“If you read between the lines, it’s not that bad."

Said Rob Reiner after reading Roger Ebert's famous "Hated It" review out loud, for laughs:

It's a funny punchline, reminiscent of "Dumb and Dumber"'s "So you're telling me, there's a chance?"

But what was it that bothered Ebert so much about Reiner's movie, "North"?

Here's more of Ebert's review:

[The main character is] a kid with inattentive parents, who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents. This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents – and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector.

"In a stunning and hasty reversal, the U.S. Coast Guard announced late Thursday that swastikas and nooses are prohibited hate symbols..."

"... erasing an attempt to soften their definition after the plan elicited furious backlash. The abrupt policy change occurred hours after The Washington Post first reported that the service was about to enact new harassment guidelines that downgraded the meaning of such symbols of fascism and racism, labeling them instead 'potentially divisive.'"

From "In reversal, Coast Guard again classifies swastikas, nooses as hate symbols/The new order came hours after The Post reported the service would instead classify such symbols as 'potentially divisive' under guidelines set for release next month" (WaPo).

Interesting. I note that Trump was asked about the policy at his press conference — the one with Mamdani — yesterday, and Trump said he didn't know about it:

"In your last lie detector test, you said you think everyone hates you. Do you still believe that?"/"Yes."

"Why?"/"I don't know why anybody wouldn't hate me. I can't think of one reason. I mean, my kids, 'cause they have no other option. I'm their only mother.... I don't think they hate me. Yet."

Scroll to 7:22 for the quoted text.

Love your enemy/hate your enemy — What did Trump really say at the Charlie Kirk memorial?

I see the headline in the NYT, framing Trump's statement in the conventional anti-Trump manner: "'I Hate My Opponent': Trump’s Remarks at Kirk Memorial Distill His Politics/President Trump has been fueled by grievance and animosity over the course of his political and public life."

Is Trump a hater? I'm not going to sift through everything he's done "over the course of his political and public life," but I will read the transcript of his speech — which I listened to live — and zero in on the part about hating his adversaries, which is getting attention from his adversaries, as I presume he knew it would:

"There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."

Said Pam Bondi, quoted in "Bondi takes heat from the right after vowing to prosecute 'hate speech': ‘We will absolutely target you'" (NY Post).

Takes heat and deserves it.

Among the conservative commentary at the link there is this 2024 tweet from Charlie Kirk himself:

Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech. 

And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. 

Keep America free.

"A month ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center declared Moms for Liberty an 'extremist group' devoted to spreading “messages of anti-inclusion and hate...."

"The 'extremist' label is justified, said Esther Prins, a professor at Penn State University who has studied the intersection of education advocacy and Christian nationalism in America. Prins said the activities of Moms for Liberty chapters — especially efforts to remove books nationwide, many of which are led by group members and which overwhelmingly target people of color and LGBTQ+ authors, a Post analysis found — are consistent with groups that promote a hierarchical social order in which 'men are over women, straight people over LGBTQ people.' Prins said, 'That’s why they don’t want children learning about racism or about the existence of people who are not straight or the existence of families that aren’t the heterosexual nuclear family.'..."

I'm reading "Moms for Liberty didn’t exist 3 years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker. Five GOP presidential candidates attended the group’s Philadelphia convention this weekend" (WaPo).

The post title is the first sentence of the article, and the next part I quoted is very far down in the article. The SPLC's designation takes prominence over any explanation of what this group is and why it deserves denouncement, and the explanation isn't convincing at all. These are the parents who object to sex-and-gender-themed books in schools? The article says "efforts to remove books nationwide"... remove books from where? Schools? Or more? 

According to Elon Musk, the misinformation (malinformation?) is in the mainstream press.

Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.

In fact, we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

"One of the reasons 'Secret Honor' is so affecting is that, with the distance of time, we feel sympathy for the man, especially because we are aware of how Nixon-hating..."

"... had a lot to do with a very personal reaction to the man. There was a sort of loathing that wasn't about politics, but about the way he looked and spoke and certain personality qualities of the sort that would have made him unpopular even as a child. And the truly challenging thing to think about is how he could have been politically effective if he repelled people on a deep psychic level. Bush-haters of today might try imagining themselves thirty years in the future, looking back at him as a mere man."

That's something I wrote on February 14, 2005, in a post called "Small and large falls." 

I'm reading that this morning after seeing this new piece at New York Magazine, "In Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall Plays Nixon As a Wounded Animal." New York Magazine is writing that now because the actor who played Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, recently died. He was 90.

I was writing about "Secret Honor" in 2005 — 17 years ago — because I was teaching the Watergate Tapes case and I had a nice, new Criterion Collection CD of the Robert Altman film. 

"Many students today go quickly to the position that there is such a thing as hate speech, that they know it when they see it that and it ought to be outlawed."

"For me that’s a topic to teach, not to simply honor or denounce. I’m revealing myself here as a person whose chords and arpeggios and scales are always the history of political thought: John Stuart Mill’s 'On Liberty' is the place to start. He says that the line between your freedom and its end is where it impacts on another’s freedom. That’s the question with hate speech: When does it do that? I’ll also mention Charles Murray. That’s tricky, because his science has been discredited by his peers, and his conclusions are understood by many as a form of hate speech, because he makes an argument about the racial inferiority of Black people in their capacity to learn and to succeed in this society. It feels terrible to give him a podium and a bunch of students who would sit and imbibe that as the truth. I think if Murray is invited to campus, you can picket him, you can leaflet him, but I don’t think it should be canceled. The important thing is for students to be educated and educate others about the bad science, the discrediting of his position, and then ask, Why does he survive in the academy, and why does that bad science keep getting resuscitated? Those are important questions for students to ask and then learn how to answer. That’s what’s going to equip them in this political world."

Said Wendy Brown, the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, quoted in "Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point" (NYT).

"No mention of the perps race in the headline. That is weirdly the most obvious clue to their race nowadays. #JouralismDiesInWokeness."

Says one of the commenters on the Washington Post article "New York authorities file hate-crime charges in attack on Asian American woman." 

There isn't even an attacker in the headline. The only human beings in the headline are the "authorities" and the "Asian American woman." The evildoer disappears. There's no attacker, only an "attack." But if there are hate crime charges, then the human mind is all important. "Attack" stresses the outward action. "Hate" requires a hater. There is a shadow of a person in the word "hate," the gesture at a mind. 

But this person is depersonalized — depersonalized because he is black. If a white man had stomped on an old Asian-American lady, he'd get full recognition in the headline. Is that racist?

In defense of WaPo, the second sentence of the article is: "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said Elliot — a homeless Black man on parole after serving 17 years in prison for killing his mother — told 65-year-old Vilma Kari 'you don’t belong here' before launching the unprovoked attack in Midtown on Monday."