Fox … is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network…
One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. [LOL] He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie... [LOOOL]
“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8. [This is the moment to visit all of UD’s UBU/TRUMP/TRUBU posts over many years. (Scroll down.)]
[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…
Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character? It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability, the vestiges of original sin. Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him. He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images. He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.
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UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.
“He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. There’s no question about it. This is a perfect example of that. He’s like a 9-year-old — a defiant 9-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it. It’s a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s, his personal gratification of his ego. But our country can’t be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.”
Speaking of all this, it’s time again to recognize and appreciate the much-maligned group of psychiatrists who back in 2017 tried leashing the beast. If they’d been able to move things along Twenty-fifth Amendment-wise, we might have been spared a very sick spectacle.
A perennial Number One Party School, WVU boasts drunk, rioting, armed students (one riot featured gunfire), plus zillion dollar a year drunk coaches staggering all over Morgantown in front of the national media.
This blog has covered floridly pissed coaches and students at WVU for decades, and nothing ever changes. The school qua, well, school, never gets much money from the state, so it stays lousy; but the coaches and athletic facilities get zillions, and I guess it all goes to the coaches’ heads cuz so many of them end up, like this latest guy, the basketball coach, driving blind and endangering the lives of other drivers and pedestrians and the brave police who try to stop them.
Sorry about that, babe. You can take out all the restraining orders you want, but this is America. Vicious insane drunks still get to keep 50 to 60 guns in their room and annihilate their family.
In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.
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While reading the book, Beauchamp emailed Deneen asking what he thought of some of Beauchamp’s reactions to his arguments. Deneen completely refused to engage:
“I’m quite certain you’re unlikely to deviate from any conclusions you’ve already settled upon, regardless of what I might try to convey in response to any questions.”
Beauchamp sees in this refusal Deneen’s revolutionary commitment to “conflict” rather than conversation with the liberal enemy. UD sees it as far more insidious, the sort of snobby/nihilistic reaction you get from a person who left a position at Georgetown University because it’s not truly Catholic and “insulated” himself (to use a word Deneen constantly uses to characterize out of touch liberal elites) at the University of Notre Dame, and who – should God grant him long life – will eventually leave Notre Dame for Ave Maria University, and then Ave Maria for a pontifical campus in Rome within walking distance of the Vatican. It don’t get no more cluelessly elite than an intellectual shut-in uniquely possessed of the truth.
The garden seems so much about tending, weeding, selecting, digging, watering, trimming, transplanting, gazing… Then some neighbors come over for lunch and you realize wait I can do fresh flowers myself! They’re right out there!
Something very strange and interesting happened at the hair salon today. A woman came in with head scarves and shawls for sale. One of the salon’s stylists jokingly told her that people don’t buy scarves anymore, that it is no longer profitable and that she should change her job. In response, the woman said that was not true and that certain people are trying to promote secularism and prostitution in society. We were all stunned, but nobody said anything to her.
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One officer told a teenage girl to move and stand somewhere else. The young girl looked at him coldly and said, “Are we bothering you?” Another guy came and said to the policeman, “Reza, let it go,” and took him away. I looked at the young girl and blew her a kiss. She blew a kiss back.
BEAUTIFUL
Now we can eat in restaurants without wearing the hijab, and not a single person says, “Madam, put your hijab back on.” The university security no longer pesters students about their attire. People don’t defend this regime in classes anymore. It doesn’t matter that we don’t protest in the streets. People are kinder and look out for one another every day. If a guard or a security person bothers a student, everyone will come to the rescue. I think it’s beautiful.
BEAUTIFUL
There was one beautiful girl with short blond hair. At the start of the uprising, women were cutting off their hair as an act of protest and a sign of mourning. Seeing her got me emotional. For years we had fantasized about the day we would take off our scarves and let the wind blow through our hair. But now that we can be unveiled, we no longer have our long hair. We cut it for that very basic freedom. Our dreams are always one step ahead of us.
COOL
Today I was talking to my family about how much people check you out in Iran and how much time you spend thinking about what to wear. It feels like you’re under constant surveillance. But I’ve noticed a change in attitude among men. Before this movement, if I went out with my red hair showing or wearing a cool outfit, some men would follow or harass me. Cars would slow down and honk their horns. Now we go out without hijab, we wear what we want and men don’t say anything. They nod in approval. They smile.
THEOCRATS NEVER LEARN
A Twitter friend posted something interesting. Until four or five years ago, he wrote, he never missed a single prayer, but now every time he hears the call to prayer, he starts cursing. Many people around me are turning away from Islam. Some religious families have stopped practicing and even asked the women in their families to take off their hijabs. What will happen to those who no longer pray and are irritated by the call to prayer? Or those who even make fun of religion? How are they going to feel once their anger has subsided? What will happen when people are no longer humiliated and threatened in the name of Islam? When religion is merely a matter of the heart?
… Never in my life have I been so eager for a day to come. The government has announced that as of tomorrow, women cannot appear in public without a hijab, and those who do will be dealt with brutally. The problem is that they cannot force us anymore. I can’t wait for tomorrow.
… The number of hijabless women is increasing by the day. Boys are coming out with shorts now, too. People boycott stores that don’t offer services to unveiled women. The shawls that women used to have around their necks in case they were spotted by security forces are now in the back of wardrobes. Short shirts are replacing long coats. Skirts are replacing pants. Short pants are replacing long ones. There is more and more unity. People have the upper hand. The other side is nothing but bluffs.
… A few teenage girls with long hair hanging over their shoulders were standing [near me,] taking selfies in the mirror, without the hijab. It made me laugh. I rejoiced at their beauty and courage, in their simple and harmless way of exclaiming, “I exist!” The government is not afraid of women’s hair or the length of their skirts. They are afraid of our existence.
