Mr. Miller stopped paying some of the family’s bills, including, according to a lawsuit, the maintenance and docking fees for their Van Dutch speedboat — a frequent backdrop for late-night parties shared on Instagram. Such models generally sell for more than $1 million…
… Emergency medical workers found Mr. Miller unconscious in a white Porsche Carrera that he had rigged to poison himself …
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UD never knows quite what to do with the NYT’s luridly fascinating chronicles of the downfall of high-flying, risk-taking idjits. She enjoys the F. Scott Fitzgerald fizz of these accounts, the lascivious tell of the departed’s lethally high-end products and adventures, his sudden weeping in corporate meeting rooms as the walls close in …
Since the fool in this case saw fit to borrow tens of millions of dollars he couldn’t pay back, and then to saddle his wife and small children with his debt (he left a big life insurance policy, but will it pay out?), one feels okay not feeling much. I mean, pity. I guess. But since the facts of the case are so stereotypically cautionary, so much the oldest allegory in the world, the specific person to whom it happened gets lost, and one not too guiltily feels comfortable reading the account the way most people are reading it – as a final twisted chapter of clueless conspicuous consumption, the short sad bio of an Instagram braggart who meets his apotheosis in a cloud of high-performance, super-exclusive, carbon monoxide.
“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” [JD Vance said] three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”
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On Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson:
“Never met him. He’s dead. Don’t care.”
He opposes no-fault divorce, including those who do so to leave abusive marriages. He’s compared abortion to slavery, supports a national abortion ban and rejects exceptions for rape – “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. He called women without children “miserable cat ladies” and villified working moms as bad parents who want to “shunt their kids into crap day care so they can enjoy more ‘freedom.’” For him, universal child care amounts to “class war against normal people.”
You can sit around with the gin running out of your mouth; you can humiliate me; you can tear me to pieces all night, that’s perfectly okay, that’s all right. You make me sick. Be careful Kamala. I’ll rip you to pieces. Total war. .. Kamala is 108… years old. She weighs somewhat more than that… There are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder, which is up your line. Now, I will hold your hand when it’s dark and you’re afraid of the boogeyman and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that… You’re a monster – You are. You’re a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden… In my mind you’re buried in cement right up to the neck. No, up to the nose, it’s much quieter. And please keep your clothes on, too. There aren’t many more sickening sights in this world than you with a few drinks in you and your skirt up over your head. Or “your heads,” should say. You can go around like a hopped-up Arab, slashing at everything in sight, scarring up half the world if you want to. But let somebody else try it? No. YOU SATANIC BITCH.’
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[thanks, albee]
The unseen but clearly felt presence of Mr. Obama in particular has brought a Shakespearean quality to the drama now playing out, given their eight-year partnership.
Paul Berman weighs in.
The students want to chant these things, of course, because these slogans are transgressive. But no one wants to say what the transgression is because it’s too horrible. So we’re having a mass euphemism event: Horrible things are being advocated by people who deny that they’re advocating it.
… It’s very difficult for people with liberal ideas to recognize the extreme and frightening views that are actually upheld by totalitarian movements. In Hamas we have radical Islamists who’ve shown us in real life what they’re actually for by acting on their principles. And there’s an inability or reluctance to see that. So we have a mass movement in defense of Hamas that calls itself a mass movement in defense of human rights. It’s a blindness, but within the blindness is a seduction and a fascination. That’s evident in the transgressive thrill students feel in chanting those chants.
“Trust me,” he says, “I lived this, and friends of mine died because of this stupidity.”
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“[T]hey’re playing into the hands of the right wing in this country. And what terrifies me is that this could end up bringing [Donald] Trump back into power.”
Mark Rudd speaks.
Scathing Online Stormy explains hyperbole to the defense.
The defense forgot that Stormy was editor of her high school paper.
When Necheles characterized Daniels’ e-commerce operation as “shilling,” the adult film star snapped back that Trump — who is currently hawking sneakers and Bibles with his name on them — does the same.
“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she replied.
This passage, from André Gide’s novel, The Countefeiters, struck me when I encountered it as a Northwestern undergrad, and has stayed with me all these years. Of course I recognized this comical, poignant form of dissembling from real life, but I suspect this passage, on the fourth page of the book, was my first encounter with a lucid prose description of it. The ways we defend against the exposure of our strongest and most authentic passions intrigued and intrigue me; forms of emotional self-defense intrigued and intrigue me.
And why do we defend? Because precisely the places we feel the most are the places we can be hurt the most.
And also – see Adam Phillips – it disturbs us to think of ourselves as capable of volcanic affect; most of us cultivate what Stephen Dedalus called “the refrigerating apparatus,” and Isaac Rosenfeld “formo-frigidism.” We be cool.
We are too much for ourselves – in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates – because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves. The whole idea of ourselves as excessive exposes how determined we are to have the wrong picture of what we are like, of how fanatically ignorant we are about ourselves.
The cofounder of the Seasteading Institute is Peter Thiel, who is also currently attempting to develop remote property in New Zealand with the hope of establishing a haven for a “cognitive elite” of “sovereign individuals” (clearly inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). As [Douglas] Rushkoff points out, these entrepreneurs have always regarded the public and civic sectors as “antagonistic to their grand designs.” The creators of projects like ReGen and Seasteading have no interest in sustainable living or alleviating economic inequality. What they want is their own personal sandbox, unrestrained by governments, judicial oversight, or the collective will. These start-up societies reflect, if nothing else, a desire to create a new world from scratch and then choose who gets to be a part of it.
Italian officials have refused a request from the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich to return a Roman statue bought by Hitler in 1938… “This work was obtained fraudulently by the Nazis, and it’s part of our national heritage,” [Italy’s culture minister said].