Ooh, and it turns out I’m staying at a really nice hotel at the conference. It’s got a swimming pool! My plan to never set foot outside the hotel is starting to look feasible.

Unfortunately, it’s a short direct flight with no layover. I wouldn’t mind a very long layover. Just sitting at an airport for hours. But it’s not meant to be.

Today I realized I’m traveling to a conference in a week.

“I wonder what the topic of my presentation is,” I said to myself and went to look it up.

“Huh,” I thought when I found out the title. I’d sent in a blurb to that conference in April and gave it no more thought since then.

Writing conference talks is a bizarre way of wasting time. I cull mine out of books I’m writing, and that allows me to give them no thought at all. The whole point of going to the conference is to have 4 days to space out over my new book in an almost uninterrupted manner.

I’m telling you, folks. He’s gone. Demons have eaten him and he no longer sees anything else. It’s useless to hope that he will realize any time soon that he’s the source of the demonic apparitions that torture him.

Everybody thinks they are a very special cookie and are immune. But if you play with demons, demons will start playing with you. And you won’t be winning that game.

Leftism mutates a lot. First it declared itself the champion of the proletariat. When that didn’t work out, it became the defender of racial and gender-based groups. Those are minor details, however. The root of leftism’s existence remains unchanged.

Leftism is born from the incapacity to accept that inequality of both individuals and groups is an inescapable feature of the human condition. If you can accept that everybody starts in a different place even before birth and, consequently, the results everybody will get in every area of life will not be equal or possibly even comparable, you won’t be a sincere leftist. If you believe that this state of affairs is wrong and must be remedied through human actions, you’ll end up a leftist.

So far, so good. Accept inequality – not leftist. Don’t accept it – leftist.

But here’s where problems begin. The initial step on the way towards remedying the inequality of people and groups is, as Kamala Harris says, to give a leg up to those who are behind through no fault of their own. Here’s the famous image of what that’s supposed to look:

Again, it looks benign enough, right? Well, yeah. But then it becomes clear very fast that propping up the underachievers doesn’t solve anything. There are still those who are better endowed by nature, chance, life, family, or God, and they’ll still reach enormously farther than the artificially propped up. I’d never dance for the Royal Ballet Company even if you showered me with every grant, scholarship and handout imaginable.

So what’s the next step? It’s invariably to hold down those who are better endowed to let the less fortunate catch up. That dude with long legs in the picture should have them broken to help out the short-legged one because there’s simply no other way. We see the beginnings of that mentality in the picture where the tall person has his crate taken away. Leftism always, invariably, irreparably leads to the extermination of the more fortunate because there’s never enough social rejigging to erase their advantage without erasing them. Mass murder is not leftism gone astray. It’s leftism allowed to lead to its natural conclusion. Problem is, even once you forcibly remove all the unfairly advantaged, in the very next generation, there will once again be more and less advantaged. They’ll all start from a different baseline. The fence will be much taller for all of them. But even in relation to the much taller fence, somebody will be better positioned to peek over it. So you have to start rejigging, re-engineering, re-propping and re-disadvantaging all over again.

The only winner in this game is the fence. Humans always lose because it’s in their nature to be different. Leftism battles something that will always exist for as long as humans do.

Trump is definitely the same person. It would be disturbing if he experienced a major personality change at his age. But he’s running a completely different campaign. If people were capable of leaving partisanship aside, Trump’s campaign of 2024 would be an object lesson in taking stock of your mistakes and correcting course. Everybody is too emotional and I’m not even sure it makes sense to post because once you say “Trump”, all reason flies out of the window.

The question was asked, though, so I’ll answer.

The Trump campaign of 2020 made three catastrophic mistakes:

1. No legal challenges were presented before the election to prevent the shenanigans with ballot harvesting.
2. The fantasy of winning the black vote  was pursued to the detriment of courting the very winnable white male vote. As a result, this was the demographic Trump went down with in comparison with 2016. It was actually the only demographic where he decreased.
3. Hiring absolute morons and incompetents, which is a problem that has dogged Trump since 2016.

This time around, we see a complete turnaround on all 3 issues.

1. Legal challenges are presented swiftly and effectively before Election Day.
2. The courting of Elon Musk, the Joe Rogan podcast, and the garbage truck photo op are only the most recent of the very successful efforts to speak to the demographic that can put Trump over. There are many others, and that’s a major difference from 2020.
3. The people who carry out the day-to-day operations for the campaign are very organized, disciplined, effective people. Trump told, for example, about how fast the garbage truck photo op was organized, with the truck being covered with the campaign signage in a very short period of time and everything being ready lightning fast.

People have such an intense reaction to Trump – both good and bad – that it’s impossible to find anybody interested in discussing this. So thanks for the question, I appreciate.

We had a very American weekend: church, bowling, arcade, trampoline park, bookstore, mall.

And here’s what I have to say.

America is an oasis.

A magical place of wonderment and peace.

Everybody is orderly, kind and civilized. I haven’t seen as much as a shopping cart left out of place.

We need to not piss this away. It’s truly the best we can do. We’ve got such a great thing going. Let’s appreciate it as it deserves and not fritter it away.

An October surprise in November: Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by 3 percentage points in Iowa – a state both campaigns assumed would be won handily by Trump.

https://x.com/carenbohan/status/1852855160248365268?t=ICiwjeQp9Rd0IsWI_sDjbg&s=19

In 2020, Trump lost the election for Republicans. The campaign was shoddy, unserious and just bad. But Trump is uncommonly good at learning. His 2024 campaign reversed most of the mistakes of four years ago. It’s a really good campaign that’s made some excellent moves. But it looks like this time Republicans will lose Trump the election, making him pay at the polls for policies he doesn’t even support.

When you lose, there are two approaches you can take.

One is to ask, “what flaws were there in my strategy? What are the mistakes I made? How will I avoid making them in the future?”

The other is to list ways in which you were victimized and robbed of a victory.

A loss is still a loss but our reaction to it is within our control. We either frame it in terms of agency or in terms of victimhood.

Somebody will lose on Tuesday, and I highly recommend the approach that is based on agency to whoever it is. I also recommend it for our individual lives.

Today is the best night of the year. It’s the night when we gain an additional reading hour.

And I have the perfect book to do justice to this occasion.

Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds is hardcore good. It’s the best I have read by him so far. I often say that Trollope does an amazing study of character but he’s not big on plot. The Eustace Diamonds, however, is not remotely lacking in the plot department. There’s a crime, a police investigation, and even a bit of courtroom drama. It’s an edge-of-your-seat novel that is a joy to read.

The novel is built on the contrast between the penniless, homely and saintly Lucy Morris and wealthy, lying and pretty Lizzie Eustace. Lucy is so saintly that Trollope is clearly bored with her and describes the flawed Lizzie with much greater gusto. Lizzie is a fascinating character. She is cognitively incapable of fully understanding what’s happening around her. She lives in an intellectual fog, confused by much of what’s happening around her. To avoid having to unravel the complexities of her domestic economy and the relationships of people who surround her, Lizzie swaps the bits of reality that befuddle her for comforting stories she invents. This always leads to trouble because reality cannot be changed with words.

The only people who can read a novel by Trollope are those with an IQ way above Lizzie’s retardation level. When they meet a Lizzie, they find such a person impossible to comprehend. Why is she lying in such obvious ways and for no visible gain? Why is she mismanaging her life to such an extent? In The Eustace Diamonds, we get a chance to peek into the mind of a low-intelligence fantasist and understand her better.

The novel also takes a look at a very dark subject in its exploration of the suffering of a young girl who is pushed into adult sexuality for which she is not ready and which terrifies her. Lucinda Roanoke is 18, and her aunt Mrs Carbuncle is forcing her to marry an older man. Lucinda is so petrified by the expectation that she will have to be physically intimate with a man that her suffering would melt a stone. Still, everybody around her looks with indifference at the agony of a teenager who is simply not ready for an adult sex life.

We no longer have families forcing young girls to marry against their will but our age witnesses an identical suffering of many modern Lucindas. We can see them in the videos of falling-down-drunk young girls in the streets of London or New York as they try to anaesthesize themselves with alcohol into a compliance with the myth that their sexuality should faithfully imitate that of their male peers. There is no exploitative aunt forcing them into it because they have taken that duty fully upon themselves.

Many things changed since Trollope’s times but his plots and characters read as mega relevant today. He’s an extraordinary writer, and I highly recommend his books.