Jonah Goldberg

Which brings me to Ukraine and the treason of the nationalists. 

In Putin’s tirades about Ukraine, he makes it clear that he subscribes to a pre-nationalist, pre-popular sovereignty, pre-modern theory of politics. He thinks that because Ukraine wasn’t a country in the ninth or 13th century it can’t be a country today—at least not if he doesn’t want it to be.

This is contrary to everything nationalists today claim to believe. And that is what is so disgusting about Putin’s purportedly nationalist amen choir. Putin is not a nationalist, he’s an imperialist. But the contemporary nationalists who wax righteous about rejecting the “imperialism” of the globalists and their institutions—the U.N., the EU, the World Bank, Davos, whatever—either cheer, mumble pro-forma objections, or simply stare at their shoes in silence as Putin attempts to erase a sovereign nation. The Ukrainians have their own language, their own culture, their own national history, and have been a nation for centuries. What they want to be is a country. And the allegedly nationalist Putinphiles are too ignorant or sycophantic to respect that desire because it conflicts with the ambition of a mass murderer and tyrant. 

Putin’s apologists demonstrate that the real point of nationalism is the pursuit of power. Ideological nationalism is an attempt to provide a permission structure, to construct the slipperiest slope possible to their attainment of power. Nationalism, like “post-liberalism,” is an intellectual pretext, a means toward an end: power.

Jesse Singal

This is a common tactic for people who profit off of conspiracy theories: they make extremely inflammatory insinuations, but they keep things just vague enough to allow themselves some plausible deniability. This allows them to seem — at least to credulous readers or listeners — like they’re in possession of forbidden knowledge of the utmost importance, but without ever having to prove what they’re claiming, which is convenient since they can’t prove it, what with it not being true. 

These sorts of conspiracy entrepreneurs, if they are talented at what they do — and clearly Bret Weinstein is — will always have a ready audience of credulous, disillusioned, addled (there’s that word again) types, especially in 2024: trust in authority seems to have plummeted as a result of social media misinformation, real missteps on the part of the authorities themselves, and all the other causes of the epistemic fracturing we appear to be experiencing.

Mary Harrington:

But those families rejecting Big Romance—and with it the overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market—are turning from an inward-focused romantic vision of marriage toward one that prizes stability and productive households as a foundation for community life. Against a backdrop of escalating chaos, they are reimagining marriage in the twenty-first century to fit a new (old) model of the postindustrial household. The postromantic solidarity this convenes, in the long-term interests of both sexes and of our children, provides a basis for real hope. 

In practical terms, households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether the work is agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. At the very least, such households offer women a sane, healthful, and rewarding alternative to the exploitative, medicated, disembodied, sexually libertine excesses of hypermodernity. And more broadly, moving beyond Big Romance toward a more practical conception of marriage is a crucial first step toward sustainable human societies.

Mark Hurst:

Love doesn’t scale.

The phrase appears in Marc’s argument about why markets are so important. Getting rich with markets, he says, is better than the alternative of starting a war. The only other option would be doing something for love, but why would anyone do that? Love doesn’t scale. …

For the rest of us – who haven’t made a career investing in unethical growth-at-any-cost companies – the phrase might hit differently.

Love doesn’t scale.

Deepening a relationship. Visiting a sick friend. Serving at a soup kitchen. Andreessen’s “techno-optimist” mindset is confounded by acts of love. They don’t make money, they don’t supercharge a market, and perhaps most heretically, they’re typically low-tech or even involve no technology at all. What is a techno-optimist supposed to do with this “love” idea, this thing that keeps people out of markets and off the internet? It literally doesn’t compute.

As I said of anti-inflation:

It may seem strange to think that the antidote to continuous shopping is a love of things, but, properly understood, it seems exactly right to me. To love and care for things rather than replace them or bury them behind the new and the more. Berry’s solution in the Menifesto mentioned above was simply this: “everyday do something/ that won’t compute.” And the first thing he lists is love. Nothing in this world is more resistant to computation than love. And if it won’t compute, it won’t inflate.

Jesse Singal:

It’s worth remembering that science is hard and expensive. That’s one reason social psychology fell in love with these cute little lab experiments that could reliably produce something publishable. To actually test the causal effects of ideology on behavioral or attitudinal outcomes is an imposing undertaking. But there aren’t really any shortcuts: this isn’t like a long road trip where you’d prefer a nice meal but you settle for McDonald’s because you’re in the middle of nowhere, and McDonald’s indeed fills you up and bridges the gap to your next meal. Studies like these, whatever the subject, might honestly tell us nothing about the real-world situations we care about …

David Brooks:

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.” […]

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, [Mark] Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

This, from Amanda Mull on the Stanley water cup hullabaloo, is basically the very same explanation I would give for the Taylor Swift phenomenon:

Trying to parse why strangers ascribe such meaning to an object or product that is meaningless to you—or why they’re so set on one thing and not another, similar thing—is usually a fool’s errand. Humans by nature turn objects into meaning, and consumerism is the process by which that impulse is commodified by middlemen looking to ascribe that meaning to particular things in order to sell your identity or values or group affinity or sense of community back to you. The product itself, as long as it’s good enough, can be largely incidental to this process. If you look at all of this and see an alienated population and degraded culture, well, I don’t disagree with you. But none of that is unique to the Stanley cup. Precious little is.

David Epstein:

The phrase evolved over time, and today it’s usually “Jack of all trades, master of none.” I think it is culturally telling that we habitually hack off the end of the long version: “A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Steve Robinson:

But, I can tell you, as necessary as “masters of one” are, there is a good living to be made and a great deal of personal satisfaction being a jack of all trades. Not everything in life demands perfection, not everyone is capable of attaining perfection. The reality is, most of life for most of us is living with imperfection, flaws, damaged and blemished goods. The world is not perfect and good enough is, wellll…. good enough if good enough relieves the pain, addresses the issue, fixes the problem, saves the day, adds some beauty, or gives us some respite. And sometimes the price to make good enough perfect is too high both monetarily and existentially for most of the human race muddling through to the next broken thing, because even if it is perfect life will eventually break no matter how perfect it is and how many times it has been restored.

I used to regret mastering nothing. But these days I look at four year olds playing Paganini, mechanics building motorcycle art, sketchers rendering incredible images, carpenters, carvers, sculptors and dozens of other trades creating unimaginable structures and adornments, because I’ve dabbled at all their crafts, I have an understanding and a deep admiration, even reverence for what it took them to be able to create their works. My world is not smaller because I am not a master, it is expanded because I see more clearly the work, skill, technicality, and beauty of the work. Breadth and shallowness have made me more capable of awe and gratitude for their beauty and what little beauty I am capable of creating. 

And, because I’ve dabbled in theology, it seems to me that is our calling: to be creatures of awe, ultimately before God who is The Creator and the end of all beauty in whose image we are created. We have hands because the hand of God formed us.

Rebecca West:

Through this lovely invisible cloud we rode slowly into the harbour of Rab, and found ourselves in one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It is very little. One can see it all at once, as if it were a single building; and that sight gives a unique pleasure. Imagine finding a place where one heard perpetually a musical phrase which was different every time one moved a few steps, and was always exquisite. At Rab something comparable happens to the sight. The city covers a ridge overlooking the harbour. It is built of stone which is sometimes silver, sometimes at high noon and sunset, rose and golden, and in the shadow sometimes blue and lilac, but is always fixed in restraint by its underlying whiteness. It is dominated by four campaniles, set at irregular intervals along the crest of the ridge. From whatever point one sees it these campaniles fall into a perfect relationship with each other and the city. We sat under a pine tree on the shore and ate oranges, and the city lay before us, making a statement that was not meaningless because it was not made in words. There we undressed and swam out fifty yards, and we stopped and trod water, because the town was making another lovely statement. From every yard of the channel that divides it from its neighbour islands, from every yard of the roads that wind among the inland farms and olive terraces to the bald mountains in the centre of the island, the city can be seen making one of an infinite series of statements. Yet it achieves this expressiveness with the simplest of means: a grey horizontal oblong with four smaller vertical oblongs rising from it. Euclid never spoke more simply.