Nov
10
2025

Well, That Was Hilarious

The rhetoric escalated quickly yesterday. For example:

Petulance, thy name is Winslow.

And Old Reliable Keith:

Quislings! Yes, he went there.

Vidkun Quisling was executed by a firing squad in 1945; I'm not entirely sure Keith wants to extend the parallel that far, but maybe.

My state's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, were among the ten votes to break the logjam. And it's fair to point out that Jeanne had previously announced that she wasn't running for re-election next year, so no points for ending her career, Keith.

I would like to think that my mean tweets, examples here and here) helped to push them into Keith's and Don's crosshairs. I also sent them e-mail! You're welcome!

Also of note:

  • How hard is it to copy-and-paste? Jesse Singal asks a pretty good question: If You Can’t Accurately Quote Someone, Why Should I Believe Anything You Write?

    For a while, I’ve been concerned about what feels like creeping intellectual rot in left-of-center circles. This rot is by no means ubiquitous, and there are plenty of liberal and leftist writers whose work I still respect, enjoy, and learn from. But in many cases, arguments are published that fail to clear extremely basic, very low bars — the equivalent of pulling a muscle during warm-ups before getting to the actual exercise itself. It’s very common for writers in this space to fail to accurately sum up the views of their opponents, to misstate basic facts of a given case, to quote in deeply disingenuous ways, and to make arguments that simply don’t hold water in a freshmen composition, A-implies-B sense. In many cases, rhetorical Calvinball is replacing sound thinking.

    A couple days ago Literary Hub, a well-regarded lefty arts publication that often publishes political takes, ran an article by Peter Coviello, the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and currently a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Coviello’s article is about how, after former Bowdoin African Studies major Zohran Mamdani hit the spotlight, Coviello started getting inquiries from journalists asking what he remembered about him. (Coviello writes that he’s not sure he ever had Mamdani as a student, but might have.)

    Former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin? A quick skim of Coviello's article, linked above, does not disappoint; Coviello fits every stereotype you might imagine for someone with that title. But Jesse does a slightly more diligent check of Covillo's claim about a David Brooks NYT column, and finds that Coviello either misunderstood it, or is lying about it. Ouch!

  • If they're gonna lie about you, you might as well tell the truth about them. I think Ann Althouse approves Greg Gutfeld's ad hominem debating strategy. It's from this NYT interview (NYT gifted link).

    Interviewer's "question" in bold:

    You called Colbert a “smug loser” or something like that. And the one that stood out for me about Kimmel was: “If that man was any more full of [expletive], he’d be a colostomy bag.” I have this thing called the hierarchy of smears, and that means if you call somebody a fascist who’s going to destroy the world, I can call you anything. I made this point in an article by The New York Times on Kat Timpf, but they didn’t include it, which bummed me out. The writer was in the “Gutfeld!” audience, and she said: “During the show, you made all of these fat jokes — there were so many of them. And I’m sitting in your audience and, you know, there’s some overweight people.” And I said, “Yeah, but they didn’t call me Hitler.” That’s the difference. It goes back to that framing: I think you’re wrong; you think I’m evil. And I’m never going to call somebody fat because they’re fat. I’m going to call you fat if you called me Hitler. And the best part about that is it hurts them. It hurts them more than if they were to call me Hitler because they have to look in the mirror every day. I know I’m not Hitler. They know they’re fat.

    I tried watching Gutfeld! a couple times; wasn't my cup of tea. But I think the point he's making here is pretty good.


Last Modified 2025-11-10 7:18 AM EST