This is another catch-up issue of ‘Substack Notes’. I’ve been ingesting a lot of news and commentary recently but I perceive that folks don’t like to receive more than one email from this Substack per day. Honestly, once a day is probably too much!
I will release Part 2 of my shorty story ‘The Gift’ tomorrow. 1 or 2 days later I will send out my essay on the implications of a radical re-adjustment regarding the American black voting bloc-to competitive (Forty Acres and A Mule… or at Least a Little Political Leverage).
Of course unrealistic expectations exist. Like expecting that first stage of love to stay the same and giving up the second it changes. But romance? Loyalty, kindness, respect? These are not unrealistic. Neither is expecting love to last; we forget that when the explosion ends, it comes back in bursts, and simmers, quietly on, in the small things…
…maybe it’s hard to talk about love like that because it’s quiet. It’s not loud or theatrical like these influencers or TikToks or everything else that screams for our attention. But it’s there, it’s there.
It’s also irrational, falling in love. Hard to explain. Which is why all these checklists and calculations about what men and women want online have never made sense to me. Of all the couples I know who are in love, there’s no explaining it. They didn’t decide. There were no calculations about money, height or age; they threw out their checklists. And we know this, we know love is messy, but that’s scary, so we turn to all these dating gurus giving us graphs and statistics, analysing it all, calling it a market. Guide us toward guarantees! Feed our hunger for control that’s gotten so out of hand we’re now trying to predict the most beautifully unpredictable thing in the world. We’ve gotten so used to algorithms and machines optimising our entire lives we think we can hack something like falling in love—if we just follow the right steps life will deliver the right results. Love is so much more unthinking than that.
“The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama.” -
Over the [subsequent] decade… we have seen people get cancelled for refusing to use the right pronouns, for refusing to genuflect before the rainbow, for wearing red hats in public, for donating to the wrong political causes, for getting into arguments with black people, for being related to someone who used a racial slur, for voicing words in Chinese that sound like racial slurs, and on and on without rhyme, reason, or limiting principle.
The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity.
This is not merely an Internet phenomenon, with consequences limited to those who draw the terrible gaze of the beast with a million eyes. You have almost certainly felt this in your personal life, the subtle, steady pressure to bite your tongue in every social and professional situation, the knowledge that if you say too much, if you cross one of the myriad invisible, ever-shifting red lines in the left’s mutable cat’s cradle of taboos, you risk total social and professional death.
[Tim Walz] is an archetypal gelded progressivoid male, of the kind I came to know well during my years in American academia. Universities are full of male professors stitched after the pattern of Tim Walz. They labour under grievous testosterone deficiencies, they are terrified of conflict and they are embarrassed about their own masculinity. They are the kind of men who sit with their thighs pressed together so as not to manspread. You always think they’re harmless, because all it takes is a few sharp words to get them to shut up and because in personal conversation they have nothing to offer but slavering flattery and deference. In my experience, however, this breed is likely to be malign and dangerous. Everything you say to them goes in a little file that they use for their petty plotting. They’re always triangulating and scheming, they’re terrible gossips, and they’re perfectly happy to hurt themselves if only they can hurt you too.
As your weirdness increases, so does your incentive to have kids. If you like football and American Idol, you’re never really alone. You don’t need to build a Xanadu for yourself. But if you’re a lonely misfit, oddball, freak, or weirdo, then find a like-minded spouse and make new life together. Let the normals laugh at you. You’ll have each other.
America’s institutions are in a credibility free fall. The country’s “experts” blame disinformation on social media but anyone with eyes can see the real problem: science is being destroyed by politics, and America’s institutions themselves have become the world’s biggest disinformation super spreaders.
Imagine being Gavin Newsom. Your wife slept with Harvey Weinstein. Your in-laws hosted a fundraiser for Trump and fled from California to Ron Desantis’ Florida to escape your governance. Your ex-wife is engaged to Donald Trump Jr. You had an affair with your best friend’s wife. You almost got recalled because you dined at the French Laundry while locking down the state.
And to top it all off, your party shut you out of a presidential primary that you had a decent shot of winning against a senile old man and a word salad DEI hire, who leapfrogged your political career after serving as your DA when you were mayor of SF.
It’s enough resentment and ego blows to make you destroy California out of spite. Full House was only 30 years ago and reminds us of what he took from us.
By way of example for the extent of wokeism’s hold, let’s take The Economist’s authoritative-sounding treatment of the decline of wokeism and then contrast the text of The Economist’s piece with the charts from their own research. “The results are consistent,” The Economist intones. “America has passed ‘peak woke.’”
But then look at the “decline” of “woke terms in print media” (below)
And look at the “decline” in those who believe that “racial differences in outcomes are mainly due to discrimination” (below)
And look at the “decline” in “woke terms in social science papers” (below)
What The Economist has done is obviously absurd—comparing rates of “wokeism” only to the 2020-2022 “woke peak” as opposed to the pre-woke era.
A graphic from Gays Against Groomers… some people are so zealous in defense of gender ideology that the very possibility that people claiming to be trans could be pathological or predatory or disingenuous is dismissed outright. But we KNOW some of them are, and acknowledging that fact is something that all educators and policy-makers should do. It’s literally undeniable, regardless of your ideological attachments.
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Actually, you commented on one of my notes today or yesterday and I wanted to restack your comment with reference to your post and my own comment, but lost this your comment, it seems it dropped out of my notifications.. Do you remember this tour comment and where is it now?
Actually, you commented on one of my notes today or yesterday and I wanted to restack your comment with reference to your post and my own comment, but lost this your comment, it seems it dropped out of my notifications.. Do you remember this tour comment and where is it now?