"Musk is notorious for sharing edgelord memes on X, the kinds of things that might be passed around by teenage boys."

"He also has a remarkably juvenile sense of humor. For example, he edited the X bio of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation to say it is 69 percent government-funded (69, get it?). He recently changed his name on the same platform to 'Harry Bolz.' His Department of Government Efficiency is itself named after an internet meme about a shiba inu. He proposed 'a literal dick-measuring contest' with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He bought Twitter and turned it into X after being annoyed by its moderation policies, which he compared to censorship, but once in charge, he experienced serial emotional meltdowns over content he didn’t like, some of which he then censored. He has gone on sprees of banning accounts that offended him in some way, while allowing white supremacists and Nazis to proliferate on the site. He often communicates on X using video-game jargon, the lingua franca of teenage boys...."

Writes Jill Filipovic, in "The Adolescent Style in American Politics/The version of manhood placed on display by Trump and his aides is the one imagined by teenage boys" (The Atlantic).

"It honestly seems like it was written by a teenage Tumblr user who, having come into contact with some new and exciting ideas about social justice, seeks to impose them widely and lecture perceived wrongdoers gleefully."

Writes Jill Filipovic, in "Hamline University’s Controversial Firing Is a Warning/Insistence that others follow one’s strict religion is authoritarian and illiberal no matter what the religion is" (Slate). She's talking about a statement written by Hamlin University President Dr. Fayneese S. Miller. 

Filipovic continues:

"'Almost all of the girls here, they do not want to get pregnant, but it is forced on them,' Omodi said. And when they do get pregnant..."

"... 'we find that they want to have the abortion.' Some girls move away to other settlements and have their babies in secret. Some give birth and then abandon or kill their infants. Others try to end their pregnancies by taking ulcer drugs or local herbs; some dig up tree roots in an effort to make their own abortifacients. 'Sometimes, you hear they use Duracells,' he said, referring to a practice of steeping batteries in water and drinking the liquid... Although there are no reliable numbers on self-induced abortion in refugee camps, and no one knows exactly how many refugee women die of unsafe abortions every year, there is good reason to believe hazardous procedures are common. We do have solid data on the high rates of sexual violence against refugee women and girls: researchers have thoroughly documented this and, unsurprisingly, found links between rape and unplanned pregnancy. Worldwide, 61 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, and unsafe abortions cause an estimated 13 percent of pregnancy-related deaths worldwide. Every year, mothers who die from unsafe abortion leave behind some 220,000 children. Another five million women worldwide are hospitalized annually with complications from unsafe abortion; this is a phenomenon restricted almost exclusively to developing countries that limit abortion access."

From "How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women’s Lives in Conflict Zones/From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and Tigray, rape is now recognized as a genocidal crime. Yet its survivors rarely receive the health care they need—thanks to America’s deadly culture war" by Jill Filipovic (New York Review of Books).

The political limits of understanding.

A core liberal/left principle for decades is we shouldn't just denounce people who do bad things -- criminals, terrorists, etc. -- but try to understand the underlying social causes, both to understand it intellectually & improve our ability to fix it.

Seems that's out, too: pic.twitter.com/DLO4CXW2RG

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 20, 2020

I read that and this lyric sprang into my head: "Harmony and understanding/Sympathy and trust abounding/No more falsehoods or derisions...." Here's how the mystic crystal revelation looks in action:

"Promise Rings and Immigrant 'Invasions': How Evangelical Purity Culture Helps Explain Trumpism."

Headline at Vanity Fair for an article by Jill Filipovic.

Subheadline: "My virginity-until-marriage pledge was based on the premise that if you don’t know any better, you’ll never want anything more. Similarly, adherents to Trumpism would rather know less, and risk stagnation and decline, than come into contact with information that complicates their view of America."

Excerpt: "Making America great again and forgoing kissing for courtship both promise an easy route to a glorified past. Both come from a fear of the unknown, an aversion to new experiences, a deep disgust at a perceived other attaining equal footing....  Much has rightly been written about the racism at the heart of Trumpism.... But I also hear the same fear that echoed in the anti-experimentation, anti-sex warnings repeated to me as an adolescent.... I took off my promise ring because not long after I got it, it became clear to me that the primary beneficiaries of these rules were men.... Purity proponents, like Team Love It or Leave It, assuage their fears with a demand that everyone else keep their life small..."

"It wasn’t just that [Eric] Schneiderman appears to have been a feminist in the brightness of day but a violent misogynist when the lights went down."

"The reality may be darker: that the power he derived from his role in progressive politics was intertwined with his abuse. He seems to have used his feminist-minded political work to advance his own career, to ingratiate himself with the women he would go on to harm, and to cover up his cruelties.... It’s impossible to know what exactly was going on in Mr. Schneiderman’s mind. But one has to wonder if his alleged actions were all part of the same pathological craving for the kind of ultimate power that makes one immune from consequence — that he got off on the simple fact that he had the ability to physically hurt women while being perceived as their noble champion. What greater sense of authority than knowing that you can rupture a woman’s confidence (and, reportedly, her eardrum) so thoroughly that she, upon your mandate, removes her tattoos, loses weight and comes back after you’ve hit her; that you can physically overpower and injure women and then scare them out of reporting it; and that you can also convince the feminist and progressive establishments to crown you one of their greatest leaders and strongest advocates? A man who derives satisfaction from riding in as a white knight fighting for women’s rights while he secretly abuses women: It’s so tremendously narcissistic it seems almost fictional.... So what are strong women to do if even the men who seem like good feminists might be misogynists, too? With right-wing men who oppose women’s rights, what you see is what you get. With these bogus male feminists, it can be crazy-making..."

From "The Problem With ‘Feminist’ Men" by Jill Filipovic in the NYT.

It wouldn't be so confusing and "crazy-making" if you hadn't indulged in politically convenient excuses back when Bill Clinton was accused of rape and sexual harassment. Stop giving Democratic Party men a pass and put the liberation of women first.

"Feminists have been on the forefront of tackling these knottier issues of sex, consent, pleasure and power."

"And so it’s up to us to lead the way in confronting the private, intimate interactions that may be technically consensual but still profoundly sexist. This will only happen if we move beyond being reactively 'sex positive' and recognize that human sexual interactions are not always clear-cut: yes or no, good or bad, empowering or not, either assault and worth worrying about or technically consensual and therefore not at a problem. We can – we must – wade into the messy, complicated nature of sex in a misogynist world. What a shame that opportunity was wholly missed with this breathless celebrity exposé."

Writes Jill Filipovic in "The poorly reported Aziz Ansari exposé was a missed opportunity" (The Guardian).

I'm surprised to see the belief that feminists haven't yet moved from "being reactively 'sex positive'"! But I think I get it. Is it that young feminists are too tightly bonded to the notion that sex should turn out well whenever they decide to have it? (I mean: as opposed to assessing the situation and predicting the odds of having an unrewarding or actively bad experience.)

"Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump."

"Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official 'commander-in-chief forum' for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico. A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable.... It’s hard to look at these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place...."

From "The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election," by Jill Filipovic in the NYT.

"I agree with everything Jill Filipovic says about the barriers that society has created that keep women from responding appropriately to men who seek to harass or intimidate them."

Says a letter to the NYT editor about “Donald Trump Was a Creep. Too Bad Hillary Clinton Couldn’t Say That,” by Jill Filipovic (Sunday Review, Aug. 27). The letter-writer, George C. Thomas (of Warren, NJ) continues:

Missing from Ms. Filipovic’s account, however, is the inconvenient fact that for decades Hillary Clinton responded to allegations of sexual assault against her husband by denying those charges on his behalf and by vilifying the alleged victims.

I don’t know whether it’s ironic or pathetic (maybe it’s both) that Mrs. Clinton helped strengthen the barrier she confronted in the debate with Donald Trump.

Yes, that's true. I was just wondering aloud about whether Mrs. Clinton's book addresses this difficulty, not that I have the slightest hope that it does, but I'd love to hear what she'd say about this if she ever really did "let [her] guard down" (as she claims she is doing in the new book).

Another letter to the editor about the Filopovic piece, from Pamela Rothstein in Falmouth, Massachusetts, says:

My response now, as it was back then, focuses on the one action that could prevent such behavior in political debates: a clear, definitive directive that candidates remain at their chair or lectern when it is not their turn to speak. Period. No moving around. No stalking. No intimidating.

Ms. Filipovic says that the moderators did not instruct Mr. Trump to physically back off, arguing, “It would have been uncomfortable, and they would have faced accusations of bias.” It is time for debate organizers to step up and accept responsibility for preventing a repeat of such behavior.

Rothstein doesn't seem to realize that viewers look forward to seeing how the candidate moves around. We have an animal-level instinctive judgment that we like to get a chance to exercise. We got a lot out of the difference between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in this segment of a debate in 1992. We feel as though we're learning something about the candidate's humanity (or lack thereof). Do we have a real person or an uncanny-valley simulacrum?

If a candidate moves around the wrong way, he's hurting himself. In my all-time favorite debate clip, the candidate who moves into the other person's space — and apparently thinks his behavior is winning — makes a terrible impression (and the other guy scores brilliantly with a slight nod):

Is this a pro-Clinton argument?

"How Men Behaving Badly Have Held Hillary Clinton Back."

It's intended as a pro-Clinton argument. It's by Jill Filipovic and published in Time (which seems to be trying to distinguish itself as the go-to place for women-oriented pieces that actually insult women through the implication that women will buy material like this).

Look, I think it's bad that so many women throughout human history have been held back by men, but that's no reason to make one of the held-back women President. A woman can be President, but it better not be a woman who's vulnerable to men holding her back. The presidency is not a sympathy prize. We need a President to protect us from bad men.

Filipovic begins:

The first woman is just days away from (probably) being elected President of the United States, and so of course her candidacy has been fraught by two guys obsessed with their own penises, including one whose last name is literally Weiner.

And she ends:

[T]he hard-ons of has-been men and the hard heads of quietly powerful ones might just screw Clinton’s shot at the White House.

By the way, the 2 men whose penises she's asking you to think about do not include Bill Clinton. BC is not mentioned in the article. Somehow, Filipovic imagines that she could get that penis-y and we wouldn't think of the man closest to Hillary. 

"I just didn’t have another sex position in me."

Says the editor of Cosmopolitan, sniffing at the product she's used as leverage to a better (I don't want to say) position.

Cosmopolitan under [Joanna] Coles has not lost its sizzle, and its pages are filled with the relationship advice and sex tips that have made it a popular guide for young women for decades. But it has also taken on heavier subjects, including women’s health and politics...

Though she was tight-lipped on her plans, she said she had two projects she has been working on with other Hearst brands....

What does Cosmopolitan look like these days? Sex, health... politics... isn't that what women's magazines have been for the last nearly half century? I'm speaking from experience, because before I went to law school, back in my painterly period, my day job was reading magazines — reading them, coding them, for a marketing research firm. I read all the women's magazines — and plenty of other magazines — for something like 2 years. Cosmopolitan in the 70s. I remember it so well. That was back when every cover screamed "sex!" but the word "sex" never appeared on the cover.

I go to the Cosmopolitan website now, and the very first thing I see is a picture of Donald Trump.



I have to read through 2 Trump things before I get to "Sex Poses" — but "Sex Poses" are not sex positions, just the beginning of "Sex Poses Different Risks for Men and Women as they Age." Or maybe my computer — I'm on my old computer — isn't displaying that correctly. I think the "Donald Trump Is Right to Go After Hillary Clinton" was supposed to be up there in that empty top left corner, and not on that man and lady in bed together. It is funnier in the botched up way.

Clicking through, I see that "Donald Trump Is Right to Go After Hillary Clinton" is written by the familiar feminist writer Jill Filipovic. She says:

This election has set a know-nothing blowhard eager for attention against a seasoned, savvy, and somewhat cynical politician who is simply not being pressed on anything substantive.... Disturbingly, what some people appear to want is spectacle of anti-intellectualism and impotent rage.... When we lose the emphasis on ideas and devolve into a contest driven by ever-more-outrageous insults, grandiosity bordering on delusion, and a dogged commitment to going lower and lower still, it's not politics. It's poli-tainment. And it's not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton who will lose. It's all of us.

I agree with some of that, but it still gets my tag "civility bullshit" (which signifies my belief that calls for civility are always bullshit (because people only want to get their opponents to tone it down)).

And now I'm distracted by the "Most Popular" list in the sidebar: "13 Things That Make Guys Irrationally Horny," "10 Things Guys Actually Want In A Wife," and "What Blow Jobs Really Feel Like According To 12 Guys." Cosmo readers seem to like numbers — 13, 10, 12 — would it kill you to give me an 11? Oh, here, I found one: "11 things your boobs could be trying to tell you." And: "11 things you never knew about your boobs/Your breasts can have orgasms, people." Apparently, 11 is the boobs number at Cosmo.

Anyway, sail on Ms. Coles. You've done your time in the lady trenches.

2 articles in the NYT that I happened to read one after the other that made me wonder if the NYT is tired of journalism and just wants to blab.

1.  "A 'Heat Dome' Is Coming. Domes Are Bad." This is an article about the weather that is mostly riffing on the word "dome" with stuff that's easy to collect by googling "dome." ("There’s Mad Max’s Thunderdome, where gladiators died. There’s the Houston Astrodome, one of the nation’s largest abandoned buildings — too big and expensive to be blown up.... In 11th-century England, there was the Domesday Book....") A comment there says:

Does this writer think he is clever? What are you thinking, New York Times? Either this is a serious meteorological event, in which case information about its cause, effect and what we might need to do to take care of ourselves in extreme heat and humidity. Or it is a non-event, and not worth the effort it took to write this article. More and more this paper feels like it's written by 20 something who approach every day as a chance to prove their cleverness, rather than to really think about what is happening in the world they live in.

2. "Why Men Want to Marry Melanias and Raise Ivankas," by Jill Filipovic. This is an interesting idea, all summed up in the title, but it's full of godawful stereotypes and assumptions about 2 women and what one man thinks of them and women in general and what men in general think of them. "Maria Shriver’s Shriver Report" found that men tend to want their wives to be "attractive and sweet" and their daughters to be "independent, strong and principled," and "This dynamic seems to play out in the Trump family" in that "Mr. Trump’s wife is professionally attractive, anecdotally nice and by her own telling fairly traditional, while his elder daughter is a strong, independent and well-educated businesswoman." Never mind that Ivanka is just as attractive and sweet as Melania and that Melania has had her professional endeavors. And forget the obvious fact that whether you devote your efforts to the commercial world or the domestic sphere, you can be independent, strong and principled or not. What do the NYT commenters have to say about that? Nothing! Because the NYT doesn't put up a comments section for this article. So let me just quote something from the comments to that Domes-are-bad article:

Why does... the NYT always allow comments on these rather juvenile articles but rarely on anything with political, elitist or racial overtones?

2 views on the connection between believing abortion is murder and wanting to punish the woman who gets one.

Donald Trump got caught in the act of being confused, and I'd like to plunk him down at this fork in Abortion-Is-Murder Road. The signpost on the left fork reads Jill Filipovic Way:

If anti-abortion advocates sincerely believe abortion is murder, they should also say that women have to be punished for it. If a fetus is the same as a 5-year-old, then a woman who ends a pregnancy should be just as guilty of murder as a woman who pays a hit man to kill her kindergartener. Claiming ignorance that murder was murder wouldn’t work.

It’s an ugly thought, and it’s electorally and socially unpopular, and that’s why some of them don’t say it out loud; others realize that while they may find abortion morally wrong, they don’t in their heart of hearts believe removing an embryo from a woman’s body is the same as slaughtering a 5-year-old. But start making those kinds of distinctions and the whole case against abortion falls apart.

Yeah, down that road you'd have to punish the woman, but the whole point is, political disaster lies down that road, and what Jill Filipovic wants is for you to run all the way back down Abortion-Is-Murder Road and go somewhere else entirely — where you see that this whole territory lies inside the body of another person and she gets full control over what happens inside there.

But hang out in this fork a tad longer. There's another way to go: It's Scott Adams Way:

Do we really need penalties for every law?... [W]e all might be better off if our government always took the side of maximizing human life while leaving room for private citizens to make tough choices as needed. A law without penalties does that.....

Governments should always favor human life, even in the gray areas. But human beings often need the freedom to make hard choices about life. If the government makes abortion and doctor-assisted dying illegal, it sends a message about the priorities of government to protect life. But by being silent on penalties for those things, government would also allow citizens and their doctors to make the hard decisions.

Adams wants to make abortion illegal, but then provide no enforcement mechanism. This is similar to having a law that's just not enforced, except the commitment to do no enforcing is locked down in the text of the statute. It's just an expressive law, the people saying "we care," but we're not going to do anything about it, because private citizens need room to govern their own private lives.

Can travelers on Abortion-Is-Murder Road take the Scott Adams fork?