other era, and if God had spoken to the rulers of that age he would have asked them, “What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?” I think the great preponderance of the evidence suggests that McCarraher’s portrait of the Middle Ages is a pious fiction.

The second governing axiom of The Enchantments of Mammon is that modern capitalism, which was, he says, created by Protestantism, sacralizes wealth in a way that no previous system did. But I don’t think that’s true. In all times and all places that I know of, wealth is generally perceived as a sign of divine favor. The peculiarity of the Axial Age is that in that era there arise, in various places around the world, philosophical and theological traditions suggesting that human flourishing cannot be measured in money and possessions. (After all, one of the key features of the land that Yahweh promises to the wandering Israelites is that it flows with milk and honey, is a place in which the people can prosper 什么加速器可伍看油管. It’s only when we get to the book of Proverbs that we discern a serious ambivalence about all this. Proverbs 22:4: “The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life.” But also Proverbs 11:4: “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”)

At one point early on McCarraher writes, “Talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about 雷神加速器上youtube.” This is true. However, it could equally well be said that talking about 上油管挂什么加速器 is a way of not talking about money. “The love of money is the root of all evil” was written long, long before the rise of the capitalist order that McCarraher denounces. Moreover, talking about money can be a way of not talking about human acquisitiveness, about the sin of greed. The tension between acquisitiveness and a dawning awareness that acquisitiveness isn’t everything goes as far back as the Odyssey, the great predecessor (or maybe great initiator) of the Axial Age sensibility, the first major work of art against greed, which suggests that only tragic suffering — like that of Odysseus, exiled and imprisoned far from his homeland, or Menelaus, whose family is destroyed as he gains godlike riches — is sufficient to break the hold of greed upon us. It seems to me that McCarraher is blaming capitalism for something that is a permanent feature of human life.

Anyway: If you believe that the Middle Ages were a veritable paradise of sacramental order and that the sacralizing of greed is an invention of modern capitalism — which is to say, if you believe that pretty much everything bad in the world is the result of Protestantism — then you may well find McCarraher’s case compelling. But even if you don’t accept those axioms, it’s a terrific read full of fascinating anecdotes. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

My employer, Baylor University, graciously provides me with a computer, a MacBook Pro; but it also loads that computer with a whole bunch of enterprise software apps that from the perspective of an IT manager are useful but from the perspective of a user are sheer malware. The chief problem: these apps eat CPU cycles at a terrifying rate — consistently over 100%, sometimes spiking to 300% or more, which I didn’t even know was possible — which means that the computer’s fan runs full-speed all the time and the computer is 雷神加速器上youtube too hot to touch. As a result, I’ve had to turn the laptop into a desktop by hooking it up to an external monitor and keyboard, which works just fine … but I really need a machine I can carry around. So I started shopping for one.

If this had happened a year ago, I would have bought another MacBook straightaway; but the release of the new iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard complicated the choice for me. Not to prolong the suspense: I bought the iPad, and have been using it for a couple of months now; recently I’ve been using it full-time, because the MacBook Pro is in the shop to have its battery replaced.

How do I feel about my choice? It’s complicated.

On the plus side:

1. Everything about the iPad is faster: It starts up, wakes from sleep, connects to Bluetooth devices faster, and connects to WiFi networks far more quickly than the Mac does.
2. Its battery life is roughly three times that of my Mac. (No matter what Apple promises, my portable Macs always get 4–5 hours of battery life at most. If I get on a Zoom call that goes down to two hours.)
3. The Magic Keyboard is fabulous to type on, better than any other keyboard I own (and I have several).
4. Annotating PDFs with an Apple Pencil is an elegant experience (and using the Pencil is only going to get better with iPad OS 14). This matters because I read a lot of PDFs.
5. Generally, the modularity of the iPad, its usability in a variety of configurations, is delightful.

On the minus side:

1. The best software for the iPad is elegant, but rarely is it as powerful as its Mac equivalents. For instance, no text editor on the iPad has even a quarter of the functionality of BBEdit. There’s no blogging app remotely like MarsEdit.
2. Because the iPad is so thoroughly sandboxed, it is impossible to create the kind of system-wide utilities that accelerate and simplify work on the Mac, especially repeated tasks. There are a number of individual apps on the iPad that support 雷神加速器能上youtube, but on the Mac TextExpander works everywhere. You can’t have a Keyboard Maestro or a 浏览youtube加速器推荐 for the iPad. You can, of course, create Shortcuts that perform some of the tasks those utilities perform, but you have to run those shortcuts. Nothing happens automatically.
3. For similar reasons, you can’t control the sound inputs and outputs on an iPad the way you can on the Mac: the magnificent audio software from Rogue Amoeba simply can’t be made for the iPad. (By the way, Apple’s App Store polices make it difficult for Rogue Amoeba even to make Mac apps, as they explain here.)
4. While the Magic Keyboard’s trackpad works quite well most of the time, some apps don’t support it well, and it still behaves inconsistently at times. That should get better over time, though.
5. The iPad has no Terminal.

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At first it didn’t go badly. Twitter created a new setting that allows users to hide replies from anyone they’re not following — an important and decade-overdue step. Also, when the lockdown started a good many people enjoyed using Twitter as a place to re-connect with people they had fallen out of touch with. There was a positive vibe.

For a while. It didn’t last long. The old habits of malice and ignorance soon reasserted themselves. And even the best-natured, gentlest people would regularly feel compelled to share some horrific news item or appalling celebrity/politician/journalist tweet. I could get Twitter’s filtering of my replies only by using its own apps — its API doesn’t provide that feature to third-party apps, naturellement — which regularly served me ads I didn’t want to see and promoted tweets I would’ve paid to avoid. (I have been asking for at least ten years why Twitter doesn’t create a paid level where that kind of shit can be escaped.) Frustrated by all that, I would return to a third-party app — I like Tweetbot best — only to be confronted by replies I was even more eager to avoid.

My feelings about replies from strangers, I realized some time ago, are largely a function of my Southern upbringing. For years, whenever I got some random question or comment from someone I didn’t know, I would feel honor-bound to reply. That’s what a gentleman does, isn’t it? I was certainly raised to believe that when someone addresses you you have an obligation to respond, and to do so politely. (I didn’t always manage the “politely,” though.) After some years of obeying the promptings of conscience, I finally understood that four out of five strangers who addressed me on Twitter were not seeking good-faith conversation but rather were angry or needy or some combination of the two. And yet my felt need for politeness had me answering them for far longer than was healthy for me. That’s why being able to hide replies from people I don’t follow relieved me of my burden: I can’t respond to tweets directed at me if I never see them.

However, that didn’t altogether solve my problem. I still felt an obligation to reply to the people I do follow, almost all of whom are friends or at least acquaintances. So if any of them addressed me or tagged me in a tweet I had to come onto the site at least to like the tweet, maybe to comment. But that always ended up exposing me to a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t want to see. And so I would fulfill my felt duty to my friends but go away frustrated by what I heard and saw. Round and round and round.

That’s why I was I was really content during that year or so my account was deactivated: my friends couldn’t tag me there, so if they wanted to get in touch with me they had to send me an email. I wasn’t failing them by not answering their tweets, because there were no tweets to answer. Perfect!

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My friends make fun of me for my long-standing ambivalence about Twitter, but since the 2016 election season I haven’t been ambivalent. I have despised it wholly. I believe that Twitter and Facebook have done unprecedented and unhealable damage to our social fabric — I believe that they are evil, and that no morally sane person should be comfortable using either of them. I do not say that every morally sane person should refuse to be on them — for some people the decision to be on social media is wholly justifiable and maybe even admirable — but if you’re happy on social media then you need to reset your moral compass.

So I wrote to my peeps at Penguin Random House and asked if I would be betraying them if I deactivated my Twitter account again. My wonderful editor Ginny Smith wrote back reminding me that Twitter is a “useful tool” — “but it’s not worth your sanity.” Exactly. Thank you. I’m outta there.

In a career spanning seventy years, Carl Reiner shaped the nation’s sense of humor through his writing, directing, and performances on stage and screen.

He used this typewriter to write “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” pic.twitter.com/rafXr9hrh4

— National Museum of American History (@amhistorymuseum) June 30, 2023

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Every time I read an entry on Richard Polt’s 能上facebook的加速器, or look at his very cool book — thanks for the complimentary copy, Richard! — I tell myself that I am going to bring this thing out of the closet and start writing on it again. It hasn’t happened yet, but … someday. In my beginning is my end.

But I won’t do anything nearly as cool as writing The Dick Van Dyke Show.

My buddy Rod Dreher has a book coming out soon called Live Not By Lies, and it’s about what American Christians can learn about living under an oppressive regime by studying what believers did under the old Soviet Union. I think this is a story that Christians ought to be interested in, whether they agree with Rod’s politics or not. Every thoughtful Christian I know thinks that the cause of Christ has powerful cultural and political enemies, that we are in various ways discouraged or impeded in our discipleship by forces external to the Church. Where we differ is in our assessment of what the chief opposing forces are.

Rod is primarily worried about the rise of a “soft totalitarianism” of the left, what James Poulos calls a “pink police state.” Other Christians I know are equally worried, but about the dangers to Christian life of white supremacy, or the international neoliberal order. For me the chief concern (I have many) is what I call “metaphysical capitalism.” But we all agree that the Church of Jesus Christ is under a kind of ongoing assault, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, sometimes blunt and sometimes subtle, and that living faithfully under such circumstances is a constant challenge. Why wouldn’t we want to learn from people who faced even greater challenges than we do and who managed to sustain their faith through that experience? Isn’t that valuable to all of us?

I felt the same way about The Benedict Option, which was mostly not an argument but rather a job of reporting, reporting on various intentional Christian communities. I read the book with fascination, because I was and am convinced that the primary reason American Christians are so bent and broken is that we have neglected catechesis while living in a social order that catechizes us incessantly. What can I learn from those communities that would help me in my own catechesis, and that of my family, and that of my parish church? I read The Benedict Option with the same focus I brought to my reading of a marvelous book by another friend of mine, Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community. Charles’s politics are miles away from Rod’s, but their books share an essential concern: How can the church of Jesus Christ, how can Christ’s followers, be formed in such a way that they can flourish in unpropitious conditions?

That’s exactly the right question, I think, and both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies introduce me to people who help me — even when I don’t agree with their strategies! — to think better about what its answers might be. (And The Beloved Community as well. Christians under Marxism and the Black church under Jim Crow offer remarkably similar kinds of help to us, a point that deserves a great deal more reflection than it is likely ever to get in our stupidly polarized time.)

Often when I make this argument people acknowledge the force of it but tell me that Rod is the “wrong messenger.” I understand what they mean. Rod is excitable, and temperamentally a catastrophist, as opposed to a declinist. (That’s Ross Douthat’s distinction.) Like the prophet of Richard Wilbur’s poem, he’s gotten himself “Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,” and I often think that if he writes the phrase “Wake up, people!” one more time I’m gonna drive to Baton Rouge and slap him upside the head.

Also, when Rod rails against “woke capitalism,” he clearly thinks that “woke” is the problem, without giving real assent to the fact that Christians are susceptible to woke capitalism because they were previously susceptible to other kinds. He perceives threats to the Church from the Right, from racism and crude nationalism and general cruelty to whoever isn’t One Of Us, and writes about them sometimes, but they don’t exercise his imagination the way that threats from the Left do. I can see why people whose politics differ from Rod’s don’t what to hear what he has to say.

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And if you think Rod has a potentially useful message but is the wrong conveyer of it, then get off your ass and become the messenger you want to see in the world. Lord knows we need more Christians, not fewer, paying attention to the challenges of deep Christian formation. Wake up, people!

Everyone’s got their wishlist, and mine, like yours, starts with an effective vaccine for COVID–19 and peace and justice in the world. But after than mine probably diverges from yours: I want an end to essays and articles about literary and cultural theory written by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Like 雷神加速器能上youtube:

These dogmas go by various names (among others, “postmodernism,” “multiculturalism”), but I will gather them under the term “deconstruction,” as it best encapsulates what is at their core. It consists of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which means exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that is hidden below the overt text of a novel. This French cultural product, which began to occupy a prominent place in American university literature departments in the 1970s, has had the effect, over several student generations, of bringing literature departments, especially those of foreign languages, to extinction. Why? It is in the DNA of adolescents, even of those who have never heard of Jacques Derrida, to deconstruct, to tear apart the assumptions of their forebears. When professors stopped talking about Milton’s prose and began pointing out his treatment of his daughters, students got the point immediately. Why would 18-year-olds hang around to confirm what they knew only a year or two earlier, anyway: that anyone born before their own birth year doesn’t have a clue?

In the immortal words of Bob Marley, I got so much things to say.

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All the strategies of reading Powers despises — “exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that is hidden below the overt text of a novel” [sigh] — are not examples of deconstruction, they are repudiations of deconstruction.

Several generations of students, and their professors too, have learned what literary theory is about primarily from one book: Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, now in its third edition (the first was published in 1983). I think almost everyone in my profession, including me, has assigned it at one time or another. A 2001 article in 求上油管的加速器 says that at that point it had sold 750,000 copies, so surely it’s well over a million at this point.

Here’s Eagleton’s wittily polemical summation of deconstruction:

Anglo-American deconstruction largely ignores this real sphere of struggle, and continues to churn out its closed critical texts. Such texts are closed precisely because they are empty: there is little to be done with them beyond admiring the relentlessness with which all positive particles of textual meaning have been dissolved away. Such dissolution is an imperative in the academic game of deconstruction: for you can be sure that if your own critical account of someone else’s critical account of a text has left the tiniest grains of ‘positive’ meaning within its folds, somebody else will come along and deconstruct you in turn. Such deconstruction is a power-game, a mirror-image of orthodox academic competition. It is just that now, in a religious twist to the old ideology, victory is achieved by kenosis or self-emptying: the winner is the one who has managed to get rid of all his cards and sit with empty hands.

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1. Deconstruction is fundamentally an inquiry into language and meaning, and in that sense continues the “close reading” model that traditionalists in our time tend to like, especially when it’s exemplified by the American New Critics rather than foreigners. It’s essentially formalist, even if it’s concerned with the dissolution of form rather than formal coherence.
2. It is therefore politically quietist.
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I think literary scholars were already tiring of deconstruction at this point — it seemed to offer a rather limited repertoire of critical gestures, and they had begun to feel rather foolish hunting around for some text that hadn’t been deconstructed yet in order to perform that repertoire on it — but Eagleton hammered some big nails into deconstruction’s coffin. And he did so by arguing that deconstruction “ignores this real sphere of struggle” — the struggle for social justice.

I don’t want to overstress this point. There were influential critics — Robert Scholes most notable among them in his 1985 book Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English — who tried to redescribe deconstruction as a tool in the toolbox of the politically motivated professor. Scholes’s book is important because it explicitly describes the task of the teacher as liberating students from texts that have power over them, and giving those students the power to dominate texts. But in general the rise of theories of power — above all those articulated by Michel Foucault — meant an end to the dominance of theories of language. Deconstruction was not the beginning of our current regime of critique, it was the end of the previous regime.

Re: Yascha Mounk’s article on leftist mobs punishing the innocent: For the ones doing the mobbing, ruining the lives of innocent people is not a bug in their program, it’s an essential feature. There can be no reign of terror when only the guilty are punished.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is the great text for understanding this phenomenon. Punishment of the guilty is, from the perspective of social control, an implicit confession of failure. A social order that has proper control over its members will not have to punish them, because they will be obedient. And you make people obedient by instilling discipline: you carefully and thoroughly train them to say what you want them to say and do what you want them to do, and to refrain from saying or doing what you think inappropriate.

However, the disciplinary systems that do this work — schools, for instance — are scarcely less efficient than punishment. What must be created is an environment in which people discipline themselves. But they will only do this when they fear exposure (and subsequent punishment) so much that they will go to extreme lengths to 什么加速器可伍看油管. And people will only exert the energy to enact this ongoing self-policing if they believe that anything they do or say can be seen. They need to believe that they are living in a Panopticon.

This is where social media come in. If everyone has a smartphone and access to social media accounts, then anything you do or say might be recorded and published. Anything those to whom you are 上油管挂什么加速器 do or say may be recorded and published, to shame you before the entire world. From the perspective of those who lust for social control, this is an ideal situation, because if they make you sufficiently fearful of exposure then you will not only police yourself, you will police your friends and family. And if you can be exposed and punished not only for what you intentionally do and say, but for what you inadvertently do and say, and for what people you know do and say, then you will become obsessively vigilant in your policing.

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I use Safari as my default browser on the Mac, and the feature I am most thankful for is Reader View. We all have the experience, probably every single day, of opening a webpage only to have the text we want to read obscured by popover ads, which we dismiss only to be assaulted by autoplaying videos and blinking ads. All that represents a money-making strategy I just don’t understand: yes, I know sites need to run ads, but ads that make it literally impossible to read their content? How can that be good? I just don’t get it. 

So day after day I scramble to hit the Reader View button, and then set the browser to always open pages from that domain in Reader View. Then, finally, I can read the article … which, four times our of five, turns out not to be worth reading. 

So let us now praise TidBITS, the venerable Applecentric website. Take a look at this article. What a clean, readable design! Nothing to interfere with my reading the article — and wow, what a fine article! Informative, clearly written, just the right level of detail. (I knew it would be good before I read a word because of Glenn Fleishman’s name on the byline — everything he writes is worth reading.) 

Why can’t more of the internet be like this? 

In gratitude, I went right to 求上油管的加速器 and put my money where my typing fingers are. I would suggest you do the same for any websites that give you the same feeling. 

Here in America, it’s a news week like any other.

• The President retweets, for political effect, a doctored video.
• Tucker Carlson says that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “a special carve-out Google has received from the United States Congress,” even though, as Senator Mike Lee points out, Section 230 was passed by Congress in 1996, two years before Google was founded.
• The ACLU says that “The death penalty evolved from lynching.” Yes, really. Read the tweet and see.

I could go on. And on, and on. And there will be more of the same next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, 什么加速器可伍看油管 and especially nauseam.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, and what I would encourage you all to do the same: First, take note of the people, like the ones listed above, who do not care whether what they say is true, but only about whether it serves their preferred narrative.

Second, look for people — politicians, journalists, academics — who do care whether what they say is true.

Third, studiously ignore the people in the first group and pay close attention to the people in the second one.

It won’t be easy to find those truth-concerned people. Sometimes you’ll feel like Diogenes with his lantern. But it must be done, for the sake of our collective sanity.

Dear Apple,

I bought my first Apple products — the original (512k!) Macintosh and an ImageWriter printer — in the spring of 1985, and in the decades since have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on things made by you. Do you know why I have been so loyal all these years? Two reasons. One, the quality of your hardware. Two, the quality of the software made by independent developers who create for your platform.

Your own software — operating system and apps alike — has been woefully inconsistent. Every OS release, on all your platforms, brings new features but also new bugs. Especially on the Mac I have perpetual problems with wi-fi, Bluetooth, window management, and support for external monitors. iOS is comparatively more stable but after ten years it’s still impossible even to select text reliably. Your apps are mediocre to poor, with only a few exceptions: GarageBand is a great app, as is Keynote; Preview for the Mac is excellent, and Pages and Numbers have gotten better and better. But again, those are exceptions. Mail is an unmitigated disaster. Safari is adequate but feature-poor and only to a limited degree extensible (though at least it doesn’t eat memory the way Chrome does). Messages is barely adequate on iOS, seriously underpowered on the Mac. Even your Settings and System Preferences apps are poorly designed, in the case of iOS shockingly so.

But you have some amazing developers writing apps for your platforms. Some of the best apps, in my experience:

• BBEdit for Mac
• MarsEdit for Mac
• 能上油管的网络加速器 for Mac and iOS
• Omnigraffle for Mac and iOS
• Drafts for Maxc and iOS
• All of Rogue Amoeba’s software for Mac
• All of Panic’s software for Mac and iOS

I could go on. But what I want to say in this post is simply this: Apple, you need to realize that these developers, whose work is better than that of almost any of your own software designers, drive the success of your platform. And yet, as recent events have reminded us, your treatment of them is shabby at best and in some cases indefensible. You charge them extortionate rates for appearing in your App Stores — some are not well-known enough to survive outside an App Store and yet your 30% cut eats so heavily into their profits that it’s barely worth their time to make software — and you apply your rules for appearing in those store inconsistently, even capriciously.

Your behavior has been so frustrating to the people at Rogue Amoeba that they have gotten out of the Mac App Store almost wholly — as Bare Bones, the makers of BBEdit, also did for a few years — but not every developer has the kind of widespread and loyal user base that Rogue Amoeba and Bare Bones do. And of course the iOS App Store is the only source for iOS apps, which may explain why Rogue Amoeba doesn’t make any iOS apps.

Apple, your arrogant and dictatorial behavior makes no sense. It’s not in your interest to frustrate your best independent developers. It’s in your interest to get smart, talented people excited about developing for your platforms. Heck, maybe you should be paying them. But short of that, there are three things you need to do:

1. Apply your existing rules consistently.
2. Alter those rules to promote maximum creativity and ambition in Mac/iOS software development.
3. Take a smaller cut so more developers can stay in the game.

In these posts on “critical theory,” I’m doing what I pretty much always do: I am separating and sorting questions that tend to be conflated. That’s my thing, right? It’s why I wrote a book called How to Think, and why I say, in a blog post, that “it seems to me that arguments about Christianity and politics have an almost unique ability to reduce the intelligence of the people involved by at least a third. We desperately need clarity about what, exactly, we’re arguing about.”

So, in that spirit, onward! — with apologies for self-quotation. A number of these issues I have dealt with before, sometimes at greater length. Here I’m trying to some up with I think are the key theological themes we need to keep in mind when evaluating what people are determined to call “critical theory.” It’s a bit of a stepping back from the details.

什么加速器可伍看油管 As noted in an earlier post, some of the questions raised by “critical theory” are empirical ones. Has the history of what became the United States been deeply, indeed essentially, implicated in the slave trade since 1619? Is our society still dominated by white supremacy? Is our social and political order structurally racist? To answer these questions is to evaluate historical and sociological evidence. You could be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “Yes” to all those questions. You could also be a deeply orthodox Christian and answer “No” to them all. It would depend on the evidence you gather and how you evaluate it.

TWO: But — and here’s where things get complicated — the people who hold the political views mentioned above tend to hold other views that are philosophically unrelated to the historical claims. Indeed many people who are not “woke” at all in their thinking about race also hold these views, which cluster around what I have called ”metaphysical capitalism”: I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. I am what I say I am. I am my own. As a Christian I do not and cannot believe this. My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

But how can I communicate this to people who aren’t Christians? Can I give them any reason to believe that they are not their own without invoking Jesus? Is there some kind of political principle accessible to non-believers that would encourage them to overcome the I-am-my-own principle? I hope so, because I think that self-ownership is destructive to the self and damaging to that self’s community. But in a plural and indeed pluralist society it’s difficult to know how to make such arguments effectively. I have tried to explore some of these issues in this essay, which, though it is largely about intra-Christian disputes, has relevance for the larger social body. I hope.

THREE: More generally, we need a great disentangling. You can see from the above how philosophically unrelated claims get entangled with one another and can seem to belong to the same general movement even when that’s logically impossible. One cannot simultaneously be fundamentally defined by one’s group identity and free to be whatever one wants to be. The attempt to hold both views at once without acknowledging their incompatibility is what leads to situations like the Hypatia transracialism controversy, in which a single academic article shorted out the entire system. Similarly, the doctrine of “intersectionality” tends, as I have written in this blog post, to focus on intersections that 浏览youtube加速器推荐 but to ignore intersections that cancel each other out. The problem with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis is not that it’s wrong about ongoing oppression, but that the people who deploy it tend to think they need in any given situation to have a clear victim and a clear perpetrator. That’s morally simplistic, and also cannot account for the distributed character of power, as I explain in this interview: “I’ve got a chapter in my book [The Year of Our Lord 1943] called ‘Demons,’ about demonic activity. Or if you don’t want to say ‘demonic’ activity, you can call it the activity of what St. Paul calls the ‘principalities and powers.’ It’s interesting, Foucault is a kindred spirit — the ‘principalities and powers’ is a kind of Foucauldian argument, right? In the sense that it is power — and what Weil would call force — disseminated through social and political structures.” That whole interview is relevant to a lot of the questions I’ve been exploring in these posts. It’s an attempt to think in as thoroughly biblical a way as I can manage about these questions.

FOUR: The final set of questions relates to what I will call, for lack of any catchy and concise term, the practical implications of theological anthropology. My point here is closely related to the previous one. Whatever Christians think about the issues I have raised above, we are obliged to conduct ourselves in ways that avoid what I call “rhetorical Leninism.” We have to extend mercy to those whom we believe to be wrong, even tragically wrong, because this is how God treats us. He loves the unlovely, and is gracious to the wicked — like me. We are to be imitators of Him. For us there can be no “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that racist over there,” or “Lord, I thank you that I am not like that pathetic cuck over there” – there can only be “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Because when we choose to measure others according to a certain standard, we are asking that that same measure be used to measure us.

Okay, that’s it, I’m done. No more from me about this — though I am, as I mentioned earlier, engaged with some colleagues on a project that will address many of the issues at stake here. But that has to remain a Big Secret for now.

Here’s the question I mentioned in my last post: 用户共享脚本 | X浏览器:YouTube 视频下载手机版 下载 YouTube 视频手机版 1 7 0 sl00p 网页限制解除 ... 浏览 器 无 5 3 0 me 知乎网页辅助 去强制下载链接 6 4 2 ZH-TX ... Note that this is not a question that is equally relevant to everyone concerned with the debates over “critical theory.” (I still hate that term.) Neil Shenvi is a Christian, but James Lindsay is an atheist, last I heard anyway. What follows is specifically for Christians and will likely be of no interest to anyone else.

But note: this will not be good. Because of other commitments I don’t have time to do this thoroughly, and anyway I have serious doubts that anyone will pay attention to anything I say — the whole discourse is now running like a perpetual-motion machine and I can’t do anything even to slow it down, much less stop it. But I have promised some people that I would say 什么加速器可伍看油管, and this is something.

Let’s begin by trying to replace the question by a more specific and more accurate one. How should Christians respond to a workplace environment in which employees are pressured to acknowledge the historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people, and to welcome and support all efforts to remedy that oppression? I think that’s the really substantive question for the church to deal with. The questions of intellectual genealogy that I pursued in my previous post are not especially relevant here, though they might be relevant in another context.

Before going any further, it’s important to recognize that this whole question feels a lot different to a person of color than it does to a white person. I do not mean that all persons of color will agree with the Ongoing Oppression Thesis, or that all white persons will disagree with it; neither is true. But the Thesis will have different valences for different people, and much of what I say below will be more directly relevant to the fears of white people than to the experiences of others. This makes me slightly uncomfortable, but it’s white people, by and large, who are asking the question. I do believe that the general principles I articulate are valid for all Christians, as will become evident. What I’m exploring here today provides but a particular instance of the kind of challenge that most Christians regularly face, in infinitely varied forms. In one sense it represents nothing new under the sun, and there is a great tradition of faithful Christian response throughout our history for you to draw upon for instruction and courage. You’ll see what I mean.

Now, let’s get to the substance. Any valid response to the question I’m addressing will necessarily have three components: the empirical, the prudential, and the principial.

Empirical: If you claim that our society is characterized by “historic and ongoing systematic oppression of racial and sexual minorities by white straight people,” you’re making an empirical claim, a claim that is to be assessed by gathering and sifting evidence. It’s not clear to me that Christians will, or should, do this any differently than anyone else. Some Christians will believe the claim to be warranted, and some will not; but I don’t see that what they believe about these matters has any necessary relation to their Christian faith. After all, a Christian might believe — many Christians do believe! — at one and the same time that (a) homosexual acts are forbidden to Christians and (b) straight Christians have singled out gays and lesbians for demonization while turning a blind eye to their own sexual sins. The empirical questions are distinct from the theological ones.

YouTube免费加速器 It’s when we get to remedies that things get complicated. If your employer is suggesting remedies that you don’t think are ideal — let’s suppose that you’re not opposed to “diversity” hires but think that not enough attention is being paid to professional qualifications; or, again let’s suppose, you think an enormous amount of valuable company time is being devoted to woke “training exercises” — what, as a Christian, do you do? You do what every intelligent person does: You try to exercise prudence. You reflect on the difference between major and minor problems; you think about who in your workplace might serve as your advocate or ally; you look for ways to gently nudge the company in what you believe to be a healthier direction. Meditate on Joseph and Daniel: you think they didn’t have to deal with some messed-up stuff? They put up with certain practices and policies that troubled or even offended them because they had a strategy for faithfulness. If you don’t have one of those, you should think about getting one.

什么加速器可伍看油管 But of course, as the example of Daniel illustrates, sometimes you’re invited — or rather ordered — to cross a line that you can’t in conscience cross. Most of you will know what that line is when you’re presented with it; it’s very difficult to say in the abstract what it might be. Indeed for me it’s impossible, not knowing your situation. But that will be at the very least a small martyrdom for you, and the rule about martyrdom is very simple: Lord, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. That said, do, please, take prayerful thought to distinguish faithfulness to the True God from obeisance to any of many false gods who forever seek to occupy the highest place. It was the tragedy of Stonewall Jackson’s life that he conflated the cause of the Confederacy with the cause of Christ.

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This is not the promised follow-up to my recent post on fear, but it certainly concerns related matters. This is a follow-up to my earlier post on “critical theory.” Neil Shenvi has emailed to alert me to people responding to my post. So let me respond to the responses! But just as an initial clarification, I don’t reply on Twitter to people I don’t follow because I never see their tweets. That’s how I have Twitter set up. I recommend that policy to everyone.

I am truly sorry I didn’t know that Lindsay and his colleagues have written frequently about the very terminological confusion I point to in my post. That must be frustrating to them, and I apologize for adding to their frustration. I can only plead as an excuse that I wasn’t aware of the extent of their empire!

The quotes in Shenvi’s post indicate that there’s disagreement among those who critique critical theory about how confusing the term is. Such disagreement confirms the relevance of my post, which, after all, wasn’t meant primarily as criticism of Lindsay et al. so much as a capsule history lesson on all the confusion the term “critical theory” has been causing for decades.

I wish I had time to support these claims in detail, but I don’t, so just for what little it’s worth, here’s my take: The movement Lindsay et al. are opposed to did not originate with the Frankfurt School, and would be largely what it is if Horkheimer and Adorno had never lived. Its raw materials derive from Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire and bell hooks and Edward Said etc. — the people who get quoted by today’s activists! — scholars who rarely if ever refer to the Frankfurt School or, in the case of Said, claim that that school was culpably negligent in its failure to combat racism and colonialism. The crisis of colonialism, and maybe more than anywhere else in French Algeria, has had an almost infinitely greater role in shaping today’s discourse than the Frankfurt School. It was French thought, not German, that dominated American humanities departments in the last third of the 20th century, and bequeathed a vocabulary that people are still using. (Beyond that lie the “masters of suspicion” I mentioned in my post.) One reason that that French discourse — along with certain English-language writers like C. L. R. James and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose “Decolonising the Mind” is 浏览youtube加速器推荐 influential — has been so dominant is that France and England had vast colonial enterprises and Germany did not. You can hardly overstate the extent to which colonialism has established the terms for current discourse about race and ethnicity and even gender and sexuality. I really do believe that the term “critical theory” misleads people about the relevant history. (By the way, Ngũgĩ decolonized his own mind by ceasing to write in English and turning to Gikuyu instead.)

One might of course argue that all of this intellectual genealogy is beside the point, and what really matters is combating false and dangerous ideas. But the genealogy is what my post was about. Also, I don’t mean that Lindsay and colleagues are wrong about everything, or even about many things. I mean to suggest only that they get the genealogy wrong. I am actually at work, with some other folks, on a project that will address these issues, but I am sworn to secrecy about that right now. More in due course.

Randomly: James Lindsay thinks I’ve been irresponsible in failing to … I’m not sure, do what he does, maybe? I suppose my most recent essay to addresses the same movements that Lindsay does is this one, from 2017; my first one, an ethical critique of deconstruction, and in fact my first published scholarly article, appeared in 1987. So I’ve been at this for a while. But indeed that kind of thing isn’t my chief focus, because quite early on I came to believe that pure critique is a high-demand, low-reward kind of work. It can be helpful if you want to rally your base, but I find it more useful to celebrate what I believe to be true, and true, and beautiful, and embed critique in a larger, more constructive enterprise.

Okay, all that duly noted, I suppose I need to say something in response to a question I get asked all the time: What should be the Christian’s response to this “critical theory”? I’ll do that in my next post — but I will do it badly. This I pledge to you.

In the most recent issue of his newsletter, David French writes,

The fear of the Christian “best” is harming this nation…. [Some], in spite of Christ’s admonition to deny yourself and take up your cross to follow Him, are not willing to risk tweetings when the apostles braved beatings. Their jobs are too precious to risk. Though they enjoy greater freedom from actual censorship than arguably any people in the history of the planet, self-censorship suffices to drive too many thoughtful Christian voices from the academy, the boardroom, and the office. But shrinking back in the face of challenges to career and reputation communicates fear, not faith, to a broken world. While the fearful Christian would never say this out loud, they’re functionally treating the “strong gods” of the partisan political moment as greater and more powerful than the God of the universe they seek to serve.

He also says, “My friend Rod Dreher’s influential blog has become a clearing-house for frightened Christian professionals to (anonymously) express their deep fears.“

So it’s not surprising that Rod replied, thus:

I like and respect David. Let nobody deny his courage in the public arena. I’m serious about that. I agree with him that Christians cannot be silent, that we have to be willing to be criticized, and even suffer for our faith. The most important chapter in Live Not By Lies is the chapter on suffering as Christian witness. But I read David’s essay as way more optimistic than facts warrant. There really is a difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a mindset before it is anything else. Totalitarianism is the idea that there is no area of life that is free from politics — and that also means cultural politics. I don’t believe that we will have a Woke Stasi in this country. But I also believe we won’t need one for the progressive radicals to achieve what they want to do. Justice Alito said in his dissent today that the ruling raises the question of whether employers will force employees to keep quiet regarding their opinions critical of homosexuality and transgenderism. Might you lose your job over your private social media posts affirming what your church teaches? Yes, you might — and you might have no recourse.

So yes, I completely agree with David that Christians should be more bold … but let’s not downplay how much they (we) are going to be made to suffer under the new and emerging cultural and legal regime.

There’s a lot here that needs to be sorted out. Let me make my best effort at the sorting. Here are the key questions:

• Are Christians as such widely in danger of losing their jobs?
• Or, are they merely in danger of losing their social standing, or of getting dragged on Twitter?
• Or, are Christians as such okay, but those Christians who hold traditional views on marriage and sexuality have become personae non gratae in polite society?
• Assuming that you are a Christian in some sort of genuine professional or personal danger, what is the proper Christian response to that?

These are difficult questions, and I would just encourage everyone engaged in these debates to be clear about what specifically they are talking about and what their answers to the above are. Then we can have more meaningful discussions.

In this post I just want to make a couple of points that may provide grist for our common mill.

I’ve met a shockingly large number of closeted academic Christians over the years, and received emails from them. I can think of one visit I made a few years ago to a university that everyone would recognize and recognize as thoroughly secular, at which no fewer than three faculty members approached me when no one else was around to confess, sotto voce, their Christian faith and thank me for my witness. It was obvious that outing themselves as Christians was unthinkable to them. But none of the three had tenure, so I understood. I really doubted whether they would’ve been in danger, because none of them struck me as conservative in their politics or their theology, but people on the tenure clock are easily spooked. The question I found myself asking, though, was: Do they know about one another? I doubted it. But wouldn’t they have been encouraged to know they had company? If even one of them had come out it might have meant a lot to the others.

Which brings me to the person Rod Dreher calls Professor Kingsfield. Professor Kingsfield is a tenured law professor “at one of the country’s elite law schools” who secretly confessed his views to Rod a few years back, and in my judgment Professor Kingsfield ought to be ashamed of himself. Just think of how much encouragement he could have given to other Christians at his law school and elsewhere! He could not have feared losing his job, only potentially the approval of some of his colleagues. The very worst possibility would have been something like being denied promotion from associate to full professor. And he couldn’t face that? He should spend some time reflecting on Polycarp of Smyrna (AD 69–155), who, when as an elderly man he was threatened with being burned to death if he did not renounce Christ, replied, “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior?”

Setting aside whatever judgment he may face when the Lord Christ comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead and he has to explain why he could not bring himself to utter the name of Jesus for terror of the Associate Dean, Professor Kingsfield has dug a hole to hide himself into which others have fallen. A pox, then, on Kingsfield, who has made it more difficult for people who come after him to navigate these difficult days, and a murrain on all of his ilk. On all of them David French’s critique falls forcefully and unambiguously.

However. The situation of the tenured faculty member is an extremely rare one in our world. Very few Americans have the kind of job security Professor Kingsfield and I have, and David French needs to have more sympathy for those who don’t — and who don’t have the benefit that he has, and as far as I can tell has had his entire career, of working for institutions that are either explicitly Christian or explicitly open to Christians. (I have that benefit too!) Should The Dispatch fail, French, thanks to his prominence and a writer and to his previous career as a lawyer, has options to fall back on that few of his fellow American believers have. For them it’s not just a matter of risking “tweetings”: as we have seen countless times, people lose jobs because of what they post on social media or what someone with a smartphone captures them saying on video. And for many millions of Americans, losing a job means losing the ability to feed the family and pay the rent. French’s failure to acknowledge the real potential costs for such Christians is insensitive at best.

That said, I can’t help wondering what would happen if the Christians of America en masse started confessing their faith openly. Not going on a crusade against sexual deviancy or whatever — but simply saying that they believe that Jesus is Lord and that they hope to serve Him, which means to love the Lord their God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind, and love their neighbors as themselves. To comfort the widows and orphans in their distress. To do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. To put no other gods before Him, even the “strong gods” who preen and strut on social media. (Facebook and Twitter are “principalities and powers,” and we should never forget it.)

I don’t know whether that would “work,” whether it would be “effective.” But those aren’t Christian categories anyway. What matters is being faithful to the God who saves us, and that necessarily has a public dimension.

In his famous Divinity School address, Ralph Waldo Emerson complained about those Trinitarian Christians who “dwell with noxious exaggeration upon the person of Jesus.” I often tell people that I want that to be on my tombstone: iTubeGo YouTube Downloader破解版-iTubeGo YouTube下载 ...:2021-6-15 · 猜你喜欢 家庭电脑相册制作系统 V6.0 绿色版 爱博邮件搜索圣手 2.41 破解版 宏达劳务中介管理系统 1.0 注册版 星愿浏览器 v4.4/v3.4.1 绿色精简版 世界风景为壁纸 CamPaper v1.54 注册版. If Even a relative handful of us did that, what might happen? One thing’s for sure: We and our neighbors would realize that there are more of us than anyone had thought.

I hope to revisit these and related matters in subsequent posts.

I was a Kickstarter backer of YouTube免费加速器 and an early enthusiast, but I eventually drifted away from it because I was having trouble getting it to do what I want it to do. In some cases there were bugs in the system — it’s still a new platform, after all — and in some cases my brain was just not getting in sync with it. But I have continued to pay my monthly fee and to cheer it on, and micro.blog’s founding genius Manton Reece has been working away at improving the platform and extending its capabilities. Now I’ve decided to come back. Here’s why:

1. My micro.blog page is 什么加速器可伍看油管 — it’s on my turf. My data belongs to me.
2. I need, for the usual professional reasons, to have a Twitter account, and the frictionless cross-posting from micro.blog allows to me to do so without stepping into the minefields of Twitter itself.
3. I used to have an Instagram account, but I hated having even a tiny place in Zuckerworld, and micro.blog offers easy and clean image posting, plus a dedicated page for all my photos.
4. Also, I devoted many years to using Pinboard as a bookmark manager, but (a) I was saving too much stuff; (b) the site has only been minimally improved over the past decade — it still lacks a responsive design, which is a crime in 2023; and (c) it’s not on my turf. Why not use micro.blog to post links with brief quotes?
5. I’ve been thinking about doing — well, not a podcast as such, but occasional short audio, posts, microcasts one might say. The ability to do that is 上油管挂什么加速器.

So basically micro.blog is a way for me to put everything I do online that is visually small — anything small enough not to require scrolling: quotes, links, images, audio files — in one place, and a place on my own site. The only weird thing about this setup is that it will make me look like I’m super-active on Twitter when I’m barely ever on Twitter. But that’s a small price to pay for moving my stuff out of the walled gardens and onto the open web. And maybe when I don’t have a new book to promote I can deactivate my Twitter account — again.

I’ll continue to use this particular wing of the ayjay.org empire for occasional longer posts, but most of the action will be happening over there. Oh, and it has its own RSS feed too — I recommend that in preference to finding my microposts through Twitter.

UPDATE: Deleted my Twitter. Yes.

Theodore Dalrymple writes,

Lewis Hamilton, the six-time world champion British Formula One driver, recently criticised his colleagues in the sport for saying nothing in the wake George Floyd’s death.

If any answer to this accusation were required, a reasonable one might have been that it was not their place as mere car racers to comment on such matters. If they had wanted to engage in polemics, however, they might have pointed out that Hamilton had remained silent about many terrible events in the world, for example (to take only one such) the war around the Great Lakes of Central Africa, which so far has claimed not one life, but several million lives. Black lives matter to Hamilton, they might have said, but apparently not the lives of these Africans.

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Consider this: Several of the largest tech companies in the world have banded together as The Technology Coalition: “We seek to prevent and eradicate online child sexual exploitation and abuse.” Why is no one — literally no one — demanding that businesses and other institutions make statements against the sexual exploitation of children? Why, for that matter, did I feel that I needed to write something about police brutality in America but not one word about Central African wars, or child sexual exploitation, or China’s treatment of the Uighurs, or a dozen other atrocities that by any rational comparative assessment are worse than police brutality in America?

Well, at least in part I felt the need to write because, as I commented in this earlier post, I’ve been thinking and writing about American racism all my adult life. But as I also note in that post, it wasn’t that long ago that I had to deal with people who criticized me for focusing too much on racial relations. Why has that topic now become something about which there are universal demands for public statements?

Three reasons. The murder of George Floyd (1) happened in America, (2) was captured on a video that seems agonizingly long but is just short enough for people to watch fully, and (3) was shared widely on social media — American social media.

(1) What happens in this country will for obvious reasons be more evident and relevant to Americans than what happens elsewhere, but the U.S. is also the media center of the world, and all eyes are typically drawn here. That’s why anything that Americans obsess over is likely to become at least a point of interest for non-Americans.

(2) George Floyd’s murder was captured on video, and video has power that text does not have. Everyone could see just how long Derek Chauvin crushed George Floyd’s neck, the remorseless asphyxiation as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. But the murder wasn’t bloody and wasn’t grossly violent, and so it could be shown. (The very slowness that makes it horrible also makes it publishable.) Compare that with child sexual exploitation, which is often recorded on video but which Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t allow anyone to post; or with depredations that never get filmed at all. We are often at the mercy of the emotions aroused by what’s put before our eyes. We feel the need for catharsis, for some kind of purging of what we have seen. Our visual cortex orients our attention and our moral response.

(3) Social media are force multipliers for America-centrism and visual stimulation; and they multiply these forces in the way they always do, by generating herd effects and the madness of crowds. The particular kind of madness generated here is a mania for unanimity that doesn’t just punish dissent, but even punishes agreement if the agreement isn’t loud enough or phrased in precisely the correct way. And this moment certainly leaves no room for those who aren’t paying much attention to George Floyd because they’re concerned with the seemingly endless wars in Central Africa or with the horrific specter of child sexual exploitation.

By contrast, I think there are so many cruelties and injustices in this world that anyone who is working to constrain any of them should be applauded. And no one should assume that others are inactive simply because they’re not strutting and fretting their hour upon the social-media stage. It turns out that the biggest problem with the herd mentality is the hatred generated for anyone who won’t — for any reason — join that herd. There’s no violence in silence about a problem the great majority of the angriest weren’t thinking about in April and won’t be thinking about in August either. I am glad that the death of George Floyd has forced many Americans to confront injustices that we have ignored or minimized for far too long; but if you’re just using Floyd’s death as an excuse to coerce and threaten others, you’re not helping.

Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding white noise to the signal, which contains a wide spectrum of frequencies. The frequencies in the white noise corresponding to the original signal’s frequencies will resonate with each other, amplifying the original signal while not amplifying the rest of the white noise (thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio which makes the original signal more prominent). Further, the added white noise can be enough to be detectable by the sensor, which can then filter it out to effectively detect the original, previously undetectable signal.

This works for sound and image alike, for example:

SR may help to explain why some people learn better when surrounded by white noise — thus writers who hang out in coffee shops. SR has been identified in the sensory neurobiology of many creatures, but I don’t understand that stuff at all, so please don’t have any illusions about my competence to grasp serious scientific ideas.

I mention all this because I think reading texts from the past — something about which I have written a book — is a way of usefully introducing stochastic resonance into our mental lives. Maybe I’m stretching a metaphor here, but bear with me.

Some people say we live in an age of information overload. Clay Shirky has said that it’s not information overload but rather “filter failure.” A slightly different way to put Shirky’s point is to say that a super-surplus of input makes it difficult for us to discern genuine information, to distinguish signal from noise. We can’t sift and sort and bring order to all the stuff assaulting us.

But if you step back from the endless flow of social media and the internet more generally, and sit down with a book from the past that appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the affairs of the moment, something curious and rather wonderful can happen. Unexpectedly and randomly — stochastically — you begin to perceive resonances with your own moment, with the concerns that you may have turned to the past in order to escape.

When you approach the text from the past on its own terms and for its own sake, it becomes a kind of white noise in relation to present concerns. Your attention to the long ago and far away makes the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart. (Allusion alert!) It’s when the current environment lies outside the scope of your attention, when you neither seek nor expect any connection to it, that you make room for random resonances to form.

And when they do form, you begin to discern the really key features of your moment more clearly. An image begins to appear where there had been formlessness. Useless and pernicious statements start to recede into the background as you perceive them for what they are. The salient and the helpful points move to the forefront of your attention.

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This may be a subset of the Eureka phenomenon, but at the moment I’m inclined to think that it’s largely distinct from that, though not unrelated.

By the way, I think all that I’ve described here describes equally well the experience of reading much science fiction and fantasy. The fact that almost all of my leisure reading is (a) old books, (b) SF, (c) fantasy suggests that my fundamental orientation as a reader is a hopeful openness to stochastic resonance.

On January 25, Joe Biden tweeted that “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” The. I texted a friend, “Because we’ve fixed all the problems Martin Luther King was concerned about?”

When the #MeToo movement was dominating public attention, I remember hearing Christian commentators say that if you‘re a preacher and you’re not preaching about #MeToo you’re failing your congregation. Later, or maybe before, it was the border crisis that was the obligatory homiletic topic. Those same commentators are now equally insistent about preaching on George Floyd and systemic racism — and yet, as far as I know, neither systemic sexism nor government-sponsored xenophobia have been conquered.

I’m reminded of a motif in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. From time to time in the book some character comments that “Time passes” — to which some other character replies, “That’s how it goes. But not so much.” This is the correct reply: Not so much.

A couple of years ago I gave a lecture at a university on difference and civility — it wasn’t this talk but it was on similar themes — and in the Q&A afterwards I got some pushback against my reliance on examples from the Civil Rights Movement and the broader history of American racial politics. The people pushing back thought I should’ve been talking about … topics of more recent attention. I replied with two points. First, I said, I grew up in Alabama during the Civil Rights era and what happened there and then has left a permanent mark on me. I didn’t end up making it my academic speciality to work on such matters, but I have written about them off and on my entire career, and expect that I will continue to do so. Second, I said, I don’t believe matters of race are any less fraught in America 2018 than they were in America 1968.

Human beings have overwhelmingly powerful cravings for novelty and unanimity. We want new problems to face, because we’re tired of the old ones: they bore us, and remind us of our failures to solve them. And, especially in times of stress, we crave environments in which dissent is silenced and even mere difference is erased. We call that “solidarity,” but it‘s more like an instinctual bullying. You must attend to the thing I am attending to. I despise both of those tendencies. They’ve turned everyone into attention muggers.

If three months ago you were primarily focused on addressing sexism in the workplace, it seems to me that you ought to be allowed, indeed encouraged, to keep thinking about and working on that now, when everyone else is talking about police brutality. If your passionate concern is the lack of health care in poor communities, here or abroad, I think you should feel free to stick with that, even if it means not joining in protests against police racism. If you’ve turned your farm into a shelter for abused or neglected animals, and caring for them doesn’t leave you time to get on social media with today’s approved hashtags, bless you. You’re doing the Lord’s work.

As for me, I will probably continue to do what I’ve done most of my life, which is to think and pray and sometimes write about racism — even when Twitter and the media that are governed by Twitter have moved on, as assuredly they will, to some new topic about which they will insist that everyone state the correct opinion. Neither novelty nor unanimity is a social good.

Here’s Auden:

Anywhere you like, somewhere
on broad-chested life-giving Earth,

anywhere between her thirstlands
and undrinkable Ocean,

the crowd stands perfectly still,
its eyes (which seem one) and its mouths

(which seem infinitely many)
expressionless, perfectly blank.

The crowd does not see (what everyone sees)
a boxing match, a train wreck,

a battleship being launched,
does not wonder (as everyone wonders)

who will win, what flag she will fly,
how many will be burned alive,

is never distracted
(as everyone is always distracted)

by a barking dog, a smell of fish,
a mosquito on a bald head:

the crowd sees only one thing
(which only the crowd can see)

an epiphany of that
which does whatever is done.

Whatever god a person believes in,
in whatever way he believes,

(no two are exactly alike)
as one of the crowd he believes

and only believes in that
in which there is only one way of believing.

Few people accept each other and most
will never do anything properly,

but the crowd rejects no one, joining the crowd
is the only thing all men can do.

I’ve read several articles and posts recently featuring the same conceit: that COVID–19 and police violence are the “twin plagues” or “parallel plagues” of black America. This is in one important sense highly misleading. It’s too simple and therefore easy to refute or ignore. But that’s not the whole story.

If you visit the Mapping Police Violence site, you’ll see near the top of the page this statement: “Police killed 1,098 people in 2023.” Then, a little farther down the page, you get the information that “Black people were 24% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population.” Which means that American police killed 263 black people last year. It’s not clear how many black people have died from COVID–19, but a reasonable estimate would be 25,000. That means that the coronavirus has killed 95 times more black Americans in just a few months than police killed in all of 2023. Put that way, the plagues scarcely seem comparable, do they?

But let’s not leave it at that. What we need here, if we’re going to continue to speak the language of plague, that is, the language of disease, is the distinction between acute and 雷神加速器能上youtube affliction. I’m speaking metaphorically here, in terms of how whole populations are affected by some invasive, destructive force, whether it’s a literal biological disease or not. I’m thinking of the black population of America as a single body. And in relation to that body COVID–19 is an acute disorder. It has sprung up quickly, out of nowhere, and afflicted people intensely. It just might go away. (From my keyboard to God’s ears.)

Police violence, by contrast, is a chronic disorder. It goes on year after year after year, decade after decade after decade. I have not experienced anything like that, but I expect that something of the endless tension of it is captured in this famous passage from Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

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Take a look again at that long, long sentence in the middle of the passage, how it goes on and on, how you keep pausing for a second but only a second, never being able to stop long enough to catch your breath. “Living constantly at tiptoe stance.” A chronic affliction.

My dear friend Garnette Cadogan just posted a reflection on these matters, and if you listen to the music he chose to accompany his words you’ll note this theme again and again. To cite just one example, this from KRS-One:

My grandfather had to deal with the cops
My great-grandfather dealt with the cops
My great grandfather had to deal with the cops
And then my great, great, great, great — when it’s gonna stop?

That’s why Toni Morrison, in a passage also quoted by Garnette, speaks of a cry that has “no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

If you think of the black population of this country as a body, then COVID–19 is indeed a terrible plague ravaging it. The fear, the expectation, of police violence isn’t like that: it’s instead a misery that the body (the whole body of black Americans) must suffer and suffer and suffer, with no end in sight. People who have chronic diseases know that what’s attacking them probably won’t kill them — but even if it doesn’t, it might make them wish they were dead. It frays their nerves. It disrupts their sleep. It damages their relationships and weakens their judgment. It makes them vulnerable to other afflictions that really could kill them.

If you’re a black person in America, walking down the streets of a city, the cops probably won’t stop you. But they might. If a cop stops you, he probably won’t kill you. But he might. It’s a non-trivial possibility. The constant awareness of that possibility is itself an affliction. Garnette’s essay and the music associated with it testify to that.

We shouldn’t conflate the sudden onset of COVID–19 and the endless tension that arises from walking, or doing anything else, while black. But keeping them conceptually distinct, we can still see them as have this essential thing in common: they attack the bodies of black Americans, they attack the social body that is Black America.

Those of us who are white don’t know much, firsthand, about that chronic affliction. But you know, while the coronavirus itself might be acute, For all of us concern about it has become chronic. Buying groceries probably won’t make us ill. But it might. And if we get ill, we probably won’t die. But we might. It’s a non-trivial possibility. We’re learning how to live at tiptoe stance. Our nerves are fraying after just a few months. Imagine what it would be like to live this way all our lives long.

One:

I am not arguing for a return to some sort of view-from-nowhere style of journalism. I have no problem identifying as both a journalist but also as a progressive and someone who dislikes Trump rather fiercely. There is nothing wrong with having your journalism be driven by a sense of general ideological mission; some of the best journalists covering the working poor care deeply about the working poor, believe they are treated unfairly, and want to see their station improved. They’re still capable of, and produce, honest journalism.

What I am saying is that if you call yourself a journalist, there needs to be some distance, somewhere, between your tribal allegiances and the way you do your job.

Two:

Accuracy norms are about, well, accuracy: People who subscribe to accuracy norms are most concerned with spreading true claims, and with debunking false ones. Rightside norms are about being on the right ‘side’ of a given controversy: People who subscribe to rightside norms are more concerned with showing that they are on the right side of a given controversy, and that the people on the other side are morally suspect, than they are with accuracy, at least in a zoomed-in sense. […]

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1) It will often harm your group standing to point out that a false claim is false

2) It will often benefit your group standing to pile on a figure who has been unfairly accused of something by broadcasting evidence pertaining not to the claim in question, but to his or her broader (ostensible) moral worthlessness

3) It will often benefit your group standing to punish those who seek to debunk false claims against ‘bad’ figures

Imagine experiencing all this over and over, outrage after outrage.

I’m re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson‘s magnificent Mars trilogy right now, which might be something to blog about in the coming days and weeks, so why not get started?

Not long ago I was in a Zoom conversation with several people, one of whom is a very distinguished scientist, and he told me that when he read my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 and got to the end, he felt that I had given short shrift to the virtues of technocracy. He thinks technocracy would be a pretty good thing, especially as compared with the plausible alternatives. The conversation veered onto other paths soon after that, possibly more fruitful ones, but before it did I sketched out an answer that I want to develop a little more fully here — because it’s a little different than the view I (implicitly) endorse in that book, which is that Technocracy Is Bad. What I think I now want to say is Technocracy Is Impossible.

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Right from the beginning of the story there is great debate, forceful and even sometimes hostile debate, among the First Hundred — the 100 (or, to be precise, 101) people who are sent from Earth to start the first Mars colony — about what sort of society they should form once they get there. They are theoretically responsible to the national governments that sent them and to the U.N., but one of the things that becomes clear to them as even as they’re on their way to Mars is that upon arrival they’re going to have to make their own decisions about how to order their common life. And so a great deal of the book is about, for lack of a better phrase, 雷神加速器上youtube.

One of the things we are occasionally reminded of in the first book of the trilogy, Red Mars, is the international celebrity of the First Hundred. People back on Earth obsessively watch video of the colonists, and enter passionately into their debates:

So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax’s plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could. But the minority who backed Ann’s hands-off attitude tended to be more vehement in their belief, insisting that it had immediate applications to the Antarctic policy, and indeed to all Terran environmental policy. Meanwhile different poll questions made it clear that many people were fascinated by Hiroko and the farming project, while others called themselves Bogdanovists; Arkady had been sending back lots of video from Phobos, and Phobos was good video, a real spectacle of architecture and engineering. New Terran hotels and commercial complexes were already imitating some of its features, there was an architectural movement called Bogdanovism, as well as other movements interested in him that were more concentrated on social and economic reforms in the world order.

All of this makes more sense if you have read the books and know the characters, but even if you haven’t, I think you’ll get the general picture. Terrans are not only interested in what the colonists will do to organize life on Mars, they‘re reflecting on the implications of those ideas for life on Earth.

For me, here’s the key thing: When you have an environment completely dominated by scientists and engineers — the only non-scientist we meet is a psychologist, sent to provide therapy to the colonists — there is no agreement among them about what kind of life they should live together. That is, scientific and technological expertise does not correlate with any particular mode of social and political organization. Scientists can vary just as much in their beliefs about what kind of life is worth living as any randomly selected group of people in a society. They don’t even agree about the importance of technology. Rule could theoretically be given over to people who have demonstrated certain kinds of scientific or technical knowledge, but we would be wrong to think that everyone who has the same level of STEM achievement will have the same views about politics. When you read Robinson’s great trilogy you will understand not only why this might be so but why it must be so.

Therefore it makes no sense to say that the decisions of political leaders should be governed by “the science.” Leaders should pay attention to scientists, dramatically more than the current Presidential administration does, but an immunologist will say one thing, an epidemiologist something slightly different, an economist something altogether other. The various sciences and academic disciplines will not speak with a single voice, indeed will not speak at all: individual scholars will speak, and what they say will arise from a combination of their scholarly expertise and their beliefs (derived from non-scientific sources) about what matters most in life, and a good political leader will have the general intelligence and moral discernment to sift the various messages he or she receives and make a decision based on all the relevant input. Which is another way of saying that there are not, nor will there ever be, charts and algorithms that can substitute for political judgment. Alas for the U.S.A. that political judgment is precisely what our leadership lacks.

Yesterday I got a sweet email from my friend Francis Spufford, expressing his prayerful concern for the condition of my country right now, and I replied,

It’s getting harder to maintain hope, and harder still to maintain charity towards Certain People. I told Teri yesterday that I’m ready to move to a cabin in the desert of West Texas and check back in with humanity in 2030. In the unlikely event that things will be better.

Francis answered that “If you do that, you may of course find yourself operating a scriptorium, where the works of St Wystan are copied by hand so they may survive the dark age to come….”

In the current circumstances, that doesn’t seem like the worst way to pass my remaining years.

But Francis also pointed me to 能上油管的网络加速器 by the Reverend Canon Jessica Martin — whom Francis happens to be married to — about a very small moment very long ago, featuring two very small people, that carries, for those with ears to hear, 浏览youtube加速器推荐

Public health depends on economic balance. Basil and Ambrose both condemned as toxic the economic profiteering of high-interest loans, describing the devastating losses they caused for those afflicted with unemployment and need. For Basil usury was a fatal, chronically self-devouring disease like a wild animal; its metastasizing growth, he implied, feeds on itself and its host to the destruction of differentiation, a disordered body, family, and property undermining civic stability. (Hom. Ps. 14b). If you are the financier, better to forgive the interest at least—or, best, write off the entire loan as a gift. The godly capitalism of right material practices was, he said, at core about thanksgiving. Addressing grain-hoarders during a famine, he wrote: “As costly capital, preserve thanksgiving in your soul….Cling twice as tenaciously to thanksgiving as you do to luxury.” (Hom. 8.6)

Economics are so bound to illness that the sick poor are “twice poor,” say Gregory of Nazianzus’ and Gregory of Nyssa’s respective sermons titled “On the love of the poor.” A Christian’s right response to their plight demands direct identification of them with the body of Christ, modeling aid action on God’s liberal and indiscriminate generosity for creation. Such “love” is not simply mercy but righteousness.

— Susan Holman

Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favour and glad to do thy will. Bless our land with honourable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogancy, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

— Book of Common Prayer (1928)

Once I saw how things were going I got away from Twitter and stopped checking my RSS reader. I didn’t want to hear any news, mainly because I knew that there wouldn’t be much news as such — though there would be vast tracts of reason-bereft, emotionally-incontinent opinionating. And I don’t need that. Ever.

Instead, I’ve just read Ron Chernow‘s massive and quite excellent biography of George Washington. It’s been a useful as well as an enjoyable experience. For one thing, it reminds me what actual leadership looks like; and for another, it reminds me of how deeply flawed even the best leaders can be, and how profoundly wrong. As is always the case when I spend some serious time with the past, I get perspective. I see the good and the bad of my own time with more clarity and accuracy. And if anything vital has happened over the past few days while I’ve been reading, I’ve got plenty of time to catch up. As I’ve said before, I prefer to take my news a week at a time anyway, not minute by minute.

One theme in Chernow’s biography particularly sticks with me. It concerns the end of Washington’s second administration and his brief period as an ex-President (he lived only two-and-a-half years after departing the office). That was a time when when political parties in something like the modern sense of the term — though many of the Founders referred to the power and danger of “Factions” — dramatically strengthened. It was also a time when journalists who supported one faction would say pretty much anything to discredit the other one, would make up any sort of tale. John Adams, violently angered by all the lies told about him and his colleagues — and there really were lies, outrageous lies, about him, just as there were about Washington near the end of his second term — strongly supported and oversaw the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts to punish journalistic bias and fake news, as well as to deter immigration — though Adams and his fellow in-power Federalists were only concerned to punish the lies that worked against their policies, not the lies that worked in their favor. (Plenty of those circulated also.) Washington, rather surprisingly and disappointingly, thought these laws good ones.

I draw certain lessons from this whole sordid history. Habitual dishonesty, on the part of politicians and journalists alike, inflames partisanship. You exaggerate the nastiness of your political opponents, and that leads people in your camp to think of the other side not as fellow citizens with whom you disagree on policy, but rather something close to moral monsters. Gratified by your increasingly tight bond with the like-minded, you stretch your exaggerations into outright lies, which gain even more rapturous agreement within your Ingroup and more incandescent anger against the Outgroup. Dishonesty begets partisanship, and partisanship begets further dishonesty. It’s a classic vicious circle.

And one more phenomenon is begotten by all this malice. Wheeled around in this accelerating circle of your own devising, you become incapable of comprehending, or even seeing, something that it is absolutely necessary for every wise social actor to know: In some situations all parties act badly. Sometimes there are no good guys, just fools and knaves, blinded to the true character of their own behavior by their preening partisan self-righteousness.

Americans have never more desperately needed reliable knowledge than we do now; also, Americans have never been less inclined to trust experts, who are by definition the people supposed to possess the reliable knowledge. There are many reasons why we have landed ourselves in this frustratingly paradoxical situation, and there’s no obvious way out of it. But I want to suggest that there’s one small thing that journalists can do to help: Stop using the word “experts.”

Of course, expertise is a real thing! — though perhaps not quite as commonplace a thing as is widely believed. In most of life’s situations we understand the value of expertise: few of us try to repair our own computers, and none of us decides to remove his own spleen. But occasionally we draw a line.

Some are inclined to draw that line in strange places — say, believing that the moon landing was faked, or that the world is ruled by lizard people. But the really common dissents seem to come in matters of health: you might not know any moon-landing skeptics or lizard-people True Believers, but you surely have an anti-vaxxer cousin, or an aunt whose belief in the healing power of essential oils persists in defiance of her doctor’s counsel. And if you’re going to try to persuade those dissenters from standard opinion to change their minds, almost the worst thing you can do it appeal to “experts.”

There are three reasons for this. The first is that many people with genuine expertise in a given field have a difficult time staying in their lane. I have long thought that the perfect example of this is the Doomsday Clock of the 网站加速器-科研学术必备上网工具 Chrome插件,网站加速器 ...:2021-8-7 · 网站加速器-科研学术必备上网工具Chrome插件下载和安装教程,Extfans提供网站加速器-科研学术必备上网工具谷歌Chrome浏览器的扩展插件的下载,伍及更加详细的网站加速器-科研学术必备上网工具Chrome插件安装教程和谷歌浏览器插件相关资讯,进而 .... The question of whether we are close to nuclear war is a political question, not a scientific one; an “atomic scientist” has no reasonable claim to knowing any more about it than you do, at least, not by virtue of being an atomic scientist. (Factoring climate change into the Doomsday scenario doesn’t help matters much, because atomic scientists aren’t climate scientists any more than they are psychiatrists or nutritionists.)

A second reason that invocations of expertise often fail is simply that people with equivalent expertise in the same field often disagree. This leads to the phenomenon, familiar to anyone who has ever flipped from one cable news station to another, of Dueling Experts.

The third, and most important, reason why appeals to expertise are futile is that the term “expert” functions as a kind of class marker. An expert is One Who Knows, a member of the 浏览youtube加速器推荐 or epistocracy — and you are not. “Experts say” is a phrase that often carries a strong implication: “So shut up and heed your betters.” This is not the sort of message that Americans like, even when maybe they ought to.

My suggestion to journalists, then, is simple: Never use the word “expert.” If you are tempted to say “We talked to an expert,” say instead that you talked to an immunologist, or an epidemiologist — and then take a moment to explain what an immunologist or epidemiologist actually is. Tell us that you talked to someone who has spent twenty years studying the ways that diseases are transmitted, especially from one person to another. Yes, that takes longer than saying “expert,” but it’s worth it. To describe the person you’re interviewing or quoting in that more detailed way tells a little story, a story not about someone standing on a pedestal labeled “EXPERT,” but rather a person who is continually working to learn more. A person who has thought hard, and tested her ideas, and worked with colleagues who care about the same things. A person whom we should listen to not because she belongs to a certain class that’s higher than ours, but rather because she‘s dedicated to gaining knowledge — and knowledge directly relevant to the questions we’re all asking right now.

It should be obvious that this discipline will also ensure that journalists rely on people with the appropriate knowledge. When you’re scrambling to find someone to interview or cite and can only find someone whose field is but tangentially related to the question at hand, he word “expert” can neatly obscure your problem.

All this takes more time and effort. But the word “expert” has been poisoned now for millions of people, and not always for bad reasons. I know that in journalism time is often short and word-count limited, but journalists have a responsibility to educate as well as inform their public, and this is a way to do that better. After all, you want to be an expert communicator, don’t you?