Firehose #207: Woke Crabs

Also: Second Sunday tonight at 9 pm ET!

One of the odd things about Friday’s Real Time With Bill Maher experience was how much of the discussion centered on places and institutions where the madnesses of 2020-21 have not yet subsided. And then, like clockwork, the controversial-in-lingering-woke-circles WNBA player Sophie Cunningham (see last week’s Firehose for details) was smacked hard full across the face by DiJonai Carrington, who, after being ejected, posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on Threads. (I will note here that Cunningham has become a lightning rod chiefly for advocating that only biological women should be allowed to play in women’s sports, which is a race-neutral concept.) The once-great Sports Illustrated magazine commemorated the hackery with the vile headline: “Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma.”

In a related side-drama, former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kantor Freedom have declared that they are entering the next WNBA draft, because after all, the league rules (plus the dominant POV of the anti-Cunningham faction) just say you need to be a woman, without getting hung up on the definition of the word. As ever on all things WNBA, it’s best to consult with Iowahawk.

These are the types of moments where you want to hear from former Fifth Column guests Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, #408) and Kat Rosenfield (#448, #565), and sure enough, the two podcasted on those and other topics just this Friday. Though, as we shall soon see, that was not the only reminder this week that though the tide may have subsided, there are still all kinds of nasty crabs jabbing their claws at any available normie feet.

* Here’s the Overtime segment from Friday night:

* On both the Overtime and earlier in the main episode, praise was sung for Nicholas Eberstadt’s terrific book Men Without Work. I talked with Eberstadt about the labor force’s missing men back in the old Paloma Media studio, for episode #376.

* There was also a stray reference (I think? Hard to remember through all the fast talk) to the laugh-out-loud travails of finally resigned Cambridge bullshit-artist prof Jason Arday, who we laughed about with Jesse Singal in #568. Jesse published a New York Times op-Ed Saturday under the headline, “A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It,” arguing that: “This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny.” To which former Washington Post press critic Dan Froomkin blueskied, “Who at @nytopinion.nytimes.com decided: ‘hey, let’s Jesse Singal to do some racist schadenfreude!’”

Jesse and his better half recorded a paywalled Blocked and Reported episode on the topic as well.

* Kmele did his CNN thing on Saturday:

* I did my Reason Roundtable thing on Monday:

* This week around here we switched it up and put our trio-only episode behind the paywall. Here’s some of what you non-paying subscribers missed:

* And here’s a clip about A.I. with our techno-grump guest on M.O. #337, Harper’s Magazine Publisher Rick MacArthur:

* Some listeners flagged the moment in our latest episode where I balked at David Frum’s assertion that Donald Trump doesn’t love his kids. The point I was attempting to make wasn’t necessarily about parenthood, it was about the use of omniscience when characterizing a political opponent, as Frum did toward the end of his controversial March 2003 National Review piece, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Here are those last three paragraphs that I contended were what critics of the piece always quote:

There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

For those who didn’t know, Frum and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, lost their daughter Miranda to cancer two years ago. Crittenden a few months back published a book about it called Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable. America’s very own reporter Nancy Rommelmann reviewed it a couple weeks ago in Commentary.

* Comment of the Week comes from Gordo:

I moved to Columbus from California, for a few years. I would pass by Meijer’s and think, “What the fuck nonsense word is that, and what the hell is a Meijer?”

After about a year I finally went in, I stayed for about an hour. I didn’t need to, but I wanted to see everything, I took it all in. I went to my car and wrote to several people, the same message:

“I’m in a store, it’s better if I don’t write the name, but, you can buy a filet of fish, a pet fish, and live fucking ammo.”

That was five years ago, and I still remember sending that text.

Thank god I live back in Monterey, the Midwest is too damned cold.

Say what you want about California people, but know this, I can see the Pacific right now, and the weather is perfect all year round. 🖕

Sendoff: One of the most glorious and star-crossed career paths in 20^th century music was the proto-punk Garage Rock-turned Punk Rock-turned New Wave pipeline. A category filled with local legends, spectacular flameouts, and some loud, sloppy, fantastically uneven recordings. I had never heard of Jeff Conolly before he died on my birthday from bladder cancer at age 69, but I can guarantee Moynihan has a story or two. “There may have been no more voluble and volatile presence on the Boston rock scene in the late 1970s and 1980s than Jeff Conolly,” begins the WBUR obit. The garage/punk band was DMZ; the shambolic & ever-lineup-shifting alt-rock combo the Lyres was the vehicle thereafter. Conolly sang, played the organ, flopped around, and fired everyone (his washouts included guys who would move on to The Cars and Yo La Tengo). It’s a lot of noise and aggression and wit, but occasionally, as in this song (which I try to hack through here), the results come dangerously close to infectious power pop. RIP, wild man!