I’ve been enjoying the Notes feature immensely. I never used Twitter very much. This was a self-protective strategy for my mental health, which I feel vindicated in adopting. Nevertheless, Substack Notes gives me an interesting roundup of recently-posted essays and articles and various thinkers’ reactions to them.
An interesting guest piece on @Noah Smith’s Substack which imbues me with (a little) confidence and faith in electoral resilience (the most important democratic mechanism, at the end of the day):
"The pandemic brought our dysfunctional public safety and education systems to the forefront of our politics: San Francisco’s school board elections have traditionally been a fairly inside baseball affair, because the percentage of San Franciscans with kids is famously small. However, the pandemic meant that a particularly ideological school board was left to handle a particularly fraught situation, and the results were…not pretty. General frustration with school closures and remote learning boiled over when board members generated national headlines over school renaming efforts denouncing Abraham Lincoln and bizarre tweets stoking racial resentment towards Asian-American students. The voters got the message that San Francisco’s educators had priortized ideology over their kids’ education and they didn’t like it, which is why the School Board recall succeeded with 70%+ of the vote and a ballot proposition urging SFUSD to reverse its removal of 8th Grade Algebra passed with 80%+ of the vote. This has been very damaging for the reputation of San Francisco’s “progressive” coalition.”
-Armand Domalewski
The Queer Theorists pushing for childhood sex ed and explicit materials and active promotion of gender confusion and sexual license are actually WORSE than Lorenz makes them seem. Here she tries to obfuscate and pretend that some credentials or expertise are necessary to keep porn out of schools.
The groomers, on the other hand, won't even discuss the issue. They stigmatize anyone who points out that changes are happening and pretend that they're not. "This isn't happening... and it's good that it is" is now the daily refrain of legacy media on a dozen cultural issues.
Reacting to:
@Sam Kahn on the media’s distortions and embellishments of a recent Trump speech:
I first read about the speech in The New York Times and learned the following: that Trump had predicted a “blood bath” if he lost; that he said “some migrants” were “not people” and were “animals.” And it was also strongly implied that Trump had lost his grip, that he was “discursive” and that the speech was utterly self-absorbed, with Trump “only sparingly” talking about the purported subject of the speech, the Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.
All that seemed clear-cut enough and fit a certain picture of what The New York Times calls “the doomsday vision” of Trump’s third presidential run. And that coverage was echoed in other bastions of the mainstream media. The Hill’s headline “Trump warns US will see ‘bloodbath’ if not reelected.” CBS: ‘Trump says there will be a bloodbath if he loses November election.”
So I was a bit surprised to actually watch the speech and see something different from what had formed in my mind. Don’t get me wrong. The speech terrified me. But it wasn’t because it was an unhinged septuagenarian ranting about a bloodbath.
What bothered me most was that the speech was composed, that Trump was reading his audience, that he clearly was campaigning effectively—and will be a dangerous, wily opponent for the Democrats. He did praise Moreno several times and tied Moreno closely to his own candidacy—which was all that Moreno needed out of him. In saying “I don’t know if you call them people in some cases,” he was talking, at least at that moment, about “MS-13” and gang members, as opposed to all “migrants.” The “animals” line referred to violent criminals. And, in context, it was clear that, in the most controversial line of the speech, he was talking about an economic “bloodbath.” The moment in question came during an extended section on auto workers and the car industry and Trump went into a riff saying, “Now if I don’t get elected it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole country.” Anybody watching the entire speech would have known that the skipped-over word in there was “economy.”
Leftists don’t necessarily have an issue with people being better looking in movies and video games than they are in real life; their problem is mainly the parts of the female body that men are most attracted to.
‘Privilege’, as a modern concept, mostly excludes: the poor, the poorly parented, the mentally ill, the addicted, those suffering from personality disorders, handicapped veterans, rural white folks, Muslim women, adoptees, etc., etc. This reveals that the Left is not primarily concerned about balancing the scales or discussing unearned advantage (after all, having two parents in your childhood home is one of the most profound advantages a person can have, as is being born in the United States, and those are never discussed). They’re concerned with using certain poorly-defined demographic groups as wedges to change our norms and institutions and gain power.
Similarly, the Left doesn’t really care about ageism or ableism or ‘pretty privilege’… When was the last time they complained about a dearth of old or unattractive characters in a film or a show? These are both categories which bear measurable extra social and financial burdens in the United States. Instead all we seem to hear is about ‘BIPOC’ or ‘Queer’ people. This is not about fairness or challenging assumptions. It’s about building constituencies that will be a solid base from which power can be grabbed and held.
Let’s act as is the race and sexuality and age and beauty and sex of characters are not of major importance (which means not race-swapping characters or feminizing stories for any purpose other than fictional effect)… and perhaps we will move toward a world in which these vague and irrelevant factors DON’T matter. They certainly shouldn’t.
It’s not an accident that Hillary Clinton is the public figure most associated with the pantsuit, an outfit that is a compromise between liberal ideals and reality. When a female politician puts one on, it’s not like wearing a sign that says “I hate men,” but it does indicate something about her values; that she would, for example, prefer her daughter go to law school and build a successful career over getting married young and having a large family.
…
How much one “sexualizes” women is among the most important cultural differences based on class and ideology that exist within American society. Think of blue collar men putting up pictures of scantily clad women in their workspaces. Law school was the first time in my life I was exposed to upper-class American culture, and I remember a guy once being shocked when I started graphically talking about a woman’s body. Where I grew up, that’s how men bonded! Appreciating women’s bodies too openly is coded as lower class and more conservative…
I’ve observed this as well. There is an upper class (of Leftist political ideas, cultural elitism, anti-patriotism, sexual normophobia, and distinct ambivalence about expressing the values of children and marriage… and then there is a working class (black, white, hispanic) which still cherishes female sexuality, male assertiveness, basic notions of hard work and earning one’s way, and is generally (not certainly not always) positive in their assessments of American capitalism and the military and police.
This division is the most profound schism in our country and it is one that is almost NEVER acknowledged or discussed in legacy media. After all… no one likes feeling like the out-of-touch rich asshole. So they display their luxury beliefs and pretend that they’re ‘fighting’ for black people or gay people or the poor. The fact that they don’t know any poor people (of any color) barely gives them pause.
A brilliant piece on normophobia by
@Mary Harrington: ‘Normophobia...’
ACLU, Once a Defender of Free Speech, Goes After a Whistleblower
In 2022, Seattle's City Council passed an ordinance mandating a minimum earnings floor for app-based food delivery drivers in the city. The law finally went into effect in January 2024, but so far the main result has been customers deleting their delivery apps en masse, food orders plummeting, and driver pay cratering.
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Heralded as a "first-of-its-kind" legislative breakthrough when it passed, the first two months of the ordinance's operation have provided a grim real-world Economics 101 lesson. First, the delivery companies were forced to add a $5 fee onto delivery orders in the city to cover the sudden labor cost increase. On cue, news stories started popping up of $26 coffees, $32 sandwiches, and $35 Wingstop orders in which taxes and the new fee comprised nearly 30 percent of the total.
Local news station King 5 reported that Seattle residents started deleting their delivery apps from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a 30-percent decline in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported 30,000 fewer orders within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.
In turn, this decrease in demand directly impacted the pocketbooks of the delivery drivers themselves. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings drop by half to $464.81 in a comparative week this year. Another reported consistently making $20 an hour prior to the ordinance, only to see his earnings likewise fall by more than half since its enactment.