"We have to be vicious just like they are. It's the only thing they understand."

Said President Trump, about the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the train in Charlotte. Trump presents the problem of violence as straightforward, easy to solve quickly if we simply have the will to go hardcore into law and order, with none of the liberal complexity.

Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, there's "Trump blames Democrats for Charlotte stabbing. Records complicate the story. The case has sharpened partisan divisions about an intractable root of crime: how to treat the seriously mentally ill who pose risks of violence."

Is it really so complicated and intractable? WaPo urges readers to see "nuances" — basically the failure to deal with mental illness.

"The left is full of empathic people. Right. And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left...."

"The ethic is pretty straightforward. Anything that cries is a baby, it's like, no, some things that cry are monsters....Well, let, let's take the case of Nicola Sturgeon. The, the Scottish Prime Minister, the previous Scottish Prime Minister. Any man who wants to can be a woman. It's like, okay, any man, you mean any man? Do you? Yeah. Ha! Have you encountered the nightmare men? Oh, they don't exist. They're all victims. Yeah. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You'll change your story very rapidly. Yeah. And for the, for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they're either psychopaths, so they're wolves in sheep clothing, or they're people so that are so naive that the, the — what would you say? — Red Riding Hood's grandmother can definitely have his way with.... There are no shortage of naive people who've never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it.... And they're, and they're very good at crying like infants... And then the mothers, the naive mothers come flooding out...."

Said Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast. Scroll to 02:30:52 for the part I excerpted.

 

"The accused firebug, who has not yet been charged, first entered the US illegally at the Arizona border in 2018, but was nabbed just days later and shipped back home."

That's the New York Post, using the cutesy word "firebug," in "Fiend accused of burning woman to death on NYC subway is illegal migrant from Guatemala who sneaked into US after he was deported."

I guess that's the way the New York Post has been talking for a long time. "Fiend" is another example.

By the way, the word "firebug" was originally used to refer to a firefly — AKA lightning bug — but it became a slang word for "arsonist" in the mid-19th century. I note that it would be highly abnormal to use "arsonist" to refer to a person who murdered someone with fire — not unless a building were set on fire and the death happened as an unintended consequence.

"Firebug" connotes pyromania — a crazy fascination with fire. The New York Post unwittingly helps this accused man with his insanity defense.

Much more could be said about the practice of likening a human being to an insect — a bug — but I will stop here... out of respect for the dead.

"I walked around this place, paranoid of my fellow legislators, racking my brain trying to think, 'What could I have possibly said or done?'"

Said Jim Carroll, quoted in "Vermont Republican secretly poured water into colleague’s bag over months/Mary Morrissey apologizes after being filmed dumping liquid into backpack of Democratic legislator Jim Carroll" (The Guardian).

Both Carroll and Morrissey represent the city of Bennington.

It's not enough to apologize for doing this. The people who depend on this legislator need an explanation for why she repeatedly did something so bizarre. You can apologize for being out of your mind, but you don't really need to. I feel sorry for Morrissey, but she needs to resign. It's interesting that she made Carroll feel that he was insane. Was Morrissey gaslighting Carroll?

"Another acquaintance he made in Paris [in 1792] was John Stewart, an eccentric figure known as 'Walking Stewart.'"

"His nickname came from the fact that he had walked halfway round the world, from Madras, through Persia, Arabia, Abyssinia, much of North Africa, and every country in Europe as far as Russia. He refused to take carriages because they were both elitist and cruel to horses. He came to believe that there was an impending 'universal empire of revolutionary police terror' that would 'bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.' The police state would ban his books, so he urged readers to translate them into Latin (a precaution against the supposed decay of the English language) and bury them seven feet underground. Their locations would be passed down orally until the dawn of the age of the Stewartian man made their disinterment possible. Despite these bizarre beliefs, Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a wonderful essay about him, said that his political views ‘seemed to Mr Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher.'"

From "Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World" (commission earned). 

Mother wants to share her ridiculous dream with her gay son.

I laughed out loud at this letter to the New York Times advice columnist:

My gay son and his partner are getting married. They plan to wear themed outfits. I support their union and their choices. They identify as male and wear traditional male garb. But secretly, I’ve dreamed that one of them, preferably my son, would wear the traditional white wedding gown that I wore. Its elegance contrasts sharply with their planned outfits. Should I share my desire?

The way she framed the question — "Should I share my desire?" — makes it sound creepily Oedipal. The fact that it's her old wedding dress makes it sound like she's inserting herself as the bride. The fact that she thinks gay men want to be — or seem like — women is presumptuous (and stupid). The idea that someone else's wedding is a place to act out your dreams is mundane but lamentable.

And why are we not told the theme of the "themed outfits"? We're told her old dress, by its elegance, is a sharp contrast, so what could this "theme" be? Is it just "traditional male garb"? Maybe this lady has drunk so deeply of the current cultural brew, that she thinks everything is a gender performance and so when 2 gay men go to their wedding they are only going "as" 2 men. They are 2 men in the guise of guys. And they might alternatively go as a man and a woman or a man and a man in drag.

Or maybe the lady is really, underneath it all, quite old fashioned, and her dream betrays the traditionalist's belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

"It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."

Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie. 

It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.

For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):

She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.

Bangs came up, organically, reminding me I still need to do that post about today being the 20th anniversary of the first day of this blog.

 

I've been looking forward to this date, so I could say, look, I've been writing this blog — writing every single day — for 20 years. 20 years! But what I like about blogging is that it's in the moment, spontaneous, so any sort of required occasion feels contrary to the essential nature of the enterprise.

That's why I've already written 6 posts today, and I've yet to do the 20-year anniversary post. But now it's happened. And all because I wanted to tell you what Theodore Roosevelt said about the 1913 Armory Show, and he'd used the phrase "lunatic fringe."

It turned out he was the first one, as far as the OED has noticed, to use "lunatic fringe" to mean something other than women's bangs. In 1874, someone had used "lunatic fringe" to mean "A woman or girl's hairstyle in which the front is cut straight and square across the forehead":

'Was that why you studied so hard all winter, and wouldn't go to singing-school, you sly thing?’ said Lizzie, eyebrows and lunatic fringe almost meeting again. Our Boys & Girls....

And there it was, the spontaneous thing: a portal back to the first day of the blog, January 14, 2004. There are a number of posts in the 20-year archive that bear the tag "bangs," but click on that and scroll, and you'll get back to...

Next to me at the hair-washing station of the salon was a woman who was ranting about bangs. "I've always had bangs. Then, not having bangs, I was going crazy." Googling "bangs," by the way, is not a good way to come up with websites about the kind of bangs people rave about in hair salons.

That was the fifth and last post of the first day. One thing fell trippingly after another... for 20 years!

***

Here's the post from 2 days ago where I noted the upcoming blog milestone and — seeking material for today's post — asked readers if they'd point out something in the 20-year archive that somehow might seem to them to represent the essence of what this blog is. There are 143 comments there, and you can add more here, but let me pick out a few: 

This idea that the politics of the other is a mental disorder — literally.

Fetterman literally went to a mental hospital and now he's no longer a progressive. Whatever therapy he went through should be studied and replicated across the country and world. https://t.co/ZNZxhS94TR

— Heidi (@HeidiBriones) January 7, 2024

"That Should Be a Movie — 'The River of Doubt.'"

It should be a movie, but if it were, how could it be better than the book?

Here, read the book "The River of Doubt/Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey." I did. 

Excerpt:

That night, while the camaradas lay wound up in their cocoonlike hammocks under dripping palm leaves and a black sky, the officers took turns watching over Roosevelt in their tiny, thin-walled tent. As his temperature once again began to rise sharply, Roosevelt fell into a trancelike state, and he began to recite over and over the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s rhythmic poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu . . .”

Glenn Greenwald, approving of the restoration of Alex Jones' X account and, speaking of defamation, calling somebody who's just interrupting "deranged."

I spoke to @piersmorgan about the decision of @ElonMusk to restore Alex Jones' account on X.

Piers has done a great job airing all views lately, but this is the 2nd straight time I ended up on a panel with a deranged person who couldn't control herself from ranting. pic.twitter.com/ztkqt2gM6O

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 13, 2023

"What did it mean? Can we hope for a meaning? 'It’s the fashion to hate people in the United States.'"

"This quotation might be from one of a hundred admonitory sermons delivered after President Kennedy’s death. In actuality, it occurs in an interview granted in 1959 to a United Press reporter, Aline Mosby, by a young American defector then living in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. The presumed assassin did not seem to be a violent man. 'He was too quiet, too reserved,' his ex-landlord told reporters. 'He certainly had the intelligence and he looked like he could be efficient at doing almost anything.'... None of our country’s four slain Presidents were victims of any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain; they were sacrificed, rather, to the blind tides of criminality and insanity that make civilization precarious...."

Wrote John Updike, republished today and originally published November 29, 1963, in The New Yorker, in "A Nation of Eyewitnesses to J.F.K.’s Assassination/How it feels—and what it means—to watch a President slain on TV."

Whether there was "any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain" in any of the 4 assassinations, there was, in each case, a woeful and shocking exposure of the President to the shooting that killed him. There will always be somebody out there — somebody quiet... too quiet — thinking of killing the President. There needs to be good security, and it's been good enough for the last 60 years.

"I pulled both emergency shut off handles because I thought I was dreaming and I just wanna wake up."

Said Joseph Emerson, 44, who is "is facing 83 counts of attempted murder, 83 counts of reckless endangerment," quoted in "Pilot Arrested for Trying to Turn Off Plane Engines May Have Been on Mushrooms" (NY Magazine).

... Emerson told police officers that he thought he might’ve been having a “nervous breakdown” and disclosed that he hadn’t slept in more than 40 hours and had consumed psychedelic mushrooms for the first time....

One more reason to adhere to your ethics even when you are having a lucid dream.

"I was three years divorced, living in leafy, small-town New Jersey, when I looked out my kitchen window and saw a neighbor friend drop off some wildflowers he promised for my nascent woodland garden."

"He didn’t ring the bell. It was hot outside, so he placed them under the shade of a crape myrtle. As he pulled away, I felt, to my great surprise, maybe a half dozen little orgasms ripple through me. From that moment, I had touch-free orgasms whenever I saw him or heard his name. Suddenly, this man’s physical beauty was unparalleled. He was a creative genius. As I slid into an 11-year delusion that overtook my life, he became 'my beloved.'..."

Writes Teresa Riordan, in "My 11-Year Relationship That Never Happened/At 50, divorced and suffering from delusions, I experienced the greatest love I had ever known. If only it were real" (NYT).

ADDED: It's only by chance that this post follows the previous post, which is about "bristling" at the touch of a partner with whom you have an established sexual relationship. The shared topic is puzzling automatic bodily reactions. What do they mean? 

"For almost a century, scientists have known that people with schizophrenia struggle to regulate their body temperatures."

"In the 1930s, two doctors in Worcester, Mass., placed people with and without schizophrenia in a small, windowless room with eight electric heaters. Under hot conditions, the researchers noted, the patients with schizophrenia’s body temperatures rose farther and faster than the control group. 'Schizophrenic subjects,' they wrote later, 'are unable to comply normally … with the regulation of heat.'... Schizophrenia has also been linked to problems regulating dopamine, the chemical that makes the body feel good; altered levels of dopamine can also prevent the body from effectively cooling itself off.... Many antipsychotic medications... also make their users more sensitive to heatstroke....Then there is the tendency of patients with schizophrenia to wrap themselves in layers upon layers of clothing, even in boiling temperatures.... Experts also say that people with schizophrenia lack insight into themselves and their condition — in medical terms, this is known as 'anosognosia.'... Under psychosis, a patient might walk for miles engaging only with the voices and characters in their own mind. Under normal conditions, that might simply be dangerous. In Phoenix, it’s deadly."

From "The unexpected reasons that extreme heat is so dangerous for those with schizophrenia/Schizophrenia may be the deadliest preexisting condition during heat waves. The fate of one man in America’s hottest city shows why" (WaPo)(headline at the front page. At the article page, it's "Heat's Hidden Risk").

"Heat Singes the Mind, Not Just the Body."

Reads the headline at The New York Times. 

To "singe" is to scorch superficially.

In French, "singe" means "monkey."

But let's read on. This sounds quite serious:

"Kennedy maintains a mental list of everyone he’s known who has died. He told me that each morning he spends an hour..."

"... having a quiet conversation with those people, usually while out hiking alone. He asks the deceased to help him be a good person, a good father, a good writer, a good attorney. He prays for his six children. He’s been doing this for 40 years. The list now holds more than 200 names. I asked him if he felt that his dad or uncle had sent him any messages encouraging him to run for president. 'I don’t really have two-way conversations of that type,' he said. 'And I would mistrust anything that I got from those waters, because I know there’s people throughout history who have heard voices.' He laughed. 'It’s hard to be the arbiter of your own sanity. It’s dangerous.'"

 Writes John Hendrickson, in "The First MAGA Democrat/Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is feeding Americans’ appetite for conspiracies" (The Atlantic).

"The History of Lobotomies and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

 

At 1:02: Duncan Trussell starts talking about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — "It's completely different from the movie... Ken Kesey, he was like..." — and Joe Rogan, who'd just said he read the book, blurts out: "Ken Kesey wrote it?!" Trussell lets that go and proceeds to put the story, as told in the book, into his own words.

At 3:22: Duncan and Joe discuss the real-world medical practice of lobotomies: "They really did that"/"They really did that.... What happened to the person? 'They became a really good patient.'"

At 4:45: Duncan and Joe discuss Thomas Eagleton and electroshock therapy for depression. "Today, in this victimhood society, if you said he suffered from clinical depression but he sought help, [he]'d be a shining example: Look at him!... He's a hero!"

"'Sybil' is part of a long American parade of books about psychologically distressed women, preceded in the 1960s by 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden' and 'The Bell Jar'..."

"... followed in the 1990s — the cloak coming off — by the confessionals 'Girl, Interrupted' and 'Prozac Nation.' It haunted teenage girls (and surely some boys) from their bedroom shelves, with its distinctive covers of a face divided as if the shards of a broken mirror, or fractured into jigsaw-puzzle pieces.... The book is a historical curiosity and a cautionary tale of mass cultural delusion that makes one wonder what current voguish diagnoses — witness the 'TikTok tics' — might warrant closer interrogation...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Even After Debunking, 'Sybil' Hasn’t Gone Away/The “true story” of a woman with multiple personalities was a 1973 sensation and is still in print 50 years later. Why do such lurid tales hold their grip?" (NYT).

"There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain [a blog] audience... but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop...."

"[The demand for content] is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much. It’s this last part that is often most difficult for writers to accept.... Before they post, therefore, many writers mentally calculate: Is this post 'good enough,' or does it dilute the overall quality of my work, alienate my audience, etc.? But [WaPo's Matt] Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.... Even the most anodyne, mediocre writing fulfills the requirement of regularity. (What is the 'Wayne Gretzky' quote? 'You miss 100 percent of the audience conversion opportunities you don’t take'?)... What do the top text-based content-creation entrepreneurs of our time have in common? Logorrhea.... It’s easy to see why writers reared in the hothouse reputational marketplace of Twitter are desperate to avoid the shame of negative attention. But... people forget, or move on, or don’t really care.... Feeling shame that prevents you from doing or saying inappropriate things is maybe a useful way to navigate complex moral-social arrangements, but fearing shame that prevents you from adhering to the first commandment of blogging ('post frequently and regularly') is counterproductive. As Yglesias says, it's the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly. Put things out. Let people yell at you. Write again the next day."

Writes Max Read in "Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging/How to be a successful content entrepreneur" (Substack)(riffing on the WaPo profile of Yglesias).

Max Read doesn't mention artificial intelligence, but if his idea of successful blogging is right, then bloggers can set their blogs to automatically generate endless posts. And that's why he can't be right. But by his own terms, he doesn't need to be right. He just needs to load in more words words words.