North Alehouse

Chaser: 

The Dalai Lama apologized Tuesday for repeating remarks that if the next dalai lama were a woman, she should be "attractive." In an interview with the BBC, published June 27, the Dalai Lama was pressed on a comment he made in 2015 that if he were followed by a female dalai lama, she would need to be physically appealing." He reaffirmed his belief that beauty matters as much as brains. 'If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive,' he told me while laughing," the BBC article said.

Picked up a bunch of books for a song at a local book sale.  As with pianos being available for near-free these days, this sort of thing is, as they say, quite a feel - adjacent to looting a lost civilization.  Almost literally so, as these cultural artifacts were once purchased by specific households that valued them but did not successfully transmit the valuing culture, and ended up letting them go for two orders of magnitude less than they paid.

The deal seems to be to, in the best case scenario, kill Huawei and secure 5G network infrastructure for America and/or a vassal state, in exchange for accelerating industrial policy to become independent of what was a comfortable American dominance of these industries.

Eliminating partial participation in 5G infrastructure in exchange for giving up a high-end chip manufacturing monopoly seems like a bad trade in the long run.

The move is simultaneously too much and too little. It's too much for narrow natsec concerns (Five Eyes seemed to be falling in line with a Huawei ban, although EU countries weren't playing along). It's too little to actually cripple the Chinese economy or even its ability to become independent in silicon, if appropriately motivated. And, of course, it supplies the motivation.  

It’s OPEC in the 1973 oil crisis, but for chips.

Presumably the chip ban is meant to kneecap Huawei/China's entire 5G capability in the short term, by which time it's hoped the 5G race will be over with - at the cost of conceding the chip monopoly in the long run.

I find much to agree with in the traditional Catholic/Latin Mass fandom’s diagnosis of the problems with the modern Catholic church.  Sure, it’s a bit ironic that the ultra-Catholic response maps so neatly to the Reformation - a notably lay-driven movement pushing back against the innovating central authority, making good use of youth energy and new media.  My main concern, though, is the triumphalism, and the unmistakable stench of "who are we praying against" in the tradcat sphere.

There's a subtle "looking at the moon" vs "looking at the finger pointing to the moon" distinction in play. "Actually being traditional" looks very different from "being about being traditional," in the same way that neopagan LARPers are very different from actual historical pagans.

What would a 17th century French peasant village do if transported to the modern day?  Prayer, lots of shared secular rituals and social life, serious mutual aid, enforcing mainly ingroup norms. Refighting the 30 Years War or getting into “my liturgy can beat up your litugry” arguments with randos on the internet wouldn't even occur to them as things to do. Well, what are the internet tradcats doing?

Now, to be fair, Having Opinions about liturgy is probably a necessary first step. You’ve gotta gather the faithful first before they can do anything interesting, and using liturgy as your Schelling point is about as good as any other ingroup marker. But triumphalism merely because you got a fan club together is premature.  Triumph is when the people in your group have lived their distinctive lives so long they no longer notice that it's extraordinary.

(Ideally after fighting a guerrilla war with USG in the Western desert and doing well for yourselves, but still.)

To be clear, I'm glad the tradcat thing exists and I met some good people through the Ordinariate.  I wish them luck. But the brute fact is that the tradcat sphere is quite larval in development, certainly compared to historic or overseas Catholic communities, and they’ve even got quite a lot to learn from solid American Evangelical churches re: community building. Triumphalism now is paradoxically a sign of low expectations for what the tradcat movement can become.  I see much more being possible and encourage tradcats to raise their sights.

One sometimes hears of experiments showing that merely by talking through a list of questions, people can be induced to fall in love.  But when you read it, the questions themselves aren’t that special, compared to the typical banter in a promising first date.

Rather, the active ingredient in these experiments is the high status authority figure (the experimenter) ordering the woman to engage in closeness-generating behavior, thereby shoving her shit-testing (and agency) out of the way to permit attraction to happen with the randomly assigned partner.  It’s Jim’s parentally enforced sexy dancing, with a lab coat on.  Or, if you like, it’s the Milgram experiment but for catching feelings!

Zhou Enlai, asked about his take on the French Revolution, allegedly responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Now, at last, it seems long enough to tell.

Augustine is the son of a devout Christian, but in practice claims to be, like his father, a typical late Roman pagan.  The striking thing, though, is how sheepish he is about it.  Sure, he goes to the arena, has a mistress, and thinks Jupiter is a cool dude.  But he’s instinctively sheepish about all of it; he’s ashamed when his mom runs into the mistress, he feels bad about joining his friends munching popcorn at the arena, he’s conflicted about how the great thunder-god could be running around having children outside wedlock.

Sure, he’s not sheepish enough about it to stop doing these things (”but not yet”). But the internal cringe is quite striking, and quite unlike what a red-blooded pagan self-confident in his worldview would think.  Indeed, it seems like his mind has been colonized by Christian ethical memes well before his formal conversion.  And perhaps this is not just him, but reflective of a broader milieu which, while many people were nominally pagan, that paganism was a crumbling edifice of unprincipled exceptions against the Christian morality which pretty much everyone believed in their bones.