It's not that Stephens, a regular NYT columnist, can or would just give the rejected column to another newspaper to publish. The Post tells us the column — which defends the NYT reporter who got ousted for saying the n-word — "circulated among Times staffers and others" and the Post got hold of it "from one of them, not Stephens himself." Presumably, the Post publishes it because it is newsworthy — not as an opinion on the news but because the spiking of it is news, so we need to see what it is.
Let's read it:
Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.
It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act).
Speaking of Donald Trump, it's the question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?
It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage. A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention.
Yeah, why are the House Managers indifferent to this distinction? I am getting distracted! This Stephen's column reads like a criticism of the House Managers case against Trump. Trump said something, perhaps without any intention of causing the harm, but the harm did ensue. To care about the harm and not what the accused person intended is a "hallmark of injustice." Noted!
This is the place to understand how protests and love of country don’t merely coexist, but inform each other. How men can probably win the gold for their country, but still insist on raising a black-gloved fist. How we can wear an I Can’t Breathe T-shirt, and still grieve for fallen police officers. Here, the American wear the razor-sharp uniform of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, belongs alongside the cape of the Godfather of Soul.Obama doesn't mention Donald Trump, but last week, Obama said:
We have shown the world we can float like butterflies, and sting like bees, that we can rocket into space like Mae Jemison, steal home like Jackie, rock like Jimmy [sic!], stir the pot like Richard Pryor. And we can be sick and tired of being sick and tired like Fannie Lou Hamer, and still rock steady like Aretha Franklin....
I, too, am America. It is a glorious story, the one that’s told here. It is complicated, and it is messy, and it is full of contradictions, as all great stories are, as Shakespeare is, as Scripture is. And it’s a story that perhaps needs to be told now more than ever.
"You may have heard Hillary's opponent in this election say that there's never been a worse time to be a black person. I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow.... But we've got a museum for him to visit, so he can tune in. We will educate him."It would, in fact, be a good idea for Trump to visit the museum, but I've got to say that Obama distorted Trump's statement. Trump did not say "there's never been a worse time to be a black person." That's Obama's paraphrase. Trump said:
"We're going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever... You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street. They're worse -- I mean, honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities."It's a statement about "African-American communities." A slave was not living in an "African-American community." And Jim Crow was an evil system of exclusion, but to say that is not to understand what life was like in the communities where black people did live. I understand the political motivation for paraphrasing Trump's remark the way Obama did, but that paraphrase pretends not to see what Trump was saying. It's much harder — and much more important — to try to refute Trump's inflammatory statement if you're precise about what he said. And even if you did amass the historical and present-day journalistic record to refute it, why would you be smug?
Goodell can begin to make up for his mishandling of the [Ray] Rice case by immediately suspending [Adrian] Peterson for the season and then throwing him out of the league....The boy did not cry, and the boy calls his father "Daddy Peterson." Peterson smiles in the mug shot and claims to have experienced the same form of discipline when he was a child. The term "switch" — which Meyers treats as odd and deceptive — is traditional:
The personal conduct policy does not require a conviction in order for Goodell to impose discipline. One of the circumstances that allows Goodell to punish Peterson is "conduct that imposes inherent danger to the safety and well-being of another person."...
Peterson reportedly called the tree branch a “switch,” and the [4-year-old] boy suffered bruises to his back, buttocks, ankles, legs and scrotum and defensive wounds to his hands... According to police reports, the child told authorities that “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face.” He also said he had been hit with a belt and “there are lots of belts in Daddy’s closet.”
The radio station reported that in an interview with police, Peterson appeared to believe he did nothing wrong. “Anytime I spank my kids, I talk to them before, let them know what they did, and of course after,” he said. Reportedly, Peterson regretted his son did not cry because he then would have known the switch had done more damage than intended.
Switches are most efficient (i.e., painful and durable) if made of a strong but flexible type of wood, such as hazel... or hickory; as the use of their names for disciplinary implements...Here's Richard Pryor: "Anyone here remember them switches?"
Making a switch involves cutting it from the stem and removing twigs or directly attached leaves. For optimal flexibility, it is cut fresh shortly before use, rather than keeping it for re-use over time. Some parents decide to make the cutting of a switch an additional form of punishment for a child, by requiring the disobedient child to cut his/her own switch.
One of the most common punishments was getting a whipping with a hickory switch or a birch rod. Sometimes the strapping was so severe that students went home with red marks across their legs....That last line quotes the 1907 song "School Days" ("Dear old golden rule days...").
Are you too young to remember the ‘good old days’ when “Readin’ and writing’ and ‘rithmetic were taught to the tune of the hickory stick?”
Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. "Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.....So is she an actress, and if so, who is the real person? I don't think you get the answer in the "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." There's a scene where she's doing a radio promotion for her new book — "Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery" — and the interviewer goes on about how, whatever a woman does to herself to try to look beautiful, she must, in the end, want to be loved as the person she really is. Joan's response: Who is the real me? Perhaps when the real person is an actor, there is a hollowness that must be filled with a written character.
[E]arly on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."...
It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr... there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."
"It was... scary... and petrifying... and... awesome... You know, fire, you know how fire looks red and stuff. It's really orange and white. I didn't know that until after it was over. I said, wait a minute. This is fire but it don't look like it."Later, King asks him if he has days when he gets depressed. He says:
"But the pain... It must be..."
"Excruciating, is the word."
"Very. I have days when I just don't know who I am, where I am, what I'm doing. But then, it comes back and says, you're Richard, and you're here, and you had a shot, and you messed it up, so you gotta stay here." He has a terribly sad expression on his face now. "'Cause we're all gonna die. We just don't get to choose when."
"He did not suffer, he went quickly and at the end there was a smile on his face," his wife, Jennifer Pryor, said.
"I said, 'Mr. Dalí, I don't understand your work,' " he recalled, "and he said: 'Yes, that is it! Dalí is confusion!' "Hmmm... that reminds me of my stock response to law students who say they've found a case confusing. That confusion ... that is understanding! Because the case is confused!
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