Fenster writes:

Mostly on Mommy and Daddy themes.

“As a human being we should pay attention to fear and not logic”.  As a friend puts it, pathos beats logos any day of the week these days.

Kirsten Gillibrand seems to be cornering the pathos market.   They used to refer to the Republicans as the Daddy Party and the Dems as the Mommy Party.  She is pushing things pretty far towards the Mommy pole, though of course that particular term is now verboten.  In any event, a heart-uber-alles approach to national policy could well be a wise politically–for a time at least.

Though she may have to deal with Nxivm in her past. Talk about Bad Daddies!

The Daddy Party still has purchase in Israel.  One has to hope that Benny Gantz is overreaching, but you never know.  Jewish values appear to play out differently in homeland mode than they do in diaspora mode.

And on that point, Israel’s willingness to give in to Daddy urges does not sit all that well with a lot of Americans of a universalist persuasion, many of them Jewish.  Michelle Alexander–herself not Jewish–recently took Israel’s Daddy side to task. In the New York Times.  That seemed to unearth some native tensions.  Will she be at the New York Times a year hence?  Betting window now open.

More tension between Mommy and Daddy.  Recently at UR Paleo linked to a Joanna Williams essay in Spiked pointing out how virtues such as Stoicism have become deeply unfashionable.  But even the New York Times will concede that “the Stoics are wildly popular among readers (predominantly men)”.

And here is a link to Modern Stoicism.  Free courses,  Stoic Week and Stoicon, an annual conference.  A guy thing mostly, looks like.

Mommy is not always to be supported, especially if she kowtows to a Bad Daddy.  That’s Melania’s curse as a First Lady.  After bashing her with what amounted to lies the UK Telegraph has formally apologized to Melania Trump for an article about her.  It contained what the American press might choose to call inaccuracies but which the Telegraph, to its credit (even if under legal duress) acknowledges as “false statements that should not have been published”.  A money settlement, too.  Interesting that we don’t hear much about this in the US press, which is as good as or better than the Telegraph at fake news.  The UK just has tougher libel laws.

Finally on to the epic Mommy-Daddy battle of Pelosi and Trump.  What is Trump up to with the Shutdown and the Wall?  Is he really backing down or is he preparing the battlefield?  Does he really have three weeks to save his presidency?  Is Q relevant to any of this?