It is quite extraordinary that an individual who said something like this should hold any elected office:

• I strongly support immigrant communities. I support policies that keep law enforcement from enforcing federal laws that everyone knows are broken. I will not back down on that commitment, and I won't back down to a bully.

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) May 23, 2018

He supports “policies” that make sure laws aren’t enforced. And the only reason he gives for behaving so outrageously is that “everyone knows” these laws are “broken.” The language of a lisping, stupid airhead is combined with the neoliberal determination to dismantle policing.

It’s also fascinating how the word “community” is emptied of meaning and perverted. And how his actual voters – which the illegal migrants he’s talking about aren’t supposed to be – are completely disregarded. They aren’t a community. They are altogether absent. The only real communion happens around breaking laws and weakening the nation-state.

And still, people went and voted for this unintelligent ideologue. And they’ll do it again, refusing to see any connection between their own actions and the results of those actions.

Instead of feeling guilty for watching too much YouTube, or doing too much Instagram,  or being on Twitter too much, do this:

1. Ask yourself what you’d do if you weren’t watching YouTube or posting on FB. What activity would help you feel virtuous and like you are using time wisely? What would the ideal you do with this time?
2. Do that activity for 30 minutes and then go back to your Twitter, Instagram, or TV.
3. If 30 isn’t working, do 15. Put it on your calendar and do it daily. And remember that doing it daily erases any culpability for the time you spend on social media.

There’s no need to do anything dramatic or force yourself off social media altogether. Make a little space for whatever feels virtuous and leave feelings of guilt behind.

In more festive news, I have begun cooking with duck fat, and it’s going great. I’d tried getting into beef tallow but it didn’t work for me. It’s too crumbly and overall too much work for too little gain.

I put duck fat into everything. Soups, stews. I fry with it. Delicious.

The only downside is that “duck” keeps getting autocorrected to “dick” all the time, and people have received some confusing text messages from me as a result.

We are being promised an end to non-existent lynchings and to equally non-existent non-consensual gender surgeries precisely because no politician is remotely interested in giving us anything that we actually want.

And that’s not because it’s hard to give us what we want. Some of the most pressing issues of the moment are exceptionally easy to solve. I already explained this in what concerns border issues, and won’t repeat but it’s mostly all like that. An easy fix.

But nobody will bother to do any of it because we have become unnecessary. We aren’t a source of legitimacy. We are annoying whiners who get in the way. We have collectively eagerly embraced that role and have nobody to blame.

It’s going to be so fun when N and I go to see Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist. As usual, we are the perfect contrast. I know everything and feel passionately on the subject of BLM while N is as innocent about this shameful excrecence as we all were in 1992 and hasn’t the foggiest who Robin DiAngelo or Saira Rao are.

My daughter knows the names of the books of the Bible in order. I had no idea until she started reciting them in front of my new friend whom I really didn’t mind impressing.

My choice of school for her has been completely validated.

In a nation-state, politicians derive their legitimacy from the consent of the people. They convince us that they deserve to represent our interests and in return we invest them with power.

In neoliberalism, it goes the opposite way. The people derive their legitimacy from the politicians. Supporting a politician gives them a sense of belonging, importance, a sense of purpose. Politicians no longer have to do anything for the citizens. Lonely, confused citizens are so desperate to feel part of something that they don’t ask for it.

Has anybody met more obnoxious and mean people than these pro-Palestinian protestors?

McGill University in Canada had to put new grass at the lawn in front of the school this summer after it was destroyed by the anti-Israel tent city there

As a new school year is starting, anti-Israel students decided to destroy the new grass straight away pic.twitter.com/gUM3X6UmWq

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 1, 2024

They have no interest in helping anybody. All they want to do is to be absolute pests all the time.

Such nasty, self-involved types.

My wife tells me anecdotally that her younger clients are slightly more likely to shop around and kill deals because they found a better rate, etc, but that they don’t have any tact or social skills. Older clients try to let you down softly or make an excuse. Millennials and…

— wanye (@wanyeburkett) August 31, 2024

That’s an interesting observation because I’ve never seen it this way. I never answer the phone if I don’t have a very specific and strong need to talk to the person calling at that moment. And I pretty much never have any need to talk to strangers. It’s the same thing with emails. I don’t even open, let alone answer, about 60% of emails I get at work because there are so many of them. The only people who always get their emails answered the second I see them are students. The idea that I’d open emails from people trying to sell me something is quite alien to me.

What I find interesting is that the quoted poster perceives a relationship between a salesperson and his unwilling mark as social and not commercial. And he indicates that younger people see it as strictly commercial. I’m neither a Millennial or a Zoomer but I believe these young people have gotten it right. Commercial and private are different things. We should not confuse them because the moment you let commercial into the private, the private is gone.

I was once friendly with a woman who was a sales rep for a supplement company. We went to dinner and she told me about how disappointed she was in a mutual acquaintance.

“I’ve been so nice to Esther!” she exclaimed. “I thought we were really becoming friends. I had her over to our place, we went out to dinner a lot. And she still didn’t buy anything from me! Not a single purchase in all this time!”

“I’m sorry, are you expecting me to buy something?” I asked bluntly because this sounded like too much of a hint.

“Oh no!” the woman said. “I really like you. I’d want to be friends regardless. Esther, though! Why did she think I was hanging out with her this whole time? Any normal person would have figured it out and bought something.”

This person still tries to suggest hanging out at regular occasions but I can never figure out to what extent it’s a sales strategy, so I don’t participate.

Let’s continue our exploration of our wonderful, Soviet-style media:

Harris has thrived in debates – will her tactics work on Trump? https://t.co/mScKlkjSHL

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 31, 2024

In fact, Harris thrived so much in the 2020 debate that opens this article that she lost her bid for the nomination with embarrassing results.

As those of us who somehow avoided having our brains erased overnight remember, Harris was deeply unpopular in 2020 and had to drop out of the primaries as a result. She was also deeply unpopular during her entire vice-presidency until she became nominee by bypassing the primaries.

Of course, Oceanía was always at war with Eastasia and Harris was equally always successful in debates and popular with voters according to the new software people installed in their heads last month.

Harris and the lies surrounding her are pretty trivial as an issue. This same outlet, BBC News (World) has been publishing such lies about Ukraine that I wonder whether its employees are even human. It is curious, though, that these journalists are simultaneously supportive of the silly, prattling Harris and Putin.