Sort of a follow-up on the previous post. Georgia has handed down over 10 indictments, not only to Trump but to his posse of enablers. Glee has erupted in many quarters, as well as continued bewilderment over how certain people can still support him. We keep assuming, we who are pleased to see the system finally working, that eventually the corruption inhering to these folks will become so obvious that supporters will fall away, will, in fact, “wake up” to the fact that this was grossly illegal, illegitimate, and inimical to our country. Some have. More perhaps than reports show. But a significant number of people are still encouraging him and applauding January 6th.…
Category: current affairs
Belief and Other Matters
By now it should be obvious to everyone that the so-called Pro-Life movement is not interested in confining itself to abortion. They have a definition of it so flexible that some designate birth control as a form of it. The line is not clear. Not to mention that in individual cases there is an evident record of hypocrisy. It’s all right for me, but no one else. It should not be legal.
It makes me uncomfortable.
I do not wish to get into the gears of the matter. I have a couple of observations about the framing issues.
Firstly, the division is largely (though not wholly) a consequence of Belief.…
Courtroom Chaos
I answered my civic summons to jury duty this week. One day, Monday. I confess to being annoyed by this as I have Things To Do this week and would have preferred another week. I do not object to being called to jury duty. I think it’s important. The last time, I was selected but never got the chance to serve because the judge had had a ruling overturned and they had to start all over. I was disappointed in that one, it would have been fascinating as both lawyers appeared to be at the top of their game and it was a murder trial with some interesting features.…
A Word About The Loyal Fan Base
CNN aired its town hall with Trump and received some criticism for it. But it had been scheduled for a while and since the Right likes to accuse the Left (which CNN is at best only an honorary member) of Cancel Culture, the question to air or not to air doubtless prompted them to err on the side of not canceling. Nevertheless, opinions about the man on the stage notwithstanding, I have no carp about that. The only downside to something like this is that it took up space where something else of presumably more value might have been aired. As that seems rarely a consideration in the board rooms of media companies (what is value?…
Obvious Things
Another school shooting.
And inevitably the posturing of those grimly determined to make it about something else. Gun rights. The deaths are pushed to one side, because it’s the guns that must be protected, because they (so the excuse-making goes) are what stand between our freedom and a tyrannical government, and that any price is worth paying to preserve the means by which such freedom might be maintained, whether that freedom actually manifests as imagined or not.
At this point one thing should be obvious: for the Second Amendment Absolutist, no reasoned argument can be sufficient to change their position, because it is not about what is right, only about what they believe and feel.…
Eyes Open, Mind Engaged
To me, that is the definition of Woke. I’ve been bemused by the backlash of people who, without too much interpretation, are obviously complaining about something else loudly hurling “Woke!” as if it is a pejorative. It’s not that they have a legitimate argument, it is that they are discomfited by the implications and wish to go back to pretending there is nothing to be woke to. It’s not even subtle.
Consider one of the consequences of the backlash—the attempt to ban books. Now, this is nothing new. Banning books that unsettle the comfortable is a long American tradition, quite often less political than the kindred forms of censorship practiced elsewhere.…
On Branding
A couple of recent eruptions over literary works have caused me to contemplate a curious aspect of the cultural situation. The move by Roald Dahl’s publisher to “bowdlerize” his children’s books, to render them more palatable to contemporary audiences, and the to-do over the creator of Dilbert’s public expressions of problematic attitudes. These are the most recent after a long string of reactions to artists who turn out to have opinions, beliefs, and political positions seemingly at odds with their work. Or not. Some of the review of said work has all the makings of a minor industry of reassessments based on the failings of the creators.*…
Blame
So Trump said (more or less) that if the midterms go well, he should get all the credit and if they go badly, he should get none of the blame. This is politics. He then noted that what would likely happen is the reverse—that a Republican victory would garner him no credit and a defeat will give him all the blame. Again, this is politics. This kind of thing is standard. We see this at the presidential level all the time, if only in the rather shallow fact that a newly-elected president inevitably gets the blame for what his predecessor did when the new guy fails to magically fix everything in the first hundred days.…
Election
Next week it will be November. Election season.
Voting is already underway and by some reports it is more than tradition would suggest. A great deal is at stake.
I don’t have much to say here. Only that the issue this time around has little to do with what we have come to engage as normal. I do not believe it hyperbolic to suggest that our very way of living is at stake and that voting for narrow interests might be a mistake. The economy will not be fixed by splenetically throwing the majority party out of office. We’re in a fix due to factors beyond the ordinary—a pandemic, a major war in the east, and the aftershocks of certain trade decisions that were not well thought through.…
Please, Pale Person, Please Stop
Only because it is so omnipresent am I aware of the new raging over Ariel in The Little Mermaid and its casting of a Not White actor in the role. I would rather have not had this in my range of consciousness. I cannot convey the depth of weariness at this nonsense. You do this kind of stuff with the expectation that I, based on melanin content, will agree and share your rage.
Skin color is not intelligence. Nor is it a sign, frankly, of any kind of kinship above the purely coincidental.
Stop. Just…stop. I realize you think this of moment, important in some fundamental way, and might possibly be the last ground on which you might take a stand that is no longer acceptable as any definition of civilized, but all you are doing is embarrassing yourself and annoying me.…