The Daily Wire is bringing back Saturday morning cartoons and more, in a bid to challenge Disney’s loosened grip on the family entertainment market. The streaming platform Bentkey, with new episodes dropping weekly, features “content kids will love and parents can trust,” Jeremy Boreing, The Daily Wire’s co-CEO, promises in a launch video.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/19/daily-wire-slams-disney-in-launch-of-bentkey-platform-for-kids/

I subscribed to Bentkey because I massively support the idea of creating a conservative alternative to Disney. Also, it’s a beautiful dream to not have to be constantly worried that my kid will be shown “gender-fluid polyamorous” characters in a cartoon.

I don’t know if Bentkey will work. I very much hope it will but it’s extremely hard to compete with Disney’s enormous amounts of money. Bentkey cartoons lose out in what concerns graphics. Their graphics are much more primitive and basic than what kids are used to. Whether this will be a decisive factor, I don’t know.

It’s definitely great to see conservatives who are doing instead of complaining. And it’s really important to mention that the conservative response to Disney isn’t about brainwashing kids in the opposite direction. There’s nothing whatsoever political in these shows. We don’t want to expose kids to an alternative to the politicized crap that they get from the existing mass entertainment. Our goal is to spare them any politics.

When my kid watches something, I want to be certain that everything she sees is age-appropriate. Surely, this isn’t much to ask?

A parent of a young child lives on a minefield, constantly alert to the danger of the kid being manipulated or confused by entertainment. Back when Klara was 3, I had to invent a whole fairytale world to explain why llama llama red pyjama never sees his daddy and why little hippo’s daddy can’t pick him up at school when his mommy is stuck in traffic. You have no idea how absent fathers are from books for the toddler crowd. And then we go straight from no dads to the evil dads and loser dads in the entertainment for 6-7-year-olds. Dads who are present and not bumbling idiots or evildoers are very hard to find.

And this is just one single issue. There’s tons more.

It’s really best to avoid both because nobody seems to understand how any of this works.

I respect this guy’s outrage but where have European and American Jews stood on open borders? We all know exactly where. And even now, I’m yet to see one who’d say “I was so wrong, open borders are terrible, build the wall / support Brexit, deport illegals, massively reduce immigration”.

People keep posting these images like they haven’t spent decades denouncing every attempt to limit migration as fascism, Nazism, and something-phobia.

Bernie Sanders is getting eviscerated by his own followers for expressing grief over a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh 7 years ago. Not in Palestine! In Pittsburgh. But what exactly did he expect, letting BLMers speak at his rallies? What, he didn’t know how they felt about Jews? He’s from Brooklyn, and he never noticed?

I have Jewish friends who went to protest at the airport when Trump tried to limit travel from Islamist countries. One of them is texting me pictures of these anti-Jew protests every day now. “We live in fear! Is a new Holocaust coming?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you bring one here? You clearly were desperate to make sure the people in today’s marches get to come here. Now they are here, what are you upset about? Wasn’t this the goal?*

Guess what the friend responded to this tirade of mine?

“What makes you think those are immigrants?”

The lesson hasn’t been learned yet.

I wonder what that massively over-represented group that nobody wants to mention is. I also wonder why the NPR sees that group’s stunning success as “not good”.

In this gossipy, easy to read novel, the Peruvian writer Jaime Bayly talks about the messy private lives of the Hispanic writers of the 1970s when literature in Spanish was at its peak. At the center of Geniuses are Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez but plenty other authors and cultural figures make an appearance.

The novel belongs to the entertainment genre and doesn’t aspire to much else but there are two takeaways I have from it.

One is that it will never cease being amazing that a source of incredible artistic beauty appears inside of very ugly people. These writers are ugly in their politics, lifestyles, friendships, daily habits, and personal lives. And at the same time, they are geniuses who create incomparable, astonishing beauty.

The second takeaway is that the wives of these famous writers are more like house pets than actual people. They allow themselves to be mistreated and humiliated in the most bizarre ways but you kind of don’t even feel bad for them like you don’t feel bad for a herd of cattle in a field or a potted geranium. It’s even hard to blame the writers for mistreating them because these women don’t have a problem with abjection as long as they get fed and housed in return.

The writer wives make a great contrast with Carmen Balcells, a genius businesswoman who was the literary agent of pretty much every important Spanish-languge writer in the second half of the twentieth century. I wish somebody wrote a novel about Balcells and her extraordinary discipline and business sense. In Geniuses she appears far less often than the many writers’ wives and mistresses who have the intellectual and emotional complexity of an amoeba.

I read the book because October is a difficult month for a public education bureaucrat, and I can’t process anything very demanding. But this is a highly enjoyable novel, and it’s the only one by Bayly that I ever managed to read. He tends to be very immersed in his boring neuroses but here he finally moved away from that and ended up writing a very nice book.

I recently wrote about Vargas Llosa and his wife in old age, but it was just as bad when they were young. But again, you want to feel sorry for Patricia when Vargas Llosa dumps her with three little kids, one of them a newborn, for some random model. But then Patricia immediately off-loads the kids on relatives because she only needs them to keep her rich and famous husband around. Once he’s gone, she discards the kids like used toilet paper.

As I said, these are all very primitive human beings. But it’s fun to read about them.

So how do Russian nationalists explain the war against Ukraine?

Their working theory is that it’s the fault of Jews. It’s interesting that they are back to blaming Jews when for quite a while they were concentrated on Central Asian Muslims as the biggest enemy.

Russian nationalists believe that Putin was tricked by Jews into starting the war. Jews want to occupy the Southeast of Ukraine and need to eliminate the current population to make space for themselves. Why Jews are so eager to live in a region that’s notoriously ugly and poor is not explained. Neither is the issue of how Jews tricked Putin.

I’ve been following the evolution of Russian nationalism for almost 20 years. It always surprises because it always manages to find the most bizarre narrative to support.

And then people wonder why Russia failed as a nation-state.

It’s finally going to be not hot outside tomorrow. This summer has been relatively mild but a person deserves not to sweat, battle off mosquitos and work with a massive ventilator 5 inches away from her face in bloody November.

It’s going to be summer again in just a few months, and I resent every day that has the potential to be cold and doesn’t.

And yes, I’m moaning about the hot weather again. It takes great restraint not to moan about it more often than I do

I agree that Hamas is a total whore, so no argument there.

I don’t like Jake Sullivan, and for anybody who follows the news it must be very clear why. But his recent article in Foreign Affairs is massively important and fascinating. There is a lot of pre-election political speak but that’s all noise. Let’s concentrate on what Sullivan is saying that is actually important. Here are some quotes:

“In the previous era, there was reluctance to tackle clear market failures that threatened the resilience of the U.S. economy. Since the U.S. military had no peer, and as a response to 9/11, Washington focused on nonstate actors and rogue nations. It did not focus on improving its strategic position and preparing for a new era in which competitors would seek to replicate its military advantages, since that was not the world it faced at the time.”

“the United States is to win the competition to shape the future of the international order”

“the United States needs to prepare for a new era of strategic competition—in particular by deterring and responding to great-power aggression”

“the coming era of competition will be unlike anything experienced before. European security competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely a regional contest between midsize and proximate powers that ultimately ended in calamity. The Cold War that followed the most destructive war in human history was waged between two superpowers that had very low levels of interdependence. That ended decisively and in America’s favor. Today’s competition is fundamentally different. The United States and China are economically interdependent.”

“we seek a free, open, prosperous, and secure international order, one that protects the interests of the United States and its friends and delivers global public goods. But we do not expect a transformative end state like the one that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union. There will be an ebb and flow to the competition—the United States will make gains, but China will, too.”

“And we need a sustained sense of confidence in our capacity to outcompete any country.”

“At times, the competition will be intense. “

“Washington and Beijing need to figure out how to manage competition to reduce tensions and find a way forward on shared challenges.”

“But it also needs to be clear about what is most important to the United States. That is how we will seek to shape relations with them: so that on balance they have incentives to act in ways consistent with U.S. interests.”

“This commitment to national strength through industrial investment began to erode in the 1980s, and there was little perceived need for it after the Cold War. “

What are you noticing in these quotes?

One obvious thing is the extraordinarily high incidence of the words “competition” and “competitors”. I only copied a tiny number of the sentences that contain these words. And what does the word “competition” tell us?

It’s a neoliberal concept par excellence. Neoliberalism turns everything into a competition. It gamifies everything. Sullivan can’t start telling us about neoliberalism because nobody will understand, so he does the next best thing and uses the clearest, easiest to understand descriptor. He is telling us that we are living in a neoliberal world that’s completely different from the preceding Cold War era.

And how are we to deal with this new neoliberal world?

By going back to being a nation-state.

There are also nice parts in the article about needing to bend the supranational institutions like the UN and the World Bank over the knee and make them serve the interests of the American nation-state. This is a highly nationalist text, the likes of which I never expected to see at this point in time.

This is not just god news. This is brilliant news.

I woke up at 3 am, and my brain started to compose an explanation I am forced to provide about why it’s important to teach in person. I tried my darndest to stop but my brain refused to comply. So I never went back to sleep. I’ve been fighting this fight for a little over 2 years now, and I’m very tired.

The administration can force us to read woke books against our will but it can do absolutely nothing to make people show up and do their jobs. It’s very frustrating because this shouldn’t be my fight. I’ve been physically present on campus every work day (except vacations and conferences) since July 1, 2020. I do my duty. I shouldn’t have to keep explaining the painfully obvious.