Friday April 3

Clueless

At my gym, I have spoken to at least a half-dozen young men who 1) are constantly engaged in betting on professional sports and 2) believe that professional sporting matches are rigged. I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would permit this sort of thing to happen where his financial interests are concerned?” The response: “He’s in on it, obviously.” And I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would put at risk billions of dollars of his own wealth and many billions more worth of intellectual property he controls in exchange for whatever paltry sums he might get from entering into a conspiracy—a conspiracy requiring the cooperation and disciplined silence of dozens of hot-tempered, high-testosterone, notoriously talkative 24-year-old men whose financial interests would in fact be much better served by betraying any game-fixing conspiracy they were invited to join—to make a little side money gambling? And do you really think that the people who run the gambling businesses would allow themselves to get taken that way? Because if you do believe that, I can tell you why Jerry Jones is rich and you are not.”

Kevin D. Williamson on conspiratorial thinking

MetaTrump

From here to “Shorts” is all about Donald Trump in one way or another. I’m not clever enough to write zingers, but I can read and curate interesting takes — for those who are interested.

Abberation

At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. … Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.

On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him.

…

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control. Since its inception, America has assured itself it was simply too big, too far away and too richly endowed to suffer any serious consequences for its actions.

Lydia Polgreen (shared link).

I don’t necessarily agree with everything I curate here, but I note (1) my substantial agreement with Polgreen’s overall thrust but (2) disagreement with “what America has always been” and “[s]ince its inception.”

We were not born a superpower; we grew into it pretty slowly. And our superpowerdom wasn’t immediately arrogant, bullying and hegemonic.

Our current hubris may be the flowering of a tragic flaw present since our inception (in my circles, the facile fatal flaw is The Enlightenment), but tragedies would be terribly short if fatal flaws manifested instantly.

Epochal vandal

Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became first consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national commemoration. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.

Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired leaders of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes — for instance, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to a foreign prison without a hearing. His actions — which have included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy” — have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and deserving of “moral reprehension.”

When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits on his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he responded. “I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, has been integral to world-historical individuals — and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.

Jon B. Judis, Trump as Alexander the Great A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)

Don’t you dare dream that this is praise of Trump. It’s resignation that the vandal has well and truly broken priceless things for the foreseeable future. We’re not going back to normal any time in my lifetime.

Immune

I do not think that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed Presidential criminal immunity as some special favor to Donald Trump just because several of them were appointed by him and several others were appointed by other Republican Presidents. I think it would have decreed the same for any other President.

Note, too, that for the Court to make such a decree, it had to have a case before it wherein the President of the United States was facing criminal charges. Presidents numbered 1 through 44 didn’t get criminal immunity because nobody was charging them with crime(s).

I hope you understand that. Courts don’t reach out and decide things willy-nilly. They decide cases.

But what’s done is done. Now surrounded by a combination of cunning, conscienceless men and bootlickers, Trump is emboldened to take vengeance on his enemies and otherwise to take full advantage of Presidential immunity.

Introspection

In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

As you may have heard, a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire investor went on a podcast and said that he aims to have “zero” introspection in his life, or at least “as little as possible.” He added that “I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem.”

This whole introspection thing, Andreessen asserted, is a folly invented in the 20th century by people such as Sigmund Freud: “If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

After the podcast aired, he doubled down on X: “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.”

As you can imagine, the internet erupted. Andreessen had unwittingly stumbled into one of the great cultural rivalries of modern times. On the one side are the business-world paragons who consider themselves decisive manly men of action who don’t waste time on girly things like feelings, self-doubt, and personal reflection. On the other are the humanists who look at Andreessen as just the sort of monster capitalism can create: emotionally impoverished, spiritually inert, arrogant, utilitarian, blind to all knowledge but empirical data, and voraciously materialistic.

David Brooks, Marc Andreessen’s Mistake.

Sunday and Monday, Thomas Chatterton Williams (The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb) and Brooks had very different articles on Andreesen’s comment about introspection in the Atlantic. I’d give Brooks the edge on subtlety, but Williams gets points for taking Andreesen’s philosophy into the White House to see how figures measure up — stopping just short of the President himself (but nailing Steven Miller). The number of very powerful men (no women were indicted) who think “move fast and break things” is veriest truth is scary.

Without even a hint about the President, Brooks equips the reader with the concept of low emotional granularity, where there are, in its purest form, just two poles: I_like and I don’t like. We must by all means avoid thinking that by gaining a name, we gain a solution, but low emotional granularity seems to me to play a major role in decisions coming out of the Oval Office.

I didn’t need Williams or Brooks to know that Andreesen was flat out wrong about the history of introspection, and my list of historic figures overlapped theirs. Beyond that, I commend both articles to you for their respective high merits. They’re not very long.

“Low emotional granularity,” unfortunately, is too opaque for a good epithet.

Shorts

On immigration, the president’s commendable achievements on closing the southern border have been overshadowed by the harsh, questionable, and counterproductive interior deportation strategy. (Michael Warren, Trump Has Brought Nothing But Chaos—And for What?)
[C][onversion is a different thing, sociologically and personally, than what you might call the ordinary transmission of an established faith. (Ross Douthat)
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. (John Adams in the 1780s)
How to unlock the potential of AI for those in the field of education and the formation of human beings: throw the key into the middle of the ocean. (Fr. Jon Jordan)
Expressive activity includes presenting a curated compilation of speech originally created by others. (Justice Elena Kagan)
[U]ltimately I would rather go down with my integrity intact than “win” through the vice of incivility. (Jon D. Schaff, We Are Not Enemies: What an Iranian Film Reveals About Vengeance and Civility)
It’s a new world; it’s the same Constitution. (Chief Justice John Roberts responding to the Solicitor General’s argument that “we’re in a new world where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen” in the birthright citizenship case on April 1. Via the Advisory Opinions podcast; I think I’ve seen slight variants in the quotes.)
“The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf,” Rick says, “is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance. You know what you want to do; you know what’s best for the pack. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect. Point is, alpha males are surprisingly nonaggressive, because they don’t need to be.” (Carl Safina, Beyond Words, which I have not read but was suggested to me by Readwise.)
I am a big fan of the law. I like the faint, wheezing sound it makes as I trample on it, and the mountains of litigation that result. (Alexandra Petri satire on Trump’s personal attendance at the birthright citizenship oral arguments Wednesday.)
It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences. (The narrator in Middlemarch. That narrator’s pretty sharp.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

(Sigh!) Politics, 10/30/25

General

History rhyming

In the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, voters were faced with two revolting choices: David Duke, a neo-Nazi and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Edwin Edwards, a former three-term Democratic governor who had been indicted and acquitted on corruption charges.

Edwards’ supporters printed bumper stickers with what became an unofficial slogan of his campaign: “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.”

Well, today, New Yorkers face an equally unpalatable choice between the Marxist Zohran Mamdani and Andrew M. Cuomo, the sleazy former three-term Democratic governor who was forced to resign in a sexual harassment scandal and whom many New Yorkers blame for the deaths of their grandparents during the covid pandemic.

Well, to those New Yorkers I say: “Vote for the Sleazeball: It’s important.”

Mark A. Thiessen.

I’m inclined to think the national press is paying too much attention to the NYC mayoral race, but maybe Mamdani really is the Democrats’ future, not just a lefty press reverie. But I always chuckle at the old “Vote for the Crook” story from Huey Longistan.

Not even subtle

“They say” that some guy named Jack Posobiec is the heir apparent of Charlie Kirk as top MAGA influencer. Among other things, he’s author of a book titled Unhuman, which is a polemic against progressives.

The working title for the German translation surely is “Untermensch.”

National

Incorrigibly ignorant

[V]arious right-wingers feigned confusion earlier this month about the “No Kings” rallies across the country. What exactly were the protesters protesting, they wondered? Where did they get the idea that Donald Trump presumes himself a king?

Well, in the nine days since those protests were held, the president slapped a new 10 percent tax on Americans for no better reason than that he’s mad about a TV commercial; he’s preparing to go to war with Venezuela without authorization or even meaningful input from Congress; he’s told people privately that he’s effectively the speaker of the House now, insofar as the House still exists after being out for about a month; he’s pardoned a corrupt Chinese crypto mogul who helped enrich him and the Trump family; he’s thinking of looting nearly a quarter billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury to reward himself for beating the rap on various crimes he almost certainly committed; and he demolished part of the White House so that he could build himself a ballroom worthy of a proper palace.

As others have noted, some of Trump’s sins against democracy are so quintessentially monarchical that they appear in the bill of particulars against George III in the Declaration of Independence. If you can digest all of that and still end up scratching your head at what the “No Kings” demonstrators were on about, it’s not because you don’t understand. It’s because you won’t understand. You’ve resolved psychologically not to take Trump’s autocratic desires seriously because doing so would force you to choose between loyalty to your tribe and loyalty to the Founders’ vision.

Nick Catoggio

Small favors

Kudos to Republicans for passive-aggressively monkey-wrenching, at least as to the Federal District courts, Trump’s effort to pack the federal courts with political cronies rather than qualified judges.

Senate Republicans are holding firm against President Donald Trump’s pressure to scrap a longtime tradition in Congress’ upper chamber, issuing a substantive rebuke to his desires and openly disagreeing with him on the issue.

Trump has repeatedly called on the Senate GOP to eliminate its blue slip practice, which allows senators from the minority party to block judicial appointments such as lower court nominees and U.S. attorneys who hail from their states. The president has argued that Democratic senators are obstructing his nominees, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is staunch in his resolve not to take away the century-old tradition.

“After a hundred years, why would you do away with it?” he told The Dispatch. “It’s supported by a hundred members of the United States Senate.”

Senate Republicans’ defiance of Trump here is perhaps the most substantive stand they have taken since they stonewalled the nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general after last year’s election. To this point, members of the congressional GOP have often raised concerns or pushed for more information about Trump’s actions, but rarely have they obstructed his agenda. This time, however, they are refusing to sacrifice one of the Senate’s time-honored traditions, one that guards Congress’ power in an age where the legislative branch is often happy to cede authority to the executive.

Charles Hilu, Senate Republicans Are Actually Defying Donald Trump.

Passive-aggression is probably all we can hope for from Republican Senators who often appear emasculated by Trump.

But continuing the blue slip tradition is only part of it. Unusually high numbers of nominees to various offices have been withdrawn after back-channel communication:

[T]he Trump administration has faced some very significant resistance more privately to a large number of nominees, and that this has led a surprising number of them to be withdrawn. So far this year, the White House has withdrawn 49 nominations for Senate-confirmed positions. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out earlier this week, that is a (much) larger number of nominees than any modern president has had to withdraw from consideration in any year of his presidency.

And it is a particularly large number of withdrawn nominees in the first year of a new presidency. Ronald Reagan withdrew five nominations in his first year; for George H.W. Bush it was three; for Bill Clinton six; for George W. Bush seven; for Barack Obama twelve; for both Donald Trump in his first term and for Joe Biden the number was 13. The year is not even over and Trump has had to withdraw 49 nominations.

…

This is surely in part because it is in no one’s interest to draw attention to it. The administration wants to always look triumphant, regardless of reality. Republican senators want to appear to be firmly backing the president, which they mostly are ….

Yuval Levin

Your tax dollars at work

Who says government can’t do anything right? ICE is advertising for thuggish goons and it’s getting them.

In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline” and even save “civilization.”

Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?

Says who? Says mild-mannered true conservative octagenarian George Will (When ICE came for a U.S. citizen and Army veteran).

And just like that, bribes are a normal business expense in Trumpistan

To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

Nick Catoggio, To Bribe or Not to Bribe

The kid with the Golden Shield

This kid (who supposedly has a law degree already) can magically provide a “Golden Shield” of immunity from prosecution for assassination, murder, torture and other governmental passtimes by writing a secret opinion that they’re legally A-Okay. Jack Goldsmith tells us all about it.

Not that the President needs it, mind you.

I wonder where the snowflakes are?

Any writer these days, who hasn’t been radicalized or redpilled, can tell you who the snowflakes are now. The people who were not long ago the loudest in preaching free speech are today the quickest to silence anyone who uses it to disagree with them. The people who railed against cancel culture are now trying to use the machinery of the state to try to destroy anyone who dares to posthumously criticize Charlie Kirk and the stances he took—which, it should be continually pointed out, included proudly sending buses to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s the people who love to dish out jokes and criticisms, but are not only outraged at Jimmy Kimmel’s distasteful jokes about Kirk, but fine with overt government pressure to take him off the air.

Ryan Holiday.

50 days after assassination, I think de mortuis nil nisi bonum passes its freshness date.

A real downer

Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.

Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.

…

[I]f Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.

To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.

…

As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”

But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.

David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming.

I got over naïve American exceptionalism a very long time ago — or so I like to imagine. The speed of our descent astonished (astonishes? do we have further to go?) me; that America was capable of deep descent does not.

And I don’t know how to climb out of the hole in an America where thinking outside the tribe will draw death threats for both the politician and his or her family.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

4/30/24

The Surprising Truth About Handmaids

The heart of Gilead is not religious extremism, but social engineering.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Handmaids themselves, and the Ceremony that defines their role. The idea that women can be used outside of the confines of marriage as incubators for strongly desired children would be abhorrent to the vast majority of religious conservatives who seem to be The Handmaid’s Tale‘s targets. But it is all the rage in certain secular and progressive circles—and by no means is it limited to the fringes. It has become especially popular among homosexual couples, many of whom pay top dollar for Handmaids who serve a purpose they cannot fulfill themselves.

Not original with me, but I’ve lost the original source.

Schrödinger persons

On a related note:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

A cautionary tale

Argentina, for all it’s faults, is a Democracy, and the people keep electing very flawed politicians. They keep electing tumult, and choosing short term satisfaction. They keep voting for the candidate that promises to give them the most things, while also taking stuff away from others. They keep doing that because now, after a century of disarray, part of their national identity is a cynicism that’s reached nihilistic levels.

Chris Arnade

That sounds like the trajectory of another country I know well. I noticed a report this morning that Trump is 6 points ahead in (some) polls.

I can relax but I’m not going to enjoy it.

Aaron Burr = DJT

Charlie Sykes, The choice Republicans face is too good for me to just pull excerpts. I didn’t know what kind of low, narcissistic character Aaron Burr was, and how close he came to being President. We need some Alexander Hamiltons in the GOP (but I fear the GOP is too far gone).

David Frum painstakingly explains why Even Bill Barr Should Prefer Joe Biden by gaming out what’s likely to happen if Trump is elected. Maybe that will prove persuasive to a handful of Trump voters, but it suffices for me that Trump, like Aaron Burr, is a “dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and ‘a man of extreme & irregular ambition.’”

POTUS candidate age disparity

At the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, Joe Biden joked that age is an issue in the election, because “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” (New York Post)

The Free Press

Presidential immunity

Hungry for coverage of last Thursday’s SCOTUS arguments on Presidential criminal immunity, I was nauseous as most of my sources were doing the usual “we know this Court is corrupt; let us now find proof in the hypothetical questions they ask on this case we’re afraid might not go our way.”

Then finally I found sanity:

As several of the justices pointed out, they aren’t making a rule for Donald Trump. They’re making “a rule for the ages,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it—one that has to apply to good presidents and bad ones, Republicans and Democrats, high-minded prosecutors and partisan ones. It can be easy to focus on “the needs of the moment,” as Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

And here’s the fear. If the high court gives presidents too much immunity, the White House could turn into a “crime center,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. Too little immunity, and there’s an endless cycle of prosecutions. The ability to find some vague statute will “be used against the current president or the next president,” Kavanaugh said, “and the next president and the next president after that.”

So how will this all shake out? I can’t say for sure, of course. And oral arguments—even a two-hour and 40-minute session—can tell you only so much. But I predict this will be a unanimous ruling instructing the district court to determine which of the charged acts were clearly outside the authority of the president, whether it was an official act or not.

Sarah Isgur

Nellie’s miscellany

Every time you see the word disinformation, remember that The New York Times said it was “a conspiracy theory” that Covid came from a lab.
In Santa Monica, a new 122-unit homeless housing project is moving ahead; it’s projected to cost $1 million per unit to build. That’s the optimistic projection! And in San Francisco, the city built special housing just for the middle class. The result: 80 percent of units in some of these buildings are empty. Why? “A city bureaucracy so convoluted that qualifying for an apartment involves a tortured and time-consuming process,” according to a great San Francisco Chronicle story. I promise that if you let capitalism work, supply will meet demand. Alternatively, we can keep trying these government scams, raise taxes to 70 percent, and build more empty construction and overpriced pot shops and Sombritas and a single charging station.

Nellie Bowles

(See comment below, which puts )

Wordplay

the Daily Stormer of gender woo
ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand
the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science
people who care less about being right than looking virtuous
“communicators” … whose job is to make consensus look sciency

Mary Harrington, Why the centrists changed their trans tune – UnHerd

dire normalization

David Frum’s odd characterization of a televised Biden-Trump Presidential debate: “The networks want their show, but to give the challenger equal status on a TV stage would be a dire normalization of his attempted coup.”

Xitter

Someone’s (Charlie Sykes? coinage for X, formerly known as Twitter. I like it for the rich possibilities of how to pronounce it.

Could a child ever dream about a Lucid or Rivian? These are generically good-looking, low-emissions vehicles that only a cyborg could lust over. They are songs sung through Auto-Tune, with clever and forgettable lyrics composed by ChatGPT.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Touch Screens Are Ruining Cars – The Atlantic

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.