The Sins of GKC

A new book, here reviewed.

[Chesterton] was content to have Frances manage his life.... His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view.

But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character. 

It's mostly anti-Semitism, although anyone who has ever seen a picture of GKC might have thought of gluttony. In his defense, GKC lived before the depths of anti-Semitism were exposed; and the introductory version he bought on to is a form that masks a valid complaint that is severable from the Jews. "He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe" is often described as a predecessor to the view that "loyalty to internationally-financed corporations undermines loyalty to one's own nation." You don't need any Jews to be involved to worry, for example, that Apple's or Nike's commitments to Communist China have worrying effects on our political culture here at home. You only even need 'the Chinese' accidentally; it could be any authoritarian nation with communistic values.

The reviewer continues:

I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended.

That last is certainly true, at least among the living. The Church believes in a metaphysical self, though, in which Chesterton himself is still a member -- and, hopefully, still praying for his beloved Ecclesia.  

Progressives and Genetics

It's ugly, they admit; "but what if it's true?", they begin to ask.

A Collegiate Theory

"Men appear to be giving up on college," Hot Air worries, citing WSJ data.

U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man...

All of this makes me worry about the future. Having CRT enter public classrooms and emphasize the idea of white supremacy and male privilege at a point where white males are already struggling with education seems like a perfect storm of bad ideas. Based on the data above, we don’t need to be telling boys that they need to check their privilege from the time they can first read and write, we need to be helping them do as well as girls.

Alternatively, it may be that college is objectively less valuable than it was, and men are on the forefront of figuring this out. Just as an initial baseline, college costs have skyrocketed over the last decades due to government making student loans easily available. Colleges responded by raising tuition to the limits the government would support. Thus, college costs a lot more now for whatever value you are going to get out of it.

There's less value to get out of it, too. Feminists sometimes complain that any field that women succeed in entering immediately begins to lose pay, although they read this as 'sexism' rather than as 'supply and demand'; if you add many more workers to the field, the supply increase naturally means that pay can be lessened. Women now are successfully dominating the office jobs that require a bachelors degree, and that means that office jobs are not as prestigious or well-remunerated as once. These environments were always unattractive to men, but the pay made up for the depressing need to be inside all day long. Now there's less pay, too. 

Meanwhile, a lot of college degrees are now education degrees or lower-level medical degrees -- nursing, say. In addition to being inside-all-day fields, these are also areas where there is social pressure to keep men out. Men are essentially unwelcome to be elementary school teachers, and barely welcome in secondary schools; and nursing is a traditionally female field, though of course men do become nurses. These are classic fields that offer security in return for no real chance of making a fortune, which are less attractive to men even absent the social pressures that keep men out of them. 

Outsourcing and offshoring are also an issue. It first affected factory workers, but at this point a lot of white collar jobs can be offshored. What can't be offshored is skilled trade work. Your plumber or electrician is going to have to be there where you are physically. Those are jobs that require certifications and practical experience rather than college degrees. 

I have obviously spent a lot of time in school, and don't mean to run down education's value. Yet an actual education is hard to get in college; you really have to work at finding one. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, it's possible to learn a lot about them in a university. What you'll probably be routed towards, though, is a degree in 'education' or some nonsense 'social science' that teaches you nothing about physics, little about math beyond statistics, and assumptions about philosophy and history rather than a capacity to inquire into them deeply. You'll read Aristotle's name a few times, but you won't read Aristotle. 

For me that was the real value in education, and most degrees do not now even aspire to it. Of course men might lose interest in something that has become less interesting. The question is why women continue to double-down on a play that has become vastly more expensive and obviously less valuable. 

Ritual of Abortion

Everybody knows this 'Satanic Temple' bit is a play-acting legal falsehood. It intends to provide fake 'deeply held religious belief' cover for things like drug usage and abortion, to mock actual religion, and to force communities to build sculptures to Satan if they allow things like crosses for war veterans on public land. It's always been an open joke by people who hate traditional religion and want to mock it, and one that occasionally proves useful to the designs of their real ideology.

One wonders, however, if invoking the abyss often enough won't actually summon it. 

"Protecting Women"

The Biden Administration's Justice Department vows to 'protect women,' by which they mean help them kill their children. Meanwhile, their new Taliban partners for peace are also interested in protecting women.

On the Importance of Sheriffs

The introduction is similar to the better movie Paint Your Wagon. This one has James Garner, and is lighter fare.

But Paint Your Wagon does seem to be the better prophecy.

Texas Bounty Hunters III

An ongoing series, because I really like the relevant music.

The Dumbledore Fallacy

Have you noticed that it's very hard to talk sense with people? Oh, you have? Sorry, so it's not just me. Apropos of nothing in particular, I spent a few hours this week trying to engage people in discussion of the new Texas "heartbeat" law, usually beginning with the startling notion that some of us think unborn children are human beings. I got lots of responses more or less amounting to "but it's really hard on some women that they can get pregnant when men can't, and men don't always support their children." I answer, yes, these are very bad things, but the point of a law limiting abortion is to protect unborn children, not to take sides in disputes between adult men and women. The answer tends to be, "Oh, of course, I agree, but the situation between the adult men and women is really very unfair, so I believe in personal choice, and a decision between a woman and her doctor/God whatever."

My brow stayed wrinkled much of the time. Why do I bother? I'm not sure; it may be because to this day I remember being struck by a placard reading "I love YOU, and I'd fight for YOUR life, too." Even if I didn't really change my mind on the subject until years later, the argument did worm its way into my conscience and do lasting good work there.

Anyway, speaking of fallacies and the never-ending work of exposing them, I came upon this 2009 piece about the "Dumbledore Fallacy":

I understand what it means to say “X is a good act” or “X is an immoral act”. I don’t understand at all what people mean when they say that Y is a good or bad person. Every person (even the damned) is ontologically good: we are all made in God’s image, all called to eternal beatitude with Him, all addressed by the same moral law. Every person has both good and evil desires; every person is capable of good or evil acts. The moral law gives us a key to evaluating acts, not persons.

“Good person” talk is closely related to what I call the Dumbledore fallacy. Here’s how it goes. I say “homosexual acts are immoral”. J. K. Rowling responds “Dumbledore protects the children of Hogwarts from the evil Voldemort. This is a good act, right?” “Yes”, I reply. Rowling continues, “So Dumbledore is a good person. Ah, but Dumbledore also likes to have sex with men. Therefore, homosexuality is good.” QED.

Now, the Dumbledore fallacy is obviously invalid; it could be used to justify anything. “Ah, but Dumbledore sacrifices children to Moloch. Therefore, ritual murder is good.” “Ah, but Dumbledore rapes old women. Therefore, raping old women is good.” It proves no such thing. At most, it proves that certain virtues can coexist with certain vices. Actually, it doesn’t even prove that much, because Dumbledore is a fictional character.

Rowling’s argument actually depends on a couple of unstated steps. “If a person does a good act, he or she is a good person. All the acts of a good person are good.” The argument only has the rhetorical force it does because these steps are left unstated. Say them out loud, and you can’t help but notice how absurd they are.

As Screwtape said, "Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!"

I Guess It's Labor Day

Never was one to cross a picket line, myself. The unions may have gotten greedy and made it hard to compete with Japan, but it was the Chamber of Commerce that sold out America to Communist China.

Burn some brats, have some beers.

Frankland: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again

My own pet project of establishing a new state of mountainous Appalachia has a precedent: the state of Franklin, or "Frankland," following the etymology that should be well known to readers here. 

Franklin represents the early American concept that “if your government is not representing you, then it’s your right and your duty to throw off that government and establish a new government,” Barksdale says. “Franklin demonstrates how the statehood movement in the heart of Appalachia was [of] central [importance] to our new nation immediately after the American Revolution.”

It didn't work out, but it should have.  

Flipping Virtue on its Head

Montesquieu warned "As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.”

True enough. This take, however puts a spin on it that may be even more true, and perhaps even more dangerous, as in the way C.S. Lewis warned us about tyrants with good intentions:

A tyrant that is not just an individual head or small group is difficult to unseat.

Mapped Ballot Fraud

From TrueTheVote:

We'd watched the mass mail out of paper ballots to highly inaccurate voter records, the harried installation of ballot dropboxes privately funded by billionaire tech magnates, and the hundreds of legislative changes, lawsuits, and consent decrees that fundamentally altered election processes. All of it came together in 2020, under the fog of COVID. It was planned. It was purposeful.

Indeed, they said as much themselves in that Time article.

Having studied election process for decades, our team was well aware of the pitfalls associated with America's uniquely insecure approach to elections. We knew that attempts to prove certain types of election malfeasance would fail, so we chose instead to focus on the grifts that would necessarily leave trackable, provable data trails.

To test our trafficking theory, we acquired over ten trillion location-based cell signals in major metropolitan areas across six states. Initially, we worked with whistleblowers and witnesses, but soon enough, the data alone told the tale. Using mobile and GPS data, we mapped the travel patterns of ballot traffickers to ballot dropboxes.  

They point out that this kind of tracking has been used by the NYT and by the government in several cases, so it's well established as a commonplace way to approach this kind of issue.

So what did they find?

Our findings reveal overwhelming evidence of ballot trafficking, some of which is highlighted in the article. We have much more.

All our research, including suspected locations where ballots were delivered, processed, and distributed, along with the individual devices associated, has been submitted in the form of a formal complaint, along with all data, to the FBI. Briefings have been provided to state law enforcement and political leadership in several states. These conversations will continue to broaden in the coming days.

We've also acquired over a petabyte of video surveillance data. The quality of this video is inferior overall; lighting is bad, cameras are poorly positioned, timestamps are manipulated, key timeframes are often missing. Nevertheless, we are working video by video, using proprietary AI-based code we've written to screen the over 100,000 clips in our possession. The result? We are successfully finding video evidence that corroborates the digital data and supports the need for full investigations by law enforcement.

The problem is, of course, that 'law enforcement' has not touched it for the same reason it will not touch it: law enforcement is controlled by the winners of that stolen election, people who intend to continue to steal elections from now on. The last thing they'd want is for law enforcement to get on with investigations into this.

The exception are the nation's Sheriffs, who are independently elected officers who do not report to the centralized governments -- not mayors, not governors, not Presidents. For this reason, in major cities they are generally defunded and their funds turned over to a "City Police" department whose leadership is hired and fired by the mayor and/or city council. This keeps law enforcement pliant. 

Outside the cities the sheriffs remain potent. Unfortunately, the fraud is city-based. Sheriffs still exist, and perhaps some of them can be convinced to take this up. If it can lead to arrests and prosecutions (another problem in those cities where non-prosecuting prosecutors have been solicited by left-leaning NGOs) maybe something can finally be done within the system.  

It's a big lift, though, because the whole system has been turned against citizen self-government. The thieves are in charge across the board.

This Airport Story

The version of the story given to CBS News is, as has become usual, designed to hide the Biden administration's culpability for a horrible situation. 

Excerpts of an email from the State Department to members of congress viewed by CBS News acknowledged that charter flights are still on the ground at the Mazar-i-Sharif airstrip in northern Afghanistan and have permission to land in Doha "if and when the Taliban agrees to takeoff." 

Such is the situation as of Sunday. On Wednesday, however, I was on a call with a member of the air evacuation efforts and the head of a small airline not in the Middle East, brokering a way to transfer people into normal airlines following their successful flight out.  Everything was in place except the money, and donors had been found -- just not quite enough as at that moment. 

I infer that someone within the Biden Administration or the State Department (whom the effort had been briefing, as we would need institutional support to finalize visas in some cases) decided to try to find their own way out, and decided Qatar was the obvious choice. Telling Doha about this is equivalent to having informed the Taliban of it, because Qatar hosted them in their exile, brokered the peace talks, and is one of their chief supporters. Qatar told the Taliban, and the Taliban now have these people as hostages. 

The Biden Administration is trying to convince the press that the Taliban are the bad guys here, and they certainly are among the bad guys: they're now holding Americans hostage. But the Biden administration also has a lot of blame to carry because they gave the game away. Instead of working with veteran operators they blew things up by trying to take over and run things with their regular incompetence.

He's in a tough spot

CNN offers the President political advice, after sympathizing with his rotten luck, what with the Taliban's betrayal of his trust, Delta unexpectedly cratering job creation, Republicans inexplicably continuing to push their agenda, and Democrat legislators balking at a couple of the fringes of the leftist agenda. Should he pick projects with broad appeal to Americans that can command a clear majority in Congress? Oh, gosh, no. He should forcefully support the Democrat traitors until they fall back in line:

What's Biden to do in the face of all these obstacles? The most important thing he can focus on at this point is keeping his party in line. He will need to lean in harder on Manchin and Sinema, giving them the support they need to retain their electoral standing while offering not-so-subtle reminders about the importance of putting on a united front to fulfill his agenda. If Democrats are perpetually stuck in a legislative logjam as the nation struggles with broken infrastructure, natural disasters, and an ongoing pandemic, there's little chance voters will give the party another shot at trying to address the many problems they face going into 2022.

There's also the danger that he will be distracted by the need to solve immediate problems with visible competence and honesty. No one cares about that stuff: voters want him to create a nationwide standard of ballot fraud and undermine the nation's energy independence, STAT.

Biden also has to actively shape his message and agenda, rather than react to events and circumstances as they occur. As the going gets tough, it is easy for presidents to be caught on the wrong foot and get swept up in the noise of the moment. What great presidents learn is that focus means a great deal. Presidents have the power to keep the nation — and Congress — on track. They have the ability to keep pushing specific issues like the urgent need to protect voting rights or address climate change — even if the news cycle veers off into different directions.

Keeping the news from veering off into unauthorized directions is pretty straightforward: just get the press back in line, where they're begging to be, anyway. Maybe they need more "support," too. That should help keep all those pesky voters from veering off into savaging the President's competence in the polls.

But that is, and it would explain a lot

The Bee again.

That's not funny!

Liberal society becomes more humorless by the day.

Heartbeats

I'm no Politico fan, but I trust the legal analysis and judgment of Sarah Isgur, the talented daughter of my first client, who is one of the smartest, most humane men I've ever had the pleasure to know. I met Sarah once when she was about four, so it's exciting to see the adult woman she grew into. This analysis is head and shoulders above anything I've read this week, regardless of anyone's position on the underlying merits of the contentious new Texas "heartbeat" law. She makes a good point about the dangers of approving the clever procedural gambit on which the law is based.

How soon do you need to know?

The Week in Pictures is up. I'm not sure if I'm binary or non-binary. Is there a deadline for my choice?

The Hon. Jim Webb on Afghanistan

I would be remiss not to draw your attention to this piece by my own favored 2016 Presidential candidate (and former Senator during my years in Virginia), author, scholar, diplomat, former Secretary of the Navy, and decorated Marine Jim Webb.

Webb's military and diplomatic service were both especially centered on Vietnam, so in the course of his description of the events he notes something probably many people missed.

In a remarkable display of tone-deaf diplomatic naiveté, the Vice President was pictured sitting in front of a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh during a meeting with Vietnam’s President Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the very moment the rest of the world was comparing America’s humiliating and incompetent dilemma in Kabul with the 1975 fall of Saigon. 

The rest of the initial description is well known to all, and even the administration's defenders would be hard pressed if they tried to deny that it was a "disgusting nightmare of incompetence that can only be rectified by holding those responsible accountable." They're doing their best to try to avoid holding those responsible accountable, or even identifying them, but they're aware enough of the danger of engaging the argument that the President and the Secretary of State are not taking questions. 

Likewise his list of military truisms, as he calls them, are very similar to the discussions we have had here. These are clear and obvious principles, at least they were clear and obvious to military officers at one time. His third section, a contrast with the much-less-calamitous Vietnam retrograde, likewise is a more detailed version of what was said here. 

His concluding remarks are where the focus should be. 

In a perverse way, perhaps we should look at the calamitous blunderings in Afghanistan as an opportunity to demand a true turning point.  Americans know that a great deal of our governmental process is now either institutionally corrupt or calcified.  They want change, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, no matter his empty credentials in government.  Lacking clearly expressed options, most don’t really know how to articulate the specifics of what that change might encompass.  It’s kind of like the statement of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart many years ago that he couldn’t define pornography for you, but he knew it when he saw it.  In this case, most Americans can clearly agree that what they have been seeing time and again, domestically and overseas, is not good government, despite honorable intentions among many dedicated people. 

Even the very best among those who come forward to serve often find that the good they came to do is stultified by distracting debates over the very premise of why the American system of government was created and whether the icons of our past were truly motivated by the words incorporated in our most revered documents.  The military itself is increasingly being used by leftist activists as a social laboratory to advance extreme political agendas.  Congressional oversight leans heavily toward social issues, with too many members struggling without success to focus on accountability at the very top when, for instance, good people at the bottom have to implement poorly conceived plans that might kill them. 

This is not an exaggeration, and it is not just what has been happening at the Kabul airport and elsewhere in Afghanistan.  Those situations merely provide us a microcosm, a symbolic moment in time, that allows us to see the implications of confused or distracted leadership, military and civilian alike, motivated by political machinations.  In the American political system, we have the capacity to demand that this inequity change.  What we need is the will to do it.

Webb and I see things in some ways very similarly; instead of 'calcified' I generally say 'ossified,' but the ossification analogy likewise depends on calcium. I have been examining underlying principles since last year precisely because I think we need a new beginning and -- as Webb says -- we need to be able to say what exactly it is we think the change should be. I wish he had been clearer about what he thinks the change should be, because I do not know from these brief remarks exactly what he thinks would do. 

I know what I think, now: I think the governments of the United States and the several states should be dissolved. Some urban regions may wish to establish socialist governments on European models, but most of America by land mass should pursue new foundations laid along lines of volunteer government in which a central principle is that no one may make money through their efforts in government. This will both remove the corrupting effect of making your living from governing others or regulating others, and force the volunteer government to take on much less because you only have time for governing when you aren't making the living you still have to make through some service to others in the private market. Likewise I think we should restore the idea that the sole purpose of this volunteer government is to defend the natural rights of the people, exactly as the Founders held. Nothing else is the proper duty of government, and anything else is at best a distraction. 

My guess is that Webb has both a longer and a less-thoroughgoing list of reforms. Perhaps it would thereby be more palatable to the many, and even (or especially) to the powerful. It is time to begin laying out these thoughts plainly. We must be able to say what exactly we want to accomplish in this moment of demanding what he calls a "true turning point."

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