Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

M1944E1/M1945 Johnson Light Machine Gun

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Aug 2016

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

After getting his Model 1941 machine gun purchased in small numbers by the US military, Melvin Johnson continued to press for more sales and a general adoption. Following testing results and recommendations from soldiers in the field, he made a number of modifications to the gun and developed the M1944, which was quickly tweaked to become the M1944E1, also called the M1945. This new version included several improvements including:

* Replacing the bipod with a monopod less prone to interfering with barrel removal
* Improved stronger bolt anti-bounce latch
* Metal dual-tube buttstock in place of wood
* and most significantly, a gas-boosted hybrid recoil operating system

This new model of the Johnson was in testing at the end of WWII, and weapons development budget cuts at the conclusion of the war prevented it from replacing the BAR as Johnson and many in the Marine Corps had hoped.

This particular M1945 Johnson is fully transferrable, as came out of the Winchester Museum Collection (now the Cody Firearms Museum) back many years ago when curators would occasionally sell items from the collection to raise money.

QotD: The TV treadmill

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At Best Buy we looked at TVs, something that always makes you rue whatever TV you had. The clerk was a smart fellow who steered us away from the 8Ks, said it’s nonsense unless you have 8K eyeballs, and besides, everything you’re getting streamed is 1080.

“All this beautiful stuff we’re seeing is shot in the highest definition known to mankind, right?”

“Right. Nothing else looks like this. But it sells TVs. What you really want, is …” and he led us over to some other TVs that looked just as good. I wondered aloud whether the entire 8K product line existed just to make us more likely to heed the wisdom of the salesman and lay out some money for the 4K.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2022-02-07.

May 10, 2022

How did Jim Jones persuade hundreds of people to commit suicide at his command?

Filed under: History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray has more disturbing details drawn from Tim Reiterman’s history/biography of Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Raven:

Reverend Jim Jones in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearny & Jackson Streets during a rally to save the hotel.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Nancy Wong, 1977 via Wikimedia Commons.

He broke families, he taught fear, he isolated people, he shamed and demeaned people to break their spirit, he made people dependent, he ran obedience tests with deliberate sadism to see who would take it. That’s it. Those are the tools. Again, all of this comes from Tim Reiterman’s book Raven, which I encourage you to read.

When Jonestown shows up in news stories, Peoples Temple is usually described as a 1970s-era Bay Area cult that moved to Guyana. But that’s not where Jim Jones started the church — he began in Indianapolis in the 1950s. In a moment when there were mostly black churches and white churches, Jones insisted on building a racially integrated congregation. Then he warned them, with increasing urgency, that the church would be attacked by white supremacists who were outraged by their social progress; a flood of menacing phone calls and threatening letters backed up the point. One night, as members of the church visited Jones at home, he stepped into his bedroom alone — just as a brick crashed through the window. The visitors rushed into the bedroom, where Jones told them that the white supremacists had just attacked his house. (Miraculously, the brick and the broken glass had landed outside the window.)

Over the years, the threats built to a crescendo — look, another terrifying letter! — and Jones warned his congregation that the white supremacist threat was moving toward its culmination. At the same time, he began to receive visions about the other great threat hanging over the world: nuclear war. It’s coming, he told them, over and over again, sometimes even naming likely dates for the attack.

Finally, under the increasingly terrifying dual threat of death from local attack or death from Soviet missiles, either of which could happen at any moment, Jones sent an advance party across the country to find a place where his people could survive — and then, with a secure haven located, he led his congregation to safety in a remote area of Northern California. Good thing they made it out, right?

For a congregation of Midwesterners, the journey to California meant a departure from parents, siblings, and adult children; for many, it meant a departure from their birthplace and every social connection they had made outside the church. It put them in the woods a couple thousand miles from their families, in isolation together in a new place.

Then, with church members living in church-built homes on a church-owned property, Jones helped them to see that selfishness was cruel and atavistic. People who loved, who were spiritual, shared together. So what kind of self-involved monster kept a husband or a wife trapped in a limiting one-on-one relationship? Liberating the members of his church, he helped them to start having sex with other church members outside of their marriages. In some instances, particularly close couples with especially stable relationships — like the church attorney Tim Stoen and his wife, Grace — forced Jones to issue direct orders telling them who else they would be having sex with. And yes, it did liberate them from the confinement of their close marriage, quickly and decisively.

Jones also helped by having sex with everybody, teaching them how to become free. One night, Jones had a heart attack — another maneuver he used all the time — in the presence of a church member named Larry Layton; as Layton rushed to help, Jones explained that he needed to fuck Layton’s wife, and had already started, and had brought her to orgasm “no fewer than sixteen or seventeen times” during their first encounter. But no worries, because Jones also assigned another church member, Karen Tow, to have sex with Layton to assuage his pain. After the divorce, Layton and Tow got married — but Tow let Layton know that she still preferred to have sex with Jones. See how liberating this is?

Canadian Armed Forces considering banning Islamic, Jewish, and Christian chaplains for their racist, misogynistic, and bigoted beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When an organization goes woke, there’s no halfway measures … it’s all-woke, all the time. Recently the Canadian Armed Forces received a report that could result in current chaplains being forced to resign their commissions because their religious beliefs “are not aligned with those of the Defence Team”. One wonders how future recruiting efforts will go with believing members of those faith-based communities who are potentially going to be explicitly described as “racist, misogynistic, and bigoted”:

Calling other parties racist in the House of Commons is bad. Calling whole religions and their adherents racist, misogynist and bigoted is worse

And yet, this government is being called to support one of the most egregious examples of anti-religious sentiment I have ever seen in Canada, and it was published by the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination. This document is supposed to advise the Canadian Armed Forces on racism and discrimination in the military and, if the government were to follow through on its recommendations, it would effectively disqualify chaplains from Canada’s largest faith groups.

In its final report, this panel recommends that the military should “not consider for employment as spiritual guides or multi-faith representatives Chaplaincy applicants affiliated with religious groups whose values are not aligned with those of the Defence Team.”

As you read the document, it quickly becomes clear that their understanding of “values” appear to be completely ignorant of the actual practice of the very religions they defame. Yet the report would disqualify clergy from — at the very least — the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) under the grounds that these faiths are inherently discriminatory.

Not content to deal with actual cases of misogyny, sexism and discrimination, the government’s panelists have taken a go at determining which beliefs and philosophies are acceptable in Canada’s new modern military.

“The Advisory Panel has observed that there are varying degrees of misogyny, sexism, and discrimination woven into the philosophies and beliefs of some mainstream religions currently represented in the cadre of chaplains in the CAF,” the report says.

Then it gets worse.

The Crusades: Part 4 — Life in Outremer

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 11 Feb 2021

The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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18th blogiversary

Filed under: Administrivia, Personal — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Eighteen years ago, blogging was already “a thing” and everyone and their sainted mother was starting a blog. The availability of low-cost and even free blogging sites encouraged a lot of people to create a blog of their own and many of them quickly discovered that they didn’t have a lot to say after the first few dozen posts. About five years later, the supply of new blogs starting was trending well below the number of bloggers hanging up the keyboard and shuttering their sites. The rise of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter took even more attention away from what once was a thriving online community. Some old-time bloggers like Iowahawk made the transition to social media very naturally and these days his follower count on Twitter is quickly surpassing almost every major community in Iowa the United States: “Update: 219,350 followers, now the 103rd largest town in the USA #SuckItTacoma #YoureNextSanBernardino”

I noted last year that the staple phrase “Blogging is a stagnant backwater of the internet these days” is still pretty accurate but Substack continues to grow and attract really good writers to its platform. They’re very careful not to call it mere blogging, of course: blogging is tired and old-fashioned and they had to knap their own flint … so not like the cool kids at Substack.

Annual traffic statistics aren’t included in these annual posts any more because the plug-in I had been using since 2009 blew up spectacularly — knocking the site offline for more than 24 hours — so I no longer have anything like a continuous data series to draw on. Over the last few years, I was regularly clocking in between one and two million “hits” in a year, but as you’d expect a lot of those were bots rather than actual human visitors. I’ve seen a slight uptick in traffic from Twitter in the last few weeks, but not really enough to qualify as significant (perhaps the possible Elon Musk take-over has reduced the shadow bans so many conservative and libertarian accounts were subject to).

Earlier anniversary postings:

Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon P’s site … and eventually consuming some 90+% of his paid bandwidth and storage — aren’t accessible any more, at least I haven’t been able to get access for quite some time:

History of Rome in 15 Buildings 08. The Baths of Caracalla

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published 27 Sep 2018

Every day, ten thousand bathers and over a million gallons of water were funneled through the Baths of Caracalla, the subject of this eighth episode in our History of Rome. The astonishing scale of the Baths indicates the power of two Roman obsessions: imperial propaganda and public bathing.

If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:

https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…

If you’re so inclined, you can follow me elsewhere on the web:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/

To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/the-baths-of-…

Thanks for watching!

QotD: When are professors not really professors? When they’re “adjunct” or “contingent” professors

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now the why of the Patreon leads neatly into my musing for the week. Because you may be thinking “wait, I thought this fellow said he had a day job” – and I do! I teach history at a university! But it does not cover my research or projects like this. But this is a good time to talk about the contingent/non-contingent divide in academia, which I have wanted to do for a while. So let’s do that (what I’m going to say here is mostly about the United States’ universities, so I’m going to use that terminology; academic titles differ country to country):

When most people think about professors, they are thinking about tenured or tenure-track (TT) professors. In the USA, generally, tenure-track professors (those who will be eligible for tenure at some time in the future) have the job title of assistant professor. Academics with tenure are typically associate professors or full professors. What all of these have in common is that the professor’s salary and workload assume that they are being paid both for their primary teaching responsibilities, but also some amount of research or public outreach. It’s a whole package. How much teaching and how much research differs substantially institution to institution.

Then you have contingent or (more commonly) adjunct professors, who are not eligible for tenure. Mostly these are early career academics still looking to land a permanent tenure-track position. Now I want to be clear here: adjuncts almost always have PhDs – the days when it was possible for people to land even these jobs without a completed dissertation and a finished PhD are long over. Most students have no idea their instructors are adjuncts which – given how poorly many institutions treat their adjuncts – is often damned heartbreaking.

Universities have realized that “adjunct” has a negative ring to it, so they call these folks (which, as you may have grasped, includes me) all sorts of job titles designed to disguise that fact (mostly from prospective students and parents). The most honest of those (and, in my opinion, the best) is “Visiting Instructor” or “Visiting Lecturer”, but you’ll see all sorts of permutations of “visiting” or “teaching” faculty. In job postings, the most substantial of these positions (with a full teaching load) are often described as “Visiting Assistant Professor” (VAP) – but note that visiting in the front essentially invalidates the two words that follow it: a VAP is an adjunct, not an assistant professor. They’re just an adjunct with a full load (and maybe benefits, but often not).

Now, the exact arrangements for these sorts of contingent positions vary wildly, but as a rule (again, there are exceptions!) as a rule, adjuncts are paid for their teaching on a class by class basis, essentially as contract workers. They often don’t get benefits (like health insurance, or even an office in some places!) or any kind of job security – the positions are frequently year-to-year or even semester-to-semester. Crucially, while adjuncts are often expected to discuss their research during the hiring process and frequently aim – as I do – to continue with it during their adjunct job, they are not paid for the research they do and generally do not receive the sort of institutional support which would enable an active research agenda (funding, sabbaticals, etc). They are paid to teach classes and pretty much only teach classes. It is not an ideal system.

(I’m intending, probably as we get closer to summer, to do a short post-series covering the entire academic life-cycle, along with what exactly an academic historian does all day. The popular image that we’re all just hanging out, smoking pipes, drinking wine and having deep thoughts is not very accurate.)

Which brings us back around to the Patreon. I am currently (as I write this) teaching as a Visiting Lecturer, which is to say, an adjunct. Now, I want to be clear that I am not beating up on my current institution here. I actually think the department I am currently in has been very good with my appointment here – it was extremely useful for me (for reasons I won’t get into). But they aren’t paying me for my research or for this blog.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 13, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-12.

May 9, 2022

Canada has no abortion law on the books: this is extremely convenient for the federal Liberals

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskate-freeloading readers portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors explain why we should expect exactly zero change to Canadian law on the abortion issue regardless of what happens in the United States in the wake of a leaked US Supreme Court draft decision that has agitated and carbonated the debate there all over again:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

… given the extent to which Canadian media and politics has become thoroughly Americanized in the past few years, it was inevitable that the draft ruling immediately took over the front pages of our national papers and became the dominant topic of debate in the House of Commons. And while we are loath to contribute to what we see as a very unhelpful trend, there are some Canada-relevant aspects of this that at least one of your editors thinks are worth discussing.

The first is the obvious glee with which the Liberal party greeted the leak. Of course they all acted appalled, with a parade of cabinet ministers taking to Twitter to talk about the “concerning” news out of the U.S. and to make it clear that they would never allow anything like this to happen in Canada.

But for all their bluster, the Liberals long ago perfected a curious little two-step here. On the one hand, they never tire of asserting that the debate over abortion is “settled”, and that the pro-choice position is and will always be the law of the land. Yet on the other hand, Liberals are constantly acting as if we’re just one private member’s bill away from Canada becoming the Republic of Gilead. But as Chris Selley pointed out in a recent column, if abortion rights are so fragile and tenuous, why haven’t the Liberals done anything about it? Perhaps the imminent overthrow of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. might provide the government with the perfect occasion to finally put abortion rights on Canada on a proper legislative footing. Or, at the very least, define and defend the status quo.

That will never happen, for two reasons.

The first reason the Liberals won’t move to do something has to do with a philosophical equivocation at the heart of Canada’s pro-choice movement. In some guises, the pro-choice position is framed as a harm reduction policy, not completely dissimilar to needle exchange programs or safe injection sites for drug users. That is, while we may legitimately debate and disagree over the moral worth of the activity itself, there is no question that it is something that is going to happen regardless. Given that, the best thing for the state to do is make sure that the circumstances under which it takes place are as safe and accessible as possible, while withholding moral judgment.

But there’s another position, which holds that abortion is akin to a victimless crime: the fetus simply deserves no moral standing, so getting an abortion is no more morally controversial than getting your appendix removed.

The advantage to the status quo is that it allows the government, as well as pro-choice supporters, to remain formally agnostic on this question. There is no law, so the law needs to take no position. But any attempt to put a legal framework around abortion would probably require that the fetus be given some status at some point in development. And that opens a huge can of worms, not least for someone like Justin Trudeau who, at times, has claimed to be personally opposed to abortion but a pro-choice practicing Catholic. Why would he be against abortion personally, unless he believed that it was, at some level, wrong?

This brings us to our second point. In his column, Selley called on Trudeau to “grow up” and defend the status quo on its principles. But why would he do that? The Liberals benefit enormously from the status quo, including the lack of clarity around it. Abortion is legal (in the sense that there is nothing in the criminal code forbidding it), and reasonably accessible, depending on which part of the country you live in. But it’s also tenuous, which means the Liberals get to spend a good part of every election campaign wedging the ever-loving crap out of the Conservatives, whose benches are chock full of people who are anti-abortion, or at least, anti-the-status-quo on abortion.

Given how successful this strategy has been, there is no reason for the Liberals to change it, since for them the tenuous status of abortion is a feature of the current regime, not a bug.

Barbie and the Trail of Blood – WAH 059 – May 8, 1943

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 8 May 2022

Europe is burning and it seems there is little that will end the suffering except victory over Naziism.
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Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

Filed under: Books, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray is reading a book by Tim Reiterman which goes into great detail about the life and career of cult leader and mass murderer Jim Jones:

Reverend Jim Jones in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearny & Jackson Streets during a rally to save the hotel.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Nancy Wong, 1977 via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1971, Jim Jones loaded up some buses in California and took members of his Peoples Temple across the country to Pennsylvania — to Woodmont, the estate of the late spiritual leader Father Divine, who had a much bigger church (and a lot more money) than Jones did.

Reaching Woodmont, Jones tried Plan A, announcing the glorious news that he was the reincarnation of Father Divine and had come to lead his church again, and we might as well just go ahead and put my name on all the bank accounts; the dead leader’s wife suggested, in fairly clear language, that Jones get back on his bus while he could still walk. The delegation from Peoples Temple took the hint. But Jones also executed Plan B, with modest success: He poached some congregants, and drove them across the country to his own church in Ukiah.

Back home, Jones worried that people who had followed Father Divine would struggle to make the transition, feeling more loyalty to their old leader than to their new one. So he showed them that he couldn’t be crossed. One day, as the refugees from Philadelphia sat eating a meal with everyone else in the communal dining room, Jones walked in and caught several of the earlier members of his church being disloyal to him — and so, pointing a finger, he ordered them to die.

They did, immediately. Bodies littered the floor. Jones let the silence linger, standing over the lifeless bodies of the people who had betrayed his trust, the power of death shooting through his fingertips. And then he showed his merciful side: He resurrected them, a choice that allowed the dead to share the horrible feeling of being struck down by the indescribably vast and awesome power of Jim Jones. Terrified, the new members of the church fell into line.

He did this shit all the time. During recruiting trips to rented churches in other cities, visitors had mid-sermon strokes and heart attacks; nurses in the congregation frantically tried to resuscitate them, but announced that it was too late. But no, the Reverend Jones wouldn’t allow death to strike in his own holy church! Rushing forward and shoving the nurses aside, he commanded the dead to ARISE, ARIIIIISSSSEEE yadda yadda whatever. In 1972, a church bulletin proudly announced that Jones had personally resurrected forty dead people so far in just that one year. And here you are feeling proud that you remembered to make the bed this morning.

I take these stories from Raven, a doorstop-thick history of Jones and Peoples Temple written by the journalist Tim Reiterman (with research assistance from a colleague, John Jacobs). Reiterman decided to write about Jones after he was shot at Jonestown, visiting the final Peoples Temple location with the congressional delegation led by Leo Ryan. The research task was made easier by the self-regard the Reverend Jones had felt, because he left behind a giant catalogue of taped sermons and lectures, and a long paper trail of church bulletins and memoranda. The resulting book is an extraordinarily detailed look at every step Jones took along the path to mass murder, starting with the sadistic hucksterism of his strange childhood.

Military Civics: The Many Armies of the United States

Filed under: History, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Chieftain
Published 19 Dec 2020

There are just shy of a hundred official land component military organizations in the United States of America, each with their own unique legal structure and chain of command. In this video, I try to break down the details for you. It also seems to have taken several days for someone to observe I have the branches in the wrong sequence, Marines go before Navy.

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QotD: Mayonnaise

Filed under: Food, France, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher’s rant, falsely innocent as a magician’s handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar.

The mystery of mayonnaise — and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this — is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine’s angry brother), salt, sugar (earth’s primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol’ calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn’t put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France’s gift to the New World’s muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity’s ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito, 2004.

May 8, 2022

“… a majority of ‘pro-lifers’ are women, not men. So [Kamala] Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?”

Filed under: Health, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan comments on the leak of a draft US Supreme Court decision that would strike down Roe vs. Wade and the over-the-top reactions on social media from progressives:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement. This was a culture war 9/11. “I have typed and deleted a great many comments,” Roxane Gay tweeted. “What do you say when nine people can dictate what happens to your body? It’s ridiculous and hateful.” The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, always the subtle one, announced that the court had abolished the entire 20th century. Yep: no more suffrage for women! Jim Crow now!

Taking the arguments of abortion opponents seriously was never an option: “Stripping women of their humanity and rights isn’t a consequence of the ‘pro-life’ agenda, it’s the entire point,” declared Jessica Valenti. Rebecca Traister confessed: “My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour. Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically — actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.”

Going further, freshly-minted critical gender theorist, Jennifer Rubin, argued that any restriction on abortion rights is a violation of secularism: “The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict.” Kurt Andersen went old school and worried about a papist cabal: “It really is kind of remarkable that only one in five Americans call themselves Catholic, but of the Supreme Court majority apparently about to permit abortion to be outlawed, all but one are Catholic and that one was raised Catholic.” Then there’s Vox‘s Ian Millhiser: “Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said ‘fuck it! Let’s burn this place down.'” Fuck it! I’ll do it live!

Kamala Harris also found her voice:

    Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, “How dare they?” How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

The premise here is that all women support abortion rights. But there is no serious gender gap on this question. In fact, a majority of “pro-lifers” are women, not men. So Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?

Within minutes of the SCOTUS leak, moreover, we were told it means that before long, interracial marriages will be banned … in a country where 94 percent support them! Imagine Clarence Thomas divorcing himself by jurisprudence. Here’s Traister again: “Voting rights were gutted in 2013. Marriage equality. Griswold. Loving. Don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you such fears are silly or overblown.” Actually, listen to them — if you can hear them over Traister’s permanent rage-tantrum.

What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it. How dare voters have a say on abortion rights! The issue — which divides the country today as much as it has for decades — is one that apparently cannot ever be put up for a vote. On this question, Democrats really do seem to believe that seven men alone should make that decision — once, in 1973. Women today, including one on SCOTUS? Not so much.

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