FRIDAY short TAKES.

If everything is a crisis, does it follow that nothing is?  "You’d think people would be tired by now of these 'sky is falling' pronouncements, but apparently you'd be wrong given the sheer bulk of them, and the crazier-than-last-time feel most have."  The bulk of them exist to keep the punditry in work.  "I think of 'permacrisis' as as a political strategy to make people feel that we are always in special dire circumstances, justifying unusual emergency measures, and warranting the sacrifice of our personal pleasure and freedom."  If it's not fifteen days to slow the spread, it's security screening at the airport, or the 55 mph speed limit, or something else that warrants breathless coverage on the evening news, at least until Normals tire of it.  "A counter-narrative is brewing. Will it prevail over the dominant 'progressive' dispensation? No one knows for sure. I take the panic sweeping like a tsunami through the fetid corridors of the Left as a good sign. They are worried, which means that the rest of us have grounds for hope."  None too soon, either.  Corona compliance?  That was for the little people.  "The more we sounded the alarm bell the more we were demonized."  So it always is with credibility gaps.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  What the denial of coherent beliefs gets you.  "Western Civ is like a Sarah Lawrence grad with a nose-ring, trained up to despise her own history and culture, trafficking with the incubi of barbarism — the romance of 'edginess' — while playing with razor blades in anticipation of her own glorious suicidal psychodrama."

2.  Pop some popcorn!  "Joe Biden and his coterie of backers continue to insist that he wear a crown."

3.  A disturbance in the Force.  "Life, it seems to say, is more than light and dark, good and evil, heroes and villains—it's a series of individual choices that are not always so easily categorized."

4.  Uncanny cognitive dissonance.  "I feel somewhat puzzled by women who convert to Islam."

5.  They'll learn about crying with their mouths full.  "The left is made up with people who bring a bag of chips to a potluck meal and won’t stop bitching about the food everyone else actually made."

6.  They have done enough damage.  "The Thanksgiving holiday exposed the dysfunctional dumpster fire that is the Biden-Harris campaign."

7.  Sixty years of punitive liberalism.  "Americans lament the nihilism born from those who were incapable of accepting its senselessness."

8.  Faculty lounge rhetoric will not produce safe schools.   “It’s my hope in the days ahead we can find a way to have meaningful discussions about challenging topics with respect for each other’s diverse perspectives and shared humanity. Unless we can learn to see each other as people we will never be able to create a safe learning community.”

9.  Stop the cultural rot.  "For far too long we have allowed the system to fail and anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and disdain for Western culture to flourish."

10.  Stop affirming dysfunction.  "England is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality."  See also the leading writers of American literature.

11.  Is anyone surprised that politics divides?  "Compromise becomes impossible when every substantive debate devolves into an existential debate over ideological superiority."

12.  The abolition of adolescence.  "Do kids really need 'guidance' at a football game? Are they not able to figure out anything by themselves?"

13.  Why, indeed?  "Why, then, should we trust Trump with a second shot at driving the car?"

14.  And yet, Trumpian populism might be no worse than what the Professional-Managerial types have given us.  "They can’t make more of a hash of things than the philosophically inert and relentlessly self-indulgent global technocratic class has made in the last few decades, anyway."

15.  The populists keep winning elections.  "If you can’t talk about/think about/write about these developments without perpetually moralizing, it is hard to be an intelligent commentator today."

16.  Act like it.  “The university is a space where every premise you’ve ever had in your life should be torn down and you have to be forced to recreate it based on all the new things you learn.”

17.  Weeknight football.  "Why are NIU stadium seats so empty?"