Literary Corner: Sarcasm

What Radio France Internationale found when they went looking for suburban women—"femmes de banlieue"—outside Raleigh on Election Day. Photo by Anne Corpet/RFI.

Suburban Women Blues

by Donald J. Trump

You remember I was saying, "Suburban women --?"
I say, "Suburban women love me. Please
love me, I've been so good to you."

"I've been so good to you. I got rid
of the worst regulation in the history of suburbia.
I got rid of that regulation so now you can actually
have a house without a building going up next to it
that you're not going to be happy about.
Without crime increasing by ten-fold and this and that."

So I said, "But suburban women,
please, please love me."

And CNN put me on, "Donald Trump,
Donald Trump is begging, he's begging
and crying for the vote of suburban women,"
right? These people are sick.

So you have to be very careful when you're sarcastic.
Sarcasm doesn't work. Sarcasm doesn't work with the --
wow that is a group of people back there! Look at that.
The fake news! That's a big group.
That is a lot of fake news.

It strikes me that there's an arguable case he really was being "sarcastic" in the normal dictionary sense of the word:

Sarcasm is speech or writing which actually means the opposite of what it seems to say. Sarcasm is usually intended to mock or insult someone.

That is, he is not begging suburban women to love him, at all. He's not even talking to suburban women, but to the enraged rural men that make up his rally audience, and expressing his rage against suburban women, for being stupid cows who are seemingly unable to understand what he did for them in dismantling the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing HUD rule, which required federal agencies and local governments to show that they were addressing patterns of segregation, discrimination, and disinvestment in return for HUD funds, which secretary Ben Carson rescinded in late July. He went out on a limb to protect them from invasion by apartment buildings for ooga-booga monsters, and they pocketed the bribe without turning over the quid pro quo of voting for him, apparently because they wanted him to be all nice and seductive about it, like some kind of Cary Grant character. Hell no! You expect me to beg for it? "Please love me, suburban women!"

That's how some kind of Cary Grant character would campaign. Not Donald Trump! And those idiots at CNN—that whole group of people back there" cowering in the press cage as he hurls his insults—don't get it, of course. No sense of humor.

Literary Corner: Women. Women. Women.

Panel from Edward Armitage, A Dream of Fair Women, 1870s, via ArtUK.

A Tremendous Number of Women

by Donald J. Trump

The people that spoke to me most vocif—
really in the strongest of terms in his favor
were women. Women. Women were outraged
at what happened to Brett Kavanaugh, outraged,
and I think that’s a total misnomer because
the women, I feel, were in many ways stronger
than the men in his favor. So you have
a lot of women that are extremely happy.

A tremendous number of women. Because
they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking
of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles,
and others. And women are I think extremely happy.

A lot of the voices clamoring inside the president's head this week seem to have been voices of women, for some reason. Mrs. Trump was out of town, and the "violent mobs" terrifying the timid Senators as they voted (50-48) to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to a seat on the Supreme Court were  mostly female, experienced as a band of frenzied Maenads—

Annals of Derp: Jordan Peterson, Clinical Psychologist

£7.99 from Mugtopia UK.

Following up on the previous post, here's Conor Friedersdorf complaining about the journalistic tactics used by UK Channel 4 News on the innocent and unsuspecting Jordan Peterson, in that interview:

Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

And of course we've seen David Brooks getting upset over this too.

So I ran across a transcript of the the thing (from an all-trite blogger called Katana17, the Daily Stormer also has one), helpfully red-lettering all the spots where Newman seems to be trying to restate Peterson's statement, and I'm going to, sort of, dispute that, first in a segment Friedersdorf doesn't look at, where Peterson is explaining how he never said that trans activists are the same as Mao Zedong. He merely said that they're the same in every important respect:

Newman: I mean there’s no comparison between Mao and a trans activist, is there?

Peterson: Why not?

Newman: Because trans activists aren’t killing millions of people!

Peterson: The philosophy that’s guiding their utterances is the same philosophy.

Newman: The consequences are, …

Peterson: Not yet!

[25:00]

The Women of Trump

Maybe he could take on a phalanx of female bodyguards, like Colonel Qadhafi. Photo by Yahoo via Pakistan's The Express Tribune.

This piece of op-ed by Jen Kerns in The Hill, enthusiastically acclaimed by Uday or Qusay, has something very odd about it:

Trump's first year in office was the year of the woman https://t.co/ZBcZT2aP9K

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 17, 2018

WTF? This bizarre story doesn't give any numbers--just "astounding"--or criteria for what they mean by "senior position", so it's impossible to tell exactly how false it is, but it's clearly false. pic.twitter.com/Z0fid8I5yR

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 17, 2018

It literally refuses to tell the reader its own story: That there's something "astounding" about the number of women the Emperor has hired as opposed to his three most recent predecessors. Why haven't the media been acclaiming this? Kern blames it on liberal bias, but why isn't she saying what it is?

Thanksgiving Cheap Shots: And Farewell to Mark Halperin

Reconstruction Thanksgiving, Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, 1869. Uncle Sam carving the turkey, self-government and universal suffrage on the menu, and everybody, a Native with a feather in his hair, Germans, French, Spanish, African Americans, Chinese (the Chinese woman looks more Japanese, but the child she's admonishing is wearing a Qing-dynasty queue), even a disreputable but hopeful-faced Irishman at far right, among the guests. Identity politics used to be a thing Republicans approved of! Image via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm grateful Trump's too busy watching TV to do all the harm he might otherwise be doing, glad to have a voice and wonderful readers, happy to have a big extended family to go have dinner with, and schadenfreudig that the exodus of famous but bad men from social respectability includes Charlie Rose, Leon Wieseltier, and Mark Halperin.

Following Dylan Byers awful tweet (since deleted) about the catastrophic loss of talent in the media industry because all these sexual assault victims keep telling their stories, Jeet Heer:

Wan and wild

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this the face of a conservative? Image by Jobsanger at Paperblog.

Like everybody else, I've gotten pretty shy about predicting the Trump's imminent demise, but I'm wondering if it may finally have begun this week, with his national approval numbers falling to extraordinary levels (30 to 63% underwater) and signs of struggle for him in upcoming primaries from Wisconsin through Pennsylvania to California, as reported by Steve M.

If it has, I'd ascribe it in part to something that goes along with Steve's General Theory of Trumpativity, according to which what his voters like in particular is his brazen certainly that he's always right and refusal to back down from anything he says, no matter how idiotic, unless by blanket denial that he actually said it. Because he was nothing like that backing off from his earlier assertion that women needed to be punished for getting abortions:

A talent to bemuse

Robert Ryan in God's Little Acre (1958).

Today's David Brooks is one of a kind of mini-series in which he pokes about in the backyard for bones borrowed from the opinionist Kevin Lewis of the Boston Globe.

Lewis performs an odd but very valuable little public service in the form of a daily blog at the National Interest where he runs, without comment, the author-written abstracts of social science papers recently published or accepted for publication.

David Brooks is a subscriber, and I guess regularly picks up on particular abstracts and copies them into his Rainy Day Social Science Prompts file, and then every once in a while (December 2010, March 2011, December 2012, and today) assembles [jump]

What are bad writers for?

Roy Edroso has been inviting us to savor the writing of James Poulos, at the Daily Caller, on the topic of "What are Women For?", a question you may never have asked yourself.

Witches at work. From A Blurred History.

Thers, whose opinions I normally revere, insists for some reason that James Poulos does not truly deserve to be called the worst writer on this or any other Internet (his italics); he thinks [jump]