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In today’s edition:
- Gamer slang is coming for us noobs, too
- Dictators’ public solidarity and Russia’s covert sabotage
- Where is the monument to the lives lost to Dobbs?
- Britain’s runaway election has lessons for Democrats
Slang expansion pack
Say you are trudging through the grocery store, filling your basket with provisions for yet another chicken-thigh dinner. Suddenly, an email arrives in your inbox exhorting you to make, mmm … esquites!
You collect corn, cotija, crema, cayenne on a speedrun through the store. Congratulations — you have not just shopped; you have completed a sidequest.
This is perhaps the most delightful of the slang terms currently osmosing from video gaming into everyday life, a trend Generation Z linguist Adam Aleksic explains in another of his op-eds on how young people speak.
Perhaps you can give some of them a whirl: “Spawn” is to appear unexpectedly. That “sidequest” is a surprise task. And “speedrun,” for good measure, is the quick completion of a trial.
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Before fuddy-duddying, consider that this is just a newfangled gloss on how language has always worked. You might think you’re free from faddy language, but if you tell your spouse you “struck out” on finding that cotija, you’re using gaming slang, too — from baseball, once the hot new game in town.
‘Alignment of evil’
The buddying up of baddies Russia and North Korea itself feels like something out of a B-grade video game. But Max Boot writes that the recently minted “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the two countries is a very real shot in the arm to a growing “alignment of evil,” the term Israeli researcher Yoel Guzansky uses for how Russia, Iran, North Korea and China work together.
Max lays out the web of arms transfers, economic supports and other boosts these dictatorships provide one another; it is complex and vast. “The world’s leading illiberal powers recognize their congruence of interests and are drawing closer together to tear down the rules-based international order,” he writes. “The democratic world must respond with at least as much solidarity as the autocracies are displaying.”
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While all this is happening publicly, Russia is working in the shadows on a “covert campaign of sabotage and hybrid warfare against supporters of Ukraine,” David Ignatius reports.
What does this mean? David points to the torching of Ukrainian-owned warehouses in Britain and Spain and to planned attacks on supply lines from Europe into Ukraine. Even civilians in Poland and the Czech Republic appear in danger of Russian targeting, David warns.
Vladimir Putin is clearly climbing the ladder of provocation, and with “each rung higher,” David writes, “the danger of a misstep gets worse.”
Chaser: In another column, David examines how the White House has had to balance sanctions on Russian oil with concerns over inflation at home.
From Kate Cohen’s column on Arkansas’ proposed Monument to the Unborn. Kate is thinking of all the people who have suffered ectopic pregnancies or tried to perform their own abortions or endured the depression and disease that comes from carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term.
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“And we will never know how many lives Dobbs altered, stunted, constrained and burdened,” either, she writes. “How many educations it deferred or denied, how many careers it derailed, how many families it broke.”
These incalculable victims deserve our attention. Kate, poignantly, wonders what a monument to them might be.
Chaser: Ann Telnaes’s cartoons about what Louisiana’s order to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom really means.
More politics
The performance of Britain’s Conservatives in the lead-up to the country’s July 4 election is not just a train wreck so grisly you can’t look away but one you might be tempted to fly all the way across an ocean to witness in person. This is what Fareed Zakaria has done.
Fareed diagnoses the problems of the Tories (who polls say could win as few as 50 of 650 seats in the House of Commons) as first a loss of seriousness and second a loss of identity. As politics moves “away from the left-right divide over economics to an open-closed one centered on cultural issues such as immigration, identity and multiculturalism,” Britain’s right is fracturing, Fareed writes.
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What’s most interesting to Fareed, however, is the strategy behind Labour’s star turn. If President Biden and the Democrats want to win this fall, he writes, it ought to interest them, too.
Smartest, fastest
- A critical Arab ally is losing its democracy, the Editorial Board writes, but Biden has remained silent.
- Megan McArdle writes that now is the perfect time to end a tax deduction despised by economists — and beloved by real estate agents.
- Israel’s definition for victory in its war is too broad, and the United States’ is too narrow. They need to meet in the middle, write former U.S. officials Dennis Ross and David Makovsky.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Way OP Labour
Pulls off a voting speedrun
Hey, Tories — gg
Plus! In lieu of a Fri-ku, an invitation to hear from you at a little more length:
Post Opinions wants to know how our warming world has changed your relationship to summer. New gardening choices? Different cooking habits? (More esquites?) Write in here, and we might use your response for an upcoming project.
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Email me with any questions/comments/ambiguities. Have a great weekend!
