"Mr. Gutfeld’s style mixes anti-liberal insult comedy with relentless punchlines about women’s bodies — their age, their weight, their sexual attractiveness."

"Each night, Ms. Timpf sits at his right-hand side, playfully challenging him while staking out an alternate style of physical humor — one that centers her own experience inhabiting a woman’s body. I met Ms. Timpf on a Tuesday morning in August, on her second day back at 'Gutfeld!' after a reconstructive surgery in which the tissue expanders inserted behind her chest muscle during the mastectomy she underwent in March were replaced with permanent breast implants. She wore baggy jeans and a tight gray T-shirt, which she had second-guessed that morning. “Would I be better off wearing a looser shirt?' she asked. 'Something about breast cancer is — I don’t want to say embarrassing,' she said. 'People are like, Are you breastfeeding? And you have to be like, I just cut my tits off.' She added, 'It’s a weird thing, which is part of the reason why I’ve decided to be so open about it.'... She will have her nipples reconstructed over the next year. It will be her first tattoo. 'I don’t think that those are small things,' Ms. Timpf said. 'I think that those are big things.'"

That's from the New York Times: "A Baby. A Double Mastectomy. Many Opinions From Fox News Viewers. Kat Timpf got pregnant, got breast cancer, then got back to work on the political comedy show 'Gutfeld!' — all as a culture war brews over ambition, motherhood and women’s health."

"Chappelle intended his special to be a protest against cancel culture and oversensitivity."

"As a comedian, he’s sick of it — and, as the audience response revealed, they — we! — are too. Chappelle did his job; now it’s time for us to do ours. It’s time to stop pretending we’re offended when we’re not, and it’s time to speak up against the loud, self-righteous, whiny few. Speech doesn’t belong only to them."

Writes Katherine Timpf in "Defiant Dave Chappelle" (National Review).

Key concept: A lot of the offense on display is phony — put on by people who are afraid of being thought ill of. I'd say those weasels shouldn't be running the culture. They're worse than the authentically sensitive folks who are really and truly offended.

"President Donald Trump said he wants to meet with NFL players and other athletes who kneel during the National Anthem so they can recommend people they think should be pardoned due to unfair treatment by the justice system."

"In what he seemingly sees a solution, President Donald Trump said he wants NFL players and other athletes who kneeled during the National Anthem," CNN report-opines.

"Seemingly sees"... I'm enjoying that confusion. What Trump is doing here is using lateral thinking. You don't go directly for a solution. You take a different angle. This is the stable genius par excellence.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for "lateral thinking":

Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was promulgated in 1967 by Edward de Bono. He cites as an example the Judgment of Solomon, where King Solomon resolves a dispute over the parentage of a child by calling for the child to be cut in half, and making his judgment according to the reactions that this order receives....

To understand lateral thinking, it is necessary to compare lateral thinking and critical thinking. Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. Lateral thinking is more concerned with the "movement value" of statements and ideas. A person uses lateral thinking to move from one known idea to creating new ideas....

It's possible that lateral thinking could be especially appealing to black people, at least that's what occurs to me after reading this piece by Katherine Timpf in National Review about a college course that teaches that supposedly teaches that "objectivity" is a "white mythology." The course — according to its official description — looks at "systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race." The National Review calls that "crazy."

I'd say it's objectively true that some people think that stressing "objectivity" is a power move associated with white males. How do you reach people who feel like that? If you think the answer is by continuing to pressure them in the way that feels white-privileged, then you have lost touch with the real world of human beings.

Timpf writes:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. 

Well, ironically, that's an emotional reaction to a misreading of a text. The course description doesn't really mean that objectivity is a myth, but that people in power use claims of their own objectivity to solidify and extend their power. I'd say that's so obvious that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Timpf goes on to snark that "water is objectively wet," which must feel comfortable and cleansing but says little about how the human mind works and how some human beings gain and keep power over others.

AND: At Debate.org (whatever that is) the question "Is water wet?" is polling at 49% "yes" and 51% "no." "No" might be winning because it's more interesting, but check out some of the arguments! For example:

Water isn’t wet Wet is what you would use to describe the feeling of water, not what it is. Things become wet after it’s been “touched” by water not while it is being “touched”. Water makes things wet but it is not wet itself. I get when you say “water is wet” but your not stating something, you’re just describing water.

And:

Just going to give you words from a scientist's pen. Back in the old days, when water was where we needed to spend our time, touch was a lot more important than it is now. We as beings had to be immediately aware if we were going in or out of water. Therefore, the feeling of wet is a primal sensory reminder.

However, thereafter once we ascended onto the land and trees, the feeling of wet became a sensory reminder of something out of the ordinary; it is raining - get shelter, you fell in a creek - start swimming.

The reason it feels as it feels when water touches the skin is actually a complex electro-chemical reaction which works at amazing speeds. The sensory inputs are a combination of:

1. Your body's pH at that moment
2. The water's pH
3. Your body's temperature at that moment
4. The water's temperature
5. The atmospheric pressure
6. Molecular polarity

This makes me think about the famous David Foster Wallace essay, "This is Water," which begins:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I'm thinking of other dialogue for Wallace's fish, like:

"You know how you feel wet?"

"Wet?! What are you talking about? I feel... the same... all the time!"

Hillary Clinton "thinks that the Trump voting bloc is made up of racists and women who are too scared to indulge their conscience even when they’re in a voting booth alone."

"She’s made that clear, and honestly, what bothers me the most is the fact that she shrinks away from just saying so. Anyone who’s paying even the slightest bit of attention realizes that we’re talking about a consistent perspective, not a gaffe — and I’d appreciate it if she didn’t insult my intelligence by saying that I just 'misinterpreted' what absolutely could not be interpreted any other way."

Writes Katherine Timpf at National Review.

Hillary Clinton's approach to communication is so annoying. I'm not a Trump fan, but he's at least a straight talker — even when lying! It works for his fans and his antagonists. He's energizing. She, on the other hand, is such a pain. Imagine having to follow the daily blather of President Hillary Clinton.