Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day (and the first day back from the Memorial Day Holiday for most Americans: it is Tuesday, May 27, 2025, and National Grape Day. The grape we’re honoring today is Pedro Ximénez, which, as I noted the other day, when dried before pressing makes the finest sweet sherry (try the Lustau version). If you don’t like sweet wines, well, it’s your loss. . . .

It’s also Cellophane Tape Day (patented on this day in 1930),  and National Grape Popsicle Day.  Here’s an early package of the most famous brand, Scotch Tape. “Seals instantly without water” tells you how they were sealing stuff before.

Improbcat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Here’s the “President”‘s message on Truth Social for Memorial Day.  What a stupid, juvenile, and retributive thing to say on a solemn day (the NYT calls his behavior yesterday ridden with “self valorization”):

 

*Once again Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine, just after Trump had rebuked Putin for Russia’s attack two days ago.

Russia launched its largest-ever drone-and-missile assault on Ukraine overnight into Monday, according to Ukrainian officials, defying President Trump’s calls for an end to the bombardment.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched more than 350 explosive drones and at least nine cruise missiles. Kyiv scrambled aircraft and deployed electronic warfare systems and mobile air-defense teams throughout the country in response, the government said.

The latest attacks came just hours after Trump issued a strong rebuke of Russian President Vladimir Putin, denouncing airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital and other cities that killed at least 12 people Sunday.

“He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers,” Trump said late Sunday in a social-media post, referring to Putin. “Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.”

He also criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying in the same post that Zelensky “is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does.”

The Kremlin said Monday’s strikes were a response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, which Moscow said involved dozens of drones over the weekend. Ukrainian officials said the strikes damaged several Russian military-industrial facilities, including a factory that makes parts for ballistic missiles.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its own overnight salvo against Ukraine struck an air base in a central region of the country as well as other military objects in several regions.=

“This was a retaliatory strike,” said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He called Trump’s criticism of Putin an “emotional reaction” at a time when Russia and Ukraine are taking some steps with U.S. encouragement to open talks about an end to the war.

I wish Trump (and Vance) would lay off Zelensky. He didn’t start the war, and if the Russians want to negotiate, they should declare and observe a cease-fire.  But I still believe that, in the end, Ukraine will lose: not just a lot of Ukrainian lives sacrificed to defend their country, but will also have to give away (at the least) a big chunk of eastern Ukraine. The NYT notes that despite Trump’s criticism of Putin, he won’t join the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU, nor will he give additional arms to Ukraine:

Mr. Trump has long said he enjoys a “good relationship” with Mr. Putin, and it was not the first time he expressed shock that the Russian president was unleashing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. A month ago Mr. Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP” as a barrage of missiles and drones hit Ukraine, including crowded playgrounds. But Mr. Trump has never linked the attacks with his own decision, reaffirmed last week, to refuse to join the Europeans in new financial sanctions on Russia, or to offer new arms and help to the Ukrainians.

The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russian’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.

*The NYT describes how thousands of people, most of them Venezuelans, have given up trying to get into the U.S. and are returning, often in dangerous ways, to their home countries.

There is no clear figure for how many people have decided to leave the United States or given up on reaching it, and migration at the southern border had dropped sharply even before Mr. Trump took office for a second time.

But in one indication that some migrants are starting to return to South America, more than 10,000 people — virtually all from Venezuela — have taken boats from Panama to Colombia since January, according to Panamanian officials, who say that more are setting out each week.

That is a tiny number compared with the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who entered the United States and Mexico in recent years, but the busy new boat route toward South America is a sign, according to migrants, officials and rights groups, that the Trump administration’s harsh tactics are having an effect.

“The world is hearing our message that America’s borders are closed to lawbreakers,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. “Migrants are now even turning back before they reach our borders.”

For those in the United States, she said, “it’s an easy choice: Leave voluntarily and receive $1,000,” referring to the government’s offer for “voluntary self deportation.”

While the administration may claim success, experts say, many migrants face so many barriers to heading home that even if they are willing, it is extremely challenging to turn back.

“They’re stuck, wherever they are,” said Juan Cruz, who served as Mr. Trump’s top Latin America adviser during his first term, noting that many migrants are impoverished and indebted and lack travel documents. Venezuelans, he added, also face a government hostile to those who left for the United States.

This is a tough situation, but the government made it clear that it will not accept undocumented immigrants. I heard Kristi Noem on t.v. saying that if they return to their home countries, they “have a chance to come back” to the U.S., but I don’t think that chance is very large!

*With the U.S. negotiating with Hamas, Trump has suggested a cease-fire deal, but it was roundly rejected by Israel.

Responding to a Lebanese report that a new outline for a hostage and ceasefire proposal had been agreed upon in principle by Israel, a senior Israeli official said Monday the deal has been rejected.

“The proposal received by Israel cannot be accepted by any responsible government,” the official told the media, without giving any further details.

“Hamas is setting impossible conditions that mean a complete failure to meet the war goals, and an inability to release the hostages,” he said.

The main organization representing the families of hostages also rejected the reported deal, saying it would not include the return of all of the captives and a final end to the war.

A flurry of reports cited sources saying that a new ceasefire deal was in the offing, similar to previous agreements, under which fighting in the Gaza Strip would halt for a period of time during which Israeli hostages would be released and humanitarian aid to the enclave boosted.

The Lebanese outlet Al-Mayadeen, which is affiliated with the Hezbollah terror group, reported that Israel had agreed in principle to a draft proposal that called for a ceasefire of about 70 days during which 10 living hostages would be released in two phases, modifying the so-called Witkoff outline, which laid out a shorter ceasefire for the release of about 10 living hostages.

But the Israeli official described the proposal as one that “does not indicate a real desire to bridge the gaps between the parties” and said it was “very far” from the one originally proposed by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

“There is no genuine willingness on Hamas’s part to move forward with a deal. Israel remains committed to the Witkoff framework,” he said.

This is a no-go, even for the families of the still-living hostages (the IDF thinks there are between 24 and 27 living hostages). Letting them go in dribs and drabs is not acceptable, and I’m also glad that the hostage-family-representing organization demands a “final end to the war,” which I take to mean a surrender by Hamas.  Not mentioned in this article is Hamas’s inevitable demand for the return of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, but for sure there would have been one.

*With the Democratic party so riven that people are even floating the idea of running Kamala Harris for President in 2028, the Party is now arguing about. . .  language. But if that sounds picayune, remember that Democratic wokeness was likely an important factor in the last election. The Washington Post reports:

Maybe it’s using the word “oligarchs” instead of rich people. Or referring to “people experiencing food insecurity” rather than Americans going hungry. Or “equity” in place of “equality,” or “justice-involved populations” instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly — hardly a formula for winning people over, they say.

The latest debate is, in part, also a proxy for the bigger battle over what the Democrats’ identity should be in the aftermath of November’s devastating losses — especially as the party searches for ways to reverse its overwhelming rejection by rural and White working-class voters.

“Some words are just too Ivy League-tested terms,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’ — why do we say that? Why don’t we say, ‘We want you to have an even chance’?”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear — who like Gallego is considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful — made a similar point.

“I believe that over time, and probably for well-meaning reasons, Democrats have begun to speak like professors and started using advocacy-speak that was meant to reduce stigma, but also removed the meaning and emotion behind words,” Beshear said, citing such examples as using “substance abuse disorder” to refer to addiction.

But of course “equity” is not at all the same thing as “equality”, and is an “even chance” the same as “equal opportunity”? Yes, given that the election showed a tendency towards populism, it’s not a good thing for Democratic politicians to sound like college professors.  The same goes for “sex spectrum”; I think people have about had the “there-are-not-two-sexes-in-humans” argument up the ying-yang, as evidenced by the very lame performance of Agustín Fuentes’s new book, Sex is a Spectrum. James Carville has been saying this for some time, and the old curmudgeon is right!

*Feminist Susan Brownmiller had died at 90.  She became famous for popularizing the view that rape was an act not of sex, but of power. From the NYT:

Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence, died on Saturday in the Bronx. She was 90.

The author Alix Kates Shulman, a longtime friend, said Ms. Brownmiller died in a hospital from complications of a fall after a long illness.

“Against Our Will,” published in 1975, was translated into a dozen languages and ranked by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

Among other things, it offered the first comprehensive history of rape across the centuries, starting with ancient Babylon, and examined its use as a wartime military tactic to further subjugate the losing side.

The book’s publication — along with real-time reports of mass rape in war-ravaged Bangladesh — joined a tide of events that were reshaping society’s attitude toward rape.

The ascendant women’s movement was already opening the public’s eyes about sexual violence. Anti-rape groups had started to form in the early 1970s. Groundbreaking works like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” (1971) were empowering women to take control of their bodies and their sexuality. When “Against Our Will” arrived, the country seemed ready to grapple with its implications.

Numerous rape-crisis centers were opened, self-defense classes gained new popularity, and several states rewrote their laws to make it easier to prosecute rapists. Rape within marriage became a crime. Many jurisdictions abolished the “corroborating witness rule,” which required the testimony of bystanders for a rape conviction. (The woman herself was not necessarily considered believable.) Several states passed rape shield laws, which prevented people’s sexual history from being u

I mourn her loss for we were, for a while, email friends, and discussed the idea of Thornhill and Palmer that rape was an evolutionary adaptation rather than a “spandrel.”  She even bought me a vial of Cuba Gold Eau de Toilette when she learned that I smoked Cuban cigars (I no longer smoke, but I still use the cologne, which is excellent and a bargain). Sadly, we lost touch because I could not agree with her that rape was 100% about power and 0% about sex, as I thought it involved a mixture of both.  I still think it does, but nevertheless, Brownmiller made a big advance in emphasizing the power and male-domination character of rape and discussing its history.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks that humans should sleep, like cats and hominin ancestors, when the sun is down:

Hili: How did people live without electricity?
A: LIke cats in those times.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak ludzie żyli bez elektryczności?
Ja: Tak jak koty w tamtych czasach.

*******************

From CinEmma:

From Jesus of the Day, how you can go wrong with bad grammar:

From Seth. a cartoon by Dennis Goris:

Masih is back, and decrying America’s negotiations with Iran:

From Luana; more violation of women’s spaces:

From Barry, a cat and a d*g play Debussy. Barry notes, “Some impressive technique here.”

can’t think of a better, more productive use of time tbh

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy.bsky.social) 2025-05-25T23:28:18.605Z

From Malcolm, a cat enjoying the sun:

Two from my feed. This first moggy is pretty, but I’ve seen prettier:

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree. . . :

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A 50-year-old French woman was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-27T09:56:08.522Z

Two posts from Professor Cobb, slowly recovering. The video is below the post:

he definitely cries during this

— onion person (@junlper.beer) 2025-05-25T19:16:59.998Z

I’d love to watch this one, but it’s too long. If you do, put in the comments the place where he cries:

Here’s a paper showing strong natural selection, though I haven’t read it yet:

🚨New paper alert!🚨We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb….#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

— Nicolas Alexandre (@nicmalexandre.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T13:20:01.895Z

60 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “picayune”

    Cannot unread that.

    Re The Bonnie Blue Debate Club with Peterson :

    David Deutsch (bold added):

    “An even better hypothetical (because it doesn’t have such an emotive setting) is: is it immoral to be a spy? Or an undercover police officer?

    It is not. And both involve lying.

    BTW Peterson is right to reject hypothetical context-less moral dilemmas. But this totally wasn’t one.”

    https://x.com/daviddeutschoxf/status/1926924267087659454?s=46

    1. Addendum because this is now got my mind going :

      To get out of the knights vs. knaves rut, I imagined the trolley problem but with lies and truths – so you lie and save five people, tell truth and save one. And vice versa.

      Peterson’s reply was evasive perhaps, but I think it brings up the realistic notion of how we operate on what we think is true or false … so would you lie if you were not sure if it was a lie, at the trolley… likelihood/Bayesian stuff.

  2. The UK brand for Scotch Tape, Sellotape, has become one of those brand synecdoches. Like Hoover, Biro, Xerox etc.

    1. IIRC, when it was first released in the UK it was called ‘Selotape’, pronounced ‘seal-o-tape’; I can remember the headmaster of my primary school in the ’50s using that pronunciation. But so many people pronounced it ‘Sellotape’ that the manufacturers gave up, and added the extra ‘l’ to the brand name.

      1. According to Wikipedia (I know…), “The name was derived from Cellophane, at that time a trademarked name, with the “C” changed to “S” so the new name could be trademarked”. Both Cellophane and Sellotape are cellulose-based, so the “seal” pronunciation seems unlikely?

  3. Starship Flight 9 window opens tonight, Tuesday, May 27, 6:30 p.m. CT.

    These things are usually entertaining one way or another. This time they’ll try to ensure that Starship doesn’t explode (like the last two did), while they will be re-flying one of the SuperHeavy Boosters previously caught by the “chopsticks”.

    1. Thanks for the reminder, Coel. It will still be daylight in Boca Chia, TX launch site at front end of launch window at 1830 CT, so we should be able to see booster return to launchsite … if all goes well…still exciting to me. Also a night where I might want to plan on not being on an airliner that must fly through Carribean airspace around the launch window times. SpaceX must develop and test its technologies in relevant and actual atmospheric environments and with the location of their launch site there happens to be significant human population that occupies and transits beneath their downrange flight track.

      1. They won’t be attempting a tower landing this time, but will be making a “hard” landing close by offshore. They are testing quite a few new things with the booster return flight that make it too risky to attempt. Significantly different angle of attack is the main thing, to see if they can reduce the amount of fuel necessary for bringing boosters back to the launch site.

    2. It seems to me that the exploding bit started after a significant modification of the junction between the starship and the booster. Before that, the starship was almost routinely just doing a controlled descent into the ocean. So why don’t they just walk that modification back?

      1. Haven’t followed closely, but reading between the lines, I think that they are going after increased efficiencies to make their moon/mars (beyond LEO) feasible (mission requirements). Prototype was likely a version 0.5 of a development process where version 2.0 or higher might be adequate for the full mission requirements.

        In any case the version that did not fail during launch, likely did fail to meet endpoint mission requirements. So just going back to it would not be an option in their design space.

      2. I can’t be sure what you mean by the junction between the starship and booster, but most likely you are thinking of the “hot staging ring.” The hot staging ring was first introduced for flight test number 2 and it is not likely that it figured significantly into the loss of starship mishaps on flight tests 7 and 8, the two most recent.

        But there was a very big change. For flight test 7 the starship upper stage was really a nearly all new starship, called version 2. Version 2 is significantly longer than the version 1 that was used on all previous test flights, has a much higher fuel capacity and the plumbing that feeds propellants to the engines was all new and very different. Also, new forward flaps, smaller and positioned differently so that the hinges are out of the direct plasma flow during reentry.

        The loss during flight test 7 does seem to have been caused by a failure of the new engine propellant plumbing. The loss during flight test 8, which looked at first glance to have the same cause, was supposedly caused be something else, an “engine hardware” failure. Since flight test 8 SpaceX has done over 100 long duration engine test firings in order to figure the problem out.

  4. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Compassion is not weakness and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism. -Hubert Humphrey, US Vice President (27 May 1911-1978)

      2. Would making unconcern for the unfortunate mandatory be Libertarianism/Objectivism ?

  6. I think the language of the Democratic Party is a direct result of their goals. The goals were conceived of as part of an ideology that uses that language, and that language was developed to express those goals in contrast to traditional goals (i.e., equity vs. equality). It’s their magic language, and, if they change it, they won’t be able to conjure the results they want.

    1. +1

      Dialectic

      There’s a long History of political parties whose faith lies in Dialectic.

    2. That seems right. The party leaders have other problems, among them being an inability to understand that most of the country, including the moderate left, is simply not with them on a variety of issues.

    3. Agree. The Washington Post and its apologist-contributors miss the point so widely I suspect it is deliberate, to hide the magic of their conjuring language. The word/phrase pairs are not just off-putting college-professor synonyms for plain language. They aren’t synonyms at all. They mean different things. “Equity” vs, “equality” we all know. “DEI” means the opposite of content of character. “Oligarchs” means that rich people are assumed to behave in ways that justify their dispossession or being eaten. “Food insecurity” doesn’t mean at all “going hungry”, since few alleged to have the former experience the latter, but the former group involves a much larger client base for activists to demand money and policy for — all of Gaza, recently. “Substance use [note than change from ‘abuse’] disorder” is not the same as “addiction” because it shifts the focus of concern to the addict and away from his corrosive effects on the social fabric, which is the chief reason most of us care about addiction. Rather, by medicalizing it, we allow the “patient” to make the autonomous choice for no treatment but self-medication and so we bend all our efforts toward ensuring safe supply and “housing first”. “Ways of knowing” means “what primitives believe.” Finally, to come to an arbitrary end of a long list, “structural racism” means its antonym: “no racism”! (And “anti-racism” means “racism.”)

      No, the Democrats, and Leftists everywhere, can’t switch from magic words to plain words because it would confess to moderates what they had been up to, that they really are the party of unequal opportunity, envy, unfocused spending to benefit client groups, social decay, superstition, and racism. It would also infuriate their activist base who do advocate for all those goals but which hardly anyone else supports and have to be tricked, conjured, into voting for them disguised as their non-synonyms.

      1. Yes, Leslie, the words and phrases reflect an ideological understanding of the phenomena they denote. Even if, as Beshear says, the words are well-meaning attempts to reduce stigma, the efforts will fail. Any negative connotation will eventually transfer to the new words—which will then be disposed for new new words. Most people who embrace the advocacy speak aren’t themselves zealots, but they do suffer from various maladies. Some are just persons experiencing conformity. Others suffer with independent thought insecurity. Most have terminal cases of courage insufficiency disorder. Realizing they have a problem is the first step to recovery. But as they also inhabit a mental universe in which their weaknesses are cast as virtues, we can’t count on that happening. We must minimize the damage they do to society—and try not to inflict our own as we roll back their “progress.”

      2. To be fair, both Left and Right are egregiously Orwellian, and to me the Right is worse than the left. Reagan’s “Freedom fighters” (i.e. terrorists) in Nicaragua, his “rescue mission” for the invasion of Grenada, Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” (later adapted by Obama as well) for “torture”, both sides’ “active defense” for “first strike”, Republicans’ “pro-life” for a policy that destroys many lives, the first Trump administration’s “alternative facts” for obvious lies, “fake news” for news that presents Trump in a bad light, etc.

        1. That you have to say the Right is “worse” than the Left shows you are being partisan. My point was to criticize an article claiming the Democrats could supposedly win if they communicated more clearly, not to catalogue euphemisms. This is not about calling garbage collectors “sanitation engineers.” Rather, the risk for the Democrats is if moderate voters figure out what they are really saying they will like them less, not more. Dredging up Republican examples from 40 years ago is beside the point I think. In any event, I think most people inclined to vote for Republicans know exactly what their circumlocutions mean, and were/are fine with it. If the Republicans get defeated because voters figure out that Gee, “pro-life” really means opposition to abortion, who knew?, then we can talk about messaging for them.

          1. It is not necessarily partisan to say that one party is better/worse than another in some respect. One of them is surely worse than the other.

            Just because Republicans have a long history of misleading language does not make them any less blameworthy for what they do with language today. “Liberation Day” for the launch of tariff chaos???? It seems pretty clear that the intent of such language is to mislead the Republican base.

          2. Almost forgot how Republicans call Jan 6 a “day of love” even though the whole thing was filmed and anyone can see the violence and hear the chants of “Hang Mike Pence”.

      3. I think Marcuse expressed it accurately – in the context of art – in his Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972 – all emphasis preserved):

        “Alchemy of the word;”

        I noticed some argument comparing L with R above ;

        Remember that Dialectical conflict proceeds from the Left, provoking a reaction directed Right – but both wings of the same beast – Leftism. E.g. Communism produced Nazism, and are mutual enemies – but both originate in Leftism. A pendulum can account for the reactions but the moving path below the pendulum goes forward according to Leftism. This discernment should elucidate a fraction of political stability that I suggest readers here are closer to – away from the reactive tips of the horseshoe (yet another model).

        E.g. currently, a Woke Right has infiltrated the White House.

  7. Here’s another section of the gang debate on Peterson in which the question is what it takes to be Christian :

    https://x.com/protestia/status/1926841969189290477?s=46

    From what I gather, Peterson is expected to be perfect because he is into Christianity even though there’s no empirical test of it, but that is an incorrect premise – in Christian doctrine, all people are fallen an unable to be perfected. I think there’s a secular point to that as well.

    I heard a number of these exchanges by now, which certainly show flaws, but I found nothing to disparage anyone over.

    I can see Peterson has flaws and is not charming as such, but I don’t understand the criticism of Peterson.

    1. I read the abstract to my wife, she said it sounds like Anna’s are on the way to domestication.

    1. Funny but it did not start out that way! I think the Kookaburra is reacting to the owl.

        1. That owl certainly looks as though it’s much more bemused then predatory.

  10. Re: Trump’s Memorial Day post and his claim that the Biden administration “allowed 21,000,000 million people to illegally enter our country.”

    21,000,000 million would be 21,000,000,000,000, wouldn’t it? That’s a lot of people!

    1. Yeah. He blew right through the U.S. to U.K. language barrier as to whether a thousand million or a million million are a billion.

          1. I have not surrendered: I use milliards, or thousand millions for the innumerate. At least that is unambiguous.
            Edit: that was meant as a reply to Coel.

  11. According to Piketty (a French Marxist), ‘left’ parties are increasing attracting highly educated elites (he calls them ‘Brahmins’). By contrast, ‘right’ parties are increasingly attracting blue-collar workers. This trend has been going on for years (decades actually) and includes many countries.

    In my opinion, Harris will not be the Democratic nominee in 2028. Leading Democrats (privately) don’t like her for losing in 2024. She is more likely to be shunned (by Democrats) than embraced.

    1. Accordingly, the Trump administration’s economic program is left wing. Allison Schrager:

      The New Right may be the future of conservatism, but sometimes it seems like they’re just left-wingers trying to remake the American economy into… well, Europe. People like JD Vance and Josh Hawley and their ilk like to complain about Europe and even bully them from time to time (sometimes for valid reasons), but if you look at the policies of the New Right—and sometimes the President—it seems like they really want us to be Europe. Maybe that’s why JD is so obsessed with talking about them, and why at times it seems we’ve left policymaking to a left-wing college student one month into their junior year abroad.

      Think about it. They want us to consume less and buy more high-quality domestic goods. They want a bigger welfare state that covers the middle class. They want antitrust to take down big tech. And they want a smaller, slower-growing economy to benefit a small group of people who represent the past. All so European! Even MAHA feels a little Euro with their obsession with artificial food. What’s next? Tethered bottle caps?

      https://allisonschrager.substack.com/p/anchored-expectations?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2

      1. You have not mentioned cultural issues. On cultural issues, the ‘right’ is very much the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ is very much the ‘left’.

  12. The Dems (and the left in other countries) definitely have a problem with extremist activists who go berserk if you think, for example, that trans women are men.

    It seems like a niche topic but to the activists it’s vitally important.

    These people are a menace.

    1. The unhinged response to Seth Moulton’s (D-MA) very tame remarks supports your theory. A grand total of one Democrat (Tom Suozzi D-NY) publicly supported him.

      1. Shameful, but not worse than the Right. How many Republicans now have the integrity to stand up and criticize Trump’s claim that the Jan 6 insurrection was “a day of love”? I think maybe one of the sitting Republicans in Congress has done so. And these sheep are worse than the Left in the sense that every one of them knows they are lying.

    1. I would have thought that would be celebrated on Trump’s birthday. Maybe it will, during his birthday military parade this year.

  14. ”Feminist Susan Brownmiller had died at 90. She became famous for popularizing the view that rape was an act not of sex, but of power.”

    Not just you, but Pinker also disagrees with her on this.

    1. I thought like the mythical “Gender pay gap” that “rape is about power” went the way of other errors of 2nd wave feminism of the 70s…. but like a zombie it it ALIVE!

      Goodness. Bad ideas take a long time to kill and then the new kids pick them up (like socialism or… and you know I’ll damn well say it.. Palestinian nationalism).
      Spare us from zombie bad ideas!

      For the record I’m a big time 2nd wave feminist – like the boss, Pinker, and most libs – but there were some parts of it that were bonkers: pay gap and rape/power being two. Oh. And something about a fish and a bicycle. 🙂

      D.A.
      NYC

    2. Maybe it is a male vs female interpretation of the fact. Women may see it as a power move and men prefer it to be as a sex act.

      Would be interesting to see if this has been studied.

  15. Trump sanctioning Putin is about as likely as him imposing a tax on the rich he discussed recently (only once). I think that Putin has damning information on him. They probably filmed Trump doing nasty stuff when he was there for the 2013 Miss Universe Contest. He can’t keep it in his pants around beautiful women. In the past the Russian intelligence services are claimed to have used Bolshoi ballerinas, as well as cinema and theater actresses in “sexpionage”. A CIA agent has claimed that women who used seduction as a tool to gain information, referred to as “swallows”, were trained at “State School 4” in Kazan, Tatarstan near Moscow.

    1. Which of the Biden-era sanctions against Russia has Trump lifted? Were Biden’s sanctions insufficient to alter Putin’s behavior? If so, then why did he and the Democrats not impose more? (Are they compromised?) Which additional sanctions will suffice?

      1. Not yet, but he’s talking about lifting them, and attacking Zelenski. He’s also cut off supplying weapons to Ukraine. This is the worst possible sanction against Ukraine.

  16. Not to belabor my point but a quick look at eXtwitter shows numerous reaction videos intended to gleefully make Jordan Peterson look like a fool and have been owned.

    This seems distinct from videos where Dawkins interviews a Christian, for example.

    “Unseemly” comes to mind…

    1. And what’s so wrong about him crying? I thought men were supposed to be more sensitive, and that not expressing emotion is toxic masculinity. But in some circles that apparently only applies to some men.

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