02/07/2021
Just a few.
• Poetry Corner. A friend has composed an exceptionally well-turned limerick to commemorate the Biden inauguration.
There once was a POTUS from Delaware
Who savored in females the smell of hair;
Though as dumb as a stump
He was not Donald Trump;
Which sufficed for the win, as you're well aware.
• GameStop. In reference to my Radio Derb commentary on the GameStop business, a listener offers this (much edited).
Why GameStop? Why now? If this were any other stock being shorted I wonder if this lid would have popped off.
See, for men under 35 years of age who grew up in suburbia or urban areas GameStop was a mainstay of their childhood. The video game era exploded in the late 90s to early 00s, and at the heart of that was GameStop, which essentially was an afterschool daycare center for 6–16 year olds. I distinctly remember when we would go to the mall racing my brother to GameStop to get in line to play the video games they setup while my mother shopped around.
These hedge funds essentially decided to poop on the under-35-year-old crowd’s childhood. That crowd all shared that early formative experience, so when one member started talking about a hedge fund targeting GameStop, that was a bridge too far for them. They finally said "no … you won’t destroy my childhood" and figured out a way to fight back, even if it meant risking and potentially losing some of the limited funds they have.
It’s sad really. The thing that motivates men to action is an attack on video games and a gamer company they liked as a kid.
• Women voters, women office-holders.
Mr Derbyshire: I think you made a fundamental error in this week’s podcast (2/5/2021, "Congressgals in the news"). Whether or not women should be enfranchised is a separate matter from whether or not women should be allowed to stand for public office.
While women in the generality may blithely follow socially destructive policies, history has thrown up many politically astute women: Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher come to mind.
So excluding women from voting need not equate to losing out on exceptional female leaders — which you seem to imply. By excluding women from the vote, but allowing them to stand for office society benefits from the best of both worlds.
Eh, yes, in pure logic, I guess there are two separate issues here. And certain peculiarities of the U.S. Constitution might suggest that my listener’s "best of both worlds" is possible. The first woman elected to Congress took her seat in 1917, 3½ years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Under modern sensibilities, though, I don’t believe it would be possible to admit women to high office but not to the voting booth. If there were sufficient general sentiment to deny them the vote, why would we let them rule?
Mr Derbyshire: Oklahoma City, where I live, is not Oklahoma. It’s a purple island in a sea of red. The Democrats, with the help of a lot of outside money, managed to elect deep-blue Kendra Horn to the House of Representatives in 2018, though she got bounced back out in the last election.
Most of the stuff going on in Oklahoma City schools is not going on — yet — in heartland towns such as Anadarko (birthplace of the fine gritty thriller writer Jim Thompson) and Altus.
I have a friend who spends time with his family in the town of McAlester, named after the Confederate Army Captain J. J. McAlester. I joke with my friend that McAlester will soon be renamed Georgefloydville; he assures me that there would be blood in the streets if that were to happen.
As for the public schools here, Oklahomans don’t pay much attention to even the ones their kids are in. The school administrators could be requiring nude voodoo dancing and necrophilia to be taught, and we wouldn’t care, so long as the high school football team has a winning season.
• Who-We-Are-ism (in my January Diary). A reader takes issue with my snooty grumbling about all the Who We Ares we get from our politicians.
Mr Derbyshire: Reproach for that kind of mindless cant would come quite rightly from an English teacher critiquing a student essay. To blame politicians for talking that way seems to me to betray a misunderstanding of genre.
In the popular oratory of politicians, diversity of audience and variety in the kinds and degrees of attention to be expected from it compel the speaker to fall back on familiar phrases frequently repeated.
Rare is the politician who can, on rare occasions, get away with addressing the masses in thought-forged and thought-inviting language. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was scarcely noted when he delivered it (despite the special solemnity of the occasion). Only when it was printed and thoughtful people read it at leisure did it become famous.
Hmm. I'll allow there’s a good debating point there. Should politicians, to be effective — and we all want our guy to be effective — go for simplification and repetition, or should they try to raise the standard of public speech?
The former case can certainly be made. Repetition? I wouldn’t argue with Richard Nixon, a very effective politician:
About the time you are writing a line that you have written it so often that you want to throw up, that is the first time the American people will hear it.
And literary allusions don’t always go over well, as Winston Churchill found out once.
Speaking as an intellectual snob, though, I'd rather see politicians try to lift us up. And I strongly suspect that they under-estimate the degree to which hoi polloi, when they are being talked down to, know they are being talked down to.
• Who-Whom-ism. Also in my January Diary, I offered this:
In the context of today’s USA, Who-Whom-ism is the practice of assigning commercial or civil rights and criminal-justice outcomes based not on stale, outmoded white-supremacist doctrines of so-called "civic equality," nor on anything a citizen may have done, but on what he thinks. If you have bad thoughts, as indicated by the company you keep or by your spoken, written, or online utterances, then companies can deny you access to their goods and services, the government can curtail your rights, the media can malign you, and the courts will deal harshly with you. Contrariwise, if your thoughts are reasonably well aligned with ruling-class ideology, then no company will shun your custom, government will zealously defend your rights, the media will smile on you, and you will get a pass from the courts.
They — corporations, the government, the media, the courts — are the Who, the ones who can do stuff to others; you are the Whom, the one to whom stuff is done.
A reader tells me that in the early days of the Soviet Union, there was actually an official category of people designated as "disenfranchised persons." One such was called a lishenets. (It looks plural, but it’s singular in Russian: лишенец.) There’s a Wikipedia page, from which:
A lishenets could not occupy any governmental position, could not receive higher and technical education, could not be a member of [a collective farm] and other kinds of cooperatives, and was deprived of various privileges and subsidies for employment, housing, retirement, etc.
I guess that when my bank account, credit cards, passport, etc. are all canceled, I shall find some small consolation in knowing that the Russians had a word for it.
• The ADOS (American Descendants Of Slavery, i.e., not Kamala or Barack) business, which I mentioned in my January 15th and January 22nd podcasts, brought forth this from a listener.
Because certain groups of American Indians kept African slaves back in the day, we might have these PC acronyms:
DOCOS = "Descendants Of Cherokee Owned Slaves"
SOBS = "Slaves Owned By Seminoles"
COBS = "Choctaw-Owned Black Slaves"
DOCAS = "Descendants Of Creek African Slaves"
NASTI = "Native American Slaves Traded Indifferently"
O.k., I'll stop, but clearly there are many other similar options.Our friend Steve Sailer may need your outstanding math skills to re-calculate the intersectional Pokeman points for the ethnic groups jockeying for peak victimhood.
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