And a citizenry that votes for an asshole is less deluded than one that votes for a messiah.

Thus, voting for, say, Silvio Berlusconi (a kind of wealthier mini-Trump, and yet the third longest serving prime minister in Italian history, after Mussolini and Giolitti) is less psychologically unhealthy than voting for Barack Obama. And, come to that, less damaging to republican virtue than voting for the previous guy's wife or brother.

Explaining Trump, I like the paragraph, previous guy's wife or brother. Painful as it's so low and true.

I did not know that, or that, or that, so much packed in there; the mini-Trump thing, the longest serving thing, nor even that Giolitti was a long serving prime minister. I must admit Mark Steyn sure knows history. He tosses these little goodies out I think because he knows his readers like it. I do. I was wondering where did he ever come up with the John McCain joke, it's awful no matter who says it, but then to come up with a thing like that to support your opinion, is interesting. Did he research that or what? Remember it from that long ago? Was it that bad it stings this long after? He explains later he wrote about John McCain's joke at the time that McCain told it. Now all that makes sense. 

I like the piece on steynonline The Superbowl of Heroes because Steyn says what I've been thinking, and I like his historical tidbits. My angle is not wrapped up with Trump, we overlap noticing that the right is doing the same thing SJWs do by creating a no-go zone for everybody and reacting with full fury when violated so that John McCain comest to represent all POWs and all servicemen and not just John McCain who does not represent those two groups very well. 

He (Mann) venue shopped very well.

He doesn't live or work in the District of Columbia. I don't live or work in the District of Columbia. But I voluntarily submitted to their jurisdiction because I figured if they were so eager to take the case they'd be capable of litigating a 270 word blog post in under 270 weeks. 

We are now coming up to the start of the fourth year.

Is the section mocking and sneering at the incompetent D.C. court that you wanted me to take out? 

Uh, okay.

Laughter.

*flips pages*

Laughter

*flips pages*

Audience roars.

Mark Stein beginning at @27:00 Five Feet of Fury

Orwell On Speech

Rabel linked to a piece by Jason Lee Steorts called "Steyn On Speech:"

I admire Mark Steyn’s gallantry in defending freedom of speech and thought, but his weekend column is less than illuminating. It seems to have been 200 percent felt and half thought. Sorting through and categorizing the jumble of quite different examples that provoked Mark’s dudgeon was nonetheless a useful exercise. Here are my undoubtedly boring conclusions. 

When it comes to the legal restriction of speech, or the legal coercion of dissenters, I’ll storm the barricade with Mark. It amazes me that any soi-disant free people tolerate that sort of thing. 

The use of speech to criticize other speech is something else, and the distinction between state coercion and cultural coercion is one that Mark typically doesn’t acknowledge, to the detriment of his arguments. That distinction can get pretty blurry in our present legal arrangements, but in principle the people have every right to make pariahs of whom they will, and to slug it out among themselves, so to speak, when they disagree. 

Still, Mark has a point, and we should ask ourselves what sort of culture we’d like to live in. The readiness to ostracize those who offend our sensibilities is stifling and unhealthy. Except in very extreme cases, we should criticize speech rather than condemn speakers. This is also prudent. Martyrs are popular; better to make an argument. 

On the other hand, I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. 

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

I boldfaced the Anglo-Saxon (A-S) nouns and underlined the A-S verbs to emphasize why I think this is a particularly poor piece of writing. Out of the whole piece, only the most vague terms come from Anglo-Saxon: freedom, speech, thought, time, slur, blurry; only two verbs, "slug" and "storm" are Anglo-Saxon, and "storm the barricade" is terribly worn metaphor.

George Orwell wrote in his wellspring of wisdom, Politics And The English Language:

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.