Did she really say this? And if so, for what purpose? 

“Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl,’” Clinton continued”

The statement is clearly dumb, offensive and counterproductive. Aside from everything else, when a 70-year-old grandma refers to herself as “the girl”, it sounds beyond pathetic. Clinton is not an idiot. Is she trying to sabotage her own party to punish it for not getting her elected? 

One sentence that is lacking in the (entirely fake) effort to help the Dreamers is “The kids did nothing wrong so we shouldn’t punish them but we need to make sure that we don’t end up with another group of 800,000 such kids after we help the current ones get papers.” 

The problem is that even if all Dreamers receive US passports today, this will in no way prevent the restoration of the underclass of the perennially scared and insecure two seconds down the road. We need to ask ourselves if we want there always to be a large group of traumatized young people who grew up in conditions that are designed to thwart in them the very qualities needed to be successful and well. We need to ask ourselves if we are refusing to see how much the existence of this group benefits our own children who have an enormous in-built advantage of growing up without this profound anxiety over deportation. 

There is such a thing as collective will. If a phenomenon exists for a long time and doesn’t go away, we need to look at which collective need it nourishes. 

The real reason why the Democrats are making deals with Trump is that they are already preparing excuses for why they will lose in 2018, 2020, and then in perpetuity. “We were tarnished by Trump and voters didn’t show up to vote for us” will be their favorite narrative when that happens.

Yes, Amazon is deleting fake reviews. It always does that. They prize their review system very highly. Of course, they are not going to let crowds of unhinged trolls who are still obsessed with Hillary pervert it. 

The organizing committee of the conference that will take place in the Dominican Republic is sending out promotional materials for their “cultural events.” Trips to museums and exhibitions are shrewdly marketed to American academics as activities that will allow us better to understand our identities. The word “identities” is always bold-typed.

Age brings wisdom. I figured out at once that before Klara’s music lessons on Saturday mornings, I need to take her out for 2 hours of intense physical activity. Then, she’ll be tired enough to sit and listen to the teacher’s instructions instead of trying to topple the potted plants, tear posters off the walls, and catch fishes in the fish-tank. 

The downside is that after 2 hours of intense physical activity with a toddler I’m wiped out and all I’m good for is to sit at the music lesson with a dumb grin, a dribble of saliva, and glazed over eyes. The teacher stares because I can’t follow the simplest instructions. I suspect she tells people that this school hires total imbeciles as professors.

The defining principle of consumerism is “you can make any choice you want (except not to choose, of course) and experience no consequence other than short-lived pleasure.”

What is today’s progressivism if not an effort to service this principle politically?

Self-awareness is in such short supply that one can make a whole link encyclopedia out of articles illustrating cluelessness. I came across these links in under 10 minutes of multilingual browsing.

Bunches of clueless people are self-importantly making clueless pronouncements at Boise State. 

In Russian but priceless. Pseudo-psychological vocabulary is used to promote the value of a consumerist approach to love. 

I thought I’d seen too many pouty emails by clueless folks to be surprised by anything but this one is too much even for this popular genre. 

And the saddest of all is TNC’s new essay. 

Clueless people in Portugal accumulate useless stocks of gold without doing anything with it. 

Both the wall and more high-tech solutions are “95 percent spectacle,” security theater that lets politicians seem tough on immigration, helps some Americans feel safer, but doesn’t ultimately deter immigrants or make the border less dangerous.

Absolutely. 100% true. So if this empty spectacle is the price of security for 800,000 DACA kids, why not pay it? Why? WHY?

This author is 100% right:

Eighteen months really marked a magical mental leap. It was like her mind reached out grasped a big new chunk of the world and ingested it (big proportional to her size; she’s still got a lot of world left to ingest), and she suddenly understood and could communicate all kinds of new things. She’s been like a qualitatively different creature ever since. I now recommend 18 months as the best turning point to all my friends with younger babies.

I have the same experience. Once Klara turned 18 months old, it became so much easier to take care of her because she dramatically expanded her vocabulary and can now simply tell me what she needs. 

Whenever she points and does the “uh-uh” thing that all parents dread, I say, “Use words. Tell me what you want with words.” 

And she says, “Ous-aye Covey park fing.”

And I immediately know that she wants me to take her outside to meet her best friend Chloe in the park with the swings. 

Or she says, “Wokie poong monkey binka.”

And I realize that she wants me to get yogurt and a spoon to feed her favorite toy monkey whom we will then wrap in a blanket. And we’ll also feed the blanket because Klara is very generous.

These are complex thoughts, and there’s no way I could just guess what she wanted. The pre-verbal pointing and grunting stage was hard. I never managed to guess anything right and constantly felt like a failure.