This Yid a Better Catholic than Russ Douthat, Who Knew?

From the, "Even this Jew Knows This," department, we have a group of Catholic theologians objecting to Ross Douthat's writings on the Church and the Pope, not because there is anything inherently heretical about his writings, but because he os so ignorant of the basic principles of the Church that it is embarrassing:

If you haven’t read Mr. Douthat’s piece, it’s worth a look—just keep a nitroglycerin pill handy, because it is a shocker, depicting the pope as a figure of “ostentatious humility” (naughty pope, rubbing his simplicity in our overfed faces) who is attempting to change that which Mr. Douthat says “the pope is supposed to have no power to change,” namely “Catholic doctrine.”

Now, if you find yourself wondering, since when is the pope (or a synod, for that matter) unable to call for a change in church doctrine, well, that's a good question. The pope and the synod can in fact change doctrine, but not dogma.

Put simply, dogma is the stuff you have to accept if you’re going to call yourself Catholic. It's the Creed we recite every Sunday—things like the incarnation, the Trinity and the communion of the saints that we hold as undeniable tenets of our faith—plus any pronouncements that popes have invoked infallibly, which has happened almost never. The Assumption of Mary was such a pronouncement; so is the Immaculate Conception.

Doctrine, as the term is most commonly used (including here by Mr. Douthat), refers to the church's moral teachings, which develop over time as new questions and also new insights arise. Doctrinal teachings—of which the church’s stance regarding divorce is one—do not change often or easily. They can even be mistaken for dogma by the amount of resistance made at the suggestion of any alteration. But they are certainly capable of development. In fact that was one whole point of the synod—to reflect on the various questions of family today, in light of our tradition and the lived experience of Catholics, and consider what if any comments, including potentially changes in practice, should be offered.

I've known of this difference for years, even though there really is not an equivalent in Judaism, formalized doctrine implies a central authority that is lacking in Judaism, but it appears that Mr. Douthat does not.

This is a stupid that rivals Maureen Dowd at her most Maureen Dowd.

Go figure.

H/T Charlie Pierce

Ross Douthat is a F$#@ing Moron

So, the latest New York Times OP/ED page conservative affirmative action case has his debut editorial for the paper, and what is his trenchant analysis?

It's that the Republicans should have nominated Richard Milhaus Cheney as their presidential nominee in 2008.

I guess that's because Cheney is such a photogenic and friendly dude, whether talking about his penis (top picture), or simply snarling at the American public (bottom).

Of course this is not really what the author believes. He wanted Cheney to run because he would have been beaten like a baby seal while showing how the right wing orthodoxy needs to be repackaged: It's simply link bait, as Froomkin notes.

He wants people to read him, so Douthat says something outrageous, and finishes with, "And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power."

No. Simply put, he is being a tool to get buzz, and it increasingly appears that the Republican Neocons are simply some sort of truly subversive performance art group.

I miss William Safire, who while right wing, had a brain, and could actually string together words in an attractive way.

Between Tierney, Kristol, and now Douthat, it appears that the sure sign that you are really, really, stupid is getting a regular Times OP/ED slot.

Yes, I know, I am really describing him being an asshole, not stupid, but his argument boils down to, "We should have nominated Dick Cheney, and we would have lost much better."

That's Doug "The Stupidest Motherf^%$er on the Planet" Feith stupid, and the New York Times already has a surfeit of stupid among their regular columnists, with Maureen Dowd, who covers politics like she is a junior high schooler dissing a classmates choice in shoes.

Still it appears that but it appears that Andrew Rosenthal, the Editorial Page Editor, feels that they need some more stupid.

Ha Ha!

It turns out that paying income taxes in New York, and registering to vote in New York, and living in New York, and summering in Oregon does not qualify you to run for governor in the Beaver State, so Nick Kristof will not be on the ballot:

Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Nick Kristof does not meet Oregon’s residency requirement to qualify to run for governor, Secretary of State Shemia Fagan announced Thursday morning.

Kristof grew up in rural Oregon, has owned property in the state for decades and returned to Oregon nearly every summer while working as a New York Times columnist in New York and abroad. He attested that he’s been a resident of Oregon long enough to run for its highest office.

In ruling he has not, elections officials in Fagan’s office focused on Kristof’s record of voting in New York state as recently as the 2020 general election. But they said their case was bolstered by his decision to maintain his New York drivers license through December 2020 and to continue paying New York income taxes well past the November 2019 deadline for a 2022 gubernatorial candidate to establish residency in Oregon.

In an OP/ED page that is legion for the the self-important pseudo intellectual arrogance of its regulars, (Dowd, Friedman, Brooks, Douthat, Stephens, Weiss, etc.) Kristof's sanctimony stood out.

………

Kristof can appeal the secretary of state’s decision to a circuit court and he said in a press conference Thursday afternoon that he plans to do so.

“We’re going to continue campaigning for governor and we’re going to win that, too,” Kristof said.

Of course he is, because he's a self-entitled ass.

………

Political observers expected Kristof would face pushback from entities including the secretary of state and others who might challenge his residency in court, even if the secretary of state had determined he qualified as a resident and could run for governor. Oregon’s constitution requires candidates to be a resident of the state for at least three years prior to the election in which they are running. “No person except a citizen of the United States, shall be eligible to the office of governor, nor shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained the age of thirty years, and who shall not have been three years next preceding his election, a resident within this state,” the Constitution states.

Kristof has raised a lot of money, largely because he has been afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable as a New York Times columnist, which means that a lot of money bags types, most of them who are from not Oregon, love him.

I hope that this ruling sticks.

I Did Nazi That Coming

It looks like there are a bunch of tech bros out there want to have huge numbers of children so that their (perceived) genetic superiority can be spread throughout the world.

This sh%$ is straight out of the pre-WWII eugenics movement, beloved by Francis Galton, Winston Churchill, J.H. Kellogg, and that unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache.

I am not surprised.  Much like the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the "science" of eugenics is beloved by ordinary people who through luck and privilege achieve some success in life:

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone," Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, "we could set the future of our species."

So this guy does not have the vaguest notion of how this all works.

First, they have not factored in deaths which will reduce the number who will reproduce, and second, you are going to start seeing intermarrying at the second, (legal in all US states) third, or fourth cousin level.

This becomes even more likely when one realizes that families tend to live closer to each other than random people, and in this case, they would all be living in the same cult compound.

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

And, of course, that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache."

This is all about the idea that non-white people are untermenchen, and so white people must have many children to prevent said, "Mud People," from taking over.

The reason that this sounds like a fever dream inspired by The Turner Diaries, is because, this is where eugenics of humanity inexorably takes you.

………

I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk's OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. "I think having a lot of kids is great," Altman recently told an audience at Greylock's Intelligent Future event. "I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.")

Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the "best" available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.

Rather ironically, if there is a genetic connection found to homosexuality, preventing gay children will become one of the, if not the, most common uses of the technology, because people are bigots.

That Altman does not "Get It" is a mark of his sense of privilege, and his deep stupidity.

………

They [the Collinses] both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there's the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of "The Handmaid's Tale."

If your movement is associated with Jeffrey Epstein and that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache," you might want to reexamine your life.

………

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world."

Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

………

While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn't be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).

No, EA is a way of justifying enormous wealth and making it appear virtuous, because you will be making donations (in the distant future) to help people in the far more distant future.  It is morally bankrupt, or as one Twitter wag put it, "It's a prosperity gospel for agnostics."

It is camouflage for greed and bigotry.

………

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It's "big here in Austin," the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group's off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin's Lake Travis to discuss "The End of Western Civilization," another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.

Here, once again, I have to go back to the real world experiment that some call history, and note that after the Black Death killed half of Europe, living standards rose further and faster than at any time in history.

The elites did not see the benefits of the increased productivity, because they had to pay their workers more, and passed laws to suppress wages, but in some cases (Poland) where contemporaneous records of the Black Death are absent, we know that the plague hit them because of the post plague wage spikes.

A declining population, one where the average Joe pays 10% more in old age benefit taxes, but earns 40% more is good for everyone, except the holders of capital, like Musk or Nosek.

………

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

"Productive nations," and "cosmopolitan society," huh?  What they mean is "Wipipo".  They might as well just say that they are worried about N*****s taking over.

As to basing your philosophy on Idiocracy, I would suggest that you go with a far better movie from Mike Judge, Office Space.  Elon Musk already has the role of William Lundberg, so marvelously played by Gary Cole in the original, down pat.

………

Once pronatalists reach critical mass, the Collinses hope, they can begin to shape society around their needs.

"You have to create cultures that reward" and have structures for large families, Simone explained. Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study found that people would stop having children when they couldn't fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly "startup town" they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be "ultimately set — all disputes resolved" by the Collinses.

When fundraising stalled, they redirected their focus to the Collins Institute for the Gifted, a specialized online lab school that is partnering with the Bari Weiss-cofounded University of Austin and the Thiel-backed 1517 Fund. (Musk similarly created a boutique education program, Ad Astra, for his family and employees' children that has since expanded into the online school Astra Nova.)

The logic behind the Collins Institute reflects their thinking at large: "If you want to make the future better for everyone and you could choose to dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people," the Collinses say to choose the 0.1%. 

The Collinses are paraphrasing William Edward Hickman, who kidnapped and dismembered a little girl in 1927, and said "What is good for me is right."

They benefit from lobbying for a future in which all of society's resources are directed toward them, because this is all that they concieve of.

It should be noted that Ayn Rand described that Hickman quote as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

To be fair, Hickman's victim, Marion Parker, was born October 11, 1915, which means that she would be dead now, so according to the ethics put forward by "Effective Altruism," it's all good.

I'm quoting American Conservative Magazine?

Why yes, I am quoting American Conservative Magazine.

You see, Daniel Larison, reads Ross Douthat's most recent New York Times screed (no link to the Times, I don't want to encourage them, but his wankitude is here on my blog).

Ross, it seems, felt offended because people were using insufficient nuance when describing Bush and His Evil Minions^™, particularly with regard to the architects of the invasion of Iraq, and Mr. Larison responds:

Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.

………

(emphasis mine)

That is a righteous rant.

Interesting

I'm not a huge fan of Paul Krugman. (I dropped him from my blog roll years ago) I've always felt that he was far too supportive of economics, and politics of the Clintons and Barack Obama.

That being said, I still believe that he is honest and that he tells the truth, so his his interview with the Columbia Journalism Review is quite informative.

Basically, he left because the editorial editors were constantly trying to water down his stuff, and were trying to cut down on the articles/newsletters that he put out.

The Opinion Editopr, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the Deputy Opinion Editor, Patrick Healy, deny that any such thing was taking place, for reasons noted above, I am disinclined to believe them.

Krugman spent years as a tenured professor at MIT and Princeton for 30 years, so he knows rat-fucking better than any journalistic rat-fucker could possibly imagine.*

For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity.

He was a reliable refuge from the mediocrity of the New York Times OP/ED page, which, given the continued employment of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Brett "Bedbug" Stephens, David French,  etc.

………

Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.

It is mendacious to suggest that they wish that he had stayed at the paper when they made it clear that they wanted a lot less of him at the paper.

………

Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.

“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.

Kingsbury said it was “patently untrue” that Krugman’s newsletter had been killed, although it stopped appearing last October. She emailed him on September 30 to urge him to stay at the paper, and offered to let him keep the newsletter, but without guaranteeing its weekly frequency. She told him he could “use it to weigh in when you and your editor agree that it’s necessary.” And there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week.

And then there is this:

………

The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”

"Flat and colorless," huh?  That should be the new motto for what Atrios calls, "That fucking newspaper."

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman’s voice. “He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode,” Healy wrote in his email to CJR.

This is an admission that Healy was trying to, "Muffle Krugman's voice." 

This is what happens when you have too many nepobaby failsons running an institution.  (It ain't just "Dash" Sulzberger)

^*To quote Henry Kissinger, "The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."

New York Times Makes an Affirmative Action Hire

I haven't really read Ross Douthat, who has now been hired to write a regular column for the New York Times.

That being said, it is clear that he was not hired because they believed that he was the best writer and thinker out there; he was hired to fill a slot for conservatives, and he was the best person that they could find to fill that check off box.

I will note that the Times doesn't do a great job with its regular columnists anyway, what with Maureen Dowd, who covers the issues of our day as if she is a middle schooler critiquing another shoes, and Tom Friedman, who seems to get his insights entirely in airports and taxicabs from people who talk like a person whose wife is worth (or was worth) about a billion dollars.

And Now, The Other Trolls are Leaving the Times

When James Bennet was finally defenestrated for going a troll to far for publishing Tom Cotton's call to unleash the military on protesters, I wondered when the pet trolls that he hired would be out the door.

After all, both have horrible records on accuracy, as well as abusive behavior towards their cow-orkers at the New York Times.

Well, now we have an answer for Bari Weiss (יִמַּח שְׁמו), as about 5 weeks.

This is not a surprise. The Times staff found her toxic for doing things like excoriating real journalists at the paper, who were then forbidden by policy from responding, and reporting an editor for declining to have coffee with her.

Hoping that Bret "Bedbug" Stephens, who is if anything even more abusive in his behavior than Weiss, is not long for the paper either.

It is quite possible to hire conservative columnists who, though they might frequently misstate the facts (Brooks and Douthat come to mind) do not contribute to a toxic work environment.