July 19, 2026

HMMM:

I would think ideology plays a far greater role than gender. In his 2001 book, Volume One of The Age of Reagan, Steve Hayward wrote that by the early to mid-1960s:

The deterioration in criminal justice was not limited merely to catching criminals; punishment also began to slip. Even as crime was rising sharply, the number of criminals in prison was falling, and average time-served was declining. Punishment was out; “rehabilitation” was in. The public went along with this—for a while. In July 1966, a Gallup Poll found for the first time a larger number of Americans opposed the death penalty, by a 47 to 42 percent margin. This did not last long, however, and as crime rose, support for the death penalty soared back to 67 percent by 1976, peaking at 79 percent in September 1988.

In the face of this obvious deterioration in the criminal justice system, liberals decided to blame—society. Johnson had appointed a President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which reported to the American people in February 1967 that neither law enforcement nor the administration of justice could do very much by themselves to stem rising crime. “The underlying problems are ones that the criminal justice system can do little about,” the Commission said. “Unless society does take concerted action to change the general conditions and attitudes that are associated with crime, no improvement in law enforcement and administration of justice, the subjects this Commission was specifically asked to study, will be of much avail.”

The Commission’s report became a collateral endorsement for enlarging the Great Society: “Warring on poverty, inadequate housing and unemployment, is warring on crime. A civil rights law is a law against crime. Money for schools is money against crime. Medical, psychiatric, and family-counseling services are services against crime.” The Commission endorsed, among other progressive measures, giving convicts furloughs to work in the community during daytime hours. The only measures the Commission didn’t endorse were the ones the public most strongly desired: money for police protection and more prisons. To the contrary, the Commission endorsed lenience toward criminals: “Above all, the Commission’s inquiries have convinced it that it is undesirable that offenders travel any further along the full course from arrest to charge to sentence to detention than is absolutely necessary for society’s protection and the offenders’ own welfare.”

Liberalism would be a generation recovering from this kind of thinking. Many poor urban neighborhoods have yet to recover, for it was precisely the poor, and largely black, populations of central cities who suffered most from this negligent criminology—the very constituency liberals thought they were advancing. Blacks were two and a half times more likely than whites to be victims of crime in 1966, and this gap would widen over the next decade as black victimization in the inner city soared. Charles Murray noted that “it was much more dangerous to be black in 1972 than it was in 1965, whereas it was not much more dangerous to be white.” By 1970, social scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded, a person living in a central city faced a higher risk of being murdered than a World War II soldier did of dying in combat. But when Richard Nixon and conservatives called for a return to “law and order,” the phrase was attacked as “a code phrase for racism.”

Whatever their gender, why should we expect Europe’s pandering leftist judges to be any softer on crime than ours historically have been?

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Art’ and the Pathology of our Age.

And then there was the student at the Ontario College of Art and Design who, in 1996, pushed his own boundaries with an “artwork” that consisted of him vomiting on paintings by others, a Piet Mondrian in New York and a Raoul Dufy at a museum in Ontario.

The truth is that, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing new or “challenging” about the “artists” who populate the trendy precincts of contemporary art. All their “shocking” moves were long ago pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and his fellow Dadaists. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp mapped out both large domains of the pseudo-avant-garde. When Duchamp took objects from everyday life — a bottle rack, a snow shovel—and impishly exhibited them as works of art, he pioneered the entire genre of art-as-banality. When he exhibited a urinal as a sculpture, he twitted the more delicate sensibilities of an earlier age with exactly the same sort of naughty schoolboy outrage that (to take but one example) Tracey Emin’s sordid exhibitionism recycled, lo, these many years later. (Pardon, that’s Dame Tracey Emin to you. Yes, really.)

What our latter-day Dadaists have accomplished is simply the domestication and routinization of the avant-garde. They preserve the gestures but lack the spirit. They pretend to be “challenging” or “transgressing” conventional boundaries, but all such boundaries were long ago erased. Far from guying conventional taste, today’s self-styled avant-garde are today’s conventional taste. The only thing these “artists” challenge is our patience. It is a melancholy, not to say tiresome, spectacle. What it says about our culture is partly depressing, partly anger-inducing. The really breathtaking feature of the thing is that these “artists” actually seem to believe they are brave aesthetic and existential pioneers. It’s contemptible, yes, but also quite sad. Curiously, this is something that Duchamp himself recognized when his impish gestures became celebrated by the art world. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

Assuming the BBC didn’t go full Michael Moore and staged this scene, you knew the war in Afghanistan was doomed when our betters thought that Duchamp’s style of modernism was something vitally important to teach to young women there: Money Down The Toilet In Afghanistan, that time when progressive US colonialists tried to enlighten Afghans by teaching them about the glories of Dadaist art.

Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan:

https://youtu.be/wdrvpSfJM1w?si=bsn2Ie6tsshKp89c

As original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long until you become garde.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROGRESSIVES OF BOTH PARTIES, DEMOCRATS, LEFTISTS, AND OTHER STATISTS HAVE BEEN CHIPPING AWAY AT IT FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY:

And here is what Charles Cooke was replying to: “Democratic Socialist co-chair Ashik Siddique says the DSA would abolish the Senate: ‘We do believe that government should be proportional to the population… We just don’t see the point of the Senate.'”

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

SAME REASON HILLARY DOES IT — THEIR AUDIENCES EAT IT UP:

I’ve never understood the desire to be pandered to in that way, but apparently, Democrat audiences love it.

UPDATE (From Ed): Indeed they do. From last year: She Don’t Feel No Ways Tired: Nancy Pelosi Chews Up Six Minutes Claiming Democrats Didn’t Move America ‘Too Far To The Left.’

“[T]here are certain people in the country who don’t want to see … women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants taking their place in anything,” she said. “And that’s just the way it is. That’s their problem. That’s not America’s problem. America is this great country with this beautiful diversity.”

Pelosi also ranted about her Catholic views to claim she valued all different types of people — before appearing to attack Republicans while seeming to use a southern accent.

“You’re people of faith? You go to church on Sunday and pray in church on Sunday and prey on people the rest of the week. What is this? What is this?” she asked, laughing.

“Pelosi chuckles, but not even the moderator or Harvard student crowd seems to find it funny:”

There’s no doubt that Pelosi already has the support of Zohran Mamdani, Hilaria Baldwin, Jasmine Crockett, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton, but seems little interested in growing the party’s base much beyond the code-switching far left:

Posted at 11:14 am by Stephen Green

SUICIDAL EMPATHY:

Posted at 10:30 am by Stephen Green

EVERYTHING THEY DO IS FAKE:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

SEDUCTIVE AI: China cracks down on AI girlfriends, leaving users heartbroken.

Related: Your Child’s Next Teacher Could Be a Sex Robot. “But look on the bright side: this is real vertical integration, people! Just imagine a future in which the same company can sell you a) a robot to teach you at school; b) a robot to compensate for the fact that you never learned to make friends at school; and c) a robot to gratify you because you’re lonely, alienated and your job just got automated out of existence! Who wouldn’t want to live in that world?”

You should read the book.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

FROM SARAH A. HOYT:  Witch’s Daughter.

Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.

Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..

Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.

Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.

Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt