Whenever the manic pacing starts to flag, a posse of clowns in punk-Edwardian drag tumble on stage to mug, break-dance or shriek high-pitched gibberish.

I’m told there’s a goddess named Diana who is predicting that now that the cat is out of the bag, “agnostic autonomism” (my old label for my pro-free-will view that is agnostic about compatibilism) will quickly become the dominant position in the free will literature; the money will drive things there, she says.

The hovering Trump, bedecked with the phallic tongue of a violet Celtic floral tie, is in Viking mode, looking like a triumphant dragon on the thrusting prow of a long boat. “To the victor belong the spoils!” I said to myself in admiration, as seductive images from Babylon to Paris flashed through my mind. Yes, here is all the sizzling glory of hormonal sex differentiation, which the grim commissars of campus gender studies will never wipe out!

And finally, Mickey Mouse is Disney in a nutshell. What human being over the last forty years, at the mere presence of Mickey, has not felt his heart swell with emotion?

The authors of this book are to be defined as follows: indecent and immoral (while Disney’s world is pure); hyper-complicated and hyper-sophisticated (while Walt is simple, open and sincere); members of a sinister elite (while Disney is the most popular man in the world); political agitators (while Disney is non-partisan, above politics); calculating and embittered (while Walt D. is spontaneous, emotional, loves to laugh and make laughter); subverters of youth and domestic peace (while W.D. teaches respect for parents, love of one’s fellows and protection of the weak); unpatriotic and antagonistic to the national spirit (while Mr. Disney, being international, represents the best and dearest of our native traditions); and finally, cultivators of “Marxism-fiction”, a theory imported from abroad by “wicked foreigners” (while Unca Walt is against exploitation and promotes the classless society of the future).

Still shocked that the likes of you continues to thrive in this cancerous cesspool of a never ending nonsensical circlejerk. Meh.

On another occasion he solemnly informed the sociologist Daniel Bell that he considered the author of a satirical popular song about marriage called “Makin’ Whoopie” a greater poet than T. S. Eliot, and his malicious delight knew no bounds when Bell cited this in a scholarly study as evidence of the changing attitudes toward popular culture among the younger generation of American intellectuals.

I was going to say that someone who actively doesn’t like food is probably not real likely to have empathy with poor people, but I thought it would be too mean to say in the post itself.

Future societies will look back on economics as a kind of foolish male mysticism, and Marçal’s book anticipates the tone of their laughter.

The count’s bedroom featured a pentagram over the bed, and there he would smoke opium and play piano late into the night, emerging the next day – late, naturally – in a dressing gown with a snake wrapped around his neck. Even these quirks were not enough to dissuade misguided local landowners who hoped their marriageable daughters might catch Stenbock’s eye; when invited to dinner with them he would turn up with a pet monkey.