You are experiencing the cartoon law of gravity. Remember when ole Wily Coyote would run over that cliff, hand suspended for a moment of rude awakening, then drop like a rock into an abyss?

Congratulations, you have succeeded in discrediting yourselves and your party forever — you will become the icons of opportunistic ass-licking, your performance of which culminated yesterday when Trump secured his legacy in snapshots of a loon-riot.

No one will forget. But we’ll be entertained by the backpedaling and tap-dancing performances in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. …

Trump’s putsch attempt

I’ll start with self-criticism, so I’m burying the lede.

When Sherry came downstairs yesterday and told me that armed Trump-cult rioters were on the Senate floor in DC, I switched on the television. Within ten minutes of watching the same video-loop of the same people smashing the same window, I was ready to call in air strikes. The incident awakened a little soldier in me, and I rediscovered in that moment of reaction why the little soldier can never, ever be let out of his cell. My mind was swamped with fantasies, and my fantasies are underwritten by the experience of things like having been a sniper, okay. …

This is a peeve.

Please, those of you who have no experience of the military, and this includes my political allies on the leftish end of things — especially you — stop and think before you pop off with stereotypical nonsense about the military. Because you really don’t know what the hell you are talking about.

I recently posted on facebook that “veteran veneration is militarism.” Not the first time I’ve said that, as a review of my earlier screeds will show. …

Liberal feminist perspectives on prostitution have focused the policy and scholarly debates on the need to protect the rights of women to choose prostitution. (emphasis added]

— Cheryl Nelson Butler

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor from begging in the streets, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges.

— Anatole France

The gnostic, Scientology-like cult of neo-Nietzschean gender-warriors would have you believe that prostitution is exactly like taking a job at Lowe’s or Burger King. The have an approved vocabulary, which they have partially succeeded in forcing onto the metropolitan petit bourgeois left, a question-begging vocabulary that employs words as stealth premises, then buries their own dogmatic conclusions in those words — like smuggling a dog’s medication into a piece of cheese. …

1582 is when we adopted the Gregorian calendar, which for us in the Northern hemisphere above the Tropic of Cancer means the dead of winter. Strange time to mark this annual passage, when the sap is flowing back to the roots and the ground is covered in the dead epithelia of of a distressed creation. These are gray days, and I, for one, already long for the warmth — this particular dissatisfaction growing with age. It may be appropriate, then, that this is when we try to imagine new beginnings . . . when our longing is the greatest and the Spring still feels out of reach. …

Walking backwards, unable to turn, blinkered, never seeing ahead. Time, visible only as it recedes. Along established walkways, for I rightly fear the unpaved future. Everything ahead inferred from what I last saw, now receding. Eyes fixed on the telescoping past, feet feeling their way into this wishful inference. Hoping it is as it was when last I tread this path. Was it safe here the time before? Perhaps going slowly, I’ll not stumble. Perchance I’ll hear the hazards ahead. What changed since last I passed? I cannot see and cannot stop. I know, I’ll lie that I know what lies ahead.

Covid-19 is responsible for me watching more television than I have since I was, like, 10. I recently came across a series called The Strain, which mashed together zombies, Nazis, and vampires . . . with a medical contagion narrative. So I decided to pull a chapter from my book, Tough Gynes, that has some bearing on this trope cluster. (You should by all means buy this book right away and get a few copies for your friends.)

I post this not just to review the contagious zombie trope or sell books, but because the pandemic has, in many ways, fed into the kinds of fears — especially “biophobia” —which have animated all sorts of mischief in the past . . . fear of fresh food, germophobia, and other manufactured obsessions that translate into fear and loathing of the “contaminated” other. …

or . . . “The Disney Delusion”

When Ivan Illich wrote Gender in 1982, he was abandoned by many on the left. This little booklet was widely misunderstood because it didn’t fit nicely into the prevailing disputes and dogmas around gender issues, but I’m not here to apologize for or critique Illich’s Gender. The point here is what happened to Illich afterwards, i.e., he was declared unclean for his departures in this one publication, and all the work he had done to date was similarly declared unclean. Illich was forgotten. Being unclean in Left World (cancel-culture contagion narratives have been around for a good long while), it was dangerous even to say his name, much less promote or discuss all his prior publications. …