The wages of toxic masculinity

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by liberal japonicus Hope I’m not stepping on Ugh’s (greatly appreciated) thread (and that’s your place for your COVID bon mots), but I thought I would crack a thread open after a comment by novakant on my observation that a woman going up against Trump would have been the recipe for disaster. I was thinking … Read more

“It smells like… victory”

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by liberal japonicus The other thread has turned to questions of accent (nothing wrong with that), but if you are like me, and can’t help turning that shitstorm around in your head, here’s another thread. Some observations. Biden was not on the top of my list, but it is hard to imaging a woman ‘winning’ … Read more

some charts about demographics

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by russell How representative are the representatives? The link above will take you to some simple graphs, comparing the demographic profiles of the population at large, vs those of the (D) and (R) members of Congress, for race, religion, and gender.  It will surprise no-one to find that the demographics of the (D)'s in Congress … Read more

a few words about the filibuster

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by russell Federalist 58 : It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision. That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution, cannot be denied. It might … Read more

RBG

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by liberal japonicus My mother kept a diary when I was a baby. I’ve been trying to find it now, but if my memory is correct, it was all in the first person, i.e. my view of the world. However, the day that Robert Kennedy was assassinated, if I am remembering correctly, she changed and … Read more

Your antiaptonym thread

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by liberal japonicus I had a friend who was always collecting store names that were antiaptonyms. The print shop called Typos, the hair salon called Tangles, that sort of thing. Well, my google news feed pulled this up Short Seller Hindenburg Research Renews Attack On Nikola and I thought that Hindenberg Research might be a … Read more

A change of pace

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by liberal japonicus For those of you who don’t want to talk about the election, compare this article https://medium.com/indica/the-overwhelming-racism-of-covid-coverage-78e37e4ce6e8 In the dirty south, we are constantly excluded from the world via euphemism. You talk about ‘developed’ world or the ‘industrialized’ world or ‘advanced’ nations. But what does that mean? How developed are you if you … Read more

Tactics?

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by liberal japonicus Another open thread. What I’m wondering about is the juxtaposition of the current fire/weather crises in the western US and the upcoming election. This Guardian article argues that the Dems are still not sure it is a crisis. My assumption is that talking it up when it isn’t an issue in the … Read more

The health of the nation?

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by liberal japonicus Reading this, I wonder if the reason we are in such a shitty state is that our health care system sucks. Related to that, I thought this from the article was interesting People are much poorer at almost every task when they are close to a cell phone; both physicians had kept … Read more

So much

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by liberal japonicus So much stuff happening, so hard to make sense of it all. My strategy is to usually to take a small corner of it and poke and prod at it, which I’ll subject all of you too. To lay down my cards, I’m largely in agreement with this article. The Bucks put … Read more

We are Philoctetes

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by liberal japonicus

A little background and my overripe thoughts about Biden quoting Seamus Heaney (after Sophocles), started off by this article from the Guardian.

What was quoted by Biden was originally part of a theatre piece that Heaney wrote for the Field Day Theatre Company, at the end of the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the program, Heaney notes:

The conflict between the young man’s [Neoptolemus, son of Achilles] sense of integrity and the older man’s [Odysseus] code of loyalty and solidarity intiates the drama, which goes on to enact itself in the consciousness of Philoctetes himself: in him and around him Sophocles locates an argument about the different consequences of outrage and obligation:

The Guardian article quotes Heaney, who says

“Poetry’s special status among the literary arts,” […] “derives from the audience’s readiness to … credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.”

The article doesn’t note that this is poetry’s trap, you can get yourself waaaay out on a limb and then saw through the limb you are perched on, which I will demonstrate below the fold

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Education and privilege

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by liberal japonicus I hope this draws some more information from the commentariat and might provoke some interesting discussion. The Guardian helpfully groups all their articles on the subject here. In the UK, there is currently a rather large problem with university places for the 2020-2021 school year. Places are (always?) allocated by the results … Read more

veep talk and the Indian diaspora

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by liberal japonicus Reading thru all the things on Kamala (pronounced ‘comma-la’, the name comes from Sanskrit) and going down rabbit holes. Didn’t know much about the Indian-American diaspora, except that in addition to Harris, Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal (and Dinesh D’Souza, gross) were part of it. I also, as is my wont, tend … Read more

In Praise of Potemkin

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by wj We’re overdue for a new Open Thread. So this is it. Recently, I’ve seem increasing numbers of reports that members of the administration who speak with Trump, or with members of his inner circle, are routinely slanting (or totally inventing) what they say to him about the world outside the White House. Especially … Read more

The Fix

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by wj The most optimistic estimates suggest that we might have a covid-19 vaccine that works by the end of the year. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that actually happens. Then what? Well the obvious first step is to get production ramped up to produce enough doses to handle the whole country. (Well, … Read more

Re: Applebaum

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by liberal japonicus I’m not going to dig thru comments to find out who discussed Applebaum and what folks said, and I can’t remember when I have cited her, but I will say, knowing all this about her make me wonder how I would reconsider things. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/anne-applebaum-how-my-old-friends-paved-the-way-for-trump-and-brexit

homeschooling, covid and educamating our youth: who knows?

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by liberal japonicus Sapient passed on this link https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/policy-issues/abuse-and-neglect/abuse-in-homeschooling-environments/ and I thought I’d toss up a post to let y’all chat. A warning: I think the landscape for homeschooling is a lot more varied than anyone thinks it is, so be careful with blanket assertions about what is good/bad or wrong/right. I’d especially be interested … Read more

elective affinities

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by liberal japonicus I really enjoyed this article about Max Weber, who wrote the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. At university, one of my favorite teachers in one of my favorite classes (a class about modernity and the 20th century) assigned selections from this and I was quite taken with Weber’s idea … Read more

The Choices Others Make

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–By Sebastian H 30 years ago my mother was in a car accident.  She was stopped in the left hand turn lane of a major intersection.  Someone blew through the light, T-boned another car, which spun around the intersection so violently it was able to hit my mother's van on three different sides.  She got … Read more

Strange animal goings-on open thread

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by liberal japonicus OK, flying snakes. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884104072/how-snakes-fly-hint-its-not-on-a-plane I’m also disappointed that pangolins got such bad press with COVID, though I am glad that there is a general agreement that it is bad to eat them (though they are still used for traditional Chinese medicine, unfortunately). One thing that isn’t mentioned about them is that they … Read more

Xiànzài huàngè wánquán bùtóng de dōngxī!!

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by liberal japonicus Which is Chinese (Mandarin) for ‘And now for something completely different!!’ (according to Google Translate) https://phys.org/news/2020-05-cantonese-lexical-tone-language-evolution.html Tone is interesting because some examples have been described as an areal feature, which I always took to mean ‘we don’t know why the hell it is there, maybe they got it from here’. The question … Read more

Back to the salt mines

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by liberal japonicus

I think that there is still a lot of talk left about racism (As DiAngelo said, white people always have an opinion on racism, white people including me), though if you are exhausted, I totally understand. But for anyone who still wants to talk about it, there is something below the fold.

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What Are They Trying to Accomplish?

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by wj Having spent a week variously trashing and defending the progressive approach, I thought we might try something similar for the other side. (Handicapped, admittedly, by the improbability of anyone sincerely doing defense.** But hey, ya go with what ya got.) At last week’s Virginia GOP party convention, Congressman Denver Riggleman (R-VA) was defeated … Read more

St Johns Church timeline

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by liberal japonicus Another video, this a reconstruction of the class between non-violent protesters exercising their rights before the curfew and a collection of various law enforcement and military personnel. Shorter. You don’t have to watch it, but if you comment without watching it, you might embarrass yourself…

Discuss

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by liberal japonicus

I normally don’t do this. In fact, I’ve never done this. Not sure if I will again. But below the fold, there’s a youtube video. It’s long, but if you want to discuss it, you need to watch it. Some suggestions and yes, rules below the fold

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COVID and social pressure

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by liberal japonicus

Since the blog has such a rep for sweetness and light, and we are living in the best of all possible ages, I thought I might present another topic near to my heart. A lot of articles (frex here and here. A bit more accurate one is here) have lauded Japan’s success. The dark side of that success is below the fold

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