Hi, guys. Imagine if one day you got kicked in the nuts, really hard, on purpose.
You doubled over. Felt the pain. Nearly passed out. Nearly puked.
Then you got kicked again. And again.
Imagine it happened to you when you were 12.
Imagine it was an 38 year old woman who did it.
Imagine it was your mother’s friend and business partner.
Imagine you told your parents and they didn’t believe you.
Imagine they never mentioned it again.
You learned to keep quiet about it.
You learned to be scared.
Imagine that later your father explained that women just wanted to kick men in the nuts, so as a boy you had to be careful.
Imagine he had very detailed practical advice on this.
Imagine you started spending your life planning on avoiding being kicked in the nuts.
Imagine you became aware that women, including much older women—even elderly women—were always looking at your nuts. Women on the street would follow you. They’d tell you what a nice package you have. They’d tell you you’d be hot if you just showed off your nuts a little more.
Imagine you started wearing clothes to hide them. You bought uncomfortable protective gear.
All the posters and advertisements in all the magazines featured men’s crotches, though frequently not their heads.
Women’s feet were frequently featured in prominent juxtaposition.
Imagine most of your friends all told you about getting kicked in the nuts.
Imagine none of them had ever told anybody else.
Imagine all the older girls at school would make jokes about kicking you in the nuts.
Imagine all the laughter. The jokes are all so funny.
Jokes.
Imagine you went to church and were told that God made girls to want your body, so you should protect your nuts at all costs.
Imagine the minister said it was your responsibility as a maturing boy not to do anything that would make girls think about kicking you in the nuts.
Imagine you found a girlfriend, and you loved each other.
One night, you were fooling around and she kicked you as hard as she could in the nuts, and it all came rushing back.
Imagine she acted like obviously you wanted to be kicked in the nuts,mocked you for getting emotional.
Imagine you told the police, and they asked you what you’d been wearing before she kicked you in the nuts. Asked if you’d had a drink. Asked what you might have been doing before. Had you been naked? Kissing?
You had.
You left.
Imagine there were laws that said that if a wife kicked her husband in the nuts it wasn’t assault.
Imagine you heard about men with ruptured testicles who had to pay for their own forensic reports
Imagine you saw statistics showing only 1% of kickings resulted in conviction.
Imagine a girl was caught kicking a boy repeatedly in the nuts while he was passed out drunk.
Imagine the judge let her off, because she was worried about the damage to the girl’s future prospects. She was a star swimmer with a scholarship.
Imagine this happened all the time.
Imagine if one day men all started talking about how almost all of them had, at one point or another, been kicked in the nuts.
Imagine if women’s main concern was what false accusation might do to their reputations, and whether this new honesty might ruin the mystery of sex.
Imagine a woman ran for President.
Imagine audio came out of her bragging about making it a regular practice to kick men in the nuts without even introducing herself.
Imagine she lost no support for this.
Imagine she claimed the men accusing her were lying.
Imagine she said they were too ugly to kick.
Imagine there had never been a male president.
Imagine she ran against the first major-party male candidate.
Imagine he had experience, and she had none.
Imagine she won anyway.
Imagine she supported a Senate candidate known for kicking young boys in the testicles.
Imagine she nominated a judge.
Imagine the judge was accused of kicking a boy in the nuts.
Imagine the accuser had to hide from all the death threats as a result.
Imagine the man who had been kicked testified, providing sworn testimony.
Imagine the judge gave an vindictive rant in response.
Imagine he was derided for providing no evidence.
Imagine if they looked for no evidence.
Imagine the judge was given an op-ed to explain herself.
Imagine the President mocked the accuser in font of a crowd, and the crowd laughed and clapped.
Imagine the judge was confirmed.
Imagine the deciding vote was a man.
Can you imagine?
Now imagine that being kicked in the nuts might result in you having to create, in your body, a genetic replication of the person who kicked you.
And imagine that the judge intended to make sure you’d have to carry it.
Imagine that was the *reason* she was chosen.
I can't imagine women's rage today, but this exercise, while abstract, helped me get nearer to it than I'd been.
Be kind to women, guys. Today and every day.
If you see somebody being cruel to women, or abusive, or violent?
Kick 'em in the nuts.
By the way it's 100% insane that this issue seems to require an analogy to draw a sharper focus on how wrong our society presently is, but here were are.
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To those who scold that we mustn’t assume evil intentions into the actions of people who consistently pursue absolute evil with steadfast dedication and unshakable resolve: yes, we should.
I guess the ultimate answer to "you don't know what their true motivations are" is "who gives a shit what their motivations are?"
I care *that* you want to burn down my house. I only care *why* you want to burn down my house to the extent it helps me stop you.
Father: *strangles my brother*
Me: help help my father is murdering my brother
Centrist Cousin: it’s that sort of us vs them thinking that’s tearing this family apart
Me: no look literally he’s murdering my brother right in front of us
Centrist Cousin: he’s never going to want to stop if you keep vilifying him with overheated black and white language; I’ve engaged many stranglers and learned a lot about the complexities
Brother: gkkk gkk gk
Me: Look he’s about to die, for real; I really think we just need to stop my dad from killing him right now
Centrist Cousin: that’s exactly the sort of judgemental escalating bad thinking on our side that we need to criticize, I refuse to let myself become just as bad as he is
To be clear, that's any Republicans at any level for any position at any time, and honestly we may want to expand that to include Democrats willing to work with Republicans.
Shut the whole party down, out, and over.
If you want to live in a modern enlightened society and you vote for Republicans, no you don't.
As a Wordle pro on the tour, I feel I should share the best starting word, which all the pros know.
(My own personal favorite starting word is COCCYX, but if I show amateurs how to guess 6-letter words I will be banned from the Wordle Pro Tour and forced to sit next to Bret Stephens in the NYT cafeteria.)
Wordle is a game of constantly shifting strategy; I recommend you get the latest version of my strategy compendium, v14.
Specifically with this order. The one that exists. This reality. The way our systems and laws are set up, the way they’re codified and the way they’re operationalized. What they claim to intend to do, and what they actually do.
“The way things are,” in other words.
Let’s think of conservatism as being, in its essence, an orientation that desires to keep the existing order just as it is, or to make slow and deliberate calculated minor adjustments, to the existing order.
In BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Mickey Rooney played I. Y. Yunioshi, dressed up in buck teeth and a cartoon squint, a grotesque caricature of a Japanese person.
So I suppose in that sense “you wouldn’t be able” to make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today.
Which seems somehow preferable.
Now: what interests me is what it means to say *you can’t* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S these days.
It doesn’t mean you CAN’T. Unlike teaching, say,The Bluest Eye to Texas schoolchildren, there exist no laws to prevent Will Ferrell from putting in the teeth and playing Yunioshi.
So actually you *can* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today, I.Y. Yunioshi and all, and throw in Long Duc Dong if you want.
You can if you want wear blackface and dance around in white gloves, like Fred Astaire in SWING TIME, if you want to.