"Please! I traveled all the way to Wisconsin!... Listen, we traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview"

News companies know women like this are tanking their ratings. If one of these Sunday broadcasts brought in a non ideological White Man their ratings would double. However, they still choose to loose money, just to promote the views of the ownership. Trump is right. pic.twitter.com/Un33VHNqro

— Nate P. Hall (@Nate_PHall) June 8, 2026

Wouldn't it have been funny if the all-the-way-to-Wisconsin plea had worked? Oh, yeah, poor you, going to Wisconsin, let me sit back down and yammer on with you, because you endured the ordeal of coming to Wisconsin.

How many times has Trump traveled to Wisconsin in his political career? 40? 60? He's put in the hard work of demonstrating to Wisconsin that we matter, and here's Kristen Welker obviously irked to have had to touch down in a flyover state. I can't believe I came to this hellhole for you!

ADDED: I love the set with the hay bales and tractors. I was hoping Welker and Trump would jump up and do his old "Green Acres" routine:

It's not a defense of race discrimination to call it "completely natural."

Murder and rape are "completely natural." 

I'm reading "Boston City Hall roiled by email party invitation for ‘electeds of color’ sent to all" (Boston Herald).

A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions....

"In view of many extremely online, spiritually unwell conservatives, [Ryan] Carson’s brutal death was a form of karmic justice."

"You see, the young man had advocated for safe injection sites after losing friends to opioid overdoses. And he dedicated his adult life to working on various left-wing causes, above all the promotion of recycling and environmentally friendly approaches to dealing with solid waste. And his girlfriend had advocated for police abolition. Therefore, Carson had reaped what he’d sowed. The far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich disseminated a surveillance video of Carson’s death, beneath the caption, 'Hey bro just like chill out bro I’m on your side bro go attack the magats bro bro bro noooooo.' Other conservatives turned photos of Carson’s dead body into memes about the perils of wokeness.... [S]adistically mocking a victim of violent crime whose politics they did not like... is... morally grotesque.... Gloating over the violent deaths of people you disagree with is... vile and ineffective.... You will not persuade anyone...."

 
Writes Eric Levitz, in "Don’t Celebrate When People You Disagree With Get Murdered" (New York Magazine).

"RFK Jr. meanwhile, a prospective president of the United States, watched calmly on."

I'm highlighting that amusingly elevated sentence that appears in the comic chaos of "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. press dinner explodes in war of words and farting" by Mara Siegler in the NY Post. 

[A] guest asked Kennedy... about the environment. And it seems that the mere inquiry was enough to set off apparently drunk gossip-columnist-turned-flak Doug Dechert, the host of the event, who became enraged and screamed at the top of his lungs: “The climate hoax!” 

"A customer complained that the portion of her scrambled eggs was too small. Her friend admitted to eating said eggs while she was in the bathroom."

"The customer then demanded that we make her new eggs since we placed her plate too close to her friend, causing the friend to be confused as to which was her plate. The friend had ordered a hamburger."

From a TimeOut collection of anecdotes about bad customers at restaurants, quoted at Facebook by jaltcoh.

At least it's obvious that ChatGPT is hopelessly biased.

The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable. pic.twitter.com/s5fdoa8xQ6

— 🐺 (@LeighWolf) February 1, 2023

Uh, what?

We imagine it’ll be abused to shape false perceptions and change the outcome of elections by feeding millions of people lefty BS about a variety of political topics.

Way to play dumb though.

— 🐺 (@LeighWolf) February 1, 2023

For more discussion of this problem, see "ChatGPT’s creators can’t figure out why it won’t talk about Trump" (Semafor). What a terrible headline! Say only what you can know.

It should be more like: ChatGPT creators say they can't figure out why it won't talk about Trump.... 

That headline is part of the problem: participating in bias. And I don't know whether the Semafor headline writer knew the headline misstated what could be known or if this person didn't realize that the truth of the assertion couldn't be known.

The column is written by Reed Albergotti, who says:

It's a propaganda postcard, but what is it propaganda for?

I found that at the subreddit Propaganda Posters.

A boy thinks he might be in trouble, arrives at a plausible defense and delivers it in the most delightful regional accent on the face of the earth.

It's TikTok, so I'm putting it after the jump.

"We don’t often hear abortion stories from cisgender men like Mr. Lavallee, even though they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the world’s unplanned pregnancies, and so often benefit when an abortion occurs...."

"What’s the effect on men who co-conceive and then the pregnancy ends in abortion? And who even are these men?... A man might not necessarily know he helped cause an abortion. Moreover, amid continuous attacks on abortion rights, the urgency among researchers has logically been to demonstrate the benefits of abortion access for those who can become pregnant. Despite this gap in the literature, the data we do have on male abortion beneficiaries indicates that the benefits extend well beyond the person having the abortion."

Writes Andréa Becker, a medical sociologist, "Men Benefit From Abortion. Why Do We Mostly Study Women?" (NYT).

Becker is intent on using the words "benefit" and "beneficiaries." But when a woman gets an abortion, it's because she's chosen it, which probably almost surely means she believes she will benefit. What's the basis for assuming that the man benefits? But Becker hammers "benefit" and "beneficiaries": 

If Trump nominates Barbara Lagoa to replace RBG, will Democrats make the "second Latina" argument? I see 2 big problems!

"An effort to install a second Latina on the high court would immediately raise the stakes of a nomination fight that quickly became a clash over principles of fairness and democratic legitimacy."

I just wanted to isolate that sentence, which appears in the middle of a Washington Post article by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Aaron C. Davis and called "Barbara Lagoa, Cuban American judge, rises on Trump’s Supreme Court list as allies emphasize Florida campaign edge."

First, I see that word "install," which I blogged about at length when we saw it in the text of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dying wish: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

As I explained at the time, "install" was not the normal word to use in the context of a new American President taking office. I won't be surprised to see a sudden vogue for "install." I'll be watching.

But that's not my motivation for writing this post. I want to talk about "a second Latina." Is this the incipient attack on Lagoa? We already have a Latina on the Court, so Trump, in a ham-handed attempt to do diversity, has failed! He would grossly over-represent Latinas on the Court!

Is that the attack they'd use or that they're testing right now or pretending that they'd use in order to scare Trump away from what would, in fact, be an excellent choice?

There are 2 big problems with the "second Latina" argument.

1. The "first Latina" is Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in the Bronx to parents who were born in Puerto Rico. Barbara Lagoa was born in Miami to parents who fled Cuba. You can group them together under the word "Latina," but if you care about diversity, you shouldn't be arguing that the proposed "second Latina" is just a repeat of an ethnicity already represented on the Court.

2. The "second Latina" argument radically exposes the problem with choosing people because of their ethnicity. You're saying just get one and then you've covered that group and you don't need another. This idea limits opportunities for those in the groups that you've posed as caring about. You're saying: We've got our Latina, so we don't need another; we can get back to hiring the type of person we always preferred.

I don't know if Trump will pick Barbara Lagoa, but I'll be very interested to see if Democrats unleash the "second Latina" argument. It's dangerous, and it should go horribly wrong.

"Looting... provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be."

"And I think that's a part of it that doesn't really get talked about—that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory."

Says Vicky Osterweil, author of "In Defense of Looting," interviewed at NPR.

[A] trope that's very common is that looters and rioters are not part of the protest, and they're not part of the movement. That has to do with the history of protesters trying to appear respectable and politically legible as a movement, and not wanting to be too frightening or threatening. Another one is that looters are just acting as consumers: Why are they taking flat screen TVs instead of rice and beans?... All these tropes come down to claiming that the rioters and the looters don't know what they're doing. They're acting, you know, in a disorganized way, maybe an 'animalistic' way. But the history of the movement for liberation in America is full of looters and rioters. They've always been a part of our movement....  

I don't know if other people in "the movement" are happy to see that idea spoken aloud. I've been hearing that there are 2 groups of people — the peaceful protesters and these mysterious other people, who, I've noted, the journalists don't seem to care to identify and investigate. Osterweil is saying these are not 2 different groups. It's one movement, and it's been going on for a long time.

Osterweil says it's a Republican/right-wing myth "that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community." She conceptualizes the small businesses as agents of oppression within the community. They're not innocent victims, unfairly targeted. So don't worry about them. In fact, as Osterweil tells it, the looting is a cogent argument — an attack on "the idea of property... the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions." In this view, it's "unjust" to have to work to make money to buy the things you need and want, because "the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories." Looters "get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.... Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police."

That seems to present looting as street theater with a message. It makes an argument. A terrible argument. We've heard that argument in words many times over the years, and most Americans reject it. We want to work and build wealth and enjoy our lives and we want the great mutual benefits of hard work and wealth. Osterweil's looting is a switch from making the argument against property in words and to speak with actions — the destruction of property. But that doesn't make the argument more convincing! It's a nasty tantrum thrown because you can't convince people with your ideas. Ironically, fortunately, it makes the argument for the other side.

Sign posted in my neighborhood tells white people we "don't get to criticize" the choice of protesters to resort to rioting.

It's "white privilege," we are told, to express a desire for order and security:



A second sign attempts to convince us to abolish the police because they "uphold an inherently racist system" and "protect whiteness and capitalism":



ADDED: I anticipate that my post title will be criticized on the ground that there were a lot of peaceful protesters and we don't know whether any of them participated in anything that can properly be called "rioting." I want to keep the facts straight, and I want to know the facts. I agree that that those who broke windows and looted shops may have been an entirely different set of people from the people who were there to protest police brutality. I await the news reports and investigations that can bring these facts to light. I keep looking!

But that post title is just telling you what the sign says! It's one of the many problems with the sign. Whoever wrote that sign made no effort to separate the peaceful protesters from the rioters. It tells me to shut up about any objection I might have to the rioting because those in the oppressed group get to choose how to fight their oppression. This implies that the form of protest chosen was, in fact, theft and vandalism, and white people are not even allowed to criticize this expression.

"The reason bribery is now the Democratic impeachment word of choice has less to do with the law than with politics."

"The Washington Post reports that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently conducted focus groups in key House battleground districts to test 'messages related to impeachment.' Voters were asked whether 'quid pro quo,' 'extortion' or 'bribery' were more compelling.'The focus groups found "bribery" to be most damning,' according to the Post. Democrats got the message because last weekend they began using 'bribery' almost in unison to describe Mr. Trump's conduct. Mr. Schiff's NPR riff is an attempt to make the noncrime fit the political spin."

From "Adam Schiff, Founding Father," a Wall Street Journal editorial.

If the focus group found "bribery" the strongest word, I suspect it was because the definition they had in their head was a narrow one, in which some private citizen hands the accused politician X amount of dollars in exchange for a specific act of government power. If you change the definition of the word so that the accused politician is the one paying the money — and the money is the government's money — and the recipient is another government — which is supposed to do something with its governmental power — then you're not talking about the same thing the people were thinking about when they were asked about the word.

People may continue to think bribery is terrible, but the central question becomes is this bribery? The risk is, once you've said it's a question of bribery, you're focusing us on the definition of bribery, and when it looks like you're trying to stretch the definition so it fits whatever it is Trump did, it seems dishonest. I mean, look at Schiff, selling his expansive definition of "bribery":

"Well, bribery, first of all, as the Founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader. It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you're offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation's interest...."

Seen in that light, is there anything politicians do that is not bribery?

ADDED: Trump does a similar thing with the word "treason."

His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 29, 2019

"Seems like this advice, which will provide essentially no meaningful benefits to the world, is designed to achieve an exquisite balance..."

"... keep travelling but feel more virtuous by tweaking your usual routines with tiny sacrifices, while retaining some of the guilt and shame that appears necessary to be a genuine 'woke' person."

That's the top-rated comment on "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT).

First, I highly recommend clicking through so you can see the fantastic illustration by Tim Enthoven (I see I recommended him before, here).

Now, to the text. Kugel is a travel writer. And the NYT makes money selling travel to its readers. The problem of air travel and carbon emissions is a huge conflict of interest for them, and it's painful or humorous to watch them try to writhe into a nonridiculous position.

So, O.K. How bad should we really feel? Well, first of all, no self-flagellation required for that week in Italy. It is true that your round-trip flight is probably the biggest single contributor to your carbon footprint this year (unless you moved from a studio apartment to a mansion or quit your job for the Nature Conservancy to become a coal lobbyist). But shame is the wrong emotion....

Why is shame the "wrong" emotion? And why does the text switch from "guilt" to "shame"? I thought the distinction was important! It's not even discussed. And the text goes on to suggest that the reason "shame" is "wrong" is because shaming isn't an effective way to get people to change what they are doing. It's not? Why not? Is that scientifically proven fact? You know, where you have the problem of people not wanting to believe the science about climate change, you ought to adhere closely to science, and yet you have nothing scientific about shaming (or guilt, which you unscientifically merge)!

It seems to me that shaming is often quite effective.

"Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday..."

The NYT reports.

The police said that four people, including three men and one woman, had been taken into custody....

A 17-minute video posted to social media appears to show part of the attack. The clip, ... may have been taken from a helmet camera worn by a gunman.... “There wasn’t even time to aim, there was so many targets,” he says at one point...

Before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman posted links to a white-nationalist manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum known for extremist right-wing discussions. The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunman’s Facebook page, where he said he would also broadcast live video of the attack.....

In his manifesto, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia and listed his white nationalist heroes. Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. “For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,” he wrote.

ADDED: Why would a right-wing fascist want to "to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms"? I understand that the man is (he says) Australian and may not understand American ideology and politics and there may be something wrong with trying to make sense of the thinking of a mass murderer, but it seems to me that discord over the Second Amendment boosts the cause of limiting the right to bear arms. When Americans are not under stress, our resting state is to accept widespread gun possession.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

Someone posted the video he took of his own shootings on a thread in Twitter. I didn't want to see it. It just started playing.

Twitter should disable autoplay.

ALSO: Daily Mail reports:

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, named [Candace Owens] as his biggest influence in his 74-page manifesto [posted on Twitter]. [He] said that Owens helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness' - but claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she calls for are 'too much, even for my tastes'.

Owens is getting attacked for reacting to that tweet with a laughing emoji. She also reacted in words (including "LOL"):

'I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!' she said.

She continued to tweet over the next several hours that she refused to be blamed for the massacre. When followers pointed out the impropriety of her response, she was indignant.

'Laughter is not the response one would expect after these murders,' one follower said.

Owens shot back: 'No. But a bunch of racist white liberals flooding my mentions is almost exactly what one would expect. You guys will never de-platform me.'

It's a mistake to use laughter as opposed to straight outrage.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

I actually read his screed. He's not a right winger. He's an eco-fascist. He's not a fan of capitalism or conservatives or Marxists. He wants the United States to have a civil war and thinks that will come about by provoking people to fight over the Second Amendment.

If it's true that "Trump's Talk of Caravan 'Invasion' Disappears After Midterms"....

... which is what I'm seeing on MSNBC right now, then the question is not merely why did Trump stop talking about it, but why does MSNBC want to bring it up? I think the answer to both questions is easy, and the answer to the second question is valuable even if it turns out that Trump hasn't stopped talking about the "Caravan 'Invasion.'" MSNBC wants a daily influx raw material that can be manufactured into the proposition that Trump is a racist whose power comes from racists wanting more racism. Trump's talk of the "Caravan 'Invasion'" worked as that raw material for MSNBC and now Trump's lack of talk works to the same end.

As I said 2 days ago:

It reminds me of a little game I used to play with my sons when they were adolescents called What if you had to argue? It challenged you to argue for a proposition that isn't true and doesn't even make sense. The game showed again and again — and comically — that you can state arguments for anything. I feel as though the press is playing a game of What if you had to argue? and the proposition is always The last thing Trump did is outrageous. But it's not a known and understood comical exercise. It's the only press we have.

So the proposition is Trump is a racist whose power comes from racists wanting more racism. MSNBC looks at what new material is available. When the material was that Trump was talking about the "Caravan 'Invasion,'" and MSNBC used that to argue for the proposition. But when the material is that Trump hasn't talked about the "Caravan 'Invasion'" in the last few days, MSNBC will use that material to argue for the proposition. If Trump now talks about the "Caravan 'Invasion,'" MSNBC will continue to play What if you had to argue? and the talk, like the previous silence, will show that Trump is a racist whose power comes from racists wanting more racism.

"No One Wants to Campaign With Bill Clinton Anymore."

Headline at the NYT.

As Democrats search for their identity in the Trump era, one aspect has become strikingly clear: Mr. Clinton is not part of it. Just days before the midterm elections, Mr. Clinton finds himself in a kind of political purgatory, unable to overcome past personal and policy choices now considered anathema within the rising liberal wing of his party....

In an election shaped by the #MeToo movement, where female candidates and voters are likely to drive any Democratic gains, Mr. Clinton finds his legacy tarnished by what some in the party see as his inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions as president with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, as well as with past allegations of sexual assault.

"Inability to reckon with his sexual indiscretions"? Does the NYT use the phrase "sexual indiscretions" when writing about other celebrities who've been accused of rape and sexual harassment? "Sexual indiscretions" is very pre-MeToo.

Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a veteran Democratic strategist, says... “It was an abuse of power that shouldn’t have happened and if the Clintons can’t accept that fact 20 years later, it’s hard to see how they can be part of the future of the Democratic Party”....

Few Democrats were eager to talk publicly about Mr. Clinton’s future role in the party. Though they’re reluctant to say it out loud, Mr. Clinton’s political exile is an open secret in Democratic circles....

[M]any Democrats are mystified by what seems like the Clintons’ inability to respond to questions about Mr. Clinton’s past that are inevitable in the #MeToo era.

Efforts to promote a thriller novel he wrote with author James Patterson were overshadowed after the former president said he would not handle the Monica Lewinsky scandal any differently today. Earlier this month, Mrs. Clinton said in a television interview that her husband’s affair was not an abuse of power because Ms. Lewinsky was “an adult.”...

What's mystifying? Unless you can articulate a better response, you shouldn't be mystified at what Bill and Hillary came up with. It's not mystifying. It's infuriating. But go ahead. Say you're "mystified," because you who have consorted with Bill Clinton for the last quarter century have no good response for why you stood with him so long.

But "mystified," like "sexual indiscretions," is the NYT's word — the NYT's mystification.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:

IMO, anyone who ignored their principles to give him a pass when he was still trendy should be named and shamed as well, including Ms. Clinton and quite a few folks at the Times.

Meade said:

#your indiscretions are rapey rapes while my indiscretions are merely peccadilloes.

"Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism..."

"... and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).... [I]t’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of 'heavenly' garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.... Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.... [T]here is no plausible path [forward] that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again."

From "Make Catholicism Weird Again" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

Cannot persuade without a lot of fascination....

The etymology of "fascination" takes us back to a Latin word that means spells and witchcraft. The oldest meaning (now obsolete) is "The casting of a spell; sorcery, enchantment" (OED). Another old meaning is "The action and the faculty of fascinating their prey attributed to serpents, etc." (Example from 1848: "The fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and frozen.") The meaning we think of when we hear the word is "irresistibly attractive influence." Examples, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" (1860):

Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before.

"Anyone who thinks that the value of 2,000 hogs transcends that of a human soul made in the image of God himself... is so obtuse that likely no argument would be effective in unscrambling the discombobulation within his skull."

The use of the plural pronoun "they" — by the non-gender-binary performance artist Emma Sulkowicz — reminds me (writing in the comments to this post of mine) of the Biblical story of the man who said "My name is Legion... for we are many." Jesus, we're told — in a passage I quote in full — speaks with demons who request and are given permission to relocate into some nearby pigs — 2,000 of them — and the pigs suddenly run into the lake where they drown.

I ask some questions, get few answers, restate questions and get accused of mockery and called stupid by one of the regular commenters. So I look for and find a serious effort at answering some of my questions, which ends with the kiss-off I've used as the post title.

I'm stunned by the horribleness of that statement. For one thing, animal cruelty does matter, and driving 2,000 hogs into a suicidal frenzy is not explained by saying that human beings are more important than animals. For another thing, if you think human beings are so precious, why do you rush to conclude that they are not worth talking to? Human beings are made in the image of God... with scrambled skull contents.

Ugh! What an image. Scrambled brains. Everyone knows you're supposed to fry brains.

"What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

A Reddit discussion. The top-rated answer is:

My junior year of high school I got into a very heated debate with my friend over whether Cheetos were considered chips. After half an hour of yelling about this he finally called frito-lay headquarters to ask their opinion on the matter. I was right, they're not chips :)

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

I remember an epic argument about whether Minnesota is "almost in Canada."

And:

A famous argument I remember having was whether or not the crust of the bread is indeed considered to be "bread" itself, or if it is in fact another, distinct product known as "crust."

I'm amused by that use of the word "famous."

Here are some things I've found myself arguing about far longer than sanity would advise:

1. Whether butterflies are insects. I found myself resorting to statements like: "If you don't think they're insects, what do you think they are? Birds?!!???"

2. At what age do you become "middle aged"? I was in my 20s and saying "middle age" must start by 40 or 45 because it's considered the longest period of one's life, and I was talking to a woman who was almost 60 and wouldn't even concede that she was middle aged. One of her arguments was that the President of the United States — Gerald Ford, in his early 60s — shouldn't be considered middle aged yet because he played golf.

3. Who was conceived in the "immaculate conception"? I was at a dinner party with Madison academics and their spouses in the 1980s and got hooted down by people who sure the answer was Jesus. I was hampered by: a. No iPhone and no Google to make the correct answer obvious, b. Not seeing any social benefit in arguing about religion at a dinner party with people who were ready to be so ignorant and assholian about religion, c. Thinking about how much money I could make taking bets and distracted by the static of the idea that it would not be religiously correct.

4. Whether it is possible to picture infinite planets. I was willing to concede that there could be an infinite number of planets, but stood firm on my own personal subjective inability to imagine such a thing. How can you argue with that? I was with someone whose point of view was: How can you NOT argue with that? I could not be left alone with my imaginative shortcoming. I said I understood the idea of infinite space and could imagine infinite space, but a whole planet.... I'm picturing each one with a number on it. You never run out of numbers. So how could there be any planet that could not have a number to go with it? I don't need you to agree with me, you can even pity me in my disability, but leave me alone with it. NO!!! It's as though my non-infinite-mindedness was contagious and he had to cure me so he didn't catch it. Or maybe he was so angry because he did catch it and it horrified him.