Sunrise — 5:46, 5:50.

"There can be no single emissary for the more than 80 million people who make up 'the White working class' nationwide..."

"... (not all of whom have ties to Appalachia, itself a wildly heterogenous region). Force of personality — or in Vance’s case, rustic kitsch — is no substitute for research. In his recent book 'Elite Capture,' the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo warns of the eponymous phenomenon, whereby privileged members of oppressed groups become spokespeople for those groups — and, in so doing, co-opt them. For instance, the members of the 'black bourgeoisie' who are so often the face of movements for racial justice emphatically do not speak for the majority of Black Americans.... This is one problem with identity politics, with its mania for electing envoys: The members of a marginalized group who enjoy enough of a public platform to speak on its behalf are often not representative. Vance, who went on to land a lucrative job at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm after law school, is hardly a typical hillbilly, and there is no guarantee that he has the interests of his less fortunate peers at heart."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "'Hillbilly Elegy' and J.D. Vance’s art of having it both ways/In his memoir and for some time after, Vance told liberals what they wanted to hear — but then he wanted power" (WaPo).

The attack on Vance as an attack on identity politics? 

"She would get a guy who knows how to talk to rural Americans, who knows how to reflect the most positive aspects of rural America, and therefore able to make our case to the folks in rural America who felt abandoned by the Democratic Party."

Said a Kentucky Democrat quoted in "The Amiable Attack Dog From Kentucky Who Could Join the Harris Ticket'Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of a deep-red state, is an intriguing Southern contender to become Kamala Harris’s running mate. He’s already straining to go after JD Vance" (NYT).

You know I told you yesterday, "Why Andy Beshear will be KH's choice for VP."

From the NYT article:

But with his television-ready presence, trial-lawyer training and a teaspoon of Appalachian drawl, Mr. Beshear appears ready and willing to take on another role: attack dog.... 

“JD Vance ain’t from here,” Mr. Beshear said this week on MSNBC, assailing the senator as an Ohio interloper....

Mr. Beshear kept it up later on CNN. “He claims to be from eastern Kentucky, tries to write a book about it to profit off our people, and then he calls us lazy,” he said of Mr. Vance, who has suggested that Mr. Beshear, the son of former Gov. Steve Beshear, owes his own success to nepotism. “This makes me angry.”

Young Emhoff and Harris.

Kamala and Doug when they were young. pic.twitter.com/aclB5sl4gC

— Kimberley Johnson (@AuthorKimberley) July 26, 2024

"It’s true that Captain Ahab can seem quite Trumpian..."

"... never more so than in the unnerving chapter titled 'The Quarter-Deck,' when he persuades the polyglot crew of the Pequod that his own private grievance against Moby Dick—for having 'dismasted' him off the coast of Japan—is theirs, and that mere profit in barrels of whale oil pales in comparison to the chance to eliminate the evil White Whale himself. 'I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,' says Starbuck, the voice then and now for narrow business interests. To which Ahab replies in his lordly way, 'Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.' As Ahab’s unhinged rhetoric escalates, even the reasonable Ishmael, schoolteacher turned sailor, surrenders to the manic mood. 'A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me,' he confesses. 'Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.'"

Writes Christopher Benfey, in "Siding with Ahab/Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?" (NYRB).

I wonder what Benfey thinks of Trump, because he seems to disapprove of the many critics who see "Ahab as the totalitarian tyrant menacing democratic freedom in the form of…Ishmael." Why don't readers "align themselves with Ahab"? The crew aligns with Ahab. And:

Not that Ahab isn’t appalling and even, at times, criminal. So is Macbeth; so is Othello. But do we really want our works of the imagination to mirror our own best selves, responsible and even-tempered, doing our small part to make the world a better place?

"As the boats ferrying the athletes moved along the Seine, what stood out was what was missing."

"The great mass of athletes in one place, moving in a continuous tide. The chaotic palette of national costumes, the different marching styles, the proud flag bearers. Few events more effectively combined the monumental and the individual. Everything about Friday’s ceremony and broadcast worked to diminish the athletes. Sitting in cheering clumps, sometimes three and four countries together, they looked like passengers on party boats competing to make the most noise, to signal that their country was having the most fun."

From "Opening Ceremony Misses the Boat/The Paris Games began with a new look and sparkled with Celine Dion. But the show suffered from bloat similar to TV’s other spectacles" (NYT).

"'How would Kamala Harris feel....' I hope that doesn't become the key question at every turn — How would Kamala Harris feel? Ugh."

"I hope this isn't the beginning of a new phase of semi-conscious misogyny: Because the Vice President is a woman, we must think about the Vice President's feelings. Does anyone ever wonder how Mike Pence feels?"

That's something I wrote on November 9, 2020. (The internal quote is from an Axios article.)

I see I made a tag "how does Kamala feel," but then I never used it again. I wanted to keep an eye on an unwholesome phenomenon. Sorry. I forgot. But I want to remember again. The question facing us in this election is what the candidate is offering to do for us and whether she or he will be very good at it. Your support should never be about wanting to boost the spirit and self-esteem of the candidate.

Sunrise — 5:46.

"Does dementia make you taller?"

Let me tell you what I really think. I don't have *any* inside info about this particular event. However, it is a fact that presidents have body doubles and decoys for security reasons. And, from a very reliable, firsthand source: To the extent our intel agencies (or whomever)… https://t.co/lAgeTIYQbm

— Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) July 26, 2024

"If what you’re saying is right, that Biden did something really heroic by stepping aside, offering the Party and the country the best chance to beat Donald Trump in November..."

"... I think what irks me is my fear that the people around Biden, and you can include yourself or not, but his staff, his friends, his family, would not be denouncing it as a giant risk to the Republic if he had decided to stick it out. I feel like they would be showing loyalty to him more than to the needs of the country."

Isaac Chotiner asked Jon Meacham, in "Was Biden’s Decision to Withdraw 'Heroic'? Jon Meacham, the President’s friend and informal adviser, considers his legacy" (The New Yorker).

What do expect Jon Meacham, the President's friend, to say? He says: "I think your being irked is now a hypothetical.... I totally get what you’re saying. But the fact of the matter is that the decision has been made.... I’m not minimizing the concern you’re articulating. I’m not dismissing it. It is totally legitimate. I absolutely see how people would be wrestling with that. But in point of fact, it’s no longer an issue...."

It's not a hypothetical when looking backward into the many months when Biden was sticking it out and his staff, his friends, his family, and others, including Kamala Harris, were showing loyalty to him more than to the needs of the country. Was it not a great scandal?

"I have never met a nonbinary person who thinks that they/them pronouns are somehow exclusive to nonbinary or trans people."

"They are a way to opt out of the gender binary in third-person reference, and people may choose to do that for many reasons—gender-based, political, philosophical, even religious. One uses the pronouns someone requests because it is the courteous thing to do. It does not stop being the courteous thing to do because one disagrees with the person's reason for requesting them (at least so long as the request is made in good faith rather than as political trolling)."

Says a commenter to the NYT Ethicist column, "My Relative Isn’t Trans or Nonbinary But Wants to Use ‘They/Them’ Pronouns. The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on allyship and forms of solidarity" (NYT).

The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, took a different position: "Using pronouns properly is a matter of not misgendering people. It isn’t part of a general policy of calling people whatever they want to be called.... [Y]our relative evidently identifies as cisgender and is motivated simply by allyship.... As the N.A.A.C.P. activist Rachel Dolezal notoriously failed to grasp, solidarity with a group does not grant you membership within it. Many will find the notion that you support people by appropriating their markers of identity to be passing strange."

Why Andy Beshear will be KH's choice for VP.

It's obvious. Just look at the lineup (at WaPo): 

The force that makes her want a white man — she on her own maxes out the desired intersectionality — will make her exclude the white men who would add intersectionality — Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro. That leaves 4. One is unusually unattractive. Two look old, just as KH and her accomplices are kicking old to the curb. They can't re-old. That leaves Andy. Wonderful Andy. He's 46! Just old enough to make J.D. Vance look too young. 

I don't know anything about Andy other than that he's the Governor of Kentucky. I tried googling his name and the first thing that popped up was "Andy Beshear issues apology to diet Mountain Dew after argument with JD Vance." What got him attacking Diet Mountain Dew? 

"What was weird was [Vance] joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew. Who drinks diet Mountain Dew? But in all seriousness, he ain't from here. He is not from Kentucky. This is a guy who would come maybe in the summers for some period of time, or to weddings or funerals."

"I would cry real tears of joy if I was drunk and a boy showed up [at a party] with homemade cinnamon bread."

Writes Nell — commenting on  a TikTok video — and it's "extremely validating" to the man who was treated as though he'd done something hopelessly weird.

"Look how angry the regime gets when you ask simple questions about what it’s doing."

Writes Sean Davis, who'd had the gall/wit to ask, last Monday, "Do we have any evidence that Biden is even alive right now?"

"Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life...."

"... leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. 'He was cold,' she said. 'He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.' Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school. 'I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,' she said. 'It was cruel.'... 'I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child,” she said. “My life should be defined by my own choices.'... 'He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there.... And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.'"

From "Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child/In an exclusive interview, Vivian Jenna Wilson said her father’s recent statements, including that she is 'not a girl,' inspired her to speak out: 'I’m not just gonna let that slide'" (NBC News).

Here's what Elon Musk said in that conversation with Jordan Peterson:

"It happened to one of my older boys.... I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on.... I was told oh you know Xavier might commit suicide.... It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs... and so I lost my son essentially uh so you know they uh they call it dead naming for a reason.... the reason it's called dead naming is because uh your son is dead. So my son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus...."

It's hard to believe Elon Musk was "tricked into signing documents." Wilson doesn't believe Musk was tricked. You can see that Musk is very angry, and Wilson depicts Musk as a person who gets angry — "constantly yelling at me viciously." But this supports the position Jordan Peterson is taking, that there are deeper personal and family issues at play in these cases of transgenderism. 

Was I too quick to accept the pushback against calling Kamala "Kamala"?

I thought the antagonism to "Kamala" was a bad idea, and I said so here.

But I switched to the "Harris" approach, as you can see in the previous post.

Then somebody asked me where I got the idea that to use the first name alone would make me look as though I were declaring my opposition to her. My aim is neutrality, cruel neutrality.

So I googled and found "'Harris' or 'Kamala'? Inside the debate over calling women by their first or last name/The vice president has enough support from delegates to assure her the Democratic nomination, but what name does Kamala Harris want to go by?" (Yahoo). Excerpt:

There's that "brat" crap again, with the fuzzy font and the intentionally repulsive green color.

And we're given this from a person who, we're told, is "an expert," Melissa Baese-Berk, a professor of linguistics: