"In the Trump cult’s theology, Mr. Trump is a god with a dual nature: He is simultaneously the macho, swaggering hero and the eternal victim..."

"... at the mercy of the same powerful forces — 'elites' — that his followers believe themselves to be victimized by. Hence the insistent refrain: 'When you say Trump is evil and foolish, you are saying that we who voted for him are evil and foolish.' That doesn’t follow logically, but this line of thinking is about divine transubstantiation, not politics. Mr. Trump’s proposition to his followers is straight from the Bible he has probably never read: 'If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.'... Republicans who still believe that Mr. Trump will be the instrument of their political salvation in 2024 — or who are cynically willing to go along for the same reason — are much more likely to find him the instrument of their political destruction. And perhaps it is time for these dinosaurs to meet their asteroid. The loss of the current Republican Party — deformed, depraved, backward and, in the end, fundamentally anti-American — would benefit the country."

"Why Trump Could Win Again" by Kevin D. Williamson (NYT). 

Trump is expected to announce his candidacy today.

Why aren't we seeing the argument that when we phase out the economic shutdown, we need to open it up into the Green New Deal?

The ravages of the disease are horrible and tragic, and no sane person welcomed the onslaught, but here we are, all shut down, experiencing the pain and taking on the burdens. With our normal life gone, we long for new activity. But why not move into the level of activity that proponents of the Green New Deal said were justified by the predictions of climate change? Why talk of going back to our old ways? The highways and airlines are drastically reduced right now, and we don't want to stay this far shut down, but why are we thinking of getting all the way back to the extreme overactivity that was contributing to climate change? We could seize this opportunity to make a good leap into something that — until now — was too difficult to begin. We've begun. Let's see the value of this environmental achievement and engrain it into normal life as we move forward and conquer the disease.

Okay — that's the argument I'm not seeing. Why not?!

I do see "Goodbye, Green New Deal" by Kevin D. Williamson at The National Review (dated March 27, 2020):

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing....

What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy.... The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.... A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

ADDED: If the argument I suggest is not being made by the erstwhile advocates of the Green New Deal, it seems to mean that they were never sincere about their demands. The Greta Thunberg HOW DARE YOU? argument was fake. Green New Dealers: Step up and prove me wrong.

I don't expect an answer, so I will offer what I think is the best explanation of how there could be both silence and sincerity. The Green New Dealers feel empathy for those who are now suffering from the disease and from the economic shut down. They don't want to exacerbate the pain. And it's not merely empathy. They're afraid of the political damage if they point to the pain and call it a great opportunity. They don't want to look like ghouls.

"Romantic love and the longing for God are closely intertwined in our music and literature, in our theology, and, beneath all that, in our souls."

Writes Kevin D. Williamson in "The Psalmist and the Sex Doll" (National Review). The "psalmist" is Leonard Cohen, and the essay begins with a discussion of the song "Hallelujah." As for the "sex doll," he's writing about the new brothels (in Toronto) where men pay to have sex with realistic looking/seeming dolls.

The sterility of the act in question is not merely biological. Regulation of that act is not entirely beside the point, but it is not really the point itself, either. Imagine, if you can — with charity, if you can — the state of a man in a silicon brothel paying to have sex (a simulacrum of sex) with an inanimate object. The act indicates a profound alienation not only from ordinary healthy sexual expression but from humanity. And from something more than that. If you want an image of a man alone in the universe, bereft, then there it is.

The Marquis de Sade thought that the old order might be overthrown by a great orgy of dissolution and blasphemy, an organized assault on every accepted value until the achievement of a state of absolute freedom. De Sade and those who follow him hated and hate what marriage was, because they hated and hate the order founded on it. (Even now, what is left of it.) But they genuinely appreciated its power, and believed that if it were to go down, it would go down in flames. He would have been disappointed by the smallness and banality of where we ended up, even if it is more perverse (though generally less violent) than his fantasies, which were almost exclusively limited to the traditional, transgressions and violations sufficiently longstanding to have Old Testament injunctions against them. De Sade dreamt up theatrical acts of depravity, while we have only dreamt up new ways to be alone.

From the psalmist who discerned in the love of husbands and wives an indication of God’s design to the question of which kind of silicone sex dolls might be unallowable in the marketplace — that is the arc of our history, and of our sorrow.

I haven't copied the part of the essay that explains the religious objection to same-sex marriage, but it made me think that the objection applies even more strongly to sex outside of marriage and to masturbation and sex with robots.

I'm not creating a new tag for sex dolls, so I'm giving this post some old tags that say whatever they say about the topic — sex tools, masturbation, prostitution, dolls, robots. The salient one is masturbation. That's what it is — sex with a sex doll. There is no human mind you're connecting to.

But there could be love and longing for real connection.

If there is no God, is prayer the same as thinking to yourself?

Is masturbation elevated if you're visualizing profound connection with another person, even if that person is not with you? Even if that person is imaginary?

I have been challenged in my use of "akimbo" in "posing on the chair arm with an arm akimbo."

I knew that was a risky phrase, because the cliché is "arms akimbo," but does that mean "akimbo" relates only to the 2-armed gesture? In the comments to the post, ballyfager said "How do you make that 'arm akimbo'? My understanding is that arms akimbo (as it is usually expressed) is hands on hips." Well, the answer to how is just that you're doing it only on one side, but the issue is whether "akimbo" is restricted to 2 sides. Another question is whether "akimbo" is only about the hands-on-hips pose (which seems to be the only way people use it)? Here I am, trying to use it just slightly more broadly, to cover the unilateral and not bilateral arm position, but why isn't it a much more useful word?

Now, let me pause a moment, to talk about Kevin B. Williamson, who's so much in the news this week. He mostly got in trouble (and fired from The Atlantic) for opining that women deserve hanging if they got an abortion, but he was also criticized for writing, back in 2014:

"Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!" The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.

The word that got him in trouble was "primate," but notice "akimbo." Do monkeys and apes — like their fellow primates, us humans — display territoriality with arms akimbo? They have such long arms compared to ours. It's a weird picture, in my head.

Oh, but I guess Williamson didn't mean "With hands on hips and elbows turned outwards" (the OED's first definition of "akimbo," and the one I, reading Williamson, assumed). I couldn't find an image of an ape or monkey standing like that, but then I reread Williamson's turgid prose and noticed the hands are on the chest, not the hips, and I can easily picture a gorilla doing that.

Anyway, back to the OED. The oldest examples have the arms or hands "in kenebowe" or "on kenbow." It becomes "akimbo" in the 1700s. What's a "kenbow"*?!

The word, which seems so restrictive to us today, did get wider meaning in the 1800s. It could refer to legs and meant "spread or flung out widely or haphazardly." (Did both legs have to be doing that, or could one leg be akimbo?) And it became "More generally: askew, awry; in disorder":

c1796 C. Dibdin in Songster's Compan. (ed. 9) 203 In life's voyage, should you trust a false friend with the helm, The top lifts of his heart all akimbo, A tempest of treachery your bark will o'erwhem.
1880 T. W. Reid Politicians of To-day II. 253 They do not wear their hats akimbo.

Ah! There's only one head for the hat and the hat can be "akimbo." And what of the heart? Only one of those.**

And in the 20th century, "akimbo" became also "Crooked, bent, or askew; that is in disorder, awry."

1959 New Yorker 5 Dec. 146 He tended to match all of Coleman's near-atonal plunges with akimbo melodic lines of his own.
2002 Esquire Sept. 80/1 He is still blue, with mitteny hands and startled, akimbo eyebrows.

Yes, but can one eyebrow be akimbo while the other maintains its orderly position?... Hmm???!

That picture is from "A DEFINITIVE RANKING OF WHITE MALE COMEDIANS RAISING ONE EYEBROW IN A PUBLICITY SHOT" at Thermocow. And speaking of cows, I could not find a photo of a monkey or ape getting its eyebrow (if any) into a position like that.

By the way, I never cared whether I was technically right or wrong in the proper use of "akimbo." I think if you know the standard meaning, with its bilateralism, you immediate get the unilateral concept, and it may be even better, because it's jocose.

Let's talk about The Atlantic firing Kevin D. Williamson — immediately after hiring him.

Here's Adele M. Stan at The American Prospect last week, "The Atlantic’s Gigantic Stumble/When a 'thought-leader' magazine hires the misogynist Kevin Williamson, that’s some kind of leading from behind":

The thing for which Williamson is most famous is his (since deleted) tweet advocating the execution by hanging of every woman who has an abortion. [Jessica] Valenti notes that this would encompass approximately 25 percent of U.S. women.

Williamson’s second-most famous comment is in his contemptuous depiction of a nine-year-old African American boy, which is basically a litany of racist stereotypes strung together, complete with a description of the boy making a gesture Williamson describes as “the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”...

So Williamson got the boot.

Here's "By Firing Kevin Williamson,The Atlantic Shows It Can't Handle Real Ideological Diversity/Williamson's rhetoric is inflammatory, but his views on abortion are not beyond the pale" by Katherine Mangu-Ward (Reason). Excerpt:

But the thing that cost him the gig was a remark he made on a podcast well before his firing and in a tweet (since deleted):

And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, "If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide." And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.

The Atlantic is obviously caving to pressure. They had to know when they hired Williamson that he maintains that abortion is murder, and the fact that he would treat it the way he'd treat any murder is just standard, mundane adherence to principle and resistance to pragmatism. There's nothing to be shocked about. Why hire him if that wasn't what you wanted?

The seemingly scurrilous insinuation that Bernie Sanders is an atheist.

People are acting disgusted at this email — leaked by Guccifer 2.0 to WikiLeaks — from DNC's Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall:

"It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist."

Last February, I had a post "'Why Not Question Trump’s Faith?'/Why not question everything everyone asserts about religion?"  — after an NRO writer (Kevin D. Williamson) questioned whether Donald Trump's faith. I said (boldface added):

I'm inclined to think we should judge each candidate in proportion to how much he or she relies on religion. If someone forefronts sanctimony, we should examine whether it's a lie. But if a candidate takes a minimal position — claiming a faith but grounding himself in morality that can exist apart from religion (which is what Trump does) — there's nothing to delve into. If it's a lie, it's an insignificant social lie, like saying you love your wife when your feelings have in fact gone cold.

There are no visible atheists or even agnostics at the presidential level of American politics. Do you want to start outing them? Maybe Bernie Sanders. He might be an atheist. What do you think? Want to try to smoke him out? He said:

“I am not actively involved with organized religion... I think everyone believes in God in their own ways... To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

To my ear, that sounds like an effort to say: Even atheists believe in God... in our own way. A mystical attitude toward all of humanity counts as belief in God.

Last March, I had a post — "How would you recognize an atheist if one appeared in American presidential politics?" — that looked at something Sanders said in a debate. Anderson Cooper prompted him to talk about religion, asking him whether he keeps his "Judaism in the background." Sanders said "No. I am very proud to be Jewish, and being Jewish is so much of what I am." But he proceeded to talk about his Jewishness in terms of history and culture — not religious belief. I was struck by the "absence of forthright atheism":

How would you recognize an atheist if one appeared in American presidential politics? He probably would speak of his family and ethnic background, showing respect and making a connection to a religious tradition, and he would present himself as a moral person with the same kind of values embraced by Americans who find those values in religion. He's not going to say "Look, I'm an atheist. There is no God. I believe in science. And as President, I will consult science, not this 'God' my opponent keeps talking about."

ADDED: Maybe Brad Marshall read the Althouse blog: "I think I read he is an atheist." Written in May 2016, after my posts.

AND: "can we get someone to ask"... Anderson Cooper asked. Correlation, not necessarily causation.

How would you recognize an atheist if one appeared in American presidential politics?

I brought this question up before, in a February 20th post titled "'Why Not Question Trump’s Faith?'/Why not question everything everyone asserts about religion?" NRO writer Kevin D. Williamson had questioned whether Donald Trump actually believes in the religion he cites as his own. I said:

I'm inclined to think we should judge each candidate in proportion to how much he or she relies on religion. If someone forefronts sanctimony, we should examine whether it's a lie. But if a candidate takes a minimal position — claiming a faith but grounding himself in morality that can exist apart from religion (which is what Trump does) — there's nothing to delve into. If it's a lie, it's an insignificant social lie, like saying you love your wife when your feelings have in fact gone cold.

There are no visible atheists or even agnostics at the presidential level of American politics. Do you want to start outing them? Maybe Bernie Sanders. He might be an atheist. What do you think? Want to try to smoke him out? He said:

“I am not actively involved with organized religion... I think everyone believes in God in their own ways... To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

To my ear, that sounds like an effort to say: Even atheists believe in God... in our own way. A mystical attitude toward all of humanity counts as belief in God.

So I was very interested in what Bernie Sanders said in last night's Democratic Party debate — video, transcript — when Anderson Cooper gave him a prompt to talk about his religious belief:

COOPER: Senator Sanders, let me just follow up. Just this weekend there was an article I read in the Detroit News saying that you keep your Judaism in the background, and that’s disappointing some Jewish leaders. Is that intentional?

SANDERS: No. I am very proud to be Jewish, and being Jewish is so much of what I am. Look, my father’s family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy and radical, and extremist politics mean. I learned that lesson as a tiny, tiny child when my mother would take me shopping, and we would see people working in stores who had numbers on their arms because they were in Hitler’s concentration camp. I am very proud of being Jewish, and that is an essential part of who I am as a human being.

Sanders spoke with feeling and political, sociological substance about his Jewishness, and I am sure most Americans would come away convinced that he gave a strong answer to the question asked, and that is fine. But the question was Judaism, the religious belief, and nothing in the answer reflected any belief in religion.

Read "'Judaism' or 'Jewishness'?" by Shalom Goldman, a religion professor at Duke University. He's interested in the way some people — notably Madonna — have embraced Judaism without Jewishness:

Thus a type of “Judaism”—in the sense of ritual practice—has found a home among those who are not Jewish. And we can now speak of “Judaism without Jewishness”: a situation in which the content is from the Jewish tradition, but the actors are not.

And he notes the corresponding phenomenon, "Jewishness without Judaism." Goldman cites an article in the NYC Jewish newspaper Forward referring to Jews who “changed Judaism forever.”

Expecting to read about Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I was startled to see that the article was about Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Sandy Koufax, and Lenny Bruce. And the “Judaism” that the article referred to was the way Jews are perceived by other Americans, and by extension, the way they perceive themselves. As a child of the Sixties, I too am proud of Bob Dylan, et al.—but what does that have to do with Judaism? In today’s cultural and religious marketplaces, religion and ethnic solidarity are often confused...

Goldman talks about a collection of correspondence between the writers Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein, who "are constantly referring to their Jewish identity":

But this is an identity devoid of all content.... [T]heir interest is in the way Jews are perceived by others, and more specifically it is about uncovering any hint of antisemitism. Neither  of these erudite authors (each of whom has authored over twenty books) expressed any interest in Jewish texts, languages, or rituals. Jewishness for them is ferreting out potential or actual antisemites. This all-too-common type of “Jewishness” has as its hallmark a lack of real content.

I think it's unfair to say there's no content when what you mean is there is no religious content. To me, what is striking is not the absence of religious content, because I would simply assume there is an absence of belief and even interest in religion. What is striking is absence of forthright atheism.

How would you recognize an atheist if one appeared in American presidential politics? He probably would speak of his family and ethnic background, showing respect and making a connection to a religious tradition, and he would present himself as a moral person with the same kind of values embraced by Americans who find those values in religion. He's not going to say "Look, I'm an atheist. There is no God. I believe in science. And as President, I will consult science, not this 'God' my opponent keeps talking about."

"Why Not Question Trump’s Faith?"/Why not question everything everyone asserts about religion?

The first question is asked by Kevin D. Williamson at The National Review. The second question is mine and is intended not so much as a question as an answer to Williamson's question.

Williamson says:

This is, after all, a man who avoided the draft with the help of imaginary bone spurs who nonetheless felt confident in mocking John McCain’s endurance of torture in a Vietnamese prison camp. Never mind Trump’s adultery and the pride he takes in it, never mind his desire for a hippie-style “open marriage,” never mind the bearing of false witness, the coveting, etc. Trump explicitly rejects the fundamentals of Christianity, i.e. man’s fallen state and his need for reconciliation with God. When asked about that, Trump made it clear that he doesn’t believe he needs to be forgiven for anything, that he just needs to — in his words — “drink my little wine and have my little cracker.” 

Trump explicitly rejects the fundamentals of Christianity? Do we really know that? And shouldn't we then have to question what are the fundamentals of Christianity? Is it "man's fallen state"? Isn't it love one another? Want to have a big public debate about it? Would Jesus forgive you for not forgiving a political candidate who won't say he needs forgiveness? Forgive me if I laugh.


"Depiction of the sin of Adam and Eve" by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens.

So what do I really think? How much religion should be part of the political debate? Speaking of fundamentals, I can't get to the bottom of that. There's already so much religion and so little religion. There's no getting to nothing, and yet going all in is ridiculous. I'm inclined to think we should judge each candidate in proportion to how much he or she relies on religion. If someone forefronts sanctimony, we should examine whether it's a lie. But if a candidate takes a minimal position — claiming a faith but grounding himself in morality that can exist apart from religion (which is what Trump does) — there's nothing to delve into. If it's a lie, it's an insignificant social lie, like saying you love your wife when your feelings have in fact gone cold.

There are no visible atheists or even agnostics at the presidential level of American politics. Do you want to start outing them? Maybe Bernie Sanders. He might be an atheist. What do you think? Want to try to smoke him out? He said:

“I am not actively involved with organized religion... I think everyone believes in God in their own ways... To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

To my ear, that sounds like an effort to say: Even atheists believe in God... in our own way. A mystical attitude toward all of humanity counts as belief in God. I found that quote in this article by Frances Stead Sellers and John Wagner in The Washington Post. They say:

Sanders often presents his support for curbing Wall Street banks and ending economic inequality in values-laden terms. He recently described it as “immoral and wrong” that the highest earners in the country own the vast majority of the nation’s wealth....

Their Jewish education was “unsophisticated,” [his brother] Larry Sanders said, grounded in a simple moral code of right and wrong. “He could read a prayer in Hebrew,” Larry Sanders said, “but not with a great deal of understanding.”... “He is quite substantially not religious.”

Do you feel a need to push any further? Are questions in order? Why? You shouldn't be saying: Because I oppose him politically and I think there are American voters who will vote against a candidate because his religion isn't good enough.

"We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency..."

"... I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures."

From "Witless Ape Rides Escalator," by Kevin D. Williamson, and that's more than I want to have to say about the person whose name I'm again declining to blog... which is what last night's post meant. I'm not saying his name. I'm not giving him the attention he wants. As my mother used to say: You'll only encourage him.

UPDATE: Originally this post had only one tag: nothing.

"Rape is a special kind of cruelty in that it transforms the life-giving act into an act of torture."

"To suffer the crime and yet cherish the life is an act of transcendence, a perfection of generosity rarely if ever equaled by the merely human."

ADDED: You might think anyone who made it out of the womb alive has got to support her mother's decision not to have an abortion (like Miss Pennsylvania, Valerie Gatto, who is the product of a rape) but here's an essay by Lynn Beisner from 2012: "I wish my mother had aborted me/This is no 'I wish I'd never been born' howl of angst. I love my mother, and having an abortion would have given her a better life."

Not much is getting said about the Chelsea/Bradley Manning transgender announcement.

I'm thinking it must be disappointing to some people that mean/stupid things haven't been said. Or did I miss something? There's nothing about Manning at all currently trending on Memeorandum. A search for "Chelsea Manning" at rushlimbaugh.comcomes up empty. The Blaze only quotes the Washington Post on the difficulty of reporting about someone who's acted in the past under one name and gender and now asks to be referred to differently.

I can't find anyone saying anything that gives pro-transgender advocates an opportunity to pounce. Where did all this restraint come from?

Here's James Joyner at Outside the Beltway handling the issue with great sensitivity a day after an almost agonizingly reticent discussion of the topic with Joshua Foust on Bloggingheads:



I don't think I've ever heard more hemming and hawing on Bloggingheads (and that's saying a lot).

ADDED: I do see this piece in NRO by Kevin D. Williamson, "Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman," which comes across as serious and not mean-spirited. Key passage:

We have created a rhetoric of “gender identity” that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought to be considered mutilation rather than therapy. This is not to discount the feelings of people who suffer from gender-identity disorders — to the contrary, those feelings must be taken into account in determining courses of treatment for people who have severe personality disorders.

That's very focused on surgical intervention, which requires the participation of doctors. Speaking of things that can be disconnected, you could disconnect that surgery from more speech- and expression-based things about names, pronouns, dress, and behavior. Why can't those things be treated more like other matters of conscience, like religion, where we leave people to their own notions?

"Education in this country is conducted on the model of a public utility owned by the government."

"It's a government monopoly, full of unionized workers, delivering a government-subsidized product to people who are required by the government to be there."

And — Kevin D. Williamson says — this is what the Occupy [Your City] folks want generally... for health care and so forth. Williamson wants the government out of all of it... including education.