Opinions, art, debate
I’m heaving with laughter because remember how the Biden and later Harris campaigns used this exact same word, “messaging”, when they thought stupid voters were stupidly misunderstanding how amazing the economy was:
It’s not happy heaving, mind you. It’s mostly cynical with a smattering of sardonic.
Yes, it’s messaging that’s the problem. Right-oh. If only somebody could explain a bit better why this is an amazing economy.
I think we shouldn’t vote any more because honestly.
Dr Anthony Garcia read at the 5th-grade level and spelled scissors as “sizzors”. Yet he not only was accepted but graduated from a medical school. This was in early 2000s, and you can only imagine how much stronger the push to graduate illiterate people for racial reasons has become since then.
You can graduate a donkey if you set your mind to it but you won’t be able to get the donkey to practice medicine. Dr Anthony Garcia went from one residency to another, shocking other doctors and patients with his ignorance of the medical profession and freaking out whenever his failures became obvious. It’s impossible to say if Garcia had been a violent psychopath before he ventured into medicine but, whatever his mental state had been before med school, it was not improved by the daily realization that he was too stupid to do the work he was hired to do.
If we treated intelligence like any other physical attribute (which it is), Garcia could have simply told his striving immigrant father that he didn’t have the physical capacity to be a doctor. The dad would have left Garcia in peace to pursue a living that his son could have made successfully. But we convinced ourselves that everybody on the planet is completely equal in terms of brain power and are trying to massage reality into this strange fantasy. Garcia explained his intellectual difficulties often and at length to the authorities at his medical school but they didn’t do anything to help. It’s not OK to say the words “cognitive limitations” or “IQ” because what are you, Hitler? Plus, the dad really wanted to have a doctor son, so Garcia was dragged towards the finish line of medical school both by his parents and his professors.
After being kicked out of several residencies, Garcia went on a revenge murder spree against the doctors who saw through his act and got him fired for incompetence. He murdered four people, including a 12-year-old son of one of the doctors who tried to help him. When Garcia was apprehended, he was making plans for additional murders. He fantasized about torturing people and had a whole arsenal of weapons and torture devices on him when the police finally caught him, 5 years after the first murders.
You are guilty of disparate impact and open to prosecution under the Civil Rights Act irrespective of whether you had an intention to discriminate on racial grounds. The only factor that is taken into account is whether your actions created disparate results for different racial groups.
How often do you stop to observe the play of shadows on a wall, the intensity of the sky at noon, or the still sharpness of air in the morning? How often do you feel flooded by the ecstasy of these experiences?
Happiness is the capacity to enjoy the daily sounds, shapes, and textures of life. It seems like a simple thing but it’s not always easy to get to the point where the barrier we erect between ourselves and happiness can recede.
Medical training should be free. Paid 100% by the government. It should also be extremely selective, with both an IQ test and a knowledge test before admission and rigorous knowledge tests every year after.
The reason why this is impossible is the Civil Rights Act. Instead of gatekeeping into the medical profession through IQ tests and knowledge tests, which would violate the Civil Rights Act, we gatekeep through extremely high costs of medical school.
People who decide to take on the exorbitant burden of debt to attend medical school are either supremely confident or mentally unwell. Often, these two groups intersect. We end up with a shortage of doctors because many people don’t want to take on the risk of saddling themselves with gigantic loans without the certainty that they can be successful in the medical profession. The field is attractive to foreigners who finance part of the medical journey overseas at a much lower cost but God knows in what conditions and with what degree of rigor. Many gifted Americans who want to be doctors never try going into the field because their afraid of ruining their lives by taking on huge amounts of debt.
This issue can be solved very easily by adopting the measures I listed above. But it’s not going to be solved because these measures will create disparate impact. We are willing to sacrifice our lives, literally, to avoid disparate impact. That is very, very crazy.
It’s impossible to win a war where one side has a total prohibition on harming the other side’s civilians while its enemy concentrates specifically on inflicting the worst possible civilian losses.
Ukraine and Russia are not fighting the same war.
Without proportional response, you can’t win. Ukraine is fighting in a way that will please liberal HR ladies in Western countries. The result is 33 Ukrainian civilians burned alive in their beds on November 19. And all of the Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russia with zero proportional losses for 11 years.
These people are such weirdos:
Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how “sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,” who was described as “one of the most famous political reporters in America,” a “blonde beauty” who “gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.”
Olivia told me she wrote the fake article as an exercise to think through what might be the worst that could be said publicly if the affair became known, though that didn’t really make sense to me given the piece’s tone.
But hey, after all this, Lizza still forgave Olivia, planned to marry her, and of course, got cheated on again and again.
Fuckup or not, it has once again saved Zelensky’s career from a huge corruption scandal. Just as the scandal was heating up… this “28-point plan” was leaked, and nobody cares about the corruption scandal any more.
I’m not saying anybody did this on purpose. I’m saying exactly what I did this morning about the Trump-Mamdani meeting.
Every couple of months something like this happens:
There are no protests, no outcry, no #MeTootery.
Before that, it was Iryna Zarutska. A few months previously, it was Emily Carlson:
Compared to George Floyd, it’s quite remarkable how little attention these law-abiding, completely innocent, productive women get.
In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, the marriages of three different generations fail. The marriage of the Western pioneer geologist and his writer-illustrator wife fail because, if the wife contributes both the children and the income and the husband doesn’t provide, then what is his role? The husband and the wife are both good people but they run into the unanswerable question of what makes a husband if he can’t provide, organize, protect, and shelter.
The youngest generation of the early 1970s fails for a diametrically opposite reason. Here, it’s the women who can’t find a role for themselves. Once a woman contributes nothing womanly—no children, no comfort, no gentleness—what happens? The young woman in the novel gets passed around sexually by her husband like a bothersome receptacle with no purpose. She consents because she can’t find any other role for herself.
The generation in the middle is that of the narrator. His relationship fails, too, but since he’s part of his own story, he can’t understand why. It’s only by the end of the novel that the narrator and the readers start figuring it out.
Thank you for the support for the book reviews! I sometimes think that there are too many of them and it can get boring for people, so encouraging words about the reviews matter a lot.
As for Trump and Mamdani, I don’t think it’s a deliberate, thought-out strategy. I think it’s completely instinctive. But. Didn’t Trump hit on the very best way to discredit Mamdani? Calling him a Muslim Communist cost him zero supporters. But having him smile subserviently while Trump says, “yeah, I’m a fascist, haha” and slaps Mamdani playfully on the back?
Again, I don’t think Trump is playing 4D chess or any of that groupie rubbish. But I do believe he has incredibly good instincts for what works.
Why did Mamdani agree? Because he’s a very immature, very sheltered man. Consider that he never had to pay his bills, never had to wonder how to make a living, never had to clean his room. A 35-year-old (or whatever his age, I can’t be bothered to Google it) man who has always lived the life of a very spoiled little princess. His meeting with Trump is for Mamdani an encounter with a celebrity. And the celebrity was nice to him. So he acted like a little boy who has his baseball signed by a famous player.
Mamdani is not an adult person like you and I are adult people. Imagine if all the strength and growth and strategizing and self-control you have been exercising your whole life to make ends meet, pay the bills, stretch the paycheck, plan for larger purchases, etc never had to be used at all. You’d be a completely different person. I started doing paid translations at 14, and since then I always had to think about making money and covering my needs. I can’t even imagine who I’d be if I had my parents always there to provide everything as if by magic. Honestly, I wouldn’t even want that.
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