Who uses this method? Either do Halloween or don't!

pic.twitter.com/0nV36VjHiR

— Out of Context Human Race (@NoContextHumans) November 1, 2023

Why are we doing handouts anyway? To show what human beings are like? If you answer the door and dispense the handout personally, you can maintain a system of one portion per person, and you might even get a smile or a thank you. If you put out a big bowl of multiple portions because you don't want to monitor the process and impose single portions, then people will serve their own interests and take all they want. You knew that. The kids who took it all also knew that if they didn't take it all, the next group of kids would take it all. It's a state of nature without supervision and enforcement. Don't pretend you trusted people and you had some sort of admirable "hope" that now I'm supposed to feel bad got crushed. No, you lazy bastard. Answer the damned door next time. Or have the courage to turn off the porch light and huddle in a back room and celebrate the end of the holiday you no longer believe in.

"[T]here has been an unrelenting effort to make 'insurrection' a litmus test for anyone speaking about January 6th."

"If one does not use that term (and, worse yet, expresses doubts about its accuracy), you run the risk of immediate condemnation as someone excusing or supporting insurrection. This framing also reduces the need to address the question of how this riot was allowed to spiral out of control.... The effort to mandate 'insurrection' as the only acceptable description prevents the country from speaking with a unified voice. It clearly serves political purposes but only makes a national resolution more difficult as we approach a new presidential election."

Writes Jonathan Turley in "Harvard Study: J6 Rioters Were Motivated by Loyalty to Trump, Not Insurrection Against the Constitution."

ADDED: From my remote outpost in the Midwest, I scoff at the people who are so easily disciplined by language rules. So there's "an unrelenting effort" and "you run the risk of immediate condemnation"? How flimsy are you?! As soon as someone gets at me with anything that feels like "an unrelenting effort" to scare me about a "risk of immediate condemnation," I feel resistant and activated. I don't want to appease and obey. What is the point of being engaged at all if you're so malleable and fearful? I mean, it's nice to see Jonathan Turley mildly objecting, but there should be far more vigilance about these nefarious efforts to control people with language. It's language: Talk back!

"The faculty letter gives the impression that many Princeton professors believe their institution is rife with anti-Black racism and that the university must risk abandoning long-standing core values..."

"... to be anti-racist. But most signatories who responded to my queries hold neither of those beliefs.... Outside observers should be sophisticated enough to understand that universities are socially and politically complex communities where faculty members don’t always say what they mean, especially when asked to sign on to a group letter with hundreds of their colleagues in a moment of national crisis. 'Much as I’m averse to aspects of any letters signed by more than one person—chiefly that they represent a form of mostly benign and well-intentioned thuggery—I’m convinced we live in a moment where we have to be seen as being part of a solution to what is clearly a problem,' [humanities professor and poet Paul] Muldoon told me... in his thoughtful email. 'That means that, as in the case of the Princeton letter, some ideas may need to be overstated to be stated at all.' ... I am concerned that some faculty members are unwilling to publicly criticize a demand that they scoff at privately. Can they really be counted on to protect academic freedom in a faculty vote? And I wish more faculty members would say whatever they actually think with clarity and precision, rather than indulging in hyperbole that does more to muddy and polarize than to clarify."

Writes Conor Friedersdorf in "The Princeton Faculty’s Anti-Free-Speech Demands/Some of the signers of a controversial open letter don’t stand behind its most alarming demand" (The Atlantic).

"It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers."

From Kindle location 320 in Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," this is the second entry in The "Bonfire" Project, where we talk about one short passage of continuous text:

All at once Sherman was aware of a figure approaching him on the sidewalk, in the wet black shadows of the town houses and the trees. Even from fifty feet away, in the darkness, he could tell. It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers. Now he was forty feet away, thirty-five. Sherman stared at him. Well, let him come! I’m not budging! It’s my territory! I’m not giving way for any street punks!

The black youth suddenly made a ninety-degree turn and cut straight across the street to the sidewalk on the other side. The feeble yellow of a sodium-vapor streetlight reflected for an instant on his face as he checked Sherman out.

He had crossed over! What a stroke of luck!

Not once did it dawn on Sherman McCoy that what the boy had seen was a thirty-eight-year-old white man, soaking wet, dressed in some sort of military-looking raincoat full of straps and buckles, holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself.

This is sort of like the old "Gatsby" project, but, for reasons previously discussed, it can't be just one sentence out of context, examined purely as a sentence. I'm giving you more text and permission to use what you know from the rest of the reading — I know some of you are reading along with me — but you need to concentrate on what's going on in the chosen text.

A few thoughts of mine:

"Just hours before the curtain was to go up, Shorewood High School has canceled its production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' in response to a planned protest over its use of the n-word."

"News of a planned protest had circulated on social media early Thursday. And by early afternoon, Superintendent Bryan Davis pulled the plug, saying the district should have done a better job engaging the community 'about the sensitivity of this performance. We’ve concluded that the safest option is to cancel the play,' Davis said in a statement."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Imagine letting students learn all the lines of a play, rehearse their parts, get all nervous and excited about the performance and then just cancelling it on them — cancelling it on them not because of anything they did wrong or anything that was wrong but because other people talked about protesting it. What kind of lesson is the school teaching?! What's the point of working hard and doing something worthwhile that you believe in and build with other people if the authorities won't support you but will take the "safest option" and side with the people who see an opportunity for protest and disruption.

I see the protesters don't like the "n-word" in the show. It would be so easy to modify the script to take out one word. But I guess cancelling is the "safest" thing to do. It's practically telling the students who worked peaceably on their theater project that they should be less well-behaved, so that ruining their work won't seem "safe."

***

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what." - Atticus Finch.

ADDED: I have drawn a line through one sentence because I now believe the licensing agreement forbids making any change to the script. My son John linked to this post at Facebook, and someone there made that point. My response there:

I'm sorry if my blog post makes it seem as though my first choice is to take out the word or if anyone thinks I'd support the cancellation if the word could not be taken out. I think the school authorities saw fit to make that play the one the students should do and the students committed a lot of work and dedication to a project in reliance on the school's choice. It is a terrible betrayal of the students who trusted the school. I was in school plays in high school, and I remember how deeply emotionally important they become to the students. Here's a play with very serious subject matter, and the subject is specifically courage in the face of ignorant opposition.

"Students Filed Title IX Complaints Against Kavanaugh to Prevent Him From Teaching at Harvard Law."

The Harvard Crimson reports, naming a student who supposedly said she'd filed a complaint with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution and has been urging other students to do the same. We're told that "at least 48 students had signed an online petition certifying they had filed a Title IX complaint against the nominee."

The student who got this started argued that Kavanaugh could be accused of gender-based harassment under Harvard's definition: "verbal, nonverbal, graphic, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostile conduct based on sex, sex-stereotyping, sexual orientation or gender identity." Kavanaugh's mere presence on campus, she and others said, makes a "hostile environment" under Harvard's definition.

[The student] said she hopes students who have previously felt reluctant to file complaints with the University — whether related to Kavanaugh or to other experiences — will see that the formal process gives them “power” and “a right to our feeling of being safe.”

“I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” she said.

Another leader in this activism said:

“If you had a meeting in Wasserstein, you don’t know if he’s going to be there... It would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime.”

Terrifying to see a person accused of a serious crime? Kavanaugh's temperament is being questioned, but what about the temperament of these potential lawyers? Do they not feel called to deal with the difficult world of legal problems? This made me think about one of the most reviled Supreme Court cases, Bradwell v. Illinois, which allowed the state to bar women from the practice of law, back in 1873. From the concurring opinion of Justice Bradley:

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... 

Why don't activist, feminist women aspire to strength?  Promoting the timidity and delicacy of women and running to the authorities with specious, backhanded complaints — what lowly, destructive activism!

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:

Every now and then, quote-unquote feminists have s minor freak out because some female celebs or young women in general don’t want to be associated with the word “feminist.” This is why. I don’t claim to know what feminism really means; it seems to be something different to everyone, so I generally avoid the term entirely. But if feminism involves this kind of weakness, I want absolutely no part of it.

If I were still in law school, I’d get that Bradley quote put in a t-shirt. It’s awsome.

"Awsome" = a typo or a word that means cute (that is, inspiring people to say "aw").

Anyway, I've had that problem with feminism for close to half a century, but I still care about salvaging the word. Why give it away to people who are undermining the very cause that matters to you? I remember saying — 35 years ago — that I didn't want to call myself a feminist because I didn't want to wear a label with a meaning that wasn't clear and stable and within my control. But that never meant I didn't care about participating in the struggle over the meaning of the word. It's a big struggle, and I say never surrender.

CORRECTION: I thought the activist students were law students, but now I'm seeing the word "undergraduate" in the first and second paragraphs and have deleted the references to law students. I hope it is true that law students know better than to engage in this maneuver and that they are leaning into strength and readying themselves to confront the roughness of the real world.

At the Afternoon Café...

... I couldn't get to everything I'd wanted this morning. I'd meant to work my way through "'The trauma for a man': Male fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh" (WaPo), and I've got a lot more to say about stoking the fear of masculine anger and the fear of fear. I mean "Male fury and fear"... aren't half the books about Trump called either "Fear" or "Fury"? What is really going on? But that will have to wait a bit. How can it wait, when everything is an eeeemergenceeeee these days? Courage! And pick your own topics, including bland and ordinary things that don't inspire the slightest quiver of trepitude. Trepitude???

"New Yorker Festival Pulls Steve Bannon as Headliner Following High-Profile Dropouts."

The NYT reports.

The New Yorker dropped Bannon after John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff, and Jim Carrey all dropped out. And according to the editor David Remnick, "even New Yorker staff members had expressed discomfort" at including Bannon. Remnick also said, "The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him."

Jeez, the editor of The New Yorker is sensitive to "dismay and anger" that's directed at him personally? Stand up to it! "I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns." What about the concerns of your readers who now think you're cowardly and lame? I'm a long-time subscriber to The New Yorker, and I think you're lame.

I think you've ignored my concerns, and I'd like to think your magazine challenges readers and isn't just about paying attention to our "concerns."

Bannon's response is, of course, much more appealing:

“The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation,” Mr. Bannon said in a statement to The New York Times. “In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.” 

Remnick walked right into that.

ALSO: The article quotes Mulaney: "I’m out. I genuinely support public intellectual debate, and have paid to see people speak with whom I strongly disagree. But this isn’t James Baldwin vs William F Buckley.” And Antonoff: “respectfully that’s a full no for me and normalization of white supremacy.”

By the way, who are John Mulaney and Jack Antonoff? I think I might be familiar with Antonoff as the ex-boyfriend of Lena Dunham. Ah, yes:

Antonoff and Dunham remained together until January 2018, with representatives of both announcing their separation as "amicable".

In June 2014, Antonoff said he was "desperate" for kids, explaining:

It just seems like the most fun thing in the world. I've never met people who have kids who haven't looked me in the eye and been like, "It's the greatest thing that's ever happened." ... I think it's biological. I'm 30. I'm not that young, right? I'm not, like, 24 or 22. I'm no longer in the phase of my life where I talk about everything as in the future. Like, I'm in the future.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Remnick was an idiot to invite Bannon in the first place. He was a fool if he didn’t know this all would happen.

Was Remnick an idiot? For one brief shining moment he believed that The New Yorker audience wants breadth and challenge. And some of us really do. But I guess he was an idiot not to see the game several moves ahead. Now, here he is, in the future, looking narrow and weak.

The way people act in real life is disgusting compared to the way I behave in my best dreams.

Trump's dreams are lovely compared to reality.



Transcript:

But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?

The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.

You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.

And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.

When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.

But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.



That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:

In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....

In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."

An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.


Detail from "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Salvador Dali.

Dreams! They're not just for Democrats anymore.

"Florida shooting: Bullets flew for 4 minutes as armed deputy waited outside."

CNN reports.

School resource officer Scot Peterson never went in, despite taking a position on the west side of Building 12, where most of the carnage happened, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday.

"I think he remained outside for upwards of four minutes," Israel said Thursday in a news conference. The shooting, he said, lasted six minutes....

President Donald Trump made his first remarks about Peterson while departing the White House on Friday, saying the deputy "certainly did a poor job."

"He trained his whole life," Trump said. "But when it came time to get in there and do something, he didn't have the courage or something happened. But he certainly did a poor job, there's no question about that."

Did he train his whole life for this situation, to go in single-handedly and stop an active shooter, somewhere in a building amid many other people? Or are we really just thinking, how could he not go in and die trying rather than to stay alive only to be mired in hopeless shame?

Moving away from the pitiful figure of Scot Peterson, I want to know how much you think school security guards are going to help. Is Peterson the outlier, or should we expect all the guards we hire to turn out to be a Scot Peterson when the crisis hits?

Hillary Clinton lauds "the courage of these women coming forward now."

She says — and I had to keep pausing the video to laugh and to say things like "What hypocrisy!" — it "is really important because it can’t just end with one person’s disgraceful behavior and the consequences that he is now facing. This has to be a wake-up call and shine a bright spotlight on anything like this behavior anywhere, at any time. We’ve had a series of revelations about companies in Silicon Valley — you know, just sexual harassment and sexual assault being, you know, kind of accepted. That’s the cutting edge of our economy. … This can’t be tolerated anywhere, whether it’s entertainment or tech or" — politics? — "anywhere."



IN THE COMMENTS: Dickin'Bimbos@Home said "Harvey bundled big D-money for you, Hillary - Any Comment on that, Hillary?"

Watch the video. I didn't blog about that part, but it's in there. She says she can't give the money back, but whatever she got should be deemed included in the 10% of her income she always gives to charity anyway. I'm paraphrasing — to make it clearer. What she garbled out was:

"What other people [how got money from Harvey Weinstein] are saying, what my former colleagues are saying, is they're going to donate it to charity, and of course I will do that. I give 10% of my income to charity every year, this will be part of that. There's no -- there's no doubt about it."

One thing cannot be clarified: "One thing can be clarified. Not everybody knew."

Says the statement issued under the name Meryl Streep. I don't know from whose mind these words sprang, but the statement continues:

Harvey supported the work fiercely, was exasperating but respectful with me in our working relationship, and with many others with whom he worked professionally.

So some, but not others, got respectful treatment. That doesn't make the behavior better. It makes it worse. It's discriminatory.

I didn’t know about these other offenses: I did not know about his financial settlements with actresses and colleagues; I did not know about his having meetings in his hotel room, his bathroom, or other inappropriate, coercive acts.

Why didn't you know what was convenient for you not to know? Was it willful blindness? Did you have any hints, but avoid learning these details? If so, you had an obvious self-interest in standing aloof. You could, on the other hand, just be lying, but for the sake of argument, I'm assuming that the statement is true and looking at the ways in which it is cagey and self-protective. 

And If everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.

The cagiest part of this writing is the phrase "everybody knew." If only one person didn't know, then not everybody knew. So it's easy to stand firmly on the trivial technicality that not everybody knew... especially since so many people had a personal interest in staying in the dark and not following up on the clues. But many people knew, and yet the matter was suppressed for many years. The "investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media" were neglectful, and the failure of everybody to know doesn't overcome the inference of neglect. And, indeed, there is neglect in the not knowing in some cases, such as, perhaps, yours, Meryl Streep.

The behavior is inexcusable, but the abuse of power familiar. Each brave voice that is raised, heard and credited by our watchdog media will ultimately change the game.

Blech. You should have spoken out when it mattered. Before the bubble burst. Speak out about somebody else. The abuse of power is familiar, you say. All right, then. You there on the inside, Meryl, you raise your brave voice, if you have one. Otherwise, this after-the-fact statement is just an inadequate effort to cover your own ass and of a piece with the ignorance of the facts that served your interest before the story hit the news.

“We didn’t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle. But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say..."

"... that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon."

Said John Stauffer, quoted in "From Prison to Ph.D.: The Redemption and Rejection of Michelle Jones" (NYT). He's one of 2 American studies professor at Harvard, who "flagged Ms. Jones’s file for the admissions dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences... and questioned whether she had minimized her crime 'to the point of misrepresentation.'"

Jones served 20 years in prison for murdering her 4-year-old son.

While top Harvard officials typically rubber-stamp departmental admissions decisions, in this case the university’s leadership — including the president, provost, and deans of the graduate school — reversed one, according to the emails and interviews, out of concern that her background would cause a backlash among rejected applicants, conservative news outlets or parents of students.

Whatever you think of the redemption of murderers and the feelings of rejected applicants, the fear of conservative news outlets — fear of Fox — is incredibly lame.

The admissions dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences refused to be interviewed, and it's a good policy not to talk to the press about students and would-be students. But there was leakage here, and that quote from Stauffer looks just awful — "Fox News... I mean, c'mon." Is that the way insiders at the exquisitely eminent university speak? Ironically, the conservative news outlets should be savaging Harvard for rejecting an applicant out of fear of conservative news outlets.

Or am I falling into a trap laid by the New York Times?

Anyway, read about the history work Michelle Jones did while in prison:

After meticulously logging demographic data from century-old registries from the Indiana Women’s Prison, Ms. Jones made a discovery: There were no prostitutes on the rolls. “Where,” she asked, “were all the ladies?” meaning so-called ladies of the night.

With the help of a state librarian, she and another inmate realized that a Catholic laundry house that opened around that time in Indianapolis was actually a reformatory for “fallen women” — those convicted of sex offenses. Then they found more than 30 similar institutions around the country, akin to the Magdalene Laundries recently unearthed in Ireland.

[T]hey wrote up their findings, published them in an Indiana academic journal, and won the state historical society award. Ms. Jones also presented the paper remotely at multiple academic conferences, and, at others, shared different work about the abuse of early inmates at Indiana Women’s Prison by its Quaker founders.

The top-rated comment at the NYT is:

Ms. Jones fulfilled her sentence and has risen to achieve what society could only hope that other incarcerated individuals achieve. It's ridiculous for some people at Harvard to question if she had disclosed enough about her past and to question if she could handle the pressures of their program. Let Ms. Jones have the opportunity to soar or to fail on her own accord. This question of letting her into the program strikes at the heart of society's false promise agreeing that incarceration rehabilitates. So many prisoners languish inside prison for a set term and then are dumped on the street with $40 and a bus ticket. Ms. Jones is exceptional and should be held as an example of what can be achieved. Society should at the very least honor the commitment that once a sentence is served, society is obligated to make every effort to support prisoners with opportunities for work, education, and mental health services.

The second-highest-rated comment is something I would imagine some of you are about to write in the comments:

This woman killed her four year old son, and the NY Times wants my heart to bleed for HER because she didn't get into her first choice of doctoral programs after serving 40% of the sentence she was given. Nearly every day the Times reminds me of why the Democrats lost the election in 2016.

"… there’s a weird number of people battling snails from medieval times … Why is this?"

"We don’t know. Seriously. There are as many explanations as there are scholars."

One answer is: "Since human knights are often seen trembling before—or, indeed, losing to—the harmless, slow-moving snails, it makes sense that the image is a way to emphasize cowardice."

"[P]assengers trapped in the moving train huddled at both ends of the car and watched in horror as [Jasper] Spires punched 24-year-old Kevin Joseph Sutherland until he fell to the floor, then stabbed him until he was dead."

"Court documents say the victim was cut or stabbed 30 or 40 times, in the chest, abdomen, back, side and arms. Police said the assailant then threw the victim’s cellphone and returned to stomp on Sutherland’s body."

“We were in a moving train,” said a 52-year-old woman, who spoke on the condition that she not be named because she is both a victim and a witness to a crime. “You’re not really sure what you need to do. . . . This man is holding a bloody knife. I don’t think anyone was going to try and stop him... I watched [the attacker] drop-kick him in the head several times, like he wanted to kick his head off... We saw the perpetrator kicking the man. He had him on the ground, punching him, kicking him and stabbing him.... I would have to say that my instinct was to stay put and try to become as small as possible.... I’m looking, but I don’t want to be noticed by him.... I really thought when he had my dad stand up and he was standing up close to him that he was going to knife him. I didn’t know what he would do after he got money off my father.... I think we were all trying to stay away from him considering he had a knife... People who were in front of us were saying, ‘Don’t do that.’... I did not want him to think that he had to hurt us because we would identify him. I wanted him to think that he could walk away from this, and that’s what he did."

I've compressed the woman's quote from a longer article, which is in The Washington Post and titled "Horrified passengers witnessed brutal July 4 slaying aboard Metro car." The headline writer, for whatever reason, decided not to frame things in terms of the failure to help, which is horrifying witnessed from a distance much farther than the length of a Metro car. 

5 things wrong with the NY Post headline "Weenies burn flag to protest cops, get attacked by bikers, need cops to save their asses."

Here's the article. Here are the 5 things:

1. The protesters didn't call the cops. The cops were already on the scene because the flag burning was a planned and promoted event. The cops observed the scene, witnessed violence, and following their own standards and judgment, ended it. The headline suggests that the anti-cop protesters cried out for help in their time of need.

2. Speaking out against bad police behavior does not entail an obligation to forgo police protection. The position that police aren't doing their jobs properly doesn't nail you down to the position that there should be no police protection at all. There's no big contradiction between criticizing the police and benefiting from police protection when you're a victim of crime.

3. Someone who exercises freedom of speech in a way that inflames the anger of a crowd is not a "weenie." It may be unwise or rude or stupid, but it's not what weenies do.  "The Weenie State is characterized by an obsession with rules and protocols, reinforced by fear.... Fear of stepping outside the lines. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of looking stupid."

4. The New York Post (in its successful clickbait) adopts the viewpoint of thugs. From the article: "'They took off like little b—hes,' said one biker. 'They lit the f–king flag and took off running once they got slapped once or twice.'" The bikers wanted a physically violent fight, and the protesters chose not to stand their ground but to run, which most people — if they're not distracted by their own anger about flag-burning — probably think is the most rational move. The message to future protesters shouldn't be: Stand up and fight or we'll call you weenies.

5. Since the police were right there to defuse the situation, we don't know whether the flag-burners really did "need cops to save their asses." In the age-old struggle to save your own ass, the 2 big options are fight or flight. When the flight instinct kicks in, it's probably for the best, probably because you're going to lose that fight. Of course, those who wanted to fight will mock and revile you for "taking off like little bitches," but they'd have laughed at the way you'd have gone down if you'd stood and fought. That would, I suspect, have amused them even more.

Accusing Scott Walker of winking insidious messages, Dana Milbank shows his frustration at the disciplining effect of Walker's no-response response.

I'm reading Dana Milbank's new WaPo column "Scott Walker’s insidious agnosticism," which doubles down on his recent "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him," which I dealt with 4 days ago in "Non-Wisconsinites, I need to explain something about Scott Walker to you that you are missing."

I'm overcoming my basic urge to ignore Milbank. Isn't he just repeating what I've already addressed? Why feed him with attention? But he's got high profile whether I pay attention to him or not. That column has upwards of 5,000 comments, and Milbank is actively shaping Walker's image right as Walker is getting national attention.

Walker — with his hardcore on-message approach — does not respond to the usual efforts to entice Republicans to make damaging remarks about sex, race, religion, and other things that aren't part of his message. Another strategy is needed, and Milbank seems to think he's found it. (I put "seems to" in that sentence in honor of Walker's dogged refusal to make statements about what's inside another person's head.) Milbank's idea is to make Walker's restraint into a horrible flaw that disqualifies him from serious consideration.

In the first column, Milbank used the label "cowardice." In the new one, it's "agnosticism." But what's wrong with agnosticism? Is he knocking one of the world's great religions? Oh, it's "insidious agnosticism." Insidious, really? Why not invidious? Or perfidious?! Milbank uses the religion-related word as he attempts to crucify Walker for saying that he doesn't know whether President Obama is a Christian:

This is not a matter of conjecture. The correct answer is yes: Obama is Christian, and he frequently speaks about it in public....

Milbank (who is probably not a Christian) is missing something about Christianity that is quite glaring to me (whose possible Christianity is an enigma). To many Christians, claiming to be a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.

As I child, I often found myself in a Christian church with a congregation singing "Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart." Dana Milbank, do you understand why that lyric is experienced as profound, or would you scoff "Why are these idiots pestering God about wanting to be something that they obviously are? The correct lyric is 'Thanks, Lord, for making me a Christian'"?  Why are you the arbiter of what is correct in Christianity? Why aren't you more of an agnostic? Your non-agnosticism here is insidious, invidious, and perfidious.

Milbank says that Walker's idea that he would need to talk to Obama about Christianity is an "intriguing standard," and then he lets loose with the snark:

I’ve never had a conversation with Walker about whether he’s a cannibal, a eunuch, a sleeper cell [sic] for the Islamic State, a sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome or a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By Walker’s logic, it would be fair for me to let stand the possibility that he just might be any of those — simply because I have no personal and direct refutation from him.

No. Walker's logic is that if anyone were to ask a bad question like that, he would turn the spotlight back on the questioner and expose the defectiveness of the question. And that would be a better response, because it doesn't treat the question as serious. That is, it's better to say "That's a clown question, bro" than to treat it like a real issue by saying no. Walker doesn't say "That's a clown question." He's more polite. But it's the same idea.

Walker is engaged in the enterprise of disciplining the press, and I can see why they don't like it. Milbank reveals his frustration:

Walker justifies his agnosticism on grounds that he is avoiding gotcha questions.... This is insidious... because it allows Walker to wink and nod at the far-right fringe where people really believe that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya who hates America. 

Only because the question was asked! Stop asking questions like that and you'll be disabling Walker's insidious winking. Face it: Those who are putting these questions to Walker are trying to elicit material that they can used to serve the audience on the left. They have the power to turn off the Walker winks, but they hate to do it. They want to generate material on hot subjects like sex, race, and religion because it works so well to draw in normal, ordinary Americans who know that economics and national security are what really matters in a President but who find these topics boring and difficult.

If only something like "legitimate rape" would drop out of Walker, they'd be in business.

... Walker’s technique shuts down all debate, because there’s no way to have a constructive argument once you’ve disqualified your opponent as unpatriotic, un-Christian and anti-American.

Disqualified? Dana Milbank used that word in the previous column, "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him." You declared him disqualified, and now you accuse him of shutting down all debate because he won't debate with you about a subject that isn't constructive. You know it's not constructive, that it's a trick, and he's not playing the game. So what do you do? You switch to accusing him of playing a game through silent signalling — unpatriotic, un-Christian and anti-American. Of course, you're frustrated that you can't lure him into the conversation you want, and you'd like to deprive him of the power to discipline you into staying on his message.

At this point, Milbank's column sinks into madness:

On the Internet, Godwin’s Law indicates that any reasonable discussion ceases when the Nazi accusations come out; Walker is essentially doing the same by refusing to grant his opponent legitimacy as an American and a Christian.

What? Walker didn't say those things. (Also, that's not even what Godwin's Law is.) And Walker isn't doing the equivalent of bringing up the Nazis. He's not talking about the things you wish he'd talk about, so you're saying it for him. You know you're doing that, so you toss in the word "essentially" to patch up the mess of that sentence... that sentence that purports to long for reasonable discussion.

Milbank ends the column with an imagined Q&A in which a Walker opponent supposedly gets questions like those Walker has received and answers them the way Walker has answered those questions. The first 2 questions are not in the form of the questions Scott Walker has been asked: "Why does Scott Walker hate America?" and "When did he stop beating his wife?" Those are questions that assume a fact, a notoriously improper form of question. There's a prior unasked question in both cases that could be answered "I don't know" — Does Scott Walker hate America? and Did Scott Walker ever engage in wife-beating?

So, right off, we can see that Milbank is doing something insidious and invidious. Milbank hasn't shown us an example of Walker's failing to acknowledge the problem of an assumption inside a question.

Milbank proceeds to some questions that don't have that problem: "Does Walker love his children?" and "Does he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?" And Milbank seems to think that he's demonstrated that the answers should just be "yes" and "no," but I think a better answer to those questions would be to refuse to accept those questions as appropriate and to turn the spotlight onto the questioner, which is the Scott-Walker-press-disciplining technique.

I’ll go out on a limb and stipulate that Walker loves his country and his family, and I have no reason to think he isn’t a good Christian and a decent man. But he’d be a better man if he didn’t insinuate with his demurrals that his political opponents are not.

And you'd be a better man, Dana Milbank, if you didn't pose as if you were saying something nice about Scott Walker and inviting him to a higher level of civil discourse.

"It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out."

"For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for it means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek to do it."

Something more from G.K. Chesterton's "Tremendous Trifles" (also quoted in the previous post).

"Snipers are cowards. They don't believe in a fair fight. Like someone coming up from behind you and coldcocking you."

"Just isn't right. It's cowardly to shoot a person in the back. Only a coward will shoot someone who can't shoot back."

Michael Moore quotes his father, whose brother, an Army paratrooper in WWII, was killed by a Japanese sniper. That's part of the back and forth over a tweet Moore made that was taken to be about the movie "American Sniper."

Wouldn't virtually all of our military techniques be classified as cowardly by the standard set by Michael Moore's father? Only a coward would drop a bomb from the air?

Maybe some day they'll make a movie about President Obama pointing to the list of targets for a drone attack, and Michael Moore will still be around to quote his father.

Maybe the problem is making a movie from the point of view of the person who is in the position of killing from a devastating advantage. A movie affects the minds of viewers who have not themselves gone through the real world experience that gets a human being into that position. They're just sitting there, safely watching, and getting charged up according to whatever manipulations the filmmaker sees fit to impose on these pliable spectators.

That's something Michael Moore knows a lot about. Michael Moore... and Clint Eastwood.

"Howard Kurtz leaves Daily Beast following Jason Collins column mistake."

Kurtz, whose area of expertise is media criticism, made a mistake in the media that drew some criticism and what looks like swift retaliation.

... Kurtz mistakenly accused Collins of leaving out “one detail” in Collins’s Sports Illustrated essay disclosing his homosexuality. The detail, Kurtz said, was that Collins “was engaged. To be married. To a woman.”...

Kurtz initially amended his Daily Beast story, saying Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” But the Daily Beast retracted the story entirely after the mistake and subsequent amendments drew heavy criticism from several Web sites.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill said:

But Collins did attempt to obscure his engagement. This is what he wrote: "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged."

That sure sounds like someone who got engaged young, not someone who cancelled a wedding at the age of about 30 after an eight year relationship. While his statement was technically true (everything in our past was when we were younger), it had to have been intentionally misleading, especially coming from a Stanford grad.

I agree, and you put that so much better than Kurtz did in his correction. This is an important basis for criticism of Collins, who's being hailed as a hero. Giving up on living a lie is a good idea, but it's not heroic. Maybe 30 years ago, it was heroic to be openly gay, but even back then, if you chose to keep your sexual orientation quiet, it was still wrong to delude another person to the extent that Collins apparently did. Collins graduated from Stanford in 2001, and it's just ridiculous that someone who lived in that environment at that time — he roomed with Joe Kennedy and was friends with Chelsea Clinton — would be seriously burdened with backward ideas about sexual orientation. I'll refrain from lambasting the man for his deceit and cowardice, but extolling him as a hero is absurd. I think that's what Kurtz might have wanted to say, but he botched his attack.

It would be interesting to know which powerful Democrats, if any, interacted with Tina Brown over the downfall of Howard Kurtz.