Alan Jacobs

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”] The London Necropolis[/caption]

Here you go:

So most likely when Trump refers to “the media” as the most dishonest people on the planet, he refers only to professional journalists. This is a contradiction in terms, because modern journalism is a profession predicated on conveying truth. Journalists’ currency is credibility. To quibble with a particular journalist’s motives is to quibble with their identity: Are they journalists? Or entertainers, ideologues, or advocates?

The goal in journalism is to be the best at identifying and conveying said truth. The entire concept of the profession is antithetical to lying. So it’s difficult to imagine objecting to the idea of journalism, in principle: To have people whose job is to act as dispassionate arbiters who discern truth. People who are fair, who are trustworthy, who do not slander, who are not beholden to any particular interest but seek transparency, to highlight injustice, and to hold people in power accountable.

— James Hamblin. I’ve never seen such a laboratory-pure case. To the charge that journalists care more about pursuing political ends than telling the truth, Hamblin replies that that’s not possible because journalists are intrinsically and necessarily people who care about telling the truth more than political ends. Quod est demonstrandum.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1567”] wonderful cover design[/caption]

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The black bloc guy got a moment he’ll treasure for life. Richard Spencer got an aching jaw, but he also got some more Twitter followers, his name in the paper, the chance to pose as a martyr for his cause. Click farmers got clicks. Facebook got shares. Teens got memes. And everybody, everybody drew their tribe a little closer around them. None of these different groups agreed on what it all meant, mind you, but because they don’t interact, it didn’t matter. Maybe this is a vision of that national unity centrists are always calling for, so maybe even they win out, too. Everybody got served.

In an unrelated note, the Trump administration demonstrated the continuity of our foreign policy yesterday by launching a drone attack in Yemen. Three people died.

— everybody got some – Fredrik deBoer

Among other pleasing errours of young minds, is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from their own affairs, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines every one that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy. He therefore considers his fame as involved in the event of every action. Many of the virtues and vices of youth proceed from this quick sense of reputation. This it is that gives firmness and constancy, fidelity, and disinterestedness, and it is this that kindles resentment for slight injuries, and dictates all the principles of sanguinary honour.

But as time brings him forward into the world, he soon discovers that he only shares fame or reproach with innumerable partners; that he is left unmarked in the obscurity of the crowd; and that what he does, whether good or bad, soon gives way to new objects of regard. He then easily sets himself free from the anxieties of reputation, and considers praise or censure as a transient breath, which, while he hears it, is passing away, without any lasting mischief or advantage.

In youth, it is common to measure right and wrong by the opinion of the world, and, in age, to act without any measure but interest, and to lose shame without substituting virtue.

Such is the condition of life, that something is always wanting to happiness. In youth, we have warm hopes, which are soon blasted by rashness and negligence, and great designs, which are defeated by inexperience. In age, we have knowledge and prudence without spirit to exert, or motives to prompt them; we are able to plan schemes and regulate measures, but have not time remaining to bring them to completion.

— Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 196. Saturday, February 1, 1752

“I just don’t want to talk about history. All that shit! You can find all this in other interviews I’ve done. I’ve been 40 years talking about other people I’ve worked with. No, sorry. I’m just not interested.”

Doesn’t he think the idea that the interview should be entirely about the present and what he may do in the future is a bit unreasonable?

“But you can do research,” he says. And calm, measured Eno has turned into irascible Eno. “That’s your job! Research! You can look through thousands of interviews I’ve done where I’ve talked about all of this. That’s your job! You get paid for it. I don’t get paid for this, by the way!”

I get paid to ask people questions, I say.

“OK, well, you’ve asked me and I’ve said I don’t want to answer them. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I know what you were after,” he says, “and I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to go into a historical gloss on my career because that is not where my thoughts are right now. I’m thinking about something as we’re talking that we’re not talking about and I don’t want to lose it.”

— Brian Eno: ‘We’ve been in decline for 40 years – Trump is a chance to rethink’. I’m 100% on Eno’s side here.

There were so many bad calls in the Arsenal-Burnley match I just sweated through that I can’t figure out whether Burnley got hosed. Certainly Arsenal’s late penalty shouldn’t have been granted — Koscielny was clearly offside — but the Xhaka red card was debatable (though I think justified), and earlier in the match Jon Moss clearly missed Mustafi being fouled in the box.

Meanwhile, the outcome of yesterday’s Spurs-Man City clash would surely have been different if Kyle Walker had been appropriately punished for shoving Raheem Sterling in the back as the small man was racing all alone towards goal (that should have been a penalty and a red card). And Mike Dean, recently demoted to the Championship for ineptitude, seems to be continuing his inimitable stylings in his new setting.

All that said, Mark Clattenburg is clearly right when he says that the refs get the overwhelming majority of calls right and that disproportionate attention is given to the ones they get wrong — though he might have noted that some decisions have disproportionate effects: Jon Moss’s decisions today could possibly affect Arsenal’s hopes to stay in the Champions’ League (and maybe even Burnley’s ability to stay up, though I expect that they’re quite safe).

In any event, I think the most important point to note about this ongoing brouhaha is this: The refs are as good as they’re going to get. A great many people want to referee football at the highest level, and they go through considerable training and intense competition to get there. It is highly unlikely that there’s a substantial group of people out there who could do the job better than Clattenburg and Moss and Andre Marriner et al; or that the current crop of refs could be trained in new ways that would significantly improve their performance.

No: the athletes are better-conditioned and faster than they have ever been, there are 22 of them on the pitch, and the pitch is vary large. Calls will be missed, and the percentage of calls missed is highly unlikely to decline. So the moguls of international soccer effectively have three choices: they can shrug and tell us all to deal with an imperfect world, they can add one or more officials, or they can look for technological means to implement in-match corrections of errors.

But there’s really no point in complaining about the refs. They’re not just doing the best they can, they’re probably doing the best anyone can.

Media: We are outraged by the behavior of the Trump administration!

Trump administration: We are outraged by your completely biased and unwarranted outrage!

M: Your outrage at our totally warranted outrage is totally unwarranted, and frankly, we are outraged!

T: Nothing could possibly be more outrageous than your outrage at our totally warranted outrage at your totally unwarranted outrage at our perfectly appropriate behavior!

M: Frankly, your outrage at our outrage at …

The frustration is understandable, but the sooner that the press come to accept that Trump and his minions will never, ever tell the truth unless it’s in their direct interest, the better it will be for all of us. 

Lately I’ve been trying to read John Calvin, and I’m struggling. When I was in graduate school I read the whole of the Institutes, and as I recall I did so with interest and at least some profit, but now … it’s hard.

People who love Calvin often say that his thinking and theology must be clearly distinguished from the use later made of them. If certain Calvinists are dour, rigid, cold, insensitive to the human condition, prone to make vast theological generalizations from a handful of biblical passages while ignoring the greater part of the biblical witness, those vices should not be attributed retrospectively to Calvin. Which is certainly true, and something I try to keep in mind. But as I read Calvin now, I consistently find him to be dour, rigid, cold, insensitive to the human condition, and prone to make vast theological generalizations from a handful of biblical passages while ignoring the greater part of the biblical witness.

I am not at all sure I’m being fair to Calvin. I would like to think that as I get older I become a better reader, because I know more and have more experience. (Don’t we all like to think that of ourselves?) But experience is a two-edged sword. In the decades since I first read the Institutes I’ve had a great deal of experience with Calvinists, or people who claim to be Calvinists, and with some notable exceptions it hasn’t been pleasant. (In general, and for whatever reason or set of reasons, I found the Calvinists I met at Calvin College far more generous and humane — far more attuned to the spirit of Christ, at least as I discern it — than the Calvinists I met at Wheaton College. And in an environment that’s not wholly Calvinist, self-consciously Calvinist undergrads can be enormously troublesome, because they believe, and tell everyone who will listen, that they and they alone have the honesty and courage to face the hard truths of the Bible….)

But I digress. The point today is that I am simply unable to isolate my reading of Calvin from those several decades of experience (both in person and in reading) with people who admire and see themselves as followers of Calvin. It is possible that this background is actually helpful: for instance, perhaps if generations of readers have discerned certain implications in Calvin’s work, then they’ve seen something that’s really there, for good or ill, and I would do well to be attentive to it. But it seems to me more likely that Calvin’s successors, being less gifted than he, are drawing less subtle and nuanced conclusions than he did. And if that is the case, then my years of experience may be making me a less successful reader of Calvin than I was thirty years ago — at least in certain ways. (What I’ve learned about theology and church history in the intervening years has to be worth something.)

In any event, as I read I keep telling myself read this as though it’s new to you, as though you have no idea who John Calvin is — but it’s not working very well. I find myself longing to turn to Thomas Aquinas, whom I find infinitely more simpatico. But I shall persevere — both in reading Calvin and in trying to understand what it means to be a good reader.