"Why America Is Moving Slowly on Assisted Suicide."

Subtitle of a Ross Douthat column that contains bulky sentences like:

The future of the assisted suicide debate may depend, in part, on whether Tippetts’s case for the worth of what can seem like pointless suffering can be made either without her theological perspective, or by a liberalism more open to metaphysical arguments than the left is today.

Tippetts is Kara Tippetts, a dying woman who wrote an open letter to Brittany Maynard about the value of the part of life that is dying. Brittany Maynard is a dying woman who has announced that she will commit suicide on November 1st.

Douthat's subtitle implies that America is on a road, with a destination, and being poky. But there is no such road, nor an entity called America that walks (or runs) on roads.

As for the bulky sentence. I don't think it would be pointless suffering to endeavor to diagram it, but it's hard to do that in typed script, so I'll just say: 1. The last comma is technically wrong and confusing, and 2. I think Douthat is trying to say that Tippett's argument is religious and conservative, so it would be helpful to hear more argument that is either not religious or not conservative.

"What Panetta is doing is a hit – a contract killing – for Hillary."

"Panetta at core is a Clinton person, not an Obama person. By accurately and truthfully describing the deliberations in the [Obama] cabinet, he makes Hillary look better, and he makes Obama look worse … And I think he’ll get his reward in heaven."

Said Dick Morris.

The Johnny Appleseed of Red Oaks.

(Link to YouTube.)

BONUS: Here's the beautiful, inspirational, and surprisingly religious 1948 Disney cartoon about Johnny Appleseed:



Things to note: 1. Beautiful graphics connecting sky to land, clouds to blooming apple trees, heaven to earth, 2. Johnny is too small and scrawny to do the manly things he sees other men doing, but his innate limitation is transformed into a powerful opportunity, with unabashed American, post-war, can-do spirit, 3. An angel depicted as an old pioneer, 4. Much displaying of the Bible, 5. Subtle acknowledgment of the fact that the most valued use of the apple was for hard cider, 6. An apple used to facilitate a sexual assault (in a kissing game, not involving Johnny), and the woman's response is a straightforward, can-do slap in the face, 7. a proto-Pepe Le Pew, 8. The Indians really enjoying life with the settlers, 9. The song, which both Meade and I remember learning as children, "The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord," 10. Strong presentation of the work ethic, to the point where, when the angel returns to take Johnny to heaven, Johnny balks because he still has work planting apple trees, but the angel brings him along by telling him of the need for the planting of apples trees in heaven. That is, heaven is not rest after a lifetime of work, but an opportunity to continue working forever.

"To Justice and All!"/"And vampires!"

Those are the kids' toasts heard at the end of "What Happens When Second Graders Are Treated to a Seven-Course, $220 Tasting Meal":

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The incredibly charming video is made by Jeffrey Blitz, who did "Spellbound."

ADDED: I want to analyze that the delightful toast "To Justice and All!" The ultra-casual "and all" after the grand beginning "to justice" makes funny contrast, but we're intrigued by what seems to be a mutation of the end of the familiar Pledge of Allegiance phrase "With Liberty and Justice for All." Assuming that's the source, we wonder how "for all" became "and all." We might think that the kids say "and all" frequently and that caused them to substitute "and" for "for."

But I think something subtler happened. These kids knew about toasting. Look how the stemmed glasses and the dinner setting seem to have motivated them to engage in toasting behavior. So I think they knew that a toast begins with "to." Having put "to" rather than "and" before "justice" in the familiar Pledge phrase, the sense of the missing "and" affected their flexible minds, and having begun with the preposition "to," the next preposition, "for," seemed excessive, and that's where the "and" moved.

You, like me, may think the "Genderbread Person" is a ludicrous, bad-science graphic...

... here's yesterday's post about the Genderbread Person...

... but there seems to be a raging fight about who created it and whether somebody is getting credit for thinking up something that had already appeared in a similar form elsewhere. I wouldn't think people would be clamoring to take responsibility for something like that.

Anyway, when accused of plagiarism, you can always try the old Wisconsin saying: "I’m going to take the best ideas wherever I can find them." Go ahead. Take that. It might be the best idea, and you will have found it in Wisconsin.

ADDED: "While we upped the ante on accuracy and inclusivity, we did our best not to compromise what was arguably the most effective aspect of the old Genderbread Person: ‘e is freaking adorable!"

Exulting in the gloriousness of blue.

It's Lily the white poodle, at one with white clouds.

More photos by Meade of Lily here.

"Just as the Delay prosecution touched off a dozen other politically motived cases, the Wisconsin John Doe investigation provides a template for similar mischief across the nation."

"It suggests that anyone can lob accusations of illegal 'coordination' between an officeholder and his allies — and all a partisan prosecutor needs is evidence of a single private meeting or email to justify an intrusive and aggressive investigation. It’s that easy to tie your ideological opponents in knots for months or years on end. After Wisconsin, the temptation to use the law as a political weapon may prove irresistible."

From a Wall Street Journal article titled "Criminalizing Political Speech in Wisconsin/Like it or not, the federal courts should intervene in the state to uphold Americans’ First Amendment rights."

"Then, male university students were divided into camps. Among them, crudely put, there were sensitive, arty types..."

"... who liked indie music and baggy cardigans, and 'rugger buggers,' who were loud, aggressively masculine and devoted to sport. Now, though, we have a new type: 'the Lad,' who is hyper-macho and makes jokes about rape. He is, according to journalist Clive Martin... 'the anti-scholar, the beer-swilling, banter-puking cuckoo in the scholarly nest… The Lad is far less cuddly than his predecessor. He’s not selling a bit of hash on the side to finance the buying of yet more Che Guevara and Pulp Fiction posters. The modern male yooni-going dunderhead buys his drugs and his degree online, so most of his free time is spent charging drunkenly around whatever provincial British city he’s been assigned to, as if it were his own personal adventure playground.'"

From a Guardian article titled: "Campus nightmare: female students on the rise of sexual harassment/Photographed in their beds, shamed on social media – and, for some female students, that’s just the beginning. So what are British universities doing about sexual harassment and assaults?"

"The Snappening."

"A giant database of intercepted Snapchat photos and videos has been released by hackers who have been collecting the files for years...."

... Snapchat confirmed the images came from third-party sites, while denying that Snapchat's servers were breached by hackers:

We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security...

4chan users say the collection of photos has a large amount of child pornography, including many videos sent between teenagers who believed the files would be immediately deleted after viewing. Half of Snapchat's users are teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17.

"Unless conservatives and liberals are masochists, promoting laws that hurt them, these laws must suppress minority voting."

Writes 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner, marshaling the evidence about voter ID laws, including the evidence that "conservatives... support them and liberals... oppose them."

Here's the opinion, dissenting from the denial of a rehearing en banc, in the Wisconsin voter ID case.

"A British performing artist has been forced to shelve a book based on his experiences of childhood sexual abuse..."

"... after his ex-wife obtained an injunction to prevent their young son from reading it."

After a copy of the manuscript was leaked to [the mother], she brought proceedings on behalf of her son, who has Asperger syndrome, attention deficit disorder and a number of other health problems. [the mother] says that on divorce, she and her ex-husband agreed to a court order that requires them to attempt to prevent their child from discovering information about their past lives “which would have a detrimental effect on the child’s wellbeing.”...

"Police in a small Alaska town mistakenly told a couple their son had been killed in a car crash..."

Hours later, when Karen and Jay Priest have driven to the home of Justin's girlfriend to deliver the terrible news in person, at 5:30 in the morning, Justin himself opens the door and is surprised to see his parents. They are even more surprised to see him.

"It opens and right here is Justin. I don't even see it but Jay is sobbing. It doesn't compute to me. Then I see him... You want it to be true, but you go, 'Am I hallucinating?' Justin didn't know what was going on."

"Remember that whole Brian Leiter kerfuffle? Well he’s gone."

"The world (of philosophy rankings) was not ready for one as beautiful as thee."

Thanks to Joe Patrice at Above the Law for summarizing all that.

I read the underlying article — "Leiter to Step Down from PGR / The New Consensus" — but I was finding it hard to think of how to get readers up to the speed where something interesting could be said. Catch up with all that if you want, if you think you need to follow the doings of the philosophers. I'll just say that it looks as though the women philosophers are making their presence felt, and philosophy in the form of invigorating insults like "sanctimonious asshole" and "stupid" will not be the way to show one's philosophical stuff in the future.

I don't read too much philosophy, but I enjoy some of the great old aggressive aphorisms and epithets, including and especially attacks on bland, blabby, blurry writing. Here's a nice list of "The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History." Who called whom "A great cow full of ink"? "An idiot child screaming in a hospital"? "[T]he king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses"? "He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices"? "[A] queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples"?

But let the philosophers in the academy deal with their own problems. Leiter had reigned over a rankings system, and that gave his words a power to intimidate that extended beyond the meaning of those words.

By the way, I too am a woman who has been targeted by Leiter. The funny thing is that I don't care enough to remember what the dispute was. I need to publish this post so I can click on the "Leiter" tag and bone up on my own old lost history.

ADDED: Oh! I see I fought insult with insult, and — so amusingly — predicted that women would be his downfall. From September 10, 2006:

Nerd wants love.

Thinks sucking up to feminists is a good move. Don't you realize all the best feminists laugh at that?

"She is a normal, useless type of a girl. Nothing in her is special at all. She’s selling what the West will buy."

Not everyone loves the new Nobel laureate.

Hostile Christmas negativity at its Hollywood worst.

Here's Robin Williams in the mean old man role in "Merry Friggin' Christmas." They must have counted on and intended to exploit Williams's long-term reputation as madcap and lovable, but now his suicide looms over every non-life-affirming line:

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I'm sure the film ends life-affirmingly, since there's no sign that this Hollywood product is anything but cynically formulaic. I'd rather watch a melodrama about an old actor who decides to make a movie like "Merry Friggin' Christmas" — because it's his best offer at the time — and agonizes over how to go on living. Something more like...

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Live-blogging the Wisconsin gubernatorial debate between Mary Burke and Scott Walker.

It starts at 7 Central Time, and I'll be updating this post, with my own commentary. Tonight, I'm going to concentrate on things other than the actual substantive argument, which will be in the transcript. I'm going to watch and listen and see what I can make of the candidates' demeanor. You can watch along with me here.

7:06: Mary Burke goes first with her opening statement, sounding a bit tense, and glancing down at her notes, perhaps out of nervousness.

7:07: Walker begins by thanking everyone for being here tonight, and he acknowledges his opponent, Mary Burke, and all the people of Eau Claire, where it's great to be back. Burke omitted such pleasantries. "It's particularly nice to have my wife, Tonette." Oh! Mary had nothing like that.

7:09: The first question is about the Supreme Court's vacating the 7th Circuit's stay of the injunction against the Wisconsin voter ID law. Burke earnestly emphasizes the importance of everyone getting to vote. Walker thinks the voter ID law is "common sense" and it will be upheld ultimately in the court. He says he doesn't care how many instances of fraud there might be, because who among us would want OUR vote cancelled out by somebody else? Rebutting, Burke calls it "shocking" that "the Governor" doesn't even care about the amount of fraud, yet he'd put these "roadblocks" in front of people. Burke is coming alive in rebuttal here. She listened to what Walker said and reacted with good spontaneity.

7:12: Walker comes back with an assertion that the Milwaukee police have found multiple instances of fraud.

7:14: The second question is about jobs. What's something new they'd do? Walker has nothing new to say he'd do. He wants to keep doing what he's been doing, touts that, and says we don't want to go "backwards," which is what we'd be doing with Burke. Burke has one thing: "actually reduce the cost of college."

7:18: Minimum wage. Burke thinks the $7-something minimum wage is "ridiculous." Walker ignores the question of what the minimum wage should be and talks about getting people into jobs that pay 2 or 3 times the minimum wage. They pursue Walker over his failure to say whether the minimum wage should be raised, and without exactly saying "no," he says "no." The minimum wage is fine for really young people working at McDonald's, as he did. Then they go back to Burke for rebuttal, and she looks surprised. "I had actually already rebuttalled [sic] to the minimum wage."

7:24: Abortion. Walker reaffirms that he's pro-life, but emits some feelings about the difficult decisions women go through, cites the Supreme Court's resolution of the question, and stresses that his efforts are about ensuring the woman's "health and safety." Burke, with some passion in her voice, accuses Walker of taking away a woman's right to choose.

7:27: Will you serve your full term? Burke sure will! Walker says it's his "plan" to serve for 4 years. On rebuttal, Burke doesn't take the obvious opening and talk about whether Walker might run for President. He "plans" but will he "promise"? She could have pinned him down there! She chooses instead to emphasize how excited she is to serve and even says she wants to be Wisconsin's longest serving governor. Walker, laughing, says his wife doesn't want him to serve that long. Why did Burke do that? I suspect she feels some people think she's not that serious and is just a placeholder for the Democrats.

7:29: An intense interchange about Obamacare.  Burke tells us that as a businessperson, she knows to take that money from the federal government. Walker thinks it's not a good "bet."

7:34: Repeal Act 10?  I don't know if Burke gave a straight answer here, but she's struggling to deflect the accusation that she's a puppet of the unions. Both candidates drift into anecdotes, but certainly Walker is clear that Act 10 was the right thing to do.

7:39: Fracking? Burke is not going to be "selling out to the special interests." Walker thinks ""God and the glaciers gave us a great opportunity to build the economy.

7:47: An invitation to say something nice about your opponent. Walker appreciates Burke's philanthropy. Burke begins with a long "uh" and a shake of the head. She likes what he's done "in the community" and "around domestic abuse."

7:48: Oh! We're up to closing statements! Yay! Walker enthuses about all the good things that have been happening. He still drives his 1998 Saturn and eats lunch from a brown bag. "And I still love the people of the state of Wisconsin." Some of us might not agree with everything he's done, but he hopes we can see that his "motives are pure." Burke tells us how bad things are. There is no "comeback," and if only we'd "kept pace with the rest of the country," we'd be way better off. She doesn't care about whether "ideas are Democratic or Republican ideas, just whether they're gonna get the job done." And she's going to change the "tone" and "the system." Unlike Walker, she has to glance down at her notes.

8:24: Well, I guess I didn't do a good job of describing how the candidates looked and acted. But to tell you the truth, those two look and sound the same all the time. They're both offering to work hard and they aren't particularly charismatic or quirky. Neither of them said a single thing that was funny or weird or cute.