Althouse

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• "The blowback against the seven Republican senators who supported former President Donald J. Trump’s conviction in his impeachment trial has begun."
• "In his executive order, Biden said a wall spanning 'the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.' But neither is a complete undoing..."
• "The Indianapolis Museum of Art... has edited and apologized for an employment listing that said it was seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its 'traditional, core, white art audience.'"
• "Senators, America we need to exercise our common sense about what happened.... Let's not get caught up in a lot of outlandish lawyers theories here. Exercise your common sense about what just took place in our country."
• At the Still Too Cold Café...

"The blowback against the seven Republican senators who supported former President Donald J. Trump’s conviction in his impeachment trial has begun." Posted: 14 Feb 2021 09:00 AM PST "In Louisiana, the state Republican Party's executive committee voted unanimously on Saturday to censure Senator Bill Cassidy, who was just re-elected in November and was among those who voted to find Mr. Trump guilty. The state's Republican attorney general, Jeff Landry, said Mr. Cassidy had 'fallen into the trap laid by Democrats to have Republicans attack Republicans.' Two of the Republicans who voted for conviction, Senators Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, are not seeking re-election next year.... Of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Mr. Trump, only one of them, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, will be on the ballot in 2022. But she is a uniquely formidable candidate in her state, having once won re-election as a write-in candidate after losing a primary." The NYT reports.

"In his executive order, Biden said a wall spanning 'the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.' But neither is a complete undoing..." Posted: 14 Feb 2021 08:57 AM PST "... in July, Biden said he would not take down the wall, an endeavor that would cost billions as he fights for funding for pandemic relief. Installing a hodgepodge of 'smart security' technology paid for with reallocated wall cash, together with limited barrier removal in sensitive areas, appears to be the most likely outcome. But that half measure will be expensive, and will require maintenance costs for the steel that stays in the ground. Even doing nothing at all will hurt the purse thanks to contract cancellations. One Army Corps estimate from December suggests that if no more work is done and no panels are taken down, taxpayers will still eat another $700 million on 'demobilization' fees.... As of December 2020, only 40 new miles of steel barriers had been placed at the southern border during Trump's time in office... [There are also] another 412 miles of so-called 'replacement fencing' that he managed to secure.... But short-term thinking has been a dominant trend in federal policy at the border for decades now — including the Obama administration's decision to finish the work of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, despite campaign promises to review its environmental impacts. Due to the ingenuity and desperation of those crossing, border barriers were clearly a sloppy and incomplete fix for the nation's bevy of immigration-policy problems years before Trump took office. Because of the steel he put in the ground, they will remain a mess through the Biden years, and almost certainly beyond." From "What Happens to Trump's Wall Now?" (New York Magazine).

"The Indianapolis Museum of Art... has edited and apologized for an employment listing that said it was seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its 'traditional, core, white art audience.'" Posted: 14 Feb 2021 07:03 AM PST "The museum's director and chief executive, Charles L. Venable, said in an interview on Saturday that the decision to use 'white' had been intentional and explained that it had been intended to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as part of its efforts toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion.... Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, the guest curators for the museum's upcoming 'DRIP: Indy's #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural' exhibition... said... they could not remain as guest curators. 'Our exhibition cannot be produced in this context and this environment,' said Simone Jeffers and Bacon, the co-founders of GANGGANG, a local art incubator working to elevate artists of color... Kelli Morgan, who was recruited in 2018 to diversify the museum's galleries, resigned in July, calling the museum's culture 'toxic' and "'discriminatory'.... [Morgan said] she was disappointed that, despite the fact that the museum had begun training its leaders in diversity, equity and inclusion, it had still included the language in the job description." From "Indianapolis Museum of Art Apologizes for Insensitive Job Posting/The museum wrote that it was seeking a director who would work to maintain its 'core, white art audience,' in addition to attracting a more diverse one" (NYT). I'm having a text conversation with someone about this, and he gave me permission to quote:  Weird  I also think attempting to show diversity by having an art exhibition that is specifically Black Lives Matter stuff shows kind of a lack of imagination  Why not find some great art by black painters, it's like the only way to be diverse is to just slap a modern political movement on the walls  But maybe I look at it in that way because I feel like they exposed their insincerity, and are just showing Black Lives Matter bc they feel obligated

"Senators, America we need to exercise our common sense about what happened.... Let's not get caught up in a lot of outlandish lawyers theories here. Exercise your common sense about what just took place in our country." Posted: 14 Feb 2021 05:19 AM PST Said Lead Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin, quoted in a February 11th Wall Street Journal piece — "In Closing, Raskin Quotes Thomas Paine: 'Tyranny, Like Hell, Is Not Easily Conquered'" — by Lindsay Wise. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet was called "Common Sense." Quoted in response to Raskin, Senator Josh Hawley: "I was really disappointed they didn't engage much with the legal standards. This is a legal process after all. Very little engagement." When do we get to bypass studying the factual details and legal standards and all the links in a chain of reasoning? When is it okay to just look at the whole thing and rely on instinct and just know that something is right or wrong?  The answer can't be: When it helps my side win.  People who liked Raskin's appeal to "common sense" — as opposed to "lawyers theories" — need to realize it's also the way Trump argued that he won the 2020 election. You just look at what you can see and feel what you feel.  And that's how Trump has been talking to his people all along. In your heart, you know he's right... or, in your guts you know he's nuts.  Bias has become the preferred form of reasoning. Better not get bogged down in lawyers theories. The other side is off and running.  Here's an article in by Sophia Rosenfeld in The Nation from 2017, "The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Trump's Appeal to Common Sense Is His Dismissal of It": Trump began his quixotic campaign for president as the embodiment of a familiar kind of right-wing, common-sense populism. Instead of deference to well-trained scientists, academics, journalists, and even governmental authorities, he touted the true wisdom of "the people." In place of fancy studies built on research, data, and modeling, he promised plain-spoken, off-the-cuff reports on the state of our world and obvious, practical solutions to our problems.  That is, Trump suggested politics was actually quite simple if only one would rely on the kind of basic reasoning which emerges from just going about normal, everyday business using one's senses and instincts and which—surprise, surprise—tends to run counter to "establishment" conclusions....  [T]he populist appeal to common sense was already a time-tested strategy to gain votes on the right... [W]hen asked about global warming, the smart move was to say that it had to be a hoax because we got a lot of snow last winter.... Common-sense truths require no further study to prove themselves correct—or so the theory goes. They are just things that everybody knows, and if they had any sense, would readily agree upon too.  This faith has a long American pedigree. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan often promised "common-sense solutions" on issues from taxation to foreign policy, drawing on folksy aphorisms to make his points. He linked the idea to the founding fathers, and, in particular, to Thomas Paine, who had once promised, in defense of a then-radical cause, to give his readers nothing but "simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense."  Trump, of course, eschews history. But when he announced that the solution to illegal immigration was building a very big wall along the southern border, it was clear that—the racism of the idea aside—he was speaking in this same faux-practical mode.... By undermining faith in traditional sources of intellectual authority, from the major news outlets to the National Institute of Health and the CIA, common-sense populists recast all those who participate in the "knowledge industry" as biased enemies rather than objective analysts working in the interest of the common good.... He has also, since well before he became a serious candidate for the presidency, refused to accept various realities even when provided with concrete, demonstrable evidence....  In George Orwell's (once again best-selling) dystopian novel 1984, Big Brother and the Party are tasked with denying "the very existence of external reality" and telling you "to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears"—until such point as "the heresy of heresies was common sense."  For even common sense—whose "biography," Orwell's contemporary Vladimir Nabokov once quipped, "makes for nasty reading"—still requires of its practitioners a certain kind of independence of thought, given its relationship to skepticism, or the ability to detect the lies and obfuscations of others...  Here's that Nabokov quote with some context:  In the fall of 1811 Noah Webster, working steadily through the C's, defined commonsense as "good sound ordinary sense . . . free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety… horse sense."  This is rather a flattering view of the creature, for the biography of commonsense makes nasty reading. Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit.  Commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time. Commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch. Commonsense is square whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its first circus show.

At the Still Too Cold Café... Posted: 13 Feb 2021 06:14 PM PST  ... there's still no new sunrise photo. I'm locked in by the subzero cold and waiting for Wednesday to get back to half-normal life. But there's the indoor fun of a Saturday night café, so please join me in the long overnight conversation.

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