At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The "bootstraps" metaphor.

I've already blogged about what Sonia Sotomayor said about Clarence Thomas, but here's one more thing:

I have often said to people that Justice Thomas believes that every person can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I believe that some people can’t get to their bootstraps without help – they need someone to help them lift their foot up so that they can reach.

What are bootstraps, and could we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps if we could only reach them?

 

Even if you can reach your bootstraps, you don't get anywhere by pulling up on them. Your entire body weight is still in your shoes. At best, you could pull one leg up, shifting your whole weight onto one foot, but that one foot would remain firmly planted in the original position. The phrase already embodies the idea that it can't be done. To stress helping people reach their bootstraps is really offering to distract them and lure them into wasting time waiting for assistance in doing something that is doomed to fail.

But it's just a metaphor. It doesn't prove that left-wing ideas about making life better for people is delusional. I'd find a different image if only to avoid cliché, but this is one cliché that is mostly used wrongly. It should be enough to say "Justice Thomas believes that every person can pull themselves up by their bootstraps." If you must say more, say: But it's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Go ahead. Try it!

"Members of a production team for 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' were arrested by US Capitol Police in a congressional office building Thursday night and charged with unlawful entry...."

"CBS confirmed in a statement to CNN that on Wednesday and Thursday 'Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was on-site at the Capitol with a production team to record interviews for a comedy segment on behalf of' the show. 'Their interviews at the Capitol were authorized and pre-arranged through Congressional aides of the members interviewed,' CBS said. 'After leaving the members’ offices on their last interview of the day, the production team stayed to film stand-ups and other final comedy elements in the halls when they were detained by Capitol Police.'... 'This is an active criminal investigation, and may result in additional criminal charges after consultation with the U.S. Attorney,' the Capitol Police statement said."

 CNN reports.

How bad is it to trespass on the Capitol Building? With the January 6th Committee working hard to horrify us about an incursion on the premises, it's an inopportune time to need to be arguing what's the big deal.

Glenn Greenwald asks why Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying this and AOC, Bernie, and their ilk are not.

Leave aside whatever views you have of MTG. Just put them in a corner for a second. OK, have we done that?

Now: think about the indisputable fact that not AOC, Bernie or a single Squad member could or would say most of what is in this thread, let alone in this tone, and ask why: https://t.co/ZuekWvA3Fw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 18, 2022

"As the backlash gains steam, a lot of feminism feels enervated. There had been a desperate hope..."

"... among reproductive rights activists and Democratic strategists alike, that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an explosive feminist mobilization, that people committed to women’s equality would take to the streets and recommit themselves to politics.... 'I don’t know that I’ve seen a new influx of energy, [said] Samhita Mukhopadhyay, co-editor of 'Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America.... ... Mukhopadhyay [used to be] the executive editor of the blog Feministing, which was once part of a vital feminist publishing scene. That scene is now mostly gone. Feministing closed a couple of years ago, and one of the last holdouts, Bitch Magazine, a publication devoted to feminist pop-culture criticism, is shuttering this month.... 'That type of earnest, identity-focused feminism has also grown out of style,' she said.... It is perhaps inevitable that a movement that was the height of fashion in the last decade would start to seem passé in this one. That’s how style works; the young and innovative distinguish themselves by breaking with the conventions of their predecessors.... The left, feminism very much included, needs people to be optimistic and confident about change.... But this is a fearful, hopeless and even nihilistic time."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Future Isn’t Female Anymore" (NYT).

If you have actual principles you don't need to worry about "fashion" and "style" and what's "passé." You just stick with it, your whole life, and it doesn't matter if you're winning or losing or how many people are crowding around you and generating a feeling of energy. 

Politics is a different way of life. If you choose that path, you'll have your big highs and lows. You can feel excited about your team and your heroes and fly into a rage when things don't work out. You can gush optimism and preen, then scream and spew pessimism. The Future Isn’t Female Anymore! What over-privileged foot-stamping. Look around the world. Look at history. Get a grip. Get some real principles and stay faithful to them without expecting to look fashionable or anticipating taking over the world.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, the newest national holiday: How should we celebrate it?

I'm not sure if "celebrate" is even the right word.

When I google my question, I also see "honor." How do we "honor Juneteenth"? People must sense that "celebrate" is wrong — too festive, too joyful and fun? — because they're not seeing that it's wrong to speak of "honoring" a holiday. It's not the holiday that is honored, the holiday honors something, and you wouldn't say you are honoring the honoring. 

At CNN, I'm seeing "Ways to celebrate and serve Juneteenth." Serve? Is the holiday our master? Juneteenth marks an escape from servitude. Why would we — how would we — serve this occasion? And yet we often speak of observing a holiday. I take a long break to research the prefix "ob-" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But enough about language. The question is are we going to celebrate Juneteenth?

"If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?"

"'Most people were very positive about it,' [Chie] Hayakawa said. 'They didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.'... In her first feature-length film... the government of a near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea as if hawking travel insurance. 'The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,' Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives 'that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.' With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society."

From "A Filmmaker Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die/The premise for Chie Hayakawa’s film, 'Plan 75,' is shocking: a government push to euthanize the elderly. In a rapidly aging society, some also wonder: Is the movie prescient?" (NYT).

"Stephanie Yeboah, a body image activist and the author of 'Fattily Ever After'... said spending an hour or two naked several days a week was a crucial step..."

"... early on in her own body acceptance journey. She would take off her clothes and read, watch TV or tidy her house.... Centering the senses can help you connect brain and body. Ms. Yeboah has also turned showering into a regular meditation. She buys nice lotions and oils, and takes the time to apply them slowly, carefully noting how they smell and feel on her skin. 'It was something I started doing on my self-love journey in order to kind of come to terms with — and learn how to re-love — my body'...."

From "How to Feel Better Naked/Whether you want to find joy in your body, or just greater self-acceptance, these four strategies from psychologists, activists — and, yes, nudists — might help" (NYT).

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Here are 5 TikTok items to amuse or intrigue you. Let me know what you like.

1. I had this feeling when I was a kid: That numbers have a personality!

2. How silently does an owl fly?

3. And speaking of birds: Imitating a parrot.

4. Tones a voice actor can use in a corporate training video.

5. Steve Coogan demonstrates the difference between young Al Pacino and old Al Pacino.

"The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday overruled a 2018 decision that said the right to abortion was protected under the state constitution."

 The Des Moines Register reports. 

The composition of the court has shifted since the 2018 decision, with Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, appointing four of the seven justices....

"Although we overrule (the 2018 decision), and thus reject the proposition that there is a fundamental right to an abortion in Iowa’s Constitution subjecting abortion regulation to strict scrutiny, we do not at this time decide what constitutional standard should replace it," Justice Edward Mansfield wrote in the majority opinion.

"He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution.... Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name, every one of them."

"And not only does he know their names, he remembers their families’ names and histories.... He’s the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, 'Is your son okay? How’s your daughter doing in college?' He’s the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida."

Said Sonia Sotomayor, speaking to the American Constitution Society, quoted at The Hill.

What a dismal time for American politics! Fortunately, I have a solution (for myself).

Look at the lineup of items to be clicked on at Real Clear Politics this morning:

 

It's that approach to balance that takes the form of alternating between being for one major party and then for the other. Neither party has my support, so I see no reason to click on any of it. How dreary for the partisans who pick through that list to find some comfort or nourishment. 

2 images of male beauty — side by side this morning on the front page of the New York Times.

I found this juxtaposition entrancing:

  

We see the idealized domesticated males, together, with idealized dog, on a park bench, looking simply and virtuously for a modest home. And we see the ominous male, heterosexual, standing in the dark next to an empty space where there once was a woman. Somehow his very looks have brought on madness! He — standing alone — is proof of the causal connection between male beauty and madness.

 

I've read both articles, but let's take a closer at the one about Johnny Depp, which is titled, when you click in "Johnny Depp Through the Looking Glass/Examining the madness that male beauty elicits." This is an opinion piece by Rhonda Garelick, School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School:

"Julian did nothing wrong. He has committed no crime and is not a criminal. He is a journalist and a publisher and he is being punished for doing his job."

"It was in [U.K. home secretary] Priti Patel’s power to do the right thing. Instead she will for ever be remembered as an accomplice of the United States in its agenda to turn investigative journalism into a criminal enterprise."

Says a statement from WikiLeaks, quoted in "Julian Assange’s extradition from UK to US approved by home secretary/Appeal likely after Priti Patel gives green light to extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder" (The Guardian).

The most marital answer ever to the old question "You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?"

From the novelist Geraldine Brooks, interviewed by the NYT:

First, I would bring back [my late husband] Tony Horwitz, because he was more fun at a dinner party than anyone I know. Then, because I think it’s rather rude — and a little dull — to invite writers without their partners, I would have my fellow Australian Tim Winton and his wife, Denise, who is a marine scientist. I’d add Margaret Atwood and bring back her partner, Graeme Gibson, a passionate conservationist.

You could have anyone. You could have Shakespeare or Dickens. But you're going to have Margaret Atwood's husband, "a passionate conservationist." I wonder what's the conservationist position about bringing people back from the dead. But the only person she exercised her resurrection power on was her own husband.