Today the Supreme Court sided against a school district that tried to punish a high school student for sending a "vulgar message" away from school grounds. The ACLU defended the student, and good for them. Free speech is free speech, and it should protect even kids on their own time.
Really? Are they trying to make sure to offend the public over this? Shouldn't our goal be to get people on our side, not to make them wonder if this is the right side after all?
Come on, people. Think. We're supposed to be the adults here.
This is the town of Big Pine, taken from halfway up Highway 168 with the Eastern Sierra in the background. It's hard for a suburban boy like me to imagine waking up every morning to this view.
There have always been nutjobs and idiots in politics and there always will be, but I think a disturbing trend in recent years has been smart non-crazy people getting invested in sanewashing bad actors.
By "sanewashing," Matt is referring to the practice of trying to explain away insane statements. For example, "Defunding the police doesn't really mean defunding the police. It really means _______"
Now, for some reason this is not an issue on the right. Their nutcases get to say anything they want and nobody cares. I acknowledge that this is totally unfair. But who cares? The goal of politics is to win elections, not to lose and then whine about the unfairness of the other side having some advantage you lack.
On the left, which is what I care about, this is a big issue, and it's a big issue for one specific reason: it scares off people who might vote for us. Go ahead and ask your moderate conservative friends why they're afraid to vote for Democrats even though they admit that Trump has turned the Republican Party into a clown show. The answer is almost always going to be a litany of complaints about the most extreme progressive policies out there. They're afraid Democrats want to spend another $6 trillion because one guy proposed it. They're afraid Democrats want to open the border with Mexico because a small clique approves of it. They're afraid Democrats want to get rid of the police because three or four people suggested it. They're afraid Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court even though this is a distinctly limited view.
I could go on, but you get the idea. These kinds of things are killers for a party that wants to win more votes, but everyone is afraid to publicly denounce them hard and fast for fear of being branded racist/sexist/transphobic/etc. by a few extremists. And that's all the opening that Fox News and others need to make it seem as if this stuff might really be the goal of mainstream liberals.
Mainstream liberals should not be afraid to make a distinction between proposals that are merely to our left and proposals that are batshit crazy. The former we can oppose in a normal way (and vice versa), but the latter should be swatted down with extreme prejudice. It doesn't matter if the folks proposing the crazy ideas are white or Black, young or old, or men or women. Have the guts to call them nutcases if that's what they are and to accept the inevitable accusations of racism, sexism, ageism, or whatever. Just tell the truth. If something is crazy, call it crazy.
Sweden suddenly announced 34 new deaths on Tuesday, so apparently someone finally came into the office and plowed through a week's worth of local reports. It's good to see that the Swedish health bureaucracy is finally lumbering back into action.
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
As I've mentioned before, I've been taking lots of pictures of the flora and fauna in our backyard lately. This means you're going to see a lot of this stuff over the next few months. Just warning you.
Anyway, this one is a picture of a bee. I've taken lots of bee pictures, but for some reason the bee is almost always sideways. This one is the first time I've gotten a nice, sharp picture of a bee facing directly into the camera. As a bonus, the bee is busily doing . . . something with a bunch of gooey looking stuff. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's sort of disgusting looking, isn't it?
UPDATE: It's just the bee's tongue. Still not very appetizing looking, though.
Jonah Goldberg writes today that present-day schools teach plenty about diversity and racism, which is why so many parents are skeptical about the whole uproar over structural racism and critical race theory. "When proponents of critical race theory say they are merely proposing a belated corrective to the way American history has been framed, many parents don’t buy it, having seen what their children are taught now."
Maybe, maybe not. But then he finishes with this:
The current battle over critical race theory is a wonderful gift to the Republicans in the short term. The GOP would much rather win back suburban white parents with culture-war issues, now that it has no credibility on fiscal matters. But in the long run, this could be disastrous for the party and the country, because the last thing anyone needs is another culture war.
"Another" culture war? Hell, this precise one has been ongoing since the seventies. It just gets a little more publicity from time to time.
More generally, there's a funny thing about the culture wars that a lot of people seem to have forgotten. It's absolutely conventional wisdom, but for that reason it gets little attention these days and I wonder if a lot of people, especially young people, don't even know about it anymore.
It's this: human beings are primates, and primates are both tribal and hierarchical. We are comfortable with pecking orders, and even if we're not at the top we feel less stressed knowing exactly where we fit in and what's expected of us. We can fight this, since our brains can overcome our instincts, but the instincts are still there.
The flip side of this is that all of us, both those at the top and those at the bottom, feel continual stress if the hierarchy is constantly changing and we're unsure of our status and how we're expected to act. This has been the case for the past 50 years, and over time it has driven both liberals and conservatives into a sort of stress-driven madness. This is why it often seems like things are getting worse even though they're actually getting better. That's what continual stress does.
We may solve differential equations faster than this guy, but his love of hierarchy remains deeply embedded in our psyche.
None of this means we should stop our efforts to gain racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual equality. We need to do it regardless of the cost. Still, we don't have a bunch of separate "culture war issues" that one side or the other locks onto now and again. It's all one thing and it's been a 50-year war so far. And in a country like ours, which is even more dedicated to hierarchies than most of our peers, 50 years of this stuff is enough to drive us all into low-grade hysteria.
This is a generational issue, and it won't fully go away until (a) we get close to equality and (b) the last generation that's been scarred by hierarchy changes finally dies off. At best, that's probably 20 years for the former and 30 or 40 for the latter. In other words, hierarchy-induced madness will continue to consume us for another half century or so.
This was all well understood and discussed routinely a few decades ago. Today it isn't, either because it feels like 2+2=4 or because we've collectively decided to pretend that other forces are at work. And other forces are at work! Still, at the very deepest level, it's our primate minds that have driven us into a fever of resentment and constant tension. And it ain't over yet.
The economic news just keeps getting better. Take a look at this:
After a year of steady weakening against Bitcoin—plummeting from 100 microBTC down to 20—the dollar has finally started strengthening again in recent weeks.
There are some who have welcomed the dollar's slide, since it makes exports from the US ransomware industry more competitive. However, it's been disastrous for US consumers and companies who do their accounting in dollars and have seen the cost of imported ransomware demands increase by 5x. Making up even a bit of that is good news for them.
Can the dollar keep up its recent rise? Some experts say that the era of old school "money" is over and Americans need to get used to it. Others say this is overblown, and the underlying strength of the US criminal sector remains vibrant enough to keep the dollar strong in the long run. Time will tell.
I happened to come across a Guardian piece about the controversy swirling around pop singer Billie Eilish. Here it is:
Billie Eilish has apologised after a video surfaced appearing to show her mouthing a racist slur....In the video, Eilish appears to mouth an anti-Asian slur featured in Tyler, the Creator’s 2011 song Fish, and is filmed speaking in an affected voice. In her apology, Eilish, the youngest artist to ever record a James Bond title track, said she was “13 or 14” in the videos and did not know at the time the slur was a derogatory term.
Holy cow! The Guardian isn't shy about printing obscenities, so this must be something really bad. But what? Other articles I googled seemed similarly shy, so finally I just looked up the lyrics for "Fish":
Slip it in her drink and in the blink
Of an eye I can make a white girl look chink...
That's it? This whole affair, lengthy apology and all, is because Eilish mouthed the word chink five years ago when she was 14?
We really all have too much time on our hands, don't we?
