Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 39. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 5:46 PM for 11h 18m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission will meet at 6 PM and there will be a Whitewater Aquatic and Fitness Center Subcommittee Meeting at 6 PM.
On this day in 1901, United States Steel Corporation is founded as a result of a merger between Carnegie Steel Company and Federal Steel Company which became the first corporation in the world with a market capital over $1 billion.
The late Pete Carril, coach of Princeton basketball for a generation, is remembered for his offense. That offense called for a lot of passing, and so produced a lower-scoring game. In this way, Carril’s offense was patient. Opponents’ frustrated fans would shout boring! as the Tigers kept passing (rather than shooting as quickly as possible). Carril’s teams never rushed the shot. That patience was beneficial, as Carril had a 514–261 (.663 percentage) record.
Carril never devised a political strategy for Whitewater (or anywhere else). And yet, in these heated times of politics not basketball, an approach like Carril’s is the sensible one to apply to Whitewater’s local scene. There’s no reason to rush the shot.
Populism runs on emotion, on the heat of the moment, and rapidly darts from one concern to another. See Defining Populism and The Environment That Populism Creates.
Whitewater has only a conservative populist faction. Despite the conservatives populists’ conflation of Progressives/Liberals/Marxists/Socialists/Whatever/Etc., Whitewater has only a few genuine progressives, and they are not uniformly populist progressives. See Identifying Types and Spotting Issues and The City’s Few Progressives.
Populism in Whitewater is a movement of the right. See The Kinds of Conservatives in Whitewater and Conservative Populism Moves in One Direction Only.
There is an intense, insatiable craving within the populists that distinguishes them from other political movements. Need after need, issue after issue, but little foresight on any of them, and no clear sense of direction. Up, down, backward, forward, love it, hate it: all one frenetic scramble from topic to topic. See Nothing Upsets the Populists Like Contrary Speech (esp. from Blacks or Gays).
Back to Pete Carril and his strategy: the conservative populists want a lot of shooting, and so they don’t like a game in which passing dominates the clock. Carril didn’t owe other teams those other teams’ preferences, and those of us who oppose the anti-individualism of the populists don’t owe the populists their preferred approach.
Easy to see what they’d like, as I’ve written before: wall-building, book-banning, and closet-confining. The last six years have brought us here. There’s a hysteria about the populists, nativists with heads shaking, arms waving, overwrought claims delivered in overwrought phrases.
One approaches all this deliberately, methodically, and seriously.
Iran Schoolgirls Targeted by More Poison Attacks, Sparking Protests: