If Kamala had been elected Gaza would not have been turned into a war zone where

This is as nihilist and antithetical to state building - well Adam Serwer wrote it! - as anything on the right - neither side seems to have learned anything in ten years

Always weird to hear liberals talk about aristocratic privilege as if being born to rich parents was any different

Say it with me: Five minutes ago never happened!

Come on Leavers, don't you want a bigger trade deficit

Anyone want to bet which way the EU-India trade balance goes now

Though I guess there's some evidence that the lesson about "immigration enforcement once every four years" getting Trump reelected has been learned - as opposed to the lesson about Fed independence getting Trump reelected, where afaict the Democratic party is still at zero

Maybe it's not new for the majority of one of the major parties to support unlimited immigration - but maybe the extremely high priority is new, at least since the 1850s - because Americans are so old now that our left automatically bet everything on the developing world young?

It's sweet how this being the best time ever for countertenors, because we've been doing it long enough to know how but short enough that it's still fresh, proves everyone didn't just imagine that they did the 19th century repertory better back in the day

You know Trump is on the wrong side of history now just like Nixon, the president every progressive now says was pretty decent and they miss him

It sure is lucky that political correctness turning against Freud (again) preempts any questions about whether today's institution-supported up to date scientific knowledge about sex and psychology will age any better than his (or even as well)

You: liking Marx brothers movies because they're "funny" or whatever Me: liking them because they preserve an authentic performance style for Gershwin musical comedies, as opposed to this (don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the effort)

Immigration doesn't matter compared to trade, except that talking about one is sort of talking about the other, because the aversion to the nation state that makes Democrats, leftists, whatever wishy washy at best about protection is also what makes them utopian on immigration

Unfortunately he's correct, and therefore the base will likely succeed in the swinging Democratic policy to the other unpopular extreme again in the next few years, and around and around we go

Of course Eric Levitz has always been on the corporatist wing of liberalism* so what's interesting is how Abundance still automatically goes woke to pwn populism - they haven't changed at all since 2016 *supposedly different from his buddies on the corporatist wing of the left

The Kingdom of Fiat betting on the wrong side in World War II was of course uncharacteristically awful judgment, but even then they returned to form by quitting early enough that when France tried to snap up those border towns at the end the Anglo-Saxons made them give them back

Gesang der Jünglinge is interesting because the tapes still sound great, but the electronic sounds are the corniest thing you've ever heard, but you can hear how Karlheinz will later write the same kind of thing for real instruments in Licht etc., but also how Bartók already did

"You're a dying breed"

Chinese coal has defeated American oil like American oil defeated British coal, but Greater NATO environmentalists don't say it because that would imply their own Nationalist compatriots are right about something, and never admitting that is a higher priority than the environment

Maybe exacerbated by Democrats/leftists/whatever seeing themselves as basically pro China - note the positive reaction to Carney, Macron - we don't want to be gross anti-China NATIONALISTS like Trump plays on TV! - so good luck getting Boston Democrats to defend their interests

Aaron Burr's misfortune is that Gore Vidal is a prestigious enough writer that now everyone thinks it's been done, but not a good enough writer to even have done as much for him as Tony Kushner did for Thaddeus

You ever just have to know how the neo-Anglicans who dominated Ivy League English c. 1950-1975 felt about the International Style-brutalist axis that dominated Ivy League architecture in precept and practice at the same time

The devil made brutalism-cels so we'd waste time arguing with them and neglect the real enemy, mid century modern Madison Square Garden blah - or: if you don't like academia's work after art deco, wait til you see The Market's

Allowing that, while he preferred Lear with a happy ending, it was possible and even most likely that the old man was ultimately right and he was wrong - probably not the single best thing Coleridge did, but only because he did many very good things

Maybe the most interesting thing about Trump whisperers is how they apparently hardly ever have an interest in noting that he's a television man who constantly needs to come up with new twists to keep people like the Trump whisperers paying attention (He's Transactional! He's Racist! He's Crazy! He'

It's the immigration stupid

I guess "most of" is one way to cover your butt on the hand count ban

Remember, even when regietheater is good it's the director telling you he was too chicken to collaborate with working writers, composers

Stop saying Keir Starmer is Abundance, Graham, he's actually very progressive and effective

Before "me and my friends are smarter than the naïve old masters because we know this week's identity politics," there was "me and my friends are smarter than the naïve old masters because we know psychology" archive.org/details/thin...

"Last week, crypto and local banks had a bitter fight in Congress over where Americans will keep their deposits. And if crypto wins, it might be over for all but the biggest banks in America"

You know, you don't HAVE to be in the Mozart, Verdi business. I'm sorry no one wants to pay that much for your stuff, but instead of spitting on meal tickets you hate, you could use your Senior Lecturer @UniMelb and ARC DECRA Fellow position to switch to banking and make MORE money

Since almost everything eventually becomes an object of nostalgia, there's something interesting about artifacts that might never go away, but always sounded wretched and you wonder if anyone actually liked them - Bob Merrill, Desmond Child-Diane Warren, Dr. Rapist-Benny Blanco

Many good reasons to read this preview and listen to the accompanying Ella, Chick Webb record, but one of MINE is the renewed opportunity to think about how much pop songwriters in the '30s-'50s HATED classical music

The worst thing about brutalism is that it lets Abundance do copypasta about how they hate the style that ended 50 years ago, to vaguely imply that they want to do nice neoclassical buildings and not huge cheap featureless boxes

No, free trade with China is going to make them A Democracy!!

If the Democrats and/or the left wanted to win then the two issues on which the voters still significantly prefer Republicans wouldn't be all they need to know, but it would be a lot of it - also remember open borders is the only thing Ezra Klein believes in besides deregulation

Those of you putting doggie coats on your Fur Babies because you'd rather deny them even the sweet, sweet relief of the few days when it's tolerably cold for their wolf blood than admit that your substitute human being is a dumb beast - no sympathy when they eat your corpse. None

Grateful to cultural critics with opinions about the media age that they annoyed God enough that he's letting the novel bury the movie in my lifetime

True as far as it goes, but what would make it useful would be acknowledgement of how purging the far left could seem like a good idea, because the Stalinists etc. really were (are) that bad - or like a wise man says, most speech is wretched, it's just that banning it is worse

Don't tell me hipsterism's long shadow has dissipated when a certain old New England brand is trying to make "the Bean boot" happen

It never happened and it's good that it happened

All the pathos about Italy being terminally corrupt and decadent proves their superiority - no one bothers to have pathos about the Dutch because no one expects much from them any more - probably no one will bother having pathos about the English or the Americans

I guess No Kings does reveal a liberal tendency to try to make a country again after decades of Multicultural Perspectives, but it's so weak, and concedes so little even to the left, never mind the right ("hey Free Palestine, you at least agree kings are bad, right? Love us!")

The best thing about liberal, leftist, whatever piety about Greenland is that Germany really could turn its industrial power into a military deterrent against America, but they'd need to replace American liquid natural gas with you know whose

Bill Gates- good billionaire, has been openly but quietly spending money for years to put himself in a position to buy and mine Greenland Donald Trump - bad man, mouths off about buying and mining Greenland Know the difference!

Everyone knows the Handel sound is really the Bononcini sound, but Bononcini maybe wasn't all that much of a composer, but slightly older fellow Venetian Lotti maybe was - did Rousseau make us think the new melodic style was all about Naples when it was really all about Venice

The Trump administration using tariffs as a threat - as opposed to an established fact - to get acquiescence on Greenland, whatever, proves they're not trying to make America self sufficient - they want America to stay the world's consumer, think they can weaponize consumption

Adam Tooze, the pot who wrote "It is not clear that protecting manufacturing industry any longer has the economic significance that it once might have," has thoughts about the color of the kettle (whom he apparently has no idea might be Trump supporters' favorite Biden appointee)