Okay I will bite: The moral duties of a Christian are as @JDVance describes them, but with duties to God first that can override the natural duties (one good reason why priests and nuns are celibate), and as with the Good Samaritan, immediate duties to people outside your normal circles who present themselves in serious need. The questions of how the latter cashes out in a globalized age and how it shapes the moral obligations of a superpower's government are not, I think, actually all that easy to answer. Telescopic philanthropy a la Mrs Jellyby is not a Christian virtue, and the US sometimes behaves in a Jellyby-ish fashion. That said our current foreign aid budget (whatever bad ideas it contains) is not large enough to constitute a real Jellybyan dereliction of natural duties.

I wrote my Sunday column on key divisions within the Trump administration/imperial court, and the ending is a little peculiar and worth unpacking:
nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opi… I've written before about a "tech-trad" convergence, an alignment on anti-wokeness or birthrate concerns or just basic optimism about the intelligibility of the universe; I think that description makes sense when you're talking about JD Vance + Elon Musk.
nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opi…

I don't think this is an accurate description of the American situation, the evolution of our educational system and cultural priorities, or our traditional strengths. (1/X)

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

American society and youth culture have become *much* friendlier to nerds and valedictorians since the 1990s (trust me on this one), and the American educational system expects and demands more extracurriculars and math tutoring and weekend science competitions than ever before.

Interesting thread on contemporary versus older fantasy from @Scholars_Stage, but if you divide fantasists between myth-makers and systematizers it's a mistake to place Tolkien fully on the myth-maker side; the reason he looms so large is that he's both:

https://x.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1841502448122311056

Indeed a big part of the challenge for Tolkien's contemporary heirs is that some of his systematizing cannot possibly be equaled - no one is likely to match the philological substrate he builds for Middle-Earth.

Speaking as someone who's been a pro-natalist since I was assigned an "overpopulation" project in high school in 1997 and realized where we were actually heading, a problem for pro-natalism is that it is inherently quite weird. It is quite weird that we seem to need some kind of ... movement? ... policy revolution? ... cultural revolution? ... to sustain something that seems natural to the human species, so natural in fact that it's conventionally associated with efforts at "control."

On the implications of the Vatican document on blessings for same-sex couples, a brief thread. 1/X In the pontificate's 1st stage I worried about Francis pushing the church over a "precipice" w/attempts at doctrinal change. But in the 2nd stage, after the family synods, there was a retreat to a strategy of ambiguous liberalization that avoided sharp doctrinal confrontation.

Let's do a thread about UFOs. Here's my Sunday column (with exactly 666 comments, I see, hmm):
nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opi… And here's the interview, with @NewsNation and @rosscoulthart, that the would-be whistleblower, David Grusch, did over the weekend:
newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-a…

Excellent @mattyglesias though naturally I don't think it goes quite far enough:
slowboring.com/p/why-are-youn… To pick up the argument I made here, it's not just a cultural accident that current-era progressivism tends toward a catastrophizing, depressive mood; some of that unhappiness was baked in by the triumph of social liberalism that preceded the current era:
nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opi…

Reading @DKThomp on AI is particularly interesting if you pair the piece with ...
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar… ... @DKThomp on how quantitative efficiency ruined baseball:
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…

Michael Gerson, RIP. A good man and a beautiful writer whose support for PEPFAR contributed to some of the most actually-effective altruism ever carried out by the US government. Here he is writing on his cancer, ten years ago:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/… Gerson on sending your kids to college (I can attest that contemplating sending one to middle school is hard enough):
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…

No need to choose a single scapegoat, Republicans can have simultaneous problems (a polycrisis?) with:
1) Trump's toxicity
2) base's preference for unelectable candidates
3) unpopularity of full pro-life position post-Dobbs
4) lack of middle-friendly economic agenda The impact of each then varies by region/candidates -- e.g. economic disconnect maybe looms larger in Fetterman-Oz -

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/1591849304897228801

- abortion in MI/WI where pre-Roe laws are on books, Trump wherever stop-the-steal candidates are running, etc.

With so much focus on Trump, a short thread on other explainers for GOP underperformance. First, here's @SohrabAhmari in our pages arguing that the GOP still doesn't have a "worker's agenda" to fit its working-class base:
nytimes.com/2022/11/10/opi… I'm more skeptical than Sohrab that Republicans can hope to gain much ground with the post-grad precariat, but he's broadly right about the problem, and crucially even though inflation helped the GOP it also creates problems for would-be populists by making deficits matter again.

? ??

My Wednesday column: How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right: nytimes.com/2022/11/02/opi… An acknowledgment/caveat: Obviously anti-institutionalism and the paranoid style existed on the right before Trump, and intense pro-institutionalism among progressives is not a novelty either.

This is a good little essay by @moveincircles whose working definition of "post-liberal" is instructively different from my own:
reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/blasphemy-is… If a "post-liberal" order is one in which ultimate questions are openly contested and factions compete to infuse the West's political system with spiritual ideas, then we are definitely post-liberal. But ...

Good to see every new playoff evolution predictably making baseball worse:

https://twitter.com/MLBMetrics/status/1581527462005329921

The fact that a bye week is a disadvantage in baseball, not an edge, should be obvious to a ten-year-old fan, let alone the people running the sport.

This piece from @michaelbd, nationalreview.com/2022/10/our-nu…, and this thread from @davidfrum, provide two different ways that very smart people might think their way through the risks of nuclear war:

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1577272516393013248

Fundamentally the key point of divergence is here - one imagines a Western world responding to nuclear use with a mix of outrage and strategic sangfroid, the other imagines panic-from-below scrambling the ability of statesmen to manage the crisis:

Relevant to NatCon debates, a predictably interesting review of Conservatism: A Rediscovery by @SWGoldman:
isi.org/modern-age/con… I think one possible rejoinder to this criticism is that the Founding-era conservatism @yhazony admires was sustained by the semi-political institutions of the Protestant semi-establishment, whose influence tends to be underrated in these genealogical discussions:

Pope Francis, no less than certain secular governments, has made no effort to address anxieties of an important part of his flock, instead has vilified them, so instead of being an institutional brake on radicalization his Vatican been an accelerant.

https://twitter.com/MadocCairns/status/1574400578297511941

I wrote about this dynamic in To Change the Church, the analysis still applies:

This was always the obvious point of the stunt, not to show that NE liberals would mistreat migrants but to provoke a huge mobilization - National Guard! - and imply a contrast w/a liberal WH failing to help border communities dealing w/far larger influx.

https://twitter.com/EmilieIkedaNBC/status/1570775078828388353

And yes, if the stunt involved lying to/tricking the migrants (as alleged) it was an awful thing to do, regardless of the point it was trying to make.

A please-no-one take on some of the controversy around this piece: It's totally possible for a self-defeating sickness culture to layer itself atop chronic illnesses without the illnesses themselves being psychogenic:
commonsense.news/p/hurts-so-good The cultural politics of chronic illness in the Covid era are frustrating in part because very-online life exacerbates some of the sickness-culture tendencies that make people skeptical of chronic sufferers - even as the hard evidence for persistent infection gets stronger.