Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 5:27 PM for 10h 36m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, Confederates commanded by Brig. Gen. John B. Floyd attack General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces besieging Fort Donelson in Tennessee. Unable to break the fort’s encirclement, the Confederates surrender the following day.
Yesterday’s post offered observations on conservative populism, and today’s post has a bit more. Not all conservatives are the same, but they different in disposition, knowledge, and ambition, not intelligence. (Almost all people, of whatever politics, are sharp; society would not function otherwise.) The traditional conservatives feel it’s indecorous to tantrum, and the transactional conservatives scheme quietly for one monetary gain or another.
Among the conservative populists of Whitewater (and other places) there is also a difference between the behavior of men and women in that faction. For the most part, excepting someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, women among the populists do better at controlling themselves in public than men of that ideology.
Indeed, many women among the conservative populists are shrewd enough to describe themselves, and present themselves, cautiously despite their exclusionary ideology. They seem more reasonable than they are. These women are a backwards version of Madame Defarge: strident once in office, but more demure beforehand, knitting quietly (but no more).
The men among the conservative populists aren’t subtle: they quickly slip into dominance-and-submission rituals, or into false (and ludicrous) claims of expertise or insight they do not have. They look maladjusted to anyone outside their ranks, and so it’s hard for them to win over anyone not already among their number. (They also assume everyone should behave as they do, and so they do not understand stoicism, forbearance, or patience as virtues. They don’t grasp that in difficult circumstances, a good maxim is the hotter the temperature, the colder the man.)
Among the men of conservative populism, there’s often a moment of self-sabotage, when they act out, lose their cool, and have public conniptions. See Who Rampaged Better? Even if they start with an olive branch, any slight they perceive along the way causes them to substitute poison ivy.
So many of these big, bad men reveal themselves as though no more than insecure children.
US Tells Americans in Russia to Leave ‘Immediately’: