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- The dissenting Wisconsin Supreme Court justices "called the approval of the Republican maps nonsensical, noting that while [Governor] Evers’s maps had added a Black-majority Assembly district, the Republicans’ maps had removed one...."
- At the Sunrise Café...
- "The most important thing to keep in mind is that Russia is a completely depoliticized country. People generally don’t want to have anything in common with politics."
- "Part of the Left’s outrage at Trump was his refusal to speak in hieratic language.* He’s spent his life buying and selling politicians, negotiating with construction unions, bureaucrats, and The Boys."
- "Mr. Trump repeatedly used the word 'we' in his remarks that day. 'We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,' Mr. Trump said."
- WaPo begins its story about censorship in medias res, and I'll bet most WaPo readers don't notice that the story is incomprehensible.
- "The Russian conservative elites currently in power supported war because they see Western power as decadent and declining...."
| Posted: 16 Apr 2022 05:32 AM PDT "The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which had filed a brief in the case, said the justices had correctly 'recognized that our Constitution reserves race-based decision-making for the most extreme situations.' 'The governor did not justify his race-based redistricting," the organization continued. 'The court was right to reject it.' Wisconsin has been among the most bitterly contested legal battlegrounds over partisan gerrymandering." So one party tried to get one more majority-minority district and the other party tried to get one less. Neither tried to keep the number the same. Under the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the governor needed to show that the federal Voting Rights Act required this additional majority-minority district. He didn't, so we end up with the only other map, the Republicans'. |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 05:31 PM PDT  ... you can talk about whatever you want.  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 10:23 AM PDT "There is an incredible contempt and disdain for all kinds of politics just because Russians are completely certain that there is no possible way to change anything through politics, that no change is possible in general. So for that reason, people prefer to lead their private lives. They have opportunities to do that because most of them are better off under Putin. Any kind of political activity is all just complete nonsense to a vast majority of Russians. If you believe in extraterrestrials, that's at least interesting. If you are into politics, you're silly. Particularly for people in business, that's a complete no go. I always say the best way to spoil the party is to start talking about politics in Russia. You will never be invited again.... The vast majority is either in denial of what is going on in Ukraine or assume this attitude of passive support that the narrative produced by the state is enough for them to keep leading their everyday lives.... The TV show House was actually incredibly popular in Russia precisely because the motto is 'Everyone lies.' This is so to the point with what Russians feel. Everyone lies. There's no truth at all. It's endless relativism. And the media was saying all the time that you should never trust anyone, including the media, of course...." Says Greg Yudin, a political philosophy professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, quoted in "'Russia Is Completely Depoliticized' A sociologist from Moscow explains how the nation learned to deny reality" (NY Magazine). |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 08:49 AM PDT "He speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official." Writes David Mamet, in the essay "Attention Must Be Paid," collected in "Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch." Here's the footnote, which is the main reason I'm blogging this: Those people who got so mad at Trump for lying — in Mamet's view, what really made them mad was that he did not lie. Consider that. It's the language he eschewed — the "hieratic language" — that's full of lies.  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 08:08 AM PDT "'And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.' Mr. Miller rebutted the implication that the word 'we' indicated that Mr. Trump was trying to incite the crowd to action... arguing that it has been used in political speech for decades, including by President John F. Kennedy in reference to the moon landing." Imagine spending 8 hours getting asked over and over what Trump might have meant by "we"? Everyone has access to the speech and can speculate. What's Miller supposed to say? "We" is an important word in political speech. "We, the People." And hasn't Trump ended every rally with a litany that repeats "We will..." with various aspirations expressed, culminating in "We will make America great again"? It's a trope. Here's your palate cleanser. JFK saying "We choose to go to the moon...."
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| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 08:15 AM PDT I'm trying to read "An author was set to read his unicorn book to students. The school forbade it" by Jaclyn Peiser. How does it happen that an author gets into the position of being "set to read" his book to a captive audience of children? There are thousands of authors who might want access to children. They can't all be sitting there in a little chair reading their book to a bunch of kids who've been forced to sit quietly at their feet and receive the ideas they've put into a book. You can love books and hate censorship and still want to carefully control what books are read to the children in your care! The article begins "Jason Tharp wants to write books for weird kids...." He's written a book and, we're told:
But wait! Why was he there? By what process had he acquired this gig? We're suddenly in the middle of things. He had a scheduled appearance before the little schoolkids, but who invited him and why? He was singled out and brought in. How does that happen? We're only told about the withdrawal of the invitation.
I wonder if he asked the same question when he received the invitation. Or did he assume they wanted him in the first place because they thought it was a gay pride book that would suit very young children?
If that quote is accurate, the principal sounds sarcastic, gesturing vaguely at parents who are afraid the school wants to indoctrinate their children on the subject of sexuality. Those words mock the parents' desire to control the education of their children by making them sound ignorant, worrying that an adult can cause a child to "become gay." (By the way, I wonder if some parents might find the book transphobic: If the unicorn's problem is not looking like the horses, why isn't the solution to have the horn removed?) I've read this article to the end, and I never learned how or why Tharp received the invitation to read to the children. I do see that the school ordered over 500 copies of the book for the event! This isn't about censorship. This is about lots of money and privilege going to one author as opposed to other authors. It's hard to believe this book was chosen because of its value as literature as opposed to its value as propaganda. There are so many children's books on the general theme of feeling like an outsider and then finding a way to be happy. Now, I do see the problem: A scheduled event was was cancelled. But we can't understand the full story unless we know why this book was chosen. This article should give us the complete narrative and should have at least some regard for the parents who want to guide their children's understanding of sexuality and who fear that the schools are crowding them out and exploiting the access they have to children. Can the schools own up to their plan to help children feel happy about diversity — including diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity — and explain how a book like this is therefore excellent and thoroughly wholesome? That's the kind of speech that is demanded, that the parents have a right to receive, and that seems to be withheld, perhaps on the theory that too many parents are stupid or hateful. Don't censor that speech. Come out in the open and say clearly what you are doing and why. It's okay. Isn't it? |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2022 08:10 AM PDT "In his sermon approximately two weeks into the war, on March 6, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church justified the invasion of Ukraine as necessary to defend Orthodox Christians against Western values and gay pride parades. On March 24, during a meeting with young artists, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained... the West was now 'trying to cancel a whole 1,000-year culture, our people … Russian writers and books are now canceled.'... Russian media filled with TV shows and 'documentaries' on 'Gayropa' and 'Sodom.' These shows conjured up a caricature of weak 'gayish' Western males and women who lost their femininity by competing with men in spheres where they could achieve nothing serious. Russian media frequently stressed the oddity that many Western democracies nominated women as defense ministers... ... Russia depicted itself... as the country of strength, the bulwark of traditional families: with strong men, fertile women and children properly guarded against subversive homosexual propaganda... Fascinated by this flattering vision of Russia, elites, it seems, overestimated the nation's strength and underestimated Ukraine's." Write Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner in "Russia believed the West was weak and decadent. So it invaded. Russia sees itself at the global forefront of the culture wars, leading the resistance to gay parades, 'cancel culture,' and liberal values more generally" (WaPo). |
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