Left/right is a continuum, and Taylor Lorenz is telling you where she is on the line, that is, what's to the right of her.

My God, this take. It’s magnificent. pic.twitter.com/cwcytjo9jh

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) December 12, 2023

This is easy for me to understand. I remember a colleague of mine — years ago — laughing that at this point she finds that everyone she knows is to her right. And in speaking about the Supreme Court, it's conventional to deny that Justice X or Justice Y has moved to the left and to assert that they stayed where they've always been while the Court moved to the right. 

"We are on Day Five of journalistic insistence on canceling an elementary school student by any means necessary."

We are on Day Five of journalistic insistence on canceling an elementary school student by any means necessary. https://t.co/Z3hvTe8UrT

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) December 1, 2023

Mary Katharine Ham crushes Bill Maher and Sam Harris. Great job — pithy and theatrical!

Mary Katharine Ham tries to cure Bill Maher and Sam Harris from their Trump derangement syndrome. pic.twitter.com/J51lcATOxO

— Turncoat Don (@TurncoatD) October 1, 2023

"In case you're wondering, as I did, how my punishment for tweeting about Toobin compares to Toobin's suspension for his offense...."

"He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work. On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not. I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put this order in place and a deputy, also gone, who kept it there. I was also told I wasn't informed of the network's displeasure because I had just had a baby and someone in the old leadership thought I might be a 'loose cannon.' Not as loose as Toobin's.... In the #MeToo era, I have been asked to make public comment on basically every errant penis in the media, government, sports, and entertainment worlds, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the news, and at the expense of some amount of professional dignity. It is ironic that in shining a light on bad behavior, which is the right thing to do, you're still a woman on TV talking about penises...."

Writes Mary Katharine Ham, in "In the Age of Quiet Quitting, I Was Quiet Suspended, And I Can't Shut Up About It/On Toobin's wake, professionalism, and the lessons I thought we learned in #MeToo" (Substack).

Can we — most of us — come together and agree to allow access to abortion in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy — or at least the first 10?

I'm seeing this at Twitter this morning:

Roughly 15 weeks was a popular, consensus position Roe prevented for 50 years. Many on both sides will still disagree with it, but it’s likely where many states will land, and STILL more liberal than most European countries. https://t.co/JFrU63AWTl

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) July 11, 2022

And it's something I'd discovered on my own, independently. In a post on July 2, I discussed a little unscientific poll of mine called "What sort of law protecting access to abortion do you think Congress should pass?" I'd noticed the problem with the polls I was seeing: They were just asking if there should be statutes establishing a right to abortion. But:

Should Netflix be shaming/mocking/stalking its own customers like this?

To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 11, 2017

I wouldn't assume Netflix is using actual information about its customers. It's just a jaunty reminder that you can get Christmas movies on Netflix, using the trope that Netflix — like Santa Claus — sees what you're doing and judges you.

And it worked really well. Look at all the re-tweets. And it got the Washington Post to write an article, "What to know about ‘A Christmas Prince,’ the Netflix movie that sparked a controversy."

The response [to the tweet] was massive (retweeted about 110,000 times so far) and alternated between amused and scornful: Wow, Netflix, way to shame your own viewers for watching a movie that you commissioned and featured and promoted on your streaming service. Also, it’s a creepy reminder that this company has access to loads of personal data about all of your viewing habits, and probably has drawn some other intriguing conclusions. And it might tweet about them.

Anyway, the “creepy tweet” kerfuffle has been in the news this week, so for those of you who are confused about this thing called “A Christmas Prince” that sparked such a controversy, here’s everything you need to know about the movie. Spoilers abound.

I don't need to know anything about "A Christmas Prince," so I go back to the thing that pointed me to this "kerfuffle" in the first place, a humor riff — linked at Instapundit — "The Sad People Who Watched ‘A Christmas Prince’ 18 Days In A Row Craft A Statement/We've done nothing wrong. But we do need to lay down a marker that watching a good, clean holiday romance every single day of the Christmas season is just good, clean fun" by Mary Kathrine Ham. Sample:

Lindsay: What’s the implication, here, that we’re all lonely cat ladies just because we want to watch a spunky reporter investigate a playboy prince and get herself entangled in some truly royal trouble a couple dozen times??

Martin: I am not a girl or a lady, cat or otherwise. I know I’m outnumbered, here, but really....

Angelica: We do have a lot of cats, to be honest....

Oh! Cats again. Time to reread "Cat Person" for the 3rd going on 18th day in a row:

She learned that Robert had two cats, named Mu and Yan, and together they invented a complicated scenario in which her childhood cat, Pita, would send flirtatious texts to Yan, but whenever Pita talked to Mu she was formal and cold, because she was jealous of Mu’s relationship with Yan....

Before he got out of the car, he said, darkly, like a warning, “Just so you know, I have cats.”

“I know,” she said. “We texted about them, remember?”

Cats take on so much of the blame for what's wrong with us humans. That is, we project our shame onto cats. The cats don't care.

More importantly, what would cats watch on Netflix 18 days in a row?

"Married, they could have capitalized on their across-the-aisle relationship — made it their 'brand,' a la James Carville and Mary Matalin, with a book deal or a TV gig perhaps."

"But anything like that, Mary Katharine said, would have felt false. They weren’t at complete opposite ends of the spectrum; they weren’t even sure they believed in a spectrum. They were fiercely independent, just as they wanted their kids to be. Making themselves a bipartisan sideshow would only get in the way."

From "She was a conservative pundit. He was a liberal activist. At home, none of that mattered."

ADDED: Here's audio from a 2011 radio show with Jake Brewer and Mary Katharine Ham talking about the "dumb" political arguments they've had.