Culture
Texas
Also, whenever I read this paragraph to people who don’t live in the South, they get hung up on the fact that we had furniture devoted to just guns, but in rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires.
Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (a book that I haven’t read, but this quote came to my appreciative attention).
Pacifying the bathroom battlefield
I have a solution to this kind of nonsense: why do we need separate men’s a women’s bathrooms?
In parts of Europe or the Middle East (two areas where I’ve traveled; I can’t remember in which I saw this), toilet cubicles have walls that extend to the floor and close to the ceiling. The doors close against jambs, leaving no vertical cracks people can see through. Men and women queue up, using the same sinks for handwashing but using cubicles one at a time without sexual distinction.
Maybe that’s too grown-up for America, though.
Burke
Society is “a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and those obligations take priority over our rights.”
Damon Linker’s summary of Edmund Burke’s conservative view.
Exiting the bubble
To work at The Free Press, though, you have to completely exit the bubble. This is one of the things I’ve come to value most about it. My colleagues and our contributors have opinions across the political spectrum—and consequently, we publish articles across the political spectrum. I’ll admit I found it annoying during the presidential campaign that many of my colleagues kept hitting Kamala Harris over the head with a two-by-four. But I couldn’t deny the rationale—that the Democratic presidential candidate fundamentally had nothing to say. When Bari was asked why we focused more on Harris than Donald Trump, she replied that the legacy media was all over Trump, and somebody needed to hold Harris’s feet to the fire. I couldn’t disagree.
Joe Nocera, It’s Okay to Change Your Mind
Pity the pacific
Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.
Duncan Trussell via Andrew Sullivan
Abigail Shrier
What she learned in 2024
As my friend Caitlin Flanagan likes to say: “The truth bats last.” Boy, does it ever. And sometimes, the truth knocks it out of the park.
Abigail Shrier, author in 2021 of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, who had a very solid vindication in 2024. That the initial reaction to her sensible observations by the bien pensants was so hysterically negative shows that “craze” was a well-chosen word.
Duplicity
The Free Press had a celebrative article about Abigail Shrier’s vindication:
History should also note that some of the individuals and institutions that are supposed to protect our freedom of expression actively tried to suppress Shrier’s work.
Chase Strangio, the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, and a transgender man, pronounced a kind of epitaph for what the ACLU used to stand for when he tweeted about Irreversible Damage: “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
This is the same Chase Strangio who, a few weeks ago, was forced to admit to the Supreme Court that the “dead daughter or live son?” question whereby the trans cult emotionally blackmails parents into consenting to medical transition for gender dysphoric daughters is a lie, that suicide is not a major problem in gender dysphoria even without transitioning.
Trump 47
Taming the press
Trump has figured out how to emasculate the media and make them tame lap-dogs. Freedom of press is enshrined in the 1st Amendment, but much of the press (e.g., Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) is owned by billionaires with multiple other business interests that don’t have clear constitutional protection:
The leverage point Trump has recognized is that most major media properties are tied to some larger fortune: Amazon, Disney, NantWorks (the technology conglomerate owned by Soon-Shiong), and so on. All those business interests benefit from government cooperation and can be harmed by unfavorable policy choices. Trump can threaten these owners because he mostly does not care about policy for its own sake, is able to bring Republicans along with almost any stance he adopts, and has no public-spirited image to maintain. To the contrary, he has cultivated a reputation for venality and corruption (his allies euphemistically call him “transactional”), which makes his strongman threats exceedingly credible.
Jonathan Chait, Trump Has Found the Media’s Biggest Vulnerability
A lot of very powerful people seem to have reached the same conclusion. The behavior of corporate America toward Trump this past week can be understood as a product of two beliefs. One: Under the new administration, the U.S. government will function like a protection racket. Threats will be the currency of politics. Either you pay for the president’s “protection” or you get squeezed.
Two: As this unfolds, most Americans won’t care a bit.
…
A news industry owned and operated by oligarchs is easy pickings for an unscrupulous authoritarian because those oligarchs have many points of financial vulnerability. Trump doesn’t need to hurdle ABC News’ First Amendment rights in order to win his suit when he can sidestep those rights by squeezing [ABC’s owner] Disney instead.
The answer may be to get a higher proportion of your news from sources like The Free Press (see Joe Nocera, above) or The Dispatch. (see Nick Catoggio, immediately above, though Nick only does commentary, not news).
Cover the children’s eyes and ears
Is Mr. Trump an irrevocable break with the past?
He isn’t the old-style president who allows you to say to the kids, “I’d like you to be like that man.” Jimmy Carter with his personal rectitude, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush with their virtues—Mr. Trump is a break with that, and the way he spoke when he first announced in 2015 made it clear. When he spoke of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, “and some, I assume, are good people,” which is a very Trumpian formulation, I thought, that’s not how presidents talk, you have to be measured, thoughtful, kindly.
I thought: That’s bad. But my sister and uncle thought it was good. They understood what he was saying and why he was saying it, they agreed with him, but they also knew he couldn’t walk it back. He couldn’t be elected and then say, “Oh, I changed my mind, on second thought we need more illegal immigration.” They felt the crudeness of his language meant that he was actually telling them the truth. It was a relief to them. “Forget eloquence, close the border!” They felt if the right policy requires a brute, get the brute.
Could a Lincoln become president today, a Reagan?
Health Care
We have lots and lots and lots of ordinary, routine, foreseeable medical expenses that we should be paying for as though they were a cup of coffee or a Honda Civic, and we would almost certainly have radically better and more affordable care in those areas if we did. If your complaint is that people can’t afford to do that, then you have a tricky question to answer: If Americans as individuals and families cannot afford to pay for routine health care, then how the hell are Americans as one big indiscriminate national lump supposed to afford paying for routine health care? If nobody can afford it, then how can everybody afford it? Even if you deduct private profit and corporate administrative costs and such from the equation (which is nonsense, but, arguendo), the math doesn’t get a lot better. If your answer is “My nurse practitioner is too greedy—she drives a Lexus!—and rich people don’t pay enough taxes!” then you are a very silly person who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.
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 the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 