All those "Democrats and white middle class" articles explained in four lines.

I’m going to translate the subtexts and signals of What’s Wrong With the Democrats? - The Atlantic into plain language:

1. Democrats should have disowned Black Livers Matter.
2. Democrats shouldn’t run a woman for the presidency.
3. Democrats should have lied more.
4. Democrats should have paid more attention to the economic collapse of the non-college (peak human, mass disability)

I agree with the fourth. I was worried about that before Trump took over. I don’t agree with #3, I think lying works a lot better on the GOP base than the Dem base.

Number one and two remind me of the Al Gore’s choice to embrace gun management measures. It was a progressive and brave act, but Americans showed they didn’t want it. Dems have not pushed it since.

I don’t think we’ll see a woman running for the presidency of the United States in the next ten years. Maybe 20 years. I was shocked that almost half of white college educated women voted for Trump. HRC was less excellent than Obama, but she was pretty good. Since white men are  hopeless the lack of support from white women was a killer.

I also think Dems will shy away from BLM like movements - at least for another decade. We won’t say that loudly, but watch what happens. American racism is stronger than many thought.

The are sad predictions. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t have a lot of faith in post-Trump America. 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can journalists top writing these articles?

Escape from the Wheel of Time

I finished ‘A Memory of Light’. And the thirteen Wheel of Time volumes before that. I feel like I’ve been released from Compulsion.

It’s not high art. Some of it was a slog and not every thread was accounted for. The twists and retcons reminded me of long run comic book sagas. It can entertain though. Jordan turned a single volume book into a trilogy and then into a monster — and he more or less held it together. That’s worthy of a prize, or, in his case, a fortune.

Jordan died after book 11 and Brandon Sanderson wrote books 12-14 from notes and imagination. I thought there were some odd word choices in his first chapters, but either he settled in or I got used to his style. It was fun that three of the heroic characters were writers; I don’t think any villains were.

Game of Thrones, which I abandoned after a particularly misogynistic volume, is clearly an heir to WOT. I read that there will be a WOT inspired TV series — that will require a bit of editing.

I can’t exactly recommend WOT, but if you get sucked in the ride isn’t all bad. Most libraries will have it and there are many used volumes floating around, so you don’t have to buy every volume new. I bought about 5 and borrowed the rest from a friend and the library.