"What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must."

"Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.... Writing satire is a privilege I’ve never taken lightly. And I’m still trying to get it right."

Says Garry Trudeau.

"There are no abortion cakes."

A sentence written by Katha Pollitt. Context:

It’s no news that support for abortion rights is stagnant while gay rights become ever more popular.... I understand that same-sex marriage and reproductive rights are different: marriage is about love, and abortion is about freedom. There are no abortion cakes. But freedom is a bedrock American value, even when it’s for women.

Actually, there are abortion cakes. I could find them on line. Nothing I want to show you though.

"Over the years, belief in the brontosaurus became a badge of melancholy quixotism."

"'We brontophiles have been defeated,' Stephen Jay Gould wrote mournfully, in 1991. 'They have won."

But the tables have turned:

Researchers from Portugal and the United Kingdom have evaluated eighty-one diplodocid fossils—including specimens of Apatosaurus ajax (the first described apatosaurus) and Apatosaurus excelsus (the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus)—for a total of four hundred and seventy-seven morphological characteristics. “The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” Roger Benson, a professor of paleobiology at Oxford University, said....

"'Free time' — an interesting concept. You always do something with your time."

"You would have more free time if you saw yourself as free when you are doing whatever it is that you do. The question is, how did you get into the predicament of doing so many things that when you do them you do not feel free?"

From a post I wrote on April 14, 2007 titled "The man whose left pre-frontal cortex — the center for positive emotion — soared off the charts."

"You know what? I don't care about any of it — private email address, Benghazi, establishment Democratic, blah,blah, blah."

"If Hillary stays healthy and runs, I'm with her, all the way. Why? Because she is the smartest, toughest, and most experienced player out there. And besides being the best candidate to be the first woman president, she loves this county and it's progressive history. I feel this in my gut like nothing else I've ever felt before — she has her head on straight and she is grounded and rooted in our Democratic Republic like no other politician or citizen out there. Any American who can spend eight years in the White House, and then go on to be a senator, and then Secretary of State, and still want to be president, after all of the slings and arrows shot her, has the guts, savvy, and fortitude I want to see in my president. Damn, that woman is a Great American, there are no two ways about it! And the more the Republican Party tries to find a way to take her down, the more I want her to be the first woman president of the US. This is one for the Democratic Party to lose — there is no competition out there, none! The purists out there will complain that Hillary is old hat, or too much a part of the establishment, or too corrupted by Washington, or not Progressive enough. Well, grow up and get over it, kids! Hardball politics in the USA is not a namby-pamby sport. Realpolitik is the order of the day in the world we live in, and if you don't want the Republican Party, aka The Tea Party, to run this country, with all that that will mean, then you had better grow up and get on board with Hillary Clinton. Lets get it together and sweep her into the Oval Office next year, in a landslide the likes of which this country has never seen."

That's the top-rated comment at an NPR piece titled: "5 Things You Should Know About Hillary Clinton."

"The Best Reason to Take Rand Paul Seriously Has Nothing to Do With His Politics."

Writes Jim Rutenberg in the NYT.

[T]he ground game that [Paul's] team is planning is pure realpolitik. His staff is focused on the delegate math and party rules that could determine the next Republican nominee — a game-theory style of presidential politics at which the Paul team is particularly adept....

[I]n a close-fought, state-by-state contest between two or more competitive candidates, the campaign that best understands the intricacies of delegate allotment will have a real edge — and at this point, that campaign is almost certainly Paul’s. Like Obama in 2008, Paul is a first-term senator who, aware of his underdog status, is spending the campaign’s early days planning for all the scenarios it can envision.

"The beautiful door is completely open for me."

Some nice viral video from Dove (that serves an advertising purpose without showing a product).

I found that because Buzzfeed had an article about it with the subtitle "Once again, soap is acting condescending" and an "update" that reads:

This post was inappropriately deleted amid an ongoing conversation about how and when to publish personal opinion pieces on BuzzFeed. The deletion was in violation of our editorial standards and the post has been reinstated.

The article was (lamely) critical of Dove:

Dove has a long and fabled history of experimenting with the shame women feel about their bodies and posturing that they are the way out of it.... Feeling beautiful is an obligation and a pressure — and sometimes a pleasure, but not always. Feeling beautiful is so much work: work that beauty companies cash in on and exploit.

Gawker attributed the deleting to the fact that Dove advertises at Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed denied that, saying that the post violated a "show don't tell" rule:

When we approach charged topics like body image and feminism, we need to show not tell. (That’s a good rule in general, by the way.) We can and should report on conversations that are happening around something that we have opinions about, but using our own voices (and hence, BuzzFeed’s voice) to advance a personal opinion often isn’t in line with BuzzFeed Life’s tone and editorial mission...

When we write about news-related topics revolving around class, race, and feminism and other heated topics, it’s important that we show the conversation that is happening, or find other people who can give smart and valid quotes to make the point, or, ideally, add to the conversation with something substantively new....

I get it. The "buzz" that belongs in the feed of Buzzfeed is the buzz out there in the world, not the buzz in the writer's head. You're supposed to receive and convey the buzz, not create buzz, or at least that's the way it's supposed to look.

"'She isn't going to know,' one man is reportedly heard saying in the video..."

"Not once does someone say something or try to help the woman, and the incident was never reported...."

"This is happening in broad daylight with hundreds of people seeing and hearing what is happening and they are more concerned about spilling their beer than somebody being raped," [said Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen].

NYC cab driver fined $15,000 for telling his 2 women passengers not to kiss.

"TV producer Christina Spitzer and her actress girlfriend, Kassie Thornton, said they barely exchanged a peck in the back seat early into their ride when hack Mohammed Dahbi became ­enraged."

At a hearing last month, Dahbi told an unsympathetic administrative-law judge that Spitzer and Thornton were doing more than just G-rated canoodling. He said they were kissing “heavily” and “touching all over each other” — including “on the chest and the breast.”...

Each woman was awarded $5,000 for emotional distress, in addition to a $5,000 fine Dahbi was ordered to pay the city.Dahbi was found guilty of denying them a “public accommodation due to their sexual orientation.”

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigates a blogger who quotes a lyric from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

The blogger — a Democratic activist named Daniel Tilson — made fun of an on-line "tax cut calculator" as "Gov. Scott’s Magical Mystery Tax Cut Calculator" and used the line from the song "Coming to take you away, take you away..."

Some person at FDLE (an “analyst,” the agency said) eyeballed those words on Tilson’s blog and perceived a potential threat to the governor. Could somebody be plotting to take him away, take him away...?

Not since Charlie Manson got mesmerized by “Helter Skelter” has anyone twisted the words of a Beatles song so ludicrously — and Manson, let’s remember, is crazier than an outhouse rat.

Yet the FDLE, the top crime-busting force in Florida, detected possible ominous undertones in the lyrics of “Magical Mystery Tour.” An agent was promptly sent to interview Tilson....

I thought no one took song lyrics seriously anymore. Anyway, "coming to take you away" meant that whatever it is that is coming — the mystery tour or the tax cut calculator — is going to transport you on a journey into ecstasy or madness. The song "Magical Mystery Tour" is quite obviously about going on a psychedelic drug trip. It's hard even to try to project a threat of violence into "coming to take you away" in that very 1960s songs. Other coming to take you away material from those simpler times:

1. "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!," the 1966 novelty single by Napoleon XIV. The "they" who were coming were the "men in white coats" — which is an expression you don't hear anymore — who would take him to "the funny farm" — you don't hear that either.

2. Calgon "Take me away" advertising. For some, it took drugs. For others, a simple bath:

"[T]he first 800-page instalment of a two-part history of America that tells of the secret gay life of figures from Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Richard Nixon."

From activist/writer Larry Kramer.

ADDED: The link goes to an article in The Guardian which has the title "Were Lincoln and Nixon gay? The ‘history’ book that is dividing America" and, right under that, this set of pictures:



The caption under that is: "Abraham Lincoln, left and Richard Nixon. 'It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,' says author Larry Kramer of his book." One gets the sense that Kramer is playing an imaginative game of hypothesizing that this or that historical figure was gay. He says:

"Most histories have been written by straight people. There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning.It’s ridiculous to think we haven’t been here for ever."

Of course, he's right about that. There were gay people who hid it, so why not speculate about which ones were gay? What evidence is there? Lincoln and Nixon look so grim in those photographs. Maybe it was the stress and pain of denying and hiding their true sexuality.

The idea that standardized tests for school kids are "a civil right."

Argued in a WaPo column titled "Is it a student’s civil right to take a federally mandated standardized test?" Excerpt:

[C]ivil rights advocates don’t trust states to pay attention to disadvantaged children if they aren’t required by federal law to test and make public the scores of blacks, Hispanics, students with disabilities and English-language learners....

States and school districts that don’t want to deal with the daunting task of improving the achievement of poor students complain about testing as a way of shirking accountability, Henderson said. “This is a political debate, and opponents will use cracks in the facade as a basis for driving a truck through it,” [said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group of civil rights advocates that includes the NAACP and the National Urban League].

Further down in the column — 15 paragraphs later — there's the news that Henderson gets paid something like $88,250 a year from the Educational Testing Service for sitting on its board of directors.

He said there was no conflict between lobbying for testing and earning income from a testing company. “I wanted to understand how testing is used and the quality of measurements,” Henderson said, explaining why he joined the ETS board about a decade ago. “It’s been a useful grounding in understanding the science of psychonometrics.”

It's also useful to be grounded in understanding the science of bullshit-o-metrics.

At the Red Eye Tap Room...

... what'll you have?

Madonna does a standup comedy routine... and the jokes are all about dating younger men.

One joke is that, needing a date, she asked her son: "Do you have any friends you could introduce me to?" Her son is 14. She's 56.



It's supposed to be funny — not that it needs to be funny (the joke is that she's doing a standup routine at all) — because we're supposed to think good for you when a woman gets a man (or boy) who is younger.

Or maybe the idea was to make the audience boo and hiss, that it was a Neil Hamburger-type routine. Well, no one seems to have gotten it on that level. You have to sell intentionally, painfully bad. It's not easy.

"[Amos] Yee’s arrest doesn't just underscore his complaints about Singapore’s backwardness on rights and freedom."

"It shows the country’s dire need for cultural education through intelligent dissent."

In the days after Yee’s arrest, a slew of local celebrities, including three Singaporean starlet types, were interviewed about his videos on national TV. In sequences depressing to watch, they all sided with the state. “If you say that, ‘Oh, people can say whatever they want, all the time,’ then what about those people who are listening?” Joshua Tan, a young actor, said. Well, what about them? The suggestion that citizens should withhold political criticism for fear of offense is preposterous—far more embarrassing to Singapore than any videos by Yee could be.

Amos Yee is only 17, and he's been arrested under the Protection from Harassment Act, apparently for hurting religious feelings when he likened Lee Kuan Yew — a dead Singaporean leader — to Jesus Christ. Here's the video, in which you can see how very charming Yee is. (Some of the language is NSFW.)

Was Shirley Abrahamson "reelected as chief justice by popular vote... 2009"?

That's what the complaint in her federal court lawsuit says. Here's how the ballot looked:



Even without seeing that ballot, it's obvious that it could not be an election to the position of chief justice. If Koschnick had won, he would not have been elected chief. We, the people of Wisconsin, voted for a Justice of the Supreme Court. The position of chief was determined by the old seniority rule in the Wisconsin Constitution, which we, the people of Wisconsin, have now amended.