FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

“I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

These words are a continual presence these days.
I hear them a couple hundred times a day, in one form or another.
I read them in desperate social media outbursts.
I find them in my inbox from friends and from strangers.
I hear them in my own head.

They are the symptoms of a shared sickness we now find ourselves afflicted with; a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis, the genesis of which can be traced to a single Wednesday morning in November. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency and sanity and goodness by those in power.

Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days.

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

Everyone it seems is convinced that as a practicing Catholic that he is going to tear up abortion rights and marriage equality, but what about the poor, over-regulated amusement park industry?

The Big Think:

“[Judge Brett Kavanaugh] was also one of three judges who oversaw SeaWorld’s appeal of citations the company received because of the death of killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, when she was drowned and dismembered by a killer whale named Tilikum after a performance.

“…In a telling bit about who this man is and how he thinks, Kavanaugh argued in a dissenting opinion that those who train killer whales were basically no different than professional athletes and racing drivers; basically, their jobs were risky by design, so they deserved no such protection.”

Kavanaugh concluded that the Labor Department should not implement onerous regulations that to prevent trainers from being eaten in front of paying customers.

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From John Scalzi:

Words or activity that would previously be confined to a select few — and would be expected to be private — can now be transmitted to a much wider audience, very quickly. This includes words and actions you might have reasonably expected would not be in the purview of the public at all.

For example, the instigating action of Dawson’s piece, in which a passenger on a plane livetweeted an apparent “meet cute” between two other passengers in the row in front of her. The livetweeter, among other things, illustrated the tweeting with photos (with faces scrubbed but even so), noted the two people being tweeted about had active social media accounts, and did other things to make it easy (or easier) for the people following the livetweeting to suss out who these two people might be — and indeed, they were found online — at which point the Internet does what it does, for good and ill, and then it came for the original livetweeter.

None of these people, it should be noted, are public individuals — the meet cute couple certainly not, but also not the livetweeter, even if they later admitted hoping to get a writing gig (being a writer also doesn’t automatically make you a public figure). And also, the couple chatting away at each other almost certainly did not expect to have their private conversation documented by someone else, particularly in a way that made it possible for their identities to be discovered by total strangers. Now, you can argue whether or not a commercial plane qualifies as a public or private space, and we’d be here all day about that, but I think it’s reasonable to say that the two people chatting with each other believed their discussion would not leave the confines of their airline row. Thanks to this, neither of the two of them will likely think that again.

And the question (or a question, anyway) is where the proper line should be for things like this.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

The march toward civil rights also demonstrates why the vote is absolutely essential. The Democrats’ choice to move toward civil rights wasn’t just about Northern politicians gaining a conscience as they looked at white supremacy in the South. What mattered overall was black citizens moving north and starting to vote in their new cities.

What that shows is that the vote is what really matters — more, in some ways, than whether any particular vote is enough to swing an election (although it certainly helped that the black vote was often seen as a swing vote). Politicians try to represent their districts. But without the vote, constituents are largely invisible to their elected officials. Of course, it also mattered that some of those voters began electing black politicians, who then fought within the Democratic Party for what their constituents wanted — for themselves, and for other black citizens.

Democratic processes don’t always work in the U.S. But without the vote — and without robust political parties — they don’t have a chance.

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From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

It was a tough week for supporters of Donald Trump’s draconian policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants at the border. (Those supporters are overwhelmingly Republican: a Quinnipiac University poll showed only 27 percent of all respondents–but 55 percent of GOP backers–endorse the practice.) It began when former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden posted an image of Auschwitz and remarked simply, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.” By Monday, the clashing sound bites vomited forth by the president and his DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reduced the administration’s defense to something like this:

We are not separating families. Period. Except when we are, which is both Democrats’ fault and essential policy.

The United Nations was unimpressed. Having already declared the family separation policy a violation of international law, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees labeled Trump’s initiative “government-sanctioned child abuse.” By Tuesday, Trump was back on Twitter defending taking more than 2,000 children from their parents (many of them asylum seekers), while warning of the “animals” who will “infest our Country,” language which Bill Kristol noted “probably sounds better in the original German.”

By Wednesday, when Trump signed his scam masquerading as an executive order, some of the conservatives’ best and brightest had enough of the backlash. “Comparisons to Auschwitz are ludicrous and offensive,” Daniella Greenbaum protested, because they “will only serve to highlight how Trump and his policies are not quite as bad as they could be.” Ben Shapiro, the former Breitbart propagandist the New York Times elevated as a “provocative ‘gladiator'” for young conservatives, complained that “Nazi has become a stand-in for ‘thing I don’t like.’ And that means that everything you don’t like becomes ‘Nazi policy.'”

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

“I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I’m running a company. My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies. And that’s what I do.”

Which brings us to todays news: he’s ripped off his chauffeur, too. Noel Cintron is joining the club, as it were, of people who are trying to get a fair shake from the purported billionaire by taking it to court. Cintron is accusing his former boss of failing to compensate him for about 3,300 hours of overtime pay he’s worked over the past six years; he would be suing for more, but the statute of limitations expired on the rest.

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From Tommy Christopher:

One of the few forms of accountability that Trump’s underlings face these days is the occasional light public shaming — but even that seems to be too much for them.

Ordinary citizens have been expressing themselves face-to-face with Trump officials with increasing frequency, sparking media hand-wringing over the “civility” of such expressions. In a new report by The Washington Post, several current and former Trump officials complained about the alleged “viciousness” of those encounters.

But in almost every case, the incidents described in the story are examples of purely legitimate political dissent. Most of them were relatively mild — and said a lot more about the Trump officials than they did about the citizens opposing them.

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From CATO’s Julian Sanchez:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump took to Twitter to draw attention to an important story about a large scale National Security Agency surveillance program—though largely for the wrong reasons.

Wow! The NSA has deleted 685 million phone calls and text messages. Privacy violations? They blame technical irregularities. Such a disgrace. The Witch Hunt continues!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2018

There are two significant errors here and one important truth. The first error is that NSA is in the process of deleting “Call Detail Records”—or metadata—about phone calls and text messages, not the calls and messages themselves. The second error is that the records being purged were acquired pursuant to a counterterrorism authority: They have nothing to do with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (or “The Witch Hunt,” as Trump is fond of characterizing it). The important truth is that the dramatic purge of hundreds of millions of records is indeed an attempt to remedy “technical irregularities” that led to privacy violations: the acquisition by NSA of large numbers of private telecommunications records it was not legally entitled to receive.

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From Frances Langum:

We’re being played by Donald Trump, folks.

At least CNN and MSNBC aren’t habitually interrupting their day for live coverage every time the so-called president holds a rally. But we still cover everything he says to the detriment of really important stories, says Ezra Klein:

If I worked in a White House where, on Friday, a corruption-plagued EPA chief resigned and a Fox News-exec ousted for covering up sexual assault was named deputy chief of staff, I'd be pretty thrilled if the media spent Monday mocking Stephen Miller for throwing away sushi.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) July 9, 2018

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Let’s see. A graduate student teaching an undergraduate class stopped a rant by a student against gay people because said rant had nothing to do with the classroom subject. Later, a conservative professor from another department disagreed. So far so good.
 
The professor published a piece on-line attacking the graduate student. So farther so good.
 
But the professor also published the name of the graduate student, contact information, and how to find her. After receiving a number of violent threats, the student left the college in fear for her well being.
 
The college suspended the professor for publishing private contact information, potentially putting the student at risk. The professor sued and the issue went to court. The professor won because of academic freedom.
 
Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson celebrates the decision as a conservative victory for freedom of speech over a liberal college that is intolerant of conservatives who dare to speak out. Well, that’s what he says.
 
Okay, he doesn’t say quite all that. James is a very busy individual who must deal with all manner of important issues. He forgot to mention the part about publishing private contact information or that it was the sole reason for the suspension. Limitations of space, I would guess. Could have happened to any ideologue blinded by conservative passion.

Actually, John McAdams didn’t publish the “graduate student’s” contact information. He linked to an instructor’s publicly available blog. Elsewhere on the blog she posted her contact information publicly. McAdams did not encourage anyone to contact Cheryl Abbate.

As for the “graduate student,” she was the paid instructor for a class in the philosophy department. She told a student at a Catholic University that he could not bring up the Catholic position on same-sex marriage because that would be homophobic and bigoted. If that’s not worthy of discussion on a blog about political correctness (among other subjects), what is?