Substack Notes, Vol. 11.2
A New Era
I’ve been very busy recently and haven’t spent as much time reading or writing notes and I’ve developed quite a backlog. This selection will include notes from mid-October until late November. Many of them will seem quite stale given the contemporary media cycle-but that cycle is frantic and insane. Relax, and let my notes transport you back to the golden, barely recalled days of early November…
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Oct. 22nd, 2024
I was struck by something as I read the interesting piece (below) by : I see ENDLESS ‘science’ articles about anthropogenic climate change… but we know that there are other factors acting upon the climate-solar weather, geological subsidence, global cycles., etc.
I never read about any of them. Like not ever. Could that be because there are no policy imperatives connected to them? Could it be that ALL (or almost all) of the ‘science’ articles about climate change exist only to push a political narrative?
I think I read that 8/10 Ivy League graduates support price controls (and artificially created shortages) to combat climate change. What a convenient stance for our wealthiest citizens to take (also the wrold’s biggest consumers of goods and energy, I should note).
The day I see rich kids NOT buying clothes on Shein or abstaining from commercial air travel or growing their own food is the day I will begin taking climate change activists seriously.
Oct. 24th, 2024
:The uselessness of masculinity?
…Benenson, expressing compassion for men and boys, thought it unfortunate that society had not “come up with more community-based ventures for men” (28:20) such as tree-planting or recycling to keep them productively occupied. One can only shudder at the thought of university-educated women directing such ventures.
Like Williamson and Benenson, Reed seems never to have encountered the millions of American men who use their strength and skills to build and maintain the vastly complex transportation, construction, energy, automation, manufacturing, food, and sanitation networks that make modern life possible. He seems genuinely to believe that qualities such as physical toughness, stoicism, and interest in technology are relics of the past with no connection to modern manhood.
If women aren’t flooding in to firefighting and road paving, sewer repair and long-haul trucking, according to this vision, it isn’t because men are more inclined for such essential physical work. In the progressive view, men’s relation to machines and physical competence can only be ironic and postmodern. Not just the lack of respect but the utter incomprehension are staggering...
Oct. 25th, 2024
:Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung”). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay.
In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.
Lol
Oct. 28th, 2024
:Regardless of who wins, these two trends will delegitimize Democrats as the party of the working class or people of color:
Black and Latino men defecting in larger numbers than ever. This cancels the monopoly the party claims on anti-racism and civil rights. You can’t have this many defections and claim you’re still representative of people of color.
Men in general without degrees - this group has fallen behind compared to women with degrees (even the NYT has shown this), and their building resentment isn’t suitable for anyone, especially women who want to form families and anyone who is against gun violence. Young, disaffected men without strong social ties are a danger to society and to themselves. Working-class and poor women have plenty of government and social support, but single men without degrees have none.
The Harris campaign is not trying to convince these people but to shame them into voting for her. Shaming people never works, as Dems themselves should know through their efforts to eradicate shame from every area of life. As usual, there is a double standard on this. If the above two trends hold, Dems have zero claim to be anything other than the party of credentialed elites who are unharmed by whatever happens in the election. This is precisely why their concerns are symbolic rather than material.
‘Mill’s Trident’:
[all claims fall] into three categories: certainly false, partly true, and certainly true.
1.) You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
2.) You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
3.) You are 100% correct, in the unlikely event that you are 100% correct, you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
Reply by :
Even if we were to accept your Bullshit premise, all it does is provide a good lesson as to why you shouldn’t make a bunch of laughable and slipshod accusations in the first place. Do you have any idea how fucking stupid you people looked last time? I’m supposed to believe that people who can’t even manage booking a hotel for a press conference have any idea about ballot irregularities?
Because, honestly, if it comes from Trump, yes, I’m immediately assuming it’s just a bunch lies, and I’m not even voting for Harris. The MAGA world is so incompetent that even if the Dems were cheating, they’d never be able to figure out how or prove anything and the specifics of their accusations still would be a bunch of made-up fantasy bullshit.
If another GOP candidate in the future, who has the ability of coherent thought and isn’t backed by a bunch of tin foil hat kooks and makes some accusations, they might get a fair hearing.
My reply to him:
That’s not ALL it does. It also indicates that our media is compromised and less and less trusted with every passing day. If the media isn’t fit for purpose on such a huge issue there are surely implications beyond just a lesson for Trump and his team. I don’t even think you believe that.
The issue of media distortion wasn’t created by the 2020 Trump campaign. We are talking about different issues, but it sounds as though you grant my premise. Perhaps you should write something about the issue you’re concerned with (which seems to be the incompetence and dishonesty of Trump and his enablers). I would moderate your tone if I were you though. Anger be intended to read as ‘impassioned’ or it might just be emotionally satisfying but it’s NEVER persuasive to those who believe differently, in my experience.
Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “you people”. I voted for Biden.
Nov. 4th, 2024
:
The last presenter introduced the audience to the clinic’s MyGender dolls, which clinicians can use in therapeutic settings to further discombobulate children about gender. The presenter says that the dolls can be used to explore a child’s “socialization to gender stereotypes and challenge binary assumptions,” “facilitate conversations about child’s own gender experience,” and reinforce confusing messages like “my body is not my gender.” The researchers tested out the dolls with children and their parents and made revisions based on feedback.
We also found that some people were uncomfortable in the second activity when we deconstructed the MyGender doll, we explicitly asked children, “Okay, take off the shirt, take off the pants, take off the underwear. Oh, what body parts do you see?”
There was some discomfort around asking children to take clothes off of a doll. We restructured the activity to still get at that type of conversation, but in a way that respected privacy and also have built in some language around how we don't do this in real life, and the importance of consent around those types of questions.
In response to this feedback, the researchers added options like nail polish, circumcised and uncircumcised penises, and insulin pumps (“to increase representation”). In the future, the researchers hope to add fanny packs, hijabs, and “more disability representation” like cochlear implants or maybe “a doll that has some kind of limb loss.”
What strikes me about this session is the way researchers and clinicians distract themselves from what they’re doing. They’re busy, busy, busy challenging “power structures within healthcare,” replacing “cis-centric” measurement tools, discouraging clinical “over-focus” on “problematic” questions like whether young children will persist in their trans identities or whether they will benefit (or not) from early interventions like social transition, “deconstructing” binaries, and promoting more “gender-expansive” ways of thinking—
In other words: so much to do! So little time to think any of it through.
Nov. 5th, 2024
:I’m watching something astounding unfold tonight, and I think mainstream media is not giving it the attention it deserves.
Whether you hate Trump or love him, he is unquestionably making the Republican Party more diverse than it’s been in more than a century. According to exit polls:
He received 60% of the Latino vote in MI
He received 20% of the Black vote in WI
He won 25% of the Black male vote in GA
He won Baldwin county, GA (41% black), the first Republican to win this county since 2004
He won Anson county, NC (40% Black), making him only the second Republican to win this county since Reconstruction
Nationwide, Trump won 45% of Latino voters
Most significantly, while Trump’s support among white voters dropped from 57% in 2020 to 49% in 2024, his support among Black and Latino voters has increased by 4%
We may be witnessing an historic demographic shift in the parties, unified less based on identity group and more based on class.
To be clear, I’m not saying that either party will actually serve the needs of these shifting groups; I, myself, am an independent and have no confidence in either party.
But I think it’s significant — and inspiring — that disparate groups of people are coming together based on their common needs, values, and goals.
Yet in the midst of this, mainstream media continues to call Trump supporters racist, fascist, and extremist. Even worse, his POC supporters are derided as ignorant.
It’s time to turn the page on these shamelessly divisive tactics. In America, we should be free to vote for whoever we want, for whatever reason we want, without fear of condemnation.
When a plurality of POC support a candidate, it may be time to stop calling him racist and ask why people support him. Or maybe that’s a question some people simply don’t want answered.
Nov. 15th, 2024
:
When swing voters were given the question of why they didn’t vote for Harris, the statement that she “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” was the most-cited reason by those who chose Trump.
Nov. 15th, 2024
It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)
There you have the core dynamic that has crippled the Democrats for the last decade. A tiny faction of usually young, well-educated, very-online social justice activists have been using the classic campus tactics of the far left to capture the interest groups and nonprofits that dominate Democratic policy-making. The weapon the activists use: classic internal accusations of racism/sexism/transphobia, empowered by staff revolts, Twitter mobs, and other social media. And then the Democrats, believing these groups represent actual public opinion, especially among minorities, take positions far outside the mainstream with scarcely any public debate — and become paralyzed when challenged.
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Andrew Sullivan
Nov. 19th, 2024
:
Families are the foundation of healthy societies. Anti-human Communists always go after the kids because they know that rootless, unhappy dependents will keep them in power. Never in human history have so many voluntarily decided to end their genetic lines, especially in economically prosperous societies. This is a spiritual war. You have the freedom to join 4B. Make yourself as lonely, ugly, and miserable as possible. Stop having babies. Save the planet by ending your carbon emissions. You can call it any word salad term like liberation, empowerment, justice, stunning, brave, or equity, but it is the opposite of joy. In the meantime, normal happy people who build families shall inherit the earth. The future belongs to those who show up.
