Alan Jacobs

A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for the first time, I would definitely be buying NBA League Pass. Now? No. I’m not standing on definitive principle; it’s simply that thinking about the league leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The two most important figures in the NBA, Adam Silver and LeBron James, have issued their warnings against the “consequences” of critiquing the Chinese regime. We now know that if Beijing rained bombs onto Hong Kong not one word of criticism would pass the lips of anyone in the NBA. And that’s not easy for me to forget.

Tom Dart: 

Since Berhalter’s appointment was announced last December there have been no results that exceeded expectations against good teams; there is currently no reason to believe that the US would be anything but makeweights at Qatar 2022, should they qualify. And there is a lack of clear evidence that the team is trending in the right direction, despite individual positives such as the continued improvement of the midfielder Weston McKennie. 

Yep.

Let’s all face certain facts about the USMNT:

1. Gregg Berhalter has no ideas. “Bring on Zardes to score a late goal” does not qualify as an idea.  
2. Weston McKennie is a good soccer player. Christian Pulisic is a decent soccer player. Zack Steffen is a fairly promising keeper. Josh Sargent may well be a good soccer player someday. Nobody else on the team is any good at all. (Michael Bradley now has the mobility of a cigar store Indian and should never get another cap for the USMNT.) 
3. None of them, coach or players, cares very much. They are, without exception, going through the motions, without energy or commitment. 
4. We are at least a decade away from the USMNT playing any significant role in world soccer, and even that statement is a gesture of blind faith and hope. Berhalter has to go, and almost the entire crop of current players should go as well. Maybe there are some 12-year-olds out there who will flip the script.

The plan that the national federation established when it hired Jurgen Klinsmann was the right one, even if it didn’t work out the way that everyone had hoped. That plan was to hire a coach who had succeeded at the highest level, who could challenge American players to develop their skills in the most rigorous conditions, and who could oversee a long-term player development program. Nothing short of all that will work. 

So wake me when this country has a soccer team. I won’t be holding my breath.

Also, if you set the over/under on Pulisic-to-the-MLS at 3 years, I’ll take the under.

My buddy Rod Dreher: “If religious liberty is the most important public issue to you — and, as a religious believer, should it not be? — then the Barr speech should be front to mind as you consider voting.” 

The question of whether religious liberty should indeed be “the most important public issue” to me is one I have been wrestling with for the last few years. I’m not convinced it should. 

For instance: Stretch your mind and imagine a POTUS who supports religious liberty but who also pursues reckless, thoughtless, and inconsistent policies both domestically and abroad. Imagine that he is cruel to the helpless, treacherous to longstanding allies, cozy with authoritarian regimes, incapable of sticking with a plan, prone to judge everyone he meets strictly by their willingness to praise and defer to him. Imagine that he is colossally ignorant of domestic and foreign realities alike and yet convinced of his matchless wisdom. 

You might, first, ask whether such a President is a reliable ally of religious freedom. Would he work to guarantee liberty of conscience for those who on religious grounds criticized his own policies? Don’t make me laugh.  

But let’s say he can be counted on. Even so, should religious believers care about their own well-being above that of their neighbors? If, per argumentum, our religious liberty comes at the cost of great suffering for others, is that a deal we should make? Should we place our good ahead of the common good? 

Perhaps believers in different religions will answer this question variously. But I’m not a generic “religious believer,” I’m a Christian, and as far as I can tell I am commanded to sacrifice what’s best for me and choose instead what’s best for my neighbor. And if I fail to do that, why should anyone take my Christian witness seriously? 

Christians remember with praise and gratitude our mothers and fathers in the faith who chose to suffer themselves — and sometimes include their own families in their suffering  — rather than inflict suffering on others. Their example should be in our minds and hearts as we reflect on what we are called to do. 

I wasn’t a huge fan of Kevin Williamson before the whole Atlantic fiasco, but since he has returned to National Review he’s been writing one superb piece after another. Here’s the most recent example. 

A while back I wrote about a scholarly mystery: what appears to have been the sale of certain ancient papyri by someone who had no right to sell them. Now we have an update by the Egypt Exploration Society: 

On 25 June 2019 the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) posted a statement on its website that it was working with the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) to clarify whether any texts from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection had been sold or offered for sale to Hobby Lobby or its agents, and if so, when and by whom. This was in response to the online publication by Dr Brent Nongbri, following its release by Professor Michael Holmes of the MOTB, of a redacted copy of a contract of 17 January 2013 between Professor Dirk Obbink and Hobby Lobby Stores for the sale of six items to Hobby Lobby, including four New Testament fragments probably of EES provenance. This statement reports our findings to date.

With the help of photographs provided by the MOTB, the EES has so far identified thirteen texts from its collection, twelve on papyrus and one on parchment, all with biblical or related content, which are currently held by the MOTB (see the attached list). These texts were taken without authorisation from the EES, and in most of the thirteen cases the catalogue card and photograph are also missing. Fortunately, the EES has back-up records which enable us to identify missing unpublished texts.

There still seems to be reluctance on the part of EES, and indeed anyone else, to say “Dirk Obbink stole papyri from our collection, sold them, and kept the money for himself” — but by this point it has become difficult to imagine any other explanation. 

The post adds that the EES “is also pursuing identification and recovery of other texts, or parts of texts, which have or may have been illicitly removed from its collection,” so this story may not be over. And the post concludes by saying that the “broader legal issues arising from these findings … are under consideration by all the institutions concerned.” Does that mean that they may not press charges? Perhaps if the offender makes full restitution? 

I’ve been trying to think about Apple’s deep embedding in a corrupt and tyrannical Chinese regime, and what that means for me, for my long-term commitment to Apple’s products. My first approach to the problem was a rough sketch of the issues involved in the use of any technology: 

But as soon as I did this I realized that I was conflating certain categories that might better be kept distinct. For instance, “usefulness”: What makes something useful? A leafblower is useful in the sense that it moves a great many leaves around quickly; but a rake, while it moves those leaves much more slowly, gives its user more exercise without endangering his or her hearing, and those are valuable features. The ideal balance of the different kinds of usefulness will vary from person to person. It drives me nuts when I’m sitting outside and a lawn service shows up at a nearby house: here comes the deafening racket of the leafblowers, which will drive me inside for the next half-hour at least. But those guys are trying to make a living, which the use of rakes would make it considerably harder for them to do. I get that. I hate it, but I get it. 

Or: Linux is useful in the sense that I can do almost any computer-related task on it, but such a task will often be, for me anyway, dramatically more difficult than on more polished systems. So I rank Linux as not especially useful to me. 

The other axis, that of ethics, is even more difficult. Apple’s Chinese entanglements massive compromise the ethical status of the company, and in more than one way. (Which is worse, obedience to the demands of the Chinese government or the exploitation of Chinese labor?) But Apple also deserves some praise for its commitment to privacy and its truly wonderful work in making its computers accessible to a wide range of users. I don’t know how to make an ethics spreadsheet, as it were, that assembles all the relevant factors — including comparisons to the available alternatives — and gives them proper weighting.

In the end, I think most of us make this kind of decision by some kind of sixth sense, an un-unpackable feel for what’s the best, or the least bad, option in the given circumstances. I wonder if that sense is wholly irrational or whether, on some deep and inaccessible level, it’s actually finding a means to weigh what we don’t consciously know how to weigh. 

(Of course, the problem for me in all this is that I am as implicated in Apple’s ecosystem as Apple is implicated in the Chinese economy. If Apple’s policies don’t change, then I hope I will have the courage to buy no more Apple products. My current Apple devices are fairly new, so that leaves me with four years or so to find an alternative. Maybe my fifth time committing to Linux will be the one that finally sticks, but who knows.) 

I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese authorities were playing a long game, biding their time and building their power, and I do not think they were relishing an immediate confrontation with Western capitalism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Beijing clearly perceives these protests as an existential threat, and have decided that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the center of the table … and the capitalists immediately folded like a Chinese-made lawn chair. 

NBA officials are bowing and scraping to Beijing and begging forgiveness while trying to tell Americans that they’re not really apologizing. (Adam Silver says he’s not apologizing for Daryl Morey’s exercise of free speech, but then what is he apologizing for?) ESPN/Disney is muzzling its employees. Apple is banning apps that Beijing wants banned, for whatever reason. 

This has all gone better for Beijing than CCP officials probably dared hope, but in fact they held the strongest hand. Tim Cook, who got his job as Apple CEO after spending years proving that he was a wizard of the supply chain, knows better than anyone that China has a stranglehold on Apple’s supply chain, and it would take years or even decades to loosen that hold. I don’t know how much revenue the NBA gets from China, but even if it’s far less than they get in this country, that Chinese revenue can be cut off altogether in an instant; by contrast, not one American NBA fan in ten thousand will care enough about what happens in China to stop buying jerseys and tickets and League Pass. 

If nothing else, this whole shameful display should put an end, once and for all, to the ridiculous idea that there is some natural and intrinsic connection between democracy and capitalism. There very obviously ain’t. When shareholders and the bottom line are not benefitted by democracy, then democracy gets flushed down the toilet. American big business has firmly decided for a totalitarian regime and against people who want democratic freedoms. The business of America really is business after all. 

But here’s an interesting question: How woke will our woke capitalists remain if an emboldened Chinese regime starts to rail against moral perversion in the form of homosexuals and trans people? 

UPDATE: This: 

“Believe me, the China situation bothers me. . . . But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my owners to make money,” then–NBA commissioner David Stern said in a 2006 interview. He may not have known then where his allegiance to the bottom line would lead the league and the game he helped to grow.

To hear him tell it then, Stern was intent on turning the NBA into an exporter of American values. Under his leadership, the league began its “Basketball Without Borders” program, which initially sent NBA players to run basketball camps in geopolitically tense parts of the world. “NBACares” television spots dominated game breaks. “We’re going to keep right on showing them,” Stern told Sports Illustrated when asked about public annoyance with the frequency of the ads. “Because social responsibility is extremely important to us.”

You know it was an article of faith for Stern that “make money” and “social responsibility” could never come into irreconcilable conflict with each other. No doubt Adam Silver and Tim Cook have been similarly catechized. But their religion is in vain, so what will they do? They’ll keep making money and tell themselves that they are also socially responsible, no matter what happens on the ground. For faith is the evidence of things not seen. 

UPDATE 2: Paul Farmer, in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, on WLs (White Liberals): “I love WLs to death, they’re on our side. But WL’s think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves.” (More about Farmer, on related themes, here.)