23 things Vox predicts will happen in 2023.

Do you have predictions? Surely you don't have 23, that is, 23 worth saying. You can always predict obvious things.

Here are Vox's, perhaps padded by obviousness — e.g. "The Supreme Court will rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional (70 percent)."

"Traditionalists argue that the feminist revolution has gone too far, and we need to get more women back into the home. But I think..."

"... it makes more sense to take the opposite perspective: that the feminist revolution is only half finished. We’ve done a lot to encourage women to pursue careers in traditionally male professions. But we still don’t do enough to encourage men to do traditionally female work in our homes and communities. That’s important not only because it enables their partners to succeed at work, but also because this kind of work is important in its own right."

Writes in Timothy B. Lee in "I'm a professional dad who 'leaned out' to support my wife's career/If we want an equal society, we need to get more comfortable with unequal marriages" (Full Stack Economics).

Lee — one of five Washington Post writers who followed Ezra Klein to Vox Media to help start Vox.com in 2014 — writes from personal experience:

Just imagine.

Just imagine being a journalist and then regularly using your keyboard to lavish praise on the nobility, compassion and goodness of the person whose job it is to deceive the media and propagandize the public. How does basic levels of dignity and self-worth not prevent this?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 6, 2021

Why isn't there a vibrant anti-pornography movement within the present-day cancel culture?

I wondered. I remember the big anti-pornography movement of the 1980s — and how it was squelched — and I thought it is due for a comeback. We're censoring Dr. Seuss books for minor racial improprieties, but the monumental misogyny problems of pornography are ignored. 

So I looked to see if there were signs of a resurgence of the anti-pornography movement, and I found this (from a few days ago, at Vox): "This week in TikTok: The problem with the 'Cancel Porn' movement/On TikTok, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion about sex work."

Apparently, there's enough of a new movement that Vox needs to instruct us about what's wrong with it. If there's a resurgence there's also a squelching of the resurgence, off and running. 

Notice that Vox's problem with it is structured as feminism — helping sex workers? — but that's how the squelching of the 1980s movement worked too. It was packaged as feminism. What's different now: There's TikTok, and the activists are teenagers reaching teenagers.

Here's #cancelporn if you want to educate yourself about how this movement is taking off.

ADDED: Here's a Reddit discussion from January: "I'm very worried about the #cancelporn movement on TikTok." The worry expressed is that it will be used "to shame sex workers and generally safe ways of sex work."

Someone there says: "I wouldn't worry too much, the porn industry is one of the largest in the world and there's no chance in hell that a bunch of TikTok cringe artists are going to have any sort of actual impact." 

That roughly corresponds to something I was thinking. You can't pressure porn businesses if they are nothing but porn. It's not like demanding some publishing company take out a book here and there or movie company cancel some of its productions. If the questionable material is only a part of a business, there is leverage to pressure the business. 

So the "Cancel Porn" movement will need a different strategy. What I would expect to see is young people, especially women, staunchly disapproving of people who consume porn and declining to be in a relationship with a porn user. Boycott the users.

AND: From the Vox article (which is written by a woman, Rebecca Jennings):

"[T]here is a lot of demand for me to address the situation at Vox in detail or to assimilate my personal story into a larger narrative about 'wokeness' or the culture wars."

"Personally I’m not a huge fan of navel-gazing. So I’ll just say that my personal interest in reclaiming my status as an independent, blog-like voice transcends any particular issues with any particular publication. I wanted to do this, not go find a different job, and I thank those of you who’ve joined me on this journey."

Matt Yglesias has a thing called "What's wrong with the media" at Slow Boring, his new place.

Are you a fan of navel-gazing? 

Navel-gazing or omphaloskepsis is the contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. The word derives from the Ancient Greek words ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós, lit. 'navel') and σκέψῐς (sképsis, lit. 'viewing, examination, speculation'). Actual use of the practice as an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature is found in the practice of yoga or Hinduism and sometimes in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In yoga, the navel is the site of the manipura (also called nabhi) chakra, which yogis consider "a powerful chakra of the body".The monks of Mount Athos, Greece, were described as Omphalopsychians by J.G. Minningen, writing in the 1830s, who says they "...pretended or fancied that they experienced celestial joys when gazing on their umbilical region, in converse with the Deity". 

However, phrases such as "contemplating one's navel" or "navel-gazing" are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.

As long as Yglesias brought up wokeness, I just want to say that the jocular use of "navel-gazing" is a micro-aggression. You've got an unexamined premise that there is something backward about Hinduism (or the Greek Orthodox Church).

Shall we avert our eyes?

None of the "top stories" at Vox is about impeachment...



... and 2 are about trees.

Tucked away at the bottom of the front page is one new story about impeachment, "Gaetz’s effort to make the impeachment hearing about Hunter Biden’s problems backfired spectacularly." There seems to be something about getting Gaetz today (I guess because he went after Hunter Biden). At WaPo, the second "most read" article is "Where is Matt Gaetz’s humanity?"

From the WaPo piece (a column by Dana Milbank):

"[I]f you start from the axiom that Trump is Hitler, every fact becomes evidence that Trump is Hitler."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, observing the NYT reaction to Trump's Executive Order about anti-Semitism. THE JOURNALISTIC LEFT IS COMPOSED OF IGNORANT, HYSTERICAL CHILDREN: The ridiculous storm over Trump’s latest move against anti-Semitism.

... Vox has a decent piece — yes, that’s right, the NYT coverage is so bad it’s being debunked by Vox –which contains this jewel-like line given the Hitler comparisons: “The draft executive order largely restates the Obama administration’s position.” The main thing Trump is doing is turning it from nonbinding “guidance” into an Executive Order.

... [O]nly an idiot would start with [the axiom that Trump is Hitler], but idiots abound. “The refusal to apply Occam’s razor was astonishing. What was more likely: That someone without legal training was misunderstanding an executive order they hadn’t seen, or that a bipartisan coalition of Jewish policymakers persuaded Jared Kushner to convince Trump to issue the preliminary groundwork for a 21st century version of the Nuremberg Laws in America? You can guess which tack got the most retweets and likes. With real anti-Semitism on the march and on a day when gunmen targeted a Jersey City Kosher Supermarket, murdering four people (three of whom were Jewish), a chorus instead rose up against Jewish allies engaging in a largely symbolic legal exercise.”

From the Vox piece:

When the New York Times reported Tuesday afternoon that Trump was about to issue an executive order designed to crack down on anti-Semitic hate speech on college campuses, it sparked an immediate and understandable panic among liberals online.

So the serious issue is freedom of speech:

Trump is "really unpopular" and "deep underwater" in some states he needs for 2020.

According to Vox.

Did Vox read my attack on the word "deeply" (here, yesterday)? Well, "deep underwater" does seem to fit with the childish "really unpopular."

And the truth is, "deep" is an adverb, which is one more reason to be irritated by "deeply." The OED finds "deep," the adverb, all the way back to the year 1000. Chaucer used it — "And swore so depe to hire to be trewe." Shakespeare used it — "That Fooles should be so deepe contemplatiue." Pope used it — "A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring." Let's keep going! There's Oliver Goldsmith — " To tie him up..from playing deep." Sir Walter Scott — "An hundred dogs bayed deep and strong." Charles Lamb — "The reason..scarcely goes deep enough into the question."

And yet the OED itself calls "deep," the adverb, obsolete when qualifying an adjective (which is what is going on with "deep underwater"). There's an exception for adjectives for colors. It sounds wrong to say "She wore a deeply blue dress" and right to say "She wore a deep blue dress" (even though we might logically think that the dress was deep). "Deep" as an adverb modifying a verb isn't wrong. Would you say "We went deep into the forest" or "We went deeply into the forest"? "Deeply" has pretty much taken over, but John Milton wrote (in "Paradise Lost"):

Oh, conscience! into what abyss of fears
And horror has thou driven me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged!

Yes, Trump is still President, still not impeached, and still — don't we all know? — likely to win in 2020. He's gathering strength there in the abyss, deep underwater, whatever those paltry polls have to say.

"Coverage of Trump’s latest rally shows how major media outlets normalize his worst excesses."

Aaron Rupar writes about the Green Bay rally at Vox:

The president falsely accused Democrats of supporting infanticide, called the FBI and Justice Department leaders he’s purged from government “scum,” referred to the assembled media as “sick people,” and even admitted his proposal to punish blue states by relocating undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities was “actually my sick idea.”...

The New York Times did attempt to fact-check Trump’s lie about Democrats and abortion — Trump accused Democrats of supporting doctors who “wrap the baby beautifully” before they get together with the mother and “determine whether or not they will execute the baby” — but in so doing, the outlet demonstrated it doesn’t really have a vocabulary to adequately deal with Trump.

Instead of calling Trump’s lie a lie, the Times used the euphemism “revived an inaccurate refrain” in a tweet that was widely mocked. The accompanying article goes out of its way to avoid accusing Trump of lying, instead describing him as “reviv[ing] on Saturday night what is fast becoming a standard, and inaccurate, refrain about doctors ‘executing babies.’”...

The irony is that on Saturday night, as always, the media was one of Trump’s foremost targets of abuse — yet the very outlets Trump demeans continue to bend over backward to cover him in the most favorable possible light.

Are the media going soft on Trump? If so, why? I suspect that if they are lightening up, it's because they've come to believe that constantly battering Trump has produced numbness and even sympathy. That's the effect it has on me. And the post-birth abortion lie is a very special problem. To expose the misrepresentation, you must focus on the death of infants, and that generates powerful feelings that abortion-rights proponents may fear.

Front-paged at the NYT: How to eat lunch at your "luxurious" company.

In case this has never occurred to you, snack items can be lunch.

Inside, the article is "How to Make Meals From Office Snacks/At start-ups and luxurious companies, the free lunch is for the taking, if you’re bold enough." I look forward to more NYT articles about things that are "free... for the taking, if you’re bold enough."

How to Stock Your Home Office... supplies are free, if you're bold enough! 

For Shoppers at Department Stores: The clothes and makeup you need for your big date are free for the taking, if you're bold enough. 

For Diners at Middling Restaurants: Your home supply of sugar and ketchup is free, if you're bold enough.

Oh, now, I'm going too far! The NYT is talking about the conditions at "start-ups and luxurious companies." It's okay to take advantage of them, just like it's okay — even a great idea — to tax the rich to pay for things you want for the poor. Well, the workers at start-ups and luxurious companies aren't exactly poor, but they are young and hip and — I'm sure — socialist. So it's not petty theft or bad faith. It's cool, cool enough to be front-paged in the NYT.

Now, why do we need a 2,000-word article about how to grab office snacks for lunch. Is it about the moral question? The legal details? Is it about the office culture — what other employees and your superiors think of the worker who raids the shared snacks to assemble a meal? Is it about the nutritional details of a fruit and cheese (and whether Steve Jobs sort of died of being a fruitatarian)?

It's about the cuisine — the "scrappy new cuisine." And the makers of this new cuisine are stepping up to preen about it and the NYT is printing their names:

“I literally never go out and buy lunch,” said Rebecca Jennings, a culture reporter at Vox Media.... Her signature dish? The personal “work pizza,” which makes use of complimentary bread, sriracha and Babybel. Jennings bakes these ingredients in the toaster oven for about four and a half minutes, until the cheese begins to brown. After that, she adds a special touch. “We have this drawer that I don’t think a lot of the people at the office know about, with leftover Parmesan cheese packets from when big teams order pizza,” she said. “I’ll sprinkle that on top.”

They know now! And what do they think of you? The NYT doesn't seem to have asked anyone. They present Jennings's pridefulness as if everyone will admire her for her ingeniousness and her can-do spirit. There's no one to say she's using too much of the best items or that she's stinking up the place cooking cheeses that they'd only presume to eat cold.

No, it's on to the next person whose snacking gets called not only "lunch" but "cuisine." It's "Kira Fisher, who has worked for several social media companies, including Tumblr...." Wait. Are Vox and Tumblr "luxurious companies"? They're not "startups," are they? Aren't media companies struggling these days?

“One thing I really like to do is make a cheese plate,” [Fisher] said. “Getting all the fruit we have in the office and cutting it — cutting the apples, having grapes, finding whatever cheese they have — and making a little spread, a little office mezze platter.”

Having grapes?  Based on the photograph, I think they meant "halving grapes." And did she really cut  grapes apples with that little plastic knife? This lady is munching on fruit and cheese and taking enough to feel all right without more. But she's calling it "a little office mezze platter." So that makes it cuisine... or bullshit. Take your pick. And maybe it is what media companies deserve. Why is Kira Fisher working at Tumblr? She got her start at "the food blog Sad Desk Lunch, where she cataloged user-submitted photos of bleak workday meals."

Elsewhere online, lists of so-called “D.I.Y. office snacks” and “office snack hacks” recommend unofficial uses of office kitchen appliances, such as using a Keurig coffee maker to cook ramen. 

And the point there was humor. Office snack lunches are depressing. But the NYT is presenting this as a jaunty lifestyle.

According to Ms. Fisher, the great challenge of office cooking is overcoming the sweetness of snack food. She sometimes makes yogurt feel more lunch-like by adding a handful of crushed-up potato chips, or a salty “new wave snack” like Biena roasted chickpeas.

Is that an embedded ad for Biena? Here, buy some of that "new wave snack" through my Amazon portal. You can pay $1 an ounce for chickpeas — or let your "luxurious" company pay — and feel free to put them on yogurt (in your heroic struggle to overcome the sweetness).

A "sales manager" named Michael Sztanski is quoted enthusing about "a make-your-own-bowl-type thing":

“I’ll take the hard-boiled eggs and chop them up to make egg salad with mayo, pepper and salt. That’ll be one part of the bowl. Then I’ll crush up Doritos, or any chip — most recently, I’ve been using Sun Chips. I’ll crush them up as another part of the bowl. Then I get mozzarella balls, which I’ll throw in there as well. And a jerky stick.” 

I'm doing a make-your-own-blog-post-type thing, and yet I will pass on Sztanski's jerky stick.

The NYT does get to some other issues. There are a few words about nutrition. There's taxation: Employers have been deducting the cost of snacks, and it hasn't been taxed as income to the employees. Then there's the question whether you could "get fired for abusing workplace food privileges." A lawprof is quoting speculating that "maybe the employer is going to start saying that this is a crime, like embezzlement or theft." And Jennings is quoted feeling "embarrassment." But:

She probably should not be concerned. “Vox Media’s office cafes make for great spots to gather, have serendipitous run-ins and host creative brainstorms,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email. “It’s no surprise our employees have grown as clever with the snacks as we are with our work.”

That's the right answer for PR and tax purposes. And I believe it, actually. The company is keeping you on campus and basically still working. I've worked in places that serve outright lunches, and it was obvious that the point was to keep you on site and in work mode.

Ah! Finally, we get to "the ethics of snacks." A philosophy professor is consulted:

“Are they an unpaid intern or an underpaid employee suffering from broader social injustices?” [Brookes Brown, an assistant professor of philosophy at Clemson University]. “Or are they the C.E.O. who wants to make a higher rung on the Forbes wealthiest people list?”

I'd like a little detail on the philosophy of that. What is the ethical principle that authorizes readjusting your pay? What's the point of talking to a philosophy professor if you're going to get an answer that sounds like the first thing an employee caught stealing would blurt out?!

There's a second philosophy professor:

“It definitely matters whether the snacks show up in an endless supply or whether there’s a limited amount put out each day,” said Karen Stohr, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. “The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke put this in terms of an obligation to leave ‘enough, and as good’ for other people,” she said. “That seems to apply to employer-provided snacks.”

That's the Lockean proviso. Read about it here. Locke was talking about taking land from the natural world and making it private property, so I think you need to do some philosophizing to get from nature to an employer and from a human being working on land to an employee eating snacks, but — what the hell? — the article is getting long, we were just pausing to snack on philosophy, and it's time to get back to Kira Fisher. She says the snacks at Vox Media "are restocked daily."

“There’s always plenty left over, so I don’t feel bad at all,” she said. “But if you are the type to go in really early in the morning and take all of the most desired thing, like the cups of guacamole or the hard-boiled eggs, that’s extremely un-chill.”

And that's how it ends, with imagining somebody else who's doing the same thing but they're doing more, and when you think about them, they seem gross. They're un-chill. Hey, Kira, look at Michael, he's taking the hard-boiled eggs and chopping them up with mayonnaise to make egg salad as one part of a bowl and then crushing up Doritos. Should he be ashamed?

A retired law professor just unseriously hoped that Vox has hit rock bottom.

Here's what I'm looking at:



Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities. It's a choice to highlight similarities when there are also differences. For example I could say that there are similarities between Hitler's gesture in that screenshot and Melania's. There are also differences, and it would be a choice of mine to accuse Vox of juxtaposing those images as a way of saying Melania is like Hitler. I could just as well say those images were juxtaposed as a way to say Melania is different from Hitler. Or maybe there's no juxtaposing at all, and it's pure happenstance that Melania got tucked in over there, to the right of Hitler and underneath "Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good/It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years."

That's some hyperventilating by Matt Yglesias, and I don't know where he gets the authority to "wake up" America to what's really going on at the Supreme Court. You know, Vox touted that new essay about America and the Nazis precisely because it is written by "one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust." And now here comes Matt Yglesias, who is not an eminent and well-respected Supreme Court scholar, and he's eager to wake us up to the "reality" of the "radical right" that's been "run[ning]" the Supreme Court and to explain why it's good for the Supreme Court to be "delegitimized."

When the Supreme Court gives lefties outcomes lefties like, they want conservatives to stand down and accept that the Court is doing proper, even brilliant, legal work. It's analogous to what I call "civility bullshit." You propound belief in something when it serves your interests, but you violate it without a care when your interests go the other way.

I'm interested in this word "delegitimize." I wonder, is it "delegitimize" or "delegitimatize"? The OED doesn't contain the word "delegitimatize," but "delegitimize" is only a subentry, under the entry for the prefix "de-" and without a definition, just 2 historical examples, the oldest of which is from 1969. What a year, 1969! I can't link to the OED, but let me cut and paste this telling quote:

1969 C. Davidson in A. Cockburn & R. Blackburn Student Power 349 People will not move against institutions of power until the legitimizing authority has been stripped away... And we should be forewarned; it is a tricky job and often can backfire, de-legitimizing us.

It looks like we're seeing the word coined right there! It works because we already know "legitimize." But is it "legitimize" or "legitimatize"? Both "legitimize" and "legitimatize" have been around since the 1600s.

"Legitimatize" is defined as "To make legitimate; to serve as a justification for (something); spec. to make (a child) legitimate by legal enactment or otherwise." The OED tells us it's rare, but John Cheever used it in 1961:

1961 J. Cheever Jrnls. (1991) 152 The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage.

Harrumph! Sounds right wing. Let's check "legitimize." The OED refers us to "legitimatize" for the definition but does not warn us that it's rare. I guess people don't like too many syllables.

"Read leaked drafts of 4 White House executive orders on Muslim ban, end to DREAMer program, and more."

Vox has "Apparent Trump administration drafts suggest a harsh crackdown on immigrants."

"The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nominee."

Said Hillary Clinton, last night, proclaiming her individual historicity and immediately including everyone else:

Tonight's victory is not about one person.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls in 1848 where a small but determined group of women and men...

She put a little special, comical stress on "and men"...

... came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments* and it was first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred. 

I hear an echo of Barack Obama's It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation....

So we all owe so much to those who came before and tonight belongs to all of you....

So yes. Yes...

... Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

... there are still ceilings to break for women and men for all of us.

The metaphor that won't go away. Broken ceilings don't sound inherently good, and I wonder how many people remember (if they ever knew) why, in that metaphor, breaking part of a building is supposed to be good.

But don't let anyone tell you that great things can't happen in America. Barriers can come down. Justice and equality can win. Our history has moved in that direction. Thanks to generations of Americans who refuse to give up or back down.

Now you are writing a new chapter of that story.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure....

This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings...

No ceilings?!

... no limits on any of us and this is our moment to come together. Join our campaign. Contribute what you can... Now I'm going to take a moment later tonight...

So this is the moment... but there's another that's going to happen later. Mixing up the moments. Where's the poetry? I'm hearing an echo of Obama again. "Moment" is an Obama word... This was the moment...

... and the days ahead to fully absorb the history we've made here. 

That's just an unnecessary lie. She's been working so long to get this nomination she's wanted so badly. It's not believable that she's going to spend time in an effort to fully absorb the history. But, obviously, somebody decided the theme of the speech should be history, and it was flabbily fleshed out.
______________________

* I cut and pasted the text from Vox, but I've corrected the transcript. Vox, with sublime ignorance, wrote "the declaration of sent." At least they didn't write "the declaration of scent." From the video, Hillary's enunciation of "sentiments" is clear, and you'd think basic pride would force a transcriber to google the name of the Seneca Falls document. Oh, Vox.

"On Thursday night, Emmett Rensin, the deputy editor of Vox’s first person section, sent a series of tweets that, among other things, urged people to riot if Donald Trump comes to their town."

"We at Vox do not take institutional positions on most questions, and we encourage our writers to debate and disagree. But direct encouragement of riots crosses a line between expressing a contrary opinion and directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity...."

Vox has "suspended" Rensin.

I had to go elsewhere to find the text of the over-the-line tweets. Here, at Mediaite: "Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot." "Listen, if Trump is Hitler then you've got no business condemning rioters. If he isn't, you've got no business pretending normal is better." "Let's be clear: It's never a shame to storm the barricades set up around a fascist."

Here's Rensin's Twitter feed. Those posts that got him suspended are still up, and there's a lot more since then, such as: "You spent a year saying Trump was a fascist, and particularly an anti-Hispanic bigot. Hispanics take that seriously, and you're Shocked." "If you too believe he's a fascist, then ask yourself what it means to concern troll poor, Latino folks who take that belief seriously."  "It remains unclear to me what people believe the appropriate response to fascism is. Say 'fascist, fascist, fascist', people will freak." "If Trump *isn't* a fascist or an existential threat to democracy, fine. But then let's stop saying that he is."

Why there are so many things with titles like "Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president."

It's a hard-to-resist link for the many people who are clinging to the belief — rampant last summer but fading ever since — that Donald Trump cannot become president. Clicking on the link won't make his ascendancy any less likely, but it's like clapping for Tinkerbell. You want to believe what you want to believe and the only thing you need to believe — Peter Pan/the link tells you — is that a simple hand gesture from you now as you gape at a screen will make that thing true that you so dearly want to be true. So you click and the thing you help happen is not the thing you want to be true but the increase in the number of things with titles like "Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president."

That goes to an article at Vox by David Roberts that I have yet to read and that I'll take at its word. Maybe Roberts is lying and just trying to earn clicks for his site, but I'll assume it's really the reasons he scrapes together as he seeks to assure himself that it just cannot happen, Trump cannot become President.

It turns out to be a long article, broken up into parts, the first heading of which is: "Trump has one mode: dominance." To me, that's on its face wrong, because I've seen Trump in a mellow mode, like when he says that he's an educated, nice man who could be politically correct but it would be boring. It wouldn't work at this talk-to-the-base phase of campaigning, especially where a big strategy is to generate social media. I expect Trump's tone to evolve, just as all candidates pivot to the center after they get the nomination. Trump has spent his life working with people, mostly in a private communicative mode. It's absurd to think he doesn't know how to do more subtle things than what we've seen from the podium, aimed at crowds. The amazing thing is that as a novice politician he's done so well at campaign orations. I wouldn't conclude that's the only thing he can do. I'd infer he's good at whatever form of communication is called for under the circumstances.

But let's read what Roberts says:

One of the best things I've read this year about Trump's appeal is by Josh Marshall. It hearkens back to his (legendary in some circles) 2004 post about "bitch-slap politics."

I must inject a side issue: "hearkens back" (or "harkens back") is wrong (though common): “An old sense of the verb hark (which mainly means to listen) was used in hunting with hounds, where the phrase hark back denoted the act of returning along the course taken to recover a lost scent." We're not talking about listening back. Sound, unlike smell, doesn't remain on the trail and can't be traced. So please say hark back or just use normal English like it reminds me of.

Back to Roberts:

Marshall has wisely abandoned that term...

Roberts doesn't go down the rathole of why it was wise, and I'm not going to do his links for him. I'll just guess "bitch-slap" has been deemed offensive to bitches. The dogs are on the loose in this post.

... but the concept behind it has never been more relevant. It's about dominance displays, about showing, rather than arguing, that one's opponent is weak.

It's done not through critique but through attack — personal attack — demonstrating that the target will not or can not defend him or herself. The attack doesn't make the point, it is the point....

Though it makes pundits somewhat uncomfortable to admit it, most voters.... don't know much about "issues" and don't have well-defined political philosophies.... They are reading the subtext, attuned to who's aggressive and who's defensive, who's strong and who's weak, who seems like a leader and who doesn't.

Trump instinctively gets this. His innovation, if you can call it that, is to abandon the text altogether, bringing the subtext to the surface. "Toughness" is no longer a side dish, it's the main dish, the only dish. Trump will win because Trump wins. It's a post-truth, post-substance campaign, affect from top to bottom.

That's overstatement, but even if it were true, it wouldn't mean Trump is permanently stuck in that mode. It would mean that he has correctly discerned what works at this stage. If more policy particularity is what will work at a different stage, I would expect him to figure that out and get some policies. Do you think it's hard to elaborate policies at whatever level of particularity is needed? He's in a better position to do that if he hasn't nailed himself down.

Speaking of particularity, I'm going to be writing this post all day if I continue at this level of particularity. And the Sunday shows are on now. Let me just tell you the rest of the headings: "Trump's shtick is a wild success ... among a certain subset of voters," "But the road to an election is too long to have only one gear," and "Trump's approach is not an act that he can turn on and off at will." I haven't read the details, but I feel that I've already essentially already responded to them in discussing "Trump has one mode." It seems our Vox writer has one mode, saying Trump has one mode.

What if Roberts's project had been to soothe readers who wanted to believe that Hillary Clinton will never be President? That could be done too. And yet somebody's going to have to be President. Roberts has a footnote at the end of his article. I have to go searching for the text with the asterisk. It's in the second paragraph: "Absent extreme and unlikely circumstances*, Trump will never be president." The footnote is:

* I can think of two scenarios that would fit the bill. One, Trump faces Clinton and, late in the race, something happens to render Clinton unelectable. Two, Trump faces Sanders and Bloomberg jumps in, splitting the left vote and throwing the election to Trump.

Both seem highly unlikely to me, the first because Clinton is already the most intensely vetted figure in US politics, the second because Sanders is unlikely to win the primary.

And if that's reassuring enough to the readers who are sweetly clinging to their belief that Donald Trump can never ever ever be President, then, here, you need a lullaby:

Is anyone praising Obama's Oval Office speech?

I'm hearing a lot of negative spin — Obama squandered the opportunity, etc. So I went looking to see if places that would be expected to support him are saying nice things.

I tried Talking Points Memo and the front page is cluttered with all sorts of things but the only Obama-speech-related items are: "Fox Guest On Obama: 'Such A Total Pussy, It's Stunning'" (top left) and (lower down) "Fox News Host: Obama ‘Could Give A Shit’ About The Threat Of Terrorism." That's nothing complimentary about Obama, just the direction to look elsewhere, at how nasty his critics are. 

The Daily Beast front page has that "pussy" guy...



There's also a column by Michael Tomasky, "President Obama’s Challenge to Muslim Americans":

This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge to Muslim Americans.... [I]f other Americans had some sense that Muslim Americans as a group were really working to ferret out the radicalism, then this stalemate might be broken. If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real service....

Sounds like there's a big, daring, additional step Obama would need to take to earn Tomasky's praise.

Vox tried to keep it neutral: "Obama's rare Oval Office address to the nation: what he said and what he meant."

The NYT did put up "President Obama’s Tough, Calming Talk on Terrorism," as I noted last night.

Salon has: "Obama calls for reason: The president’s nuanced take on terror post-San Bernardino." The classic liberal buzzword. I've said it before:

"Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture."

A Vox piece.

"FiveThirtyEight founder and statistics guru Nate Silver has accused Ezra Klein's Vox.com of stealing other people's charts without attribution."

"'Yo, @voxdotcom: Y'all should probably stop stealing people's charts without proper attribution,' he tweeted Monday. 'You do this all the time, to 538 & others.'"

"In the popular imagination, Men's Rights Activists are 'neckbeards'..."

"... morbidly obese basement-dwellers with a suspect affection for My Little Pony. But Max is remarkably unassuming in appearance, handsome enough and normally tall; equally imaginable in board shorts and a snapback as he is in the sort of graduation suit one wears to a first post-collegiate interview downtown."

Vox explains what internet men's rights men are really like.

Vox is pleased at getting over 500,000 page views for re-posting a bunch of old stories.

"In a five-day period, we ran 88 of these [2+-month-old] stories, and collectively they brought in over 500,000 readers. That was great to see... "

What was interesting — though not completely unexpected — was that no one even seemed to notice that we were flooding the site with previously published content. A lot of the articles were enthusiastically shared by people who had shared them the first time around, too. No one seemed gripped by a sense of deja vu, or, if they were, they didn't mention it.

Vox is so pleased that they're adopting a policy of re-running old stories as if they weren't old, to give them another chance to win traffic. Here's the spin on why this is a good — as opposed to lame and lazy — policy:

On the modern web, content tends to arrive via miscellaneous streams rather than coherent chunks. So the meaning of strict chronology is breaking down regardless of what publishers do. If we can use our archives as a way to deliver more great pieces to today's audiences, then that's a huge win — for us and for them.

Let me re-spin that in the opposite direction: The internet is completely incoherent anyway, and nobody's going to notice, so why shouldn't we take advantage of this strategy?

Question: Why call attention to the strategy? Answer: To immunize themselves from criticism if anyone ever notices and cares. Or: Because they actually do think they're very clever and deserve credit for this journalistic efficiency.