At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Photos by Meade.

"A group of about 20 neo-Nazi demonstrators waved swastika flags and used the Nazi salute in downtown Madison on Saturday, Nov. 18, 2023."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports (with video).

From the madisonwi subreddit:

Caution: Nazis on state street
byu/LogisticsRecruiter inmadisonwi

Top-rated comment at Reddit: "Carl! We said black pants! Why did you wear urban camo? Nobody’s gonna take us seriously now!" Second: "Looks like someone forgot to bring their solid red or black shirt to their nazi dress-up party and had to wear a flannel. Soooo embarrassing!"

More comments from over there: "Can you imagine being as much of a loser as these guys? This is probably the most pathetic thing you could possibly spend your time doing on a Saturday in Wisconsin"/"I keep laughing about this. It’s just a beautiful fall day, it’s hunting season, there’s a football game. You could just walk around Madison and be normal, and people would give you beer! But these guys chose to put on masks, pile into a Uhaul like it’s a clown car, and drove to downtown Madison to waltz about waving Nazi flags and acting menacingly toward families and college students. There is nothing you could possibly be doing today that would be a sadder life decision than that."

Is there any good reason why this was withheld?

Think whatever you want about this video (which I regard as quite revealing).

That we only saw the Jan 6 excerpts that Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff wanted us to see, while they hid everything they didn't want us to see (like the below clip), corrupted everything from the start: https://t.co/78oT9JHpVQ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2023

I was going to say Elon Musk needs to have a clear idea of what things mean before he re-tweets them with anything like approval.

But I didn't think it was my job to untangle the meaning that other people purported to understand and deplore.

Then, I decided to give Elon Musk the respect he deserves and assume he knows what he's doing and means to do it, and, in this case, I think that means he knew some people would make a hostile interpretation and others would present counter-interpretations and there'd be an extensive debate about good and evil.

That is: He knew there would be virality to something on X and that's exactly what he wanted. Clarity and restraint would not have given him what he wants, which is to make things happen, intensely, on X, to crank up the debate.

Meanwhile, what's up with that rocket?

"Some people call these ‘folk songs.' Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!"

Said Big Bill Broonzy, in 1956, as he was performing "This Train (Bound for Glory)" alongside Pete Seeger to an audience of college students.

Quoted in "Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre/In returning to a songbook that is decades — if not centuries — old, a new generation of performers is expanding the definition of what their traditional art form can be" (NYT).

"Folk," meaning people in general, goes back to Old English.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces it back as far as 999: "Þa elkede man fram dæge to dæge, & swencte þæt earme folc þe on ðam scipon lagon." Chaucer used it, in Middle English, c1405, that's surprisingly readable: "Vp on thise steedes, grete and whyte Ther seten folk."

And here's Alexander Hamilton, with American terseness: "There were Folks killed in 1723." That made me think of Ilhan Omar's "Some people did something."

IN THE COMMENTS: James K said:

Incidentally, the Alexander Hamilton who said "There were Folks killed in 1723" is not the Alexander Hamilton who co-wrote the Federalist Papers. It was some other guy with the same name.

And I see at the link that the other Alexander Hamilton was not an American, but a Scot. So that must be Scottish terseness. And I am retrospectively less reminded of Ilhan Omar.

Is anyone watching the new season of "The Crown"?

I was excited about the premiere of the new season on November 16th, and I started to watch episode 1.

I got about 15 minutes into it and impulsively switched over to the Criterion Channel, where I browsed the "Pre-Code Divas" collection, picked one almost at random, and watched it straight through to the end.

I tried watching the rest of that "Crown" episode the next day and only got through about another 15 minutes before giving up. Turned the TV off entirely.

Why is it so unwatchable? I'm not even up to the really bad thing that I've seen spoiled in various reviews. And by "really bad thing," I don't mean that Diana dies in a car crash. That can't be spoiled, and the show puts that first, before the opening credits, so at least you're spared wondering how they will depict that. (They show the car entering the tunnel, and you hear a crash.)

No, what I saw spoiled is this, so don't go there if you're avoiding spoilers. I'll just say I hate that device, but I hadn't got there yet. Should I force myself to watch to the end of the series because I've come so far?

"If Trump manages to escape conviction in Jack Smith’s Washington case, which may be the only criminal trial that ends before the election, that’s going to turbocharge his campaign."

"Of course, if he’s convicted, that could turbocharge his campaign even more. It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting. He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about...."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "The Axe Is Sharp" (NYT)

"The Axe" refers to the person Biden calls a "prick," David Axelrod.

Trump mocked a disabled reporter, but he did not, as Dowd may want readers to falsely remember, make fun of his disability.

If we could read Trump's mind, would we find that he has "no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries is subhuman"? But we can't read his mind.

Sunrise — 6:55, 7:01.

Sunrise — 6:46, 6:51.

"What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis."

Said Sacha Baron Cohen, quoted in "Jewish Celebrities and Influencers Confront TikTok Executives in Private Call/TikTok faces escalating accusations that it promotes pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel content. 'Shame on you,' Sacha Baron Cohen said on the call" (NYT).

“If you think back to Oct. 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate,” Mr. Cohen said in the meeting. He accused TikTok of feeding similarly incendiary content to young people....

"There’s a classic Gen Z nihilism. My generation has spent a lot of time in a sort of destabilizing, regressive wave."

Said Rayne Fisher-Quann, 22, "an independent writer focused on girlhood and identity."

Quoted in "Goodbye, Feminist Blogs. Hello, Gen Z Content Creators? Young women are more feminist than ever, as are big brands and Hollywood franchises. But what happened to the online community blogs and zines once offered?" (NYT).

Also new at the NYT today: "Jezebel, the Oral History: 'There Was This Riotous Sense of Fun'/The site defined an era of feminism for millions of readers. According to its editors and writers, it was also an exhilarating place to work."

I can see how efforts to maintain a "riotous sense of fun" would tend to devolve into "a destabilizing, regressive wave."

"I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again. I would make up the report sometimes, because..."

"... the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report. So I was like, 'I’m just gonna make this up.' Because first of all, no coach is gonna get mad if I say, 'Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over … and do a better job of getting off the field.' They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, 'It’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.'"

Said Charissa Thompson, a Fox Sports commentator, in a recent podcast, quoted in "Why Charissa Thompson’s comments on making up sideline reports are so damaging" (The Athletic).

The columnist, Richard Deitsch, makes much of a response from another female sideline reporter, Laura Okmin, who just said the obvious thing — it's not okay to make up reports. Now, Okmin seems to be acting as though she's terrified at being thought of as a mean girl:

"I felt like I was permanently hung over, drunk, high and in a brain freeze all at once."

Said Emmanuel Aguirre, "a 30-year-old software engineer in the Bay Area [who] had Covid at the end of 2020," quoted in "Can’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive Fog/Adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s are driving the trend. Researchers point to long Covid as a major cause" (NYT).

We're told Aguirre "stopped dating, playing video games and reading novels, though he managed to keep his job, working remotely."

And look at this graph:

Assuming this change is real, is it from Covid? Why would Covid damage the brains of the young but not the old?

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. — Winston Churchill was never more right."

That's the most up-voted comment — by a lot — at "We Talked to Some Kamala-but-Not-Joe Voters. Here’s What They Said. A slice of voters would vote for Vice President Harris but not President Biden, reflecting his challenges and opportunities" (NYT)(based on interviews with voters who, in a poll, said they would vote for Harris but not Biden).

A few of the things the Kamala-but-Not-Joe voters said: "her skin color is like my skin color," "I just think she has a lot more to offer than the standard straight old white dude," "I like the idea of a female lawyer," "just to see a female, a woman in power, being that I was raised mostly by females," "I feel like she would probably do more for us, because I feel like there’s not enough being done for Black people."

I read the top comment and decided to blog it before I read those quotes. Now, I feel unsettled that so many NYT readers voted for it. It's too close to regretting that black people have the right to vote. 

The headline doesn't mention the support shown for Trump: 

Part 2 of today's sunrise — 6:42, 6:53, 6:55.

Sunrise time today was 6:51, and this was the kind of sunrise...

 ... where you are at great risk of missing the best part. I only got these pictures because I made it to a vantage point 16 minutes before the sunrise time:

I have more pictures, from this morning, taken around the actual sunrise time, but they don't have the red that was so prominent at 6:35. And before you quote me that "red sky in the morning" business, there is approximately 0% chance of rain today.

Open thread in the comments.