Anxious

Two of these states are Arizona and West Virginia. Via Data For Progress.

I'm starting to get too anxious. I'm anxious about going back to the office, which I keep putting off week by week, not because I think we won't be adequately protected against Covid (the protocols look very good) or not wisely but too well protected (hybrid Zoom meeting today had unmasked people gathered around my desk that I haven't sat in for 19 months, and I knew everybody was vaccinated) but because I'm afraid I may have become too weird. Or incompetent (I've had two tech emergencies in two days that involved endless hours of head-desking panic before I realized they involved tasks I've figured out and done before). Or unable to skip my mid-afternoon nap.

And I'm really anxious about politics, with the sense that, as Steve says, 

For the Record: Team Spirit

"Team of Rivals", 2013, by Mary Bailey/Flickr.

Think you misspelled Pramila Jayapal pic.twitter.com/Q89lAP81BR

— Renewed Vivor (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2020

The fact is that if Biden's the nominee, and we want to put an end to Trump's horrific and inhumane ethnonationalist immigration and refugee policies, you're going to have to vote for him. That's just a fact.

— Dan Nexon (@dhnexon) March 7, 2020

If anything, I’d say that the “purity politics” problem lays with moderate House Democrats... but I won’t go into that now.

— David Walsh (@DavidAstinWalsh) March 7, 2020

*lies not "lays"

Aflame and Disordered

From the Moment Magazine Great DNA Experiment of 2012, which tested the DNA of 15 prominent Jewish-American writers and found that they were literally within zero degrees of separation from one another, i.e. that not only were David Brooks and Steven Pinker third cousins, unbeknownst to each other, but also directly related to NPR's Robert Siegel, freakonomist Stephen Dubner, Esquire's A.J. Jacobs. neuroscientist and actress Miriam Bialik, law professor Alan Dershowitz, and more. I'm probably related myself to Pinker, whose ancestors seem to have hailed, like the Yastreblyanskys, from Kishinev/Chişinau.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Virtue of Radical Honesty", February 22 2018:

The virtue of radical honesty is that it is exemplified in the the new book (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)  by psychologist Steven Pinker, who is radically honest and also optimistic, in defiance of those who feel that, especially on campus, you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous rage. After all, tremendous economic progress has taken place in the world and in the United States since the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong and a third of American children lived in poverty. However he is wrong, because he's lying when he refers to himself as an Enlightenment man rather than as a scientific rationalist, and he only cites data that support his progressive hypothesis, refusing to look at where the real problems lie, which is in the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions, or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres. Still, I'm glad I said he was radically honest, because apparently we're related.

Brooks feels that you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous sniffing. He's opposed to rage, though. On the relationship, see the illustration above.

The peculiar thing Brooks has been doing with his book report format is getting increasingly irritating, like a tic. As you might represent it with a general Shorter:

Annals of Derp: The Paul Popenoe Story

The early ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns have an unpleasant chiding tone. Popenoe, along with his organisation’s marriage counsellors, thought of female clients as unrealistic babies: immature, and expecting too much glitz from their marriages. There was a strong element of intergenerational critique in their counsel – a sense that young women were seduced by popular culture, and hopelessly unable to ‘keep house’ and make sacrifices. ‘Don’t expect too much romance,’ Popenoe’s counsellors said over and over again. In treating ‘Ralph’ and ‘Alice’ (February 1953), a young couple who had four children in the space of five years, the counsellor wrote that Alice needed to be convinced to stop ‘nagging’ her husband for affection: ‘Ralph’s way of pronouncing his love was not in extravagant speech but in coming home to her and the children, and displaying his willingness – indeed, his determination – to support them.’ The happy ending was for her to provide: ‘When Alice recognised this fact and acknowledged that the language of courtship and juvenile dreams is seldom the language of marriage, she started keeping household accounts and padlocking her tongue.’ (via Aeon, illustration from Redbook.)

I was kind of thinking I'd take a bye on Dinesh D'Souza's newly emitted project, The Big Lie (from Regnery, already getting remaindered at $4.95 five days after publication!), aimed at persuading us that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was too mild, because Jonah left out the important bit about how liberals are also Nazis, which isn't how I remembered it, but this tweet kind of called out to me to find out what it was about.

Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe--associate of Margaret Sanger--gave Nazis the idea for "lethal chambers" to kill the disabled & unwanted pic.twitter.com/iAjfVrOFvH

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 12, 2017

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, an associate of the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, gave the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei the idea of "lethal chambers" for killing the disabled and unwanted?

Answer: It's incredible how much wrong D'Souza can pack into 21 words.

Let's not have this fight

Kitty Dewall and Harry Liedtke in Ernst Lubitsch's Das Fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail, 1917).

David Atkins at the Political Animal informs us that

a war of words and ideas still rages on the left between the Sanders-leaning economic populists and the more establishment defenders of the Clinton campaign. Broadly speaking, the contours of the argument center around whether Clinton could have done more from a populist messaging standpoint to appeal to white working class Rust Belt voters and to disaffected voters who stayed home, or whether Clinton’s overall approach was good, but that she was overwhelmed by the prejudices of white voters and stabbed in the back by Comey, Russia, and various parts of the progressive left.

You know, no.

For one thing, if by "various parts of the progressive left" he means the tiny knot of irredentists who refused to follow Bernie into the Democratic embrace and the construction of the most "economic populist" campaign platform in American history, I can't believe anyone really thinks they played a significant role with their retweets of Breitbart and otherwise Russian/Republican talking points. They were extremely annoying, especially with their insistence on kidnaping the term "progressive" for their own stupid purposes,  but they were not in any way an important part of what happened on November 8. Those who actually are progressive in orientation (like Atkins himself) voted for Clinton and urged their friends and admirers to do the same. Unfortunately there aren't that many of them either, as we learned during the Democratic primary, when Bernie's political revolution turned out not to exist.

Whitesplanation from Dr. Stein

.@DrJillStein Mind-boggling to me is how you're more interested in "those who claim to care about POC" than you are in POC.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2016

.@DrJillStein Few POC put Libya and Honduras near the top of their issues list, why doesn't that boggle your mind?

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2016

.@DrJillStein Because you don't know how to regard people of color as having agency and ability to make decisions.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2016

Or perhaps because she isn't fully aware that voters of color exist.