Then there's the presidency. Donald Trump Brought This on Himself. "I so wish he could contain himself." Sometimes the opposition tells you what your best friends won't. "Conservatives have never managed to adopt as conventional wisdom the much simpler explanation that in 2020, a really disorganized and incompetent president blew a very winnable election, even though this level of chaos was typical of his whole presidency." It is time for establishment Republicans to recognize the truth. "Say in public those things about Donald Trump that you so often say in private."
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right?
The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. This fight is just beginning. Now the jesters are silent. "We traded the American republic that kept us free for centuries because the bureaucrats of our unelected Kemalist administrative state didn’t like the immaturity of a boastful man who dared defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016." The wrong people would win!
2. Irritable mental gestures. "The world of liberal elites is one of workaholism, in which family life is often downgraded as a priority, and in which spiritual life has little focus on it at all; it is also made joyless by constant self-surveillance and self-denial."
3. Enjoy the incoherence? "Progressives willfully see in imperfect but largely decent societies nothing but evil, injustice, and exploitation. Critical Race Theory and “wokeness” have replaced gratitude to our forebears and democratic self-respect, and new groups of people, alleged oppressors, are called to loathe themselves or to be banished from the civic and human community." Only until you win. “They’re only for subversion until they’re in power.”
4. It's the Age of Proprietary Truth. Until it isn't. "The whole month of Pride has fallen into cringe territory shockingly fast." A fake girl flashes fake boobies in front of a real booby, and all of a sudden the Jarrett regency announces standards. "The White House invited all these people for their own 'Pride' festival, and now they are shocked, SHOCKED, that the same public behaviors that conservatives have been pointing out have now showed up on the White House lawn???"
5. Can you teach physics on a frictionless chalkboard? "Friction is a property of the universe. Most of the things we do, and the way we do them, assume that friction is substantial. Well, so is transaction cost, which is the 'friction' of market processes."
6. Ordering people about is the idea. "Government doesn't do anything well. Whatever design motif or strategy it chooses, it will impose them in a heavy-handed manner."
7. When government orders people about badly, the people find a Trump. "He has been able to marshal understandable resentment of our current elites to shake the very core of our democratic processes in a way unprecedented in American history. And the elites — with their woke Kulturkampf, incompetence, overreach and bigotry — have legitimized him in ways I honestly never thought possible."
8. The intersectional faith displaces logic. "Indeed, it was politics that motivated these conclusions. The guidelines were written from a radical, intersectional perspective."
9. Intersectional psychology denigrates men. Women don't gain by it. "Like it or not, progressive women are stereotyped as next-gen hippies and therefore easy. Not easy going, just easy. It probably has something to do with how progressive women are always talking about being pro-sex and pro-abortion." Case in point: "She is at a loss because she wants to be with a masculine man but doesn't want to compromise her morals and values. She asks her followers if she is asking for too much when she requests a man she can be "equal" with while he still provides for her." She, too, has been had.
10. It's called the Fatal Conceit, and it generalizes. "The key tenet of highway planning is fundamentally flawed."
11. Why it matters: "Posting a video of Muslim children stomping all over the American flag would be considered 'Islamophobic,' but Muslim kids stomping on a Pride Flag is more challenging because it involves two 'oppressed' minorities. Sometimes the intersection is empty.
12. Ya think? "When a policy originally intended to compensate blacks for a long history of oppression has gradually morphed into efforts to cap the number of Asian students at selective universities, something has gone badly wrong."
13. Signal that virtue? "Now they can’t say I’m racist." The institutional rot is everywhere. "[Academic] administrators know their DEI staffs are insane, but will do nothing to stop it. Unless they get caught. Even then they won’t do much beyond damage control."
14. Not that the grant-grifters are much better. "A professor, he likes everything about the Democrats except that white male professors have the lowest priority for getting research money!"
15. Why shop class shouldn't be for kids on the dropout track. "Not only did it leave my ignorance of basic auto mechanics intact, but it enabled a certain tunnel vision on both sides of the divide."
16. Privilege is civilization. "The people with the biggest carbon footprint from air travel are, in global terms, a privileged minority."
17. The deprivation is the point. "It sometimes seems as if the last invention these people approved of was the wet blanket."
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