Linky Friday: Eternal Vigilance Requires Eternal Listicles, Soundtracked to Roundball Rock

Vänrikki Brandt testing the vigilance of the Soviets. Date 1 July 1941
Photo by Military Museum of Finland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Desperate times call for desperate measures…or at least the return of the Ordinary Times end of week listicle of legend, Linky Friday!

[LF1] Liberals…assemble, or something

From The Unpopulist: Time for All Liberals to Unite

Ekeing out narrow election victories against the Trumps and Le Pens of the world by mad, last minute political scrambling is better than losing. But only repudiating these regressive nationalisms in the marketplace of ideas will ultimately restore liberalism’s footing. Every election shouldn’t have existential stakes for liberal polities. Vigilance might be the price of liberty, but the need for constant hypervigilance is the sign of a polity in trouble.

So what should we do?

The challenger ideologies have nothing in common beyond the rejection of liberalism. They have diverse, often conflicting, goals. What, after all, do integralists who want a confessional state, communitarians who blame Western individualism for destroying community and breeding alienation, and the Nietzschean Bronze Age Pervert who wants the Übermensch to rule have in common?

Yet they have done a remarkable job of uniting and building a movement around their shared rejection of liberalism. Even as we are hosting our inaugural gathering, NatCons, just a few miles from here, are in their fifth year of convening. And they meet multiple times every year in multiple cities across the world. Clearly, the travails of the working class and high inflation aren’t cutting into their travel budget.

It is time for true liberals to set aside their existing policy disagreements and come together in a renewed defense of core liberal democratic values (personal freedom, openness, pluralism, toleration and human rights) and institutions (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, executive restraint and representative governance). We, after all, have something affirmative, namely liberalism, in common. It should be possible for us to jettison the old and stale left/right divisions and forge a new liberal/illiberal alignment. We need to offer a revitalized intellectual defense of liberalism that points out how life is—to repurpose the phrase of Thomas Hobbes—“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” for people living under illiberal states. And, above all, we need to show how liberalism is the only governing system that can generate workable solutions with broad buy-in for the very problems that are leading its critics to reject it. A commitment to these values, as opposed to tribal identities, will have the great advantage of allowing us to recognize and respond to this threat regardless of which side of the spectrum it emerges.

[LF2] Pier today, gone tomorrow: Gaza Edition

NY Times: Pentagon to Dismantle Temporary Pier Built for Gaza Aid Operation

The Biden administration will soon permanently shut down the star-crossed $230 million temporary pier that the U.S. military built to rush humanitarian aid to Gaza, American officials said on Thursday.

“I do anticipate that in relatively short order, we will wind down pier operations,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters.

On Wednesday, personnel from the military’s Central Command attempted and failed to reattach the makeshift pier to the beach in Gaza after rough seas forced operators to remove the structure several days ago to avoid damage, the Pentagon said.

In a statement, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said the latest effort to re-anchor the pier failed because of “technical and weather-related issues,” recurring problems that The New York Times identified last month when it reported that military officials had warned aid organizations that the project could be dismantled as early as July.

General Ryder said in the statement on Thursday that the pier, support vessels and other equipment would return to port in Ashdod, Israel, “where they will remain until further notice. A re-anchoring date has not been set.”

Mr. Biden ordered the U.S. military to begin building the pier in March, at a time when he was being sharply criticized for not doing more to rein in Israel’s military response to the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7. At the time, health authorities were warning that Gaza was on the precipice of famine.

Mr. Sullivan explained that the pier was not as necessary as it once was because more land crossings to ship aid into Gaza had opened in recent weeks under pressure from the White House.

“The real issue right now is not about getting aid into Gaza,” he said. “It’s about getting aid around Gaza effectively. But there are a lot of things that we need to work through, including lawlessness and armed gangs. In some cases, Hamas itself is trying to disrupt and derail the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

Still, humanitarian groups have complained that the pier has largely failed in its mission. In the nearly two months since it was first attached to the shoreline, the pier has been in service only about 20 days, military officials said. The rest of the time, it was being repaired after rough seas broke it apart, detached to avoid further damage or paused because of security concerns.

[LF3] Remembering Shelley Duvall

The Guardian: Shelley Duvall was a sublime and subversive screen presence

Her best work was clearly with Robert Altman, the film-maker who discovered her, and found in her those easy, unforced performances and line-readings that lent texture, sexuality and her own kind of innocent mystery to his films. Shelley Duvall was intensely modern, the very face of the New American Cinema, but was also in her slender grace and wide-eyed charm, and her way with a cigarette, a neo-flapper, a kind of 20s or 30s woman reborn long after the second world war – which also made her an excellent casting choice in period movies.

Sissy Spacek, in Altman’s 3 Women from 1977, calls her “the most perfect person I ever met”, and for all that it’s a comic and ironic moment, there is a kind of truth in it. Duvall delivered a kind of perfection in Altman’s still amazing film about the enigmatically complex trio, Duvall, Spacek and Janice Rule, a psychological drama conceived at the opposite end of the universe from Bergman’s Persona, strange and dreamlike, but forthright, robust, open and American. Every microsecond that Shelley Duvall is on screen is drenched with a kind of guileless, distraite sensuality. She was brilliant also as the bank robber’s non-Bonnie girlfriend in Altman’s Thieves Like Us and as the hapless woman forced to work in the brothel in McCabe and Mrs Miller. For Woody Allen, she contributed an imperishable cameo in Annie Hall as the journalist and the film leaves us to wonder how American cinema might have changed if Shelley Duvall had had the title role. Perhaps she was too really individual, or too subversive, to fabricate that kind of kooky performance.

Altman found in Duvall that feel for combining sexiness with comic innocence in her cameo in 1975’s Nashville and in 1970’s Brewster McCloud, yet perhaps it was Altman who did her no favours by casting her as Olive Oyl in Popeye in 1980, the same year as The Shining, again playing a wife to an over-the-top attention-grabbing male lead: that is, Robin Williams as Popeye himself. Terry Gilliam found a witty and intuitive way into Shelley Duvall’s performing persona by casting her as the timeless lover opposite a similarly unlikely swain: Michael Palin, and perhaps there is a genius in making Michael Palin her amour. I’d have liked to see Duvall recur as Palin’s love interest in Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Duvall did first-class work for Guy Maddin, Jane Campion and Fred Schepisi but it was surely Robert Altman for whom she gave her classic performances. In 3 Women her screen presence is sublime.

[LF4] How to get women to go nuclear? (No, not like that)

From Gabriella Hoffman at IWF:

Support for nuclear energy in the U.S. is at an all-time high, hovering at 77% in one recent survey. Georgia Power Plant Vogtle Unit 4 recently went online, becoming the “largest generator of clean energy” in the U.S. And our government wants to supercharge nuclear as well.

For some reason, however, women aren’t warming up to nuclear just yet.

An August 2023 Pew Research poll revealed men are twice as likely to support nuclear energy than women (54% vs 28%). The same survey also found men overwhelmingly favor nuclear plants over others to generate electricity compared to women at a rate of 71% to 44%, respectively. One expert told Morning Consult in 2015 that “women are both less engaged on energy topics, and far less likely to express concern.” Another expert told the polling outfit that “messaging isn’t targeted to women” despite them having decision-making power at home.

A Twitter/X user recently posed this question: “How do we make women love nuclear power?” Some respondents replied with clever suggestions: a Hallmark movie, giving the industry a Barbiecore treatment, getting popular singers to endorse it, or getting companies like Sephora to sponsor cooling towers.

[LF5] What do you call a celebrity un-endorsement?

On his SubStack, Chris Cillizza argues that, yes, that Geroge Clooney opinion matters:

Here’s why: Biden and his campaign have repeatedly cast his debate performance as “one bad night.” The idea being that because Biden was sick (or because of his makeup or because he was jet-lagged or because Donald Trump kept interrupting him or….) he was bad in the debate. But that it was a total one-off. And it won’t happen again.

What Clooney is saying in his op-ed is directly counter to that message. Clooney is saying that he was with Biden less than a month before the debate — and he saw the same bad Biden that 51 million people saw during the debate on June 27. And, presumably, Biden wasn’t sick at that fundraiser. Or distracted by Donald Trump yelling at him. Or his bad makeup job.

Now, if you have been reading the media coverage in the 13 days since the debate (and even before that), you likely already know this. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post (among many others) have all reported that signs of Biden’s mental slippage have been apparent behind closed doors for a while now — and that it has gotten worse in recent months.

But I think Clooney admitting it — in such a public forum — is actually different, and more powerful. Because even if you have convinced yourself that the media is out to get Biden (we are not), it’s impossible to claim that Clooney is some kind of MAGA plant aimed at bringing Biden down.

[LF6] Keep your Nat to yourself, Con…

KDW in The Dispatch: Is National Conservatism All That National?

The organizers of NatCon 4, the fourth annual conference of the so-called national conservatives, proudly announced Wednesday that they had set a record for attendance at the event—more than 1,000 people.

I don’t mean this as a sneer at NatCon—there are better reasons to sneer at it—but that is not a very big number. To pick a point of comparison with which many of these ladies and gentlemen are strangely obsessed, that is about the size of a very successful National Review cruise—and going on a cruise is a much bigger commitment in terms of time and money. For another point of comparison, consider that that is about 0.7 percent of the typical size of the crowd at ComicCon in San Diego—a crowd that probably would be a good deal bigger if the venue could accommodate more guests.

In the digital age, it is easy for certain kinds of events, movements, and personalities to appear much larger than they actually are. The so-called national conservatives are one such, but the phenomenon is a common one. Finding useful points of comparison can be difficult. For example, Miley Cyrus has about twice as many X (formerly Twitter) followers as U.S. newspapers have combined circulation, but, even though she is a very big celebrity and newspapers have been in long decline, she isn’t a larger cultural presence than all of the nation’s newspapers put together—and we can be confident that if it cost money to follow her on social media, her following would be smaller.

But even apples-to-apples comparisons do not necessarily tell you as much: Vogue, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire—none of those magazines has as large a circulation as Golf Digest or American Rifleman, but those more widely circulated magazines do not punch proportionally to their weight—even considering that American Rifleman is the house organ of the National Rifle Association, which once was a very important special interest group.

Different numbers will tell you different things…Fragmentation benefits the smaller players.

[LF7] Hear No Evil, but with some science behind it

From DW Documentary: Isolation and dementia – Why we should protect our ears

[LF8] Sell that to a (literal) Brick Wall

WaPo: The Georgetown wall, listed for sale at $50,000, is off the market

The brick wall in Georgetown that went viral last year after its owner put it on sale for $50,000 is no longer on the market — though its future remains a mystery.

“Well, I have some other plans for it,” Allan Berger, the owner, said Thursday. “I’d rather leave it at that for now.”

Last summer, this brick wall in Georgetown — a neighborhood with trendy shops where houses sell for millions — had been online for just days, priced at $50,000, before it became a punchline on social media.

“Not me looking at this thinking ayyyy that’s cheap,” one user commented on Instagram. Another wrote: “This seems like a cruel concocted boomer prank to excite us poor millennials into thinking we can *actually* afford something and then crush our dreams with ‘endless possibilities.’”

The wall faces a bank parking lot and is attached to the home of Daniela Walls. Walls said this wall’s deteriorating structural integrity was directly impacting her house, letting water into her basement for years, fostering mold and ultimately, could bring about her home’s demise.

Berger had said he hoped someone could eventually paint a mural there, while Walls previously said an engineering report showed that such a project could trap water and accelerate structural damage.

UrbanTurf first reported the wall was no longer listed for sale.

[LF9] Porn in the USA, or Something…

TNR: The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn

The “Promise to America’s Children” campaign is not only an American project. It’s one facet of a global effort to roll back progress around gender and sexuality, as seen in Russia and Hungary and other countries that have marshaled protecting “children” and “families” in service of eroding civil rights for women and LGBTQ people. Despite homosexuality being decriminalized in Russia in 1993, the Russian Supreme Court last year decreed that the “international LGBT movement” is an “extremist organization.” Earlier this year, under Russia’s new so-called “propaganda law,” employees at queer and drag venues were charged with “promoting nontraditional sexual relationships and preferences” and “promoting nontraditional sexual relations among the visitors of the bar.” Others have been convicted under the law for wearing frog-shaped rainbow earrings and for posting a photo of a Pride flag online. Such policing is part of what Putin has called defending “traditional family values”—a framing that borrows from conservatives in the United States.

That exchange goes both ways: Kevin Roberts has had a receptive audience with Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “We must not give up on our core values: #family, #sovereignty, #liberty and #faith. This was at the heart of our discussion with @Heritage president @KevinRobertsTX,” the prime minister posted to X in November 2022. Roberts replied, “It was an honor, @PM_ViktorOrban, to meet with you. One thing is clear from visiting Hungary and from being involved in current policy and cultural debates in America: the world needs a movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families, and for the average person.” There is much in Project 2025’s vision of “tradition” and “families” that evokes Orbán’s rule, such as Hungary’s own anti-LGBT propaganda law and his anti-abortion laws.

Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, “a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,” a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified. And if you look to the work of its constitutive groups, Project 2025 is already here, depending on where you live: in Alabama, one of eight states that forces schools to out trans students; in Florida, one of more than a dozen states that bars or highly restricts discussions of LGBTQ people or issues in the classroom; or in Texas, one of the two dozen states that ban hormones and puberty blockers for trans and gender-nonconforming youth. These kids already live under the conservative vision of “protecting children.” Project 2025 is proof that they want to finish the job, to make everyone in the United States live subject to their rules.

[LF10] For $76 Billion, can we at least get Roundball Rock back?

From The Athletic: NBA finalizes TV deals with ESPN, NBC, Amazon, but TNT could still match: Sources

The NBA and network executives finalized contracts that will make NBC and Amazon Prime Video new partners, while maintaining ABC/ESPN as the home of the NBA Finals, under agreements that will extend for 11 seasons and be worth $76 billion, according to executives with direct knowledge of the deals.

While the NBA and its partner agreed to all the language, incumbent TNT Sports continues to threaten to match. The CEO of TNT Sports’ parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, has publicly stated he may attempt to use language in the current contract to remain involved with the NBA. If Zaslav goes through with that, he is expected to target Amazon’s package.

The next step is for the league’s governors to approve the agreements with ESPN, NBC and Amazon, which is expected to be a formality.

The board of governors has meetings Tuesday in Las Vegas. At some point following the final step by the league’s governors, the NBA will send the finished contracts to TNT Sports.

At that point, the company will have five days to make its move. If it declines, then the NBA is expected to be an official announcement before the Olympics, which open on July 26.

The NBA, TNT Sports, ESPN, NBC and Amazon declined to comment.

Under the new NBA television deals with ESPN, NBC and Amazon Prime, the regular season would feature national telecasts nearly seven days a week, according to sources briefed on the agreements.

The NBA will borrow a page from the NFL, as following the end of football’s regular season, NBC will have the NBA succeed the highest-rated primetime show on television, “Sunday Night Football,” while, on Thursdays, Amazon will do the same after its TNF coverage concludes.

Just for good measure, here’s John Tesh explaining how Roundball Rock started with him singing into his own answering machine…