And here is the Renaissance painting by Andrea Mantegna:
Like Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Sebastian did not die from this shooting (though he was soon killed):
[The Roman Emperor Diocletian] commanded [Sebastian] to be led to a field and there to be bound to a stake so that the chosen archers from Mauretania would shoot arrows at him. "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks, and thus left him there for dead." Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him. The widow of Castulus, Irene of Rome, went to retrieve his body to bury it, and discovered he was still alive. She brought him back to her house and nursed him back to health.
Sebastian later stood by a staircase where the emperor was to pass and harangued Diocletian for his cruelties against Christians. This freedom of speech, and from a person whom he supposed to have been dead, greatly astonished the emperor; but recovering from his surprise, he gave orders for Sebastian to be seized and beaten to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer.
I guess I'm forced to use one of my gift links — here — so you can defend the NYT from the presumption that it had any workable awareness of this classical image.
Perhaps the idea is that an Ionic column — used in some Washington D.C. architecture — represents the federal government and the arrows represent attacks on democracy. Arrows won't take down a stone column, so the metaphor is not strong, but even assuming that interpretation is accurate, an editor should have questioned the depiction of shooting violence so soon after 2 attempts to shoot Trump, and the evocation of St. Sebastian — intentional or not — should have been noticed.
If I had to guess, I'd chalk it up to cultural illiteracy.
Anyway... must I say something about the editorial? It would have a lot more power to interest me if the NYT took a cruelly neutral standpoint and held Democrats as well as Republicans to account:
Over the coming weeks and months, poll workers, state officials and Republican members of Congress may be well pressured to cast doubt on, or even work to undermine, election results that don’t go Mr. Trump’s way. If the recent past is any guide, they may be called on to block prospective voters from the polls, to question ballots from Democratic precincts, to refuse to certify valid election results, and even to engage in election fraud by posing as presidential electors....
Why haven't Democrats worked to increase confidence that the vote is secure and accurate? People who are not committed to the Democratic Party get suspicious when they are simply berated for questioning and challenging the voting process.
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Althouse, “ Why haven't Democrats worked to increase confidence that the vote is secure and accurate?” Begley, Why didn’t the Democrats vote to prohibit illegal aliens from voting?
Answer to both questions is that the Dems plan to cheat and, in fact, cheating and stealing is the only way for the Dems to stay in power.
I’d go with the simpler explanation. It’s an open invitation: “Please assassinate Trump!” The 2020 election was rigged and sabotaged openly and unapologetically. The DNC/Intel cartel bragged about it was they were doing it. Demanding proof for this flagrant, Soviet level rigging is an insulting psy-op.
Two words: Marc Elias.
Observe the rise of state fascism at home and in real time. My father used to say that USA politics runs several decades behind European politics. See Europe's genocidal extremism during WW1 (USSR), 1930s (Nazis), and then UK/France/Germany utopian nuclear-freeze-government-dole-social-welfare fantasies (1960s-1980s). A parallel shift happened at the NYT and among leftists between 1990s "triangulation" Bill Clinton and today.
I chalk it up to:
* Generations of bohemians and hippies told they can do anything they want / fight the establishment (who became the establishment)
* Several generations of amoral hedonists with shallow 2-hour Hollywood "religious" training. See leftist saints Hugh Hefner and Harvey Weinstein.
* About 50 years of lefties telling themselves they were superior to conservatives in all ways (Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes) and that their opponents were literally evil (e.g., global empire, fossil fuels, abortion, guns, etc.). This thinking always leads to moral justification for assassinations (Trump), political prosecutions (Trump), political prisoners (J6 grannies), and then genocide.
* About 50 years of lefties systemically pushing opponents out of government and academia, in favor of the Party Ideology and really terrible ideas such as Defund the Police and letting bio males crush bio females in sports.
The 2024 election will reveal whether this lefty self-destructive pattern is collapsing in on itself (i.e., Joe was ejected; Kamala is flailing badly) or whether our Praetorian Guard remains fixated on control (i.e., unpersuasive vote cheating; leadership by Teleprompter; a 3rd, 4th, or 100th assassination attempt on Trump, the rise of a post-Civil War style KKK and the even more direct flouting of national laws, etc.)
They know they can’t win if he is alive
The NYT is a building full of pricks…
One month before another crooked election is not the time to kind of mention we haven’t taken steps to reduce voting corruption by Democrats. If anything Democrats have done more to undermine it. Shoulda spoke up instead of moving on…
Whether the St. Stephen allusion is intentional or not (probably is—what else could have been the inspiration?), it is a clear suggestion of violence.
…and aren’t we seeing some prominent Democrats a bit panicked about Kamal’s chances? NYT seems to be undermining their party’s steal when the voting doesn’t go Kamala’s way…
3 isn’t enough?
Not subtle at all.
“Why haven't Democrats worked to increase confidence that the vote is secure and accurate?”
It’s not just that they haven’t increased confidence, they work to increase ways to cheat, to lessen confidence. Examples are obvious: mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes, dmv registration, no voter id, illegal voters, disruption of chain of custody of ballots, booting Republican poll watchers, extraneous ballot adjudication, eschewing voter roll cleanup, etc etc. Their “tells” are multitudinous and varied, so they can fraudulently prevail in any state.
Then they have the gaul to call J6ers insurrectionists, when all the J6ers wanted was an objective and honest review of the results.
In the 2020 election Wisconsin used absentee ballot drop boxes. On June 28, 2021 the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that there was" no statutory authorization" for the drop boxes and that" Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance encouraging their use was unlawful." Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty Press Release. Following upon an election for the Suoreme Court that created a liberal majority the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled this year on July 5, 2024 that drop boxes are legal in this year's election. They will be a feature once again. They can be placed anywhere which an election clerk declares is secure.
Biden would not have won without Wisconsin and would not have won Wisconsin without drop boxes and associated ballot harvesting. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has said that the boxes are legal and that they are not legal.
Suppose now that Harris using drop boxes wins the same large vote in Milwaukee and Dane County as before and carries Wisconsin and therefore the election as in 2020 even though Dem support in the black and Hispanic communities has dropped sharply as recently noted by Barack Obama.
Am I entitled to support the reasoning of the first Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, knowing as I do that there has not been time to challenge the July 5, 2024 ruling? Meaning, perhaps, that I might challenge the vote in Milwaukee, depending? Or, fully aware of the contradictory rulings, must I simply support whoever has spoken last? Is "spoke last in a July surprise" now the same as the rule of law in Wisconsin? Is this kind of shenanigan what the Founders meant by democracy? Why is it being done? Is this malarkey necessary for the Dems to win?
Why don't millions of American citizens vocally object against this scandalous state of affairs?
I'll believe they're serious about election security when they require ID to certify you are are a citizen who is legally registered, when you cease to use statewide ballot mailings and allow ballot harvesting, when you put out multiple additional unauthorized ballot boxes for harvested ballots to be dumped, when you close the window for election day to 2 DAYS maximum (declare one of those days a national holiday if you will), and when the electronic voting machines are dumped in favor of something that cannot be hacked- like paper ballots.
If the largest banks in the world, the Pentagon, and every university research center on earth can be hacked, a Dominiion voting machine is certainly a beginners practice unit.
I'll stop having questions about all of this when Democrats actively clean their voter registration rolls on a regular basis.
No other activity in our civic life is as open and insecure as our elections are. And it is not by accident. It is by design. And we are the only civilized nation that does it the way we do. We should be embarrassed- all of us. That Democrats, and the morons posing as journalists or opinion writers don't understand what they are doing does not mean it isn't happening.
It is and it is by design. And I'll go to my grave with full knowledge that there is no way 81 million people voted for Joe Biden.
St Sebastian is a dead white male.
"cheating and stealing is the only way for the Dems to stay in power."
Actually, there's a third way: killing.
And Democrats are not above killing people to stay in power. Ask any of Hillary Clinton's victims, starting with Seth Rich.
Flammable ones. Yes. They forget that.
Millions of people have ALREADY voted. People TODAY are standing in lines to vote. When the election is dragged out for over a month, and the count totals are released BEFORE they are completed (which allows the other side to know how MANY votes they need to manufacture) ... you can just assume (correctly) that our elections are rigged and fake.
They tried to. Many now sit in DC gulags for merely attending a protest.
Many of those people are LANGUISHING in prison for objecting. This is why nothing short of a violent revolution will resolve this issue.
This issue cannot even be discussed or you are hounded out of your profession, if not outright put into a political prison.
America as you knew it is dead. Democrats murdered it.
Those boxes should be burnt.
The illustration was generated by AI. (It's graphically simple.) The AI knew about St Sebastian and giggled up its matrices at fooling the uneducated humans.
And the GOP hasn't insisted on "clean" elections because they think they can work the broken system better than the Dems can. (Hey, how's that workin' out, fellas...?)
Maybe that’s one of Obama’s styrofoam columns?
The illustration is obviously an allusion to St. Sebastian and I agree with Althouse (sort of) that casting "poll workers, state officials and Republican members of congress" as St. Sebastian is a swing and a miss but let's not lose sight of Sturgeon’s Law.
The arrows are red. They bounce harmlessly off the stone edifice that is the State.
Nothing that you Deplorables can do can hurt us.
That's my read.
It's not evoking it, necessarily, as much as it's holding out hope.
A classical column to today's Times folk simply means old, antique, not current, unmodern, nonprogressive, i.e., Trump. And while St Sebastian is certainly the classical allusion here, don't forget that doing great, until taking an arrow to the knee, was a gamer meme for several years in the childhood of these current Times folk. There are 5 arrows that hit the column and penetrated the stone (bad symbolism?) and three that broke. I bet the artist is thinking of five events that hurt Trump and three that failed to end him. (Pick your own guesses)
Like Obama's blank slate, we are invited to put our own desires and meaning on the relatively blank slate of the image here. But certainly the Times folk know that if you aim at the Prince, you better kill the Prince.
---- A parallel shift happened at the NYT and among leftists between 1990s "triangulation" Bill Clinton and today
Pinch Sulzberger, publisher of NYT 1992-2018.
Bulk harvesting mail in ballots under current rules produces legal votes . That the votes are unauditable and cannot be proven to be the intention of the supposed voters is a feature, not a bug.
"an editor should have questioned the depiction of shooting violence so soon after 2 attempts to shoot Trump"
Nah, they like violence against their opponents. Dems have called for it repeatedly. They'd take pleasure in Trump's death.
"It would have a lot more power to interest me if the NYT took a cruelly neutral standpoint"
LOL. Funny stuff on a Sunday morning.
"Why haven't Democrats worked to increase confidence that the vote is secure and accurate?"
Good question. 1. They don't give a damn about such confidence, since they like the wailing of the right and can exploit it with MSM help as an attack on "our democracy." 2. They don't want the vote to be secure and accurate in fact, since manipulation of no-ID procedures, absentee/mail-in ballots, harvesting, and big-city counts favors Dems.
could arrows represent tricks in D quiver?
have all been loosed? any left still?
Trump was Psalm 91d. The arrows missed.
One of the problems with current Democrats is they will simply make other parts of our civic life unsafe just to make the claim that you are wrong.
I believe most states, if not all, require the count differential to be very small in order to execute a recount. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and money.
IMO, the image is meant to be suggestive of the aftermath of the sacking of a city by a barbarian horde, of an attack on civilization itself. The column represents democracy, one of the pillars of civilization as we know it.
Arrows are a primitive weapon, suggesting a backwards, uncivilized enemy. They're red for obvious reasons.
The message is, this is war, a war for civilization. And all's fair in war.
+1 then why not arrows shot at bros?
Our voting system should be like Ceasar's wife.
how does one get standing pre-election from sitting judge?
require the count differential to be very small
=================
so if cheat miss by ?that? much!
was not Cleopatra Ceasar's wife?
Need heroes? Didn't have to look very far!
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/10/12/more-than-a-dozen-medal-of-honor-recipients-endorse-trump-ding-walz-over-stolen-valor-claims-n2180489
I love how you have totally fallen into the abyss of Trump victimology. That's the great power of the bully con man is when he convinces you that he is your modern day Christ dying from the slings and arrows from the evil money changers in order to absolve you of all your sins.
The editorial's text makes it clear the NYT editors claim to be trying to protect the U.S.A. from the depradations of mad dictator and Destroyer Donald Trump. Their argument is presented imaginatively but exclusively one-sidedly. But it could certainly persuade any tottering uninformed voters that indeed they must block these depradations in any way they can.
So, it seems to me to be superficially arrows striking the state, exactly as Althouse reads the architectural column, with some naturally missing among a flurry of launches by the forces of the evil one. Danger! But, in its reference to St. Sebastian, it seems yet another somewhat subtler call for killing Trump, as St. Sebastian only without the sainthood. Isn't that the "best" of all solutions to this dire threat from a Christian? That's who we should really put up against the wall, it suggests. Just a slightly twisted reference whose historical error, in its way, says more about the creator and publisher than it meant to.
As Elon said, the democrat party are playing a long con. Import voters, period.
Howard is anticipating a successful fraud and is letting us know.
This is the same New York Times that printed the swastika crossword on Yom Kippur. They're The Good Guys...I mean, they're fucking asshole Democrat Party members.
Symbol salad.
>"Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him."
There is nothing miraculous at all given that there is glaringly not a single potentially fatal wound depicted. The closest to one of those is the left thigh shot which is a few inches from his femoral artery. It's as if the archers were really excellent marksmen...who were trying not to kill him. Sorry, just sayin'..
When Trump asked for increased security due to threats from Iran, the media immediately called him a liar by saying that there is no known connection between Iran and the "two assassination attempts." They don't mention the third assassination plot, this summer, broken up by the FBI that absolutely did trace back to Iran.
I am so sick of the lies.
The NYT needs two groups of heroes. The beleaguered poll workers who will be the fall guys for the coming fraud, and the unsung election fortifiers who are executing the fraud behind the scenes.
Seems like a stretch. Could be a reference to Saint Simeon (a man who lived for decades on top of a pillar near Aleppo) instead?
Err, up to 4 now. 1 fired, 1 aimed, 1 caught near the premise, 1 caught in preparation.
I love how you have totally fallen into the abyss of Trump victimology.
Maybe if you guys stopped trying to kill him, there'd be no victimology.
I think that's what they had in their heads. The image might be a reference to Jan 6 and how Trump is attacking Washington D.C. and civilization itself. The arrows might represent Jacob Chansley and the rest of a backwards, uncivilized mob.
But it's kinda awful to accuse Trump of seeking violent revolution when all he's doing is running for office. The NYT is engaging in fantasy if it thinks Jan 6 was the "sacking of a city." The reality is that Democrats have tried to kill Trump twice, and one tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justices before that.
Ironic that the article makes a hero out of a pro-lifer who had to leave the Democrat party!
The accidental implication of their incompetent editorial is to remind us that Democrats have tried to kill Trump and failed twice. He escaped death and is running around free.
Prof, you, an art major, must know that St Sebastian was acceptable homoerotic porn for all the ephebophile artists and patrons of the Renaissance. Not just Seb himself writhing with his beatific face raised to heaven, but also his executioners, often portrayed nearly nude themselves and bending over to cock their anachronistic crossbows. Surely the NYT’s graphic artists also know this, as do the gays and allies who throng the other NYT departments and its readership. A column and a bunch of arrows would trigger thoughts of Sebastian for all of these.
Still probably a bad editorial choice, as they all clicked away for real gay porn instead of reading the article…
JSM
Ali on Esquire redux.
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