Tim Walz’s “I’m harmless fun” act is a kind of ritual of neighborliness among progressives.

Among conservatives it reads as a symbolic inversion of male roles. | @michaelbd https://t.co/FZa2HT1ATf

— National Review (@NRO) October 4, 2024

And both groups are idjits.

Walz is channeling one of very popular leadership models in the corporate world. If nature endowed you with a soft physique, a higher-pitched voice and a kindly Santa visage, you play it up, and nobody notices how vicious you are.

We have an administrator who puts on exactly this kind of persona but to an even greater degree than Walz. I made the mistake of writing him off immediately as a frumpy lightweight. Until he quietly and with a “sweet grampy” voice narrated to me how he destroyed a certain unfriendly power. This is an unfriendly power that had wrestled 4 Deans and 2 Provosts to the ground. And this fluffy pot-bellied dude in a crumpled shirt that perennially hangs out of his trousers defenestrated it in one conversation. I can’t go into details but this was a “Master and Commander” sort of feat. I very uncharacteristically felt like a little, very sheltered girl protected by a raging demon.

Walz has been mega successful in bending Minnesota in the direction he wanted. You write him off at your own peril. Gender roles, schmender roles. Forget about Walz, it’s not even about him. It’s about what I said earlier. It’s so easy to play people because they try to understand reality based on half a dozen silly clichés they memorized.

After making a few mistakes of this kind, I took a 3-month class in profiling, and now I know immediately where the power center lies in any group I enter and how to work it to my advantage.

The old man is standing up for himself:

BREAKING: Joe Biden tries to drag down Kamala Harris' campaign even further.

"I am in constant contact with her. We are singing from the same song sheet. She helped pass all the laws. She was a major player in everything we've done." pic.twitter.com/1OIzZo7An2

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 4, 2024

Good for him.

This picture has been seared into my mind.

My heart hurts💔😭 pic.twitter.com/SCwEMP0aXC

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) October 3, 2024

The spread of these fake images will sound the death knell to the remnants of social trust and cohesion that we enjoy. We are only at the beginning of this journey but soon enough we’ll be in a place where the first immediate and visceral reaction to anything unpleasant will be a refusal to believe it’s real.

The absolute bastards who spread this fake photo are complaining that the government is not taking the catastrophe of Helene seriously. In the process of complaining they are making sure that the government will simply deny the reality of the next Helene and that denial will sound believable and realistic to everybody affected.

And please don’t tell me this is inevitable. People who are caught plagiarizing are eviscerated and destroyed even though they aren’t meddling in a humanitarian catastrophe where lives are at stake. And good, they should be held accountable for this egregious violation of academic rules. Why, however, are we accepting Thai bastardization of our newsfeed?

That whoever created and spread this fake image (or the fake quotes from Vance’s autobiography or the fake images of mass graves in NYC during COVID, etc, etc) is not eviscerated like the plagiarizing Columbia profs is a terrible mistake on all our parts.

Good question, thank you.

I was wondering why Israel, which is the strongest nation-state in the West currently, wasn’t interested in supporting the fight for the preservation of the nation-state model. Since then, Israel started fighting for the nation-state on its own behalf. That’s good. The US has largely abdicated both the nation-state model and its erstwhile world leadership. Somebody else has to do it instead, or we are all screwed.

Smaller, less powerful nations are stepping into the void while the US is still trying to figure out whether to become Rhodesia and how fast.

This is the number one question facing every nation in the world right now. Do we embrace the fully neoliberal model like the one described in the article on South Africa posted in one of the comment threads? Or do we look at it and say, “God, this stinks. Let’s dial it down because this sounds atrocious”?

Instead of palpating the elephant of neoliberalism blindly, we need to step back and look at the big picture.

Pronouns are stupid because nobody addresses people in the third person. So it makes no practical difference whether you announce “pronouns” or not. People who are at least marginally polite and integrated into society refer to others in their presence by their name. I’d be taken aback if an administrator referred to me in my presence as “she” not because I want to be called “he” but because it’s rude.

With students, I speak in Spanish, and it’s a language that drops personal pronouns almost always anyway.

If, on the other hand, you are asking about transgender students, I use the name they provide. In language courses, half of the people present use assumed names because they want to sound Spanish.

The new Mexican president is just as bad as the previous one. This is not surprising because she’s his puppet. Two days into her presidency, she restarted the previous president’s demands that the King of Spain apologize for Hernán Cortés.

The King of Spain belongs to the dynasty that came after the dynasty that sent Cortés yo Cuba and prohibited him from conquering Mexico. The Mexican Creole* elites that rob Mexicans blind and that produce these presidents, however, definitely are Cortés’s fault.

At least, AMLO was his own man. This Sheinbaum person, on the other hand, is a subservient, useless, Putin-worshipping, race-mongering lefty.

*Creole means white in Latin America.

DEI was dialed down 80%-90% after 10/7 and the reaction to the Gaza war.

This was not organic – a whole bunch of switches were purposefully flipped off.

There’s a huge, coordinated apparatus that produces this stuff – it should never be taken at face value.

— Coddled affluent professional (@feelsdesperate) October 3, 2024

It was definitely dialed down a lot but I don’t see the connection with 10/7. Much of the change where I am was provoked by the patient and painstaking work of the conservative organizations that sued for discrimination again and again. The other crucial factor is the money shortage. Even at our obligatory anti-racist bookclub we weren’t assigned a racial book this Fall. Instead, we are reading a pro-neoliberal book about the high moral value of austerity.

So in both cases it’s about money.

Also, you can motivate people with negative emotions – guilt, pity, etc – for a short period of time. But you can’t evoke them for long. Neoliberalism – unlike DEI – is successful because it appeals to the best, strongest, most motivated part of us. We like it because it feels good, even if it’s killing us in the process. It’s a feel-good drug.

I spent the morning at a budget meeting where I successfully defended my department against every attempt to cut us down. I won because I was really prepared. Other people will lose but I won. And it feels good.

After the meeting, I worked on my research to enhance my personal brand, and again, it feels good. I have a whole system in place to ensure my high productivity, including 5 apps and professional psychological support. Success, accolades, awards – that’s all motivating. Listening to how I’m irreparably racist and perennially guilty does not. Neoliberalism wins, DEI loses.

This, by the way, is why pro-Palestinians keep losing. They appeal to compassion but that wears off fast. They don’t even try to position their cause as that of strong, resilient people, winners, whose incredible powers will rub off on you if you hang around and ally yourself with their cause. You can’t whine “but don’t have the right” and attract people. It’s off-putting, weak. I come out of all my Ukrainian meetings excited, energized, feeling powerful. That’s what works.

BREAKING:

Israel has struck a Russian air base in Syria for the first time.

Israel attacked warehouses of the Russian Khmeimim Air Base shortly after an Iranian plane unloaded its weapons for Hezbollah.

Russian air defenses tried intercepting the Israeli missiles but failed pic.twitter.com/ffCxVTXtnV

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 3, 2024

Finally, somebody grew some balls. Good for you, Israel.

JD Vance advocated the Democratic Party platform of Walter Mondale. The conservative movement in Washington, DC, has decided to reject conservatism and embrace being the Democrat lite party, and that has always been a losing solution because you cannot beat the real thing.

https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1841462540745822630?t=nBKGhs9eg978LigdaLeoqA&s=19

And Vance’s foreign policy ideas are Berkeley left, as well. People who aren’t noticing are doing themselves no favors.

Not only is Vance doing vastly better than Trump did in his debate, Walz (who is getting sharper as the debate goes on) is showing himself to be more nimble than Harris was in her debate.

America would be better off if the VP candidates were at the top of the tickets.

— i/o (@eyeslasho) October 2, 2024

If it were Vance vs Walz running for president, I wouldn’t have a problem deciding how to vote.