Welcome to Thursday, November 7, 2024, and International Stout Day (no, it’s not celebrating fatness, but dark beer). I don’t know if this is a stout, but this bottle of Ola Dubh, which I first encountered in Davis, California, and then drank on my stay in Utah as well, is “stoutlike,” and certainly the best dark beer I’ve ever had. The name means “Black Oil” in Gaelic, and it does indeed look like what you drain from your crankcase during an oil change. It’s made in Scotland and very hard to find (kudos to my friend Phil Ward for tracking it down. It’s complex and wonderful: here is a description from the Harviestoun website:
Ola Dubh, meaning ‘Black Oil’ in Gaelic, is craftily created by taking our Old Engine Oil and maturing it in 12 year old Highland Park whisky casks. The process is far from simple, but the result is a beautiful brew with complimentary whisky notes and a chocolate, roasty and bittersweet aftertaste. All thanks to the labour of love of our master brewers.
Ola Dubh is a labour of love. Everything about it is extreme. The brew team fill the mash tuns to the brim with roast barley, pinhead oats and malted barley. It ferments more slowly as the the yeast struggles to move around in such a viscous beer! The base beer is Old Engine Oil which they then put into Highland Park Whisky casks and it stays there for at least 6 months. During this time the flavours from the wood enter the beer to produce Ola Dubh. It is ready only when our Master Brewer, Stuart, deems it ready!
It’s also Hug a Bear Day, Little League Girls Day, International Merlot Day, National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day, and Men Make Dinner Day (I’m having a consolation rib-eye steak).
Here’s me hugging a bear: my teddy bear Toasty, who is as old as I am (the picture is from 2002:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 7 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*As of this writing, Trump’s accrued 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, the Senate is firmly in the hands of the GOP (52-44), and the House is still up for grabs (205 Republicans and 190 Democrats). Kamala Harris gave a concession speech at Howard University, vowing to continue her fight for America:
“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Ms. Harris said.
“Hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright,” she added. “As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.”
Ms. Harris, her voice cracking with emotion at times, made the final speech of her presidential campaign at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington. The results, still trickling in as Ms. Harris spoke, showed her on track to lose both the national popular vote and the top seven battleground states.
But of course the analyses of why she lost to Trump are already everywhere; in fact, this Nooz discusses several (see below). One explanation which is ubiquitous is that she lost because she is not only a woman, but a black woman (you can see articles about this in the NYT here, and here, and one in the WaPo here),
From the Free Press’s morning newsletter (I’ll save Helmuth for later):
But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:
- On MSNBC,Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history...and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
- OnThe View,Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
- OnMorning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to anodding Al Sharptonthat “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performednine points betterwith Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
Here’s a tweet with that clip fromMorning Joe:
Hispanic men are racist and black men are sexist. This is why Kamala lost per MSNBC this morning: pic.twitter.com/EeDT365PVY
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 6, 2024
- Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief ofScientific American,chimed in with a now-deleted tweet:“I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen Xvoted Trump.)
- The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X,declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator ofThe 1619 ProjectatThe New York Times,warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”
I think the gender and race issue, while they may have played a role, were not the main factors in the Democatic loss; after all, Obama won twice, and, although I have no proof, I haven’t detected a note of misogyny from Republicans or Trump-supporters (of course, people were say that it was kept hidden). But you can also read Kat Rosenfeld’s Free Press article, “It’s not because she’s a woman” (archived here). Four paragraphs:
It’s not hard to see the appeal of this [sexism] narrative. It displaces blame for Harris’s failure onto everyone but the candidate herself and allows her supporters to claim the moral high ground, in the face of abject defeat. The idea that voters dismissed Harris on the basis of sex rather than the substance, or lack thereof, of her policies means there is no need to consider the campaign’s missteps or how it could do better next time. In this paradigm, Harris was perfect; it’s Americathat is wrong. And so she lost, yes, but only because the country itself is so full of losers.
. . . . To suggest that Americans balk at the notion of putting women in power is absurd. Hillary Clinton won the nation’s popular vote by a margin of three million just eight short years ago; an elderly Biden easily won the presidency in 2020 despite the very real possibility of his female VP ascending to the Oval Office in the event of his death.
But even more importantly, fitness for office isn’t just about being charismatic and competent enough to win; it’s also about accepting defeat gracefully, without claiming that the system was rigged against you. And much like Donald Trump’sinsistence that he would have won the 2020 election if not for widespread cheating by Democrats, the idea that Kamala would have been victorious if not for the moral failings of a misogynist electorate is a lie, and a cope, that has no place in presidential politics.
If you want to become president of the United States of America, then you have to convince Americans to vote for you, full stop.
*I don’t like Bret Stephens insulting my party in the title of his new op-ed—”How a Part of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat“—but I always read what Stephens has to say. And note that he voted for Kamala Harris. (The article is archived here.)
Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”
There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who,as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.
See AlsoNovember 2024 – Why Evolution Is TrueFrance resists US challenge to its valuesDoes being woke do any good?APPG and the National Right to Life Committee Join ForcesBut these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.
. . .Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there wasno migration crisisat the southern border. Or averred thatBiden was sharpas a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.
Yet when Americans saw andexperienced things otherwise(as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues.
The second “mistake of worldview”:
The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequentlycounterproductiveD.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.
The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.
The more I hear from both sides about Harris’s loss, the more I think that her “wokeness” was a factor; but also important was the rather unfair way she became a candidate: without competition. Stephens deals with the last point in the article (read for free), which he says made Dems look “hyperbolic” and “hysterical.” He finishes by chastising us this way, and he’s right:
I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.
*Jesse Singal wails on Substack that “We are losers.”
I hope, but am not holding my breath, that the thoroughness of the thumping will drive home a point that has been clear to many of us for a while: The anti-Trump movement is a broken, ineffectual, frequently self-sabotaging mess that cannot be salvaged. It needs to be burnt down (NOT LITERALLY) and rebuilt into something more effective and less delusional. This movement consists of far too many individuals who, having gottenwaytoo high on their own supply, have spent the last few years wandering around like zombies, chanting strange mantras and scaring the normie neighbors. They need to be taken by the arm and guided gently to the nearest comfy chair for a long, restorative rest while people whose eyes are less bloodshot take over.
But the point is simply that the anti-Trump movement’s decade-long attempts to define Trump as beyond the pale, as racist, as evil, as a threat to America, and on and on and on, has failed utterly and completely and spectacularly. By nearly every available metric, at the level of averages, American voters have marchedawayfrom these claims: Trump has gained significant ground among just about every group supposedly threatened and/or offended by him, including black andLatino voters(that’s an interesting NPR interview from this morning that is worth listening to).
Singal’s argument is that a lot of the anti-Trump movement’s leaders (he is of course an anti-Trumper) are failures and should get out of the way? Okay, what then? He says that we can’t use this mantra (bolding is Singal’s:
There are a few reasonable-sounding objections to my indictment of the anti-Trump movement. I don’t have it in me to respond to all of them, so I’ll just choose one:Trump won because of a combination of economic concerns (perceived or real) and widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden campaign’s handling of the border, and other issues, and no anti-Trump movement (or Democratic candidate) could have really done anything about these difficult on-the-ground facts.
But then gives three arguments against it. In the end, he doesn’t offer much of a solution save that Democrats should be less self-congratulatory, which jibes with Stephens’s view that we are prigs and pontificators:
I’m not offering a lot of solutions here, and the fact is I’m hoping to really turn away from politics for a while and back to this newsletter’s red meat (let’s see how successful I am). In terms of the rough contours of a possible way forward, Ileave you with Matt Yglesias:
There has been a lot of strategic investment in a deliberate project of narrowing the progressive tent both by purging a few and by intimidating others out of speaking their minds and it’s basically worked.
The problem is you just lose!
[I] am doubtful that most groups will do serious reflection and reconsideration of their strategy and demands because their organizational incentives are primarily not about actually winning, one of the saddest dynamics to me about contemporary politics
At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important iswinningto you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as hell.
*And one paragraph from Matt Yglesias’s column “A tale of two machines: Democrats need to stop shrinking the tent.”
The electoral tent is too narrow. Setting aside the question of toxically unpopular progressive positions, Democrats just have too many stances that are considered non-negotiable. Democrats’ formal campaigns emphasized abortion rights, health care, and a light smattering of left-populism (federal price gouging law, anyone?) on top of an upbeat, inclusive cultural positioning. But if you want to be seen as a party that’s obsessed with abortion rights and health care, then you have to welcome people who agree with you about that stuff as allies, even if they disagree about other stuff, not dopurges over student loan reform.
But have we done that? Who, exactly, are we supposed to welcome into the Democratic party?
*Comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisen gives us his analysis of why Trump won and Harris lost in a Substack piece called “10 reasons you didn’t see this coming“. (h/t Anna). Here are the first five:
1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.
I call this the “Patton argument”.
2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don’t have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.
3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people’s lives are not the same.
4. Unlike you, Americans do not believe in socialism. They believe in meritocracy. They don’t care about the super rich being super rich because they know that they live in a country where being super rich is available to anyone with the talent and drive to make it. They don’t resent success, they celebrate it.
5. Americans are the most pro-immigration people in the world. Read that again. Seriously, read it again. Americans love an immigrant success story. They want more talented immigrants to come to America. But they refuse to accept people coming illegally. They believe in having a border.
As you see, the reasons vary in quality. Here’s one more, which makes more sense than some of the others, but go look at the last four.
6. Americans are sensitive about racial issues and their country’s imperfect history. They believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed. What they reject, however, is the idea that in order to address the errors of the past new errors must be made. DEI is racist. They know it and they reject it precisely because they are not racist.
*Or, if you want to be a really petulant Democrat, just have a big fat tantrum and stop supporting Musk, Amazon, and Twitter, unsubscribe from all national news papers, never vote for a Republican, ever, and stop giving your money to companies that could enrich already-rich owners because, as we know, all very rich people are “assholes.” Now that is a recipe for a Democratic comeback, no?
*Finally, across the pond and then the Mediterranean, Israel is in turmoil. First, Hezbollah fired 150 rockets at Israel yesterday, with one hitting near the Ben-Gurion airport. One person was killed, and of course Israel will retaliate. Second, Netanuyahu and other Israeli leaders rushed to congratulate Trump on his victory:
As the results of the 2024 United States presidential election indicated on Wednesday morning that former president Donald Trump had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, Israeli leaders and politicians began congratulating the Republican on a decisive victory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first world leader to congratulate Trump, even before news outlets began to call the election in his favor.
“Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he said in an English-language statement written in Trump’s trademark over-the-top style.
That’s another reason to dislike Bibi, but realize that he, like other Israelis, realized that the candidate who would be the best for Israel’s welfare was Trump, not Harris. But surprisingly, Arab-American voters in the Midwest alsoo exulted in Trump’s victory, for they felt that the Biden-Haris administration was to blame for America’s support of Israel:
Optimism and hookahs were bubbling in concert on Tuesday night at the Arab Americans for Trump election watch party in Dearborn, Michigan, as the major TV networks called one state after another for the former and soon-to-be future US president.
It was a scene that was virtually unimaginable just four years ago, when Joe Biden won nearly 90 percent of the vote in the southern part of Dearborn, where a similarly overwhelming percentage of residents are Arab and Muslim.
But riding the community’s utter fury over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza, Donald Trump managed to win a plurality of the vote in Dearborn — 47 percent to 28% for Vice President Kamala Harris, who only beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein by six percentage points, according to an NBC News projection.
Now how can this be? How can Bibi celebrate Trump’s victory on one hand and Arab-Americans on the other? The answer, I think, is twofold. First, many Arab-Americans have no idea of how much friendlier Trump will be to Israel than was the Biden/Harris administration was, or that Kamala “Cease Fire/Two-State” Harris would have been. (Yes, the Biden administration said they would stand by Israel, but they withheld weapons at time, tried to run Israel’s war strategy with blackmail and threats, and kept touting an impossible cease-fire and “two state solution”.) Second, throughout the Middle East, and perhaps in America, Arabs not friendly to terrorism or the Palestinians are hoping that Trump can help purge the area of terrorism, particularly or the species generated by Iran and its proxies.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is gnawing on a sticl:
Hili: This tastes awful.
A: But what did you expect?
Hili: I don’t know but something less awful.
In Polish:
Hili: To ma okropny smak.
Ja: A czego się spodziewałaś?
Hili: Nie wiem. ale mniej okropnego.
*******************
From Strange, Stupid, and Silly Signs:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Scott: a meme about Ahou Daryaei, the Iranian woman who stripped (including her hijab) to protest the covering of women mandated by the theocracy. A tweet showing her transgression is below. She has been arrested, of course, and put in a mental hospital, for Tehran University says she has a “mental disorder”
A tweet:
@TaylorArmstrong Support us, as we support Ahou$Ahou began as a memecoin to portray the story & courage of Ahou Daryaei, but now we believe that we can do more
We aim to support financially, creating a MultiSig wallet where we can raise funds for the #AhouMovement #AhouDaryaei pic.twitter.com/QgNfsW7kzf
— Ahou Daryaei Movement (@AhouDaryaei_Sol) November 6, 2024
And from Masih, who publicized Darvaei’s gesture of defiance, a lot of details about the woman, including the worrying one that the doctors found her mentally healthy but she’s still under guard:
Exclusive: Ahoo Daryaei Revealed as the Woman Who Undressed in Protest Against Morality Police
Close associates of Ahoo Daryaei, a student who protested against morality police harassment at Tehran’s Science and Research University by removing her clothes, have shared photos and… https://t.co/9RCKOdoG7h pic.twitter.com/MIhXF4COqj
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 6, 2024
And a relevant cartoon:
“Just Take Them and Leave Me Alone”
By Iranian artist, Raoof Haghighi.#WomanLifeFreedom pic.twitter.com/uJ09cePoMz— Maral Salmassi (@MaralSalmassi) November 4, 2024
From Andrew Doyle, the alter ego of Titania McGrath. Sound up.
Jacqui Smith, the government spokesperson for equalities, is asked to define “gender identity”. She can’t.
Why is so much public health policy predicated on a concept that no-one can define? pic.twitter.com/a5XjjEvwHC
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) November 5, 2024
Two from my feed. First, from the mysterious Elder of Ziyon:
“We tried so hard!” pic.twitter.com/MbfcPnjopm
— Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 (@elderofziyon) November 6, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I re-Xed:
He lived about a month before he perished in the camp. https://t.co/nBmjL4ltyc
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 7, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) from Asia:
At the foot of the Great Wall, nightlife begins for people and the leopard cats in the Yanqing forest. Our camera trap in the Badaling Friendship Forest captured this scene.
Sightings of leopard cats were also recorded in 2024 at Beiwu Park and Zhongwu Park in Beijing. pic.twitter.com/3RWA5ocsia— Shan Shui Conservation Center (@ShanCenter) October 19, 2024
From Bluesky, where Matthew is registered. He gook a screenshot of this gynandromorph ant: male on one side (haploid) and female on the other (diploid):
