Women and Racy Fiction

The Quillette article (subscription only) What Explains Women's Fascination With BDSM Fiction? - "Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex..." is on my sidebar.

I don't think I have ever commented on this, but I thought about this years ago, and the simplest answer is that it is not about a desire to be controlled, or quasi-raped, no matter how handsome and dashing the Duke is. Quite the opposite.  When one is reading a book, even more than when going to a movie, one can put it down at any time. Unlike a husband, boyfriend, or even a date. One can choose an author whose works are similar but safer if it's too hot. The woman is in complete control of the experience. I mean, if you get to choose your rapist and pretty much write his dialogue and direct his actions, relying only on the descriptive talents of a sister who you have already vetted for being in your range of artistic enjoyment, it's not really rape, is it?

Too steamy, too rough? There are things available one level gentler or ten levels gentler.  Or you can take the spice in small doses. Everything is a la carte. Like women misunderstanding what men's pornography means, men misunderstand what this women's pornography means. Or feminists misunderstanding what girls' fantasies about princesses (or Barbie) means. Princesses do whatever they want and order everyone around.  If they have a prince, he is decorative and mostly silent and obedient. He is the proper reward for being a princess. Write his dialogue, script his actions. Barbie buys whatever she wants, wears whatever she wants. That's what they like.  

I'm not saying any of it is especially healthy, I'm just saying it's different from what is popularly supposed.

Cerne Abbas Giant

"I'm delighted to have with me today the National Trust archaeologist in charge of the Cerne Abbas Dating Project, Dr. Martin Papworth who has agreed to talk to me about his organisation's biggest member

 Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words by Dr Cat Jarman (bioarchaeologist, University of Oslo) of the "Gone Medieval" podcast.

The figure is in Dorset and has long been believed to date from the 1600s.  Papworth's excavation suggests it is from 700-1200 instead, likely around 900 AD. 

Update: There is good evidence that the figure was allowed to be overgrown for many years, then redug, rechalked, brought back.  There is some evidence that the belt used to transverse the entire body, and there was also a bellybutton. This would suggest that the penis was added on later, perhaps even as late as the early 1900s. The club is also believed to have been modified more than once, and actually be a staff. We always like simple, single explanations for what something originally meant to the people who built it, regarding that as what the figure "really" was. But as digs get more complicated and almost magical geophysical techniques reveal more information, archaeologists are now forcing themselves to interpret all data in terms of its own time period only.  I have mentioned before that the henges, long barrows, rows of stones, and other organised piles of rocks seem to have served different purposes in different generations.

The Producers

We went to see a local professional production of The Producers last night.  It's a fun script, they did it well. It was bawdier than I expected - I never saw either version of the movie - but upon reflection, Mel Brooks.  I should have had different expectations. I have only been to children's productions at the Palace - I think - since I went to see Shakespeare in 1976 or 77 just after leaving William and Mary. I didn't think much of the quality compared to what I had been used to. Things can change in 45 years, and this was quite good.  It is dance-heavy and clear that the ensemble, male and female were cast first for that skill. Very high energy required, number after number.

It trades on every gay stereotype, but it must not be considered offensive, as my college roommate, who came out a few years after, has directed the show in the last few years. There are literary references scattered throughout - the second male lead is named Leopold Bloom, for example. The theme song for the play-within-a-play, "Springtime For Hitler," echoes "Willkommen" from Cabaret. Clownish Nazi stereotypes are also prominent. The basic originality of the show's idea prevents any of it from being trite.

Oleanna

 Like most Americans who are not of Norwegian heritage, I knew this song first from the Kingston Trio.  A few also learned it from Pete Seeger. I just sent it to my son in Norway. We'll see if they even know of it up in the northern sections.

A Little Meta

Frequent commenter  David Foster has a collection of links on the topics of data, reasoning, thinking, over at Chicago Boyz.

A Little Hardball

 Abortion is the wine and wafer of the feminist movement. (A despised cultural figure of the 1990s.)

I thought that was extreme and unfair at the time. I have come to believe they were right. If you remember who that was, you may mention it.

A) What part of "If Roe is overturned it goes back to the states" is opaque?

B) What part of "Not everyone agrees with your assessment that the right to abort is just, like, obvious, which is why we have legislatures, attempts at persuasion, and try to have significant allowances for differences of opinion" is opaque?

C) Given A), and B), I submit that the "passion" as Jen Psaki called it (a sentiment she did not allow to those who assembled peacefully to protest the 2020 election) is about feelings of cultural victory rather than attention to practical considerations?

One of the foundational topics of this blog has been issues that people feel are intellectual, but upon applying pressure turn out to be only social and emotional. I may not have been successful at enforcing that upon myself and my friends here, but I have at least recognised the possibility and tried. I may be only deceiving myself in one of those reverse-gainer Screwtapian ways, yet I can claim that even that is an advantage over those I oppose, who seem oblivious to the possibility that such considerations apply to them as well as every other human being in history. 

But because we are in the territory of my own passions at this point, it is best that I not accuse further.

Social Mobility

The Economist Greg Clark, who you may have heard of as the author of A Farewell to Alms, had another book, The Son Also Rises,  about social mobility - this time showing that it is quite slow in both egalitarian societies like Sweden and inegalitarian ones like Chile. I have heard reference to "the surname paper" a few times over the years but had never followed up on it. There is a New Republic interview with him, and there are a a few versions of the paper, of increasing length.  This one is good. 

Most cultures have some version of a proverb like "clogs to clogs in three generations." Three seems a little quick to those who think in terms of Old Money and land ownership, but it also sounds plausible.  Clark says status, when measured by a variety of measures rather than a single one (as economists and other social scientists often do), actually last 10-15 generations. Even a lot of liberal outlets covered this when it came out. Even I can see that some of the criticism of it, some by professionals, is bogus.  But I can't attest to other criticisms. 

Much of his work is focused on England from 1200-1910 or so. Part of his contention is that more children of the rich survived, and thus are more common now.  Hence the surnames as a proxy for that.

Correct Speech

We create our own problems among young people in language usage when we do not tell them that there are different registers of speech and they need to notice and understand what they are already automatically doing.  If we do not walk them through this, they notice that their communication with their friends, which they think is the most important thing in the world to them at this point, does not follow the rules that teachers and adults in authority are insisting on, yet seems to work quite well in communicating and getting them what they need socially. This is how they conclude that the conventions are unimportant or even meaningless, and they have to do repair work of learning late a skill they should have been practicing situationally all along. We can save them the trouble. Use what you like with your friends. Speak differently to adults, and be especially careful in any writing assignment. Toggling among them is not a problem. This is particularly important with black students whose informal language has greater variance from formal written English. They can learn the latter quite well, especially if we aren't spending time wrestling with them uselessly over the former.  It turns out there is no advantage to dropping "very black" English in favor of "medium black," or even "lightly black" English in peer group exchanges.  This is hard for me to hear, because I have made some effort to keep my speech close to formal standard and have felt that was good for fluent writing. Apparently not. All it does is mark me by class and background - which is fine with me, but not the same thing.

Transcripts also reveal that none of us speaks in formal English anyway, nor all that close.

There turns out to be no correlation between children's usage of social media abbreviations like "ur" or lots of emojis and the number of errors they make in formal writing.  So also, informal speech uses conventions such as "quotative 'like'*," in which someone says "And then I was like...and she was like..." in which we reference what was being said without committing to it being the exact words.  Such things are not random, and the usage rules are often quite subtle and difficult to explain to learners of the language. Yet they are stable. One picks them up only in context from fluent speakers. We destroy our own credibility when we insist on formal communication rules in informal contexts. 

Interestingly, Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford have learned that students made about the same amount of mistakes (a little over 2 per hundred words) in the 2000s as they did in 1917 and a few points in between in their college first-year writing assignments.  They write essays 2.5x longer now - and they make a different type of mistakes. They used to make spelling errors, now they improperly cite, and in-between there was a tendency toward wrong word choice.

*Linguist Alexandra D'Arcy at the University of Victoria is the expert on the many uses of 'like.'

Fashion

I know people - blessedly few now - who have not held an unfashionable idea in 50 years. That overview has rather obviously never occurred to them, for if it had, they would be shamed at the intellectual vacuity of it and resolve to find something, some small thing they could call independent. In the main, they rebelled against one or both parents in favor of the beliefs of teenage culture before age 15 and have ridden their social skill in reading the times ever since. They assert independence of thought by finding even-cooler pockets of culture amidst the musicians and authors in order to demonstrate that they are not merely members, but important members of the tribe. Yet never once, not even by accident, do they land outside.

Abortion Issue As Proxy

Since the 70s I have found that the public discussion is only occasionally about abortion itself and the issues underlying it. It is a proxy for full cultural attitudes, usually in the form of accusation that the other side does not respect women, or the other other side does not value parenting, or is selfish. People say amazing things about each other. One interesting consistent bit came up at Althouse this morning (she is pro-choice and has taught law courses about the specific cases and the underlying legal [though it doesn't sound like philosophical - I could be wrong there] issues). We fought for this right.  We fought to keep it. Such things make people invested in an issue, yes, but it is not of any use in telling us whether they were right or wrong.  People fight for many things.  Yet our heart does follow our treasure, especially if that treasure was time and self-definition. (Matt 6:21) The treasure-heart exchange flows both ways, but we usually only credit that we have given our treasure to something because our heart led us to.  I think the other way is stronger. Her heart will always go to where her treasure has gone before. The sunk-cost fallacy applies also to ideas.

Abortion rights have been regarded as conquered territory by feminists since Roe, and any loss is considered an invasion over the Real Boundary, and a type of theft. The attempt by conservatives, and especially libertarians, to switch the ground of the discussion back to decisions by the individual states has not changed that. I think it is regarded as a ruse. Conservatives otherwise consider Roe to be the farthest expression of justices inserting their personal opinions rather than forcing themselves to stick to the text. Emanuations from the penumbra, indeed! We say Harumph! to that.

There is some pressure on becoming an evangelical to pick up a pro-life belief as something expected to be part of the club.  I think this is less pronounced in those who grew up in the older evangelical denominations, such as the one I am in now. I don't know if it is also true for Catholics, though I suspect there would be at least some pressure, as they are noted for especially holding this position. It may not be mentioned all that often except to announce events one might attend or references to pray for the end of it.

Even though not all my classmates were pro-choice at William and Mary, I think there was a cultural pressure to regard that as modern, the choice of the smarter and career-oriented women - and the men who wanted to have any chance at them. It was part of a package of learning to leave the false and outmoded beliefs of your parents and childhood behind. It was expected in order to be part of the club. Some clubs, anyway, though unofficial. It still has that feeling to many women of my generation, at least.  To be against abortion rights is to be nearly against women voting, or to be tolerating rape, or something.  There is huge emotional attachment.

Related, because it is about the Althouse blog and debate in general, was her offhand statement last week that her comment section became conservative over time and is now mostly so, even though she is left-libertarian.  She did not offer an opinion as to how this occurred, at least not there.  She may have addressed it at another time. Do liberals not endure criticism of their views as well?  Did the conservatives treat opponents more rudely and harshly? A few other possibilities occur to me as well, but I don't know a thing. It is something I have wondered about previously, that so many people who have only partial agreement with her feel so comfortable on her site.  It's a mark in her favor, I think.

Irish History

"I wish that the English remembered more of Irish history and the Irish remembered less of it." Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, 1899-1973

That could apply to many places. I think, however, that there is a nuance that the academics and almost-powerful people of a place remember more than the population as a whole, and it is they who remember too much. They are held aloft by those in other centers of power who remember too little, which gives them a reason for not just getting a real life and moving on. The English remember very little about Cromwell and the Restoration, and what they know is not only oversimplified, but wrong. Yet it doesn't much matter anymore, does it? People have families and jobs and football teams to follow.

What is the cutoff? I wonder.  Living memory? When you have moved up enough in the world to be oppressing others yourself? As long as you are failing to thrive you will continue to remember, I suspect. One would think that in every generation a few would move up and forget all but the ethnic dishes (themselves often inauthentic, as with the Irish) and the colors of the flag, but in the Balkans 1381 is still alive in some memories.

It is true internally as well. Why on earth do the Flemish and Walloons have even a remote distinction in their minds, for example? How many centuries of being oppressed together and oppressive together does it take to see yourselves as one?

Censorship

There is a subtle assumption we make about censorship: that you have been censored it means you are right and the powers-that-be don't want to hear it. While we think there are good historical reasons for this, those are themselves based on winners writing the history.  We were despised, ignored, shouted down, but eventually we were proved right by the force of our truth. Er, maybe. But sometimes censorship occurs not just because there is one set of facts that the powers don't want to get out, but because they are just irritable, lazy, and controlling, and are sick of stupid ideas coming across their desk. In censoring the stupid and getting away with it, they find it's just convenient to censor anything that bothers them.

When I was younger it seemed that popular opinion was always on the side of the censored, straining to get a hearing for a suppressed truth.  We liked it so much that the ACLU defended the rights of Nazis to march and to speak. But being censored did not make the Nazis right - nor in the romanticised retrospective of the left did it make the communists right (well, at least mostly right and stating truths other Americans didn't want to hear, they claimed). 

This was brought on speaking to a man at church today who thought it a terrible thing that YouTube and Twitter had censored some people who had controversial views - as do I - but there was an undercurrent that considered this a mark that those ideas were therefore worth paying attention to.  I realised I had heard this before but never quite put words to it. 

Being censored can make you hopping mad and more determined than ever to get your ideas out, and that's fine.  It probably means you won't be reconsidering your ideas anytime soon because you are seeing red, but that it at least understandable - for you.  For the rest of us it should be a neutral.  It's worth being suspicious why this particular set of ideas is being shut down, but it doesn't add to their veracity.

Steering Wheel on the Right

You will very occasionally see a British car with the steering wheel on the right here in the states.  If you have one, get a large dog that likes to sit upright and put him in the front. It made me pretty nervous when I saw it, anyway.

Louis Jordan

I picked this one of his at random.  He defines "hybrid" style, having taken in many influences and influencing later musicians in several genres.  He is usually included in any comprehensive history of Rock 'n Roll. 

Starting to Solve a Problem

 As often happens these days, I listen to the first part of "The Glenn Show" and then just stopped, going to "Mark as Played." He had a very nice young woman on who was talking to him about being persuasive rather than declarative about subjects of controversy.  It's not a bad point. He referenced how with his students he is "teacherly" and not confrontative or telling them that they are wrong (they are wrong), but pointing out some things they might consider.  She was inarticulate, seemed to be beating around the bush, and then said that perhaps a concrete example might help.  He agreed. She chose affirmative action, and said that rather than having "one male, then one female, one black one, then one white one" something freer was better and should be the ultimate goal. She chose an analogy of a flock of birds, and noted that there would be some internal factors and some external factors why some birds were not as able to lead the flock as others.  She was losing me here. As it developed, she came to a point of saying "so shouldn't we start by not treating all the birds as if they are the same..." and I thought "Start? Start? What is this start? That's your first problem right there." We have had affirmative action for over fifty years, and it extends back informally before that. Whether it's good or bad, this is not the beginning of it.

I saw immediately that she is young, and for her this is the beginning of her looking at the problem. To her this is the start. "Hey, why don't we try this?" says the thousandth person to come upon the scene, echoing what the previous 999 have said.

We would see it repeatedly in acute mental health with new staff or with students on rotation. Acute psychiatric clients can be dangerously out of control, endangering themselves, staff and other patients, so the unit staff tasked with keeping a unit safe are very aware of cutting situations off at the pass, nipping things in the bud, getting someone who is a problem away from crowded areas.  They do jump the gun at times, their voices sharp, commanding rather than sympathetic or listening. I used to do that job and I was worse than most. Tender-hearted students can be heard saying to their advisors "I just think these people would do better if they were treated with a little more kindness."  Outside speakers come in and say the same thing. (They're not wrong. But no one gets in their face, you will notice.) Six weeks later, as the student nurses are leaving they are saying to the unit nurses "I don't know how you take this abuse and work in this tension day after day." What looked obvious to them at first glance turns out to have more to it.

You can find it all over comment sections, including conservative sites we are all familiar with, when discussing education, or parenting, or policing, or homelessness, or just about anything that is difficult to solve.  You will hear variations on the phrase "Well, all you have to do is..." Yeah everyone's an expert. It is maddening to the people who actually have to accomplish the task to have the obvious pointed out to them for the hundredth time.  I once had a well-connected (FOB*) professional mental health advocate go over our heads to the medical director to arrange a meeting about a client who did not feel he needed to be held in the hospital and wanted to be released. Well, we politically had to do it, so the next day we are in a big room with all sorts of outside (non-)players to put our heads together to see what was holding up young Jason's discharge. After the usual donuts, unfunny humor, political jibes at Republicans, and posturing about previous agency battles they had won by just being right, and insistent, and cleverly rude, we got down to the root of it. "Looking over his chart and talking at length with Jason about the situation, the problem is that he needs an adequate aftercare plan." Please credit me for refraining from slapping my forehead and saying "Oh! Creating aftercare! Why didn't I think of that! Ma'am, what the f--- do you think it is that I do forty hours a week? He's not ready for aftercare because he's still trying to beat the s--- out of anyone who says the word 'no' to him. Landlords and outreach workers don't like that, no matter how many expensive supportive government programs you put in place." 

Well, okay, I sorta did say that, but more politely - which of course means that they didn't understand it and thought I hadn't understood them, so they repeated it more slowly, loudly, and pointedly.**

And people wonder why I lose my temper at fools. Yes, yes, I shouldn't, certainly.  The person challenging my assertion with what they are sure is a fact I have somehow overlooked is new to this and not aware that they are one in a long line. I really am unfair to them, and they are right to feel ill-used. Okay, I am lying.  They aren't right.  It is they who need humility more than me. It should be tough to need humility more than me, but people seem to manage it daily. If you are farther down the humility-needing scale than me, you may be at the mouth of Hell, so be careful.

Eddie Izzard has a routine about not suffering fools gladly.

So also with education.  It's not just having high expectations, or focusing on essentials, or instilling discipline, or whatever your oversimple solution is.  Homelessness is not just places to stay in a rich but selfish country. Even my immediate retort that it is not a housing problem at all but a drug and mental health problem is merely a second-level useless oversimplification. Foreign policy is very simple, you know.  Losing weight... All it takes is...

All it takes is...

We like to pretend these things because...well, I would just be engaging in the same fallacy, wouldn't I?

Confession: this is the rant that lay beneath my recent post Lived Experience.

There are reasons why this persists, and as with all things, they last because they are half-truths. Real experts will sometimes sum up what they have learned at the end of a career, such as Helen Hayes saying "Acting is easy.  All you have to do is say your lines, don't trip over the furniture, and go home." Master teachers will reveal the very few goals they tried to keep ever in mind. Mystics will wisely intone a single phrase they kept returning to.  Preachers, therapists, artists, programmers, writers, researchers, trial lawyers, comedians, all have their accurate observations about how others have gone wrong and become scattered and ineffective, but they chanced upon the key. They aren't wrong, but those are the lessons that need to be hammered home not to beginners, but to other experts. 

Next, there is a wisdom in first encountering a huge, seemingly insoluble problem and rather than being overwhelmed, identifying some piece that can be bitten off and chewed. That's what parenting in general and especially adopting from Romania or taking a nephew is. The people developing Comprehensive Solutions are insufferable and destructive, but this single thing does need to be done and I'm going to do it.  Such things often don't even need to be done brilliantly, they just need to be done.  By someone. You can't do it all, but pick something.  And if your immediate thought is how your contribution is going to be advocating so that other people will do something, you have missed the point that we are here to be made better, not make others better.

*Friend of Bill, meaning Clinton. There were also Friends of Ted, whose influence extended throughout New England and could destroy any little people in their path.

**Sometimes it "works" in the sense that if you are powerful enough, the agency has to crumble and give you something you can call a victory in their threatening future agencies. We have to grovel and provide some cosmetic solution and pretend we are repentant sinners. (It is not at all accidental that there are so many accounts of people who grew up fundamentalist Christians and ran screaming to become liberals found the same fundamentalism as soon as they got below the fun surface of journalistic liberalism into the actual agency work.) People wonder why I, a good student radical, learned to hate professional liberals - even as I like very much the well-meaning liberals only involved at superficial levels and Just Want a Better World. If you are one of those, my challenge would be that you pick a cause and get in and try to fix it at a micro level before attempting the macro. Only the micros understand the macro.  I have seen new gov't programs that set me on my heels thinking "That was designed by someone who has been there. Limited, targeted, focused. I want to shake that person's hand."

Breakfast, Cupboard

There was for many years the idea that we had to preserve letters in spelling so that people would know where the words came from.  That is why the b was put back in to doubt, even though it had vanished from pronunciation already. Fussy pretentious people wanted people to know that it came from a Latin word that had a "b" in it, because...er...well...it was more elevated and refined to know such things than not to know them. Or something. 

That is how we got the spellings for breakfast and cupboard that we have now.  The latter was already "cubberd." But it just seemed like something that people should know, that the former was about breaking your fast, and that closet used to have a board, not a shelf, where you held your cups. Because...because...that's what it was, dammit, and you are supposed to remember! You fools, you fools! And we get to look really educated when we point out things which you should have noticed but didn't. Ha ha!

This is related to the rather opposite situation, in which people can also treat you with disdain for pronouncing a word as it looks rather than how it is used in conversation.  What a maroon! Such as a book-obsessed and introverted young woman who says a fashionable dress is "chick" because that's the way it looks. That she spends more time reading than listening to older others about clothing fashions may not be a bad thing. The talkers, the social butterflies, are very good at making everyone else feel bad about Not Being Quite. Pay them no mind.*

I am not in any way an advocate of spelling reform.  Too much effort for too little payback, to my mind. But don't strain to put letters back in that fell out of pronunciation and were artificially reinserted so that people would know. Like Arctic and Antarctic.  The "c" in the middle had gone from pronunciation.  Fussy people thought it should go back so that people would know. So aspirational people in newly-literate groups began to worry "Oh dear!  I must have been saying this wrong! Er, Wrongly!" ArCtic."

*My younger brother will regard you with false gentleness of disdain and correct you with the other pronunciation whichever one you use for "patronising." Fortunately, most people in his circle get the joke.

1600s=17thC

It's ridiculous, and I am old enough and educated enough to do this whatever way I damn well please. Even after years of use, people still have to do just a touch of adjustment every time, and it is unnecessary.  The whole thing is a pretentious convention - a trick, really - that has been around for so long that we will never be rid of it.  But I'm just dropping it.  When I mean that something is in the 1600s I'm going to write and say 1600s, not 17th C. The years of the 17th C all begin with 16, after all. Same with 3rd Millennium BC and the like. The whole thousand years each begins with a "2," after all.  If I need to refer to the whole thousand I'll say 2000-3000BC or even just 2000+.

And frankly, even I seldom need to refer to the 5th Millennium BC in any fashion.  Hardly anyone does.

But, but...what about the First Century, the plaintive cry will go up.  Things have to be consistent, things have to match, things have to fit into a nice tidy order that goes all the way to the end. Well, no they don't really. If it makes you nervous that there's a hair out of place there I sympathise (I straighten other people's pictures), but really, it's a molehill. The number of times that we are depending on a full list where we have to put everything in a row is vanishingly small. Usually, when we are talking about a time period, it's pretty limited. Writing 1400-1700 is clearer than 15th-18th C. If I'm making that list, starting it

00s

100s

200s...

is going to be entirely clear.  In sentence form, I probably will use 1st C, or First Century, and I will likely use 20th C and 21st C because we are so used to those that we don't need to mentally adjust.  Though if I wanted to say a word was used more commonly in the early 1900s, that would actually be marginally clearer than "early 20th C." It types more easily as well - the latter has the same number of characters, but plus a space, switching between numbers and letters, and also switching to a capital letter.  What's simpler about that?

In proper names, such as CS Lewis's Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (yes, he was the scholar chosen for that and it is still assigned 70 years later) I will of course not change the name.  Though in discussing it I might repeatedly use phrases like "mid-1500s." Nor am I remotely interested in correcting other people, who might be more immersed in the convention or uninterested in putting any energy into a change.  But I don't have to say 4th C and I ain't gonna.

Sing Before Breakfast

 

Have a second look to see if you can guess who the actor is. You saw him on TV in the 60s and 70s. That's his real-life sister Vilma dancing with him, which will help you not at all. An odd note: if they are living on the roof - and not the tallest roof around - where do they change? What are their nightclothes? 30s movies were notorious for introducing such sexual elements without a shoulder being shown or even a passing reference to a body part. The audience is titillated without quite knowing why.

He was also Doc Holliday in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a supposedly romantic movie that is carried by the fact that Audrey Hepburn is so adorable and people like to think they can get away with being "unconventional" like that.  It is otherwise just strange and even creepy.

Immigration

Legal immigration used to be a big topic, didn't it? Not so long ago we talked about it a lot.  Now we talk only about the illegal immigration at the southern border, most of it from Central America. Razib had an immigration expert from the Cato Institute on and I picked up some updated facts about American legal immigration.  He also talked about Ukrainian refugees moving to Poland, Slovakia, and Romania, the guest workers from SE Asia in the Gulf countries, and what is likely to come next in terms of Europe, and the last place where the population is still growing rapidly, and thus a source of immigrants, Africa. However I'll just pass on some of the American info here. Catch the podcast if you want more.

Trump talked almost entirely about illegal immigration in his campaigning, but he also occasionally said he would greatly cut back legal immigration, and did. When covid hit it slowed to a trickle for the last two years. Of note, Trump stressed job protection for Americans when he shut it down, not health concerns, though the powers he invoked were based on the disease. Biden, to please his voters, stated he would resume the old pre-Trump levels, but has only gone back up to the last pre-covid levels. He is only getting complaints from those Democrats for whom immigration is a primary issue, which apparently isn't many. The accusation has always been that many liberals, though they can be moved by individual sad stories or care for a while about the issue if they have it constantly in front of them, mostly like it only to call conservatives, especially Trump, racist. It looks like there may be something to that from the evidence.

There are also a couple of constituencies in the Democratic coalition that are quietly restrictionist, though that is kept on the down low.  Unions and a big chunk of environmentalists (not all) are unenthused by the arrival of new Americans. The remaining Democrats who care much at all are focused on citizenship for those who are already here. The Cato Institute and other libertarians that are in favor of reducing (though not eliminating) restrictions, would prefer that those who come have some way they can become citizens, and especially want to defend birthright citizenship.  But they are otherwise mostly interested in workers being able to move about to find jobs.

What with one thing and another, over the last six years it is as if we missed four years of legal immigration, and it looks like we will be staying well below pre-Trump levels for the duration of Biden's term. I wouldn't project out any farther than that, but I don't see any powerful pro-immigration force arising in either party in the near future.

Twitter

My prediction is not much will change, for good or ill. Consequently, I wish Musk would spend that much money elsewhere.