Ah, so Michael Flynn, the new national security adviser, is a long-time Putin employee. And not in any sort of a respectable position, either. He was an obedient little puppy, picking up sorry little crumbs at Russia Today. How very cute.

Was he that indigent? Because it’s a very pathetic job. 

About the Pence / Hamilton debacle but can be applied to so, so, SO much else:

So the question becomes: What are you trying to do? Have a real political impact, or just engage in emotional self-therapy and tribal bonding with people who already agree with you? Or to put it another way: Will this help flip Iowa? If it will, it’s politics. If it won’t, it’s narcissism and self-regard.

Preaching to the converted is clearly not working because the converted are not numerous enough to win elections. 

Also, if you reduce politics to clownish acts that do nothing but create scandal, don’t wonder why you get beaten by a more skillful clown.

After publishing a few duds, this best-selling Irish mystery writer has again produced a good police procedural. There isn’t much of a plot and the protagonist is a compendium of the most exhausted old stereotypes about female police. But she does interrogation scenes really well and there is an occasional good insight. Like this one about people on dating apps,

ordering their relationships from the online menu because of course you have to have one, same as you have to have a state-of-the-art sound system and a pimped-out new car, and it’s important to make sure you get exactly what you want.

It’s not Kant but it’s good entertainment.

Before Klara was born, N and I were sure we could never love anybody more than we love each other.

Why is identity politics getting increasingly rabid?

According to Bauman, “the search for identity is the ongoing struggle to arrest or slow down the flow, to solidify the fluid, to give form to the formless.” 

Fashioning an ironclad identity and clinging to it for dear life is one of those biographical solutions to systemic contradictions that are so popular these days.

Yes, they should have totally learned that this kind of thing results in a humiliating, pathetic defeat in the elections. Oh, wait. . .

People are freaking out all over the place:

I don’t care that Pence got booed at a Broadway musical. I’m not even sure I’d be one of the boo-ers if I was there. But the instincts of our elite press to side with the powerful over the great unwashed masses is frightening.

The “great unwashed masses” are the folks who can afford to pay hundreds of dollars to attend a Broadway musical, of course. Those poor, downtrodden sufferers. I’m sure they’ve gone hungry for months to save up for the show and queued up in the cold, clutching their tattered rags to their bony, emaciated chests.

. . . who needs any enemies?

Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, took a break from planning the next administration on Friday night by attending the popular Broadway show “Hamilton.” Though Pence received a smattering of applause when he arrived, the New York audience mostly greeted the Indiana governor with boos.

The only goal this achieves is ensure the success of the narrative of “the Trump administration didn’t fulfill its promises because it was sabotaged and persecuted by nasty liberals even before the inauguration.” 

In the midst of all the self-righteous virtue-signaling, people don’t even stop to think that the world didn’t end after this election. And the only chance not to keep failing at the following elections is to think first and pout next.

Just imagine what it would look like to you if Tim Kaine came to see a show a week after getting elected only to get booed and lectured about, say, the rights of “the unborn” from the stage.  

In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It’s like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.

In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It’s like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who’s just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.

It looks like many Clinton supporters believe in the first model, and many Trump supporters in the second model. I think this ties into deeper differences – Clinton supporters are more atomized and individualist, Trump supporters stronger believers in culture and community.

Ok, a very long quote, I apologize. But I’m very shocked by this. I’m a Clinton supporter but not only do I not believe in the first model, I don’t think anybody on the planet does. Because it’s deranged. Has anybody ever met a person who told them they believed this shit? 

But I’m completely atomized and individualist and words culture and community make me want to vomit. So this is supposed to be my approach. But it totally isn’t.

This is not making sense at all.