When it comes to aspects of the current gender-swapping madness towards which I am most adamantly opposed, the spectacle of teen and twentyish born males putting on a dress, calling themselves Loretta and demanding to compete as a female athlete tops the list, because of the inherent unfairness of it. Human sexual dimorphism is a stone-cold reality: the mature male of our species tends to be taller, heavier, faster and more muscular than the female. Personally, the last time I was ever able to hold my own, physically, against my brother and his friends was at the age of twelve or thirteen – right before puberty set in. I will concede that there are outliers and variances; I am fairly sure that Ronda Rousey could smack the tar out of that skinny little twerp Dylan Mulvaney every day before breakfast and twice on Sunday.
Leftism
The Fire Next Time
And there will be a fire next time, and another after that. Und so wieter. Because that is how it is, the peculiar mild Mediterranean climate with the gusty, hot and dry winds which usually come blasting down the mountains from the desert beyond. Winds which mostly arrive in the fall, but this time in mid-winter. My late father, the professional research biologist who gave the best nature walks ever, told us over and over how the native ecosystem was engineered by nature to burn every twenty-five to thirty years; to burn fast, clearing away and revitalizing dead grass and overgrown chaparral. We lived in near-constant awareness of the danger posed by those fires in that brush which covered the hills where my parents preferred to live – especially in the fall, when the high winds roared over the mountains, straight off the baking-hot desert. A couple of acres at the end of a dirt road was absolute heaven to Mom and Dad. Hell to them was tightly packed suburbia, elbow to elbow with the neighbors.
What’s the Matter with Wisconsin?
Curious about election result changes in one of the swing states, once Wikipedia had the final vote counts of the 2016 election (allowing a relatively simple copy to an Excel spreadsheet), I took a look at stats for Wisconsin’s two most recent presidential elections to see if I could spot signs of any trends. The exercise confirmed what I already knew about the divides in both parties – better than expected.
Stick a Fork In…
… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.
Literary Life
(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)
I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)