Ross Douthat, NYT: Catholic Chickens Coming Home to Roast

And it is impossible, as a Catholic, to be writing about this subject while the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is literally burning on Holy Week and not feel that everyone engaged in Catholicism’s civil wars is being judged, and found wanting, and given a harrowing lesson in what is actually asked of us.

Here, Ross suggests—perhaps metaphorically, perhaps not (it’s hard to tell with the Believers)—that the destruction of the cathedral at Notre-Dame is the Just Hand of God at work, the Lord having judged the state of modern Catholicism and found it wanting. Sentence? A good old-fashioned burning!

Meanwhile, any number of outlets are combing through Jihadist Twitter looking for examples of Muslims making the vile claim that the destruction of the cathedral at Notre-Dame is…the Just Hand of God at work. From the Daily Mail, via Drudge: 'Have a nice day': ISIS fanatics revel in Notre Dame's destruction days before Easter as they describe the inferno as 'retribution and punishment'

You can always count on the Believers, of all stripes, to insist loudly and persistently that their God really is a dick with a decidedly arbitrary sense of justice.

Various Actual News Orgs: God’s Stuff Fine, Thanks to the Heroes

The phrase “political correctness” is basically meaningless these days, deployed as it so often is as nothing more than culture war bullshit. But to me, the height of absurd political correctness is the credulous reportage by serious news outlets around the world of plainly ridiculous beliefs about the provenance of Catholic’s tourist-luring, collections-plate enriching idols.

While the exact age of the relic is unknown, historians have dated it back to Jesus’ crucifixion.

The relic originally came from Jerusalem and was carefully placed in the nearby Sainte-Chappelle, a chapel built in the 13th century specifically for the crown.

It is presented to believers for veneration on the first Friday of each month and every Friday during Lent.

The crown was housed in the cathedral’s treasury, which also contained other sacred Christian artefacts.

A fragment of the True Cross and one of the Holy Nails used to crucify Jesus Christ were also kept with the Crown of Thorns.

Oh, yeah? That’s a splinter from the actual cross, and a nail that was plunged through Actual Jesus’ hands or feet, and the crown that rested on his actual crucified head? How about a little healthy journalistic skepticism? “While many Catholics believe, and the Church insists with dubious evidence, that the items are authentic, these relics can probably best be understood as physical symbols of the faith, the historical significance of which is reliant not on their absolute divine-adjacent provenance, which they almost certainly lack, but the meaning millions have imbued in them through the years. Truly a great loss averted, but, uhh, you know, maybe they could’ve discovered another crown of thorns, had worse come to worst.”

President Big Ideas Man, Firefighter Edition

He really is just your average idiot grandfather sitting in front of the television with the folding tray table over his lap, yelling his simple solutions to the world’s problems at the screen, except of course the screen can actually hear him, because the screen is billions of people, and it is impossible to imagine a dumber world. But seriously, where were the helicopters with their bellies full of water?! This isn’t complicated! Put out the fire, Frenchies! Real American firefighters would have had the fire beaten out with righteous fists, the ashes fleeing the scene in terror on the waves of reverb from a particularly loud rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. Where are the flying water tankers? Do something! There’s a fire burning, can’t you see?!

Deadspin: Robert Kraft Is Challenging The Florida Constitution To Keep You From Seeing Video Of His Hand Job

All I have to say about that is godspeed, Bob. Godspeed.

Seriously, though, do you want to find yourself, sometime soon, with your thumb hovering over the link that leads to video of a septuagenarian billionaire getting yerked off in a massage parlor in Florida? Do you trust yourself to make the right decision, there? Let’s not find out.

Thomas Friedman, NYT: I’m So #blessed to Witness Tiger Woods Overcome Banging Many, Many Women to Win at Golf

This is a very bad column from a routinely bad columnist. Here is a fun part:

You cannot overestimate the psychological aspect of that shot. Golf is such a head game, and if you are distracted by something, you’ll never put the geography, geometry and physics together at the level needed to win in professional golf. That’s why Tiger’s game deteriorated so far after his infidelities had been broadcast all over the world in 2009, and even before his back gave out. You could actually see it when Tiger walked through a golf gallery back then. His eye never wanted to meet those of his fans, because he knew that they knew that he knew that they knew that he’d been a first-class jerk.

What was in his head translated into his hands, and it translated into his scores. For the better part of a decade, he could not win a major until his back was healed and he got the monkey of his own misdeeds off his back — by becoming a good father and a better person to his fans and his fellow golfers. You could see him looking everyone in the eye in the last couple of years, and it finally unlocked his fan base. It gave them permission to root for him again, full-throated, despite all the ways he’d disappointed them. And that clearly unlocked his mind, and I am sure his body too, so he could swing freely again.

I have had an essay percolating for many years about how “winning the big one” in sports is overrated. As a Georgia Bulldogs and Atlanta Braves fan, this is a decidedly convenient take, of course.

The thing that I most want from the athletes that I most like to watch is something that almost certainly makes them insufferable pieces of shit in real life—I call it HATERAGEWINWINWIN. Michael Jordan had HATERAGEWINWINWIN out the wazoo. Max Scherzer has it exploding out of his face. Lebron James…often does not. Tiger Woods, for as long as I can remember, has oozed HATERAGEWINWINWIN. I like to watch the HATERAGEWINWINWIN in the arena, so to speak, but I do not mistake it for something good.

What makes Tiger an unstoppable force of nature on the Sunday back nine of a major championship almost certainly makes him just an absolutely terrible human being everywhere else. And even on the golf course!

The biggest takeaway for me is the reminder of the truism that golf is the sport most like life, because it is played on an uneven surface. Good and bad bounces are built into the game, and so much of success in golf is about how you react to those good and bad bounces. Do you quit? Do you throw your club? Do you cheat? Do you whine? Do you blame your caddie?

Tiger did like all those things, Tom—though he seemed to save the cheating for off the course, at least. Not that I care, to be clear! I steadfastly refuse to make heroes out of the single-minded humorless obsessives who only care about winning and winning and winning. I love watching them do what they do, but to link the accomplishments that derive from unbridled HATERAGEWINWINWIN with the height of human virtue, as Friedman does, is super weird!

And that is where, for me, the meaning of Tiger’s comeback begins: his willingness to commit to endless hours of physical rehabilitation and then endless hours of practice. How many of us have that iron will? But the physical part is the least of it.

Friedman’s mistake is imagining that he and his readers have anything in common with Tiger Woods at all, beyond basic biological realities. That “iron will” to withstand the spotlight again, when most people would have the appropriate sense of humiliated self-disgust to just go away after such a spectacular fall, is born not of some beautiful human urge to transcend and improve, but of the HATERAGEWINWINWIN. Tiger is a paragon of something—absolute shameless determination and the empty, grasping need to win, perhaps—but not self-improvement. Tiger, the person, sucks. He always has. But I absolutely love watching him play golf. HATERAGEWINWINWIN should be regarded like the Old Testament God that it is—with awe and fear, respected for its terrifying power, but not admired.