Counter Points for August 2, 2023

Here’s something I never thought I’d get to say: I’m writing this to you from the south of France, where I’ll be spending the month of August. I’m here by total luck, in more ways than one. But the immediate cause of that luck is HomeExchange.com (which is not the sponsor of this newsletter). We put our house on that site hoping to trade homes somewhere fun this summer, and a French family reached out, bizarrely looking to spend all of August in Washington, D.C. We quickly agreed to that deal.

My initial observations of France: it is hilarious and insane that they have not adopted screens — yet have no A/C and have all their windows open. I’ve gotten several mosquito bites indoors, despite claims I’ve seen online that there are no mosquitos here. I did Counter Points remotely from our house today and it was 31 degrees Celsius inside. I did the math, and that’s pushing 88 real degrees. But the windows were open and with the breeze, it was actually quite comfortable.

Specifically, we’re in a village called Cabriès, if anybody wants to hang out or has ideas of things to do. A big thanks to Deconstructed listener and Bad News reader Julia Delille for taking us on a walking tour of Paris. We visited the place where Marat’s revolutionary newspaper was published, across the street from where the guillotine was designed. It’s now a fancy soap shop, which sounds like a successful revolution to me.

I’m also deeply impressed by the minimal amount of plastic compared to what we produce in the USA. A revolutionary world with much less plastic really is possible.

While I’m here, I’ll also be doing research for a potential new book I’m kicking around: on Napoleon; his wife Josephine, who was raised on a Caribbean slave plantation; and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, and the relationships between them. Gonna hit some Napoleon archives in Marseille for research.

Speaking of which, my next book is now available for pre-order, more details on that here.

As promised, here is today’s show, in which we covered Trump’s hat-trick indictment, the coup in Niger, DeSantis’ new economic plan, and “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk suing a nonprofit for defaming him.