Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Beltway pundits like to ridicule Trump supporters for thinking he’s playing some sort of four dimensional chess when he clearly isn’t. Whether it’s the fight with Musk or ending Iran’s nuclear program, it’s all the same complaint: not only does President Trump not understand what he’s doing, his supporters think there’s a plan when there isn’t one, confusing random flailing with multi-dimensional strategy.

In fact, though, that’s not what I see most Trump supporters celebrating in Trump’s actions. Most Trump supporters appear to be grateful that the President plays mere two-dimensional or one-dimensional chess.¹

Most politicians and beltway pundits seem to be stuck in zero dimensional chess. When Trump announces some action in pursuance of some policy, such as that he’s going to raise tariffs against a country until that country decides to negotiate to reduce their tariffs against the United States, the beltway class yells that this is crazy.

And then when the President rolls those tariffs back when the country announces they’ll negotiate, the same crowd crows that Trump is walking back his actions, not that the actions resulted in the consequences the President desired.

The same thing happened only last week with Iran. Trump threatened Iran with specific consequences unless the Islamic leadership in Iran started negotiating, starting with a ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz. The beltway class yelled that he’s crazy. Iranian leaders came to the table, so he stopped the threats that he explicitly said were meant to bring about this result and the beltway class crowed that he was chickening out. They didn’t argue that he shouldn’t trust the Iranian leadership—or that he shouldn’t trust the Pentagon—or that the starting point of negotiations offered was a bad one or even that the ceasefire was likely to be measured in hours rather than days. For that you need to go to someone on the right, someone who has actually supported Trump, such as Mark Steyn. No, they argued that he was chickening out when he did what he said he would do.

It’s literal zero-dimensional thinking. There is no sense that policies have goals and that reaching those goals will affect policy. When a politician literally announces the goal of an action, and the goal is met and so the action is ended, this is crazy and incomprehensible to beltway “thinkers”. Who, to paraphrase Edgar Rice Burroughs, “do more talking than thinking”.

“The comparison between the tactics of the Nazi storm troopers and our modern Antifa thugs is apt. It illustrates the time we now live in… the same unwillingness of decent Germans to believe the Nazis were a threat is the same unwillingness of too many modern Americans to believe the same thing about Antifa and the Democratic Party. Worse, we now have a large minority of Americans who support this violent behavior. To them, violence is wholly justified against those who disagree with them.”

“As he told us this story, what struck me was how similar my own experience has been. Time after time for the past four decades my liberal friends and relatives have refused to believe anything I say to them—always based on actual events—about politics and the growing corruption and bigotry within the Democratic Party. Like those decent Germans in the 1930s, these decent Americans find reasons to quickly dismiss what I say, without making any effort to find out if there is any merit to it…

“What I said was simply too unbelievable to be true, even though I had actually experienced it.”

“…the best part of free health care is that death is always free. And fast. While it may take months to see a specialist, ‘the median wait time between first request and referral was 1 day’ for Canada’s free death health care system. Beat that or die trying.”

“There’s no medical problem that free government health care can’t solve by killing you. For free.”

“Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.”

“Five years after the election—when it is too late to rectify the crime, and never mind all the injury inflicted on those branded ‘election deniers’ for protesting this fraud—we learn the truth… Here you have more than 300,000 ballots illegally included in the tally, which is nearly 30 times more than Biden’s margin of (alleged) victory in Georgia.”

Voting reform has been an 80/20 issue—or higher—for decades. But it’s a 1/99 issue in the beltway.

Trump voters are not Republican voters. For several months after November, it seemed that beltway Republicans and even otherwise-smart bloggers chose to ignore this. They seemed to think that Trump’s victory was a new era for Republican dominance. I didn’t understand this. Not only was there no evidence for it, there was a lot of evidence in that election against it.

Now that it’s becoming more obvious that Trump voters are not Republican voters, people are starting to write about it. But they haven’t yet progressed to asking why. Why did voters who do not identify as Republican—and may even disdain Republican politicians—vote for Trump? Because I’m pretty sure that many of the voters who voted for Trump don’t see themselves or Trump as Republicans.

Instead, they blame Trump for not trying hard enough to convince his voters to also vote for Republicans.

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don’t think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump’s personal political fortunes that he doesn’t have a Congress controlled by “lunatic left-wing Democrats” impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

This is beltway-class advice, not worthy of Ace. Ace misses two very important points in this summation. First, and most importantly, Trump owns no voters. Those voters aren’t his to command. He is theirs. Trump is the voters’ candidate, not the other way around.

The first line is on the wall far above the altar at our local church.

In a recent issue of Benedictus—a word I’ll be talking about in this post, as it happens—I ran across the following question about Latin masses, quoted from the Tradivox Catholic Catechism Index vol. 14:

Why is the Mass said in Latin?

1) Because this language comes from Rome, whence we received our faith; 2) because, being a dead language, it does not change in the course of time like living languages, and 3) because thereby the unity and uniformity of the Church, even in her public service, is represented and preserved.

That was written back when most masses were celebrated in Latin. There’s a lot to be said for the unity and precision that comes with presenting the Mass worldwide in a single, unchanging language. In the modern era, the near-complete lack of comprehension of that language is probably an insurmountable obstacle.

This installment, I’m going to decipher the Sanctus. That is, the Holy, Holy, Holy that comes at the start of the Eucharistic Prayer.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus

It’s obvious enough from the identical repetition in both versions that sanctus means “holy”. How does it get there, however? Sanctus actually means a whole bunch of things in Latin, and several of them are likely play into the full meaning of the word in the prayer. Consecrated, sacred, divine, and just are all possible meanings along with holy.

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare in America: If you want single payer, you must believe in magic.

I’ve written a lot about how science is becoming indistinguishable from magic in the minds of so much of the beltway crowd and the anointed—and not in the good science fiction way. Science is not something to be believed in, like religion, or voted on like politics. Science is the scientific method, nothing else. To paraphrase Feynman, if it disagrees with the scientific method it is wrong. That is the only key to science.

Science is not legislating the value of π or calling a council of the wise. That’s religion. Science is acknowledging the ignorance of experts, not their expertise. Every time you hear about science being “settled” or about a “consensus”, what you’re hearing is little more than a cargo cult religion wearing a cheap suit of scientific trappings and buzzwords.

One of the worst places for this substitution of magic for science is in medicine. Without the scientific method, medicine will kill both directly, through action, and indirectly by inaction. Nothing illustrates the cargo cult in medicine as clearly as this meme about health care that I ran across last year on a gaming group. The text specifically called out Americans:

The Legend of Affordable Healthcare: An adventure specifically designed for American D&D players.

To someone who both plays D&D and has done some thinking about health care and health insurance, the accompanying image is both profoundly weird and revelatory. For those not familiar with D&D’s iconography, the image pictured under the text “affordable healthcare” is of a priest—a “cleric” in D&D parlance—using magic to heal a sick or injured character.

Not a doctor. Not a scholar. A wielder of magic. This is neither an appeal to logic nor for better science. This is a religious tract.

It isn’t in any way necessary or even likely that a D&D-related affordable health care joke has to involve magic spells. D&D has had non-divine, completely non-magical medicine since at least the advent of its fifth edition, which was well over a decade ago. The skill “Medicine (Wis)” is literally on every character sheet. It’s on the character sheet of warriors and rogues as well as of wizards and priests.

A Wisdom (Medicine) check lets you try to stabilize a dying companion or diagnose an illness.

Veteran’s Day, once Armistice Day, is this coming Tuesday. But the armistice that ended the Great War is not the only thing that happened on November 11 in our history. Among the most barbaric was the 1778 massacre by English troops at Cherry Valley, a village now in Otsego County, New York.

The Cherry Valley massacre is an obscure part of the American Revolution to anyone but the residents of Cherry Valley, who remembered it at least up to the release of The Patriot in 2000.

The English employed Iroquois—in this location, Seneca and Mohawks—in their attempts to quell the American rebellion. The Iroquois were paid to attack under the direct command of British officers as well as to attack independently of English control. In response mostly to those independent raids, Continental soldiers had destroyed several Iroquois towns, hoping to end the many raids that had come from them earlier in the year. All accounts that I’ve seen say that the Continentals destroyed lodgings and provisions—not people. The direct antecedent to the massacre, the destruction of the Iroquois villages of Unadilla and Onaquaga, had by all accounts been empty at the time of the Continental raids.