Archive for 2025

MATT TAIBBI: Germany Opens Big Fat Pie Hole. “German Foreign Minister Boris Pistorius disapproves of J.D. Vance’s criticism of European censorship laws.”

A somewhat different reaction from the NATO Secretary General: “You are absolutely right. We have to grow up.”

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance’s reaction to German criticism is likely to be along these lines:

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FREDDIE DE BOER: Doing This Again Makes Me Hate Myself and Hate You, But Yes, Something Happened to Liberalism in the 2010s, and Sometimes That Thing is Called “Woke”: what can Obama’s “beer summit” tell us about how the American left evolved?

American liberalism clearly experienced dramatic changes in the 2010s, and these changes are specific and comprehensible. Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime. And, just… why? Why why why? A lot of dedicated people insisted that American liberalism had to evolve, worked hard to force it to evolve, and ultimately achieved remarkable success in doing so. It’s not a surprise, and frankly not interesting, that I personally think that that evolution was mostly disastrous. But so what? Shouldn’t these people be celebrating how liberalism was changed over time, to emphasize race and gender and sexual orientation to an even greater degree than it already did? I just find it bizarre, as well as willfully obtuse, to defend a political project by insisting that it never existed, especially when the evidence of its influence is all around us.

It’s fallout from the crazymaking of Higher Ed, and from the Democratic Party’s takeover by well-off white people who fight for prestige based on virtue-signaling luxury beliefs.

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THE LIES DON’T HAVE TO BE CONSISTENT, THEY JUST HAVE TO BE CONSTANTLY REPEATED: “I say hilariously, because there has been all this effort to portray Trump as a huge narcissist who must be losing his mind over the ascension of Musk into a ‘co-President.’ That Time Magazine cover has been talked about as if it’s an enraging taunt that is utterly at odds with the idea of Trump as a maniacal egoist. And now here’s Trump, calmly sitting, and Musk, standing, gleefully gabbing to the press about all the cool stuff he’s doing and horsing around with his short little tiny kid, and Barbaro’s idea is that we must all still think the same thing about Trump. I’d love to credit Barbaro with having a super-dry sense of humor, but the next speakers didn’t take a cue to say, wow, we’ve got a whole new Trump here and let’s try to understand him.”

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