The leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, has said she does not believe one in four people are disabled and the term is in danger of losing its meaning, as she used a speech to criticise the size of the welfare state.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/10/term-disabled-in-danger-of-losing-all-meaning-says-badenoch

And she’s right. If everybody is disabled, then nobody is.

My Twitter feed is bursting at the seams with people feeling self-righteous about Badenoch’s eminently reasonable statements. They are drowning in self-pity and clearly experiencing great pleasure at doing it. Being sick, incapable, and wounded is like a badge of honor that they won’t relinquish.

I’m not sure whose side I’m on in this conflict:

These people all truly deserve each other.

So what’s been happening news-wise?

I’m on vacation, and my news are mostly of the culinary kind. For example, today I tried something called “fried green tomatoes with grouper.” It wasn’t half bad. But I would like to know what’s happening on more elevated planes of existence.

Any important news stories I need to know?

Klara keeps referring to things “back home in America.” I have not been able to impress upon her that we are currently also in America.

JP Lindsley went on Ben Shapiro. Please listen because this is a conservative American journalist in Ukraine, and there’s no better coverage than what he provides.

JP’s segment starts at 00:15:00 and goes until 00:25:30.

This is excellent journalism. If you aren’t following JP Lindsley, you should.

I haven’t been in this area since 2022, and it turned pretty much completely Hispanic since then. It’s to the point where a customer at the 7/11 said “Please go ahead” in English, and I jumped because I wasn’t expecting it.

Miami was like this years ago but in FMB this is new.

In her thirties, overwhelmed with work and struggling with the debts she’d inherited from a gigolo loser she used to date, Sarma finally met a mega-rich, powerful man who liked her and could have solved her problems.

In response, she immediately found a fresh gigolo user, moved him into her place, ditched the stable, wealthy suitor, and wasted the next several years of her life on servicing the needs of the gigolo.

Finally, the gigolo dumped her. Guess what she did then?

Yes. Found a new gigolo loser.

The most fascinating part of the memoir is that none of this seems to have led Sarma to any insight. I’m 30% into the book, and I’m yet to see a single sentence where she’d recognize that ditching good men in favor of the trashiest loser bastards imaginable was something she kept doing with the dedication of a crazed woodpecker.

The really funny part is that Melngailis wrote her memoir The Girl with the Duck Tattoo to counteract what she thought was an unfairly negative portrayal of her character in the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan.

Of her own free will, she shared that horrid “falafel in, baby out” story in order to – get this! – make a good impression on people. She thinks this is a story that will endear her to strangers. She’s hoping to rebuild her brand as a result of these efforts to restore her reputation.

She could just simply have avoided sharing the story. Or pretended to not be a horrible person about it. This is completely self-inflicted.

Think about it. She believes “falafel in” is going to make a good impression.

I’m fascinated by Sarma Melngailis’s memoir (the one with the abortion story I quoted yesterday). It’s identical to the novels of neoliberal femininity that I discuss in my new book. Their heroines can have every economic advantage, fantastic careers, connections, achievements, riches – and they’ll throw it all away to pursue the dream of being enslaved by a low-quality dude. They all either reject the possibility of having children or dump the children they already have in order to be free to get bossed around and humiliated by some random guy. And not by some very manly, alpha type but a hyena-like degraded loser. I’m not talking Shades of Gray. This isn’t women prostituting themselves in inventive ways. That wouldn’t be an interesting development because that always existed.

I’ve been observing this phenomenon for as long as I have been a literary critic. There’s no medieval or Victorian heroine that would dream of being as slavishly and abjectly subservient to a man as the modern liberated woman. And look at Melngailis who is not writing fiction but narrating her life. It’s still the exact same thing. Total self-abasement for some utterly worthless dude. Or a bunch of dudes. In these stories, a successful, serious man who offers respect, equality and parity gets rejected in favor of some antisocial, emasculated loser gigolo. Melngailis discarded a wonderful husband who gave her everything to pursue feminized (in her own description), much younger men who sucked her dry and spat her out.

Nobody is talking about this because we are stuck on the idea that female liberation in real life should result in literature that celebrates said liberation. But what actually exists in accounts of women’s lives (be they fictional or not) is a wasteland of such horror that no 19th-century female character upset with the expectations of being the Angel in the House could even imagine.

Melngailis is completely liberated of all societal expectations. Highly successful in very masculine jobs (she worked for Bear Stearns and Bain Capital and made a packet, then founded a successful restaurant in NYC). Not burdened by family and children. Free from any form of morality. Sexually promiscuous with zero societal stigma. The dream has been fulfilled! Yet read her memoir and you’ll see what abject misery this dream brought her. This isn’t my interpretation. Melngailis doesn’t claim that how her life unfolded is anything short of catastrophic.

“I feel like I’m under occupation,” said N, closing the door to the room where I was doing my Duolingo exercises.