Remember earlier this spring when I did a couple of podcast episodes with Josh Barro and Megan McCardle? It was an exploratory pilot development situation. We did a few shows and then stopped to look at The Data™ and the feedback, and we spoke to some psychics and holy men and therapists and spouses and parole officers, and they were all fine with it, s…

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Next week I’ll be on a panel for Reason magazine about a big question: why is Europe poorer than the United States? Sam Bowman’s cover story is really good and you should read it. The basic argument is that Europe is choosing to be poor.

As you probably know, this is one of my favorite subjects. At the panel, I will provide humorous takedowns of Europe because they don’t know how to make iced coffee and have never been to the Moon. You should come! But I actually want to focus today on a somewhat more serious illustration of the sort of devil’s bargain Bowman describes.

A story happening right now, not in Berlin or Paris, but thousands of miles away in the sweaty corner of northern South America: two countries with the same coastline and the same oil under their waters. One is booming. The other is stuck in poverty because Europe told it to be.

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I originally published this story last year but since it is July 4th I am republishing it because America rocks!

There are two main methods humans use to evaluate objects. The first: You can look at an object in isolation and say, “This object is 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide and made of stone.” The second: You can look at an object in comparison to other objects and say. “This object is taller and wider and sturdier than that object.”

Either method will lead a sane person to conclude that Europe is a shithole.

Europe? Europe? Please. Europe is a joke.

I try not to write about Europe because we spend too much time talking about Europe as it is, but I am compelled to do so today because the Los Angeles Times has published yet another article about how Americans are ruining Europe.

Yet another? How many could they have possibly published on this subject?

Three in the last few weeks!

I can’t take any more!

The premise of these articles is all the same: Europe is a lovely place filled with lovely people and history, and loud, ugly Americans keep popping over and treating it like shit.

None of them have anything interesting to say. It’s all “buy local goods” and “be aware of the impact your presence has on residents.”

So, 1) shut up. 2) the scolding and debasing way the US media treats its own consumers totally fits the self-flagellating character of America in the 21st century, where everyone is embarrassed to be proud of the country and feels the need to say that other countries are better, even though they obviously aren’t. 3) No one is forcing Europe to do tourism. What is happening in Europe is not like, well, what Europe did to the rest of the world for a few centuries, where it just came and went as it pleased, raping and plundering.

Europe wants tourists because Europe is poor. There are a handful of countries in Europe that could survive without tourism, but most of them suck too.

The EU and the US have a visa waiver program, so we can all visit each other without much fuss or muss. The number of Americans who visit Europe a year is basically the same as the number of Europeans who visit America every year.

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I had always wanted to be a mother. It’s the first thing I said to your dad. We met at a party in LA in February, 1983. I was a producer at CBS. “What do you want to do with your career at CBS?” he asked me. And I said, “Nothing, I want to get married and have children.” And he said, “Me…

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Very Serious

Reaping and Sowing

Dear listeners…

Listen now

a year ago · 14 likes · Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, Megan McArdle, and Mike Pesca

Hey there cats and kittens,

, , , and I jumped on another podcast from the center and chatted about all of the [motions widely] stuff going on in the news.

(You can listen in Substack above or if that isn’t your cup of tea, here is the Apple link.)

The opening premise of this episode is that a lot of reader feedback to the previous episodes was that we were insufficiently panicked about everything going on with Trump.

Speaking for myself, I think it’s all been pretty bad so far. But it’s gone bad in a way that has made me pretty confident that the GOP is not going to play a long game here, which would ultimately be more politically endurable. It seems like they’re doing unpopular, chaotic, messy things that are pulling their numbers down. That’s what is supposed to happen.

I don’t totally get around to articulating it like that in this episode, but when you hear me sort of be on the more unruffled side, that’s essentially my position.

We also discuss various and sundry topics like Andrew Cuomo and Snow White.

As always, everyone else is much smarter than me anyway, and you should listen to it to feast on their juicy brains, and maybe at least enjoy some of my jokes.

Xoxo,

Ben

P.S. This chat show is still in the pilot season stage, where we are particularly sensitive responsive to feedback—what do listeners like? what do they not like? is it perfect and listeners have no notes? should we not do this at all and instead cut apologies into our skins so that medical examiners will be able to identify our bodies after we are pulled from the waters into which we should suicidally jump?—so no matter what you think, you should tell us what you think, unless you think the last one about cutting and medical examiners, in which case you can probably keep it to yourself.

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UPDATE: Delayed. Taylor had some last minute car trouble and needs to reschedule. I will update again when we are able to do it. My apologies!

and I disagree about everything in the entire world but we also have been close friends for over a decade.

On Wednesday, we will do a Substack Live at 1pm PT where we fight abo…

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There are two main methods humans use to evaluate objects. The first: You can look at an object in isolation and say, “This object is 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide and made of stone.” The second: You can look at an object in comparison to other objects and say. “This object is taller and wider and sturdier than that object.”

Either method will lead a sane person to conclude that Europe is a shithole.

Europe? Europe? Please. Europe is a joke.

I try not to write about Europe because we spend too much time talking about Europe as it is, but I am compelled to do so today because the Los Angeles Times has published yet another article about how Americans are ruining Europe.

Yet another? How many could they have possibly published on this subject?

Three in the last few weeks!

I can’t take any more!

The premise of these articles is all the same: Europe is a lovely place filled with lovely people and history, and loud, ugly Americans keep popping over and treating it like shit.

None of them have anything interesting to say. It’s all “buy local goods” and “be aware of the impact your presence has on residents.”

So, 1) shut up. 2) the scolding and debasing way the US media treats its own consumers totally fits the self-flagellating character of America in the 21st century, where everyone is embarrassed to be proud of the country and feels the need to say that other countries are better, even though they obviously aren’t. 3) No one is forcing Europe to do tourism. What is happening in Europe is not like, well, what Europe did to the rest of the world for a few centuries, where it just came and went as it pleased, raping and plundering.

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When I was 21, I was in a play in Hollywood, which was one of those plays that are a total con. They’re things that predatory middle-aged nobodies in Hollywood put on by renting out a theater and then charging bright-eyed desperate actors to help cover that expense (and the director’s time) because they want something to invite agents to.

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I fell for this and was the lead, which means I probably was the dipshit who paid the most. In the play, I was some college-age fellow who blah blah blah gets loaded and eventually kills his girlfriend in a very violent finale. The girlfriend was the second lead of the play, which meant that the actress had probably paid the second most.

There are only a few rehearsals for plays like this. It's more of a “learn your lines, run it twice on Wednesday and Thursday, and then do the show Friday through Sunday.”

The girl who played the girlfriend, whom I killed, was—I don’t remember her name—but she was from the South, and she pronounced “Ben” like “Beeeeen.”

So I strangled her twice in rehearsal and then on Friday night during the actual show.

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I’ll have another post up later today about this but I just wanted to quickly take this opportunity to say, THANK YOU, JOE.

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My dad likes to tell a story about Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was a longtime member of a fancy country club in LA, and after leaving the White House and returning to California, he spent a lot of time there. He had Alzheimer’s at this point, and it was getting worse, but he had a group of friends that included various Hollywood people—one of whom must have to…

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A few weeks ago, Oppenheimer was released in Japan, and as you can imagine, it set off a bit of a discourse about the virtue of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A very silly video that went around accused the US of never grappling with the ethics of that choice. As every American knows, this is nonsense. Every kid learns about this in elementary school, and the ethics of it are a huge part of the discussion. This ethical question didn’t become central until a few decades after the war ended. My grandfather’s generation definitly had no qualms about it, but by the time I was learning about this in the 90s, things had shifted.

The arguments against it are pretty obvious: tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed even though Japan was already going to lose. The argument for dropping the bomb(s) is normally that Truman had been told that a land invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and would result in potentially millions of Japanese deaths. We had already firebombed Tokyo, so it’s not like we had some “no civilians” carve out for this total war.

My dad once had a television show on CBS called The Education of Max Bickford, in which he played a college history professor. One of the episodes is about him teaching his students about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the episode, they basically all agree that it was bad.

I’ve always been a little put off by this conclusion, mainly because it feels like Monday morning quarterbacking. We know things that Truman didn’t know. We approach the question with a more enlightened view of civilian casualties, etc… But at the same time, I think it can be colored too much by the “Pandora’s box” element.

The entire last half of Oppenheimer is based on the Pandora’s box idea—that he and his friends invented this thing that will one day kill everyone. But of course, that isn’t true. God invented it when He made it possible for atoms to be split for explosive effect.

If the Manhattan Project had been slower and failed to result in a bomb by the end of the war, it’s not like no one ever would have made one. Someone would have figured it out within the next few decades, and then they would have used them.

The choice isn’t between living in a world with or without nuclear weapons; it’s between living in a world where we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or one in which it was dropped by someone else somewhere a few years later.

And then the question is more complicated. All things considered, dropping the bomb on Japan was a pretty good way of it going.

There is no more virtuous war than WW2. Germany and Japan were bad. They were murderous aggressors that had to be stopped. The worst weapon in history was being chased by a bunch of different combatants in this very morally one-sided war, and using that weapon ended it, with destruction that could not be immediately matched, so humanity had time to be appalled and establish a taboo on further usage.

If, instead, the war had gone on for another year or two while the Allies invaded Japan, the bomb would not have been discovered for years or decades. It might not have been discovered until the world was plunged into another World War, which might have come twenty years later but might also have begun much sooner when the US and USSR went to the mattresses over Europe.

And in that case, the bombs might not have ended a war but would have instead begun a new, unimaginably worse one.

We might not have had the chastening demonstration that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We just would have had a situation—like every other war in history—where some terrible new weapon is developed contemporaneously by both sides and then deployed by both sides.

And the fact is, in the first half of the 20^th century, something like 50 million people died violently in world wars. That doesn’t happen anymore. Great Powers don’t go to war. (We fund proxy wars, which can be very bad but are not remotely the same thing.)

This is the “nukes as peacemakers” argument. They represent such destruction that they have forced everyone to keep their dicks in their pants. No one really disagrees with it. It’s just that, well, it makes sense until it doesn’t. If we ever do end up in a full-on nuclear war, then so many people will die that the survivors will look longingly on the cutesy death tolls of WW1 and WW2.

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Dall-E’s response to the prompt: “a wide image of two emojis eating one another”

Like every other newsroom in the world, The New York Times uses Slack. Every newsroom has Slack drama. But the New York Times seems to have emoji-specific Slack drama.

Every story about internal drama at the New York Times always mentions Slack emoji. The latest example is in the Atlantic, where Adam Rubenstein has published an essay called “I was a Heretic at The New York Times.”

Rubenstein was the primary editor for the Tom Cotton op-ed in 2020 about “sending in the troops,” which ultimately led to James Bennet’s forced resignation.

Rubenstein writes:

Cotton’s office had emailed me several photos that they wanted to see published alongside the op-ed, showing times when the same legal doctrine had been invoked in the past. One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. I sent these to a photo editor, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to “consider” them. He wrote me back to say, “A false equivalence, but historical images are there now,” meaning he’d added them to the story file in the system. I thanked him and added a “confusion” emoji, in case he wanted to expand on what he meant. He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box, representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

This interaction then gets misreported by the paper:

Later that day, the Times published a story by Lee and two other reporters. “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein,” the article said. It devoted five paragraphs to my interaction with the photo editor, who had, against company policy, shared with the reporters some of our Slack messages.

Mr. Scales raised an objection. “A false equivalence, but historical images are there now,” he wrote to Mr. Rubenstein on Slack, the internal messaging software used by Times employees.

“Yeah, there are a few in there,” Mr. Rubenstein responded.

The full exchange made clear that I had been talking about the photos; presented this way, many read it as a confession that I believed the article was drawing false equivalences. Indeed, after this account came out, The Washington Post described me as having “shrugged off accuracy issues.”

Everyone is focusing on other parts of this essay but I want to zag and provide you with a brief history of NYT Slack emoji drama. It is one of my favorite recurring motifs.

The first time I noticed it was in 2020, in the aftermath of this op-ed.

Ben Smith, who was then the NYT media reporter, wrote a piece about all of the drama:

When The New York Times forced out the opinion editor James Bennet over a controversial column a week ago, two employees reacted in Slack with a slackmoji of the word “guillotine,” prompting internal complaints, a Times reporter said. “We encourage constructive, honest dialogue among our colleagues but there are lines that can be crossed, and this was one of them,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in response.

Then when Bari Weiss resigned, she wrote about being bullied with Slack emoji:

My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

When the Wirecutter wanted to unionize, Choire Sicha wrote in New York Mag about the slack emojis:

Management is not happy. In the Times all-company Slack, David Perpich, whose title is head of standalone products, which means he oversees things like Wirecutter and the Cooking product — and whose grandfather is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger — posted a message saying that, while the institution understood the right to strike, management was “disappointed.” He wrote:

“Strikes are extreme measures that are typically reserved for instances in which an employer is not willing to negotiate further. With the Wirecutter Union, we are very close to reaching an agreement and have remained willing to engage in the necessary give and take of negotiations to try to reach overall agreement.”

Emoji reactions to his Slack post, as of about 11 a.m. on Wednesday, were not friendly. They included union logos and at least 39 people posting a fist raised in solidarity, 34 people posting a grimace, 38 people posting the thinking-face emoji, plus 12 people responding with an emoji depicting Gritty, the chaos-oriented Philadelphia Flyers mascot.

When the NYT union was involved in labor drama in 2022, the substacker Eliz Mizon wrote a post titled “NYT Tech Staff Use 'Slack Hack' to Fight Union Busting.” What was the hack? Emojis.

But not just any old slack emojis. These were special Slack emojis.

Over and above using available reacts to spell “vote yes”, Tech Guild members also uploaded bespoke reacts, such as the Guild logo, and perhaps their most inspired move: a number of bright red, re-labelled, ‘info’ squares.

When staff hover their pointer over (or ‘mouseover’, thanks Tim) those info reacts, each one is titled with rebuttals such as :unions-dont-make-things-harder-they-ensure-we-are-heard:.

Maybe the NYT should deactivate Slack emojis?

I was involved in lots of Slack drama at Mother Jones but I can think of only one time when the emojis played a role, and it was a secondary role.

Storytime: Mother Jones/Slack/Race/N-Word/Drama

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Donald Trump walking by Picasso’s “Woman Sitting By A Window” (1932). I put him there. He didn’t actually walk by it. Both Picasso and Trump are mentioned in this post.

Happy Wednesday! Let’s do one of those newsletter posts where I talk about multiple subjects that aren’t necessarily connected.

First up:

The Twisty Timing of Trump’s Trial

When is Donald Trump’s DC trial going to start now that the appeals court has ruled against him? We’ll get a better idea next week once he appeals to the Supreme Court, but according to Just Security, the most likely scenario is that the trial happens pretty close to the election:

Once the Court issues its decision, the case would then return immediately to the district court, which would then restart pretrial proceedings. With another three months of those pretrial proceedings to go, trial would begin approximately between July 5 and July 15 (in the shorter cert grant scenario) or between July 19 and 30 (in the longer scenario). A three month trial would conclude between Oct. 5 and Oct. 15 (in the shorter cert grant scenario) or between Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 (in the longer scenario).

Accordingly, if the Supreme Court follows the timelines we lay out above–which we believe are well-supported by its prior practices–Trump’s trial would conclude no later than just before Election Day on the longer timeline and by Sept. 1 on the shorter timeline if there is a denial of cert.

One thing that is clear about this schedule is that it basically closes the door on Nikki Haley being tapped to be the nominee at the Republican National Convention in July. That was always totally a longshot possibility but it entirely rested on the premise of him being found guilty by then. Doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards. I’m not entirely sure what the point is of her even staying in the race for the next few months.

But the primary aside, Trump’s delay strategy seems pretty high risk here. If he can delay it past the election, which is his goal, then it’s great news for him, but if he can’t actually push it that far and it happens in the fall, it’s risky. For one thing, he’ll have to be in court every day and won’t be campaigning. But beyond that, it’s risky to have this conclusion near election day. If it happened in the summer, and he was found guilty, there would be sufficient time for his supporters to get over it and rationalize supporting him again, but if he is found guilty on October 30^th, they might not have time to make that mental adjustment. On the other hand, this goes for the Democrats, too. If he is acquitted, he will get a spike in support. If that happens in the summer, it will decline by election day. If it happens in early November, he will ride higher into election day. To make all of this even harder to game out, early voting will begin in lots of jurisdictions in October.

And that’s just the DC trial!

The Georgia one just isn’t going to happen this year, but the NY one is. It’s just that no one really cares about the NY one because the Stormy Daniels thing is such old news and even if he’s found guilty, he probably is just getting a fine. But he could still technically be “a felon” after it.

The Florida case about the documents is nominally still supposed to happen this summer, but everyone has always said that it would get pushed back because of various pretrial motions to do with classified material. (The conventional wisdom among liberal law types is also that the judge in that case is in no rush.) It seems hard to imagine that the Mar-a-Lago one and the DC one could both happen before the election.

A lot of people who don’t know what they’re talking about think that Trump has a good chance of getting a mistrial in the Florida case just because of the jury pool being more sympathetic to him.  I also don’t know what I’m talking about, but I am suspicious of that belief. I am also suspicious of the belief that he will definitely be found guilty in the DC one because that jury pool hates him.

In general, it seems like people take jury duty seriously. Judges have to find juries in tough situations all the time. Sometimes people have to decide cases while receiving death threats from the mafia! It can be done. The thing about the documents case is it seems pretty open and shut. This isn’t how the world works, but I would be sort of curious to know, given the choice between the two, which Trump’s attorneys and Jack Smith would prefer to have happen this year.

One scenario everyone understands could happen is that he is found guilty of some of these and wins the election anyway. Polls show that a significant number of Republicans say they won’t vote for him if he’s found guilty of a felony, but I really think that the way the human mind works, most of those people will talk themselves into it if they have the chance. But let me throw out another crazy scenario: what if the trial is still going on election day? And he wins. And is then found guilty in November or December?

If that happens, Trump will take office on January 20^th, and his sentence will just be delayed four years. But Democrats will scream bloody murder and march their little hearts out, demanding that he be impeached the second he is sworn in. Republicans won’t go for it. Everyone will be driven crazy by everything.

We’re getting to the point where liberals are jerking off to “Will he go to prison, and if so, what prison” stories. NYMag has a long version of this. They interviewed some former Secret Service guys about what it would be like to protect him if he’s sentenced to serve time in a minimum security federal prison. After thousands of words of this fan fiction, you get to the section where they acknowledge that, in all likelihood, Donald Trump will never be sentenced to prison because it’s just a logistical nightmare for the prison and for the Secret Service. They’ll find a way to sentence him to home confinement of some sort.

That NYMag story is your Democratic fantasy for the day, so let’s now go the opposite direction and do some noodling on what happens to the mental health of Democrats if Trump wins.

How Would Dems Respond To Trump Winning?

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It’s Christmas and your wife is dead. She didn’t just die. She’s been dead for some time. But it’s still raw. You met when you were young. You fell for each other quickly, completely, and irrevocably. You both knew that you were meant to share your lives together. And so you did. And you didn’t doubt it, either of you, e…

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Le Bernardin, alone, 2019

The only restaurant I have ever been anxious about going to alone is Benihana. Benihana is teppanyakiki. You are seated with other parties and then the cook does a “show” which involves some participation. The idea of going alone was even too much for me.

But in 2013, I decided that I had to go alone. I had to push my limits. I had to force myself to do a masochistic test of my own self-confidence.

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I owe you an explanation for why I haven’t posted in a week.

I’m just incredibly upset and angry about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and how the discourse is going in the United States,

My main belief in life is that being upset about stuff like global affairs, which are beyond your control, is really unhealthy. That belief is some…

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Dumb money is a term that institutional investors use for small-dollar retail investors who don’t know all the smart things they know because they have a Bloomberg Terminal. It is also the name of a new movie out about the Gamestop saga.

DUMB MONEY in theaters, stupid money in the news:

Some of the biggest Republican donors in the country will converge next month at the historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach for a two-day meeting to rally behind Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The closed gathering, named the “Red Vest Retreat” after the fleece Youngkin wore during his 2021 campaign, will begin Oct. 17 and be focused, officially, on the Republican effort to win full control of the General Assembly in Virginia’s upcoming elections. But unofficially, several donors tell me, it will be an opportunity for them to try to push, if not shove, Youngkin into the Republican presidential race.

LMAO.

Look, I get it: the GOP donor class doesn’t like Donald Trump, and they are constantly searching for someone they find more palatable to get behind who has a chance of beating him. But this is insanity. As Nate points out, there is no lack of serious Republicans in this primary. If donors really want to prevent Trump, they should be conspiring to force some of these people out of the race to consolidate the anti-Trump vote.

It’s not a sexy answer. It’s not even intuitive, considering just a few nights ago, we watched a complete shitshow of a debate in Simi Valley. It would be somewhat strange if you watched that debate and didn’t at least think briefly about how nice it would be if another horse strode up to the gate. But come on. Getting another person to enter this primary should be an in-kind donation to Donald Trump!

Give it to a soup kitchen! Buy a new jet! Fund an expensive Broadway musical about your own childhood! What is the point of being fabulously wealthy if the only thing you can think to do with that wealth is set it on fire?

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Howdy!

Here are three brief thoughts about current events.

Why Vivek Ramaswamy Is So Insufferable

During last week’s Republican debate, Vivek Ramaswamy came out pumped up on either excitement or meth and drove everyone mad. I described him in the moment as “a coke addict who keeps dropping the price of the used car he is trying to sell me every time I mention I’d like to run the VIN and get a carfax report.”

I was apparently not alone in this revulsion as lots of people have taken to the web to explain why they can’t stand him. Some of it is described well by Josh in this post about how Vivek reminds him of Harvard’s “section guy”:

“Section guy” wasn’t a specific person, but an archetype — that guy² in your discussion section who adores the sound of his own voice, who thinks he’s the smartest person on the planet with the most interesting and valuable interpretations of the course material, and who will not ever, ever, ever shut up.”

Yes, a thousand times, yes, but there was one specific moment during the debate that I thought really captured Ramaswamy’s insufferability.

In the middle of a back-and-forth with Mike Pence, Ramaswamy said the following:

“This isn't that complicated, guys, unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal and embrace nuclear, put people back to work by no longer paying them more to stay at home, reform the US Fed, stabilize the US dollar, and go to war [on the administrative state].”

Anyone who believes that US energy policy, economic policy, monetary policy, or the administration of the federal government is not “that complicated” is an idiot.

Those are incredibly complicated subjects! People get doctorates in those subjects. They spend their entire careers focused on those subjects. And they still get it wrong!

The smartest people working in the best faith implement public policy with the expectation that X will happen, and half the time, it doesn’t. Y happens. Or X+Z happens. Or whatever. Because that’s just life. No one’s batted .400 since Ted Williams, either.

When those policies fail or create too many negative externalities, you can seek to fix them or not, improve them or not, modify the theory, and adapt the application or not.

People who choose the “or not” are dangerous ideologues.

But Ramaswamy is worse than that. Those people have a theory of the case. Maybe they’re too stubborn to abandon it when it fails, but that’s a second-move failure. Ramaswamy not only has no theory of the case, he is appalled by the notion!

All politicians do what Ramaswamy did, to some extent. They pretend that complicated subjects can be solved in soundbites. But Ramaswamy went further and mocked people who know enough to know these subjects are hard.

This is a thing that populists do.  But smart populists use populism as a means to an end. Populism as campaign tactic. At most, it’s populism as general vibe direction informing policy implementation. Populism as actual governing philosophy is unspeakably stupid. (Particularly in a country so polarized that both halves the country think the other half is a Neanderthal.)

Saying things are easy or simple when they are anything but is what adolescents with low self-esteem do. What they are saying to you is, “It’s simple,” but what they are saying to themselves is, “If it’s simple, then I can understand it.”

One of my favorite things to do is talk to people who have jobs I know very little about. I don’t mean NASA scientists. I mean people who work at paper mills. I might understand the general gist of their work, and I might think I’d be quite good at it, but when you talk to someone who wakes up every day and actually does it, you learn all of these fascinating small things that they have spent thousands of hours thinking about. No one in history has spent as many hours thinking about this very minor bit of printing as have people who do it every day for a living. They have tips and tricks that you never would have imagined because they do it every day. They think about it every single working hour. And you? You just have spent a few hours on this subject.

Everyone knows what it’s like to suffer a backseat driving dilettante. And that’s who Vivek is. And that’s what Vivek reminds me of.

Maga Talking Point Is Racist

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