Althouse: At the Thursday Night Café...

August 31, 2023

At the Thursday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

44 comments:

rhhardin said...: Wisconsin Supreme Court chief justice accuses liberal majority of staging a ‘coup’

cat fight (AP); 8/31/23, 6:40 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Accurate explanations aren't easy to come by...

https://www.frontpagemag.com/anti-white-racism-and-the-maui-fires/; 8/31/23, 6:46 PM
Narr said...: Yay! Some few of you--perhaps a single fanatic--nudged my count over 4K. No stopping me now.

The news makes the Florida situation look not too bad, considering. I hope all our Florida Men and Women and Carolinians are high, dry, and comfy.; 8/31/23, 6:54 PM
FullMoon said...: Notice some commenters disparaging The Gateway Pundit, so I checked it out. Pretty funny stuff posted to trigger the left.
The comments are cluttered with people so despicable they seem like progressive trolls trying to make the site look bad.
Also, probably wrong, but one of the slimming down ads may feature our beloved commenter Inga.; 8/31/23, 7:06 PM
Narr said...: Prof. Martin van Creveld's last several posts (As I Please) are sobering.; 8/31/23, 7:17 PM
Michael K said...: The WI Supreme Court seems like a cat fight that will go on until the election and maybe beyond. The left has no respect for tradition. History began last month.; 8/31/23, 7:38 PM
rehajm said...: I arrived back in SC today. Driving around we really didn’t see much damage. Small debris, branches and pine needles everywhere and a small area with a few uprooted trees. Tree crews were already out cleaning up. Thunderstorms have done more damage this year…; 8/31/23, 7:52 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Via my X: Governor Ron DeSantis' $50 million super PAC is shutting down as donors are beginning to jump ship.

According to the Daily Mail, the super PAC will now be backing Donald Trump after they accused the governor of making "rookie s***" mistakes.

The super PAC was set up by Republican strategist John Thomas who secured massive commitments from mega donors.

Thomas said he began having second thoughts after DeSantis' 'Twitter Spaces' announcement back in May.

"We were hoping to do like a formal TV campaign of air support when DeSantis officially launched,' Thomas told the Daily Mail. "But the problem with that is with the Twitter Spaces blunder, like almost from the get-go, all of our major donors said, "let's just see how this plays out."; 8/31/23, 8:22 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: More from my X: "Vice President Joe Biden’s office and Hunter Biden’s firm exchanged over 1,000 emails during Biden’s time in office."

My X got the stuff it takes the NYT years to write about.; 8/31/23, 8:25 PM
Mike of Snoqualmie said...: The coming ban on meat, dairy and cars:

I dare Bruce Harrel, mayor Seattle, to announce the coming ban from the pitcher's mound at T-mobile Field. He can make the announcement during the Fan Appreciation game, Friday, September 29. I doubt he'd make it back to the dugout without being ripped to shreds, metaphorically speaking.; 8/31/23, 8:42 PM
Iman said...: McYertle!; 8/31/23, 9:18 PM
Jamie said...: So. My personal hobbyhorse is the whole trans thing. I'm not entirely sure why. I haven't had it personally affect me (so far), except peripherally; I know a kid, a very young adult now, who has transitioned. I'd known this kid since then-she was 4, and never caught a hint of gender dysphoria. But when two (might have been three) other kids in her freshman class, all in her small group of friends, went trans, she did too. I should add that she had always been socially awkward, had recently been diagnosed with ADHD, and that her parents are serious progressives. I was both shocked and unsurprised, if that's possible, having already heard about ROGD and the utterly disproportionate number of girls on the spectrum and with ADHD who go trans in adolescence.

But here's something I've been wondering about. The anti-trans-activism "conversation" breaks down into two basic threads: the ROGD social contagion resulting in girls' sterilizing themselves etc., and the "TERF" angle about women's spaces, laws applying specifically to women, and the expectation that women will cheerfully go along with whatever incursions are required in order to show support of trans people.

These two threads switch from focusing on child or teen F->M transitioners to adult M->F ones as if they're the same, but they're clearly not. I'd like to learn more about the other version of each. What about autogynophelia - how much of a factor is it for teenage boys who say they are trans? And what happens with adult trans men - how do natal men feel about sharing their spaces and guy time with them? Men may not feel unsafe with a trans man in the locker room, but what about young teenage boys - how awkward must it be for them? Is anyone actually researching the use of puberty blockers and their longer term effects, such as insufficient penile size to line a normal sized neo-vagina, to say nothing of how that teenage boy's physical development will progress - or not - if he changes his mind and goes off the blockers? I mean, it's no wonder kids who go on blockers almost always transition - there is a serious sunk cost for them, and unlike in the world of logic, it's not altogether a fallacy.

There is of course the "gay conversation therapy" thread, and it's getting more play now, which of course I think is an important and positive development.

Another thing I never hear discussed on either side: the relationships trans people enter into and how they go. The kids transitioning at young ages now, whom are they dating? What are the characteristics of those relationships - are these primarily F->M young people finding straight young women who will date them, or other trans kids, either those who transition in the same direction or those who go the other way? (I just learned that the young person I know just got engaged, to another very young adult whose name, which is ungendered and very unusual, definitely suggests that the kid chose it.) Are the neo-boys experiencing adolescent male sex drive, or not? If they date girls, is the relationship more characteristic of a lesbian relationship or a straight one? And what about the neo-girls - are they dating straight boys, or other trans people? And in their case especially, how often do their partners end up being older, even much older?

In counseling, when the kids are informed that medical transition can and surgical transition will sterilize them, are they also being told, "But don't worry, you can always adopt" as if adoption doesn't have overwhelming costs and difficulties?

Basically it seems that we're just scratching the surface of all the terrible immediate effects and longer-term outcomes from this.; 8/31/23, 9:38 PM
Canadian Bumblepuppy said...: @Narr yes things in Israel seem pretty tense.

I was glad to discover his blog a year ago Prof. van Creveld is a solid historian I read in the 90s glad to find him hale and hearty.

I just wished to say thank you to Prof. Althouse for her blog. I rarely speak but I enjoy the read.; 8/31/23, 9:39 PM
Narayanan said...: for Narr >>> +1; 8/31/23, 11:00 PM
Narayanan said...: looks like it is Martin van Creveld v Caroline Glick ex-Chicago; 8/31/23, 11:14 PM
Kakistocracy said...: I wasn't aware anyone paid attention to Gateway Pundit.; 9/1/23, 12:10 AM
wendybar said...: "Tahmineh Dehbozorgi
@DeTahmineh
·

As a law student, seeing attorneys named as co-conspirators and threatened to have their licenses revoked only because they gave legal advice to former President Trump worries me. This is against the very nature of the American justice system I’ve long aspired to be a part of.

Dehbozorgi’s grandfather was among the first targets of the new regime after the fall of the Shah in 1979. He was thrown in prison, where he faced execution without trial. His crime: He worked as a public servant in the previous government before the Islamic Revolution.

The new Islamic regime also used guilt-by-association tactics to prosecute lawyers who represented its opponents. So when the news broke here that President Trump’s legal advisers would be indicted along with him, Dehbozorgi was alarmed."

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/08/iranian-immigrant-law-student-encounters-americas-own-revolutionary-guard/; 9/1/23, 3:39 AM
Jaq said...: Rich only watches MSNBC and only listens to NPR, so he is not aware of a lot of things, such as Joe Biden claiming executive privilege in refusing to provide emails between him and his son, which contained references to Hunter’s business, Rosemont Seneca. So we are supposed to believe that his son was making a great deal of money selling the “illusion” of access, but he seems to have been clued in on the “internal deliberations” of the vice president’s office.

NPR has to have carried the story that shows that the Biden claim of “illusion of access” was a lie, right? Or CNN, or the New York Times, or at least one of the “credible” outlets. I am beginning to think that “credible” means “we won’t trouble your little minds with facts that you don’t want to hear.”

“All the news we see fit to print.”; 9/1/23, 5:43 AM
Breezy said...: Long before this indictment stage, Trump’s lawyers were shunned, blacklisted and/or forced to resign or fired from their jobs. It’s one long string of punishment for helping the opposition. You’d think lawyers would be better, but you’d be wrong.; 9/1/23, 5:57 AM
gadfly said...: Laura Ingraham, like most of her cohorts at Fox News, has spent the past few years portraying Biden as feeble, senile, and mentally incompetent (while also occasionally painting him as the mastermind of a mob-like operation). During her Fox News broadcast on Wednesday night, she brought up McConnell’s recent freeze-ups by saying “We have real problems here” before comparing the GOP leader to the president.

On the other hand, even though countless experts have already pointed out Trump’s obvious paranoid, sadistic, and psychopathic tendencies; diagnosed him with a malignant narcissistic personality disorder; and suggested he might suffer from neurological conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Naturally concerned with the former president's mental health, as shown by his failure to observe and follow the rules of law, many qualified professionals have questioned his fitness to ever serve as the President of the United States again.

So let's get on with the Trials of Trump - all of them including his gangster activities - before the next election. And while GOP change is in order, Democrats need to find replacements for Biden and Harris, perhaps with Joe Manchin and Liz Cheney (I know, it cannot happen). But POTUS is a killer job and neither Biden nor Trump are physically and mentally able to survive four years beginning in January 2025.

Recall that Dutch Reagan's Alzheimer's disease may have raised its ugly head near the end of his presidency when the president found himself alone in the middle of Iran-Contra while unelected military (Ollie North) and cabinet members (James Baker) exacerbated the controversy.; 9/1/23, 6:05 AM
Jaq said...: "Why does a very young Biden grandchild have any reason to have almost 7-figures from China in a bank account?"- @RepNancyMace

Maybe the same reason that a Chinese-funded think tank, Penn-Biden, directed by our now Secretary of State, paid Joe Biden a million dollars for a no-show teaching job at Penn. Remember the Penn-Biden Center? Where classified documents the Vice President had no right to have were stored, and where Chinese nationals had keys? No wonder the Chinese were publicly laughing about the corruption of Joe Biden, and giving him the" traditional token of goodwill" through his son Hunter.; 9/1/23, 6:25 AM
wendybar said...: Makes you wonder how much he is getting paid and by whom....

"The Mar-a-Lago IT director who flipped on Donald Trump in the classified documents case is a part-time DJ and registered Democrat with a history of money troubles, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Yuscil Taveras, 45, managed to rack up debts of nearly $750,000 despite holding down a string of well-paid tech jobs and moonlighting as 'DJ Juicy.'

He and his wife are currently renting a smart $850,000 home in a gated community in Lake Worth, Florida, less than 30 minutes from the Mar-a-Lago Club, where the longtime Trump organization employee has worked for the past several years."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12462629/Trump-staffer-Yuscil-Taveras-flipped.html; 9/1/23, 6:50 AM
Mr. Forward said...: The Gateway Pundit features a recurring character called Karine Jean-Pierre who says ridiculous things like Joe Biden "has done more to secure the border" than anybody else. On video no less. I don't know how Jim Hoft does it.; 9/1/23, 6:50 AM
farmgirl said...: DJ juicy.
Made me look.; 9/1/23, 7:40 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Great site, Narr!; 9/1/23, 7:54 AM
Aggie said...: gadfly sez: "On the other hand, even though countless experts have already pointed out Trump’s obvious paranoid, sadistic, and psychopathic tendencies; diagnosed him with a malignant narcissistic personality disorder; and suggested he might suffer from ..."

Say dude, it appears to me that you can't count very high. But - what does the medical profession have to say about doctors that attempt a psychological diagnosis remotely, without an interview, without in-person observation - and does it on the national news? On multiple channels, the same day?

By the way, your 'countless experts' lost her cushy job at Harvard, because didn't have her contract renewed, for countless mysterious, inexplicable reasons.; 9/1/23, 8:04 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Michigan dems sold the farm...

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/08/31/chinese-company-employing-ccp-members-build-battery-plants-michigan-biden-approval/; 9/1/23, 8:06 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/1/23, 8:14 AM
rhhardin said...: Any Fox show without Gutfeld sucks. Just sampling what's available on youtube anyway.

Why? Gutfeld insults everybody, the right harder than the left, producing an all around friendly competition.; 9/1/23, 8:19 AM
Jamie said...: even though countless experts have already pointed out Trump’s obvious paranoid, sadistic, and psychopathic tendencies; diagnosed him with a malignant narcissistic personality disorder; and suggested he might suffer from neurological conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

No "expert" deserving of the title would diagnose a person with the Dark Triad in the absence of personal contact and consultation. You're talking about media hacks, gad - they're not "diagnosing," they're opining. Opining, in fact, for an audience already fully entrenched in enthusiastic hatred of Trump.

Two can play at that game, and some on my side do. But the difference between "diagnosing" the effing Dark Triad and opining that the President may have cognitive deficits based on his inability to appear publicly without either (1) a teleprompter or (2) embarrassing himself and his administration with fabrications and grossly insensitive "gaffes" is that the latter is clearly observable.

Have you - has anyone - witnessed or reported on Trump's fire starting? Animal abuse? No? So how do you infer sadism and psychopathy, exactly? So, about the "Alzheimer's": Can he speak off the cuff? Can anyone deny that he can speak off the cuff for literally hours without comparing his kitchen fire to the horrible deaths of hundreds?

How about Biden?; 9/1/23, 8:21 AM
Jaq said...: This is why gadfly doesn't like ZeroHedge

In the last two months, the US has lost 670,000 full time workers, offset by the gain of 1,004,000 part-time workers.

And this:

June payrolls originally reported: 209K
June payrolls revision one month later: 185K
June payrolls revision two months later: 105K.

Yes, what was originally a "strong" 209K has been deflated to 105K two months later (original exp was 230K).

Basically Bidenomics amounts to "Lie when it matters, and tell the truth after people stop caring."

Same thing when they said that going into the 2022 elections, we were not in a recession even as we had two negative quarters of GDP growth because of the "strong jobs numbers" and then at the end of the year, those "strong jobs numbers" were completely revised away.

The "credible" media doesn't see fit to report these things, which is why they hate ZeroHedge for doing it. It seems like a good story for the WSJ to report, but the WSJ wants Biden re-elected.; 9/1/23, 8:39 AM
Rusty said...: Gadfly said,
"On the other hand, even though countless experts......."
I think I see yer problem lady!; 9/1/23, 8:54 AM
Michael K said...: Blogger rhhardin said...

Any Fox show without Gutfeld sucks. Just sampling what's available on youtube anyway.

Why? Gutfeld insults everybody, the right harder than the left, producing an all around friendly competition.

The decline of Fox can be illustrated by my wife's channel changing now that college football is back. She even turns Fox off to watch video of last year's games.; 9/1/23, 9:10 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: Tim the BLS now puts out more revised stats than initial stats and many of us have noticed. The changes made to how they count “employment” started in Obama’s term. Government numbers are now inherently unreliable.; 9/1/23, 9:50 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Chicoms buying into U.S. agriculture... What could go wrong?
Lots... wait and see.; 9/1/23, 9:55 AM
BUMBLE BEE said...: For Starters...

https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2023/08/31/never-trumpers-warn-democrats-ditch-biden-whitmer-warnock/; 9/1/23, 9:56 AM
lonejustice said...: From a comment on Legal Insurrection:

Save America, the leadership PAC founded by former President Donald Trump, has less than $4 million cash on hand, after siphoning over $101 million to pay legal fees for Trump and his allies since the beginning of 2022, reports the New York Times.

Mid-year tax filings for PACs provide awareness about presidential campaign funding and how those funds are being used. In Save America’s case, money that could be going to necessary campaign needs or political work, is being spent overwhelmingly on the former president’s and his associates’ pending legal cases.

According to its mid-year Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing, the Save America PAC has spent approximately $25 million in the first half of 2023, $21.6 million of that went to legal fees.

— https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-donor-money-just-plummeted-113018905.html; 9/1/23, 11:09 AM
Kakistocracy said...: With regard to third parties, there are two types of American presidential elections — some are like 1968 and 1992 where third-party candidates capture a significant share of the vote in the range 10-20 percent and then other elections where third-party candidates get a small 1-2 percent share but tip a critical swing state one way or the other. The first type feature structural shifts in politics while the second has a random walk flavor like stock markets.

In 1968, George Wallace's third party candidacy got 13.5 percent in the end and Richard Nixon barely nudged out Humbert Humphrey to win. Notable is that Humphrey was surging at the end as he separated himself from Lyndon Johnson's disastrous Vietnam war policies in the public mind and many feel he would have won if the election had gone on another week or so. The key dynamic here was that in the closing weeks traditional working class Democrats attracted to Wallace's racist populism made new calculations and went back to Humphrey. Other than the war, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had the most prosperous economy since the Second World War. This could be Biden's strength in September-October 2024—his record gets compared to that of the challengers. Americans are not going to vote to overturn the fabled kitchen table where they do family budgets.

In 1992, Ross Perot's third party candidacy took votes from George H. W. Bush and allowed Clinton a 6 percent margin over the hapless Bush and the Democrats won. Clinton wisely stressed the weak economy and obliterated the 85 percent approval ratings that Bush had the previous year for winning the Gulf War. Perot had run an economic populist campaign against profligate federal spending and deficits that garnered an eye-popping 19 percent of the vote. Could an economic profligacy campaign work next year? Possibly, but who would articulate it? Perot had credibility on the issue (his chart presentation was a masterclass in this). Today's Republican House is threatening every major spending program. In short, the Republicans are touching every third rail in the federal budget, highlighting their fanaticism rather than their prudence. If the Democrats challenge Republican House members broadly, a Democratic landslide in the House could help carry Biden past some close spots in swing states. Marginal third party candidates like West and others will be lost in the storm.

The No Labels group is headed by Joe Lieberman, one of the establishment's more maladroit politicians.

Prediction: voters coalesce around Biden in the fall of 2024 while a minority of malcontents fracture and spread votes across Trump, who is rapidly becoming a third-party-like candidate rather than a major institutional party candidate, and other third party candidates.

Oh yes, Wallace and Nixon succeeded. The Trump Republican party today is a thoroughly Confederate party, racist and populist and centered in the left behind regions of a more cosmopolitan US.; 9/1/23, 11:15 AM
FullMoon said...: Rich said...

I wasn't aware anyone paid attention to Gateway Pundit.

9/1/23, 12:10 AM

Nobody does, except you, Inga, Left Bank ,Gadfly, and others in your posse.; 9/1/23, 12:25 PM
Kakistocracy said...: Day 555 of Putin's 3 day war and Ukraine starts hitting targets 700km inside Russia. Putin has got to go down as the worst leader in Russian history, and there has been some pretty stiff competition for that title.; 9/1/23, 12:40 PM
Narr said...: Rich writes, "Oh yes, Wallace and Nixon succeeded. The Trump Republican party today is a thoroughly Confederate party, racist and centered in the left behind regions of a more cosmopolitan US."

Talk about refighting the Civil War.; 9/1/23, 1:33 PM
Jaq said...: Remember when Biden took over the census, and they mistakenly gave a bunch of Congressional seats and Electoral Votes to Democratic states, after mistakenly taking them from Republican states? Then after they corrected the count, the Democrats kept their ill-gotten gains?

We are run by criminals. Where is the RICO probe for this massive denial of civil rights?

Do you think that Rich lays in bed at night worrying that an anti-war candidate like Cornell West is going to cost the war mongering Biden Administration the election?; 9/1/23, 2:30 PM
Jaq said...: Senate Democrats are blocking aid to Hawaii unless they can also pass weapons money for the... let's just call them the Cold War relic CIA proxies in Ukraine who sill worship a certain mustachioed leader who was big in Europe in the 30s and met an untimely, as in it should have happened sooner, end in the mid forties.

That's right, Kiev needs its genocide money. It turned out that their "Revolution of Dignity" which was about ending the indignity of giving ethnic Russians the same civil rights as ethnic Ukrainians, hasn't worked out for them, and of course, a settlement was out of the question, peace was out of the question, under those terms.; 9/1/23, 2:38 PM
Rusty said...: 1/23, 12:40 PM
Blogger Narr said...
"Rich writes, "Oh yes, Wallace and Nixon succeeded. The Trump Republican party today is a thoroughly Confederate party, racist and centered in the left behind regions of a more cosmopolitan US."

Talk about refighting the Civil War."
Don't engage the liar known as Rich/Chuck. Nothing good can come of it and it just prolongs his presence.; 9/2/23, 7:33 AM