David French's Wife and Her Boyfriend
I usually avoid reading either David French or the tiresome conservative responses to him, but I found a Tweet of his worth reading. First though, we need the backstory, a tweet by his wife.
Mrs. French taunts Senator Hawley with an implicit accusation, one that sounds serious, and Mrs. Gonzalez taunts Mrs. French with an implicit accusation, one that sounds humorous. This makes Mr. French’s Tweet pretty funny in itself:
815 plus 135 is a lot of comments, which illustrates a problem for both blogs and twitter: although the comments often contain even more insights than the original post (and the better the post, the more it attracts wise and witty readers), the comment *section* is not worth reading because 99% of the 500 comments are vacuous, rude, or stupid. For this reason I skip the comments on famous people’s posts, though Steve Sailer, Scott Alexander, Richard Brookhiser, and Andrew Gelman are exceptions.1 I urge, in the strongest terms, famous bloggers to moderate their comments ruthlessly and delete both the obscene and the brain-numbing “Yeah, right on!” and “You’re an idiot” comments. Such comments are like Edward Tufte’s “non-data ink” or the verbosity condemned in Strunk and White; words that convey no meaning are not just useless but positively bad, because they clog the output channel and reduce the informativeness of the comment section.
Sermon over, however, I can give an example. I’ve done what I just told you bloggers should do, by deleting most of the comments on French’s tweet. I leave you if not the creme de la creme, at least the creme de la garbage. First, read the post again:
Here are the comments. They work better as comments than as bullet points, I see, but I’ll publish this Substack now anyway.
Um, it seems like the kind of joke men tell all the time.
You going to answer the question?
@gay_lumberjack: You’re so masculine.
French is always playing the victim…which is not a masculine trait
Are you new to the internet? It’s a juvenile attack but framing it as evidence of “rot on the right” is disingenuous at best. This is evidence of rot of our discourse but it’s hardly something “the right” only bears blame for.
polyphobe
Cool cool, do you take ‘yo mama’ jokes personally too?
Yeah, while we are on the topic of what constitutes evil, bear in mind that David French is mischaracterizing what was meant by the joke.
I gotta be honest, the rest of us aren't interested in all your drama.
Could you maybe take it to DM's?
That’s disgusting. What did your wife’s boyfriend ever do to deserve this? I’m appalled .
It really wasn't so much about your wife as it is about what a pathetic man you are, Dave.
Kind looked like a joke to me… are you overreacting perhaps?
Lol, when you're explaining you're losing.
It was a joke....she's saying you are a beta, which is factual based on the garbage you spew.....
It’s not adultery if you’re in the same room.
It’s such narcissistic framing, it’s embarrassing.
Okay but what does her boyfriend think of it tho
If you really want to see moral rot, I’m sure you can find a mirror. Incidentally, you seem pretty triggered by the mere suggestion that your wife is unfaithful. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” You have my sympathies.
You should be thanking her for getting you views. No one would even know who you are without her pointing you out. Your wife and her boyfriend too.
David, c’mon. It’s petty, childish, crass, and over the line, sure. It’s not “actually evil”.
Settle down. Have a Snickers.
There’s a certain level of decency I personally think one should have in order to be taken seriously
I think calling pedophile who twerk in front of children a "blessing of liberty" and parents can love their children by transing them is significantly more evil than a troll post.
But that's just me.
Did your boyfriend write this whiney tweet for you?
Evil is letting registered sex offenders dressed as drag queens read to toddlers. In public libraries.
This is called one upping.
So does your wife's boyfriend have no comment then, or...?
Maybe you should write an article on femininity.
Dude, your wife started it… right or wrong yea Twitter is childish but you don’t get to complain when she struck first.
It'll be ok little camper. Just go into your safe space for a little while
David French doesn't get jokes, volume IV
You thinking that tweet is the definition evil is revealing.
"What does your wife's boyfriend think about it?" is a very common line.
It means you're a weak, gooey-spined cuck underneath it all. It's not suggesting your wife has an actual boyfriend.
People aren't accusing your wife of adultering, they're accusing you of being a cuck, which you are
“actually evil”? Lol, it’s a joke, grow up you dork.
This is some of the most cowardly victimhood I've ever witnessed.
I realize you're a sellout but feign some dignity.
If you have any comments to add, put them in the Comments section and maybe I’ll insert them here in the post itself
Am I being cruel to edit these for posterity? No, I think not. David French is one of the most despicable people in America, the ultimate pharisee and fake. Such people ought to be mocked relentlessly. Mockery is the best way to deter pharisaism. If the target really is a pharisee, it’s easy to make fun of him, and since he’s solemn, pompous, and self-righteous, you may hope your mockery will sting when it reaches him. It may even reform him, but at least it will shut him up or shut him down. It will deter other aspirants to the pharisee class. And, best of all, while most instruments of deterrence— ostracism, violence, and rebuke— impose costs on he who deters and third parties who witness the penalty, mockery is fun for the speaker and fun for the listeners, even occasionally rising to the level of art.
I just read a notable example in Andrew Gelman’s blogpost of today titled, “OK, I was wrong about Paul Samuelson.” He is saying he was partly wrong about what he said about one of my old professors, Paul Samuelson in a blogpost of a few days earlier. He had rightly mocked Samuelson’s gullible view of Soviet economic growth in in the 1960’s editions of his famous basic economics textbook (which was used in my first econ course, with Samuelsons’s student Nordhaus in 1976). He had wrongly mocked Samuelson’s use of a hypothetical simulation of stock prices to explain why investing in stocks in the long run didn’t necessarily reduce risk. Several commenters did the simulations themselves; others pointed out the context of the Samuelson quote; others discussed serial correlction and heteroskedasticity in stock price changes, etc. So Professor Gelman changed his mind, as is normal in scholarly discussions, at least in math, statistics, economics, and the type of political scientist I hang out with (Gelman is a statistician in a government department, I think).