Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats; it’s Sunday, September 14, 2025 and National Eat a Hoagie Day.  By now even foreign readers, if they’re regulars, will know what a hoagie is, so I needn’t explain it. Here’s a hoagie place close to me in Chicago (we call them “subs”), and I must go there and get the wagyu combo:

@dafattestninja

Bronzeville Hoagie & Panini Cafe 238 E 35th St Chicago IL #chicagofoodie #chicagofoodguide #chicagofoodspots #chicagofoodies #chicagofoodscene #chicagofoodauthority #chicagofoodreview #chicagofoodmag #chicagorestaurants #chicagorestaurant #chicagoeats #chicagocheck

♬ original sound – DaFattestNinja

It’s also National Cream-filled Donut Day (beware if they spell it “creme”), National Gobstopper Day (and Americans need to know what a “gobstopper” is), National Black and White Cookie Day (I didn’t even know what those were), and Racial Justice Sunday.

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association); click the logo to go to the schedule. There are four games today.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I still can’t determine what part of the political/ideological spectrum the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, dwells on.  It isn’t really that important to me, though, as that segment of the spectrum, whatever it is, will get blamed as a whole, yet over the last decade we’ve had shooters from every part of the Political Rainbow.  I am not worried about the Left being blamed for the shooting.  If I have political worries, they’re that the celebrations of Kirk’s death come largely from the Left, as he was clearly a conservative, no matter who killed him. That is going to hurt the Democrats. But I feel churlish in even pondering such things in the face of Kirk leaving behind a wife and two young children. They were there when he was murdered–and in a gruesome way. I can’t imagine how they feel, along with Kirk’s friends, relatives, and colleagues.  We get an inkling from this public statement  below from his wife Erika.  She is devastated but defiant, and he would be proud of her.  Yes, she vows to continue the movement that Kirk started, and I don’t at all like its principles, but the movement fostered discussion, not violence.

How can you say how great it was that Kirk was killed when you hear his grieving widow?

You can’t tell whether he was even on the Left or Right from his doings so far, though we know he didn’t like Kirk. From the WSJ:

One thing is apparent about Robinson: He lived much of life on the internet. By age 15, he had developed enough of an online presence that he dressed up as “some guy from a meme” for Halloween, according to his mother. Writings on the bullet casings found by police appeared to reference various memes and online culture.

One unfired casing was inscribed with lyrics from “Bella Ciao,” an Italian song dedicated to those who fought against fascism during World War II that has been revived on TikTok.

“It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” [Utah Governer Spencer] Cox said in an interview with the Journal.

Online, however, X users have noted that a version of the song also appears on a Spotify playlist for Groypers, the name for followers of Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist personality who has criticized Kirk, including for his support of Israel. Fuentes has publicly condemned the shooting of Kirk and posted on X that “my followers and I are currently being framed” for Kirk’s killing “based on literally zero evidence.”

*After seeing this article I’m now convinced that The Free Press is touting religion for the masses as a curative for our ills. The piece, by Paul Kingsnorth, is called “How the West Lost Its Soul,” with the subtitle, “We’ve abandoned the founding religious story that has sustained us for 1,500 years. The result is the greatest age of abundance we’ve ever known—and a complete lack of meaning.” Shades of Ross Douthat! And this is only one of several such article the FP has published (it appears to be a series). My theory, which is mine, is that Bari Weiss is religious and so she allows her pages to be used to spread superstition. A few excerpts:

After so many centuries of this, after so many years of humans missing the mark, of wandering from the path, of civilizations rising and falling and warring and dying, of eating the fruit again and again, the creator stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Most people don’t listen, naturally, and we all know how the story ends. God himself walks on Earth and what does humanity do? We torture and kill him.

But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice. When he comes to Earth he comes not as warlord, king, or high priest, but as a barefoot artisan in an obscure desert province.

He walks with the downtrodden and the rejected, he scorns wealth and power, and through his death he conquers death itself, releasing us from our bondage. He gives us a way out, a way back home. But we have to work at it. The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Clearly they’re pushing Christianity as the nostrum rather than, say, Judaism or Islam. But there’s more, there’s the damn god-shaped hole that no article like this fails to mention:

If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract “freedom”; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.

. . . . We are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

This is an excerpt from Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity. And the thesis is bogus. Even if Kingsnorth is correct in that religion’s demise leaves a lacuna in our souls or our societies that must be filled with something supernatural, that doesn’t address the question: Is what I believe really true? If you say, “It doesn’t matter,” then you’re living a lie. But in fact the secular countries of the West have, as Steve Pinker maintains, only gotten better without faith, and religion has held back progress. Of course some things are bad now, but would you rather live in 1350, when everyone in the West was religious, and mostly Christian? Back then you’d be dead at 35 from a tooth absess (if you had any teeth).

I didn’t think you’d want to live back then. I’d love to write a piece for the Free Press about why this kind of palaver is nonsense, but I’m not even going to try.

*I’ve written recently about the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, stabbed to death by a mentally ill career criminal on a Charlotte, NC rail train. At the time there was almost no media coverage of this event. An article in Quillette by Jukka Savolainen (identified as a “former Director of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (USA) and a professor of sociology & criminology at Wayne State University”) asks why this murder has become a “flashpoint on the Right” and tries to answer three questions:

Why did this particular killing cut through the daily background noise of American violence? And why did it elicit such a powerful reaction from the political Right? The answers lie in three interrelated concerns: (1) the inconsistency with which victims and offenders of different races are treated by mainstream media, (2) the problem of urban disorder and impunity, and (3) the characteristics of the victim herself.

. . . Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

Here are Savolainen’s reason why the killing is now getting traction (quotes from the article indented)

a.) Identitarian media bias:

In other words, there is a pronounced tendency to suppress information about black crime, and this racialised double-standard is obvious to millions of Americans. The Zarutska case struck a nerve because it inverted the usual script—a young white female refugee was brutally slain by a black man with a long criminal record on video, and yet the story barely registered in the pages of the legacy press or in headlines of mainstream broadcasters until it exploded on X. And when the story finally did appear in the New York Times, its reporters were less concerned with the circumstances of the murder itself than with how the incident had ignited a “firestorm” on the political Right.

b.) Urban disorder and impunity in the Post-Floyd Era:

As Kat Rosenfield has argued, “we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same.” In practice, the taboo against insisting on order and decency has meant abandoning shared spaces—trains, platforms, sidewalks—to the most disturbed and dangerous people among us. The Daniel Penny saga, meanwhile, taught bystanders a cruel lesson: if you intervene, you may be punished, so the safest course is to do nothing.

c.) The victim herself:

Finally, this senseless crime resonated because of who Iryna Zarutska was. She was neither a career criminal nor a drug dealer nor any other kind of lawbreaker participating in a dangerous lifestyle. She was a young woman who had fled war, found work in America, and was heading home from her shift when she was stabbed three times by a stranger for no reason. Compare her to the individuals elevated into icons by the social-justice movement. George Floyd had a long criminal history for which he had served several jail terms; Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend was a drug dealer; Michael Brown assaulted a store clerk minutes before his fatal encounter with a police officer. Yet their deaths, tragic as they were, were transfigured into myths of oppression and sainthood.

Zarutska, on the other hand, embodied the sort of immigrant success story Americans are supposed to celebrate: she was industrious and hopeful and her grotesque murder was entirely unprovoked. That is why her story elicited sympathy and outrage on the Right, and why it was met with icy indifference from many progressives.

d.) Fairness and care:

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory holds that conservatives place a strong emphasis on “fairness” and “proportionality”—punishing cheaters, rewarding those who play by the rules, and protecting the innocent from predators. Progressives, on the other hand, place greater emphasis on “care” and “liberation,” but struggle with proportionality, especially when it cuts against their preferred identity-based narratives.

So in the progressive moral matrix, the murder of George Floyd becomes evidence of systemic oppression, while the murder of Iryna Zarutska is just another crime or an opportunity to feel compassion for her killer. In the conservative matrix, it is the reverse: a hard-working immigrant murdered by a repeat offender is a paradigmatic symbol of unfairness and a profound violation of proportionality. To ignore that fact is itself immoral.

It does surprise me that the MSM talked more about the killer than about the murdered woman; it is the opposite with Charlie Kirk.  The accused killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., had fourteen crimes under his belt, and needs to be kept out of society. To me that means institutionalization in a place where he can get help, though it looks as if he’ll never be releasable.  But if he’s seen as a victim, than surely Zrutska was even more of a victim.

*Reader Jay sent me a link to this disturbing new poll, adding this:

In a YouGov survey just out today, when asked, “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals?” fully one in four (25%) of those who rate themselves “very liberal” answered “Yes, violence can sometimes be justified,” compared to an almost trivial 3% of those who rate themselves “very conservative.” (Source: What Americans really think about political violence.)

First, concern about political violence has risen in all age groups:

Happiness: liberals and younger folk find being happy about public figures’ deaths more acceptable:

Justification for political violence is more pervasive in younger people and more liberal people:

Finally, Luana thought this was telling. This comes from a Generation Lab/Axios poll reported by Axios. Man, if you’re a Republican in college, your love life is in the toilet!

*I wrote yesterday about Ghost the octopus, a giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), laid a bath of unfertilized eggs in a California aquarium, and she’s caring for them. Unto death! When octopuses lay eggs (only once in their lives), they stop eating and then die from starvation. Ghost is dying, and is in her last month or few months, and is receiving an outpouring of affection from her fans. I find this ineffably sad, but if you want to see this in its full wonder and sadness, watch the Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher.”  Here’s a news story on Ghost:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we get all three cats in one photo! They assembled to have a serious discussion:

Hili: You interrupted an interesting discussion.
Andrzej: About what?
Hili: About the superiority of feline intelligence over Artificial Intelligence.

In Polish:

Hili: Przerwałeś nam ciekawą dyskusję.
Ja: O czym?
Hii: O przewadze kociej inteligencji nad Sztuczną Inteligencją.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From Give me a Sign:

From Jesus of the Day:

Masih is still quiet, but her substitute isn’t, and probably won’t ever be. Rowling’s been reading genetics!:

From Simon: the expected degree of sympathy that Trump evinces for Charlie Kirk:

Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-12T15:40:40.445Z

From Maarten, the usual antisemitism in Belgium (the Netherlands are pretty bad, too):

A tweet that originated from reader Michael. He thought if it as embodying “a lot of [his] feelings about peer review and commercial journals like Nature” (it was retweeted with a Nature caption), but I like mine better:.

One from Malcolm, the happy-cow compilation we need:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was nine.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-14T10:11:19.956Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, an illusion. Can you figure out how it’s done?

コレクションが増えた。

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@akiyoshikitaoka.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T10:10:41.114Z

. . . . and do you think these elephants are, as claimed, “joyful”? Click here to go to the video, as I can’t embed the “skeet”:

66 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity. -Sydney J. Harris, journalist (14 Sep 1917-1986)

  2. Shades of Ross Douthat!

    Not just Ross Douthat. Don’t forget Jonathan Rauch!

    Here is a discussion with Michael Shermer:

    https://youtu.be/8kJ2Cm3OP7g?si=uFB6niAlv7P-Yxfk

    Here is the blurb introducing the video:

    What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? Jonathan Rauch—a lifelong atheist—reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.

    Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.

    In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.

    1. Wow. If a megadose of LDS is the best solution to the problem, we surely need to find a different problem.

      2. I can’t read Chanclas’s image–too blurry–so here’s a transcript:

        JKR: I met Katy Denise as a result of a court order. She’s no poet, unless you count her scribbling lewd limericks signed with her phone number on bathroom walls.

        Adam Carter: Which is ironic, because I first met her through a toilet cubicle wall.

        Not a phone number, but what I thought at the time was a fleshy toilet roll holder and that’s all I’m prepared to say at this time.

        JKR: She’s been pulling that trick for years. Or, more accurately, hoping someone else will pull it, for years.

        Dr. Dame Katy Denise: Selective memory as always. I think you’ll find it was at Spearmint Rhino; I taught you how to pick up a £10 note without using your hands. I told you about my idea for a book about a boy wizard & the rest is history!

        1. The lead-in gives a little more context. There was discussion about weird/awkward things said on on first dates. JK said someone once offered to read her his poetry… and then someone asked if that’s how she met Denise…

  4. Speaking of the Free Press’s slide into superstition, this came in my NYT morning news:

    “Good morning. Today we’re launching Believing, a newsletter about modern religion and spirituality. To kick it off, we’re exploring how chatbots are mimicking chaplains — and even gods.”

  5. The claim that the Scandinavian countries are social utopias because they are irreligious is getting a bit tired. They are social utopias because until recently each was an almost entirely uniracial, unicultural ethnostate. Few people immigrated because few people in other parts of the world have any opportunity to become fluent enough in Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, or Danish to work productively there. There was high social trust. Swedes knew the high taxes they paid were going to support short-term benefits to other Swedes who got sick or were down on their luck, or who needed childcare so Swedish mothers could work and pay taxes. With so many now-permanent beneficiaries being African and Albanian Muslim criminals abusing the asylum system, we will see what happens to social trust. (It doesn’t help that the labour unions, who really run Europe, don’t want the foreigners to be able to work gainfully, a first step to integration in a Lutheran work-oriented albeit collectivist culture.)

    To avoid charges of racism, Scandinavian countries might choose to restrict benefits to those baptized as Lutheran and deport everyone else.

    1. I see the reason for your disagreement, but you seem to be swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. One of the reasons that their politicosocial systems arose, but didn’t arise in other ethnic monocultures, was because religion had declined. There was indeed immigration back then. 40 years ago, 10% of Swedes were immigrants or children of immigrants. However, they often immigrated to Sweden since they were fleeing right-wing regimes, and were happy to learn Swedish and join a social-utopia society. Now, most of the immigrants are different, leading to widespread opposition to immigration. The only left-wing party which has realized that it has to change is the social-democratic party of Denmark (which now heads the government). Denmark has some of the most restrictive immigration laws in all of Europe.

    2. The elephant in the room is, of course, Islam. Does anyone want to make the case that Scandinavian societies are improved by Islamic immigration?

      Likewise, although the U.S. has avoided mass Islamic immigration, is it not obvious that our politics has become more like the other countries in “the Americas?”

    3. I’m not sure that anybody has argued that, as Leslie stated, “the Scandinavian countries are social utopias because they are irreligious.” A weaker claim is that Scandinavia works well even though most Scandinavians are irreligious. That’s all one needs to counter the claim that most of us need to believe in some religion to be happy or that our society would function better if more people believed in some religion (excluding Islam – most Islamic societies don’t function well. The Dutch sociologist Ruud Koopmans, professor of sociology at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, wrote a book about it, which, unfortunately, is only available in Dutch, German and Danish).

      1. I risk an over-comment just to acknowledge that my use of “because” was incorrect and invalid, as you point out.

  6. ” Can you figure out how it’s done?”

    First I thought, this is not a mirror, but a plain glass pane with appropriately draped objects on both sides.

    But I think it is even simpler than that: This is a realistic image that has been arranged and set up in such a way that it appears to be a mirror at first glance.

    1. There is no trick photography here, except that it’s a kind of forced perspective picture. When one picks up the shapes to view them in entirety, one sees that they have various weird angles that make them look different when viewed from different perspectives.

  7. It looks like Trump is taking Kirk’s murder as a pretext for going after leftist organizations regardless of the political vies of the killer. I think in cases like this most people form an opinion of the political views of a killer and don’t change their mind when more information becomes available.

    1. It looks like that? I haven’t seen a single thing indicating he’s “going after” any group.

        1. For this to be improper, doesn’t the President have to single out a particular group by name and then threaten it with unlawful executive action, or with politically motivated enforcement actions like IRS audits? If a Canadian Prime Minister responded to Mr. Kirk’s killing by saying he was going to terminate his Government’s ties to Egale and revoke its tax funding, I would be delighted, asking only, “Why did it take a murder to get you to do the right thing finally?”

          I don’t subscribe to the Washington Post. If there are specific instances of improper retaliation contained in the story, I know I can count on you to enumerate them for me.

          1. Proper or not wasn’t the issue. “DrBrydon” was apparently unfamiliar with Trump several threats to ‘go after’ lefty groups (and individuals) — George Soros was a notable example that the White House mentioned several times recently.

            However, the common Trump playbook is to spout this kind of drum-beating aggressive rhetoric to play to his base, and then the furor dies down and he actually does nothing. So it’s impossible to say what sort of retaliation he might have in mind, and the more rational heads in the White House have cautioned that they walk a fine line when it comes to trying to punish people for free speech….

        2. Ah, “free speech” as you note below.
          Here’s a hypothetical, inspired by Maarten Boudry’s tweet in today’s Hili about the Israeli conductor cancelled by the Ghent music festival. Further information here:
          https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/festival-cancels-israeli-conductor-1.7632896

          This festival (unlike a Taylor Swift concert tour) is surely heavily subsidized by government — certainly in Canada it would be –, both by direct grant funding and by its status as a tax-exempt charitable organization, which allows donors to claim donations to it as deductions from their income tax liability. The orchestras and other ensembles who participate in the festival are themselves similarly publicly subsidized. The Belgian Prime Minister is dismayed at the festival’s action, as it brings the nation of Belgium into international disrepute.

          Now, imagine the music festival is taking place in President Trump’s America. He directs his Treasury Secretary to order the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of the festival, on the grounds that in engaging in political advocacy it forfeits its charitable standing. He also directs whatever Cabinet Dept. disburses direct arts funding to cancel the festival’s grant. Is that a free-speech punishment that more rational heads should talk him out of? Or is it within his executive obligation to enforce the tax laws and to evaluate tax expenditures in the public interest?

          You’re probably right that in real life he would do nothing once the public interest (in a different sense) turned to the next shiny object. I bring this up only because of the free-speech implications you raised.

          1. Thanks for your hypothetical — but I note that it is easy to load such a case with facts that are not present in the targets of much of Trump’s threats, especially the role of government in the imaginary festival.

        3. Thank you very much for the New York Times article today, Barbara. (I would never not read one of your comments. Fortunately it appeared briefly on the list of Recent Comments before today’s bumped it off.)

          VP Vance’s remarks precisely illustrate my point about the difference between constitutionally protected speech on the one hand — I don’t know why the Times put scare quotes around it — and the Executive’s prerogative on the other hand to deny visas to foreigners (and revoke them) as it sees fit. Arts funding would come under this executive discretion as well.

          I realize that the U.S. federal government may not fund the arts and entertainment as munificently as Europe and Canada do, so my hypothetical was off-base there. At every Toronto Symphony concert, a live voice from the wings acknowledges funding from the governments of Canada, Ontario, and the City of Toronto. Yet the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera from New York acknowledge only the large foundations and major sponsors of the broadcasts like Annenberg and Toll Brothers, no mention of government. (Texaco in the old days. There is a plaque in the Met lobby honouring decades of the Texaco Opera Network.) I can’t recall any live acknowledgements of funding for the Met itself spoken in the auditorium before the overture starts. So it’s possible that the federal government yanking its funding from cantankerous arts organizations like antisemitic music festivals would just not be a thing in the U.S. Canadians are stingy. We wouldn’t have nice things if government didn’t provide them from what it compels from wealthy taxpayers, and now that it does, we tell ourselves we don’t need to do private charity. The hand that feeds also holds the collar, though.

          That’s probably enough to and fro for Da Roolz.

      2. I don’t where you get your news from.

        Maybe Fox News? They provide an extremely distorted selection of stories.

  8. Stop with religion! The people touting religion claim it will do individuals good. I don’t believe it. But even if that was true, what good will it do humanity in general? Absolutely none.

    The one and only thing that all human beings have in common is material reality. It is the medium within which we interact, within which we benefit or harm each other. The incorporation of imaginative constructs – which is what both religion and secular ideologies are – into the material world and the actions that follow from these non-evidence-based beliefs have been the genesis of witch hunts, holocausts, Satanic panics, jihad, burning heretics alive, the torment of gay people… the list of evils goes on and on.

    The lesson is that the only moral basis for action in this world is empirical evidence. Period.

    Speaking of fantasy-based beliefs – though I know Trump’s lies are motivated by sycophancy and not anything so exalted as an ideology – I just read this, and I’m burning with outrage:

    Trump on President Zelensky: “He’s always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.”

    1. If you read the comments at the Free Press, I notice a lot of the readers are religious. Perhaps they’re simply trying to please them?

      2. I wonder if it is actually something else. I’ve heard a number of secular opinion writers express the view that a revival of Christianity (in its “Love your enemies” mode) may be necessary to counterbalance the dangerous rise of the twin demons of Wokeness (“Speech is violence”, “Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler”) and Islam (“Kill the infidel and take his women as sex slaves”).

  9. Trump has repeatedly expressed his grief about Kirk’s death and sympathy for his family. He has announced his plans to attend the funeral. Perhaps he’s tired of dwelling on it? Ever notice how at funerals people talk about things other than death?

    1. That’s one interpretation. Mine is that Trump is so self-absorbed that he couldn’t wait to talk about the construction of the new ballroom. Trump has also missed several opportunities to say something comforting or healing about Kirk’s death, as well, instead choosing to blame the “radical Left lunatics.”

      2. And of course, not a peep about the assassination of the Hortmans in MN, because in Trump’s world only Republicans (or rather Trump supporters) are worthy of victimhood.

  10. I don’t know about the motives of Kirk’s assassin. It may be this or that motive, or he could have no motive other than just wanting to kill someone (anyone) who was in the spotlight. Some assassins are like that.
    What is different here is that I saw no media that was urging caution and objectivity about motives, and of course the president was not doing what he should be doing.

    Meanwhile, PZ has jumped on some very tenuous and possibly entirely wrong conclusions. He just never learns.

    1. Well, the “anti-fascist” messages on two of the cartridges and the reported news that he had a “trans” lover would appear to be highly relevant to his motive.

      I still don’t know who PZ is; perhaps it is best I don’t.

  11. Young people are more apt to accept political violence simply because the young have been brainwashed by the catechism that the world is divided into the oppressors and the oppressed. This dichotomy on its own hints at violence. After all, how else would one cast off one’s oppressors?

    This is also why 71% of young Democrats would not go on a date with a Republican. Doing so would be sleeping with the enemy. Now we can understand how the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy has extended its tentacles into what used to be ordinary political discourse—and why violence has become (to some) an acceptable form of engagement.

    1. Once you believe that words are violence, then it’s justified to kill people who say things you don’t like.

    2. I agree. On one side, there’s this unthinking acceptance of the post-modernist rhetoric about oppression, along with the convenient claim that speech is literally violence (speech that you don’t like, said by someone else, that is). So, if you say something I don’t like, you are oppressing me, and I am justified in killing you if necessary to achieve social justice.

      The hypocrisy of the other side is galling as well, where any violence against one of their own is tantamount to the instigation of “war”, for which violent retribution is implied, while violence committed by someone ostensibly on their side is merely an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of maintaining the essential “freedom” for everyone (and their dog, apparently) to own a cache of lethal firearms. Democratic politicians killed in Minnesota, children killed in schools? Nah, these things just happen, they’re just part of a free society, so… thoughts and prayers. Yep, those come cheaply.
      What a wonderful world we humans are creating.

      1. …post-modernist rhetoric about oppression….

        A friendly correction? Any reference to “oppression” is almost certainly poststructuralist, not postmodernist.

        1. Hmm… well, I’m sure you are technically correct, but in my experience references to an oppressor/oppressed paradigm occur fairly often in discussions of political or sociological aspects of postmodernism. It seems to me that the latter, at least in political terms, has perhaps to a large extent subsumed poststructuralism, so in this context I’m not sure the distinction is especially significant. But I will endeavor to be more precise in the future.

          1. Well, I could apologize for being picky, but I’ve spent years teaching grad students the fundamental difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism, so I hope my investment is not pointless!

            A large part of the problem, I suspect, is that, as in many realms, there is a difference between technical vocabulary/terms/concepts on the one hand, and popular or non-technical use of the same terms on the other. The sociolinguist Anna Wierzbicka has written insightfully and even humorously on this point.

        2. Didn’t poststructuralism grow out of postmodernism, though? Or have I got that wrong?

          And–if the question doesn’t take us too far afield–where does “deconstruction” fit in?

          1. Poststructuralism grew out of dissatisfaction with the blindness of structuralism to issues of power. Postmodernism grew out of the rejection of what Lyotard called “master narratives,” whether in architecture, where it originated, or in History, to embrace multiple perspectives for a richer picture. My first crack at describing this is hundreds of words long, so I’ll leave it at that for now!

    3. It has nothing to do with Right or Left. Within my lifetime I have seen the same kind of political violence promoted by the Right, and it was the Right who divided the world into irreconcilable categories (capitalist and communist). When I was a young kid the Right not only promoted political violence against the dreaded Communists but actually practiced what they preached, killing (Allende et al) and trying to kill (Castro et al) world leaders and innocent civilians (remember the Contras?) who disagreed. Right-wing extremists killed MLK and right-wing government officials (in particular Reagan and the elder Bush) were happy to kill abroad in the name of ideological purity. I think historically neither the Left nor the Right has a monopoly on promotion of political violence.

      1. You have to distinguish State violence — war, even if the target of the violence is a single state actor — from private violence. The State claims a monopoly on the lawful use of violence. Political violence by private actors is a direct challenge to the State’s monopoly as well as being morally wrong from the point of view of human relationships. Since States can’t function if private elements can use violence to thwart the State’s attempts to govern, it is not hypocritical for it to severely punish private political violence at home while enthusiastically engaging in state violence against its enemies abroad. We citizens may need it to do both.

      2. But, I think, tallying up historical violence is important, but the violence happening tomorrow or next week is more so.

        When Islamic violence is discussed, someone always brings up the Crusades or the Inquisition. In truth, nobody worries that their child will encounter either of those on the way to school or playing in the park.

        I think the reason the killing in Charlotte resonates so much is that a great many people see those images and imagine their daughters in place of that poor young woman. The new left seem to be so invested in seeing everything only as conveying a political advantage to their side or the other that they fail to consider that some people see these things with real visceral horror and fear for their families.

  12. Politics be ******. This is serious. Jerry wrote “Here’s a hoagie place close to me in Chicago (we call them “subs”)”

    When I was an undergrad at UC in the early ’60s a shack on the Midway held a sandwich shop “The Grinder King.” It sold grinders, known outside of Chicago as hoagies and submarines, subs for short. Ever since then I’ve thought that grinder is a Chicagoism.

    I understand and accept that language changes over time. When did grinder leave Chicago?

    2. Having been born and raised in the Chicago area, I never heard the word “grinder” until I much later moved to New England.

      1. I believe both of you — thanks for commenting. Before I posted I looked for grinder as a synonym of hoagie, found that it is, as both of you pointed out, current in New England. That said, I ate too many grinders while in college. The Grinder King’s owner was a genial madman who had The Hall of the Mountain King from Grieg’s Peer Gynt music on a loop, insisted it was The Hall of the Grinder King. He may have been a New Englander.

  13. The far left and far right can be difficult to sort because they overlap in so many ways—tactics, rhetoric, core matters of concern. Our political spectrum is sometimes best conceived as a circle, particularly when discussing the violent activists among us.

    Paul Kingsnorth, the writer of the above Free Press article and far from violent, is an interesting example of how our political spectrum can confuse us as we try to bin people as left vs right. Kingsnorth came to Christianity only in the last five or so years. Before that, he would have been recognized as the globe-trotting, tree-hugging hippy hanging out with Wiccans, dabbling in Buddhism. You know the type.

    Here is how he now describes himself: “Over the years, I’ve had an excitingly diverse range of labels stuck on me, including: communist, anarchist, reactionary, crazy collapsitarian, woolly liberal, soy boy, nativist, cave-dweller, Luddite, Romantic, Anabaptist, left-wing oikophile, eco-socialist, eco-fascist, doomer, nihilist, ‘lower middle-class eco-toff’ and – my current favourite – ‘environmental activist turned apocalyptic mystic.’ My politics have in fact remained much the same for most of my adult life. … If you forced me to label myself at gunpoint, I might call myself a conservative hippy, an Orthodox Christian anarchist, or a reactionary radical.”

  14. Re the “Gays for Palestine” chicken crossing the road — whew! I expected roadkill. (Not to imply that roadlkill never ends up in a KFC….)

  15. Re the “joyful” elephants, no. They’re intensely frustrated that they can only plug up one ear at a time.

    1. Me too. But I read the meme as saying, “Here’s how much coffee you’ll need IF you [got only so many hours of sleep/haven’t slept at all].”

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