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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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By: Kat Rosenfield

Published: Oct 27, 2022

One of my longtime survival strategies as a career freelance writer is a policy of saying yes to everything. This includes paid work, of course, but it also includes lunch invitations, since the only thing I love more than writing is eating. (These are also, incidentally, the only two things in the world that I am any good at.) My policy goes like this: If you invite me to lunch, I will come. Embedded in my policy is a second, equally important policy of asking no further questions about the purpose of the lunch, lest I accidentally trigger a series of events leading to the withdrawal of the invitation, which would be tragic.

This is how I came to be sitting across the table from National Review editor Rich Lowry at one of the nicer restaurants on Main Street in a small town in New England on a sunny afternoon in May. In keeping with my policy, I hadn’t asked what I was doing there — but he also hadn’t told me, and after nearly an hour, it was starting to get weird. The food was eaten, the plates were cleared, and we had covered all the obvious topics: our shared interest in writing fiction, our families, our respective trajectories out of New York City and into the suburbs. And then, finally, the penny dropped.

“I was hoping to talk to you about writing for National Review,” Rich said, apologetically. “But apparently you’re . . . a liberal?”

This was not the first time this had happened to me. The first and best (or perhaps worst) time someone mistook me for a conservative, I was interviewing live with a gravelly-voiced drive-time radio host whom I hadn’t bothered to google and who had evidently been similarly lax about googling me.

“How about these libs,” he said, conspiratorially. (The noise I made in response was somewhere between “nervous laugh” and “strangled cat.”)

It happened at the Edgar Awards, where I was a Best Novel nominee for my 2021 thriller, No One Will Miss Her. A fellow attendee smiled and said, “It’s just so great that a conservative like you was nominated,” prompting my husband to snort so violently that he nearly choked on his beer.

And of course, it happens online — and particularly in the darker corners of what is known as “bluecheck Twitter,” where those who mistake me for a member of the political Right are not conservatives but fellow lefties, writers and lawyers and academics. There, the allegations of conservatism aren’t a fun case of mistaken identity; there, they’re delivered with an accusatory snarl.

To explain why people keep mistaking me for a conservative, I need to first explain what kind of liberal I am and always have been: the free-speech and bleeding-heart variety. As a kid born in the early 1980s — now a Millennial in early middle age — I understood conservatives through the lens of the culture wars long before I knew anything about politics, which is to say (with apologies to my audience) that I saw them as the uptight control freaks trying to ruin everyone’s good time.

Ah, yes, conservatives: the ones who wanted to ban, scold, and censor all the fun out of everything. They were humorless, heartless, joyless, sexless — except for their bizarre obsession with policing what kind of sex everyone else was having in the privacy of his own home. Conservatism was Rudy Giuliani trying to shut down an art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it was “sick stuff.” It was Dan Quayle giving a campaign speech that condemned Murphy Brown, a fictional character, for having a fictional baby out of wedlock. It was some lemon-faced chaperone patrolling the dance floor at homecoming to make sure nobody’s hands were migrating buttward. It was my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Teitelbaum, calling my parents at home to report that she’d seen me doodling “satyric symbols” in the margins of my notebook.

“Satyric?” my mother said, her brow furrowed with confusion. “Like, half man, half goat?”

There was a long pause, a series of faint squawks from the other end of the phone. “Oh, you mean satanic,” she said, and put Mrs. Teitelbaum on hold so that she could shriek with laughter.

Here I will acknowledge that it was a different time; the “satanic panic” (a frenzy I now understand to have been as much a product of breathless corporate media coverage and the hubris of certain medical professionals as it was of the religious Right) was only barely behind us. Teen-pregnancy rates were skyrocketing; half of all marriages ended in divorce; violent video games were transforming the entertainment landscape and stoking fears of copycat crimes. If conservatives were anxious about the culture and their place in it, they certainly had their reasons. But to me, a teenager, their anxieties seemed ridiculous, and meddlesome, rooted in a wholly inappropriate yearning to control what was going on in other people’s bodies, bedrooms, and minds.

Of course, ridiculous and meddlesome are not the same as evil — and here, even early on, I diverged from the more strident members of my own political tribe. I had friends who didn’t share my politics, whose existence made it impossible to write off all conservatives as stupid and evil; these people, whom I loved, were clearly neither. I also had friends who did share my politics but whose existence was nevertheless a valuable cautionary tale about what a self-sabotaging trap it was to make “The personal is political” not just a rallying cry in specific moments, for specific movements, but a whole-life philosophy.

So, yes, I was a liberal. I just wasn’t the type of liberal for whom other people’s politics were a deal-breaker or even necessarily all that interesting. When in 2006 I met the man who would become my husband, the fact that he’d voted for George W. Bush was less concerning to me than another affiliation, infinitely more horrifying and far less defensible: He was a Red Sox fan.

In hindsight, the breakdown of the liberal–conservative, Left–Right binary happened like the famous quote from Hemingway about bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the culture wars that animated my young adulthood had been roundly won by the Left.

Britney Spears, once the poster child for conservative purity politics and virginity pledges, had engaged in a three-way lesbian kiss on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, gotten married and divorced twice over, and was fading into obscurity on the back side of a highly publicized nervous breakdown. The few conservatives still in the fight — over violent video games, high-school sex education, or the worrisome sexual proclivities of people on TV — seemed ridiculous as well as ancient, on the verge of obsolescence, like animatronic characters at Disney World still mouthing their lines from the 1980s through a decades-old patina of rust and grime. When Rush Limbaugh went on a three-day rant over the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, shouting about the “slut” who “wants to be paid to have sex,” it was less outrageous than pathetic, a front-lines dispatch from a battle long since lost.

From my vantage point — I was by now working as an entertainment journalist at MTV News — this massive cultural shift was best observed alongside the rise of a remarkable new age of television. Creators were reimagining storytelling on the small screen, while redefining the limits of what was considered appropriate to beam into the average American living room on a Sunday night. A show such as Breaking Bad, which debuted in 2008, not only reflected the evolving culture but also revealed from the first just how much had already changed. Here was a story that, had it been released just ten years before, would have surely raised conservative hackles for its violence, its glorification of drugs and crime, its foul language up to and including one uncensored use of the f-bomb per season. (The f-bomb! On basic cable!)

But when Breaking Bad came under fire for being a poor moral influence as it neared the end of its five-year run, it wasn’t because of foul language or graphic violence. The outrage was about toxic masculinity, male privilege, and “mediocre white men.” It was about the misogyny directed at Walter White’s long-suffering wife, Skyler, a topic on which actress Anna Gunn penned a New York Times op-ed in which she concluded that the venomous reactions to her character were symptomatic of a culture still permeated by deep-seated sexism: “Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.” It was about the show’s being too white, except for its villains. This was also — to use a buzzword — problematic.

The trajectory of cultural juggernauts such as Breaking Bad was an illustration of the gradual. The sudden, on the other hand, was a series of jolts. There was one in 2015, when the horrific massacre of Charlie Hebdo staffers was met with suggestions from left-wing journalists that perhaps the violence was not undeserved, given the magazine’s penchant for “punching down.” There was another in 2017, when folks swept up by the momentum of the #MeToo movement suddenly began to argue that due process was not just overrated but wholly unnecessary. There was the 2020 Covid-era meltdown over “misinformation,” culminating in the bizarre spectacle of a bunch of free-speech, free-love, Woodstock-era hippies demanding the censorship of podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the country’s most successful self-made content creators.

And the new moral authoritarians, the ones bizarrely preoccupied with the proclivities of fictional characters, the ones clamoring to get their grubby hands on the censor’s pen? They weren’t conservatives — or at least not the kind I’d grown up with. This scolding, shaming, and censoring was coming from inside the house.

This is a theory I’ve had for some time, but it crystallized in the writing of this piece: In our current era, politics no longer have anything to do with policy. Nor are they about principles, or values, or a vision for the future of the country. They’re about tribalism, and aesthetics, and vibes. They’re about lockstep solidarity with your chosen team, to which you must demonstrate your loyalty through fierce and unwavering conformity. And most of all, they’re about hating the right people.

Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for, but by whom you wish to harm.

Consider this representative moment from the Covidian culture wars, the aforementioned weeks-long controversy that began when musician Neil Young attempted to muscle Joe Rogan off the Spotify streaming service. Rogan, a one-time reality-television personality whose podcast was bought in 2020 by Spotify in a $200 million deal, had sparked backlash for interviewing guests who made skeptical comments about the Covid vaccine. Young blasted Rogan for “spreading fake information about vaccines” and issued an ultimatum. Spotify, he said, could have “Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify took Young at his word — his music was removed from the service within weeks — but the controversy, fueled by intense politicization of all things Covid-related, had ballooned by then into something bigger. Mainstream-media commentators argued in earnest that Rogan must be censored in the name of public health; Spotify quietly disappeared some episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience from its back catalogue while appending warnings to others; even the Biden White House weighed in, with then–press secretary Jen Psaki saying, “This disclaimer, it’s a positive step, but we want every platform to be doing more to be calling out mis- and disinformation, while also uplifting accurate information.”

Amid the kerfuffle over Rogan — which had begun to take the shape of a proxy war over independent media and free speech in times of national emergency — a list began to circulate online of all the guests Rogan had ever hosted, divided by perceived political affiliation. This list, created by journalist Matthew Sheffield of the Young Turks, attempted to undercut notions of Rogan as an equal-opportunity information-seeker by asserting that he “overwhelmingly” favored “right-wingers” as guests. Entries in Sheffield’s “right-wing” column outnumbered those in the left column by nearly four to one. But as multiple commenters (including me) began to note, a plurality of these so-called right-wingers were proponents of drug legalization, same-sex marriage, gun control, and other progressive policies. Many if not most were not just Biden supporters but longtime Democratic voters, dating back 20 years or more. One of them, Tulsi Gabbard, had been a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and then a Dem presidential hopeful in 2020. (This was before Gabbard’s recent announcement that she was leaving the Democratic Party, calling it an “elitist cabal.”)

In addition to their longtime progressive politics, many of these curiously categorized “right-wingers” had one other thing in common: In recent years, they had been critical of the Left for its censorial, carceral, and otherwise authoritarian tendencies.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted, “the whole thing makes no sense — except as an exercise in labeling anyone out of step with progressive orthodoxy in any way at all as a right-winger.”

But of course this exercise is increasingly the preferred — and perhaps only — means for sorting people into various political boxes. And on that front, the whole thing makes perfect sense: This with-us-or-against-us ethos is how I, a woman who has voted Democrat straight down the ticket in every election for the past 20 years, found myself suddenly accused of apostasy by the Left at the same time that I began receiving invitations from right-wingers to appear on Gutfeld!

I said yes to those invitations, too, of course. I even had a good time!

But this is why conservatives so often mistake me for one of their own: not because I argue for right-wing policies or from a right-wing perspective, but because progressives are often extremely, publicly mad at me for refusing to parrot the latest catechism and for criticizing the progressive dogmas that either violate my principles or make no sense. I look like a friend of the Right only because the Left wants to make me their enemy — and because I can’t bring myself to do the requisite dance, or make the requisite apologies, that might get me back in the Left’s good graces.

On that front, I am not alone. There’s a loose but growing coalition of lefties out there, artists and writers and academics and professionals, who’ve drawn sympathetic attention from conservatives after being publicly shamed out of the progressive clubhouse (that is, by the type of progressive who thinks there is a clubhouse, which is of course part of the problem). It’s remarkably easy these days to be named an apostate on the left. Maybe you were critical of the looting and rioting that devastated cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. Maybe you were skeptical of this or that viral outrage: Covington Catholic, or Jussie Smollett, or the alleged racial abuse at a BYU volleyball game that neither eyewitness testimony nor video evidence could corroborate. Maybe you were too loud about the continued need for due process in the middle of #MeToo. Maybe you wouldn’t stop asking uncomfortable questions about the proven value of certain divisive brands of diversity training, or transgender surgeries for kids, or — come the pandemic — masking. Maybe you kept defending the right to free speech and creative expression after these things had been deemed “right-wing values” by your fellow liberals.

This is a fraught moment for those of us who aren’t reflexive team players, who struggle with reading the room, who remain committed to certain values on principle even when they’ve become politically inexpedient. The present climate leaves virtually no room for a person to dissent and yet remain in good standing. Attorney Lara Bazelon — whose commitment to due-process protections in Title IX cases puts her not just at odds with her left-wing peers but also, in a shocking turn, on the same side as the Trump administration — described the challenges of heterodoxy on an episode of Glenn Loury’s podcast in October 2022. “I have a tribe and they have a position, and I don’t agree with it,” Bazelon said, looking bewildered. “Why is it so poisonous and toxic and canceling-inducing to be able to say that basic thing?”

It’s also important to note that this isn’t happening only on the left. Many conservatives told me as much themselves, with a familiar mix of frustration and incredulity.

But admittedly, as recently as a few weeks ago, I still thought that the left-wing manifestation was something else, something worse. It was in the toxic high school–ness of it all, the way that people gleefully coalesced around a new target each day, as if their confidence in their own righteousness relied on the perpetual presence of a scapegoat to kick. The intolerance seemed particularly intense among the type of highly educated liberals who dominate the media sphere, who police the boundaries of their extremely online in-group with the same terrifying energy as the most Machiavellian high-school mean girl. When various polls were released in the aftermath of the 2016 election as to the willingness of various American voters to date across party lines, it did not surprise me at all to learn that liberals were far more likely to say they wouldn’t.

After hearing stories from conservatives who have been shunned, shamed, and estranged from loved ones over their lack of support for Donald Trump, I no longer imagine that this brutal breed of politics is unique to progressives. I think it just seems worse to me because the Left has always been my home — and a home where (as those ubiquitous, insufferable lawn signs say) we believed certain things, and behaved in certain ways. We were not censors. We were not scolds. We were not in the business of trying to shut down artists or meddle in people’s sex lives or deny health care to people whose lifestyle choices we disliked. That sort of vicious sanctimony, the boot-stamping-on-a-human-face-forever sense of self-righteousness, was what the Left stood as a bulwark against . . . until it didn’t.

On this front, the erosion of free speech in the creative and intellectual spaces that belong to the Left feels like a particular loss. It’s devastating to see the worlds of journalism, academia, publishing, and comedy all in such thrall to (or fear of) a culture that sees creative work as activism first and art second, a culture that demands conformity to progressive pieties and is always on the hunt for heretics. It’s also alarming to realize that virtually all of America’s cultural products are now being made in environments where admitting that you voted for Trump — a democratically elected president who was supported by roughly half the country — would be not just unusual but akin to professional suicide.

This sort of homogeneity is bad for art, and it’s also not good for people, for building community, for coexisting peacefully in a society sustained by social trust. And it’s not lost on me that expressing these thoughts publicly, especially in the pages of National Review, will no doubt prompt a fresh round of allegations that I’m some kind of faker, a double agent, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This, too, is part of the way we do politics now: Even if something is true, we’re told, you shouldn’t say it lest it provide ammunition to the other side.

Within the past five years, this toxic variation of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy has become pervasive. In the span of just 20 years, we’ve gone from “The truth has a liberal bias” to “The truth is a right-wing talking point.” People who question the orthodoxy are no longer seen as gadflies but as traitors, and they’re summarily ejected from the club by some self-appointed arbiter of Who Is And Is Not Liberal. Commentator Bill Maher was the subject of one such defenestration this spring: “He prides himself on just asking questions (a lot of which sound suspiciously like GOP talking points),” wrote Molly Jong-Fast in an Atlantic article with the not-so-subtle title “Bill Maher Isn’t a Liberal Anymore.”

Maher’s suspiciously Republican-sounding questions in this case centered on whether the explosion of the number of people under 25 who identify as LGBT+ could be explained in part by social contagion, a psychological phenomenon that has lately been explored by such hateful right-wing outfits as Reuters, the New York Times, and (wait for it) the Atlantic. But Maher was guilty of broaching an uncomfortable truth too early — which is to say, before the powers that be stepped in to declare that Now It Can Be Said.

The title of this essay is “Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative,” and it’s not lost on me that it would be an excellent setup for a tidily dramatic ending in which I suddenly realize that wait, no, the mistake was mine, and finally I see that I’ve been a conservative all along. But despite the occasional flirtation (or lunch) with members of the center-Right, and despite the lucrative career potential of a right-wing pivot, I shan’t be coming out of the closet or putting on a “Team GOP” jersey today. I still believe in liberal principles such as free speech, high social trust, and a government that provides a robust safety net for people in need while leaving the rest of us to live and let live. I support same-sex marriage, universal health care, police and prison reform, and an end to the destructive and foolhardy wars on drugs and terror — and while we’re abolishing things, I wouldn’t mind getting rid of the sex-offender registry and capital punishment, too. Like most people, I’ve seen some of my policy preferences evolve over the years (living through Covid has given me some pause about socialized medicine, for instance), but my values remain the same.

On the other hand, those values also still include sitting down for lunch and conversation with anyone who asks — not just because I love eating (although, man, do I love eating), but because I like people and find them interesting, even when we come from different worlds, or perhaps especially then. To be clear, I don’t think this makes me special; if anything, it makes me normal. Those of us who live in political bubbles, who work in political fields, who spend all day online obsessively refreshing Twitter and consuming news straight from the hose — we’re the weird ones, and it behooves us to remember how weird we are, irrespective of which side we’re on. Outside of my professional sphere, I could probably guess with 85 percent accuracy how any one of my friends voted, but I also wouldn’t do this, because it’s not the most important thing. Really, it’s not even in the top ten.

And within that sphere, where political affiliation resembles a team sport, a religious faith, and a recreational witch hunt, I remain more interested in watching the game than playing it. The work I love best is about analysis, not prescription; it’s about trying to understand what is and why, not what ought to be. And yes, granted, when talking about what the progressive Left is up to, sometimes I feel as if I’m standing inside a crumbling building that used to be my home, narrating the slow collapse of the walls as they rot and buckle around me. There’s also a sense that when the house is rebuilt, it might be elsewhere, on different foundations, so that all of us “suspicious” question-asking types are left standing outside.

But the way things are going, the folks who’ve been pushed out of the club will soon vastly outnumber those still in it. And if words such as “liberal” and “conservative” and “left” and “right” are increasingly meaningless tribal signifiers rather than statements of policy or principle, if all they convey is who you’re against rather than what you stand for, then maybe it’s in our best interest not to keep clinging to them. What are we without these labels? A tribe of the tribeless, unaffiliated and unfettered, with no choice but to get to know one another as individuals. This doesn’t sound so bad. Let’s have lunch.

#MeToo

Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for, but by whom you wish to harm.

#Kat Rosenfield #liberalism #liberal ethics #liberal values #progressive #conservative #tribalism #political tribalism #cancel culture #online mob #religion is a mental illness

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books-to-add-to-your-tbr · 1 year

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Title: Alliances

Author: Stan Lee, Kat Rosenfield

Series or standalone: series

Publication year: 2019

Genres: fiction, science fiction, fantasy, action

Blurb: Gifted but desperately lonely hacker Nia is living in isolation with her strict single dad. As a social media maven, she is wildly popular and has more than a million friends...but they are all strangers who love her posts while knowing nothing about her that is real. Cameron is on a quest for YouTube fame as a vlogger, focusing on exploring the mysteries of Lake Erie. While recording his latest video, he is knocked out by lightning in a freak storm that appears to defy the laws of physics. When Cameron awakens, he discovers an astonishing cyberkinetic talent: the ability to manipulate computers and electronics with his mind. After a chance meeting online, the two teenagers - one born with extraordinary gifts, one unwillingly transformed - join together to right wrongs in the world. As Nia and Cameron develop their powers and deal out reckonings, they draw the attention of dangerous forces...putting the future of the planet at risk.

#alliances #a trick of light #a new reality #stan lee #kat rosenfield #series #2019 #fiction #science fiction #fantasy #action

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nicklloydnow · 7 months

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“If any of us thought we could do our fellow creatures good by committing or, more probably, condoning an evil act, would we do so? Would we even recognize the moment when it happened, or accept that it was evil? Most of us are wonderfully good at persuading ourselves that our actions are pure. Does treason actually exist or, as Talleyrand quipped, is it just a matter of dates? Worse, is it a process of human sacrifice, in which exposed individuals are singled out to pay for the sins of thousands—who escape punishment? Switch allegiance at the right moment, or die opportunely, and you may be spared centuries of shame. Live too long, or cling to the wrong raft and your name will be a byword and a hissing. I suspect that Talleyrand, living in a wittier and less dogmatic age, might have reflected that Marshal Philippe Pétain was just unfortunate in his timing.

From this perspective, Pétain’s mistake was to carry on living after the fall of his Vichy State during the last grisly months of the Third Reich. If he had managed to die (he was after all 88) then he would have escaped much humiliation. If he had been shot out of hand by French resisters, a lot of scores would have been neatly settled. (Winston Churchill thought this would have been a much better way of dealing with the actual Nazi leadership than the dubious Nuremberg trials with their Soviet prosecutor). But, as Julian Jackson recounts in his book about Pétain’s surrender, trial, condemnation, and lifelong imprisonment, the old soldier more or less sought out his fate. The Germans had carried him off to the Reich. But Pétain found his way back to France, so compelling De Gaulle and his provisional government to put him on trial for treason. To do so, it had to reopen the whole bitter period, in which many apart from Pétain had behaved weakly, or dishonorably, or just mistakenly. As the title of this book reminds us, France was on trial alongside Pétain.

(…)

The shepherd, the argument runs, is supposed to stay and tend his sheep when the danger is at its worst, not to flee abroad—even if he eventually returns triumphant. Did Pétain perhaps stand between the French people and the full wrath of their conquerors? He may have thought so, at least to begin with. And when he spoke of “collaboration” with Hitler, the word did not seem to mean what it later came to mean.

But, as it happened, Pétain did not stand between the French people and their Nazi occupiers. He became their all-too-willing servant. We now know beyond doubt that Marshal Pétain’s Vichy state enthusiastically offered collaboration to the Nazis, so much so that the Germans actually rebuffed it. It had even suggested its own persecution of the Jews, rather than reluctantly given in to German pressure. In 1972 an American historian, Robert Paxton, obtained German documents on the Occupation which left no doubt about this. Pétain’s supposed “National Revolution” closely collaborated with the fiends and demons of the Third Reich and vigorously urged on one of its ugliest policies. Anybody who has any serious interest in Pétain now knows all this.

But they did not know it when it mattered most, when Pétain and France were on trial in 1945, or for some time afterwards. In fact, Pétain died in custody in 1951 before the facts were wholly known. Jackson’s book on the French state’s 1945 prosecution of Pétain contains a lengthy passage on Paxton’s discoveries. But it rightly leaves them until long after this extraordinary process was over and the Marshal slept with his fathers. So Jackson is able to treat seriously several French citizens, lay jurors, journalists, politicians—and Pétain’s brilliant, dangerous and inconvenient lawyer, Jacques Isorni. All these were determined to give the old man some semblance of fairness, at a time when violent hysteria would have been quite possible instead. Remember, it was not long since the repellent and chaotic epuration (purge) of actual and alleged collaborators after the German defeat in which wild, violent street “justice” was imposed on some of those believed to have been too helpful or friendly to the occupying power, especially the public shaving of women’s heads, not a brave action whatever else it was. France’s Communists, in particular, were keen to condemn the conservative Catholic Pétain as a national traitor comparable to the reviled Marshal Bazaine of the Franco-Prussian war. They published propaganda showing him dangling at the end of a hangman’s rope and urged the imposition of the death penalty.

(…)

It was not just Denmark where this sort of thing happened. British sneering at the weakness and cowardice of continentals under the jackboot is also badly shown up by the curious, embarrassing and largely-forgotten German occupation of the British Channel Islands in 1940. “But what would you have done?” the islanders ask their mainland critics, to this day. The islands’ local authorities were cut off from the British constitution and government when Churchill brusquely abandoned them as indefensible after Dunkirk. Suddenly these largely conservative gentlemen, some nearly as elderly as Pétain, found themselves implementing the decrees of the Third Reich rather than those of His Majesty the King. They felt they had little choice but to work with the German occupiers. Where can a resistance movement hide on a tiny island?

But compromise leads to compromise and to worse compromise. Some of their leading officials ended up cooperating in terrible acts, such as the deportation of local Jews to Auschwitz. Those who survived this distressing period are understandably angry about criticism from safe mainlanders who never saw a German soldier on their streets. When the author Madeleine Bunting wrote a severe account of the islands’ subjugation, The Model Occupation, she met much resentment from those who had experienced it. But I wish this story was better known so that boastful and ignorant British people would stop mocking the supposedly cowardly French for their collaboration in the Vichy period. The fate of the islanders suggests that it would have been the same for the British, if Hitler had ever got ashore.

(…)

Despite the French Communists’ righteous wrath at Pétain, they had their own highly embarrassing secrets from the era. This is hugely significant because of the undoubted (and gravely mistaken) attraction of the Pétain regime for French conservatives and Catholics. His national motto of Travail, Famille, Patrie, replacing the Republican Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, made it plain that this was not just a necessary co-operation with a new master, but an attempt to overturn many of the principles of the French Revolution. To this day, some figures on the political right in France seek to defend Pétain, the most recent being the failed presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, who most unwisely and inaccurately sought to defend Vichy’s policy, for supposedly saving French Jews by sacrificing recently arrived Jewish refugees to the Nazis. Why would anyone bother to do this? Could it be because of an actual lingering sympathy with Pétain’s social policies?

The Communist attempts at collaboration with the Germans were (like Vichy’s active anti-Jewish behavior) not widely known at the time of Pétain’s trial. Julian Jackson discussed the Communist approach to the German occupation authorities in another work on France’s occupation period France: The Dark Years 1940-44. For many years after the war the episode was little more than a bitter Trotskyist rumour, but it has now taken solid form in serious research. To even begin to comprehend it you must recall that in May 1940, as France’s democratic government collapsed and Nazi power swept into Paris, the Nazis and the Communists were allies against the democracies, thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, which would endure until June 1941 and was far more than a brief flirtation. The previous September, there had been a joint Wehrmacht and Red Army victory parade over Poland in the city of Brest-Litovsk (pictures still exist of German and Soviet officers happily communing as they take the salute). Not long afterward the two worst secret police forces in the world, Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s NKVD, exchanged prisoners, as each wanted to get their hands on persons the other had arrested. Much of the fuel and material used in the German Blitzkrieg against the European democracies in May 1940 had come from or through the USSR.

The French Communist Party was therefore considered a pro-enemy body by the French state. It was banned and its daily newspaper L’Humanite shut down. The French Communists brushed aside rumors of their behavior for long after the war, and their considerable power and popularity in Gaullist France allowed them to get away with doing so. But scholarship has now caught up with them. Beyond doubt, French Communists went voluntarily to the Nazis and sought permission for the re-issue of their newspaper. Apparently the Comintern, then the central headquarters of all Communist Parties, was taken by surprise by the French defeat in 1940. It did not know how to respond. The leaders of French Communism had been dispersed by the proscription of their Party, and were in hiding or abroad. But some heavyweight commissars, Jacques Duclos, Jean Catelas, and Maurice Treand, wondered if the fall of the French state might be a chance to recover their organization’s lost influence. This was in the Leninist tradition of ruthlessness and of scorn for patriotism and other such bourgeois notions.

The negotiations involved the subtle French-speaking Otto Abetz, Germany’s future ambassador to Vichy France. Treand and Catelas promised, Jackson writes, that if allowed to reappear, the Communist daily would “pursue a policy of European pacification” and “denounce the activities of the agents of British imperialism.” Underground editions of the paper (secretly printed since September 1939) published three articles in the summer of 1940 praising fraternization between French workers and the Germans. Perhaps these were aimed at persuading the Germans to allow open publication. Who can now say?

As so often in history with things that nearly happened, it is like watching a ghost begin to appear, and then disappear again. There was surprising sympathy for collaboration on both sides in France. Some conservatives loathed England, hoped for a British surrender, and thought Hitler was better than socialism. Some Communists suspected that Hitler might be kinder to them than democracy had been. Only as the occupation hardened, and as the French Communist leader in exile, Maurice Thorez, reasserted control, did the Communists end the talks. They did so very shortly before the Germans also went off the idea, though it was a close-run thing. One Communist, Robert Foissin, was made an internal scapegoat by the Party—which belatedly realized how embarrassing the talks would one day become. But Duclos was too important for such treatment. He would live to be the Communist candidate for the Presidency of France in 1969. No wonder that in 1945 the Communists—now covered in glory because of their post-1941 Resistance role—wanted to draw eyes away from their own behavior in 1940, and concentrate instead on the wickedness of the Catholic, conservative Pétain.

(…)

In truth, France was on trial in 1945 more than Pétain. And France emerges from the trial with perhaps a little more credit than we give it. This at least was not a howling enraged tribunal, as the Communists might have desired, but a genuine attempt to apply due process and so to restore some sort of legitimate stability. De Gaulle’s view of the old man was that he was a living corpse who had died to all intents and purposes in 1924. Probably those in French politics who (perhaps too willingly) let him take responsibility for making peace with Germany had a similar view. He was a cypher, not a person. Those who seriously imagined that he was the head of a conservative national revolution were deluded at the time, and those in modern French politics who suggest the same are equally deceived, though it now seems fairly certain that the Marshal was, more often than not, conscious of what was going on around him and aware of what was done in his name. His reprieve from execution was not only a recognition that he was too old to face a firing squad. It was a humane compromise between the De Gaulle and Pétain factions which still haunt French public life in surprising ways. After all, the Socialist President Francois Mitterrand served and was honored by the Vichy regime, yet lived to prosper. The far more brutal fate of Pétain’s colleague Pierre Laval, shot after a brief and undignified hearing and a botched suicide, probably satisfied the general desire to erase the shame and discomfort of the collaboration years which Mauriac had identified. How pleased any reader of this book must be that he and his country did not undergo such misery. Do not be defeated in war. Defeat corrupts the defeated, and it is far harder than we think to stand above the grim process. Pray that it never happens to you.”

“One of the greatest challenges human beings face is how to tease apart a bad act from a good character — or, conversely, a toxic personality from the good and worthy things he created. How do we separate the long-time childhood friend from his insane Facebook polemics? The good neighbour from his bad politics?

“People are thoughtless all the time,” writes Alexandra Hudson in her new book, The Soul of Civility, while arguing that the best way to depolarise our society is to recognise that good people can have bad ideas. This idea is classically Christian, but also fundamentally American: even after the Civil War, a central tenet of Reconstruction was that those who fought for the Confederacy should be given grace for having chosen the wrong side. But that’s a principle it’s easier to hold to in the wake of victory than in the fog of war — or, as this past week’s events have reminded us, War Discourse.

The response from certain corners of the progressive Left to the stories coming out of Israel has been extraordinary. The silhouette of a paragliding Hamas militant has been adopted by groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America — a graphic successor to that Che Guevara block print that used to hang on every dorm room wall. A crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanted “gas the Jews”. A cheer went up in Times Square at the news that 700 Israelis had been killed. And among the academic and media classes, a series of statements ran the gamut from half-hearted condemnations of the terrorist attacks to triumphant and bloodthirsty snarling.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue. “Today should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide,” tweeted Rivkah Brown of Novara Media. The language varied, but the sentiment was the same: this is good, actually, and seeing it should fill you with the same cathartic glee as any underdog story. Don’t you see? This isn’t terrorism; it is justice.

(…)

The war in Israel, and the one in Ukraine: it’s not hard to see how our distance from these events, combined with the immediacy of so much coverage and conversation about them, lends itself to the most grotesque kind of rubbernecking. It’s war as spectator sport; people haggle over the reports of Hamas beheading babies with the same energy as a group of armchair referees debating an off-side call.

Some people, anyway. The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in this sort of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a hazard of their utter insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of the policies they advocate. Violence and chaos have a way of breaking through the barriers that separate the ivory tower-dwellers from the masses they condescend; one imagines the occupants of Versailles looked out their windows at the guillotine being constructed in the public square and, not understanding what lay in store, pronouncing the structure adorable.

But it’s also what happens when you succumb to the Manichean worldview that every conflict, every issue, boils down to a simple question of who is the more oppressed party. Whichever guy has more privilege, more power: this is your villain. In trying to topple him from his unearned position of influence, his victim can do no wrong. Hamas, composed as it is of Muslim people of colour, is merely punching (and raping, and kidnapping) up.

While the attacks on Israel have given rise to a particularly stomach-turning iteration of this rhetoric, we have seen it before. In 2020, as the US protests against police violence spiralled out of control, members of the laptop class could reliably be found posting that Martin Luther King Jr quote about riots being “the voice of the unheard” — always from the safety of their homes, in nice neighbourhoods, in coastal cities, where things were conspicuously not on fire. The people looting, rioting, and wreaking havoc were members of an oppressed class, and hence above reproach.

But the most absurd example of how true-life horrors become grist for the mill of perverse progressive fantasy popped up downstream of the “decolonisation” discourse. Every now and then, someone announces on the internet that they would begrudgingly allow themselves to be murdered if Native Americans decided to violently re-exert ownership over their ancestral lands. The authenticity of such sentiments is obviously belied by the fact that these same people could, if they wanted to, voluntarily renounce their power instead of waiting for some noble savage to take it by force. If you truly believed yourself to be a colonist, illegitimately squatting on someone else’s property, why would you waste time tweeting about it? Wouldn’t you just leave?

(…)

If civility demands that we hold people to account for the hatred they spew, it also rejects the notion that a person of an “oppressed” identity category should get a free pass to spew hatred. The bar for human decency, surely, does not shift depending on the colour of your skin or the arrangement of your genitals — and to insist on this, on one standard for all people, creates a clear path forward, which may be the best thing about civility as an ethos. It works on the assumption that, as bleak as things are now, there will be an “after” in which we forgive, even if we don’t forget.

(…)

As I left Hudson’s event on Tuesday night, I found the street closed off. Instead of cars, the pavement was occupied by hundreds of people holding signs and banners and flags: the remnants of what had been a massive rally in support of Israel. I would later learn that some people present were captured on camera wishing for the annihilation of Palestine; no one side, as it turns out, has a monopoly on hatred.

As I weaved through the crowd, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” was playing through my headphones, a fitting meditation on war, death, and the cruelty we inflict on each other in the name of a just cause.

They’re lining up the prisoners

And the guards are taking aim

I struggle with some demons

They were middle-class and tame

I didn’t know I had permission

To murder and to maim

The chorus to this song is a Hebrew word, a line from the Torah. It’s what Abraham says, in response to God’s request that he sacrifice his son; it is also what we might say to each other, eventually, when civility or decency or whatever deity you believe in asks us to confront and forgive each other’s failings in this moment, the better to thrive in the moments we have left.

Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, I’m ready.”

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librospdfgratismundoepub · 1 year

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Nadie se acordará de ella - Kat Rosenfield (2022)

Una novela inteligente e ingeniosa de suspense psicológico en la que una chica humilde de un pequeño pueblo conoce a una bella influencer de Instagram de la gran ciudad, con un giro mortal que sorprenderá incluso al lector más inteligente. En una hermosa mañana de octubre en una zona rural de Maine, un investigador de homicidios de la policía estatal se detiene en la deprimida ciudad de Copper…

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#Kat Rosenfield

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arcticdementor · 2 years

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The Star Wars franchise has always been a cultural mirror, with each manifestation reflecting the fears, hopes, and political themes of the moment it was created. The original 1977 film was steeped in the anxieties of a postwar landscape; the late-Nineties prequel trilogy is imbued with the lighthearted confidence (and excessive CGI use) of the pre-social internet era. And as its latest property, Obi Wan Kenobi, is released, a post from the official Star Wars Twitter account launches in to the culture wars.

…

Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge.

Today’s predominant mode of cultural engagement began incubating on Tumblr around 2010, spread to mainstream media in the lead-up to America’s 2016 election, and now dominates the entire cultural apparatus up to and including Hollywood itself. It owes much to the 2008 recession, and the mass layoffs in media which fundamentally transformed how news was covered.

Imagine a horde of freshly unemployed veteran writers, alongside new journalism grads, desperately trying to claw out a livelihood in a world where writing had been completely devalued. (It was not unusual, at this time, to be told that the job you were applying for paid not in money but “exposure”.) Gone was the $2-per-word magazine staff writer position; gone was the local shoe-leather reporting job that might launch a lifelong career. Now, a writer’s best option was freelance blogging, churning out listicles and aggregated new stories at $15 a pop — and with a quota, which at some outlets ran as high as 20 posts per day.

The pressure to produce content on such an accelerated timeline spawned a lot of half-arsed, hastily-executed work (“10 Times Brad Pitt’s Butt Made Me Want To Die: A List In GIFs”) but also created a constant scramble for something, anything, to write about. Social media, then in its infancy, was a lifesaver: as a reporter at MTV News, I could curate a quick roundup of Twitter or Tumblr reactions to last night’s Game of Thrones episode in less than 20 minutes, which allowed me to meet my quota while also prioritising more interesting, time-consuming work (for instance, getting a trauma surgeon to assess whether it was actually, medically possible for The Mountain to crush Oberyn Martell’s skull like a grape).

…

But, in 2014, as cash-strapped media outlets chose to prioritise opinion journalism (quick and cheap) over investigative reporting (time-consuming and expensive), the news cycle became increasingly outrage-driven, and our thinking about the type of post that was deemed worthy of coverage changed. The saga of Justine Sacco had recently introduced a hungry populace to the joys of playing hunt-the-racist on Twitter. The US was becoming more tribal, and art, in turn, more political. The ridiculous culture war known as Gamergate consumed the discourse for months on end, as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.

…

But what it also reveals, in hindsight, is how this mode of coverage blurred the boundaries between identifying a trend and manufacturing one. The two embedded tweets in that piece had a total of 11 retweets between them, suggesting that the sentiment within them were anything but popular. If not for the existing practice of trawling Twitter for “people are saying” stories — and if not for the absurd expectation that journalists should post new material every hour — there would never have been any reason to dig them up. The racist haters would have simply languished in obscurity, their tweets lost to the sands of time.

This would have been a good time for culture writers to step back, both from the quota model of journalism and from its engagement with stupid social media controversies. But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.

In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against. By the time the new Ghostbusters was actually released, the criticism of it was not criticism so much as a celebration of its mere existence, so that any assessment of whether it was good or not became entirely irrelevant. (It was, for the record, not good.)

And Star Wars was an opportunity like no other to stick it to the baby-men. It was about strong female characters, and intergalactic diversity, and standing up against the fascist forces of the Trump admi… uh, I mean, the Empire. By the time The Last Jedi came out in December 2017, the American Left had so thoroughly fused its pop culture with its politics that it was no longer possible to discern if the “Resistance” movement people kept referring to was the one with the spaceships, or the one with those ludicrous pink hats. By 2020, every Star Wars news cycle included stories about how the franchise’s forays into diversity continued to infuriate its toxic fanbase.

…

Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.

Except the art, of course. In a culture that cannot conceive of appreciating something you love unless it’s part of a righteous backlash against the angry baby-men you hate, art loses every time.

#kat rosenfield #unherd #star wars #twitter #journalism #'it all started with a site called 'tumblr''

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theliteraryvixen · 2 years

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No One Will Miss Her: A Novel by Kat Rosenfield - My Review

No One Will Miss Her: A Novel by Kat Rosenfield – My Review

Title: No One Will Miss Her: A Novel Author: Kat Rosenfield Release Date: October 12th 2021 Genre: Thrillers, Psychological A smart, witty, crackling novel of psychological suspense in which a girl from a hardscrabble small town meets a gorgeous Instagram influencer from the big city, with a murderous twist that will shock even the most savvy reader. On a beautiful October morning in rural…

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#3 Stars #Kat Rosenfield #Netgalley #No One Will Miss Her: A Novel #Psychological Thriller #Review #The Literary Vixen

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lovelyylittleladyy · 2 years

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Currently Reading:

Inland by Kat Rosenfield -

i read this for the first time about 4 years ago. Going to reread it and see how i feel about it now!

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lesbiancosimaniehaus · 1 year

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When they make a good point, they make a good point

#feminine chaos #I mostly just like Kat Rosenfield #Spotify

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dhaaruni · 6 months

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The truth is, people have always held an incredible variety of stupid opinions. They’ve always been foolish, or biased, or bigoted, or believers in wild conspiracy theories. But they have also always been perfectly capable, and deserving, of remaining employed and contributing productively to society irrespective of the views they hold. Social media has not changed any of this; it’s only made it easier to know who thinks what. Can that be upsetting? Of course, but the onus is on all of us to deal with those feelings like adults. The list of appropriate responses to offensive speech is virtually limitless; you can argue, or look away, or just silently revise your opinion of the speaker for future reference. (I will not, personally, be inviting the posters of those Hamas paraglider memes to my birthday party.) But the idea that speech should have consequences, and that losing your livelihood is an appropriate price to pay for using your voice? It’s grotesque, and as we are beginning to see, unsustainable. This snitching, surveilling, offense-seeking culture of intolerance is anathema to a functional society; it will tear us apart if we let it.

"You shouldn’t be fired for being a jerk" by Kat Rosenfield

#links #media matters lots

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mauradersdaughter · 9 months

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“Barbie is Fight Club for women” (credits to the writer: Kat Rosenfield) (taken from UnHerd)

read the whole article: https://unherd.com/2023/07/barbie-is-fight-club-for-women/

#barbie #margot robbie #philosophy #women empowerment #feminism

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liskantope · 7 months

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Public intellectual Robert Wright, who runs the Nonzero YouTube channel (once known as Bloggingheads), just a week ago finally had the last of his weekly political discussions with his conversation partner Mickey Kaus on the channel since around the end of 2005. I've been a regular listener for the past few years (only a small fraction of their total run though, and I've never been a subscriber and so haven't seen their after-conversations in what they call the Parrot Room). Although I've always found their dynamic to be a bit cold and caustic compared to that of other pairs of conversation partners that began through Bloggingheads (Bill Scher and Matt Lewis, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, Kat Rosenfield and Phoebe Maltz-Bovy), and that Wright in particular is unpleasantly prickly towards Kaus, I'm going to miss the sound of their voices in their weekly back-and-forths.

Here is a bit of what I humorously imagined to be their final episode (which in real life turned out to be as dry as usual and not so much of a "goodbye episode").

[Videos turn on in split screen.]

ROBERT WRIGHT: Hi, Mickey!

MICKEY KAUS: Hey Bob!

RW: How're you doing, Mickey?

MK: I'm doing fine, Bob! [holds a photo up to the camera, which shows a split-screen image of two dark-haired middle-aged men each with a microphone in front of him; the man on the right is mostly bald] I have a quiz for you, Bob. Can you guess the identities of these two men in the photo?

RW: [squinting with perhaps a feigned intensity] Let's see... is it Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, back thirty years ago?

MK: It's not them, Bob! But you're right that it's from many years ago.

RW: Are these guys more the political type?

MK: You could say that, Bob.

RW: Is it... is the one on the left George W. Bush during his administration and the one on the right Karl Rove?

MK: Closer, Bob! But they're not actual politicians. And they're not neocons.

RW: Oh, I see. So if they weren't neocons, is it possible that one of them happen to vote for Trump twice?

MK: I'll give you a hint, Bob: this photo is to commemorate the end of an era that has arrived this week.

RW: Wait a minute... [mock moment of realization] Is that us, Mickey?

MK: It's us, Bob! From almost 18 years ago, when we started having conversations on your channel.

RW: But... but how can those guys possibly be me and you? Look at those baby faces, and such dark hair...

MK: It's called aging, Bob! I'd say you should try it sometime, except, well, judging from the photo and your face as it appears now, it, uh, it looks like you have. [awkward grin at having successfully reached a spontaneous punchline of sorts]

RW: [unperturbed] Yeah, you got me there, Mickey. You know who else has tried aging? I'll give you a hint: he has a little more power and influence than you or I do, Mickey. And I've been harping on him for a while.

MK: Elon Musk isn't getting that old.

RW: [visible exasperation] I'm talking about Joe Biden, Mickey! I noted three more moments of the past week that highlight his senility, which I'd be happy to describe to you, but since this is our final episode, I'd rather just take my last opportunity to ask, is it still not too late to get him off the Democratic ticket?

MK: Since last week I've developed a new theory about that, Bob, about a plan that possibly could work for getting him to step down, one that I don't think anyone else has considered, Bob. It involves coercing him to take a seat on the Supreme Court, after removing one of the current justices by invoking a constitutional clause that hasn't been recognized since eighteen--

RW: Let me stop you right there, Mickey: does this idea of yours end with Kamala Harris taking his place?

MK: [a bit sheepishly] Uh, yeah.

RW: Because I may not have made myself clear the last dozen weeks I've brought this up, but my one condition to go with Biden not running for reelection is that I don't want Kamala Harris on the ticket either. Geez, is that too much to ask?

MK: Well then I don't think I can help you, Bob. But I'm sure I can come up with some other clever idea in time for next week's conversation.

RW: There isn't going to be an episode next week, Mickey! Today was our last chance to get Biden and Harris out of the race!

MK: Well, there are enough problems right now where Biden is concerned. Something really came to a head for him this week, and it vindicates me on something I've been railing against for quite some time. One of my favorite topics, actually.

RW: Could it possibly be the Child Tax Credit, Mickey?

MK: No, it's not the Child Tax Credit. Why would anything that happened with the Biden administration this past week have anything to do with the Child Tax Credit? Although I'm happy to discuss that as much as you like, even though it's not on our planned list of topics, Bob. I thought of half a dozen more points I wanted to make right after the last time you actually let me talk about it, which I --

RW: I can't even remember the when the last time was...

MK: Exactly my point, Bob! And yet, from back whenever that was, I do still remember just a few more arguments I wanted to make --

RW: [hastily interrupting him] Wait, don't you have another favorite topic, Mickey? Oh yeah: the influx of undocumented immigrants?

MK: [eagerly, with a smile] You got it, Bob! Undocumented immigrants and how they're driving down wages of decent working Americans!

RW: [with obvious sarcasm] Oh right, I had almost forgotten what your views on that were! That's right, now it makes sense again, that's why you voted for Trump twice, never mind him being a visible menace to our democracy...

MK: Right, uh, well, uh, it looks like Biden is going to be forced to take up Trump's policies on the immigration issue, due to the unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants into big cities full of his voting base. Guess who's talking about building a wall now?

RW: Well I potentially have a lot of strong counterarguments to make to the thesis that I know you're driving at, Mickey, but I don't think our listeners really want to be treated to the dry conversation that would ensue. The important point is, you voted for Trump twice, even though he's a threat to our democracy; let that be put into the record.

Now, I say one of us comes up with some sort of segue to the war in Ukraine.

[awkward silence]

MK: Well, it's not my job to get us onto the war in Ukraine, Bob.

RW: Shall I just dive into it then? I can talk for the next twenty minutes about something going on in the Donbas, and in Kyiv, and name several other places, and bring up the ground hardening for the winter, and how Russia can replace its troops much more easily than Ukraine can, and how Biden should be urging Zelensky to pursue peace talks, and so on, provided you're willing to nod along and interject with an empty comment or two to keep the conversation flowing. Are you feeling up for that?

MK: Sure, Bob! It's always relaxing, listening to you talk about Ukraine and nodding my head and jumping in with occasional comments and questions without really having to know what we're talking about. But do our listeners really want twenty minutes of that on our last episode ever?

[continuing with sincerity] We could have a very engaging conversation instead about the unacceptable shortcomings of the Child Tax Credit. I think I already suggested that actually, and mentioned that I came up with several more shortcomings.

RW: [gazing at the ceiling] Please, let's end on anything but the Child Tax Credit. Anything, Mickey.

MK: How about amnesty bills for illegal immigrants, then?

RW: Okay, you know what? That's the alarm, to remind us to wrap it up. [No alarm is heard, but he is glancing over at a supposed object sitting just off-screen.]

MK: You set it to go off awfully soon, Bob.

RW: Yeah well, I'd forgotten that I wanted to make this last episode short and sweet. It's our final Parrot Room afterwards that the subscribers are really excited about, after all.

MK: Do you know what I think, Bob? I think you decided on the spot to pretend that the alarm went off, because you didn't like the way the conversation was going. Do you know what I just employed there? Your favorite skill, cognitive empathy, Bob!

RW: That's not really what cognitive empathy is about, Mickey. Or the type of thing it should be applied to. But I understand, even if I don't approve, of where you're coming from here: you hear me bringing up the importance of cognitive empathy from time to time, and you couldn't pass up a potential opportunity to show me that you understand and care about the concept too, especially if it helps deflect from the fact that you voted for Trump in both his elections. And this is a natural tendency that you and others have and I should learn to expect in the future. See what I just did there, Mickey?

MK: [with half a grin] Right. Well. Do you have your list of Parrot Room topics, Bob? I have mine. [picks up half a novel's worth of sheets of handwritten notes and starts riffling through it]

RW: Yeah, well I have both of mine up here. [points to head] Want to give a run-down of everything you got?

MK: If we go through all of these, we'll have spent more than half of this conversation on what we're going to cover in the Parrot Room, Bob.

RW: Oh, well I suppose that's right. At least, given how much detail you put into describing your topics, so that I always have to stop you from completely spoiling your takes on them right away and thus rendering the Parrot Room superfluous.

MK: It doesn't matter, Bob! It's too late for newcomers to subscribe anyway, and it's our very last Parrot Room so our current subscribers are excited about it regardless!

RW: Now once again I want to make sure listeners are clear on the fact that this YouTube channel will remain as active as ever, and I'll still be having conversations every Friday night, just with other people who are not Mickey. Because Mickey here had to attend to other projects of his, projects that are so important. Which is perfectly all right.

MK: [with a loyal, slightly strained grin] That's right, he'll be talking to much more worthwhile conversation partners than me.

RW: [matter-of-factly] Exactly, my Friday podcast guests are going to be much better than Bob here. And hardly any of them will have voted for Trump even once... [holding up a solemn index finger towards the camera]... that's how high-quality my future Friday guests will be. Anyway, I don't think our listeners really want to hear us discuss actual issues in the Parrot Room this last time, Mickey, any more than they wanted to hear us discuss actual issues in our final episode.

MK: That's right, Bob, they just wanted to hear us spar and jab at each other. And I think we delivered, Bob!

RW: I think I delivered on this, Mickey, and you... Well, I suppose you delivered on this about to the extent that you usually do.

MK: [the strained grin momentarily returns] And there's another blow! Well, I guess it's time to head to the Parrot Room, where what the subscribers really want to hear is our reminiscences about the last 18 years, and how much we'll miss talking to each other.

RW: [very dryly] Oh I'll miss talking to you, Mickey. I might actually cry in the Parrot Room. Tears may be shed. I may, in fact, weep.

MK: I actually had a point I wanted to make, a take on one of your superficial attributes I'll miss the most from our conversations, Bob: the uniquely whiny, nasally quality of your voice.

RW: Didn't we already discuss this, Mickey? I thought we came to the conclusion that, although it had been agreed upon by scientists that my voice is the most whiny and nasally among all human voices, a certain presidential candidate --

MK: They did a further study, Bob, with an audio analysis, and showed that the previous conclusion was correct after all, that even Ron DeSantis' nasally voice is no match --

RW: [hastily interrupting] There you go again, giving away Parrot Room material to those who haven't paid for it! Anyway, I'm sure that all of this is motivated by your desire to take superlatives away from DeSantis, since he's running against your superlative bestie, Donald Trump.

MK: Since when is Trump my bestie, Bob?

RW: Perhaps our listeners are unaware, but you voted for him both in 2016 and in 2020, Mickey...

MK: That's right, but, uh, our listeners may not realize that it's not as though I actually ever liked Trump, I was mainly concerned about Congress not being able to pass an amnesty bill...

RW: ...even after Trump refused to promise that he would accept election results...

MK: ...and actually, uh, the thing is, I was making a calculation based on an average of predictions for the number of House and Senate seats the Republicans would take, and if I'd known that Republicans would gain so many House seats, there's actually a chance, uh, Bob, that I may have voted for, I dunno, someone else! [a little feverishly] It's the Amnesty Bill, Bob, the Amnesty Bill would be the very undoing of our country, and sometimes you have to choose between the lesser of two --

RW: [ignoring MK] Okay everyone, we're heading to the Parrot Room for some very intriguing and exclusive content, as always. Something much more interesting than Mickey's opinions on amnesty. Patreon-dot-com-slash-parrotroom.

MK: [taking out his toy parrot and speaking into its microphone] Down with the Child Tax Credit and with amnesty! Forever and ever!

PARROT: [in a high-pitched rendering of MK's voice, flapping its wings] Down with the Child Tax Credit and with amnesty! Forever and ever!

RW: See you in the Parrot Room!

[The screens flicker and blip off, for the very last time.]

#bloggingheads #robert wright #mickey kaus #my attempt at satire #got slightly carried away actually #and i'm not sure of any follower who knows RW and MK so #more for self-amusement than anything #too many political things to tag here

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