Today is the 85th Anniversary of Kristallnacht.
If you don’t know, look it up (and may God have mercy on your soul).
Culture
Swifties
I do not follow Taylor Swift (I know that she has not taken on the affect of a whore, a pop music rarity I appreciate), but other sure do — even the august Economist:
Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her album “1989” sold nearly 1.7m copies in its first week post-release, surpassing the 1.3m sales of the original in 2014. The pop singer started re-recording her albums in 2021 as a way of regaining control of her master tapes, after Big Machine, her former record label, sold the original masters to Scooter Braun, a music mogul.
Pretty sharp thinking, that — and another 1.7 million album sales to boot.
VR
Virtual reality is friction-free. The dissidents are removed from the system. People get used to that, and real life seems intimidating. Maybe that’s why so many internet pioneers are tempted by going to space or the metaverse. That sense of a clean slate. In real life, there is history.
Sherry Turkle at Crooked Timber
Humblebragging
David Bernstein’s conclusion to Bill Ackman’s Letter to Harvard re Widespread Antisemitism on Campus
The Jewish intellect
May heaven have mercy on the European intellect if one wanted to subtract the Jewish intellect from it.
Walter Kaufmann in his translator’s preface to Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
Things nobody’d dare say today
If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little—not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Did we forsake our sin or vice-versa?
Fewer men are needed as gang workers in the fields: slavery has become uneconomical.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
(But I’m sure we abolished slavery purely out of the goodness of our hearts. Right?)
The Feast of Hot Takes
In many cultures, holidays are celebrated in tandem, on consecutive days. Halloween is followed by the Day of the Dead; Christmas is followed by Boxing Day; Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday; New Year’s Eve is followed by, uh, New Year’s Day.
There’s a special pairing for pundits: Election Day is followed by The Feast of Hot Takes.
On The Feast of Hot Takes, you gather piecemeal results spread across different regions from the previous evening and arrange them to form a mosaic that perfectly matches your priors.
Politics
At or over the brink
I have been a reluctant liberal democrat (small l, small d) because I cannot think of a better and more just way to govern a fractious, highly diverse polity like the United States. Christian nationalism? It could work in Hungary, which is far less religious but far more monocultural than America, but it is very hard to see how America could pull it off and remain a democracy. Anyway, whose Christianity? The Catholic integralists? The Calvinist integralists? Seems to me that if we Christians can’t keep our own churches from bleeding out, the idea of ruling the country is a pipe dream.
… Please understand, I want to live in a properly liberal democratic society. But liberal democracy doesn’t exist outside of a context. You have to hold prior beliefs that serve as a foundation for equal treatment under law, for free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and all the rest. The moment, for example, that you believe that some people deserve preferential treatment under the law because of their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity, you have largely ceased to be a liberal democrat, whether you know it or not.
… [I]f it comes down to a choice of having to support Caesarism as a way to protect the rights and interests, and even the lives, of my family and people I care about, or keep bowing to the idol of liberal democracy while the radical Left takes over, then I’ll be a reluctant Caesarist.
Rod Dreher (italics added).
Despite my italics, it’s that last paragraph that’s the most dangerous, because millions of MAGA Americans have concluded (delusionally, I think) that it has come down to that — that the Democrats truly are an immanent and existential threat. (I understand that the Democrats may reciprocate, but despite not having voted Democrat in a Presidential race since 1972, I’m more sympathetic to their conclusion than the MAGA conclusion. See the next item.)
I read a bit about the French Revolutionaries very recently, and they brought to my mind not Antifa, but MAGAworld; not the Summer of 2020 but January 6, 2021.
But in the spirit of refusing to pick my poison, I remain a reluctant liberal democrat who expects for vote for neither major-party POTUS candidate next year.
More Dreher:
The message is clear: … the people vote the way the ruling class in the US and western Europe want, and you’ve got a democracy; if not, well, there’s nothing wrong with your authoritarian bigot country that a Washington-financed Color Revolution can’t fix.
There’s truth in that even if Rod’s catastrophism has pushed him to or over the edge.
Why the far Right is worse than the far Left
Trump’s extremism isn’t mainly a function of policy commitments, however much his positions on immigration, trade, and foreign policy are heretical in the context of the Reaganite conservatism that dominated the GOP from 1980 until 2016. No, Trump is a threat to American democracy primarily because of his tactical extremism—that is, his indifference to the rule of law, procedural norms, and above all his defiance of the democratic rules by attempting a self-coup in the two months following the 2020 election. Not even the most radically left-wing faction of the Democratic Party has shown any indication of favoring such flagrantly anti-democratic tactics for gaining and holding political power.
…
The right-wing media ecosystem is a machine that runs on the fallacy of composition.
Damon Linker. As hinted, I’m inclined to agree with Linker in the rather abstract way of one committed to despising both major parties.
DeSantis’ disqualifying “signature move”
Just once, … I’d like to see [Ron DeSantis] debate without proposing a policy that violates the Constitution. Yet there he went again, proposing plainly unconstitutional summary executions for fentanyl smugglers at the border and bragging about violating the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian student groups on Florida campuses. Unconstitutional policymaking is a divisive waste of time, but that remains DeSantis’s signature move.
David French, part of a New York Times panel analyzing performances in the third GOP Presidential debate.
DeSantis isn’t just shooting off his mouth. Several of his “successful” signature legislative initiatives in Florida have been unconstitutional.
Jamelle Bouie, on the same panel, had one of his periodic flashes of insight:
Ron DeSantis cannot escape the fact that it makes no real sense to try to run as a more competent Donald Trump, for the simple reason that the entire question of competence is orthogonal to Trump’s appeal. There’s not really much of an audience in the Republican primary electorate for what DeSantis is trying to sell, and it doesn’t help him that it seems he hates being a salesman of any sort.
That really wraps up my impression of DeSantis and puts a bow on it.
A flash of sanity; settled mendacity
It’s not a question between right versus left anymore. It’s normal versus crazy …
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders says something sensible. Unfortunately, she didn’t stop there:
… and President Biden and the left are doubling down on crazy.
Wut?!?!
Bummer of the day
I had understood that the poll showing Trump ahead of Biden in six swing states was a piece of crap that only called landlines. That was encouraging.
Unfortunately, it appears to have been false:
The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate. The margin of sampling error for each state poll is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, plus or minus 4.5 points in Georgia, plus or minus 4.6 points in Pennsylvania and plus or minus 4.8 points in Wisconsin.
So now I’m relying on my impression that those margins of error are awfully big.
Silver lining: My home state is still showing solid red, which means I at least can again vote my conscience instead of trying to suss out who’s the lesser evil between the major parties.
The Left Made Us Do It!
So how did a party and a political movement that once saw itself as a vanguard of objective truth end up on the side that gets to make up its own facts, its own scripts, its own realities?
Rich Tafel, the chief executive of Public Squared, developed a training called Cultural Translation, which teaches participants how to find shared values to build bridges across different worldviews. He told me the narrative he’s heard from people on the right is that they tried fighting the left for years, nominating admirable people like John McCain and Mitt Romney, but these leaders failed to understand how the game had changed. “Those on the right argue that claiming that there are objective truths and hard realities didn’t work against the identity politics of the postmodern left,” according to Mr. Tafel. “Now, they’d say, they are playing by the same rules.” In fact, he said, “MAGA has weaponized postmodernism in a way the left never did.”
Mr. Tafel added that MAGA world “likes the trolling nature of the postmodern right and the vicious attacks” against those they oppose. “The right likes the snark, irony and sarcasm of it all.”
Peter Wehner, Donald Trump Has Closed the Republican Mind
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 