Monthly Archives: November 2016

Dealing with the despicable, disgusting, depraved and deranged

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I don’t think I broke any friendships during this election and only one in 2012. It’s not me, of course. I am always ready and willing to discuss politics with anyone, any time, and usually in a civil way, even if they are idiots. Here are the ten from Dennis Prager’s list of 10 Reasons Left-Wingers Cut Trump Voters From Their Lives.

1. Just like our universities shut out conservative ideas and speakers, more and more individuals on the left now shut out conservative friends and relatives as well as conservative ideas.

2. Many, if not most, leftists have been indoctrinated with leftism their entire lives.

This is easily shown.

There are far more conservatives who read articles, listen to and watch broadcasts of the left and have studied under left-wing teachers than there are people on the left who have read, listened to or watched anything of the right or taken classes with conservative instructors.

As a result, those on the left really believe that those on the right are all SIXHIRB: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted. Not to mention misogynistic and transphobic.

3. Most left-wing positions are emotion-based. That’s a major reason people who hold leftist views will sever relations with people they previously cared for or even loved. Their emotions (in this case, irrational fear and hatred) simply overwhelm them.

4. Since Karl Marx, leftists have loved ideas more than people. All Trump voters who have been cut off by children, in-laws and lifelong friends now know how true that is.

5. People on the right think that most people on the left are wrong; people on the left think that most people on the right are evil. Decades of labeling conservative positions as “hateful” and labeling conservative individuals as “sexist,” “intolerant,” “xenophobic,” “homophobic,” “racist” and “bigoted” have had their desired effect.

6. The left associates human decency not so much with personal integrity as with having correct — i.e. progressive — political positions. Therefore, if you don’t hold progressive positions, you lack decency. Ask your left-wing friends if they’d rather their high school son or daughter cheat on tests or support Trump.

7. Most individuals on the left are irreligious, so the commandment “Honor your father and your mother” means nothing to those who have cut off relations with parents because they voted for Trump.

8. Unlike conservatives, politics gives most leftists’ lives meaning. Climate change is a good example. For leftists, fighting carbon emissions means saving human existence on Earth. Now, how often does anyone get a chance to literally save the world? Therefore, to most leftists, if you voted for Trump, you have both negated their reason for living and are literally destroying planet Earth. Why would they have Thanksgiving or Christmas with such a person?

9. The left tends toward the totalitarian. And every totalitarian ideology seeks to weaken the bonds between children and parents. The left seeks to dilute parental authority and replace it with school authority and government authority. So when your children sever their bond with you because you voted for Trump, they are acting like the good totalitarians the left has molded.

10. While there are kind and mean individuals on both sides of the political spectrum, as a result of all of the above, there are more mean people on the left than on the right. What other word than “mean” would anyone use to describe a daughter who banished her parents from their grandchildren’s lives because of their vote?

I think “mean” is too good for them. Despicable, disgusting, depraved and deranged is much closer.

Socialists everywhere you turn

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My wife knows I don’t read The Oz any more so she opened the paper to the page while I sat down to dinner. And on the page there was this: Does the National Broadband Network work? What a question! Initiated by Labor and then taken up by Malcolm, with a pair of socialists responsible for the outcomes you shouldn’t even have to ask. But the newspapers have got to pretend, but it’s hard going. This is the contrast the story will provide.

(1) It’s a huge drain on the nation’s finances and a source of political division and grandstanding.

(2) But Australia’s National Broadband Network is starting to pay dividends for some everyday users.

So what we find are first discussions about what a pile of junk it all is:

The just-released Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman annual report cites a doubling in complaints about the NBN from July last year to July this year. New complaints about faults with NBN services jumped by 147.8 per cent and complaints about NBN connections rose by 63.2 per cent. NBN complaints represent 11.9 per cent of new complaints to the ­ombudsman.

Complaints span all modes of NBN delivery: fibre to the home, fibre to the node, the Sky Muster satellite service and fixed wireless. “But the rate of growth is lower than the growth of active services,” says ombudsman Judi Jones. “Delays in connections, faults including unusable services and dropout of services were regularly reported, which is of concern.”

In the bush, people battle to get NBN satellite connections and suffer prolonged outages and high costs. Being offline in the bush means not only digital isolation but potential safety hazards such as missing a bushfire alert.

All this is contrasted with Mr and Mrs Untypical who have experienced an improvement from their dial-up.

But there are some happy NBN customers. For Geoff Quattromani at The Ponds, in Sydney’s northwest, the NBN transition was effortless. Quattromani and his wife simply walked into a new home with the pre-installed NBN fibre to the home.

In their previous home in Windsor, the family had ADSL1. It forced them to be “picky and choosy” about visiting websites — those with autoplay videos were a no-no. The family could connect online only one device at a time. They couldn’t watch YouTube, and Netflix, subject to pausing and data buffering, was a pain to watch.

Great, they move from the bush to Sydney and find their internet service has improved. Billions of dollars later, we are dealing with possibly the most expensive white elephant ever, but since both sides are complicit, it will remain a political secret. Let me add a couple of comments that follow the story just to round it off.

1) I have had nothing but trouble since connecting to NBN. It is a bit like the little girl with the curl. My main complaint is with the complaints process. The call centre, which sounds as if it is in India, seems incapable of communicating with local service providers. The steps one is asked to perform to get the same advisor do not work and no notice is taken of information one gives to the ‘support person’.

I had a technician working in the Telstra pit outside my home and the Internet and phone ceased working while he was there. He assured me he would check with me before leaving. He did not. It took me a month, several no shows and two technician visits before somebody went to the pit and discovered wrong connections. I was then told I should not attribute the loss of Internet to any action by the technician in the pit.

There is poor communication between Telstra and the NBN and the inability to speak to a local technician is maddening, particularly when one has to identify oneself over the phone with full name, date of birth and drivers licence number every time one communicates with someone with an alias in a call centre.

2) I have fibre to the home in an apartment in inner city Melbourne. After multiple inconvenient and unpredictable contractor visits in the installation process, none of whom seemed to be in communication with the others, I now have a considerably worse service than prior to NBN. There are times when it is so slow during the day that it is impossible to work and frequently the internet drops out altogether. Progress??? i don’t think so. It has been suggested that I should complain to Telstra, but I know the frustration that is involved with that process so I will just battle on with a lesser service than I had before.

It is just socialism “at work” which both parties seem to prefer. And if you think that we will be spared from these idiocies by our journalist class even within our major financial press, right opposite the story on the NBN was another about Cuba, reprinted from The Wall Street Journal, which is about as cluey nowadays as The Economist. The sickening part of the story is how benign the transition appears, as if the past fifty years have not been a horror story of the deepest kind. Two examples.

1) The economy has been hit hard by the decline of Venezuela, its key ally and a source of billions of dollars in free oil for the past decade.

2) “Would a new leader be able to secure legitimacy without free elections?” said Carlos Pagni, a ­renowned Argentine political commentator.

These people are so ignorant that “the decline in Venezuela” is simply isolated from the even greater decline in Cuba. And the notion that the Cuban terrorist government that has existed since the 1950s is in any way concerned with legitimacy is an idiocy almost too breathtaking to believe. Do these people have any idea about anything?

Trump is really going to be president after all

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After a bit of a flurry of activity, the inevitable has overcome the Democrats and the left. This was not a matter of 600 or so votes hanging by a chad in Florida. This required the overturning of the results in three states in which thousands of votes would have had to be reversed, and thousands more overlooked ballots suddenly discovered sitting in a warehouse. It must have been decided that no good could come of it, so the process has now been brought to an end. Even Obama has called a halt, which makes me suspicious but this is what he has said: White House insists hackers didn’t sway election, even as recount begins.

The Obama administration said it has seen no evidence of hackers tampering with the 2016 presidential election, even as recount proceedings began in Wisconsin.

“We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” a senior administration official told POLITICO late Friday.

“The federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day,” the official added. “We believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

There are, of course, other perspectives besides cybersecurity, such as illegal voting, voting by illegals and the rest, which the Democrats would prefer left undisturbed for use another day. Even so, it’s been something of a mess, pretty well as you might expect from the Democrat side.

I also think that the presence of Donald Trump on the other side suggested that there would be zero tolerance for any messing about. Trump is non-standard-issue Republican in every way, and the most important way may be that he really does intend to prevail in every encounter. He will not go down without a fight, an attitude I could not imagine Romney, for example, taking.

So bless my soul, President Trump it will be. We have been saved from Hillary so it’s all benefit from here. And then, he might even do what he promised, and how extraordinary that would be as well.

Funny business

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I get asked all the time how I can go to Woody Allen movies when he married his step-daughter and he’s such a lefty. And while I won’t deny that I have my own personal index of Hollywood types I won’t see at the movies, Woody Allen is not on it. I like his movies because they make me laugh and because they are often extended example from a course in Philosophy 101. I also like his movies because they are so conservative. I actually think he crossed the divide into my side of the political divide some time ago, but can never say it since it would ruin his reputation among those who he depends on. If you can go to Cafe Society and not see that he is raising moral dilemmas in a funny way – “you can’t kill someone just because they play their music too loud” was one of the funniest lines I have seen in a movie in a long time, specially since he sets up the situation where you might just think that there is a case. Anyway, this is all in aid of directing you to an article of mine at Quadrant Online, The Left’s Gag Reflex which is a discussion on why all genuine humour is conservative. The left likes to laugh at people and show how superior they are. But for true funny, you have to go to the conservative side. Here is a bit from the article with an extension of the point I make there:

Here is an excerpt from Ann Coulter’s In Trump We Trust:

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire, whacking working‐class Americans with his polo mallet. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! Early in Trump’s campaign, journalist Mark Halperin asked him about the “backlash against rich candidates like Mitt Romney—any chance of that with you?” Trump said, “First of all, he wasn’t rich.”

And that was that. How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is? Yes, yes, I’m a WASP, too—it’s appalling, embarrassing, awful—but oh, my gosh, does it work! Luckily, voting machines register only yes or no—not yes, but I hate myself.

I see this as a series of factual statements interlaced with jokes. Various statements or observations, each of which is followed by a funny bit. Here is what she wrote as a set of assertions.

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is?

I find her writing pure genius. And because I write other things with the same kind of background research, I appreciate how much goes into it, and even more how much goes into making it look like nothing has gone into it. I wish I could write like that, but such is life. I’m just happy enough that she can write like her, which no one else can, and certainly no one on the left.

ADDING A BIT MORE: I really liked this bit from Faye in the comments and I wish I had said what she said, which is what I certainly think. She was commenting on where I had written, “The left likes to laugh at people and show how superior they are. But for true funny, you have to go to the conservative side.” She then wrote:

I thought you were going on to say that conservatives laugh at themselves and are happy to set themselves up as the joke. I love this. It means they aren’t afraid.

If not being afraid is part of the conservative ethos, I am certainly not that. But laughing at oneself and the ridiculous nature of life is a conservative trait. If you would like to see an example of what I mean, you can go back to an earlier post of mine from four years ago on The best shower scene since Psycho.

As good a marker of your politics as anything

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castro-justin

Your attitude to Castro is a pretty exact measure of how out to lunch your political attitudes are. If you can find it in your heart to excuse any of what Castro has done since 1959 then you your beliefs are the very essence of what it means to be a fascist.

With Justin Trudeau, however, there is the possible excuse that he is showing paternal filial piety, but even so.

Investigating political madness

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These are two sets of comments on the post at Instapundit on Maybe Their Mental Health Wasn’t That Good Before the Election, previously discussed here. The first set are actually four different comments made by “Gagdad Bob” which I have strung together.

The deeper structure of human nature hasn’t changed since the arrival of liberalism. Liberalism is a new way to be mentally ill, but not the illness as such. It is similar to how fear of aliens is a way to be paranoid. Paranoia has always existed, but the objects of paranoia change.

Being that I am a clinical psychologist who has seen countless liberals, I would say the majority have been just ignorant or of low intelligence. No need to reach for a complex explanation. The more activist kind — the true believers — are another story. For them, liberalism can be anything from a substitute religion to a massive defense mechanism to covert sociopathy. There’s no one-size-fits-all explanation.

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they think they are doing good, but in fact are sadists. It reminds me of why Homer Simpson wanted to become a police officer: “because it combines my desire to help people with my desire to hurt them.”

If liberalism didn’t exist, the unconscious would invent it as an ideal way to embody and express so much pain and conflict. In so many ways it’s the perfect vehicle for a host of irrational psychological, spiritual, and existential issues, which is why it is so difficult to eradicate. It is immune to reason, the same way an illness is. (And yes, it is important to distinguish between the cynics at the top, the true believers in between, and the passive & manipulated masses below.)

This then is a comment put up by AndrewZ along similar lines.

Identity politics creates mental illness because it makes people paranoid. It teaches them to see other people not as individuals but as representatives of a category. The categories are organised into an elaborate hierarchy of victimhood and oppression and all social interactions are treated as an expression of the power relationships between the groups.

A person who has internalised this way of thinking will start to see everyone who belongs to one of the designated oppressor groups as a threat and will feel acutely uncomfortable in their presence. They will feel that they are surrounded by enemies who are just waiting for an opportunity to do something terrible to them. Since they have been trained to interpret everything they see and hear in terms of power relationships they will see threatening messages everywhere, and their heightened self-consciousness will make it seem as though it’s all aimed at them personally.

The SJWs are so full of rage and so ready to lash out because they really do think that they are under constant attack. They need to scream and shout to relieve the unbearable psychological pressure of living in a state of permanent siege. That’s also why many leftist writers have such a breathless, frantic style full of hyperbole and wild accusations. It’s the desperate strung-out voice of the paranoiac, surrounded by phantom menaces that nobody else can see.

To somebody in that state of mind, it would be impossible to conceive of a rich white male Republican – the apex predator of oppression – wanting to do anything other than establish a brutal tyranny. So naturally they go into a state of panic when such a person is elected President.

For me, it is all just a phenomenon which is beyond my understanding. That it is real and out there, of this I have no doubt. But it does make things much more difficult, and to me, these people really do seem deranged.

Sentimentality and politics

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The greatest enemy for getting anything done in politics is sentimentality, an exaggerated concern for propriety. The left in politics have for many years made suckers of the right by pretending to care about things that the right really do care about but which are mere levers to anyone on the left. That Mrs Clinton can have made an issue about some locker-room tape of a decade ago while still married to Mr Clinton is only possible because Republicans actually care about such things while no Democrat ever really does. But they do pretend. I also think of our own piling on of Bronwyn Bishop over a helicopter ride by both sides but when Tony Burke was found to have done even worse, the story lasted a day or so and then died.

So Hillary said that she would accept the result of the election. But that was before and now there is mileage to be made in not accepting the result so off she goes. This being an election year in which anything can happen, I am not reassured that there is no basis for such a challenge or that it cannot succeed. It also depends on what success is, and actually becoming president is only one possible outcome. Weakening Trump’s authority to act is another. And there are no doubt others.

That the Democrat political constituency is from a different planet has been evident for a long time, but this story from The Washington Post has really confirmed it: I haven’t slept in my room since the election. I discussed it yesterday – under Socialism is a cult – but thought then that it might be satirical. Nothing of the sort. I asked myself whether he was just very funny or was insane. Turns out he’s not a satirist, but you really must read it all to appreciate the raw material of left politics in the US. This is how it begins:

Since the election, I haven’t slept in my dorm room once. I’ve slept on couches, futons, floors and unoccupied beds in my friends’ homes. At first, it came from a need to be with people who supported me and understood how scary this political moment is for young people who grew up under the liberal auspices of an Obama presidency and came of age politically in a time marked by progressive movements such as that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But after I went home for clean clothes to find an anti-gay hate message written on my door, right next to a set of stickers spelling out “Vote 4 Hillary,” my couch-surfing took on new urgency. I was no longer searching for comfort from my peers — I was trying to preserve a sense of safety.

More to the point even is to read the comments on the article which is at the Washington Post so it’s not some hicksville readership. That there is widespread understanding and sympathy with this lad’s psychodrama does make me wonder about how mad the world may really be.

The only bit of flotsam I still cling to is that perhaps Trump is normal and the people he will bring into government are also normal. But first there are the recounts and then, who knows, the entire mess might yet end up being decided in Congress. That is, if the death threats to the members of the Electoral College don’t turn enough votes to Hillary first.

AND FURTHERMORE: This is Helen Smith discussing the mental problems of the left in an article on Maybe Their Mental Health Wasn’t That Good Before the Election found at Instapundit. She quotes from an article in The Economist titled, America’s election has led to a boomlet for therapists.

Around the country therapists say anxious conversations about politics have become inevitable. “I’ve never had an election like this,” says Joe Kort, a psychotherapist in Michigan. Some of his clients are apparently showing signs of post-traumatic stress. Many have decided to skip the usual turkey meal if it means avoiding a confrontation with a gloating uncle. Awkwardly, avoidance is not an option for some of his trickiest customers: married couples who pulled levers for rival candidates. “I have clients who say ‘I don’t know if I can stay married to someone who would vote for a misogynist, a xenophobe’. I try to get them to stop trying to change each other’s minds, to just hear each other.”

The problem, though, is that many of these therapists are as loony as their clients:

Therapists often pride themselves on their neutrality, but demography tells another story. Most are concentrated in left-leaning cities on the coasts, and more than two-thirds are women. Many will privately allow that they too have been grieving since the election. “Trump is unleashing the worse angels of our nature,” says William Doherty, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. His manifesto against the rise of the bullying tactics of “Trumpism” has collected over 3,500 signatures from fellow therapists.

What a double dose these people must have endured with the almost simultaneous death of Castro. The dissonance in their lives must be at fantastic levels. You might want to laugh at such people – truly hard to find room for sympathy – but they are doing so much to ruin the world that it is impossible to do other than to wish many more years of suffering on them as they have to live through a generation of sound government, with hopefully the first eight led by Donald Trump.

Socialism is a cult

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Socialism is a cult rather than a series of rational beliefs. With the evidence of failure available at every turn, to hang on to the beliefs a typical socialist must hold about the world under socialism requires a form of distortion in one’s belief system that is so disorienting but nevertheless so intensely held that it is near impossible to change the minds of anyone holding such delusions. Looking at the sadness on the left after the death of Castro is a phenomenon that suggests serious detachment from reality. Like with global warming, there are no facts that matter. This is Scott Adams (i.e. Dilbert) picked up at Instapundit: ‘A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance”.

Imagine you are one of the anti-Trump folks who believe we just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator. Let’s say that’s the movie playing in your mind. That’s some scary stuff.

Now imagine watching the news as Trump reveals in slow-motion that he’s flexible and pragmatic on just about everything. . . .

As Trump continues to demonstrate that he was never the incompetent monster his critics believed him to be, the critics will face an identity crisis. They either have to accept that they understand almost nothing about how the world works – because they got everything wrong about Trump – or they need to double-down on their current hallucination. Most of his critics will double-down. That’s how normal brains work.

And that brings us to our current situation. As Trump continues to defy all predictions from his critics, the critics need to maintain their self-images as the smart ones who saw this new Hitler coming. And that means you will see hallucinations like you have never seen. It will be epic.

The reason this will be so fun to watch is that we rarely get to see a situation in which the facts so vigorously violate a hallucination. Before Trump won the presidency everyone was free to imagine the future they expected. But as Trump continues to do one reasonable thing after another, his critics have a tough choice. They can either…

1. Reinterpret their self-images from wise to clueless.
or…
2. Generate an even stronger hallucination. (Cognitive dissonance.)

If Trump’s critics take the second option – and most of them will – it means you will see a lot of pretzel-logic of the type that is necessary hold onto the illusion that Trump is still a monster despite continuing evidence to the contrary.

And so onto the recounts. Socialists are liars whose only interest among those who lead such movements is power. Whether it is Venezuela, Cuba or the United States, they have nothing to offer other than illusion and sanctimony. No one, other than their leaders, has ever benefited from a socialist in government.

Let me also add this which I assume is satire except that is is from The Washington Post: I haven’t slept in my room since the election and it is posted under the heading, “Opinions”. It begins, but read it all since it is so well done:

Since the election, I haven’t slept in my dorm room once. I’ve slept on couches, futons, floors and unoccupied beds in my friends’ homes. At first, it came from a need to be with people who supported me and understood how scary this political moment is for young people who grew up under the liberal auspices of an Obama presidency and came of age politically in a time marked by progressive movements such as that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But after I went home for clean clothes to find an anti-gay hate message written on my door, right next to a set of stickers spelling out “Vote 4 Hillary,” my couch-surfing took on new urgency. I was no longer searching for comfort from my peers — I was trying to preserve a sense of safety.

He is either very funny or insane, but it is so pitch perfect it is impossible to tell for sure which it is.

UPDATE: Turns out he’s insane. Read the comments on the article at the Washington Post. There you will not only others treating him sympathetically, but very few pointing out how psychologically damaged the writer of this article must be. I can hardly believe such people exist, never mind that the Washington Post is not embarrassed to give them space on their opinion page.

Humour is conservative

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I don’t know what to make of this.

One of the differences between conservatives and we classical liberals is that we do humour better than they do. And way better than the left.

Libertarian humour is a fantastic idea, one that would never cross my mind, but at least I can see the funny side in saying it. I definitely do not read Ayn Rand or Mises for their lighter bits. Humour is essentially the preserve of conservatives. You might say Woody Allen or Seinfeld are funny and they are on the left. But that’s just their politics and here we are discussing what makes what they write funny. Where have you seen humour as conservative as in, let us say, Midnight in Paris or Annie Hall or almost any Seinfeld episode? Portrayed is the world as it is, in which we see life with a comic touch. Here is the list put together by The Guardian of the 100 best novels ever written in English. I will pull out the ones that are comic (and note they are in date order only). Almost all the authors are conservative by nature, and even where you might associate them with the left, there is no utopian madness found in any of these.

3. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
5. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7. Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
9. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
14. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
25. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
57. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
60. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61. Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
66. Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
72. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
80. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
86. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
88. Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
96. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

Now find me anyone funnier than Mark Steyn today or Ann Coulter. The left just laugh at people from their smug superior view from above. To be conservative means not just to understand the human condition but to show sympathy with life’s victims, which is everyone. I was asked the other day for a joke about the Scotch which led me to this (and please also note that final bits of dialogue in the story must be in a Scottish accent):

An Australian goes into a shop selling tartans somewhere in Glasgow and asks for a length of MacIntyre tartan. The shop assistant says that he’s terribly sorry but they have sold out of the MacIntyre tartan. This Australian grabs the shop assistant by the collar, shakes him around a bit, and says look, I didn’t come all this way to Scotland not to be able to buy my clan tartan when I got here.

Just one minute, says the shop assistant, I will check with my boss out the back. So he goes into the backroom, and says to his boss that there is this mad Australian out the front, who insists on having MacIntryre tartan even though I told him we had run out.

OK, says the boss, give him this, and throws him a piece of cloth.

But that’s not MacIntyre tartan, says the shop assistant, that’s Dunlop tartan.

That’s OK, says his boss, Dunlops have been MacIntyres for years.

What is quite interesting about the story is that in this very short narrative there are three different personalities involved, each one of whom is as real as anyone you might meet. It’s the world as it is. No one is trying to prove some kind of subtle political point, although there’s no reason why they couldn’t. It’s really no more than a pun, but the humour is situational. You could actually imagine this as a real-life event.

It is this same absurdist humour you find in Steyn and Coulter. It is essential that you agree with their politics before you find what they write funny, but they both write about the world of politics in ways that make you see reality differently, but also more accurately.

Ann Coulter is the more difficult to appreciate because she is so hard hard edged. There is no writer I admire more since what seems just off the top of her head polemics is actually very well researched analysis of what is going on around us. But her style is brilliant but only someone with the most highly developed sense of irony could pull it off. This is what she does:

1. Make a factual statement

2. Make a joke about what she has just said.

Here is an excerpt from In Trump We Trust from which I have taken the following.

The media successfully smeared Romney as an out‐of‐touch multimillionaire, whacking working‐class Americans with his polo mallet. He was helpless. Tasteful people don’t talk about themselves, and they certainly don’t talk about money. Not Trump! Early in Trump’s campaign, journalist Mark Halperin asked him about the “backlash against rich candidates like Mitt Romney—any chance of that with you?” Trump said, “First of all, he wasn’t rich.”

And that was that. How do you attack someone for being rich who is constantly bragging about how rich he is? Yes, yes, I’m a WASP, too—it’s appalling, embarrassing, awful—but oh, my gosh, does it work! Luckily, voting machines register only yes or no—not yes, but I hate myself.

You know, I laughed when I read it for the first time in August and I laugh at it again now. This is funny even with a serious point. What is there on the left that is the equivalent of that? As for libertarians, I won’t even ask you to look since why search for unicorns when there are other things to do with your life.

BTW if you haven’t read Ann Coulter, or Thomas Love Peacock, it’s time you did.