Althouse |
- "Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves 'Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?'"
- Magnolia, scilla, fritillaria.
- "On Friday, West Point officials said in a statement that the [second-chance] program had 'not met its intended purpose' of increasing the self-reporting of honor code violations and reducing cadets’ tolerance for them...."
- Bob Ross, resurrected to paint a Mountain Dew ad, is welcome even as it obstructs the "Repo Man" clip I wanted to find.
- "So he hauled a new generator into his S.U.V., strapped $800 worth of wood onto the vehicle’s roof and drove down into one of the city’s ravines in the middle of the night..."
- "I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs."
| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 08:11 AM PDT "Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It's possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.... Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.... [M]ost people who take to the streets about cases like Daunte Wright are not thinking about the fact that black people are killed by cops 2.5 times more than their representation in the population would predict. They are protesting because all they see in the news is the black people killed, and have no way of imagining that whites are regularly killed in the same way and in much greater numbers.... Every time the media broadcasts the murder by cop of a black person, ask yourself if it's really true that a cop wouldn't have done it to a white person – and then go to, for example, the Washington Post database and see cops doing just that. And upon that, we will settle upon an honest national conversation about the cops as murdering people in race-neutral fashion. Or at least we should." Writes John McWhorter in "The Victorians Had to Accept Darwin/We Need to Accept that Cops Kill White People as Easily as They Kill Black People/Otherwise, our conversation on race is deeply and perniciously fake" (Substack). *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Magnolia, scilla, fritillaria. Posted: 17 Apr 2021 08:07 AM PDT    Flowers in Madison, this past week. The magnolia was in the arb, the frittilaria and the scilla on the Meadhouse property. |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 07:07 AM PDT "'The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same, to graduate Army officers that live honorably, lead honorably and demonstrate excellence,' General Williams said in a statement. 'West Point must be the gold standard for developing Army officers. We demand nothing less than impeccable character from our graduates.'... Tim Bakken, a professor of law at West Point, said the involvement of so many athletes in a cheating scandal was a recurring theme at the academy and he called for greater scrutiny of the issue and more transparency on the part of the institution's leaders. 'We have to ask the question of whether there is something about the culture of athletics that is at odds with the academy's mission with regard to honor,' he said... Echoing Professor Bakken, C. Richard Nelson, a 1960 West Point graduate... noted that the 1976 scandal, like last year's and another in 1951, was concentrated among athletes at the academy, in that case the football team. Mr. Nelson said that in his day, there was 'no slack' given and that 'any violation meant separation' — the academy's term for expulsion. He also said he could see how the second-chance program that was being discontinued, known as the Willful Admission Process, might have fallen short of its goals. 'You're asking an awful lot of these young people to turn somebody else in,' he said." I'd like to see the NYT go more deeply into the question of athletics and cheating — something more than quoting 2 professors on the subject. The question that arose in my mind — and I have no idea of the race of the various accused cheaters — is whether an honor code is a manifestation of white supremacy. The NYT has been weaving Critical Race Theory throughout so many of its articles that we ought to take note of its failure to include that dimension. *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 05:35 AM PDT For once, I am not annoyed — I am the opposite of annoyed — by the ad YouTube served up in front of the video I wanted to watch:
Well, that's just great. Good to know the beloved dead man is refreshed. There is a Bible verse about tending to the thirst of a dead man: "And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'" Yet no one pictures Bob Ross in hell. It is more likely that you would picture him in a Heaven that resembles his paintings, and I'm sure that picture has abundant water features, with painterly tree reflections. Still, you weren't picturing Paradise with soda, were you? Maybe you were! There's that song about Paradise with cigarette trees and a soda water fountain. Now to the serious business of this post, the "Repo Man" clip:
That's the pine-tree-shaped air freshener that the repo man will find in every repossessed car. I needed to look up that clip because I was about to read the NYT article, "Why Police Can Stop Motorists With Air Fresheners Hanging in Their Cars/A majority of states have laws making it illegal to hang anything from a rearview mirror that obscures a driver's view. But critics say the laws are often used as pretexts." I haven't read the article yet, but I'd say that hanging something from the rearview mirror is an activity associated with the lower class. There's a bit of a safety issue, but it's easy to suspect that these laws justify traffic stops of people the police might want to intrude upon. And we have a recent incident in which a young man was shot to death, apparently by accident, after he was stopped, we were originally told, for having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror. Now, I've read the article. I'd summarize it like this. There's a legitimate, though fairly small, safety issue, but not every car with something hanging from the rearview mirror is stopped, so there is room for racial animus to play a role in who is stopped and how that person is treated after they are stopped. The article ends with an anecdote about a woman who, at 35 years of age, still feels traumatized by a traffic stop over an air freshener that happened when she was in high school:
*** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 05:53 AM PDT "... to build... a wooden box — 7 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 9 inches — sealed with a vapor barrier and stuffed with enough insulation that, by his careful calculation, would keep it warm on nights when the thermometer dipped as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. He put in one window for light, and attached smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later, he taped a note to the side that read, 'Anyone is welcome to stay here.' Since then, Mr. Seivwright (pronounced Seeve-right), 28, has built about 100 similar shelters with a crew of 40 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations. He has hauled them to parks across Toronto where homeless encampments have slumped into place — jarring reminders of the pandemic's perversely uneven effects. The city's bureaucrats called them illegal and unsafe, and stapled trespass and eviction notices to many, informing their residents that the city had rented out hotel rooms for them. They served Mr. Seivwright with an injunction, ordering him to stop putting the structures on city-owned land." The box is not much larger than a coffin (which tends to be 7.17 feet by 2.5 feet), but people prefer them even when they know "the city had rented out hotel rooms for them." A city can't allow a shantytown — far below its standards of habitability — to grow up its in its parks. But Seivwright is nevertheless celebrated. I can see how building these squalid boxes and depositing them around town works as protest art, speaking loudly to the people of Toronto about the poor and desperate people who live in their midst. The city is providing hotel rooms, but if these people are in hotel rooms, the housed citizens of Toronto won't need to agonize about them. To be in the box is to be inside but outside, seen but unseen. To be in a hotel room is to be thoroughly inside and unseen. That's what the city prefers. I don't think the article explains why it is what the homeless prefer. (To comment, you can email me here.) FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes:
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| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 07:18 AM PDT "By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school.... Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley's oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.... I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners.... I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums.... Lastly, I object, with as strong a sentiment as possible, that Brearley has begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think. I object that the school is now fostering an environment where our daughters, and our daughters' teachers, are afraid to speak their minds in class for fear of 'consequences.' I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality, and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home.... It is abundantly clear that the majority of parents believe that Brearley's antiracism policies are misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous.... But as I am sure will come as no surprise to you, given the insidious cancel culture that has of late permeated our society, most parents are too fearful to speak up. But speak up you must. There is strength in numbers and I assure you, the numbers are there." From a letter by Andrew Gutmann, the full text of which is published by Bari Weiss in her Substack column, "You Have to Read This Letter/A New York father pulls his daughter out of Brearley with a message to the whole school. Is the dam starting to break?" Brearly is a girls' school in Manhattan. The annual tuition is $55,000. Gutmann's daughter has attended the school for 7 years, since kindergarten. He's calling on the other parents — the other parents who, presumably, have done what they could to shower privilege on their children — to rise up and object to the "anti-racism" that, he says, has permeated the school. "But speak up you must" — and yet, I'd predict that other parents will not speak up, but will silently agree with Gutmann, then steel themselves and endure the treatment they have been designated to receive. The one thing that makes me think parents might get it together and object is the "mandatory anti-racism training for parents" — if it really is "so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane." There has to be a point where any decent parent will say, Oh, my God, this is the crap they are feeding young minds, including my beautiful child! And yet each of them knows — they've heard it so sophomorically and simplistically — that they will be stepping directly into the official definition of racist. So Gutmann has a lot of nerve. *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email. FROM THE EMAIL Sydney writes:
And Heartless Aztec writes:
AND: Chris writes:
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