Rod Dreher's Blog, page 540

Cigar Aid For The Cajun Navy

A care package sent by a reader

Yesterday a BIG box arrived in the mail. It was sent by Jason Clabaugh of CigarWeekly.com, on behalf of his community of readers. They wanted to reach out and send aid and comfort to members of the Cajun Navy. I counted about 200 cigars in the care package. Jason says these are fine cigars from the personal collection of members — all donated out of care and respect for the men who saved flood victims from their rooftops.

Boy, do I wish I smoked cigars. Never have, and can’t stand the smell, so I guess I never will. A friend came to dinner last night, looked at the box, and was impressed to spy some Arturo Fuentes in the mix. I am going to a barbecue on Labor Day at which some Cajun Navy guys will be present, so I will distribute some of these gifts. But there are lots of cigars here, and I want to distribute them as widely as I can. If you live in the Baton Rouge area, love a good cigar, sailed with the Cajun Navy and can prove it with a photo, I’d love to share the Cigar Weekly community’s gift with you. Drop me a line at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com and include a photo of yourself (and your buddies) out in the flood. Maybe next week we can arrange for all the Cajun Navy cigar fans to meet up at a pub or somewhere, and I can pass out the cigars. First come, first served. I don’t know what kind of response to expect, so if we get to a point where I have more Cajun Navy vets wanting cigars than I have cigars, I’ll have to cut the giveaway off.

Be prepared to have me take a photo of you with your cigar(s), so Jason can share it with the smokers who were kind enough to send them.

What a great community of readers this blog has.

Hillary Clinton: Incompetent, Or Criminal?

Why, exactly, did the FBI wait until Labor Day Weekend to dump this startling news about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal? Hard to believe it was a coincidence that official Washington wanted this story to have the best chance of going away. From the Daily Beast:

A laptop containing a copy, or “archive,” of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server was apparently lost—in the postal mail—according to an FBI report released Friday. Along with it, a thumb drive that also contained an archive of Clinton’s emails has been lost and is not in the FBI’s possession.

The Donald Trump campaign has already called for Clinton to be “locked up” for her carelessness handling sensitive information. The missing laptop and thumb drive raise a new possibility that Clinton’s emails could have been obtained by people for whom they weren’t intended. The FBI director has already said it’s possible Clinton’s email system could have been remotely accessed by foreign hackers.

The revelation of the two archives is contained in a detailed report about the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email account. The report contained new information about how the archives were handled, as well as how a private company deleted emails in its possession, at the same time that congressional investigators were demanding copies.

More:

The archives on the laptop and thumbdrive were constructed by Clinton aides in 2013, using a convoluted process, before her emails were turned over to State Department officials and later scrubbed to determine which ones had classified information and should either be withheld from public view or could be released with redactions. The archive of messages would contain none of those safeguards, potentially exposing classified information if it were ever opened and its contents read.

The FBI has found that Clinton’s emails contained classified information, including information derived from U.S. intelligence. Her campaign has disputed the classification of some of the emails.

The archive was created nearly a year before the State Department contacted former secretaries of state and asked them to turn over any emails that they had sent using private accounts that pertained to official business. A senior Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told the FBI that the archive on the laptop and thumb drive were meant to be “a reference for the future production of a book,” according to the FBI report. Another aide, however, said that the archive was set up after the email account of a Clinton confidante and longtime adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, was compromised by a Romanian hacker.

Whatever the rationale, the transfer of Clinton’s emails onto two new storage devices, one of which was shipped twice, created new opportunities for messages to be lost or exposed to people who weren’t authorized to see them, according to the FBI report. (The Clinton campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment for this story.)

Read it all.  The disappearing laptop and thumb drive story is incredibly fishy. Either Team Hillary is lying about it, or they are spectacularly incompetent and reckless with national security information.

Look at all the things Mrs. Nixon-In-A-Pantsuit couldn’t recall when interviewed by FBI investigators.  And, take a look at Chris Cillizza’s takeaway from the FBI report, especially No. 8:

Screen shot

Who can possibly look forward to at least four years of this same old “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” Clinton garbage? Seriously, I get not voting for Trump. And I get people who voted enthusiastically and affirmatively for Bernie Sanders. But I genuinely do not understand why anyone would be excited to see Hillary Clinton become president. It’s like choosing a hangover.

Her Brother’s Pregnancy

This is what American liberty has wrought: Time magazine’s story “My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family”. Excerpts:

My brother Evan was born female. He came out as transgender 16 years ago but never stopped wanting to have a baby. This spring he gave birth to his first child

Well, sure. Why should Evan be denied anything he wants? As long as the will is present and the technology enables it, anything is possible, right? More:

Now that gay marriage is legal, the social battleground has shifted to new frontiers, frontiers that include the most private aspects of people’s lives. Transgender Americans have gained greater visibility and acceptance as stars like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have trained a pop-culture spotlight on trans issues. Corporate leaders across the Fortune 500 have moved to protect their transgender employees. And in May, the Obama Administration declared that all public schools must treat students equally regardless of their gender identity, classifying inner feelings of maleness and femaleness as protected by the government. We have come to the point where the President of the United States can candidly and comfortably discuss gender fluidity.

We have also come to the point where the backlash against these rapid changes has manifested in sometimes surreal fashion, as it did earlier this year during the so-called battle of the bathroom, when about half of all states joined lawsuits against the Obama Administration.

Notice that the adjective “surreal” is used to describe people who don’t believe biological women should be compelled to share the restroom with biological men. Surreal is not the word used to describe a man (“man”) suckling the baby that passed through his vagina (see the photo accompanying the essay). More:

In 2013, when Evan made an appointment with his primary-care physician at the Boston LGBT health center Fenway Health, he was the first prospective birth father his doctor had seen. Several years earlier, a few trans men who, like my brother, had undergone hormone treatment but kept their reproductive organs, had begun consulting physicians about pregnancy and speaking openly about wanting to give birth. In 2008, Thomas Beatie posed for People magazine, bare-chested with a rotund belly, and went on Oprah to talk about his pregnancy. Trans men began to trickle into fertility clinics more frequently. When Andy Inkster was turned away from a Massachusetts clinic in 2010 because he was told he was “too masculine” to have a baby, he sued for gender discrimination. The case settled a few years later; Inkster sought out another clinic and later gave birth to a daughter.

You should understand that we are fast moving towards a time when physicians and physicians’ assistants who do not wish to participate in procedures like this will face lawsuits and possibly the loss of their professional licenses. This is not a joke. This is coming. More:

There is very little research about trans pregnancies. One of the only medical papers addressing the topic was written in 2015 by the University of California, San Francisco’s Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Harvey Makadon. They noted that, in form and function, getting pregnant as a trans man is not that different than getting pregnant as a woman. Most of the time, trans men stop taking testosterone, and their bodies begin ovulating again. (Testosterone doesn’t necessarily preclude a pregnancy. Some trans men may have unintentional pregnancies while taking it.) If their partner is biologically male, trans men may try to conceive without medical intervention.

My brother has a female partner, so he inseminated using donor sperm. It took a while. The first time Evan tried, five years ago, he was unsuccessful. He took a break before starting again three years ago. He stopped his T shots, Kowalik prescribed two medications to trigger ovulation and monitored Evan’s body throughout the process to get the timing right.

“Very little research about trans pregnancies,” but by all means let’s put the pedal to the metal on them in the clinics, and celebrate them with a long essay in Time. Do you see how freakish this is, a female who has tricked her body to some extent into thinking it’s male by hormone injections, trying to trick it back by ceasing hormone injections?

Here’s one more:

My brother has a good friend, also trans, who’d gotten pregnant a year earlier. He’d had a rough pregnancy because he felt a traumatizing disconnect between his masculinity and the female attributes of his body. He took medical leave from work for much of the time and was relieved to restart testosterone immediately after his child’s healthy birth. I spoke to another trans dad who had given birth to his son at age 20. He said the pregnancy catapulted him into depression. “It was as if all the things I’d hated about my body were re-emerging, and I felt awful about myself,” he told me. Evan didn’t have this experience. “It was a gamble,” he said. “I didn’t know how I’d feel, but it turns out I just feel like it’s really cool that my body can do this.”

Really cool. Read the whole thing.

 

The photo of the bearded man-woman nursing “his” baby, and that image appearing in a celebratory context in Time magazine, is about as powerful an icon of the spiritual and moral state of 21st century America as you could imagine. It put me in mind of this satanic mockery of motherhood from The Passion Of The Christ (fast-forward to the 1:00 mark). In 2004, director Mel Gibson explained the symbolism to Christianity Today:

When asked why he portrayed Satan—an androgynous, almost beautiful being played by Rosalinda Celentano—the way he did, Gibson replied: “I believe the Devil is real, but I don’t believe he shows up too often with horns and smoke and a forked tail. The devil is smarter than that. Evil is alluring, attractive. It looks almost normal, almost good—but not quite.

“That’s what I tried to do with the Devil in the film. The actor’s face is symmetric, beautiful in a certain sense, but not completely. For example, we shaved her eyebrows. Then we shot her almost in slow motion so you don’t see her blink—that’s not normal. We dubbed in a man’s voice in Gethsemane even though the actor is a woman … That’s what evil is about, taking something that’s good and twisting it a little bit.”

But what about the ugly baby?

“Again,” said Gibson, “it’s evil distorting what’s good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old ‘baby’ with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it’s almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place.”

There is no more tender scene in the world than a mother nursing her baby. What we see in Time magazine is a symbol of a society and a culture that is so far gone into decadence that it will defile what is most sacred in the human experience. It will use technology to transgress all natural boundaries to impose man’s will — and will call that freedom, will call it progress, and will punish anyone who dissents. And it will teach its children that there is no such thing as man, no such thing as woman. It destroys in the hearts and minds of the people the icon of fatherhood, of motherhood, of the family — and it intends to do this! As the writer of the Time piece points out, the “social battleground” has shifted. There will be no peace. No peace is possible with this thing, even if we want peace.

This morning I heard the story of a particular family here in south Louisiana whose middle school daughter came home from (public) school one day and said, “I am trans. Here’s the name I want you to call me. From now on, I will be wearing boy’s clothes.” Et cetera. The blindsided parents went to the school counselor for help, but found that the counselor was 100 percent on the side of this confused 13 year old girl. The system is lined up against the parents. This is not in California or Massachusetts. This is in one of the most culturally conservatives states in the US. You might think you’re safe, but you’re not.

Now is a good time to brush up on your Jeremiah. And your Benedict, in the MacIntyrean sense. As David Gushee, who is on the side of these anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-metaphysical revolutionaries, warned, “Neutrality is not an option.”   Believe him.

 

 

Military On Culture War Front Lines

This e-mail came from a medical officer in the US military. I publish it with his permission:

By no means am I getting rich but I make surprisingly good money, enjoy what I do, and have pretty great job security. In accordance with my personal convictions, I am in a non-combat role — this may sound like splitting hairs since I am still in the military but I sleep at night knowing that my job helps save lives, not take them. My plan has always been to serve my time and then reap the wonderful retirement the military offers. But now, I am not so sure. Culturally, today’s military is nothing like it was a mere 4 years ago and 180 degrees from where it was a decade ago.

Four years ago, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was still official policy. Approximately a week ago, I received a memo outlining a policy and a way ahead for reassignment surgery for transgender troops, something that would have been absurd in 2012. I cannot state this enough: this is how far we have come in 4 years. On top of that, I find it profoundly disturbing that what seems to be psychosis is treated via grotesque mutilation of the human body that, clinically, has shown very few positive psychological results. Military medicine has one of the most robust mental health networks in the entire country. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines who have mental health issues from depression and anxiety to PTSD and substance abuse are treated and continually evaluated for their fitness to serve. But, transgender troops have now been given the go ahead (and to be fair, there is a lengthy approval process) to remove or disfigure sexual organs, take hormones, and call it good — all at the expense of the taxpayer. What world are we living in?

Regarding who I am and what I stand for, I don’t even agree with DADT. It’s bad policy and I could give a damn if any of my troops are gay. In fact, in the last year I have had 3 homosexuals serve in my direct command and all 3 are excellent at what they do. All 3 received promotion based in large part upon my evaluation of their performance. The military has always been a meritocracy but that’s changing. You see, I am not worried about some of the fantastic men and women who have served in my command. I am, however, worried about the dirtbag (military-speak for a do-nothing) who doesn’t deserve promotion and who, upon receipt of a poor performance report, accuses me, a trad Christian, of anti-gay bias. That day isn’t here yet but the writing is on the wall. It is coming fast and there is no promise of respite under Hillary Clinton who, let’s just be honest, is likely to win in the biggest landslide in 30 years. We must not forget that she has basically stated that she does not think freedom of religion extends past Sunday and churches who are on the “wrong” side of history, as it were, must change their ways. In other words, in her mind it’s not enough to be kind, considerate, and fair whilst agreeing to disagree.

As an aside (but since I brought up presidential politics), I would also like to note that my anecdotal impression is that Republicans, with their nomination of Trump, have lost the military voter. For the first time in my career, the seeming majority of troops are voting for the Democrat. After Hillary, it seems Gary Johnson draws the most support. I have had several non-religious, non-culturally conservative troops say they have always voted for Republicans because they felt like they were the party that really supported the troops. Unfortunately for the Republicans, I think we can mark 2016 as the year they lost an entire generation of military voters. Granted, we are not the biggest voting bloc but we vote and we overwhelmingly supported the Republicans. Of course, I am not voting for Trump so why should I be surprised?

I am simply hoping to convey the cultural shift experienced across the military within a very short time. I guess I will close by saying this: those who have served for 10 years or longer started their careers as pawns in the Bush administration’s interventionist wars and will likely end their careers as pawns in the Obama and/or Clinton administration’s culture wars. I will say it again: I truly believe the US military is on the front lines of our country’s culture wars. The worst part is that I don’t think anything can be done right now. In an attempt to bring this full circle, I planned on retiring out of the military but now my family is strongly considering pulling our lifestyle way, way back and living according to BenOp principles. By no means do I wish to sound alarmist but if we wish to pursue a life of peace and piety, BenOp may be the only way forward.

I look forward to the book and, in many ways, I hope we are wrong. But like you, I don’t think that’s the case.

I will keep you and your family in my prayers and I ask you do the same. It’s not easy out there, right now.

In the title of his email, the reader said that the US military is no place for Christian traditionalists. I have a question to you Christian readers who are now on active duty, or are veterans: Would you encourage faithful orthodox Christians to serve in the US military?

Why or why not?

The Death Of Movement Conservatism

If you missed Samuel Goldman’s TAC piece about what comes next for the conservative movement, go read it now. I was late getting to it, and boy, is it good. Here’s the gist:

Of all the illusions Trump has dispelled, however, none is more significant than the illusion of the conservative movement. Rather than being the dominant force in the Republican Party, conservatives, Trump revealed, are just another pressure group. And not an especially large one. In state after state, voters indicated that they did not care much about conservative orthodoxy on the economy, foreign policy, or what used to be called family values.

The poor record of this orthodoxy as a governing philosophy is one reason for this indifference to conservative dogma. Some apologists blame Obama for provoking the Trump rebellion through a feat of reverse psychology. The truth is probably simpler. Many Americans remember the George W. Bush presidency as a disaster. Reasonably enough, they expect that another self-identified conservative administration would bring more of the same.

Demographic changes are also part of the explanation. The conservative movement is disproportionately comprised of middle-class white Christians. There are fewer of those than there used to be.

As the conservative movement approaches retirement age, finally, its rhetoric has become almost unintelligible to outsiders. Rather than making arguments addressed to normal people, conservative leaders invoke limited government almost fetishistically, as if the words themselves possessed the power to convince. Ted Cruz’s reputation as an orator rests on his mastery of this jargon.

Goldman’s speculation about what comes after conservatism is pretty depressing. He considers the libertarian option, but recognizes that most Americans are not libertarians. The only other apparently option is that conservatism becomes an “ethno-class solidarity” movement for whites. There are problems with this too. I don’t want to steal Goldman’s thunder — read his piece — but he is surely right that there aren’t enough whites, and whites who buy into that worldview, to make it successful. Nor is there an actual program to do something serious to help blue-collar whites. Those jobs that went overseas aren’t coming back, no matter what Trump says.

J.D. Vance recommended to me a really good piece in Mother Jones by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who spent five years down in southwest Louisiana, among the proletariat. Excerpts:

I wanted to leave my subnation of Berkeley, California, and enter another as far right as Berkeley is to the left. White Louisiana looked like it. In the 2012 election, 39 percent of white voters nationwide cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. That figure was 28 percent in the South, but about 11 percent in Louisiana.

To try to understand the tea party supporters I came to know—I interviewed 60 people in all—over the next five years I did a lot of “visiting,” as they call it. I asked people to show me where they’d grown up, been baptized, and attended school, and the cemetery where their parents had been buried. I perused high school yearbooks and photograph albums, played cards, and went fishing. I attended meetings of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana and followed the campaign trails of two right-wing candidates running for Congress.

When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed (“I believe in freedom”) or who they’d vote for (“I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m voting Trump”). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I’ve come to think of as a deep story. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it’s-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need. Except Trump had opened a divide in how tea partiers felt this story should end.

Here’s the core:

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:



You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit (“the line-waiters form a new line”) or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, “I live your analogy.” Another said, “You read my mind.”

Hochschild talks about the split even among Tea Party types that Trump has revealed. Some of them think the government should quit coddling idlers. Others who are farther down the totem pole believe that government should quit coddling idlers, but people like themselves are not idlers. They’ve convinced themselves that they deserve government benefits, but others don’t.

Read the whole thing. It’s illuminating. The most important insight I found in it is that the sense of security for middle class people is gone, or at least severely compromised. I can see that in my own life and circles, and not just economic security. There is a pervasive sense that everything is in flux, that everything could change because of economic and cultural forces beyond one’s control. That there are no guardrails anymore, and that hard work and playing by the rules doesn’t guarantee nearly what it used to.

I’ve said in this space before that the debilitation of the white working class is the most important political story of our era. Part of that story is the detachment of educated elites from those people. Here’s a bit from a Spiked Online interview that Sean Collins did with Charles Murray:

Collins: You are a self-described libertarian, and your latest book is robust defence of freedom. Do you believe that Enlightenment values such as liberty are enough to stand up to the strong, often tribal, cultural forces at work today? Can they serve as a counter to those divisive forces?

Murray: A year ago, I would have given you a much more optimistic answer than I’d give you today. The thing about the Trump campaign that has been most disheartening has been the realisation that the electorate on the right, voting for Republicans, has many more people in it than I ever realised who don’t give a damn about freedom. They are motivated by the kinds of tribal instincts that you describe, and they are also populist in an authoritarian sense, in that they don’t want to limit government, they just want to use the powers of government for their own ends. In the short-term, then, I’m very pessimistic. I am very undecided about what will happen, but I suspect the Republican Party is going to go into serious decline. And, insofar as it does not go into decline, it is not going to represent policies that foster limited government and freedom. It will be a party that fosters a different kind of authoritarianism than the left does. The only difference will be in the type, not the authoritarian nature of the policies.

This is the thing that drives me nuts about libertarians. It is a philosophy that works for people who have a significant degree of self-control, or who at least have internalized a social ethic of self-control. That is not most of humanity. When we were a more religious country, there was a certain moral code imposed by the mainstream that, fair or not, kept a lot of people from going off the rails. That’s gone.

Just yesterday I ran into a friend who told me about N., a woman we both know. N. is a white working class woman who, earlier this summer, left her husband and three kids to run off with a guy she met. Now she’s strung herself out on pills, and has left that guy. Some variation on this story plays out over and over among a people that within living memory may have lacked money and education, but had a coherent, binding moral code by which they lived.

At some point, it’s all bound to crash. But there’s a world of hurt for us all to go through before then. Meanwhile, let’s all pay attention to things like this, which Slate calls one of history’s most important crossword puzzles. What makes it so important? It contains the word GENDERFLUID:

“I think that people are going to enjoy this puzzle because it’s sort of a monument to how far queerness has come,” Tausig [the puzzle’s writer] told me in an interview. “And ideas about gender identity that weren’t mainstream 20 years ago or even five years ago.”

Go ask the people in the trailer park what they think of this milestone in the March of Progress.

The forces of dissolution are all but irresistible now. We have to figure out how to ride them out without being destroyed by them. But you knew I would say that.

Can Your Avatar Determine Your Identity?

Early in my teenage years, I was a miserable nerd. One great joy in my life, and in the life of my small nerd circle, was Dungeons & Dragons. This was the early 1980s, and I was aware of the D&D panic in some Christian circles. But those weren’t my circles, and my parents had no idea what I was doing. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and became the center of my social life for a year or two. I remember being so ticked off at the scare stories about teenagers supposedly freaking out over the game, and losing their minds. There was a 1982 TV movie, Mazes and Monsters, starring a young Tom Hanks (see this clip), exploiting this fear.

Yet I remember one night lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, thinking about the adventure my character was having in the game. I did this a lot, and that night was no different from any other. For some reason, it struck me that the life of this fictional character whose story line I was narrating was far more engaging to me than the actual life I was leading as a ninth-grade nerd and social outcast. Don’t get me wrong here — I was not remotely close to thinking that the game was reality. It was a bit unnerving, though, to realize that I preferred to live in the imaginative reality created by the game to real reality, in which I was deeply unhappy with myself and with everything around me.

It was deep escapism, no doubt about it, and I still don’t think it did any harm. In fact, it probably did me a lot of good, compared to other ways I might have escaped my adolescent unhappiness (booze, drugs, etc.). Still, I can’t deny that living imaginatively as what I suppose today we would call an avatar had an unusual psychological affect on me. This character I played — I believe he was a half-elf, but I can’t remember — was everything I was not in real life, but wanted to be. There was obviously no way to become a half-elf, and if I had started presenting in public as a half-elf, I very quickly would have been made to understand that I was living in a fantasy world, and ought to return to reality.

All of that is background for this story from today’s NYT, about how the latest generation of video games are allowing players to expand their gender identities. Excerpts:

In the popular simulation game The Sims, players have long been able to create male and female characters — but only up to a point. That changed this year.

In May, Electronic Arts, the publisher of The Sims, released a patch for the game that removed all gender barriers, freeing players to create virtual characters with any physical attribute.

For Blair Durkee, the shift was significant. The day after the patch was introduced, Ms. Durkee, a student at Clemson University in South Carolina, logged into The Sims and started designing her first transgender character. She named the character Amber, gave her a deep voice and broad shoulders, and made her infertile, “which is really the only attribute that all trans people have in common,” said Ms. Durkee, 28, who transitioned to female at 24.

“A lot of people assume that all trans men have feminine features and trans women have masculine features, but that’s not the case,” she said. She plans to make another trans character as a love interest for Amber.

This inclusive attitude toward gender and sexuality, once a rarity in video games, is becoming more common as games take on more diverse and weightier subject matter, beyond flesh-eating zombies and alien attacks.

One man says playing gay characters in The Sims while in the Navy led him to come out:

At the time, the United States military operated under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibited gay, lesbian and bisexual members of the armed forces from openly disclosing their sexual orientation. So Dr. Schloss found an outlet for his identity in the game, creating four male characters, who were in two couples, and having them live in the same virtual house.

“The more I played the game and experienced that possibility for life in an alternative universe, the more I wanted to make that a reality for myself,” said Dr. Schloss, 41, who was granted an honorable discharge from the Navy Medical Corps in 2007 and is now an assistant professor of clinical radiology at a New York hospital.

Get this:

This is linked to what is known as the Proteus effect, a concept introduced in 2007 by the Stanford researchers Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, who concluded that the appearance of a person’s online avatar had a significant impact on his or her behavior, in and out of a virtual environment. In one study, participants who were assigned a more attractive avatar in a virtual environment were found to exhibit more confidence and intimacy in the real world than those assigned to a less attractive avatar.

“This tells us that avatars can change our behaviors,” Ms. Fox said. “They allow us to practice and test out certain behaviors in a virtual world.”

Read the whole thing.

Is there ever a time in one’s life when one’s identity is more unsettled than adolescence? Even though things are rather more, um, diverse in 2016 than in 1981, we still are not in a culture in which one can declare oneself a half-elf and find oneself affirmed and even valorized by one’s culture, including the institution of high school. We are there, however, with transgenderism and gender fluidity. What if the happiness I thought would be mine if I could have stepped into the constructed identity of my D&D character, with whom I had come to identify after months of intense playing, had been offered to me as something real? How would I have reacted at 14 and 15?

But there are no such things as half-elfs. There are such creatures as transgenders, genderqueers, and the lot. If the Proteus effect is real, then a child or an adolescent who feels some attraction to playing an alternative gender role in a simulation game may find that this constructed, artificial identity feels more real to him or her than who he or she really is. One can imagine that the totally immersive virtual environments coming with Oculus Rift and its successors are going to be more potentially transformative of adolescent psyches.

I laughed at adults who thought D&D nerds like me were going to run off and get lost in the woods, thinking that we were half-elves fighting orcs and basilisks. But I’m not at all sure that this new stuff is a laughing matter.

The reader who sent me the link to the Times story comments, “What are we becoming, before our very eyes?”

At The Privilege Factories

Take a look at that short (13-minute) documentary about what’s happening at Brown University. It was made by Rob Montz, an alumnus who is concerned about the monstrous culture of “weaponized grievance” destroying the core of the university.

It’s not just Brown, of course. It occurs to me that this same movement in American higher education is threatening to marginalize and even crush Christian colleges who hold to the traditional Christian teaching on sex and sexuality, while at the same time wrecking the ability of mainstream universities to do what universities are supposed to do: teach.

Here’s another great clip, this one just over three minutes, by a Haverford College student named Olivia Legaspi. She writes about how the skills and resilience she learned working at McDonalds taught her more about real life and character than the coddling atmosphere at her school:

Funny, but I heard not long ago from the head of a Christian college that he had run into a (secular) employer in his city at a social event, and the employer told the college president that he loved having kids from the Christian college intern there. Why? The Christian college students show up on time, they aren’t hung over, and they have none of the sense of entitlement that so many others of their generation do.

Those clips come from the vital website Heterodox Academy, which warns students that college can make you dumber if you’re not careful.

It is interesting to contemplate where all this is going to put us politically in two or three decades. Privilege factories like these elite universities will continue to manufacture a leadership class besotted with grievance and blind to its own preciousness and bigotry. Meanwhile, outside the walls, discontent and resentment will grow. And then?

‘Inspired To Be A Better Christian’

Courtesy of Brent Mangum

Remember Brent Mangum, the Apple store manager who I saw doing relief work at the flood shelter? He sent this yesterday:

I took the [above] picture in our church service on Sunday and felt prompted to share it with you.

It was a sabbath day like no other I had ever experienced. The pictures below are of nearly 1000 folks from seven states to help strangers they had never met. Many of them (Mormons and Non-Mormons) slept in tents, on floors and in their vehicles. These men and women sacrificed time with their loved ones and personal resources to help strangers miles away with no thought of recognition or compensation. Robin and I hosted a handful of these individuals from Houston and they spoke of what a great blessing it was to be able to serve and at no point did they bicker or complain.

I left this makeshift and humble meeting inspired to be a better Christian.

 

That’s what I meant when I said that this terrible flood has also occasioned a flood of grace.

Meanwhile, in earthquake-stricken Norcia, the monks are nearly re-established in tents outside the city walls. They received a famous visitor yesterday: Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Below, the photo, and the latest report from Father Benedict, the subprior:

As the monks slowly but steadily get back to routine, these updates too will be less frequent. Your prayers and financial support in this critical time have helped us to get on our feet and allowed us to help others here in Norcia and beyond with our prayers and even material support. Still there is much to report!

Yesterday was a day of visitors and homecomings. What no doubt garnered the most attention from the press was the visit of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who came in by helicopter to Norcia to see the damage. Accompanied by the mayor, the archbishop and the president of Umbria, Renzi was able to see first hand the damages done to the Basilica and assure us and all those in Norcia of his support. Fr. Cassian and I were able to greet him personally.

Much closer to our hearts, though, was the return of our dear brothers from Rome who arrived at the same time the prime minister did. They were less noticed but much needed. Their presence in Norcia had not been possible up until yesterday as the cells and other parts of the building had been declared unsafe by the fire marshals and they were required to evacuate. But we have found a few rooms that are usable for 4 brothers, and 3 brothers are sleeping in what were once our small guest quarters, which was not damaged since our neighbors who own it had it rebuilt after the last earthquake from the ground up.

With the community now all safely back in Norcia the monks were able to pray vespers together at Fuori Le Mura and Br. Michael posted his first recording since the quake. Afterwards we had a warm celebration together with a little Birra Nursia and a large Minestrone soup prepared by a friend of the monastery. All of us thanked God that in spite of the damage we are all safe and alive and we renewed our intention to be present to the people of Norcia through our prayer and support, now needed more than ever.

One more visitor is pictured below. The first snake we’ve encountered was thankfully already dead, which the brothers took to be a propitious sign: the reclaiming of our property from the beasts! Other visitors have been hedgehogs, wild boar, and a neighbor’s cow which feeds near our stone wall.

Pax,

Fr. Benedict

Subprior

The Balkanization of Campus

File this under “I’m Not For Trump, But I Get Why People Want Him To Throw A Brick Through The Establishment’s Window.” A reader at Emory University passes on this e-mail sent out to the academic community this week:

From: Sweeney, M. DeLa

Sent: Monday, August 29, 2016 9:34 AM

Subject: Fall 2016 Multicultural Emory (ME)

Greetings..

On behalf of the Office of Multicultural Programs & Services (OMPS), I wish you the very best for this fall semester and the 2016-2017 academic year. Additionally, I invite you to explore the opportunities in our Multicultural Emory (ME) portfolio that aims to acknowledge, validate, and affirm the racial identities and racialized experiences of Emory students.

ME includes four branches:

Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi Experience (APIDEX)

Building Leaders And Cultivating Knowledge (BLACK)

Multi Ethnic & Racial Group at Emory (MERGE)

Support & Opportunity for Latinxs (SOL)

Each branch includes multiple components. While some components are intended for specific demographics (e.g., women; first-year students; graduate & professional students; graduating students), every branch has a community component that is open to all Emory students: undergraduate, graduate, & professional.

APIDEX Discussion Group; Monthly, 2nd Mondays, 530-700p | Starting 12 September 2016, OMPS (DUC E207)

The BLACK Collective (presented with the Emory Black Student Union); Weekly, Tuesdays, 600-730p | Starting 6 September 2016, EBSU (DUC E206)

MERGE Discussion Group; Semimonthly, 1st & 3rd Mondays, 530-700p | Starting 19 September 2016, OMPS (DUC E207)

La Sala; Weekly, Thursdays, 530-700p | Starting 1 September 2016, Centro Latino (DUC, West Wing, 2nd Floor)

Additionally, we have a few openings on the ME Leadership Team. Each branch is supported by Managers & Coordinators. These volunteer positions are responsible for preparing and implementing the programs & events of their respective ME branches. For more information and to apply for a position, please visit http://www.emory.edu/MULTICULTURAL/me....

I hope you will consider connecting with some component of ME during your time at Emory. We are also very open in exploring opportunities and expanding programming to meet the needs of individuals who are interested in creating spaces for additional communities not currently available in ME. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns (omps@emory.edu). In OMPS, we envision an Emory where every student can proudly say, “This is ME!” Wishing you a wonderful fall semester.

Warm regards..

DeLa

*****

M. DeLa Sweeney, PhD, NCC

pronouns: they, them, their, theirs

Director, Social Justice Education

Interim Director, Multicultural Programs & Services

Center for the Advancement of Student Advocacy & Agency

Writes the reader:

I don’t know which part is worse … no, scratch that, the “preferred personal pronouns” under the name of a UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATOR WITH THE POWER TO CENSOR ME is 100% the worst part.

But after that, I think the next-worst thing by a hair is the existence of such a ridiculous office. It’s doubly insulting since we just lost a big deal professor in the university [details redacted], and the administration is making that department fight to justify the idea of replacing him with a new hire. In fact this is the case throughout the American university system. Administrations are loath to hire faculty — you know, the people who teach students, which is ostensibly the reason why they are there — but happy to shell out for “safe spaces” and genderfluid Commissars “Directors of Social Justice Education.”

He continues:

The reason I bring all of this up is for context. I am looking to enter the academy as a professor. But they are not hiring people like me, i.e., people who exist to teach undergraduates content-knowledge about a specific field. They are, instead, hiring people like Mr. Genderfluid Them to tell me how to do my job. University administrations are suffering from a Stage IV metastasizing cancer of mid-level managers with degrees/Masters’/Ph.Ds in “Education,” who know nothing except the SJW propaganda they were fed in “Education” school (because they certainly don’t know anything about math or physics or biology or history or foreign languages or even freaking English), with the nerve to tell me how to do my job.

The reader concludes by referencing the case of a contrarian professor tossed by the College of Charleston for not going along with revised bureaucratic procedure:

Did you hear about Robert Dillon? He is, or perhaps I should say was, a Biology professor at the College of Charleston with more than 30 years of teaching and research experience. He won numerous awards, and was particularly singled out by other science educators for his staunch defense of Darwinian evolution. He is also a practicing Presbyterian … and I wonder how much this has to do with what happens next. See, a bunch of these mediocre intellects with degrees in “Education” got together and compiled the latest regional accreditation standards for universities. (The Ben Op implications here are ominous). In these latest standards, they decided that every syllabus must have a bullet point list of “Student Learning Outcomes,” because apparently if they aren’t in a bullet point list on the syllabus, the students won’t learn anything. Professor Dillon had stood up to the state Legislature when it wanted to impose Creationism in the classroom, and he stood up to these bullies as well. Except they told him he was being “insubordinate,” and after he refused to budge, they physically barred him from his classroom before TERMINATING HIS TENURE.

I just want to pause and let that sink in. An award-winning professor, with tenure and 30 years of experience, was FIRED because he wouldn’t put a meaningless shibboleth on his syllabus that didn’t actually have any ideological content in it. They got rid of him because he dared to stand up to them. Of course the lawsuit is in process, but the damage has already been done, the example has already been set.

Well. Lots for you readers to comment on here. I just want to point out some of the verbiage in M. DeLa Sweeney’s e-mail:

Additionally, I invite you to explore the opportunities in our Multicultural Emory (ME) portfolio that aims to acknowledge, validate, and affirm the racial identities and racialized experiences of Emory students.

Think about that: the university actually wants to make people more aware of their racial difference, and to “racialize” their experience. They are paying people like this man (or whatever he thinks he is) to foment Balkanization on the university campus. Of course the only Emory students who will not be allowed to have their racial identities and “racialized experiences” acknowledged, validated, and affirmed are white students.

And that’s how it should be! I don’t want my own white kids going off to college and encouraged to think of themselves as special, and especially aggrieved, because of their race. I don’t want the university to teach them to view people of other races with suspicion, and to meditate on their own racial preciousness.

Whenever I see the words “Social Justice,” especially in an academic context, I am certain that I am confronting a moralistic progressive scam designed to impugn the integrity and rights of white heterosexuals, and redistribute power to groups that have achieved hegemony within the established culture. Whose society? Whose justice?

It costs $61,000 per year to attend Emory. A former senior administrator at a different college told me not long ago that only about 30 percent of his school’s entire budget goes to academics. He wasn’t talking only professors’ salaries, but everything that could possibly be said to support teaching (e.g., cost of classroom building maintenance). Thirty percent. The rest of it goes to pay for programs and other things at the university that have nothing to do with the purpose of the university: to educate. The former administrator revealed that to me as part of a conversation about how the college bubble is bound to burst soon, because the whole thing is unsustainable.

Meanwhile, the woebegone University of Missouri, still reeling from the disastrous income losses following its capitulation last fall to political correctness, which led to a dramatic decrease in enrollments, continues to lead the way to the progressive Promised Land. From the student newspaper:

Many single-occupancy restrooms across the MU campus that were labeled as “unisex” will be re-labeled “toilet” by the time students return in August.

The change to “toilet” will only affect single-occupancy bathroom stalls. In residential halls, single-occupancy stalls with showers and sinks will be re-labeled “shower” and “toilet,” depending on the contents of the restroom.

The move follows a resolution passed by the Missouri Students Association in January.According to the resolution, the change will “make MU’s campus bathrooms more accessible to trans and gender non-conforming students.”

Sterling Waldman,  a social justice chair in the MSA Senate, engaged the support of the MSA for the re-labeling. Waldman said the word unisex excludes people who do not identify as male or female.

“Unisex is just such an uncomfortable and outdated word,” Waldman said.

More:

It will cost an estimated $11,600 to change every relevant sign on campus and, due to budget cuts, Hurst said there is insufficient money available to support the entire project.

“Campus facilities is currently working with students from MSA to identify which bathroom signs are of the highest priority and change the signage on those bathrooms using the remaining $3,000 of the allotted MSA money,” Hurst said.

Priorities! American higher education has priorities! The tuition payment for one undergraduate at Mizzou this year is going to pay for changing signs to keep up with the most fashionable nomenclature among progressives. Think about that: not for faculty or adjunct salaries, or anything to do with educating students. It’s about changing toilet signs to please transgenders.

You’d think that the university, having seen a 25 percent decline in enrollment in the wake of last fall’s PC debacle, and a $46 million revenue loss, would have awakened to the folly of yielding to this nonsense. But no. The M. DeLa Sweeneyfication of the American university continues.

The day of reckoning cannot come quickly enough.

UPDATE: Reader Axxr:

I have a Ph.D. and worked in academics on the east coast in major private universities for a decade.

These are not bureaucrats—or at the very least, they don’t understand themselves in that way. These are true believers, overcome by an all-encompassing righteous indignation and a repressed hate and fury that will not go away without many years of therapy. And they are the strong majority on the administrative payrolls of many institutions.

They see it as a mission and as a calling to right the world (see the common term “social justice warrior”—it is quite apropos) whatever the cost.

I very much worry that we are seeing the emergence of a newspeak that will come to be taken for granted, matched as it already is with strong ideological education and a body of negative sanctions for violators that can be permanently debilitating for careers and families.

I further worry that it is not that schools like Chicago will survive while others fail, but quite the contrary—that schools like Chicago will fight the good fight but ultimately be numbered amongst the victims of this round of cultural madness, pressed out of existence and faded from memory until revived in discussions of its regrettable casualties by future historians.

 

Does Colin Kaepernick Hate America?

I have been trying to work out my position on the Colin Kaepernick affair, and nothing quite satisfies. Kaepernick, as most people know, is the biracial San Francisco 49ers quarterback who refuses to stand for the National Anthem, as a protest against police brutality against black people. It has caused a huge stir. New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees criticized his NFL colleague, saying he respects Kaepernick’s right to protest whatever he wants, but drawing the line at this form of protest. Brees calls the American flag “sacred.”

1. As a general matter, I don’t take protest by wealthy celebrities seriously. Kaepernick is one of the richest and most famous people in America. America has been very, very good to Colin Kaepernick. Few if any classes in America are more privileged than the professional athlete. He signed a six-year, $114 million contract with the 49ers in 2014. There’s something obnoxious about a multimillionaire NFL athlete taking this kind of stand. If his stand actually costs him something, I will reconsider.

2. On the other hand, Drew Brees is wrong: the American flag is not sacred. I mean, I understand why he believes that it is, and I am sure it is sacred to him, as it is to tens of millions of Americans. But should it be? Do we worship the nation and its symbols? At what point does loving one’s country — patriotism — become an idolatrous form of nationalism?

3. What if the United States government, as well as American culture, began to oppress Christians in a serious, deliberate way? How would I feel about standing up for the National Anthem myself? I would be hard pressed to do so, precisely because the state would be violating the one thing I do hold sacred: the Sacred.

4. It is no small thing to refuse to stand for the National Anthem. It shows disrespect towards the nation, which is to say, All Of Us. It is to say, “I’m not part of you.” If that’s how one feels, then there’s no gainsaying it, but it’s a big deal. What would happen if more people began to think that the ties that bind us together as a people are not as strong as the forces pulling us apart? And what if that were true?

5. I think the vast majority of people who stand for the National Anthem do it unthinkingly. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. One’s love of and fidelity to one’s country should be assumed, normally. Most people will see Kaepernick’s stunt as just that: a stunt. But the day may come when things like this have more power than mere shock value. Though Kaepernick’s action is wholly political, with no discernible religious content to it, it ought to make Christians think about our own relationship with the nation and its symbols.

6. Here’s what I mean: To what extent do we consider being a faithful Christian coterminous with being a good American? We may see no meaningful difference today, but how will we be able to tell when the nation asks us to burn a pinch of incense in honor of the national deity, and that’s something we cannot do without violating our consciences? We may see no contradiction between being a good Christian and a good American, but what happens when Americans as a whole look at dissenting Christians and call us un-American for the things we believe and do? Will we stand for the National Anthem then? If so, will we stand for the America we think is real, versus this politicized, debased America that the mainstream holds to? Or will it be more important for us not to stand, and to accept whatever consequences come with that?

7. Are we asking too much from our country, to expect it to be perfect, and to withhold our public expression of loyalty and respect until it perfects itself — a day that will never arrive? Would we refuse to respect our extended family until it sorts out its own problems? In what sense is the nation like a family? Same with our church (an issue that has been very much present in my own life, as longtime readers know).

8. What will it cost us if we lose the ability to stand together for the National Anthem? Is it worth what we stand to gain?

These are the thoughts I have around the Kaepernick incident. I welcome yours.