This is something so American that I will never understand it. Fifty-plus-year-old people angrily refute allegations that they might have kissed each other on the cheek 40 years ago. High school yearbooks that have yellowed with age are found to be “extremely hurtful.”

If it’s ok to write in the NYTIMES that you are “horribly hurt” and “sickened” by a yearbook from 1982, then it’s definitely fine to be devastated by the absence of horseback lessons today.

Democratic socialists see social democracies “as an improvement over the present situation in the United States,” said Maria Svart, the national director of the D.S.A., but “it’s really still society and the economy functioning on terms that are set by the capitalist class. Our ultimate goal is for working people to run our society and run our workplaces and our economies.”

And that’s exactly what we heard verbatim from our Soviet leaders from the first day to the last.

My only question is whether this Maria is the stupidest person in the world or if she’s actively malicious. It’s like those folks with “compassionate gulags” I linked yesterday. I can never figure if these people are all intellectually challenged, so to speak, or evil.

It’s like people walking around calling themselves national socialists and saying they favor the final solution but it’s not the bad final solution and not the bad national socialism. It’s just a coincidence the terminology is identical.