Month: July 2020

 

From nojo:

The hypocrisy of America’s Founding Fathers — let’s go with the traditional gendered version here — is self-evident. All men weren’t created equal. The rights they were born with were totally alienable, especially at birth. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — “property” in the original Lockean — were only conditionally available.

Yet those are the words they wrote, and signed their names below, large enough for the King to see it, in one case.

Those are the ideals of our nation, however much our nation has failed them in the centuries since. And some of us are damnfool enough to take them seriously.

You live under a monarch, you’re a subject. You live under a republic, you’re a citizen. And as a citizen, well, you rule. Not by yourself, not as a crank in the wilderness, but collectively, among other citizens, a majority of whom can make the rules.

Within limits, of course. You can’t rule away other citizens. You can’t restrict their citizenship. You can boss them around a good deal, as long as you don’t change the nature of who they are as citizens.

That’s the idea, anyway. That’s the ideal. And, last we checked, that’s still the ideal our nation aspires to, even when it’s just lip-service.

Kind of like touching the stump at the Apollo.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Imagine for a moment that you find a wallet someone has accidentally dropped on the ground. In the wallet are the person’s ID, credit cards, and $300. What would you do?

I suspect most of us would attempt to track the person down and return the wallet. Why? Because it is the right thing to do.

The Christian Post reported a story about an anonymous Christian finding a wallet and returning it to its rightful owner. The Christian did the right thing and he should be commended for doing so. If you have ever lost your wallet or ID, you know how stressful and gut-wrenching the experience is, especially in this day of identity theft.

The problem I have with the Christian Post story is the motivation the Christian had for returning the wallet. Instead of it being a good, decent, honorable thing to do, the Christian had a “Biblical” reason for returning the wallet.

The Christian attached a Post-it note to the wallet…

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From Frances Langum:

Today on Fox and Friends, Tom Cotton forgot how much of today’s politics is between people who want to stop honoring slaveowners, and those who think Confederate flags and monuments are a critical part of their white heritage. That second group is defined as “The Republican Party.”

So when Tom Cotton decides to paint the protestors in Oregon as “insurrectionists” much like those who seceeded from the Union in the 1860’s?

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From PZ Myers:

Matt Taibbi used to be one of my favorite writers, but then I learned about his ugly misogyny (which he unconvincingly claimed was made up), and I was never able to look at his work in the same way. So I cancelled him. By which I mean I stopped reading him. Apparently he has sensed the declining number of eyeballs gazing at his writing, and the fading number of tongues wagging his praises, because he is mad about it, and I had to read something new of his. I am disappointed even more.

It’s the usual spittle-flecked screed we usually see from disgruntled right-wingers, with but one message: the Left is just as bad as the Right! They’re all prudish, finger-wagging authoritarians at heart, but the Lefties are just the worst! We can’t even discuss how stupid the Left is, he says as he writes about how stupid the Left is, because they’ll descend on us with great force and crush us!

Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

That he can claim this in the era of Trump, when badgeless cops in unmarked cars are grabbing civilians off the street, when cops are maiming citizens with rubber bullets and truncheons and pepper guns, when our president openly considers not respecting the outcome of the next election, is weird and dumb. The old Taibbi had sharp perceptions; this one seems blinded with resentment that his good ol’ boy rape fictions have damaged his reputation.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

This new study gives a quick, iffy method to identify which country’s politicians appear to be bigly corrupt, or just plain bigly.

The study is: “Obesity of Politicians and Corruption in Post‐Soviet Countries,” Pavlo Blavatskyy, Economic of Transition and Institutional Change, epub 2020.

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From Andy Borowitz:

A plan elegant in its simplicity!

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he will eventually be right about the coronavirus going away when there is no human life left on the face of the earth.

Speaking to Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump said that, once there are no living humans left for it to infect, “like I have said before, the virus will just disappear, like a miracle.”

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From The Lincoln Project:

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From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Just over a month ago, on June 7, Representative Lewis visited the BLACK LIVES MATTER public art painted on a street in Washington, D.C., with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. Six days before, the president and Attorney General William Barr had set federal police in riot gear, wielding tear gas and rubber bullets, on the peaceful protesters nearby to clear them out of the way for a presidential photo-op. It must have been a chilling echo for Representative Lewis.

But he told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart that he felt compelled to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza because he was “inspired” to see the peaceful protests in America and around the world against police violence. “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something’,” Lewis told Capehart. “And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.”

Lewis said he had a warning for Trump. “Mr. President, the American people are tired and they cannot and will not take it anymore. They have a right to organize the unorganized. They have a right to protest in a peaceful, orderly, nonviolent fashion. You cannot stop the people with all of the forces that you may have at your command. You cannot stop people when they say ‘no.’”

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From John Lewis:

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