"Many in the entertainment industry are creatives, they’re freethinkers, they’re out-of-the-box thinkers..."

"... and so, the idea that someone isn’t conventional is kind of part and parcel of how they move through the world."

Said Dr. Erica Anderson, "a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping children with gender identity issues and who is transgender herself," quoted in "Why do so many Hollywood celebs have trans or non-binary kids?" (NY Post).

These entertainment people are "freethinkers," according to Anderson, who also says, contradictorily, that "the prevailing politics are extremely progressive," so "they don’t feel safe to question an asserted identity by one of their children."

So what is it? Do they feel compelled to go along with whatever the child says — politically compelled — or are they — because of their inherent creativity — celebrating and encouraging unusual expression?

I'm seeing a mysterious merger of freedom and compulsion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd: "I think she means outside-the-box thinkers. Out-of-the-box usually means you don't have to do anything yourself, no assembly required." 

That's closely observed and correct. This is the case of a dying metaphor. What is this box we're talking about when we say "outside of the box"? Grok tells me the expression originated with the 9 dots puzzle:

You're an outside-the-box thinker if you realize you can connect the 9 dots with 4 lines if you go beyond what is only an imaginary box. Apply that metaphor to thinking about how to parent a child who doesn't fit the gender stereotypes associated with its physical form. That's what an outside-the-box thinkers would do. Now, compare the out-of-the-box thinker. This would be someone who has pre-determined ideas built in and really doesn't think at all.

"People find anything offensive, but we pushed back and we won. So f*** them. Until the next time. They haven’t gone away."

"They’re just licking their wounds. They’ll be back with something madder. But remember who it is next time? Right? It’s always these sort of educated, middle-class, privileged, elitist, sort of people telling ordinary working-class people what they can and can’t do and say and laugh, not realizing how important comedy is to ordinary people."

Said Ricky Gervais, in his new Netflix special, "Mortality," quoted in "Ricky Gervais Uses Netflix Special To Declare Victory Over 'Virtue Signalling' Elites Who 'Find Anything Offensive' — And Reveals Golden Globes Gag He Bottled" (Deadline).

Also: "The most annoying thing about virtue signalling is people being smug about having the morality of the age. You’re what you’re like because of where you are and when you are.... I’m willing to admit that if I’d have been born 300 years ago and I was white and wealthy, I’d have probably owned slaves...."

And then — I'm saying this based on having watched the show — he proceeds to fake-fawn over himself for being a particularly benevolent slaveholder. He virtue-signals within the slaveholder role. And the implication is that's what today's virtue-signalers are doing, praising themselves within the standards of the time but blind to the larger picture.

"I'm still mulling the point... about whether or not both parties moved in an individualistic direction and that there were these big solidaristic movements on the left that that began to to fade.... "

"My instinct was it was wrong. And as I think about it, I think it's right, but I think that it's right for possibly a different reason...."

Mulls Ezra Klein, in the new episode of his podcast, "MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question." I'm jumping you to a spot about half an hour into the discussion:

"I think there's a sense that that politics failed... particularly after 2024... You look around at the way... communal shaming worked. You look at the way people look back on the pandemic. You look at the backlash now to what gets called wokeness, Me Too. And whatever you believe about the underlying arguments being made that the effort to shame your way to a better world was a political failure — not a small political failure, but a political failure that has empowered the absolute worst people, the people you feared the most, like a Murderers' Row of who you did not want to have power.... And the move — I'm not sure if I would call it towards individualism — but away from this heavily enforced solidarity of both action and language — very, very aggressive on speech and info hazards — that that was part of what went wrong....  [T]he left became extremely comfortable with the deployment of state power on behalf of institutions and so on in a way that really radicalized the other side. And the other side didn't become libertarian — in a strange way, they became authoritarian...."

Klein seems to be blaming the left for making the right authoritarian, but isn't he also accusing the left of authoritarianism? What is "heavily enforced solidarity" that's "very, very aggressive on speech and info hazards" — what is it to be "extremely comfortable with the deployment of state power" — if not authoritarianism?

By the way, what is a Murderers' Row? The term goes back to at least 1850, when it referred to a row of prison cells in New York City's Tombs. But most Americans probably think of it in as referring to baseball— especially the 1927 New York Yankees, which had a very intimidating batting lineup. If that's your reference point, Klein sounds like he's expressing awe and admiration for the left's adversaries. Trump is the Babe Ruth of politics.

"How are we supposed to do pro-Trump messaging?"/"Oh, come on, guys. We're South Park. We can do it!"

Read warnings* before clicking.

*Warnings:

• Although South Park Studios posted this on YouTube, it is the end of the episode, so it's a spoiler, but I don't think that matters much, and they obviously don't either.

• There is some male nudity. 

• Trump is exalted but also humiliated. I think both Trump haters and Trump lovers can be entertained, depending on psychological complexities I would not pretend to plumb in this list of warnings. 

I watched this episode last night... after forking out $119 for an annual subscription to Paramount+ Premium. I paid precisely because I wanted to watch this episode, which I'd heard was great.

I was entirely satisfied. The animation of Trump is inventive. His Canadian-style detached head and pronunciation of the word "about" suggest an ongoing narrative — perhaps that he was really born in Canada and that's why Canada needs to become the 51st state. There are the new problems of living in post-"woke" America. Cartman — and the show's writers — are deprived of the material they liked to satirize and so life may not be worth living. We laughed a lot and are planning to rewatch.

"Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses."

"When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, 'Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?' It seemed like a small and judgmental world. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable.... If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s...."

Writes David Brooks, in "When Novels Mattered" (NYT).

Brooks goes on and ends up with the prediction that the literary novel will make a comeback, but I can't figure out what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. Why wouldn't they have done it already? They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication.

ADDED: Something I found myself saying to Grok: "One problem is women do most of the literary fiction reading and wom[e]n today don't take the kind of low-level misogyny that used to power man-written literature."

An "SNL" sketch that surprisingly spoofs the idea that you're not allowed to ask where that baby came from.

Gavinx.

THIS IS BRUTAL! Gavin Newsom claimed on his podcast that no one in his office ever used the word "Latinx" to describe Latinos, so CNN aired a compilation of Newsom himself saying it REPEATEDLY.

It's amazing to see leftists tearing themselves apart.

Newsom: "By the way, not one… pic.twitter.com/jM1YxiWxeC

— George (@BehizyTweets) March 21, 2025

"Your job is to be clever and agile enough that wherever they put the gates, I'm gonna make the gate."

That's where Seinfeld ends up, but not until after he decries "the extreme left and PC crap" which makes comedy writers need to "worry so much about offending other people."

🇺🇸SEINFELD: EXTREME LEFT HAS DESTROYED COMEDY

“Used to be you would go home at the end of the day, and most people would go:

'Oh, Cheers is on, or Mash, or All in the Family.’

You just expected there'll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.

Well guess what? Where… pic.twitter.com/JWp2Jyf4DO

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 29, 2024

"When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things."

"Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort. While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold.... I can’t blame younger writers for believing that it is their job to convey a strenuously correct public morality...."

From "Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable" by the writer Jen Silverman, in the NYT.

Can't blame them? I say blame them. They're already feeling bad about not doing everything possible to promote prescribed morality. Make them feel bad about making bad art. You've got to leverage the bad feeling. 

"Everyone has something they can offer."

Elon Musk tweets, "New York City just forced kids out of their school to house illegals."

He's responding to a tweet that displays this video of Massachussetts governor Maura Healy saying listening to* "Everyone has something they can offer" and inviting citizens to offer their homes as housing for those who are in the country illegally:

6 months ago, Massachusetts began to ask residents to host illegals in their homes and properties.

Soon it will be mandatory. pic.twitter.com/wyhjXlxWDf

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 11, 2024

Are you willing to have "an additional family be part of your family"?

I note that Musk uses the emotive expression "illegals," but what is the respectful term? I found this Department of Justice memo recommending "undocumented noncitizen"and "undocumented individual," but these terms don't fit easily in conversation and they confusingly suggest that it's about paperwork and bureaucracy.

ADDED: I'm seeing some people nudging me to accept "illegal aliens" as the respectful term. That's more respectful than "illegals," but it is not respectful. First, even "aliens" is rejected. As you can see from that memo, the current preference is "noncitizen." Second, it's bad to say that the person is "illegal." Their entry into our country was illegal, but they are human beings. It's crude (and nonsensical) to describe the entire person as illegal. A person is not a thing. To say "illegal immigrant" is not like saying "illegal drugs." I would say "a person who has illegally immigrated," but that's too long to work in natural conversation.

____________________

* A commenter informs me "Governor Maura Healy is not the person speaking in this video, she is the person to the right of the speaker."

AND YET: We don't generally follow a rule of refraining from referring to a person by one thing that he has done. If a person escapes from prison, we wouldn't refrain from calling him a "fugitive." We wouldn't think it was important to display our goodness by eschewing the simple expression and calling him "a person who has escaped from prison."

"The dreariest aspects of the 'woke' movement are partisanship, outrage, victimhood and an obsessively political view of the world."

"But just as politically correct comedians trade on stories of their own oppression, anti-woke comedians now delight in referencing their own cancellations — Gervais and Chappelle’s shows are full of tales about people who have attacked them on the internet and in real life.... The outrage of woke comedians at the immorality of their enemies is echoed by the ceaseless outrage of anti-woke comedians at the absurdity and stupidity of their enemies. Comedy should offend. Comedians should speak freely.... But offensiveness is not synonymous with wit. And the best comedy is anarchic, not partisan. Surprising, not predictable. The antidote to an age of political polarisation and outrage is not more of the same. That men as talented as Chappelle and Gervais have succumbed to the temptation is a testament to just how powerful those forces are."

Writes James Marriott, in "Sorry, anti-woke comedians, the joke is on you/The problem with Ricky Gervais is not that he’s outrageous, it’s that he’s not outrageous enough" (London Times).

Yes, having watched the new Netflix shows from Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, I think this criticism is apt.

"I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives."

Said Judd Apatow, quoted in "Judd Apatow’s 'Bob and Don: A Love Story'/Watch a short film about the lifelong friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, who were not an obvious match" (The New Yorker).

“What’s so different about them is Bob was a real writer. He wrote those routines, which were, like, one-man sketches. . . . Don came from working really hard playing lounges and strip clubs, figuring out how to do crowd work, doing multiple shows a night into the wee hours in Vegas. Bob just got huge immediately..... [Don] came from a time when his theory was, It’s O.K. to make fun of people as long as you make fun of all of them,” Apatow explained....

The New Yorker writer, Bruce Handy, quips: "Think of it as a very old-school version of D.E.I."

ADDED: I've given the impression that I think "very old-school version of D.E.I." is quite clever, but I don't. It's a variation on the cliché wisecrack: "I'm an equal opportunity offender."

Urban Dictionary has an entry for "equal opportunity offender": "One who bashes and trashes any and every different type of person known to earth; including the basher's own race. Don't call me racist, I am an Equal Opportunity Offender."

"Visiting our museums and galleries, you might believe there is no such thing as art, only appalling artists and their still more appalling subjects."

"In the last few years, we have witnessed museums in acts of mass self-flagellation. Collections must be decolonised, recontextualised, purged and sent for conservation in perpetuity. Naughty Gauguin, nasty Picasso, horrible, horrible Hogarth. There is a card on sale in the Royal Academy shop designed by the illustrator David Shrigley. It reads: 'It’s a complete disgrace I am deeply offended by everything.'"

Writes Laura Freeman in "Galleries should drop the cringing and tell our story" (London Times).

"I invented Edna because I hated her.... I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation."

Wrote Barry Humphries, quoted in "Barry Humphries (Dame Edna to You, Possums) Is Dead at 89/Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer" (NYT).

Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne.... On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest. 

Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self...

I loved Dame Edna. (Click my "Dame Edna" tag.) But not everyone appreciated this sort of humor: 

"I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!"

"When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up." 

Said Roald Dahl, quoted in "Roald Dahl promised to set a crocodile on anyone who changed his words" (London Times).

 

This is from a recorded conversation he had with the artist Francis Bacon in 1982.

"Many of the changes to Dahl’s books seem minor: 'I’d knock her flat' becomes the much more diplomatic 'I’d give her a right talking to,' for instance."

"'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!' Other changes are just patronising. The Witches once imagined a woman 'working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.' Now she might be 'working as a top scientist or running a business.' Are there no women cashiers now? Rather than going  white as a shee,' the Queen’s maid in The BFG now goes 'still as a statue.' Dahl can’t even poke fun at a tortoise any more. In Esio Trot, tortoises can only read backwards because they are 'very backwards creatures.' How rude! Now they can only read backwards ... just because. And when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set out on their tractors to destroy the foxes’ home once and for all in Fantastic Mr Fox, the animals once noted in terror that 'The machines were black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.' The tractors are no longer black, just in case a fox was being racist."

Writes Laura Hackett, in "Censoring Roald Dahl? I’ll be keeping my original copies/The author’s books have been edited for fear of offending. Kids should be allowed to read them in their full, nasty, colourful glory" (London Times).

I already blogged about this travesty yesterday. I'm blogging again because this has new examples of the awful wreckage.

"Augustus Gloop now ‘enormous’ instead of ‘fat’, Mrs Twit no longer ‘ugly’ and Oompa Loompas are gender neutral."

"Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive" (The Guardian).

Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added.... 

In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.... 

References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”....

"Mr. Zhang, 56, said he lost $70,000 gambling last year, prompting him to play more in the hopes of winning it back."

"He immigrated six years ago from Beijing, where he worked as a calligraphy teacher, but is now unemployed, he said. He rides the bus [to the casino] weekly from his home in south Brooklyn to play baccarat and other games. He pulled out his platinum Resorts World card, saying he was prepared to stop gambling once he played enough to obtain a black card, the highest status. 'If only I could win a little bit every time I came,' Mr. Zhang said in Mandarin. 'How great would that be?'"

From "Casinos Target a Vulnerable Clientele: Older Asian Gamblers/The industry’s efforts to lure Asian customers will be a significant factor looming over the upcoming application process for new casino licenses in New York" (NYT).

The article isn't entirely about the vulnerability of "older Asian gamblers" to gambling problems. Some of them are riding the bus to socialize with other people who speak their language, and others make money by selling the $45 gambling voucher they receive for taking the $20 bus ride.

"There seems to be genuine confusion over what a well-meaning person can say without offending someone."

"According to Pew, a majority of Americans believe there isn’t any agreement on what language is considered sexist or racist of late.... You might find yourself wondering: Can I use that word? Am I not supposed to say that anymore?... [W]e enlisted the help of the polling firm Morning Consult to survey a representative sample of over 4,000 Americans...."

This is a very useful and entertaining exploration by the New York Times. Let me just highlight — uplift and highlight — a few things that stood out for us here at Meadhouse: 

First, the overview:

"Despite his best efforts, Jake has recently hit a wall in his career and personal life. He feels stuck..."

"... and unfulfilled, and has begun to question whether the path he has chosen is really the right one for him. Jake is intelligent and resourceful, but he can also be impulsive and reckless. He has a tendency to act without fully thinking things through, which has gotten him into trouble in the past. Jake is good-looking and charming, but he has never been able to settle down in a committed relationship. He has had many casual flings and short-term relationships, but has never found someone who truly understands him. Overall, Jake is a complex and multifaceted character who is struggling with a deep sense of uncertainty and disillusionment. He is at a turning point in his life, and the events of the story will force him to confront his fears and doubts, and to ultimately make some difficult decisions about his future."

That's A.I., responding to a fiction-writer's request for a good fictional character, quoted in "Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? As a young fiction writer, I dreamed of a technology that would tell me how to get my characters from point A to point B. Could ChatGPT be it?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker).

It's terrible — isn't it? — or do I just need it to be terrible because I don't want any machine-written fiction? But am I clinging to a desire to love real, human fiction-writers? Maybe A.I.'s idea of a good fictional character is bad, and it's actually as good as what the humans do? If so, my desire to hate any machine-written fiction could lead me to hate the human fiction writer.

Here's what the real human writer — who needs us to continue to want him (and perhaps has never found someone who truly understands him) — has to say: