Althouse

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• "Ideally, all of State Street would become a grand promenade and urban park with sidewalk cafes, public art, trees, live music, small business kiosks and more."
• "To be sardonic is to be disdainfully or cynically humorous, or scornfully mocking."
• "And together, their righteous music created all kinds of tacit friction with the accusations of racism currently being leveled at today’s NFL..."
• "Is the legal standard for libel outdated? Sarah Palin could help answer. Her lawsuit against the New York Times will hinge on an earlier case. Some critics think it’s time for a new rule."

"Ideally, all of State Street would become a grand promenade and urban park with sidewalk cafes, public art, trees, live music, small business kiosks and more." Posted: 14 Feb 2022 07:08 AM PST "That's been a dream in our community for half a century — one the State Journal editorial board will continue to promote. For now, though, the mayor insists her snazzy and long BRT buses must run up and down the top half of State Street. We don't agree with that decision, and we hope a future mayor thinks bigger about Downtown's potential.... As soon as the weather improves this spring, Madison should cordon off lower State Street on weekends and give a longer pedestrian mall a try. Assuming the extra space is popular — and we're confident it will be — Madison can then pursue remaking at least half of State Street into a permanent mall without vehicles, similar to Pearl Street in Boulder, Colo. Madison should make this the summer that its most famous street comes roaring back after years of struggle." Write the editors of the Wisconsin State Journal, after a public transit consultant hired by the city recommends new bus routes that avoid the lower half of State Street (the 3 blocks closest to the University).

"To be sardonic is to be disdainfully or cynically humorous, or scornfully mocking." Posted: 14 Feb 2022 07:26 AM PST Wikipedia explains at "Sardonicism," to which I was redirected when I clicked on the words "sardonic grin" in the caption "Sardo-Punic mask showing a Sardonic grin" under this riveting image: I found that at the Wikipedia article "Punic people," which I was reading because the letter combination "punic" had arisen in the course of talking about a particular word puzzle. But what is the "Sardonic grin"? Both the concept and the etymology of the word ["sardonic"]... appear to stem from the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. The 10th-century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia Suda traces the word's earliest roots to the notion of grinning (Ancient Greek: σαίρω, romanized: sairō) in the face of danger, or curling one's lips back at evil. One explanation for the later alteration to its more familiar form and connection to laughter (supported by the Oxford English Dictionary) appears to stem from an ancient belief that ingesting the sardonion (σαρδόνιον) plant from Sardinia (Σαρδώ) would result in convulsions resembling laughter and, ultimately, death. In Theory and History of Folklore, Vladimir Propp discusses alleged examples of ritual laughter accompanying death and killing, all involving groups. These he characterized as sardonic laughter: Among the very ancient people of Sardinia, who were called Sardi or Sardoni, it was customary to kill old people. While killing their old people, the Sardi laughed loudly. This is the origin of notorious sardonic laughter (Eugen Fehrle, 1930). In light of our findings things begin to look different. Laughter accompanies the passage from death to life; it creates life and accompanies birth. Consequently, laughter accompanying killing transforms death into a new birth, nullifies murder as such, and is an act of piety that transforms death into a new life.... Risus sardonicus is an apparent smile on the face of those who are convulsing because of tetanus, or strychnine poisoning. From the Oxford English Dictionary, "A fixed, grin-like expression resulting from spasm of facial muscles, esp. in tetanus." Also: [Convulsion of the] facial muscles may cause a characteristic expression called Risus sardonicus (from the Latin for scornful laughter) or Risus caninus (from the Latin for doglike laughter or grinning). This facial expression has also been observed among patients with tetanus. Risus sardonicus causes a patient's eyebrows to rise, eyes to bulge, and mouth to retract dramatically, resulting in what has been described as an evil-looking grin. In 2009 scientists at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Italy claimed to have identified hemlock water dropwort as the plant responsible for producing the sardonic grin. This plant is the candidate for the "sardonic herb", which was a neurotoxic plant used for the ritual killing of elderly people in pre-Roman Sardinia. When these people were unable to support themselves, they were intoxicated with this herb and then dropped from a high rock or beaten to death. If I read that correctly: The old people were given a substance that made them look like they were laughing while they were being murdered, and the murderers were also laughing, and not because they found it funny, but because they believed their laughing would transport their victim to a new life. And that's what "sardonic" means.

"And together, their righteous music created all kinds of tacit friction with the accusations of racism currently being leveled at today’s NFL..." Posted: 14 Feb 2022 06:33 AM PST "... from the league's silencing of quarterback Colin Kaepernick's public stand against racist policing to coach Brian Flores's recent lawsuit against the league for its allegedly discriminatory hiring practices. Not so tacit: Dre's foregrounding of rap music as a truth-to-power speaking mechanism and a rebuke of the American police violence that continues to disproportionately end so many Black lives across this broken country of ours." Writes Chris Richards in "Dr. Dre delivered the Super Bowl halftime show rap music deserves/Today's most popular idiom of American music was long overdue for this kind of celebration" (WaPo). Tacit friction.... "Righteous music" creates "tacit friction" — "all kinds of tacit friction" — friction against "accusations of racism." What point is being made (if any)? The fact that rap artists performed at the Super Bowl somehow counters all the various arguments that there is racism within the business of football?  If that's Richards's point I'm not impressed. Of course, the business of football likes to put the most famous and popular artists out there on its big Super Bowl half-time stage. They want credit for that, presumably, but I wouldn't give any. Do they get demerits? Eh. Why? So what can you say? You can say it creates all kinds of tacit friction. In which case, why say anything? Speaking of not saying anything, I couldn't hear the words. Rarely can you understand the words from the performers at Super Bowl half-time, but it's a special problem with rap, which depends so heavily on its words. But I know the material performed is very famous, so much of the audience knows the words and heard it just fine. And anyway, as I was just saying yesterday, here, "My personal policy is to skip every song as soon as the 'n-word' comes up." And by "comes up," I mean, I hear it. I never did.

"Is the legal standard for libel outdated? Sarah Palin could help answer. Her lawsuit against the New York Times will hinge on an earlier case. Some critics think it’s time for a new rule." Posted: 14 Feb 2022 04:09 AM PST Headline at The Washington Post for an op-ed by University of Chicago lawprof Genevieve Lakier: It's rather strange that such a heated debate is raging over the 'actual malice" standard. These words, now a lodestar of constitutional law, almost didn't make it into [New York Times v.] Sullivan at all. None of the litigants in that case argued for such a rule, nor was there much debate about it during oral argument. Justice William Brennan, who wrote the opinion in the case, claimed that his clerks came up with it in chambers. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a rule fashioned on the fly, there really is much to criticize about it....  Lakier puts a link on "clerks," and it goes to a law review article that says, "In later years, Justice Brennan would recall that his clerks discovered the opinion's 'actual malice' language, but in fact, it was contained in Herbert Wechsler's brief." Wechsler argued the case for the New York Times. Lakier's conclusion calls the "actual malice" standard "an accident of history": The rule is an icon of American constitutional law and unique in the common-law world. It's an emblem of American free-speech exceptionalism and a source of pride. But it's also, to some extent, an accident of history. We need not let Sullivan limit our imagination of how First Amendment law could better serve the public interest in a vastly different media environment from the one in which the decision was handed down. As a writer in this "vastly different media environment," I think New York Times v. Sullivan is more valuable than ever. Go ahead ahead and exercise your "imagination" over how First Amendment law could "better serve" your idea of "the public interest," but the Supreme Court needs to keep the iconic precedent that we have relied on for so long.

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