Monday, May 31, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Distraction.

Posted: 31 May 2021 10:00 AM PDT

Wild geranium.

Posted: 31 May 2021 09:28 AM PDT

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"China said on Monday that it would allow all married couples to have three children, ending a two-child policy that has failed to raise the country’s declining birthrates and avert a demographic crisis."

Posted: 31 May 2021 09:24 AM PDT

"The announcement by the ruling Communist Party represents an acknowledgment that its limits on reproduction, the world's toughest, have jeopardized the country's future. The labor pool is shrinking and the population is graying, threatening the industrial strategy that China has used for decades to emerge from poverty to become an economic powerhouse. But it is far from clear that relaxing the policy further will pay off. People in China have responded coolly to the party's earlier move, in 2016, to allow couples to have two children.... China's family planning restrictions date to 1980, when the party first imposed a 'one-child' policy to slow population growth and bolster the economic boom that was then just beginning. Officials often employed brutal tactics as they forced women to get abortions or be sterilized, and the policy soon became a source of public discontent. In 2013, as Chinese officials began to understand the implications of the country's aging population, the government allowed parents who were from one-child families to have two children themselves. Two years later, the limit was raised to two children for everyone."

And now it's 3 — but only 3 and only for married couples.

The NYT reports.

"Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice."

Posted: 31 May 2021 08:39 AM PDT

"It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

A quote by G.K. Chesterton that I bumbled into this morning as I attempted to research the hypothesis: Seriousness is not serious. But what is the source of this hypothesis?, you may ask. Ha ha. You probably have many other questions, and yet you have no reason to think I will answer them.

"The reason we’re still watching Bond movies after more than 50 years is that the family has done an extraordinary job of protecting the character through the thickets of moviemaking and changing public tastes."

Posted: 31 May 2021 07:40 AM PDT

"Corporate partners come and go, but James Bond endures. He endures precisely because he is being protected by people who love him. The current deal with Amazon gives Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who own 50 percent of the Bond empire, ironclad assurances of continued artistic control. But will this always be the case?... The Bond movies are truly the most bespoke and handmade films I've ever worked on. That's why they are original, thorny, eccentric and special. They were never created with lawyers and accountants and e-commerce mass marketing pollsters hovering in the background. This is also why they can afford to be daring."

Writes John Logan in "I Wrote James Bond Movies. The Amazon-MGM Deal Gives Me Chills" (NYT).

So... keep James Bond James Bond, right? Think again! Here's Logan's favorite thing that happened in the making of "Skyfall":

Sam Mendes, the director, and I marched into Barbara and Michael's office, sat at the family table and pitched the first scene between Bond and the villain, Raoul Silva. Now, the moment 007 first encounters his archnemesis is often the iconic moment in a Bond movie, the scene around which you build a lot of the narrative and cinematic rhythms.... Well, Sam and I boldly announced we wanted to do this pivotal scene as a homoerotic seduction. Barbara and Michael didn't need to poll a focus group. They didn't need to vet this radical idea with any studio or corporation — they loved it instantly. They knew it was fresh and new, provocative in a way that keeps the franchise contemporary. They weren't afraid of controversy. In my experience, not many big movies can work with such freedom and risky joy.

"Task-driven, repetitive, monotonous but immersive, often very frustrating, it’s exactly like having a bullshit job."

Posted: 31 May 2021 05:13 AM PDT

"The best thing about childhood, the bit that makes up for people constantly telling you what to do and where to be, is that you have those years outside the productive economy, where no one thinks to measure your worth by the net value you create, where all you have to do is grow and be endearing. While it remains the case that none of them is creating any value, in every other respect they are at the coal face, wage slaves without the wages. I'm worried that the kids have a seriousness of purpose, a rigidity of application totally out of whack with the task in hand, that nobody should rightly learn until their mid-20s...."

From "Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages" by Zoe Williams (The Guardian).

I'll end the blogging day, once again, with the sunrise.

Posted: 31 May 2021 10:14 AM PDT

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"The humor in 'Seinfeld' is a bit too gritty and New York-specific... while 'The Big Bang Theory' could come across as too much of a 'scientific nerd thing.'"

Posted: 31 May 2021 09:36 AM PDT

"'Other shows do work,' [said someone who teaches how to speak like an American]. 'Friends' just seems to have the magic something that is even more attractive.' Fans and educators on three continents echo the sentiment, saying that 'Friends' is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan's West Village. Kim Sook-han, 45, known in South Korea for her YouTube videos about teaching herself English, said that the show helped her understand the basics of American culture, including which holidays are celebrated in the United States, as well as how people there deal with conflicts between friends and family members."

From "How 'Friends' Helps People Around the World Learn English/Language teachers say the show is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from the West Village" (NYT).

Here's something linked in the article: speech instructor Rachel Smith using Rachel Green to demonstrate how to sound American (or, for us Americans, how much we know instinctively about how to sound like ourselves):

Smith has many videos, but that one concentrates on a few lines spoken by Jennifer Aniston. You learn how letters are dropped and stress and pitch are used. Very interesting! It's easy to figure out on your own why Aniston is used as a model. She sounds like a real American speaking normally. Imagine teaching non-English speakers how to talk like an American by using Jerry Seinfeld. That would be hilarious. And very wrong. Similarly, however, you could get in trouble talking like the Friends — especially if you handled stress and cadence like Chandler. Actually, all the men talk in a comically strange way. 

As for learning the culture of America by watching "Friends," that's pretty tricky too! The Friends actually do a lot of things that are socially unacceptable — notably, sexual harassment in the workplace — and because they are all nice looking and mutually supportive — and because it's 20+ years in the past — you could get the wrong idea about how to act like an American.

And yet "Friends" models a very mainstream American view of how life should be lived. You struggle with your job and your love life when you're in your 20s, but then you find a good career that you like and that establishes you firmly in the middle class, and you find someone to marry who becomes the center of your life — a life with children. "Seinfeld" did not have that. It had outsiders who actively repelled conventional love, and the only one who had job satisfaction was the one whose job was to stand apart as an outsider and make comic observations about all those normal people whose lives he did not envy or admire in the slightest.

FROM THE EMAIL: Justin points me to this old Conan O'Brien clip that seems to embody the exact point I was making in my last paragraph:

5:24 a.m.

Posted: 30 May 2021 07:30 AM PDT

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"The flagship commemoration event to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre was scrapped after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear."

Posted: 30 May 2021 07:16 AM PDT

"Monday's Remember & Rise event - which was also set to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams - was called off on Friday after survivors Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, upped their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each."

The Daily Mail reports. 

State Sen. Kevin Matthews, the chairman of the [1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission], said after meeting with Solomon-Simmons and other representatives of the survivors, the commission agreed to provide $100,000 to each of the three survivors, along with $2 million in seed money for a reparations fund.

'We raised the money and we were excited the survivors were going to accept these gifts,' Matthews said Friday. 'Unfortunately, on Sunday they reached out and increased the amount of the $100,000-per-survivor gifts to $1 million, and instead of $2 million, they asked for $50 million - $50 million - in seed money. We could not respond to those demands. To be clear, I absolutely want the survivors, the descendants and others that were affected to be financially and emotionally supported. However, this is not the way.'

This is a lesson on reparations: It will never be enough. Do the three centenarians look greedy? I will presume they feel principled. I would not criticize them. They were tapped for use in political theater, a fact made obvious by the use of the term "appearance fee." The much larger demand should be read as a desire to speak in terms of reparations, but as reparations, the exorbitant "appearance fee" looks radically undersized. In retrospect, it would seem that the commission should never have spoken in terms of money at all.

Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?

Posted: 30 May 2021 06:25 AM PDT

I'm seeing this headline on the front page of the NYT website: "Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales 'Unlike Anything We've Ever Seen.'" Clicking through, I see the headline "An Arms Race in America: Gun Buying Spiked During the Pandemic. It's Still Up. Preliminary research data show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners." 

It's absurd to state — as if it's a fact — that the pandemic "fueled" the surge when there were riots and the police stood down and did not protect the citizens! I personally got trained to use a gun last summer, and I fired a gun for the first time in my life. That had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was about civil disorder threatening my neighborhood and the manifest unwillingness of the city to keep order. You're on your own, we were told, quite plainly.

Let's see how obtusely the article avoids taking self-defense seriously. Guns aren't a way to defend yourself from the pandemic, so we look like idiots arming ourselves against that. I'd like to see if the NYT respects those of us who are actually thinking rationally about self-defense.

Paragraph 3 of the article alludes to the riots, but look how the NYT strains to undermine the rationality of decision to own a gun:

While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked. 

Not "riots," not even "disorder" — "protests." As if the gun purchasers are afraid of ideas that were expressed. Buying guns was a "spree" — "spree" sounds irrational — and it was "fueled" — as if it's a fire — by "fear" — and that fear sounds irrational, because it's a reaction to "protests" and the pandemic — 2 things that are not properly addressed by owning a gun.  

In the sixth paragraph, we see some very interesting facts:

New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic...

I'm a woman, and I was a first-time gun user last summer. 

"Americans are in an arms race with themselves," said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles....

From my perspective, I think it seems that people who want peace and safety got forced into some new practical thinking as the traditional idea of calling the police suddenly looked shockingly weak. 

There is no single reason for the surge, but social scientists point to many potential drivers. "There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality," said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence.

Well, she's almost saying it, but at such a high level of abstraction, it's almost meaningless.

"There is also all this social change, and social change is scary."

Again — meaningless abstraction. Maybe Mason said more in the interview and the NYT chose not to use it.

Thomas Harris, a former law enforcement officer who works at the gun counter at Sportsman's Warehouse in Roanoke, Va., said that around March last year, the customers he would speak with began to include more white-collar workers, such as people from insurance firms and software companies.... He said many of these apparent first-time buyers purchased more expensive guns, in the range of $400 or more. The purpose, he said, was not to carry the gun around in public, but to keep it at home.

"They were saying: 'We're going to be locking down. We're constrained to our homes. We want to keep safe.'"

That's a great quote for the NYT framework: Irrational folk thought a gun would help against the virus. 

But I do see something rational even in that. I know that last March, as the lockdown began and we laid in provisions, I contemplated the possibility that civil order would break down. What if the disease spiraled upward to the point where you couldn't get any medical care? What if you had a dead body in the house and no one would come take it away? Some people would lose their mind. Then what if the food supply chain broke down? That never happened, but it could have, and it was rational to imagine that there would be home invasions in search of food.

"Someone must explain why celebrities running for office is a recurring nightmare we cannot seem to shake. The Rock, Caitlyn Jenner, Matthew McConaughey, Randy Quaid."

Posted: 30 May 2021 05:27 AM PDT

"They all have suggested lately that when it comes to running the country, they have what it takes. And they do: malignant narcissism," said Bill Maher on his show Friday night: 

"The last four years was a warning, not an inspiration. You were supposed to see that and think, 'I guess high-level government jobs should go to people who have trained for it and know what they're doing.'..." 

The problem with that is that we don't think people in politics know what they are doing. 

"Let me put it bluntly to you and all of these show biz candidates. You're not good enough, you're not smart enough, and, doggone it, it completely doesn't matter that people like you. They like you now because you're an entertainer and thus largely uncontroversial. Governing is the opposite. If you think you can unite the country, you're delusional."

I didn't personally transcribe that. I relied on the transcription at The Hill, but I made one correction: "doggone it." The Hill has "dog on it," which made me laugh... then made me wonder what "doggone it" represents. Are we supposed to see the word "gone"? It's not as though "dog gone it" makes sense. 

Grammarphobia writes: 

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) says "doggone" is an "alteration of the Scots dagone," which is in turn an "alteration of goddamn."

And the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, citing the Scottish National Dictionary, offers published references for "dog on it" dating to 1826 and 1828.... 
The OED's first print references for "dog-gone" are from a book by the Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid called The Scalp-Hunters: Or, Romantic Adventures in Northern Mexico (1851). Here are the OED citations: "'I'm dog-gone, Jim', replied the hunter." … "Dog-gone it, man! make haste then!"

For most of the 19th century, the expression was found as both "dog gone" and "dog on" (with and without hyphens). An appearance in about 1860 in Southern Sketches has the "dog on" version: "No, says I, I won't do no sich dog on thing." Edward Eggleston's novel The Hoosier School-Master (1871) has this: "She was so dog-on stuck up."

Other versions appeared as well: "If there's a dog-goned abolitionist aboard this boat, I should like to see him" (about 1860); "He looks the dogondest cuss" (1868); "I'll be dog-oned" (1872, Eggleston again); "I'll be dog-goned" (1879); and even "dagont" (1893).

In 1892 a writer in The Nation had this opinion: "I think 'Dog gone it' is simply 'Dog on it.'"

So I can't rightly laugh at The Hill. I think the "Goddamn" theory is most likely, but once people got to saying "dog," the dog took on a life of its own. We love dogs, and bringing up dogs, even pointlessly, means something. There's so much difference between having a dog on something — which might even be pleasant — and condemning it to eternity in Hell, but euphemisms are euphemisms.

And, of course, the reason why Bill Maher — who loves to use the noneuphemisms — was saying "doggone it" was that his lines were a parody of the famous Al Franken/Stuart Smalley routine:

"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"/"Hooked on a Feeling."

Posted: 30 May 2021 07:32 PM PDT

Goodbye to B.J. Thomas, who has died at the age of 78. 

It seems that every headline about his death identifies him as either the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" singer or the "Hooked on a Feeling" singer.

You must pick one:
 
pollcode.com free polls

 

ADDED: A reader named Christopher emails:

I don't know how rough a time he had recently--it sounds pretty rough--but a scant four years ago, he was still able to sing like this. 
Also of some note, key lyrics are a changed from what I recall of the original, replacing the doomed drag racer with perhaps a simpler portrait of a man beautifully in love.

 

Beautiful song and performance. He sounds — and looks — great there. And I love the Larry's Diner set.

I love the original Beach Boys song, but here at Meadhouse, we have a special love for the Ronnie Spector version. She goes ahead and sings those drag racing lines, without changing them at all, so that the woman is the drag racer.

Peonies.

Posted: 29 May 2021 06:15 PM PDT

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"Have a good life, Jerry."

Posted: 29 May 2021 06:12 PM PDT

@nellystevens4

Don't judge my voice over 🤭 just wanted to share Jerry and my's love story #cecropia #cecropiamoth #wildlife

♬ flowers by in love with a ghost - moth

"The Great Outdoors Was Made for White People."

Posted: 29 May 2021 01:42 PM PDT

A great headline at The Nation... but is it deadly serious? Actually, yes:

Through military and legislative intervention, such as the Mariposa Battalion's violent raid of the village of Ahwahneechee in 1851, which expelled the remaining Indigenous people from Yosemite, these places were cultivated primarily for white people. Early conservationists like Bowles, or the venerated John Muir or Madison Grant (who wrote one of the foundational texts of the American eugenics movement, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History), were not shy in advocating racial exclusivity: When they spoke of the importance of nature for our nation, they meant the white nation....

The complicated relationships that people of color in the United States have developed with the outdoors because of white violence, coupled with the fact that many local parks—and all national parks—either did not admit people of color or, in some cases, segregated them until 1964, rendered it an effectively white domain....

As many of us—myself included—are itching to be outside in the greenness of summer, it is important to recognize that these are privileges that have not been afforded to everyone. At this moment of nationwide racial justice reckoning, let's not forget to interrogate the great outdoors. Like many of the most insidiously imbalanced institutions, it may appear neutral or "natural," but it's anything but. It's a man-made construction, structured to exclude. So we must work to make it truly democratic so everyone can enjoy the physical, mental, and psychological benefits of our beautiful land. Let's truly make it "our land."

ADDED: Saying "White People" hides something that lefties talk about except when they don't talk about it: women. It's much harder for women to feel free to get out and about in the great outdoors.

"[T]he pandemic turned the kaleidoscope of U.S. migration, and many families—especially many high-income families with work-from-wherever jobs—are shopping around for sunny, spacious real estate..."

Posted: 29 May 2021 01:10 PM PDT

"... and bidding up prices wherever they land.... When people leave multimillion-dollar houses in, say, Los Angeles to plunk down $1 million on a house [in Texas or Idaho] that was worth $500,000 a year ago, they turn a merely frenzied housing market into a once-in-history, hair-on-fire, what-the-hell-is-happening bonanza. Supply issues are just as important. Years of insufficient building and a construction pause during the pandemic have led to low inventory. Seniors, who in previous decades sold their homes to downsize, are now more likely to 'age in place,' which is keeping millions of homes off the market. Plus, some builders are putting their projects on hold because of the sudden tripling of lumber prices, which could delay the construction boom this country so badly needs...."

From "Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market/Rising inventory is one of several signs that we may have reached peak ludicrousness" (The Atlantic).

"What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means."

Posted: 29 May 2021 11:55 AM PDT

"That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom. My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.... The West's idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.... Our world is just a set of interlocking forms of oppressive structures, and has been since the West's emergence.... When it began, critical theory was one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them. Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal 'reasonable person' standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.... This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal."

From "Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism/What the 'Critical Race Theory' debate is really about" by Andrew Sullivan (Substack).

Sunrise.

Posted: 29 May 2021 09:03 AM PDT

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Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald punch down at Just Jess.

Posted: 29 May 2021 09:00 AM PDT

Just Jess is a woman on Twitter with less than 10,000 followers, but she said something that got a reaction:
So... turns out the new friend I went on vacation with doesn't believe there was an insurrection. So... vacation over 4 days early. Friendship way over. Mind blown.

I can't tell what this "new friend" did. Did she think there was no breach of the Capitol at all or was she getting semantic about the word "insurrection"? 

Anyway... I thought it was interesting that both Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald reacted.

Adams's reaction is pithy and funny, but he's using a tight definition of "insurrection" that exaggerates the extremism of Just Jess. He tweets:

Never go on vacation with someone who believes you can conquer a superpower by occupying a room in the Capitol.

I admire the humor technique of switching the perspective to that of the new friend. She shouldn't want to be stuck in close quarters with Jess. 

By the way, isn't it always a bad idea to go on a vacation with a new friend — at least if you're going to be stuck in a car or a hotel room with this person for many long hours? You don't know whether you'll bug each other or be any good at navigating around arguments.

Greenwald is not so funny. He barrels straight into the official humor format of the internet, sarcasm — heavy, obvious sarcasm:

Immediately terminate all friendships with anyone who sees the world differently than you see it -- especially politics. Much healthier that way never to have your views questioned or challenged by anyone near you.

What if you had to go on a cross-country road trip with one of these 3 — Glenn, Scott, or Jess? Well, I think the first choice is quite clear, but I'll hold back my response for now and give you a chance to vote:

You must drive cross-country with Glenn Greenwald, Scott Adams, or Just Jess. Assume they're all good drivers. Who do you pick?
 
pollcode.com free polls

"When Trudi Juggernauth-Sharma became wifelet No 68 to the seventh Marquess of Bath the polyamorous aristocrat drove her up to a ramshackle cottage on the edge of his Longleat estate..."

Posted: 29 May 2021 07:44 AM PDT

"... and asked her to live there so he could see her whenever his wife wasn't at home.... That was in 1998, but after his death from Covid-19 in April last year the 74 wifelets he accumulated during his life discovered this week they had been left with nothing in his will, after he gave £14 million to his wife, children and the Longleat estate. The Times understands that at least one of the three wifelets still living in cottages on the estate are being kicked out by Ceawlin Thynn, his son, the eighth Marquess of Bath. Juggernauth-Sharma, 61, who still lives in her cottage at present and said she was the most favoured wifelet, told The Times that the son had made her an outcast. 'There were some very badly behaved wifelets,' she said. 'Ceawlin doesn't have to take on his father's wifelets, I do understand but I thought he would be a bit more lenient towards me because I was different and he knew I really cared for his father. In his will he didn't say take the cottages back from my girlfriends. I thought at least I would be able to use the cottage for as long as I want.'... Dressed in glamorous clothes, she explained that her home didn't have central heating until about 2008 and the estate installed a shower only about five years ago. 'It was perishingly cold, there was just a little coal fire,' she said. 'I used to wash with a jug in the bath.'... She proudly explained that she was from the Brahmin caste, the highest position in Indian society... 'I was in love, it was something different... I was just exploring life as it came.'"

From "Marquess of Bath's son is kicking me out of Longleat, says wifelet No 68" (London Times).

"Structural and cultural shifts have convinced many on the left that their causes are broadly and increasingly popular, and that strong rights protections have become a political obstacle. "

Posted: 29 May 2021 07:35 AM PDT

"But it is rash, especially in a big and insubordinate country like this one, to imagine that appeals to reasonableness and popularity will always serve as a more reliable guide to justice than the language of the Constitution. Yes, the N.R.A. used the language of rights to defeat laws that many people say they support.... But this is how rights often work: they protect things that most people think don't deserve protection at all."

From "From Guns to Gay Marriage, How Did Rights Take Over Politics? The N.R.A., the Supreme Court, and the forces driving the country's most intractable legal debates" by Kelefa Sanneh (in The New Yorker).

Of course rights are experienced as "a political obstacle." That's exactly the idea. When shouldn't the majority win. 

Sanneh is mostly bouncing off of a book: 

Jamal Greene, a legal scholar at Columbia, thinks that all this talk about rights has gone too far. In a provocative new book, "How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), he pushes back against what he calls "rightsism," which in his view makes judges too powerful, and makes it harder for the rest of us to find reasonable solutions to our political problems....

Greene's approach would oblige both liberals and conservatives to accept compromises that they might find abhorrent. He notes that when the Court found that the right to privacy implied a right to abortion, for instance, it was "denying that a fetus could be a subject of constitutional concern." As a result, abortion in America is largely unrestricted in theory but not always readily accessible in practice, mainly because of our endless fight over state-level restrictions. He thinks that we could learn something from Germany, where laws consider the interests both of pregnant women and of fetuses. Abortion is decriminalized there, but generally only in the first trimester of pregnancy, and seekers are required to speak with a counsellor; there are special benefits and rights available to new birth parents as well. Because there is no possibility of a court offering total vindication of the right to choice or the right to life, each side is more willing to live with the compromise. This is the sobering underlying message of Greene's book, aimed at a wide range of advocates: you probably won't win. The United States is a big country, full of obstreperous citizens who claim, or would like to claim, a broad array of rights that can't all be recognized. In his view, the only way for us to live together is to guard our rights a little less jealously, resigning ourselves to a future in which we are entitled to most of what we want, but not all of it.

"Look, to his credit, Donald Trump brought many new voters into our party, and we want them to stay. He’s a former president now..."

Posted: 29 May 2021 06:58 AM PDT

"... but the issues and values that held so many Republican voters and turned so many Democrats into Republicans, those issues and values still matter.... In a lot of manufacturing towns, and in other once-forgotten places, people know who's speaking for them, and more than that, who's listening to them. Like the Reagan Democrats of another time, these voters feel respected in our party, respected for the work they do, for their way of life, and for their love of country. I can't think of any better evidence that the Republican Party has been doing at least a few things right. Having joined our ranks in the last five years, there is no reason these voters cannot go on adding their conviction and support to the conservative cause. All good-meaning people from every background should feel welcome in the forward-looking, inclusive, aspirational movement that we must be...."

From "Paul Ryan Reagan Library Speech Transcript May 27: Future of GOP" (Rev).

Peony.

Posted: 28 May 2021 05:26 PM PDT

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