Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 21, 2025, and National Reptile Awareness Day. here’s a video of a very weird turtle, the mata mata turtle (Chelus fimbriata). The video is on FB and can’t be embedded, but if you click on the screenshot you can see the video. Wikipedia describes the turtle’s appearance, which takes advantage of crypsis (camouflage).
The appearance of the mata mata’s shell resembles a piece of bark, and its head resembles fallen leaves. As it remains motionless in the water, its skin flaps enable it to blend into the surrounding vegetation until a fish comes close. The mata mata thrusts out its head and opens its large mouth as wide as possible, creating a low-pressure vacuum that sucks the prey into its mouth, known as suction feeding. The mata mata snaps its mouth shut, the water is slowly expelled, and the fish is swallowed whole; the mata mata cannot chew due to the way its mouth is constructed.
Click below to see one:
Reader Divy, who runs a veterinary business with her husband Ivan, a business concentrating on reptiles, also sent in a photo with the caption:
Here is a picture of our pet Shingleback skinks (Tiliqua rugosa aspera), Boggy and Bindi. We’ve had Boggy since 2004, and we got Bindi in 2008 when she was 6 months old. Sadly, we lost Bindi last year, and we’re still so sad about it.
It’s also Apple Day, Garbanzo Bean Day, International Day of the Nacho (yes!), National Mezcal Day (double yes!), National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day, and World Bolognese Ragù Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT editorial board is now weighing in about what the the Democrats need to do to win future elections. The title of their long op-ed, called “The partisans are wrong: moving to the center is the way to win“. They begin with a cool moving graphic showing that in the last election 16 Representatives (13 Democrats and three Republicans) won their seats in Congress in districts that were predominantly from the other party. And all of the winners were moderates, which launches the editors’ message:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.
The evidence is vast. Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating extremist candidates, while Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who represents a state that reliably votes the other way in presidential elections. On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.
One way to see the pattern is to examine the 17 Democrats — 13 in the House, four in the Senate — who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won. Moderation dominated their campaign messages. Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration. Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada criticized other Democrats’ tolerance of illegal immigration. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats who had imposed needless regulation. Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.” No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these.
Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns. They are wrong, but their argument does contain an element of truth: As the country has become more polarized and many voters cannot fathom crossing over to the other party, persuasion has become harder. It is not impossible, though — and it remains far more effective than pursuing the fantasy that America has a latent left-wing or right-wing majority waiting to be inspired to turn out.
. . . As Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, said in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course.” She cited “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.” Although Mr. Trump won her district by seven percentage points, voters re-elected her.
The op-ed is long, informative, and correct. The sad part is that Democrats are moving away from the party itself, particularly young people. Regardless of the electoral success of people like AOC or Mamdani, if we want to win the House and Senate, and especially the Presidency, we need to stay towards the center. Damn the “progressives,” and full speed away!
*My friend and collaborator (we co-wrote a philosophy paper), the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry, has a good article in Quillette called “They Don’t Believe It Either,” with the subtitle “The ‘Gaza genocide’ calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the ‘stolen election’ hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence.” Maarten is a brave guy: not Jewish, he’s nevertheless defended Israel in the Gaza War on moral grounds, and has suffered professionally for his stand. (Belgian academia is rife with antisemitism.) His topic: dispelling the bogus accusation of genocide against Israel. An excerpt:
If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, the overwhelming majority of casualties are male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).
🧵GAZA FATALITY UPDATE: Hamas issued new list of 50,021 fatalities. Findings: (a) Fatalities age 13-55 are 72% men (b) Teen soldiers confirmed; males=65% of deaths age 13-17 (c) Natural deaths are ~8,300 of total fatalities. (4) IDF targeted combatants; NO genocide. Analysis: 1/ pic.twitter.com/gP2nl4ztLc
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) March 27, 2025
Israel also enabled the delivery of tens of thousands of trucks with food and medical supplies, organised humanitarian pauses and aid corridors, and even facilitated a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of the war. This is not the behaviour of a state attempting to wipe out a population group. Even the provisional ruling from the ICJ acknowledges that Israel delivered water, food, and medical assistance in Gaza throughout much of the conflict, behaviour inconsistent with charges of deliberate starvation.
From the very beginning of the conflict, Israel’s war objectives were unambiguously clear: recover its hostages and secure the surrender and disarmament of Hamas. Now that Hamas has released the surviving hostages it held in Gaza and has agreed to release the remains of the Israeli dead, the fighting has ceased. If Hamas disarms in accordance with Donald Trump’s peace place and plays no further part in Palestinian governance, the war will be over, just as Israel always said it would be once it achieved its objectives.
Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? Because Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracise, delegitimise, and boycott Israel.
The absurdity of the genocide charge should not obscure valid criticisms of the mistakes Israel made during this conflict. Particularly in the last few months, Israel’s miscalculations have been infuriating at times. The decision to wrest humanitarian aid from Hamas’s control and establish an alternative distribution system seemed to make sense at first, but the eleven-week aid blockade employed to put the screws to Hamas was a moral and strategic error. This kind of tactic was never likely to work with a jihadist organisation that employs human shields to maximise its own side’s civilian casualties. The cynical exploitation of Palestinian suffering to bring international pressure to bear on Israel is central to Hamas’s strategy.
Nevertheless, nothing Israel has done over the past two years reveals an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—as the UN definition of genocide stipulates. It is fine to criticise Israel for taking insufficient steps to protect civilian lives in a particular operation, or to question the proportionality judgements made before executing a strike. But the very framing of these criticisms implies that the avoidance of civilian deaths is integral to the moral calculus of the IDF. The only genocidal party to this conflict is Hamas, which fantasises about the eradication of Jewry in its apocalyptic foundational covenant, and which has openly vowed to repeat the 7 October pogrom as soon as the opportunity arises.’
This explanation is particularly insightful:
The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the wilful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel, even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
What can I say?—Maarten’s right. When I hear people accuse Israel of genocide (and ignore the fact that Hamas deliberately made genocide of the Jews an object in its founding charter), I write those people off as obtuse. For the accusation is both false and also a sign of virtue signaling. It is a token of wokeness. For sure Maarten will get into even more hot water for writing this article!
*I thought Trump was starting to be more negative towards Putin and favorable to Zelensky, but now he’s apparently told the Ukrainian President to give up land to the Russians and meet other demands of Putin. What the deuce?
“He said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will destroy you if you don’t agree now,” one of the people said. “Zelensky had his maps and everything, and he was explaining it to him but [Trump] wanted nothing to do with it.”
Trump listened but was not responsive to the Ukrainian message, the person said. “It was pretty much like ‘No, look guys, you can’t possibly win back any territory. … There is nothing we can do to save you. You should try to give diplomacy another chance.’”
. . .As European leaders issue proclamations of support for Zelensky, hisWhite House disappointment is set to dominate diplomatic talks this week, including a European Union summit Thursday.
Just days after musing about giving Zelensky Tomahawk missiles to strike Russia, Trump’s latest swerve on the war appeared to stem from a call with Putin last week. Putin demanded that Kyiv surrender Donbas as a condition to end the war.
A European official said Trump moved from talk of long-range missiles before the call to land swaps in his meeting with Zelensky. “Now he was saying the U.S. needs Tomahawks and doesn’t want to escalate.”
A European diplomat briefed on the White House exchange described itas a mess and said Trump also “went on and on” about “his grievances of not having gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Good lord! Trump’s surrendering land to Putin is not going to help him win the Nobel Peace Prize and, in my view, the cease-fire in Gaza isn’t enough for the Prize: the peace there has to be more lasting before it counts as “peace” (of course, Obama did bupkes to get the Prize). On moral grounds the U.S. should be supporting Ukraine as far as it can.
*I can’t believe that thieves broke into the Louvre in broad daylight, using a truck equipped with a ladder, climbed up to the second floor and smashed glass containing priceless historical jewelry, then making their escape on motobikes. How could that happen? The NYT describes the heist:
The police in France were racing against time as they searched on Monday for four thieves who carried out a daring heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, aware that the chances of recovering the stolen jewels risked diminishing with every hour.
The robbery on Sunday stunned France and has raised uncomfortable questions about security at one of the world’s most famous cultural institutions, which remained closed on Monday.
Much about the heist remained unclear. But the authorities said that organized crime was most likely involved and that investigators were looking into how the museum’s alarm systems functioned.
Many are now worried that the thieves, ignoring the jewelry’s historical value, might break the pieces apart to sell the stones on the black market and melt down their precious metals for sale.
“This morning, the French people, for the most part, feel as though they have been robbed,” Gérald Darmanin, the country’s justice minister, told France Inter radio on Monday. “In the same way that when Notre-Dame burned, it was our church that was burning — even if you weren’t Catholic — such an incredible jewelry robbery at the Louvre looks bad.”
“We cannot completely secure all locations,” Mr. Darmanin added. “But what is certain is that we have failed.”
. . .They took eight precious pieces of jewelry, including a royal sapphire tiara, necklace and matching earring; a royal emerald necklace and its matching earrings; and a tiara and a brooch worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.
But they dropped a ninth item, which the authorities recovered later: Empress Eugénie’s crown, which features 1,354 diamonds, 1,136 rose-cut diamonds and 56 emeralds.
They haven’t provided a net worth for the items, but that may be impossible because of their historical value but they say this about one item:
But one of them, a decorative bow with jeweled tassels that also belonged to Empress Eugénie, is listed by the Society of Friends of the Louvre as worth 6.72 million euros, or about 7.8 million dollars. The Society, a private sponsor that helps the museum buy objects of artistic or historical value, helped acquire the bow from the United States in 2008.
And given that, the thieves may well take the jewels out of their setting and sell them, along with the gold and other precious metals used. That’s why the cops are racing for time. But it’s unthinkable to me that security wasn’t better (the Louvre was OPEN then), and nobody noticed the truck with the ladder pulling up to the museum.
*The AP considers Shohei Otani’s great postseason pitching and hitting performance on October 17 and ponders whether it was really the greatest one-game sports performance in history. Here are some possible comparisons:
To put his performance in more simplistic terms: There are three main components to baseball — pitching, hitting and fielding. Ohtani pitched for two-thirds of the game and allowed the fewest runs possible. He had four opportunities at the plate and did the best thing possible in three of them. The other was a walk.
It would have been hard for him to do any better unless he pitched more innings — or maybe played in the outfield and robbed a couple homers.
When Don Larsen threw his perfect game for the New York Yankees during the 1956 World Series, he dominated on the mound only. And it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. He went 0 for 2 with a sacrifice at the plate that day, according to Baseball Reference.
Other comparisons involve fewer skills:
Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a game. Carli Lloyd had a hat trick in the first 16 minutes of a World Cup final. Secretariat’s 31-length win at the Belmont was so jaw dropping even non-horse racing fans can understand the enormity of it. You could argue those three — or even Larsen — were more dominant on those days than Ohtani. But their performances didn’t combine two increasingly incompatible skills in such a wondrous way.
Comparable examples of using more than one skill:
In the NFL, passing and running are distinct skills, but plenty of players possess both. Colin Kaepernick threw for 263 yards and ran for 181 in a 2013 playoff game. Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes have both surpassed 500 yards passing plus running in a game, but the fact that multiple players have done it makes it less of a novelty.
The reverse — a great running back who also throws — is less common. Darren McFadden was a two-time Heisman Trophy finalist at Arkansas, dominating games on the ground while also taking snaps at quarterback in the Wildcat formation. He once tied an SEC record with 321 yards rushing in a game — and also threw a TD pass that night.
The article ponders other performances (soccer is presumably out of the running), and winds up with baseball again:
It’s probably easier to compare Ohtani to other baseball performances. The two previous pitchers with three-homer games were Jim Tobin with the Boston Braves in 1942 and Guy Hecker with the Louisville Cardinals in 1886. Both pitchers allowed five runs in complete-game victories.
Perhaps the closest feat to Ohtani’s came in 1971, when Rick Wise of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a no-hitter against Cincinnati while also hitting two homers. Although it wasn’t a postseason game, Wise is one player with a legitimate case to have bested Ohtani’s effort last week.
And later in that 1971 season, Wise pitched a 12-inning complete game — retiring 32 batters in a row at one point — and won the contest himself with a walk-off hit.
Rick Wise’s performance is comparable, but he pitched a complete game while hitting two homers. That’s one less homer than Ohtani, but he pitched a full game. Wise, I think, is tied with Ohtani. And I won’t consider other sports, which I don’t know as well as baseball (which has been very, very good to me).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is beefing even though she doesn’t eat grapes. Or maybe she’s just observing.
Hili: The grapes have been picked. Only the ones no one wanted are left.
Andrzej: I pick them sometimes. They’re really sweet.
In Polish:
Hili: Winogrona zebrane, zostały takie, których nikt nie chciał.
Ja: Czasem je sobie zrywam, są bardzo słodkie.
*******************
A letter to the editor found by Ant (not sure where it came from) and posted on Facebook:
From The English Language Police:
From Jesus of the Day. You better know your Bible if you use these:
Masih has resumed tweeting. Read the full text (reading time: 1.5 minutes)
I love you, America!
In this photo are two faces of the same regime of terror.
One was the head of Revolutionary Guard in Iran, Hossein Salami, he ordered my assassination. The other was the man sent to kill me on U.S. soil, at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to… pic.twitter.com/Rmbjva3G5J
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 19, 2025
From Luana. Take care of any jumping spiders in your house: they are awesome, cute, and harmless.
This is Ocho. Ocho lives in my bathroom and hangs out on my orchid plant. Every day I soak a Q-Tip in water and put it down for him wherever he is (on the plant or behind the toilet or on the vanity) and he comes running over and gets a drink. Was my first reaction to smash him?… pic.twitter.com/dDbq6BZjyq
— Mr PitBull (@MrPitbull07) October 19, 2025
. . . and another from Luana. I suspected Greta was making stuff up:
Breaking: The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirms Greta never reported any abuse to the Swedish diplomats who repeatedly visited her in Israeli custody. Israeli court transcripts likewise show she made no such claims before the judge.
Instead, she refused to sign a deportation… pic.twitter.com/Ytar4dJRgq
— Daniel Schatz (@drdanielschatz) October 18, 2025
From Malcolm: cat plays with a Roomba, imitating it:
Tiny kitten plays hide-and-seek with a robot vacuumpic.twitter.com/wEaqA7bBam
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025
One from my feed; cat crazy hour way too early:
cats at 3am: pic.twitter.com/xvw6p1fv2o
— Cats with Aura 😺 (@catwithaura) October 19, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial
A Dutch Jewish girl and her mother were both gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. The girl was three years old, and would have been 87 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-21T10:53:44.489Z
One post from Dr. Cobb, and it’s a good one. Click screenshot to go to the original:
Click below to see the obscene video that our President posted on Truth Social, showing him dumping feces on the “no kings” protestors. Because it only embeds part of the “tweet,” I’ll put the YouTube video below that:
OY! THE PRESIDENT!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned if at all. -Martin Gardner, mathematician and writer (21 Oct 1914-2010)
Probably the first writer I actively read (although I didn’t know who he was until I much older). He wrote stories and the science pieces for Humpty Dumpty magazine, a subscription of which I received from my grandparents during the mid-sixties when I was a pre-schooler.
I also read him avidly as a kid, in Scientific American.
The first book I read by him was Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, a great, informative and often funny book
The Annotated Alice was my introduction to Gardner. I had just read the Alice books for the first time (I tried them as a kid and found them boring; I tried again as an adult and loved them) and then read Gardner’s take and was amazed at how many jokes were hidden in the books. It not only deepened my appreciation for Lewis Carroll, it made me a fan of Gardner and annotated literature as well.
The earliest memory I have of Martin Gardner is of him writing about hexaflexagons.
A flexagon is a strip of paper folded and pasted back onto itself, in a particular manner, to form a sort of disk which can be manipulated to show or hide different surfaces. Sort of a cross between a Mobius strip and a Rubik’s cube.
From Wikipedia
1956 was way too early for me to have read the original article. Mr. Martin must have revisited the topic when I was very much older.
I very, very highly recommend his book, “The Musings of a Philosophical Scrivener.”
It was from reading that book that I became aware of Miguel Unamuno’s great book, “The Tragic Sense of Life.”
True as far as it goes, but excludes Hypatia, Noether, M Curie, etc.
The ‘letter to the editor’ is from Viz magazine. Their Top Tips and Letterbocks columns are hilarious.
https://uk.pinterest.com/mgregory6272/viz-top-tips/
In other news the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (two in the majority, one concurring) overturned the District Court’s injunction against the deployment of National Guard to Portland. It’s worth reading for the narrative of action against Federal agents in Portland and for the criticism of the District Court in cherry-picking the evidence it used in determining there was no need for the National Guard. The opinion is HERE.
For Democrats to move to the center, they would actually have to work with the GOP in Congress and the Administration on some issues. A good start would be to recognize that the majority of voters supports deporting illegal aliens and to stop pretending that enforcing the law is fascism.
“A good start would be to recognize that the majority of voters supports deporting illegal aliens…”
That might be a little simplistic. For example, a majority of voters favors a simple path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for a decade or longer, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. A majority of voters favors a simple path to citizenship for current DACA recipients. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for a bipartisan agreement on immigration was that Republicans insisted on allocating money for the “wall” that Trump assured us multiple times would be paid for by Mexico, and which pretty much proved to be worthless in those places where it was actually built. I have seen little evidence that the Trump administration cares about what a majority of voters thinks. This is a guy who still insists that he won the 2020 election.
At the same time, you may be ignoring the fact that the last two Democratic presidents deported large numbers of illegal immigrants and would-be immigrants. Obama was called the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Biden tried to follow the law and court rulings on refugees and asylum, but ultimately deported more illegal immigrants in his final year than Trump did in 2019.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o
I’ve been saying for years that the way to beat the other side when they become more extreme is to move to the centre. You keep all your own voters and attract those from the other side who are unhappy with the move to the extreme. That not only works, it avoids the positive feedback loop that has been evident in politics for a while – one side moves more leftward/rightward, and then the other moves further in the opposite direction. Hence polarisation and distasteful politics on both sides of the aisle.
Nice that the NYT is finally catching up!
Have to be careful, though. In low-turnout electorates, a centre-seeking party may not draw enough actual voters to its column (as opposed to people who make supportive noises to pollsters) to replace the partisans who stay home on Election Day, jilted by their party’s abandonment of its sacred principles.
This is especially risky for the Democrats where “moving to the centre” is racially coded. Dare they make a historic gamble of alienating a voting bloc that goes 90% for them albeit with low turnout? It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party isn’t stuck with DEI and affirmative action and at least (emptily) promising redistributive reparations if it wants to “have their votes for the next 200 years”, as LBJ boasted in 1964. But why should anyone else vote for them?
Which leftist policies can the Democrats abandon in their tack to the centre that won’t further de-motivate black voters? Climate change? Trans ideology? Tax “reform”?Enough to draw centrists? They are also afraid of their own activists don’t forget. The Party will need to purge them, as Canada’s New Democrats did to its Marxist “Waffle” faction. But are American political parties structured with enough top-down autocratic leadership to pull that off? Can they do without the donor money tied to those now ejected activist causes?
The alternative is to continue to move the left towards outright communism, and the right towards corporatist totalitarianism. I’d rather avoid both those things, plus I would like to see whichever side I am voting out lose, so I do need the other party to have a winning strategy.
Political parties are private clubs organized to seek public power. Their electoral strategy is whatever they think will win elections, not at all what will necessarily attract the moderate median voter or appeal to broad swathes of the potential electorate in a civic engagement of the popular will, nor to give the voter a “real choice.” The lower the turnout, the less each party can afford to care what the centrist voter thinks. It must hang onto its base. If over-all turnout is, say, 20% because of voter disengagement, the party that gets 90% of its partisans to vote will defeat its opponent who could muster only 85% because it compromised on some value held dear. The outcome might have been very different if all eligible voters had voted. But they didn’t. Only if turnout is high will fickle voters dominate over committed partisans.
Yes, this is how extremist parties get in, through broad voter disengagement. (And how organizations get captured by activists.) But you can’t expect the parties to fix this by moderating their policies. I reiterate that if turnout is already low, the losses to defection will outweigh the gains from increasing turnout through moderation. They won’t do it. I can see democracies dying this way as turnout dwindles. Politics becomes a spectator sport, like hockey, where the outcome doesn’t really matter to anyone but the players and sponsors. And the teams don’t care what the fans think of them as long as they’re making money from that committed tiny minority who buy tickets.
The other remedy is the rise of a centrist third party. But third parties are like passenger trains and bicycling to work. Everyone agrees that they are great ideas and deserve our support….from other people as a public service. Since few do give that support with their own money and effort, third parties fail.
Moving to the center is going to me hard for (some) Democrats. Seth Moulton (D-MA) said “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that”. For his relatively tame remarks, his campaign manager (Matt Chilliak) quit, there were demonstrations against him, he was denounced by the governor of Massachusetts (Maura Healey), his mayor (Kim Driscoll), and was called a “Nazi collaborator” by the head of the local Democratic party (Liz Bradt).
Correction. The mayor of Salem was Dominick Pangallo, not Kim Driscoll.
Leslie, your remarks about party strategy in low-turnout elections are relevant for primaries in the US.*
It seems to me, though, that you don’t have a good idea of what black voters in the US want. For instance, black voters do not support affirmative action in higher education. I would be very surprised to learn that black voters care more about climate change than any other ethnic group, or that black voters support the radical trans agenda (black voters tend to be more socially conservative).
I recommend (it’s not long):
Polarization in U.S. politics starts with weak political parties. Yale News, Nov 17, 2020
Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale, says weak political parties are responsible for the polarization in American politics.
https://archive.li/fqdGu
And what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: these remarks on Trump also apply to the Democracts (and their fringe voters).
Cogent article, thanks. Yes, your primaries illustrate my argument nicely.
I remain unconvinced that black voters reject affirmative action generally but I will take your word for it. The test will be if the Democrats are willing to dismantle DEI and the clandestine remnants of affirmative action if doing so polls poorly with black voters. Just don’t conflate homosexuality with trans advocacy, even though that’s what the trans advocates do with their “LGBTQ rights.” They aren’t equivalent on the political spectrum. It is possible to loathe the one and valorize the other, as Iran does. A hard needle to thread if homosexual candidates are shunned but trans candidates are embraced as having at least tried to fix their homosexuality instead of celebrating it.
As to what insulates strong political parties from extremism, I don’t think it’s the difference in representativeness. Canadian parties are highly unrepresentative, totally dominated as they are by the personalities of the leaders selected in private closed conventions held whenever a party wants to select a new leader. Not at all like your primaries and quadrennial conventions. Whether in government or opposition, the party leader holds in his hands the political future of every MP in his party. Loyalty and conformity with the policy platform are enforced rigidly. All party leaders are every bit as autocratic as Donald Trump, but they have even more power than he does over those in office or who want to run for it. Trump does it by personality and intimidation. Canadian party leaders do it by the internal rules of their parties and the willingness of Canadian politicians to be dictated to.
Crucially the leader also determines who can run under the party banner in an election. Candidates are nominated by their local riding associations involving a handful of people – no public primary votes — but the party leader can veto a candidate whom he sees as hurting the national fortunes of the party as a whole. This is probably the biggest brake against extremism. Even if the local yokels love you, if people in Toronto won’t vote for the party because you are espousing an extreme scary personal hobby horse that reflects badly on the party, you’re out. But this is highly undemocratic, obviously. 😉
I don’t think “unrepresentativeness” plays a role in extremism, rather it’s this very feature of Canadian party leaders that makes them so strong in combating it. Sticking with the numbers for the 2016 U.S. election (as the article does) I can show you that Donald Trump’s 5% nomination vote made him 12.5 times as broadly representative in his nomination as Prime Minister Mark Carney was in his leadership contest this year. His 46% direct popular vote in his election made him 285 times as representative as Carney in his. What combats extremism is instead the power of the party leaders to demand electable candidates. The national perspective of the party leader allows him, requires him, to weed out extremist candidates who will make all his other candidates less electable and cost him the chance at leading the government.
Re the Waffle faction —
(1) I’ve now learned something quirky about Canadian political history.
(2) My first thought was about maple syrup, and whether their opponents were the Pancake faction.
In more Trump news, the president of Colombia now claims that a Colombian fisherman was murdered by one of Trump’s boat attacks. In response Trump promptly cut off aid and hit Colombia with punitive tariffs.
The Colombian president said that the boat was adrift after an emergency and was sending emergency signals when it was attacked.
As for the genocide charge against Israel, I recommend this comprehensive 300-page scientific study: “Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025”
A PDF version is freely downloadable here: https://besacenter.org/debunking-the-genocide-allegationsa-reexamination-of-the-israel-hamas-war-2023-2025/
An article on the report you cite:
The Genocide Libel
A new report from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies separates verifiable facts from politically motivated fiction in Gaza.
https://quillette.com/2025/10/09/the-genocide-libel-besa-report-israel-gaza/
From Wikipedia:
The Begin–Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) is an Israeli think tank affiliated with Bar-Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and supported by the NATO Mediterranean Initiative, conducting policy-relevant research on Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs, particularly as they relate to the national security and foreign policy of Israel and regional peace and stability. The center’s mission is to contribute to promoting peace and security in the Middle East, through policy-oriented researches on national security in the Middle East. It is located at the Social Sciences Faculty of Bar-Ilan University.
Yes. Judging from the excerpts, Maarten Boudry is correct. (I look forward to reading the full article in Quillette.) Boudry’s idea that the genocide hoax has its equivalent in the “stolen election hoax” may be correct as far as it goes, but this theory is only part of the story. Why would the left come to accept the genocide hoax so readily? It’s because the believers in the genocide hoax have been vulnerable to that other longstanding hoax that if the Jews are involved, the Jews are at fault. Like a superconductor, antisemitism allows the genocide hoax to thrive without resistance. This gives both the left and the right a license to believe that Israel is in the wrong.
Putin, Zelensky, and Trump. Why does Trump seem to be reeling from one position to the next without an apparent center. It’s probably because Trump cares less about who wins than about ending the conflict itself. He may want to end the war in order to get credit for ending the war. But even if he’s not seeking credit and cares only that the bloodshed end, it appears that he’ll go this direction one day, another direction the next, in order to effect a truce. That explains his wobbly behavior.
Finally, I love the hilarious video of the insane cats at 3:00 AM. But can anyone tell me why that woman has a camera trained on her bed at night?
Re “Trump … Putin … What the deuce?”, that’s probably the wrong card. He’s the joker, in almost all senses of the word: fool, buffoon, trickster, “The Clown Prince of Crime”, you name it. What does his birth certificate say the J really stands for? 🙂
In reading the Wikipedia about Jokers — I was suddenly struck with curiosity as to how they came to be living in packs of cards — this sentence jumped out at me:
So there. He trumps the Right Bower! (In the Southern Ontario farm country we didn’t use the Joker.) The Joker is the trickster and satirist, not the village idiot.
Interesting! And although I often refer to him as iDJT, in this case it would have been inappropriate since the “fool” /”buffoon” is the court jester, no doubt a rather difficult and nuanced job if you want to keep your head.
And I looked up “what the deuce”: deuce here is a euphemism for the devil, which seems another appropriate coincidence.
This just in from a friend of mine:
“The Times editorial of a couple of days ago (“America Still Has a Political Center, and It’s the Key to Winning”) is a foul smelling load and the kind of pandering to on-the-fence politicians that isn’t meeting the moment.”
I agree.
Sorry, but this is just name-calling without an argument. If you think the editorial is a “foul-smelling load” (not a great simile!), you should explain why.
Barely-credible factoid: a 1970’s religious cult actually believed that they were so holy that their excrement literally literally did not stink. Maybe their leaders suffered from anosmia? Maybe they were more delusional than other cults?
Wise had a no-hitter (one of ~326 in baseball) whilst Ohtani’s 3 homers performance was one of 480.
According to this, Mr. Otani is one of only two pitchers to have hit three HRs in a single game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_leaders_in_home_runs_by_pitchers
Or did I misunderstand your 1 in 480 statistic?
Maarten Boudry is I think absolutely correct when he draws parallels between the left wing claim that “Israel is committing genocide” and the right wing assertion that “the election was stolen,” but I can’t go along with the implication that neither side really believes it. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority probably does believe it, ignoring overwhelming contrary evidence not because they think evidence isn’t the point but because, as usual, they don’t trust the sources.
Absurd claims (and I’ll add in “some women have penises” and “the earth is 6,000 years old”) don’t really seem absurd to the ideologue. They look like common sense supported by science and history. It’s just that the usual caution against demonizing the opposition has been danced on and thrown out the window. When skeptics are haters with no moral sense, anything they bring up is bound to be tainted, they’ll have found a way.
There’s still a gulf between making bad arguments in pursuit of the truth and taking the postmodernist stance that there is no truth. While some of the extremists jump over that divide, I think the hoi polloi is firmly entrenched in dragging out the bs charts, quotes, and studies before flouncing off shaking their heads.
That was a genius move. What kind of imbecile would try to rob a highly guarded facility in broad daylight out in the open? Non, must be workers. Ce n’est rien.
I would suggest that Masih Alinejad change her name and go into hiding. These recommendations are based only on safety considerations. I have zero sympathy for her persecutors.
I favor resolving the war in the Ukraine by plebiscites. My guess is that Kiev and the area around Kiev would vote to stay in the Ukraine. The far east (of the Ukraine) would vote to join Russia (I guess). Critically, Crimea would probably vote to join Russia. Plebiscites were successfully used to resolve the final status of Alsace and Lorriane (my name is common in Alsace, none of my ancestors came from there). Does this put my position closer to Zelensky, Trump, or Putin? Probably, not Putin. Not sure about the other two.
Some ironically, my family lives in Sebastopol (CA). Of course, the town where they live was named after the other one. The one in California is not notably connected to the other one. For the record, I have actually been to Kiev (and Moscow) and have friends from Kiev.
I favor resolving the war by Russia abiding by the Budapest Memorandum from 1994. I understand Putin ignores it completely. But it is what really should happen. It is a given that Putin betrays every single agreement that does not benefit him historically, and I have no reason to believe he will change anytime before his future obituary.
As my preferred method is completely unrealistic, I agree that plebiscites should be used.
The issue is what kind of plebiscite? One where the entire country of Ukraine votes? Or one where each area occupied by Russia has the plebiscite coordinated by the conquerors and thereby we have to trust Putin cronies to accurately report the vote totals in Crimea, Donbas, etc.? Will the Russia Army soldiers get to vote, or only the previous inhabitants? We know the voting in Russia is a total farce.
What happens if they choose one plebiscite for all of Ukraine and Russian-run votes in Crimea, Donbas, etc. count 40 million votes for joining Russia. That is just larger than the entire population of Ukraine. Would we count that as valid? If anyone thinks Putin wouldn’t try this, they are delusional.
The election in 2019 went to a run-off and Zelenskyy won 74.96% of the valid vote in the run-off. He serves as the representative of all Ukraine based on this large majority of Ukrainians. In the absence of safe and accurate voting, I take his decision as the best indicator the world can make of what Ukrainians want as a whole.
For the record, I have never been to Kiev. I have been to Moscow. Spent a month working there in 1998. I loved it. I worked with a team of great Russians (and two Americans) and visited a bunch of sites after work and on the weekends. Pre-Putin.
I see two problems with your idea. Changing the sovereign borders of a nation by plebiscite would a) be a recipe for guaranteed international chaos as virtually every nation has ethnic, religious, language, and historical, etc, districts, populations, and resentments and b) it would essentially be rewarding the Russian war of aggression.
In International law, there is an essentially sacrosanct precept which has been used for at least 100 years to prevent such chaos, which is known as uti possidetis juris. It says that the borders of a new nation are to be inherited from the previous highest functioning governmental entity.
Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian SSR to the Ukraine SSR in 1954. When the USSR dissolved, Crimea the new independent nation inherited the borders of the previous highest functioning governmental entity – which was the Ukraine SSR, regardless of the fact that the people of Crimea felt and spoke Russian. And this is why the nations of the world (and the UN) considers the Russian takeover of Crimea illegal.
Interestingly, uti is why Israel inherited the borders that the Mandate for Palestine gave it, and why virtually no countries recognized the sovereignty of Jordan over the West Bank in 1949. Which is why it is so spectacularly hypocritical of the UN to refer to Israel as the “occupying power” wrt the West Bank today.
As much as I dislike Trump, he is right on the higlighted part:
Ukraine does not have the military manpower to win back large chunks of the Ukrainian territory Russia controls now. We have a stalemated war of attrition that the Ukrainians are more likely to lose than the Russians.
Until very recently no-one thought Ukraine had the military power to destroy a significant chunk of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Cannon fodder quantity is less decisive than it used to be.
That’d be ideal Frank but I’m not sure it is possible. Main problems are constitutional (apparently they can’t have elections in a time of war) and … well you can’t RUN an election when the bombs and shaheed drones are literally falling from the sky. We don’t hear enough about it unless one follows it specifically, but the Russians are MONSTERING Ukraine, some nights they send 100 or more drones/rockets a night.
That said, I agree some areas in the East might indeed want to be part of Russia or moreso, Ukrainians everywhere might regard the loss of 15pc of their country for peace as a decent trade off.
best to you Frank
D.A.
NYC
If would want Crimea, but I doubt that the Ukraine is going to get it. It turn out that I have ties (quite indirect) to Crimea. Years ago, I played an airplane game written in St. Petersburg, but set in Crimea. I claim to know every field and tree in Crimea (not really true), but only from the air. I have also read the memoirs of Hans von Luck. He spoke Russian and was a POW (for five years) in Crimea.
I would tend to want Crimea because it is scenic and has ports. By contrast, the far east of Ukraine is not nearly as nice.
‘If’ should be ‘I’
Matamatas are indeed deeply weird. I was bitten by one once (it got a bit over-excited at feeding time) – the strangest bite I’ve ever had, like being attacked by a rubber vacuum cleaner. No damage done, it let go immediately.
Seeing the picture of the shingleback skinks also brought back memories. We had four in the lab where I did my Master’s work, and they were real charmers – tame and gentle. Very quick to notice when a human was eating something and to beg for a bit – something I’ve never seen in a reptile before.
In other news on X, James Esses reports that a phantom sticker(er) in the biology department at Oxford has been placing quotations from famous thinkers over various EDI noticeboards: https://x.com/jamesesses/status/1980298054105477172
Department management is treating this as “hateful”. If this person does not voluntarily submit to re-education for wrongthink, they will be expelled.
From the Paris jewel heist I gather that Les Misérables has taken on a new meaning.
Claudine Gay has a citation count of 2,600. By contrast Alan Garber has citation count of nearly 20,000. Predictably, Alan Garber has authored or co-authored many books. The book count for Claudine Gay was/is zero.