Ask Nathan Anything: Quarantine Edition

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Watch Serial Experiments Lain! It's better than sex.

Ah, yes, Serial Experiments Lain!. I came across it years ago on TV Tropes and thought "boy, this is way too trippy for me". Now I'm thinking I might just be reaching the anime power level necessary to digest it. NGE was a good stepping stone.

Really less an issue of anime medium power level and more an issue of cyberpunk genre power level imo. I do think you could handle it, though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A few more questions with no common thread, just dumping everything that comes to mind.

First off, in parallel to your last question, favorite Governors of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Jersey? Feel free to divide it by period if it's easier.

Massachusetts: Far and away John Albion Andrew, who might actually be one of the greatest governors any state has ever had. He was a #populist abolitionist lawyer--the sort of "cause"-oriented attorney who today works for the ACLU or CLINIC if on the left, or one of the various Evangelical religious-freedom outfits if on the right--who fought the ex-Know Nothing element in the nascent Republican Party and was swept into office on Lincoln's coattails in 1860. He was in office throughout the Civil War and was one of the strongest abolitionist and Radical Republican voices in the country, constantly pressuring the Lincoln administration to adopt stronger anti-slavery measures and creating the first black US Army formations. He also rejected the nativism and anti-Catholicism that was rampant in the early GOP, chartering the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and spearheading the repeal of a state constitutional provision requiring naturalized citizens to wait for two years before gaining voting rights. Unfortunately, by the end of the war he had moderated on racial issues--either out of sheer war-weariness or because he was one of those people who, while a firm abolitionist, was still quite personally racist; I'm not sure--but the vast majority of his legacy is that of somebody who was genuinely ahead of his time on issues of equal justice under law, one of the few politicians of the time who opposed the Slave Power and the Know Nothings with equal vehemence.

Vermont: The more I learn about Vermont history the more I come to think that maybe the progressive wing of the VTGOP during the state's one-party "Mountain Rule" period really was as good as it got--not in the sense that it was the best Vermont could have done (far from it!) but in the more limited sense that it was, well, the best Vermont did do. The progressive Republican governor I'm most familiar with is George Aiken, mentioned up-thread, a local hero in my hometown who held office during the Great Depression before becoming a long-serving US Senator. (Although he preferred to be addressed as "Governor Aiken" throughout his later career; evidently, like that Capetian king who turned down an opportunity to be crowned Emperor because being King of France was honor enough, Aiken was of the opinion that being Governor of Vermont for four years was more than enough kudos for one lifetime.) Aiken's big achievement is rural electrification, which he accomplished in tandem with the federal New Deal (it was an opt-in program) and over against the interests of the powerful private utility companies of the day. In many ways Aiken was a classic small-state clientelist pork-barrel governor, welcoming the "free stuff" that the federal government provided for Vermont but resenting FDR's attempts to oversee how the Vermont state government managed that stuff; but I actually don't mind this much, since I've never had the centralization fetish many leftists seem to.

New Jersey: I know much less about New Jersey's political history than I do about New England's--not because it doesn't interest me; it just doesn't interest me as much--so this'll be a much more concise assessment, but I always had a soft spot for Richard Codey. He was a soothing WWC Democrat who succeeded to the governorship after Jim McGreevey resigned in 2004 and served for a little over a year, in which time he took more decisive action against New Jersey's endemic public-sector corruption than any other recent governor has even attempted. He also ended capital punishment in New Jersey, vetoed making "New Jersey: We'll Win You Over" the state's new tourism slogan, and was an advocate for mental health awareness who once physically threatened some shock jock for making fun of his wife's postpartum depression. For moral and religious reasons I'm obliged to deplore Codey's later support for legalizing assisted suicide, but that happened after he was governor and I still think he's perhaps the only New Jersey governor in my lifetime with whom the good outweighs the bad.

I'll answer the rest of your questions later!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

A few more questions with no common thread, just dumping everything that comes to mind.

First off, in parallel to your last question, favorite Governors of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Jersey? Feel free to divide it by period if it's easier.

Massachusetts: Far and away John Albion Andrew, who might actually be one of the greatest governors any state has ever had. A #populist abolitionist lawyer--the sort of "cause"-oriented attorney who today works for the ACLU or CLINIC if on the left, or one of the various Evangelical religious-freedom outfits if on the right--who fought the ex-Know Nothing element in the nascent Republican Party and was swept into office on Lincoln's coattails in 1860. He was in office throughout the Civil War and was one of the strongest abolitionist and Radical Republican voices in the country, constantly pressuring the Lincoln administration to adopt stronger anti-slavery measures and creating the first black US Army formations. He also rejected the nativism and anti-Catholicism that was rampant in the early GOP, chartering the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and spearheading the repeal of a state constitutional provision requiring naturalized citizens to wait for two years before gaining voting rights. Unfortunately, by the end of the war he had moderated on racial issues--either out of sheer war-weariness or because he was one of those people who, while a firm abolitionist, was still quite personally racist; I'm not sure--but the vast majority of his legacy is that of somebody who was genuinely ahead of his time on issues of equal justice under law, one of the few politicians of the time who opposed the Slave Power and the Know Nothings with equal vehemence.

Vermont: The more I learn about Vermont history the more I come to think that maybe the progressive wing of the VTGOP during the state's one-party "Mountain Rule" period really was as good as it got--not in the sense that it was the best Vermont could have done (far from it!) but in the more limited sense that it was, well, the best Vermont did do. The progressive Republican governor I'm most familiar with is George Aiken, mentioned up-thread, a local hero in my hometown who held office during the Great Depression before becoming a long-serving US Senator. (Although he preferred to be addressed as "Governor Aiken" throughout his later career; evidently, like that Capetian king who turned down an opportunity to be crowned Emperor because being King of France was honor enough, Aiken was of the opinion that being Governor of Vermont for four years was more than enough kudos for one lifetime.) Aiken's big achievement is rural electrification, which he accomplished in tandem with the federal New Deal (it was an opt-in program) and over against the interests of the powerful private utility companies of the day. In many ways Aiken was a classic small-state clientelist pork-barrel governor, welcoming the "free stuff" that the federal government provided for Vermont but resenting FDR's attempts to control how the Vermont state government managed that stuff; but I actually don't mind this much, since I've never had the centralization fetish many leftists seem to.

New Jersey: I know much less about New Jersey's political history than I do about New England's--not because it doesn't interest me; it just doesn't interest me as much--so this'll be a much more concise assessment, but I always had a soft spot for Richard Codey. He was a soothing WWC Democrat who succeeded to the governorship after Jim McGreevey resigned in 2004 and served for a little over a year, in which time he took more decisive action against New Jersey's endemic public-sector corruption than any other recent governor has event attempted. He also ended capital punishment in New Jersey, vetoed making "New Jersey: We'll Win You Over" the state's new tourism slogan, and was an advocate for mental health awareness who once physically threatened some shock jock for making fun of his wife's postpartum depression. For moral and religious reasons I'm obliged to deplore Codey's later support for legalizing assisted suicide, but that happened after he was governor and I still think he's perhaps the only New Jersey governor in my lifetime with whom the good outweighs the bad.

I'll answer the rest of your questions later!

Whats your problem with Phil Murphy?

None so far, but he's still in office and so his term can't be assessed holistically yet.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What are your favorite periods or events in European history? Do you have any hot takes about it? What are the periods or aspects you'd like to learn more about, and what are those you're comparatively least interested in?

I'm deeply interested in the High Middle Ages, the "long nineteenth century" (especially in England), and both World Wars (especially the social history of the wars rather than the military and political events, although those do interest me too). I'd say I'm quite knowledgeable about High/Late Medieval England, Victorian Britain, and Europe during World War II; getting more knowledgeable about High/Late Medieval Italy and "Golden Age" Spain; and still not very knowledgeable about pre-Louis XIV French history or about Central and Eastern European history before 1700ish.

My hot take on European history is that royal and aristocratic dynastic politics, heraldry, succession crises, etc. etc., including idiosyncratic survivals like the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, are actually really interesting and fun to learn about, even though ideologically I'm opposed to them (sane).

What is your favorite pre-1492 historical what-if? Any hot takes on how things might have turned out differently?

My recent read of the Tale of the Heike got me thinking about what Japanese and thus East Asian history might have been like if the Genpei War hadn't happened or had gone differently. I think Japan would have been a significantly less militaristic and even more heavily bureaucratized society going forward, more similar to China in China's more peaceful periods. I'm not sure the country would have been closed off to Western influence for over two hundred years, mainly because I don't think the institutional logic would have been there to maintain support for a leader who would impose that kind of policy to the degree that support was maintained for the Tokugawa IRL.

What are your thoughts on Muslim theology? How do you view it in comparison/relationship to Christianity and Judaism? What are the aspects of it, or currents of thought within it, that you find most interesting? And what are the aspects you find most difficult to reconcile with your religious perspective? How would you suggest approaching the subject as a complete beginner?

I'll answer this tomorrow.

And finally... marry, f**k, kill: Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzsche.

F**K Bentham (UGH UGH UGH), marry Nietzsche (might actually be the lesser evil, at least in terms of personal habits; I'd consider reversing him and Bentham but Bentham to my knowledge didn't have an STD), kill Aristole (#NeverClassicalAntiquityMaleSexuality).

I recently played Steins; Gate. Have you either played the VN or watched the show (which I haven't seen yet)?

I adore Steins; Gate, despite a few aspects I don't approve of.

I saw the show years and years ago, I want to say maybe in the spring of 2012, in my undergrad alma mater's anime club (Et in Arcadia ego...). I liked it a lot; I appreciate that it's usually pretty irreverent but is willing to shift into a more sentimental register when that's what's called for. (The "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" scene is undiluted bathos without sufficient context--readers of this thread will have noticed this based on the fact that "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" is an actual line that a character in this show says out loud--but becomes startlingly effective once you do have that context.) The show is also often laugh-out-loud funny, and it doesn't pull punches about what kinds of people in modern Japanese society would be liable to become Doc Brown LARPers fooling around with physics equipment in a walk-up apartment.

I haven't played the VN and I don't really feel like I'm missing much; something about the visual novel medium doesn't appeal to me even though I know plenty of great stories are being told in that medium.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What are your thoughts on Muslim theology? How do you view it in comparison/relationship to Christianity and Judaism? What are the aspects of it, or currents of thought within it, that you find most interesting? And what are the aspects you find most difficult to reconcile with your religious perspective? How would you suggest approaching the subject as a complete beginner?

To finally get around to this (sorry!), I actually don't know much about Muslim theology--only Muslim mysticism, which isn't the same thing, and to some extent also Muslim philosophy, which also isn't the same thing. I'm interested in al-Ghazali less because I agree with his key insights (I don't) and more because it fascinates me how they anticipate certain concepts in Western philosophy (occasionalism and by extension radical skepticism; the concept of qualia) by many centuries. The most difficult aspect of Islam to reconcile with Christianity is obviously going to be the fact that it is not an incarnational religion and doesn't believe in the divinity of Jesus; the thing I like most about it is that it is a "law religion" (I appreciate religions that make a serious attempt at modifying their practitioners' behavior, although I know many people do not) that, relative to Judaism, contains more of the stories--about Jesus, Mary, and so forth--that I love in my own religion.

That is fascinating. I know next to nothing about pre-Tokugawa Japan (and really not that much on Tokugawa and beyond), and that's another area I'd really like to expand my knowledge of. So far it's been hard to identify the critical moments that truly changed the course of Japan as a society and a polity (rather than just changing whoever was in charge at a given time). I knew that the Genpei War did the latter, but I had no idea it impacted the former as well. Could you elaborate on how and why it did so? What were the key differences, culturally, sociologically and politically, between the Taira and the Minamoto? Or were the differences between the two clans less important than the way in which the war was fought and what it did to both sides of the conflict? I'd love it if you could expand on all that.

The Genpei War marks the transition of Japan from civilian to military rule and from rule by a bureaucratized court set up around the Emperor to rule by a military and administrative caste set up around a shogun, typically based somewhere other than Kyoto. The Taira and the Minamoto weren't really different "philosophically"--both were gangs of hardened thugs who happened to have close personal and familial ties to the imperial family. The war shredded Japanese society and caused severe famines; parts of the Heike read almost like the over-the-top descriptions of war-ravaged Westeros in A Feast for Crows, with "smallfolk suffering while the great lords play their game of thrones", and by the end neither side had the moral high ground even by the standards of the day. However, geographically the Taira were more associated with Kyoto and the well-settled areas west of Kyoto, which were also on the trade routes to Korea and China, whereas the Minamoto were associated with the more sparsely populated and culturally less Continental-influenced north and east.* The power base after the war thus moved out of Kyoto and into eastern Japan (Kamakura, seat of the Minamoto shoguns, is now a bedroom community of Tokyo), where it fell more fully under the influence of figures with primarily military rather than civilian credentials. The centralized bureaucracy was then gradually supplanted by what we'd recognize as feudalism, with great landholding lords, vassals, and so forth. This also had an influence on Japan's religious history; organized Shinto declined (I once saw somebody make the ridiculous claim that Shinto has a tradition of "sacred prostitution"; what it actually has a tradition of is priestesses falling on hard times and taking to the open roads to become traveling conjurors who turn tricks on the side) and forms of Buddhism that had an appeal to the warrior mentality, such as Zen, became popular in Japan for the first time.

*I was going to say that the Taira were also so closely interrelated with the imperial line that Taira no Kiyomori was the maternal grandfather of both rival emperors during the war...but no, I looked it up and Emperor Go-Toba was the son of Emperor Takakura's Fujiwara concubine rather than his Taira consort.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How comparable have Japanese and, broadly-speaking, "European" political structures been, pre-1945 (let's say going back to the 1600s or whenever)?  Additionally, was Japan more or less comparable than other notable contemporaneous non-European political organizations?

We of course use the term "feudal Japan", but I have no idea how accurate a characterization that is, and some (Barrington Moore Jr.) have even compared the late stages of Japanese militarism to fascism (though there is substantial reason to be skeptical).

I tend to be pretty generous about drawing parallels between Japanese and European political developments, certainly more generous than with other Western/non-Western parallels. The way I was taught about medieval Japan indicated that the system there genuinely was very similar to European feudalism. You have the same structure of theoretical overall hegemon, de facto (i.e. armed to the teeth) political leadership of the country, lords, vassals, peasants, nascent urban middle class, and so forth, right down to the polycephalous moral authority-cum-power broker role of "the church"--although Japan had a diversity of Buddhist denominations as opposed to Europe's Catholic/Orthodox duopoly. One interesting difference is that in the producerist-inclined Confucian-ish class system the peasants were nominally "above" the artisans and merchants; however, in practice it didn't work that way.

I tend to refer to Japan's 1932-1945 period as fascist when speaking with non-specialists and ultranationalist (the currently-preferred scholarly term) when speaking with fellow Japan studies people. In my reading of the history involved, it had most of the same features as European fascism but with a stronger religious element (the religion of course being State Shinto, an unwieldy chimera with next to no meaningful theological resemblance to previous stages of Shinto's development) and (relatedly) without the claim to have broken from the more "traditional" hard right.

Would you consider running for local (or any) office again?

I don't think I have the stomach for an election cycle at this point. Maybe that'll change some day. Recently I've been considering applying for a position on one of the appointed boards in my town like the Historical Commission or the Disability Access Commission.

You’d be great on either board, but the Historical Commissions sounds fun. Go for it friend!

Thank you! I just might.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How comparable have Japanese and, broadly-speaking, "European" political structures been, pre-1945 (let's say going back to the 1600s or whenever)?  Additionally, was Japan more or less comparable than other notable contemporaneous non-European political organizations?

We of course use the term "feudal Japan", but I have no idea how accurate a characterization that is, and some (Barrington Moore Jr.) have even compared the late stages of Japanese militarism to fascism (though there is substantial reason to be skeptical).

I tend to be pretty generous about drawing parallels between Japanese and European political developments, certainly more generous than with other Western/non-Western parallels. The way I was taught about medieval Japan indicated that the system there genuinely was very similar to European feudalism. You have the same structure of theoretical overall hegemon, de facto (i.e. armed to the teeth) political leadership of the country, lords, vassals, peasants, nascent urban middle class, and so forth, right down to the polycephalous moral authority-cum-power broker role of "the church"--although Japan had a diversity of Buddhist denominations as opposed to Europe's Catholic/Orthodox duopoly. One interesting difference is that in the producerist-inclined Confucian-ish class system the peasants were nominally "above" the artisans and merchants; however, in practice it didn't work that way.

I tend to refer to Japan's 1932-1945 period as fascist when speaking with non-specialists and ultranationalist (the currently-preferred scholarly term) when speaking with fellow Japan studies people. In my reading of the history involved, it had most of the same features as European fascism but with a stronger religious element (the religion of course being State Shinto, an unwieldy chimera with next to no meaningful theological resemblance to previous stages of Shinto's development) and (relatedly) without the claim to have broken from the more "traditional" hard right.

So it seems that "ultranationalist" Japan lacked fascism's "revolutionary" claims. There are a few other key points that I'd probably consider key to "fascism", not being an expert in it myself--namely, the idea of a mass-mobilizing party (a.k.a. the adaptation of reaction to the modern age of mass participation in politics). Was some form of this present in Japan?

They tried. In 1940 all remaining legal political parties were dissolved into something called the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai), which was supposed to be a mass-mobilizing organ similar to the Fascist Party and the NSDAP. It never had the same hold on the Japanese consciousness, though, for reasons I don't completely understand (perhaps it didn't have to, since in Japan the top military brass was actually calling the shots and driving the ultranationalist project itself, as opposed to the Italian and German brass who were "merely" fully complicit enablers?).

How do we reconcile the Judeo-Christian Fall of Man with the fact that, so far as we know based on history and evolution, the events in the Garden do not appear to have taken place? I think there's something to be said for, perhaps, the growth of independent consciousness, but I'd like the take of someone who's far more theologically minded than myself, and the defense there is probably flimsy.

First of all, "Judeo-Christian" is an inappropriate term here because most Jewish theology doesn't understand Adam and Eve's sin to have drastically changed human nature. The concept of original sin is absent and in some Jewish interpretations so is the idea that the expulsion from Eden was even an unmitigated bad thing. So the Fall of Man as you and I understand it is a specifically Christian notion.

The Church teaches--maybe not as de fide dogma, but at a fairly high level of theological certitude nonetheless--that original sin does come from a specific sin that a specific common ancestor committed at some point in human prehistory. The detailed blow-by-blow of the Genesis 2 and 3 account is maybe not The Way Things Were in every particular or even in most particulars, but we know, to the extent that we "know" anything in the natural sciences, that common human ancestors did exist, so the aspects that are actually binding Catholic teaching aren't refuted. The 1950 encyclical Humani generis asserts that this isn't incompatible with the idea of that ancestor having himself biologically evolved. By the end of the twentieth century John Paul II was treating the coexistence of both of those concepts as established fact.

Personally, I have a crankish pet theory that the Fall changed the history of the universe, so to speak, retroactively, in the same way that the Atonement preserved Mary from original sin retroactively, but that's my fantasy-novelist self talking rather than something I would advance in actual theological argument.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How similar would you say Atlantic Canada is to New England?

I'm not familiar enough with Atlantic Canada to say how similar it is today, but I can tell you that the two regions are intimately connected by history and that I personally do feel that their fates are in some sense intertwined. I'm not sure if I'd say I feel a kinship with Nova Scotians that I don't with Texans, but I'd definitely say I feel a kinship with Nova Scotians that I don't with Manitobans.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What are your thoughts on the Avignon Papacy (both in its legitimate and schismatic incarnations)? Did anything good come out of it, theologically, culturally or politically, or was it the unmitigated moral and PR disaster that it's usually portrayed as?

I honestly don't know quite enough about it to say. I do know that Clement VI, the Pope during the Black Death, was an Avignon Pope, and from what I know he handled the plague about as well as any continent-wide leader could have and made an effort to stop the worst of the social reactions to it (such as the various pogroms). Characteristically for an Avignon Pope, he was also wildly corrupt and appointed dozens of members of his extended family to high Church positions, in addition to being hackishly pro-French even by Avignon Pope standards. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were other Avignon Popes too who, while staggeringly corrupt, were also on some level public-spirited and even devout.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thoughts on William Jennings Bryan?

The tl;dr is that I have a more positive opinion of Bryan than not, and probably a more positive opinion of him than most modern American leftists do, but with several very serious qualms. But I want to take the time to give this a fuller and more considered answer. Watch this space.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Okay. William Jennings Bryan.

The first thing to keep in mind about Bryan is that he was a true #populist in a way that nobody in America today, with a political life that revolves around balancing interest groups as delicately as possible without pissing off campaign donors, could ever be. Bryan believed in (as this article about a very different Christian political thinker, L. Brent Bozell, puts it) "identifying an 'us' who must not be ruled by a 'them.'" I have mixed feelings about his analysis, in the political environment of the 1890s, about who the "us" and the "them" were. He was a ruralist who put very little effort into building bridges between the Western and Southern farmers he spoke for and industrial workers in the Midwest and Northeast; the ruralism appeals to me on an emotional level but it was counterproductive in an election in which a unified working-class front might have done better against what McKinley represented. (Admittedly, we'll never know how 1896 would have gone if the election had been held to today's standards for "free and fair"; many industrial workers voted for McKinley in part because their bosses threatened reprisals if they went for Bryan. But I still don't think Bryan would have won.) On the other hand, Bryan's Presidential campaigns were harbingers of what later became standard progressive policy in the US, such as a freer money supply and public-sector relief efforts in natural disasters and economic crises. (This article about Laura Ingalls Wilder talks a bit about how astonishingly coldhearted American policymakers were towards disaster survivors before 1896. Gilded Age America was a dark and cruel place and we need to resist efforts to drag us back to it at all costs. I'd be shocked if Bryan's Nebraska constituents' memories of "the Grasshopper Year" didn't help shape his views.)

About Bryan's brief, troubled tenure as Secretary of State under Wilson, I know less. Foreign policy isn't my area of expertise or greatest interest when it comes to American political history, other than what I consider no-brainers like "Mexican-American War bad; World War II mostly good (for the US); Cold War mixed bag". I admire Bryan's anti-war stance and I think his anti-imperialist stance was far ahead of its time, but I'm not as convinced that World War I neutrality was the right policy as are most people who lean non-interventionist. On the other hand, Secretary of State Bryan helped Wilson push through many of his first-term domestic reforms such as progressive income tax, and for that he deserves a ton of credit. Apparently he was also ahead of his time when it came to international arbitration, but I just read that on his Wikipedia article today and I don't know a ton about it.

Bryan's late career is generally looked upon as an embarrassment, but it's important to remember that there were what we'd recognize today as left-wing reasons to take some of the stances he did; Prohibition in particular presented itself as a "reformist" movement (although it was also of course a deeply bigoted one). People actually tend to forget this today partly because of the association of Bryan's late-period causes with the retrograde hick caricature a lot of people have of him. I don't fully agree with either the traditional ("Menckenian") view or the revisionist view of Bryan's creationist activism; I believe that it's true both that Bryan correctly opposed the way evolutionary theory was being used to justify unjust social hierarchies and that he was a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist seeking to make his religious views everybody else's problem. People are complicated.

A harsh critic of Bryan, Irving Stone, argued in They Also Ran that he was one of the crudest and most dangerous minds to come out of the nineteenth century; I don't agree with that at all, especially given some of the candidates Stone does think would have made good Presidents (Horace Greeley? Seriously?!). I agree with Michael Kazin that Bryan's greatest flaw is his rarely discussed--and at that time near-universal among white Democrats--acceptance of Jim Crow. Taking into account the context of the times, I think it's a far graver problem than any of the religious moralizing Bryan's more (in)famous for.

So. That's my take on William Jennings Bryan.

(Thanks for asking me this, btw; I had fun writing this answer. This is my second-favorite question I've gotten in this AMA so far, after "top ten hottest saints" back on the first page.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does Japanese culture lose anything valuable if sumo wrestling dies out or is it just a freakshow with archaic rules?

The loss of a freakshow with archaic rules is always on some level a tragedy (temperamentally conservative, normal, insane).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What's your opinion of this song/lyrics?

(My opinion by the way is the song musically is a 10/10 utter classic....but HORRIBLE lyrics.)

I actually agree with you. Pretty good instrumentation, but geez those lyrics are awful.

thoughts on this video?

Good takeaway. A pretty good history/sociology lesson.

I'd correct the video on one point: The Vermont Republic's "legitimacy" isn't really what's in dispute; what's debatable is its sovereignty, since (just like the Texan and Hawaiian republics) it was formed with the full expectation that it'd be admitted to the US eventually.

Favorite Gulf monarchy.

UGH UGH UGH. Oman by process of elimination.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How familiar are you with the online left-wing media? What's your assessment of the role they've played in US politics since 2016, and what role do you envision for them going forward? What should an effective counter-hegemonic media strategy for the American left look like?

By my own design, I know very little about online left-wing media with the sole exception of Current Affairs (which I like for the most part). What little I know about the rest of it makes it seem absolutely dreadful. An effective counter-hegemonic media strategy for the American left would perhaps not orient itself around emotionally immature extremists swearing constantly on podcasts.

ETA: I don't mean to be dismissive; online news/nonfiction media just isn't a genre that enthralls me as much as it does most people our age. I don't even like listening to podcasts very much (ironic since I'm writing one). The majority of what I read and watch is fiction and has been for a long time; for example, I've read about a dozen novels in the past three months, but it's rare that I sit down and read a whole nonfiction book, whereas you seem to be reading one more often than not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I recently played Steins; Gate. Have you either played the VN or watched the show (which I haven't seen yet)?

I adore Steins; Gate, despite a few aspects I don't approve of.

I saw the show years and years ago, I want to say maybe in the spring of 2012, in my undergrad alma mater's anime club (Et in Arcadia ego...). I liked it a lot; I appreciate that it's usually pretty irreverent but is willing to shift into a more sentimental register when that's what's called for. (The "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" scene is undiluted bathos without sufficient context--readers of this thread will have noticed this based on the fact that "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" is an actual line that a character in this show says out loud--but becomes startlingly effective once you do have that context.) The show is also often laugh-out-loud funny, and it doesn't pull punches about what kinds of people in modern Japanese society would be liable to become Doc Brown LARPers fooling around with physics equipment in a walk-up apartment.

I haven't played the VN and I don't really feel like I'm missing much; something about the visual novel medium doesn't appeal to me even though I know plenty of great stories are being told in that medium.

I forgot that in my mid-to-late teens I actually was quite familiar with the VN series Umineko no naku koro ni, a beyond-tacky and utterly deranged but oddly affecting gothic romance* that got a pronouncedly subpar anime adaptation in 2009. The basic premise is that a guy gets kidnapped by a supernatural being and forced to watch her perpetrate the mass murder of his family over and over again in a time loop until he can prove there was a human culprit; also she keeps inserting her dominatrix fetishes into the time loop as a way of flirting with him. It made a big impression on teenage me, partly because of the femdom aspect (which is...pronounced, although never outright pornographic) but mostly because at the time I was also reading a lot of the Golden Age mystery novels that the murders in it are a pastiche of. A few nights ago I saw something that reminded me of the series for the first time in a long time and I've been going on a nostalgia binge of fan content and memes from it since.

*A tendentious designation for the story's genre, but I'm willing to back it up if challenged

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Can you share some of your general thoughts on Canada?

In general I'm fond of the place and I've had good experiences on the occasions I've been there. I like a lot of the paradigmatic/stereotypical "Canadian foods"--maple and maple by-products, poutine, Tim Hortons. One of my favorite songwriters and poets, Leonard Cohen, was Canadian, as was my favorite right-of-center political philosopher, George P. Grant (mentioned up-thread). The province I'm most familiar with is Quebec, which is the easiest to reach from Western New England; I've been to both Quebec City and Montreal and had a great time in both. I don't have a ton of love lost for Quebec's political scene, though.

A few months ago I ran into a Quebecois woman selling maple syrup at a kiosk in a Christmas market in France; I felt as if she was "from home" much as I would have felt about somebody from the Northeastern United States. I think this ties back into what I was saying to TimTurner earlier about feeling a certain affinity for people from Atlantic Canada, too.

If I were approaching Canada as a cultural critic I'd observe:

1. that the Canadian self-stereotype of decency and politeness is really a national myth along much the same lines as "entrepreneurship" in the US; it's a way of asserting moral superiority for what's fundamentally a country much like any other in the developed world
2. that the series of views that Americans call "social liberalism" being as culturally hegemonic in Canada as it is, seems to be causing deep simmering resentments by circumscribing public discourse.

I wouldn't commit to either of those criticisms because I'm not Canadian, but those are the criticisms I would make.

Which party would you vote for, or against in Scotland?

Ideally I'd vote for Scottish Labour but in the current political environment I'd probably suck it up and vote SNP to stop the Tories despite really not "getting" the Scottish nationalist project.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If I were approaching Canada as a cultural critic I'd observe:

1. that the Canadian self-stereotype of decency and politeness is really a national myth along much the same lines as "entrepreneurship" in the US; it's a way of asserting moral superiority for what's fundamentally a country much like any other in the developed world
2. that the series of views that Americans call "social liberalism" being as culturally hegemonic in Canada as it is, seems to be causing deep simmering resentments by circumscribing public discourse.

I wouldn't commit to either of those criticisms because I'm not Canadian, but those are the criticisms I would make.

There is some truth to #1, though on average I'd say Canadians use the brain God gave them more, are more decent and more polite. We have plenty of people that don't fit that description though.

I'm referring less to Canadian manners or habits, which I agree with you are by and large exemplary (far better than the passive-aggression that passes for "good manners" in much of the US), and more to the way this affects a lot of Canadians' sense of the country itself as a moral actor--which I've seen extend to uncritical attitudes towards Canada's awful energy policy, fraught history with its First Nations communities, etc. I'm not accusing you of any of that but it's a cognitive bias I've noticed among a lot of center-to-center-right Canadians I've known.

#2 is very accurate IMO, to which our non-silent majority would say to the far-right Canadians, "womp womp".

See, framings like this (anybody not fully on board with assisted suicide or Bill C-16 or whatever as ipso facto "far-right") strike me as really unhelpful. But I say this as somebody who regularly throws around the term "far-right" when it comes to my own country's politics (mostly on material rather than culture war issues), so take that for what it's worth.

Ever watch this YouTube channel? What's your opinion of it?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCct9aR7HC79Cv2g-9oDOTLw

I wasn't familiar with it until just now, no! A quick look through some of its video titles makes me think it's probably doing some really good work, although there's also some clickbaity "we've been had, maaaaan" Da Vinci Code-type stuff that I assume is there to get metaphorical butts in metaphorical seats to watch the more substantive ones.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If I were approaching Canada as a cultural critic I'd observe:

1. that the Canadian self-stereotype of decency and politeness is really a national myth along much the same lines as "entrepreneurship" in the US; it's a way of asserting moral superiority for what's fundamentally a country much like any other in the developed world
2. that the series of views that Americans call "social liberalism" being as culturally hegemonic in Canada as it is, seems to be causing deep simmering resentments by circumscribing public discourse.

I wouldn't commit to either of those criticisms because I'm not Canadian, but those are the criticisms I would make.

There is some truth to #1, though on average I'd say Canadians use the brain God gave them more, are more decent and more polite. We have plenty of people that don't fit that description though.

I'm referring less to Canadian manners or habits, which I agree with you are by and large exemplary (far better than the passive-aggression that passes for "good manners" in much of the US), and more to the way this affects a lot of Canadians' sense of the country itself as a moral actor--which I've seen extend to uncritical attitudes towards Canada's awful energy policy, fraught history with its First Nations communities, etc. I'm not accusing you of any of that but it's a cognitive bias I've noticed among a lot of center-to-center-right Canadians I've known.

This is true, mostly though because Canadians don't know enough about our own policies and lawmakers. We focus on US politics more, oddly. If the public paid closer attention, IMO attitudes would shift.

That's good to know; I definitely think Canada seems like a society that wants to pursue racial reconciliation and environmentally sounder ways of living, which is more than can be said for most sectors of American society.

#2 is very accurate IMO, to which our non-silent majority would say to the far-right Canadians, "womp womp".

See, framings like this (anybody not fully on board with assisted suicide or Bill C-16 or whatever as ipso facto "far-right") strike me as really unhelpful. But I say this as somebody who regularly throws around the term "far-right" when it comes to my own country's politics (mostly on material rather than culture war issues), so take that for what it's worth.

There are way fewer politics nerds who dive deep in Canada I think, at least in terms of Canadian politics. MAs I mentioned, many pay closer attention to USA politics than our own.  I think a lot of people don't have a firm position on assisted suicide and don't know about Bill C-16. I was just referring to regressives thst want to repeal our gun laws, LGBTQ acceptance and environmental protections.

Yeah, that makes sense. I might be looking at Canadian politics through an American, and possibly specifically American Catholic, prism for what constitutes "a social issue".

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1. What, in your view, is the most underappreciated issue that affects countries throughout post-Soviet Central Asia?

Climate change. Obviously it's an extremely well-known and high-profile issue in general, but its effects on Central Asia in particular are understated, partially because Central Asia was the site of another perhaps even more dramatic and infuriating environmental disaster (the literal destruction of the Aral Sea) that sucks up most people's emotional energy. But especially for pastoral peoples in Central Asia, changes to weather patterns and in particular snowfall patterns are disastrous. People who rely on livestock are starving, or being forced to move to some of the most polluted cities in the world.

2. How do you interpret the rise of politicized conservative-to-fundamentalist religion throughout much of the world since, say, the 1970s? I have my own interpretation, and it is very much related to the decline and eventual disintegration of the USSR, but I think it played out differently in different countries and on different continents - even though there are some eerie parallels (but not exact duplicates, of course).

I think it first became prominent in the United States due to, yes, late-Cold War posturing and triumphalism, and then started to spread abroad because of the US's short-lived hyperpower status. I can't cite sources for this but I read somewhere once that the spread of Evangelicalism to Latin America began life as a Nixon/Ford-era deliberate policy of ratf**king the region's by-then-relatively-left-leaning Catholic institutions, and if that's true, evidently it's worked.

3. Where do you see the Catholic Church by 2030? Interpret this question as you wish.

We'll probably be well into the pontificate of Pope Francis's successor by then, possibly even towards the end of it; there hasn't been a Pope under the age of 75 since John Paul II celebrated that birthday in 1995, and Francis's appointments to the College of Cardinals really don't make it seem like the commitment to gerontocracy is being reduced. There's a lot of attention paid in developed-world Catholic circles to the possibility (probability, I'd say) that Francis's successor will be a lot less tolerant/lenient than him on what Americans recognize as "muh social issues", but I don't think that's because there'll be some sort of backlash against him at the next conclave; I think it'll just be because of Third Worldism and a continued pivot to parts of the world where even most women are suspicious of contraception and histrionics about "gender ideology" are a winning political message. In some ways I think this will be healthier for the Church in the long run than continued domination by Western European "city father" types; when we say we want a Church that's "of the poor and with the poor", we need to accept that, on the worldwide level, "the poor" tend to be...well, just not very punk rock. I definitely don't see the Napa Institute, Acton Institute, National Review, "my problem with this flash-in-the-pan radtrad political party is that it doesn't support trickle-down economics" style of "conservative Catholicism" succeeding in taking over the Church, mostly because (with the arguable exception of the mid-period of JP2's pontificate, but only the mid-period and only arguable) the magisterium has never catered to those people and by this point they're mostly consulting sources of moral and epistemic authority other than the Church's actual leadership anyway.

I know this isn't particularly relevant to because you are no longer Protestant, but can you foresee any positive sign of growth for mainline churches in the future or do you believe that they will continue their rapid decline?

I think they'll hit rock bottom at some point. Most of the mainline denominations are far too integrated into "highbrow" American life to ever outright disappear. I think progressive mainline Protestantism as you and I recognize it is in serious danger of becoming a somewhat crankish boutique religiosity, though, and I'm not any happier about that than you are, because après moi, le déluge.

Also, what are your views on Distributism and why do you think it never materialized as a mainstream ideology?

I've been called a distributist. I wouldn't classify myself that way, otherwise I'd probably have an orange avatar rather than a maroon one, but I'm definitely sympathetic to what the economic system it advocates is trying to do. "Capitalism produces too few capitalists, not too many" has been a winning message before, just not connected to the mostly-theological specifics of distributist thinking. Part of that is because it's so specifically Catholic--in ways that capitalism is not specifically Protestant whatever the likes of Max Weber might say--and part of it is because it's a romantic, nostalgic ideology that's just not focused on the necessary work of redeeming the era of mass production and cheap plastic crap. You can't have artisanal smartphones handcrafted on a family farm with three acres and a cow.

Antonio, I'll get to your question soon!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Have you read Hayy ibn Yaqzhan? If so, what did you think of it?

I haven't, unfortunately. But I've heard of it and I think it looks super interesting.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What your opinion on Georgism? Also thoughts on why it lost the popularity it had during the late 19th and early 20th century and became less well known today?

I don't know a ton about the specifics of Georgism, although I like the ~aesthetic~ of it. My guess is that it's lost prominence just because land is less valuable (relative to capital and labor) than it was during and shortly after George's lifetime. Somebody interested in carrying forward the general concept of Georgism in the late-capitalist age could do a lot worse than to adopt a progressive and redistributionary understanding of the purpose of state and local property taxes. This is an understanding that I hold and a position that I strongly support myself, so you could say I'm a bit of a neo-Georgist in that sense at least.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

So, I just had this warm-ish take in another thread:

What I don't like is the idea of the Fall, that humanity was morally perfect once and made the conscious choice to leave that state. I've always hated golden age myths in all their variations (including those that are popular on the left, like Rousseau's state of nature). There's something deeply perverse about the idea that the advent of human history was a tragic event that should never have happened. It is to reactionary thinking what Fukuyama's "end of history" is to progressive thinking: an attempt to reject the immanence of history and to somehow bind it, either at the front or tail end. In both cases, I view the political ramifications of these attitudes with extreme suspicion.

I'm very interested in your thoughts on the subject, because I know you are emotionally attached to the idea of the Fall (as opposed to just grudgingly accepting it as something you as an orthodox Catholic have to believe in, which I obviously wouldn't take issue with) and generally view history in a tragic light (I know that you're fond of Walter Benjamin's Ninth Thesis, for example).

So I guess my questions are: do you agree with my characterization of golden age myths as attempts to reject history, and is that why the idea of the Fall appeals to you? If so, what, emotionally and intellectually, leads you to this attitude toward history? And how does it inform your moral and political attitudes? Is undoing or reversing the unfolding of history something you aspire to, if purely on a theoretical level?

The short answer, which I've already communicated to you privately since you asked this question, is that I believe in a strong enough version of Hume's fork that thinking that a golden age myth correctly describes reality doesn't force me into the position of thinking that that myth is an acceptable basis for political action.

I don't think the story of the Fall is an attempt to "reject" history at all. It necessitates an unpleasant view of the nature of history, yes, but an unpleasant view isn't the same thing as a nihilistic one or even an impoverished one. I'm fond of that Terayama quote about the past as our first and ultimate "lost home"; Terayama connects this with a dislike for history, but I don't, because I have a nostalgic and ruminating personality. "Undoing or reversing the unfolding of history" isn't something I aspire to at all because it's impossible; if I could wave a magic wand and put humanity back in Eden I probably would, but I can't so instead I prefer to focus on attempting to improve humanity's lot going forward. (I can't put my finger on why I think this, but I think the Dickinson verse "Rowing in Eden/Ah, the sea!/Might I but moor/Tonight in thee" is relevant here, as is the Tolkienian "long defeat" concept that I've talked to you about numerous times before and that provided the inspiration for two of my previous display names.)

So far in this answer I've mentioned Terayama Shūji, Emily Dickinson, and J.R.R. Tolkien. All of these are primarily literary rather than political or even theological figures, because I approach history, even the history of politics and of religion, in a fundamentally literary way. Narrative, genre, and "motif" are how I've been trained (both academically and autodidactically) to think about the world in general, so I interpret the Fall as (while being a real event) having more abstract and symbolic implications for what kind of "story" history is, rather than as a catastrophe that demands a program for somehow "reversing" it. That would be immanentizing the eschaton, and I'm at least temperamentally conservative enough to have a deep suspicion of any ideology or plan of action that attempts or purports to do that.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

To follow up on your excellent answer, allow me to be a little more narrow about my point of contention.

I certainly don't mean to claim that belief in the Fall or other golden age myths necessarily entails a political program for reversing history and returning humanity to its original state. I do realize that that's not what the vast majority of Christian doctrines advocate (and, to be fair, neither did Rousseau). My final question might have muddied the waters, but I really did intend to ask it in the most abstract and theoretical sense. I was interested in whether the idea of reversing or undoing history appeals to you emotionally (in the same way in which, say, the Human Instrumentality Project appeals to me emotionally) rather than as a call to action. So, would you say it does appeal to you emotionally?

So, my claim that the story of the Fall represents a rejection of history is in the sense that it treats history as something that ought not to have happened. I don't think the strongest version of Hume's fork can possibly separate religious parables from their normative implications - I'm convinced that you'd agree with me on that. From my understanding, Biblical exegesis interprets the Fall as humanity exercising its free will in a way that undermined God's plan for it (if there are authoritative perspectives that view the Fall as part of God's plan, I'd be fascinated to hear about them, but they raise many questions of their own). This entails viewing history as not just a tragedy, but an avoidable tragedy (since it hinges on human free will), something that shouldn't have happened and could have been stopped. Is this a fair characterization? Is it a reading that you personally embrace? And if so, again, what do you think leads you to embracing it?

These questions rely on at least three premises, two of which I'm going to challenge.

1. "History", as such, would not have been possible if not for the Fall.
2. The Fall should have been prevented if possible.
3. Since the Fall wasn't prevented, that means that all subsequent history is a mistake that ought not to have happened.

The only one of these premises I'm at all willing to concede is the second one; if you're presented with a situation in which you can avoid committing a sin or stop somebody else from committing a sin, you should of course do so. But that has little to do with whether or not the trajectory of consequences of that sin is some sort of horrible mistake. God can bring good out of evil just as the forces of evil can bring evil out of good.

The first of these premises I reject out of hand. The fact that the actually-existing course of history is a depressing and in some ways, yes, very tragic slog, doesn't mean that every possible history would have been the same way. I don't think it's at all the case that growth and change, and thus history, would have been impossible in an unfallen state. I'll concede that the assumption that they would have been is pretty deeply ingrained in the way most people emotionally understand what an unfallen state would have been like, myself included, but that doesn't mean that it's inherent in the concept. An artist or writer or actor who starts great and keeps getting better with every new work is undergrowing growth and change, and a history of their career could easily be written, despite the fact that nothing is going badly. So too with the idea of a history of an unfallen humanity. So even if we believe that the course that history has actually taken is a mistake that oughtn't have happened, there's no reason why we need to believe that about history as such.

The third premise is dubious too. It's definitely how a lot of Christian theologians and historians today understand the Fall, but in fact the idea that any stage of history was a completely unmitigated disaster denies the omnipotence and omniscience of God and is an incredibly serious heresy; the fact that it's a heresy associated with political reactionaries, rather than the liberal "cafeteria Christians" on whom self-ordained orthodoxy police prefer to focus, doesn't change this. None of the great Doctors of the Western Church would have tolerated the suggestion that what gets called "salvation history" is "an avoidable tragedy that shouldn't have happened and could have been stopped". So eager were they to avoid even the implication of this that they formulated the idea of the felix culpa or "fortunate fall", which is the idea that the Fall, while a bad thing in itself, worked out for the best in the end because it paved the way for the salvation and glorification of humanity through the lives and afterlives of Jesus and Mary. The Wikipedia article for "felix culpa" insinuates that it's an unorthodox idea but this is not so; Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas (writing implicitly against Anselm, whom I know is something of a philosophical hobgoblin for both of us) all advanced the notion, and it was directly articulated in the liturgy for the Easter Vigil right up until 1970, even after the Council of Trent instituted a New Order of the Mass (yes, I went there) in the sixteenth century. (I checked an immediately pre-Vatican II missal I own, publication date 1961, and yes, it's still there.) (ETA: I checked the USCCB website and it's there in the Pauline Mass too; I just didn't remember because I wasn't able go to the Easter Vigil this year.) Magisterial Protestant liturgies don't tend to include this bit, but the concept isn't absent in Protestantism; it appears in Paradise Lost, a work that has a much more hopeful and upbeat ending than its reputation suggests.

What the idea is, is paradoxical; of course the Fall "should have been prevented", but equally obviously, the history that came after the Fall should not have been, and was God's design. This is probably why modern theologians, who have a worrying tendency to be aesthetic, historical, and narrative ignoramuses, are uncomfortable with the concept; they view paradox as indicative of inconsistency or insincerity, rather than of mystery.

You could, perhaps, think of unfallen and fallen-but-redeemed humanity as the two women who appear at the top of Mount Purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Matilda, as Voltaire (or Leonard Bernstein) might put it, "builds her house and chops her wood and makes her garden grow", whereas Beatrice is tomboyish, judgmental, and all the more brash and confident for having suffered and died and been exalted. Both are admirable figures, but, well, anybody with even the slightest familiarity with Western literature knows which one is presented as the ideal woman.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nathaniel, last night, in a bout of insomnia, I believe I thought of a fantastic question for this thread. That said, all form or direction of it has been lost to my memory except something having to do with the intersection of politics and Lord of the Rings. So I guess I'll ask: what, if any, political takeaways can we get from Tolkein's epic trilogy?

I don't think Lord of the Rings is an especially political text, although it definitely touches on politics-adjacent subjects like historiography and questions of legitimacy (on the latter of which it's of course relentlessly small-c conservative, as exemplified in the Meiji Restoration-esque titular "return of the king"). It definitely has an anti-authoritarian message, and a "small is beautiful" critique of "big" combines (big government, big business, etc.) generally. That; the effusive love for the natural environment; and the fact that pipeweed appears to be a slightly stronger depressant than tobacco is, probably account for most of the hippie love for the story. It can also of course be read in terms of a critique of Whiggery, which it has in common not only with the works of the other Inklings but with much of the British fantasy tradition going back to the Victorians and even continuing forward to today. (Even Michael Moorcock with all his criticism of Tolkien and Lewis is not an "onward and upward" Enlightenment Now type.)

I've been called a distributist. I wouldn't classify myself that way, otherwise I'd probably have an orange avatar rather than a maroon one, but I'm definitely sympathetic to what the economic system it advocates is trying to do. "Capitalism produces too few capitalists, not too many" has been a winning message before, just not connected to the mostly-theological specifics of distributist thinking. Part of that is because it's so specifically Catholic--in ways that capitalism is not specifically Protestant whatever the likes of Max Weber might say--and part of it is because it's a romantic, nostalgic ideology that's just not focused on the necessary work of redeeming the era of mass production and cheap plastic crap. You can't have artisanal smartphones handcrafted on a family farm with three acres and a cow.

Antonio, I'll get to your question soon!

Curious to hear you expand on this. I've always liked The Protestant Ethic (if only as a criticism of historical materialism) and I'd love to hear you expand on it.

I like The Protestant Ethic too. I just don't think--and, on further consideration, I doubt Weber thought--that only Protestant societies were capable of developing the "spirit of capitalism". Some of the most successfully and rapaciously capitalist societies in the world today have either Muslim or Buddhist-Confucian religious underpinnings. With distributism, on the other hand, I find it hard to imagine any non-Catholic society ever really warming up to it. (I'd love to be proven wrong, though!)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Opinion on the viability of a one-state solution as compared to a two state solution for Isreal/Palestine?

A one-state solution is on paper both the only long-term viable solution and the only one with what I see as sound moral fundamentals. The practical problem with it--and it's a massive, potentially insurmountable one--is that the two main people groups that would be thrown together in a one-state solution are both dominated by political leaders and ideological trendsetters who want to commit ethnic cleansing against the other people group. Unless there's some sort of Northern Ireland-style power-sharing agreement enforced by some international body or hegemonic world power (probably the United States but who knows at this point), it'll turn into either a Ba'athist wonderland or a Kahanist wonderland the second either Arab parties or Jewish parties win a solid majority in the Knesset.

On a more lighthearted note, what book/books are you reading currently, if any?

I'm about midway through Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding by Mary C. Boys. It's excellent so far, except for the fact that its treatment of the actual life of Christ leans a little too heavily on shopworn "historical Jesus" truisms. It's really good and genuinely inspiring otherwise, though; I'm learning a lot about the actual positive alternatives to the historical "teaching of contempt" that are being discussed within Christianity and especially within Catholicism today. And I'm waiting for a copy of Dante's Vita Nuova that I ordered to arrive in the mail so I can read that too.