Hi, It's Stupid: Beware of Sykes Bearing Gifts

 

GORGEOUS 3 BD 2 FULL BTH 2 HALF BTH COUNTRY FARM HOUSE W/HEATED AND COOLED 700 SQ FT OFFICE/STUDIO OVER 3 CAR GARAGE, IN-GRD HEATED POOL, 5 STALL BARN ON OVER 7 ACRES IN THE HEART OF BEDMINSTER. $6,000 month as opposed to almost three times that if Secret Service is writing the check. Via Zillow.

New Substack post on that 14th Amendment theory.

Opinions We Never Finished Reading. III

 

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches (1647), showing witches identifying their familiar spirits for the Witch Finder. Via Wikipedia.

Hi, it's Stupid to criticize Justice Alito for citing a 17th-century jurist just because the jurist, Lord Edward Coke, happened to be an advocate of marital rape and had ordered women to be executed for witchcraft. After all, marital rape and the execution of witches are deeply rooted in our nation's history and traditions too! Besides, why should we suppose his views on these matters are even relevant in any way to his views on abortion?

Alito notes that

The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U.S. __, —_ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton's 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” H. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae...

Although what Coke says, in fact, contra Bracton, is that it is not homicide, unless the child dies after being born, because while within the womb the fetus isn't really a person, a "reasonable creature", a thing in rerum natura, in the world of natural beings, and under the King's peace, that is a member of society:

Hi, It's Stupid: The Last Post on Modern Monetary Theory

 

Statue from 2009 by the late William Fawke, in the Garden of Heroes and Villains, Warwickshire, via Ellen Herold's Pinterest.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Modern Monetary Theory is all wrong, but I just can't help myself.

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the great Irish philosopher midway between Locke and Hume, argued brilliantly that things don't exist—I mean things, material objects, the out-there stuff we see and touch, in that you can have a perfectly coherent picture of the universe without them: all you need are minds, full of perceptions, and that's enough. Things corresponding to the perceptions don't have to be there. "Berkeley's system," says the Stanford Encyclopedia mildly,

while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.

Which made Dr. Samuel Johnson, the irascible lexicographer whose portrait serves as my avi, pretty mad. Because obviously the theory was revolting to his stolid English soul, but he didn't even know how to participate in the discussion. One day as he was leaving a church with his future biographer, James Boswell, they started chatting about it, Boswell observing that "though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." As they spoke, they passed a big stone along the path and Johnson turned to give it a powerful kick, no doubt hurting his foot: "Thus I refute it!" 

Meaning, more or less, GTFOOH, are you telling me this doesn't exist? Deze nutz!

This is my problem with so-called Modern Monetary Theory. 

Hi it's Stupid: Four Little Children

 

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images via Women's Health.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we need to keep responding to this bullshit as if there were a chance that it would make a difference in the world—Kevin Kruse and Imani Gandy are both practically weeping with fatigue at the thought of having to push that filthy stone another half an inch up the hill, and you really can't blame them, because they've been struggling for a lifetime and the opponents NEVER LEARN ONE SINGLE THING, but I thought of a slightly new line of argument I"d like to preserve for the record—

Namely, that when Dr. King said he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, he meant something by it, and in particular he had a reason for using the word "dream": because he knew when he woke up it wasn't going to be true. And he knew it wasn't going to come true in 1964, and in spite of all the ungratifying work he'd put in to elect a Southern Democrat to the presidency to build on the Civil Rights Act and prevent Republican Barry Goldwater from getting the opportunity to destroy it it wasn't going to come true in 1965 either, or 1967. It was going to take more than his own shortened lifespan to get there, and maybe more than those of his children as well, because the problem of racial injustice was so deeply ingrained into the fabric of American society—because it was, as we now call it, systemic. He was a master of critical race studies before they existed:

Hi, It's Stupid: Critical Race Pedagogy

 

Pledging the flag to conceal their wicked aims. It's what they always do, the swine, especially the first graders. Via Learning for Justice, and some great big explication of what "CRT" in the classroom is actually like (it works extremely hard to not make anybody feel bad, white kids in particular).

Hi, it's Stupid to say critical race theory is being taught in school classrooms all across the USA. Do you want to get good teachers in trouble? Anyway it's not really critical race theory, and it's certainly not being taught. 

But then I ran into somebody smart saying something similar, my tweep Nathan Newman, professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in a post at his substack ("Critical Race Theory IS In Our Schools—And It Needs to Be Defended):

The rightwing legislators seeking to ban “Critical Race Theory” from our classrooms are lying about what CRT teaches about race in our society – but they are not lying that CRT has been influencing how children are being educated.

Some progressives want to pretend that Derrick Bell is some kind of Gnostic learning, taught only to the select in the cloisters of elite law schools, but that does a disservice to the profound impact, Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw and other CRT scholars have had on our culture, including in the field of education and teacher training in particular.

Because it indeed is not the case that there are any grade school teachers imparting this gnarly body of theory to their charges, but there are some who are applying it, or what Newman suggests calling a "critical race pedagogy" (at the moment I like "CRT-informed pedagogy"), in the classroom, and it's a really good thing. Kids don't have to learn CRT, but teachers should learn about it and bring it to the way they do their practical everyday work, as an aid to the way they handle the difficult feelings about race they may encounter in the kindest and most productive possible way:

Hi, It's Stupid: Weekend Sedition

Hi, it's Stupid to say you should stop calling it "sedition".

Because what other word would you use to describe what does appear to be an attempt, on the part of a lot of Republicans, to subvert the Constitutional order, overturn our two-and-a-third-century tradition of building electoral democracy, and install some kind of emergency dictatorship, half-assed and certain to fail, but ominous in the lesson it seems to be drawing for that very big minority of discontented white people who are unhappy about the way the presidential vote turned out in November, the ones who "feel disenfranchised", that they don't have to put up with electoral democracy—that they can demand minority rule if they feel like it and, if they get enough shady lawyers and thugbois on the case, maybe one day succeed? How is that not sedition?

Dr. Google's first suggestion, credited to Oxford Language.

Well, in the first place because it's not, in those simple terms. It's not "against the authority of a state or monarch". It's on behalf of it, in favor of the desires of the pseudo-monarch who is in power and his party, currently in control of half the legislature, against a regime or administration that doesn't exist yet, to stop it from being born, and only secondarily against the constitutional authority that guarantees this regular succession.

Hi It's Stupid: Rudy

Painting by Burhan Dogancay,1998, via WikiArt.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Rodolfo Giuliani really had no idea Andrij Derkach was a Russian agent. No, hear me out!

Giuliani had been hanging out last December with Derkach, a Ukrainian MP formerly from the Russia-backed Party of Regions and supporter of the corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych, now in exile in Russia, and Ph.D. graduate of the KGB's Higher School in Moscow (his dissertation was on the "Organization and Conduct of Meetings With Secret Agents"), and Derkach had supplied him with edited audio of phone conversations between Ukraine's former president Petro Poroshenko and then–Vice President Joe Biden, which Giuliani believes, or claims to believe, are evidence of some kind of corruption on Biden's part, though The Washington Post was not convinced in May:

The recordings played at the news conference Tuesday [19May] shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year. They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven by the tapes...

The tapes released in Kyiv offered no evidence to back Giuliani’s long-standing accusation that Biden pushed for the prosecutor general’s ouster to help his son. At the time, Hunter Biden was earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a month on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, whose owner, a former government minister, was under investigation in Ukraine. Still, the tapes gave Trump’s allies a chance to recycle that allegation closer to the 2020 election.

Derkach did not say he had gotten the tapes from the FSB, but rather than he got them from unnamed "investigative journalists" who had in turned obtained them from recordings made by President Poroshenko himself, which is not quite easy to believe .

But in a startling twist yesterday, it turned out that Derkach is a Russian agent! According to the US Treasury Department, which has slapped him with sanctions: 

Hi It's Stupid: Preoperational

Illustration by Andrew Couts via Daily Dot.

.....Our massive testing capability, rather than being praised, is used by the Lamestream Media and their partner, the Do Nothing Radical Left Democrats, as a point of scorn. This testing, and what we have so quickly done, is used as a Fake News weapon. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2020

We have more Cases because we do more Testing. It’s Lamestream Media Gold!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2020

Hi It's Stupid: The FBI

Via.

Hi, it's Stupid to say the FBI didn't take the Trump-Russia story seriously until Trump fired the FBI director and they finally realized there was enough smoke that they might want to think about looking for the fire.

Nevertheless it's the only takeaway I'm getting from Senator Lindsey Graham (chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee since they took down old Richard Burr with an insider trading allegation) and his release of a couple of peculiar documents from February 2017. I thought he and the comrades wanted us to believe Peter Strzok and Lisa Page mounted a conspiracy to "spy on Trump" and "take him down" back in July 2016 or even earlier, but these releases make it pretty clear that wasn't the case. 

One document is what I think must be the first New York Times story on the investigation (by Schmidt, Mazzetti, and Apuzzo, "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence"), from 14 February 2017, with contemporary annotations said to be by Strzok himself outright denying the story.

WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

No, says Strzok, this isn't true at all:

Hi It's Stupid: Horse Race

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, figurine by Donald F. Saari, 1973, via WorthPoint.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Elizabeth Warren shouldn't compete for the vice presidency with all the means at her disposal, including deploying all the power of those hot influencers Lawrence Tribe and Jane Fonda. After all, doesn't she have the right to think she's the best for the job?

With all respect and fervent admiration, she has the right to think she's the best for a lot of jobs, and she's probably right about it, too, but that doesn't mean she has to take all of them. I've said it before and I'll say it again: why shouldn't she chair the Senate Banking Committee after the coming blue wave democratizes the Senate and exercise some real power? Why should she opt instead to be "buried before I am dead", as Daniel Webster saw it when he turned down the vice presidency in 1839?

Hi It's Stupid: Barr

Hi, it's Stupid to say old Billy Barr was literally angry with Trump last week when he told ABC News, on the subject of Trump's Twitter polemic against the Justice Department in re the Roger Stone sentencing,

I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me. To have public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we're doing our work with integrity.

Everybody knows he was just pretending to be mad because Trump tweeting his denunciation of the DOJ sentencing request just before Barr was about to up and withdraw it, and then tweeting his praise of Barr after he did that thing revealed that Barr is just a toady for Trump who does whatever abusive thing Trump wants and—

Hi it's Stupid: Britain

Hi, it's Stupid to say the Conservative Party didn't win its election because the Labour Party was too far left, or because the Labour Party was anti-Semitic, but rather because everybody hates Jeremy Corbyn. He's just not likable.

As in Hillary Clinton was, as Obama put it, "likable enough", if just barely (the press could never tolerate her, perhaps because she couldn't hide her low expectations of them, but ordinary people mostly could, if they had a chance to judge for themselves), and he isn't.

This is why there are so many Brits who are willing to believe he's an anti-Semite: they're working under the assumption that anybody they know who's an anti-Semite is probably a pretty unpleasant person, not like that dotty prime minister Johnson, who looks like the Earl of Emsworth thinking of nothing but his prize fat pig, and who is self-evidently a jolly good fellow if not entirely reliable. They wouldn't lend Boris Johnson £50, and they're not crazy about having him for prime minister, but they can't imagine he'd be anything so reviled as an anti-Semite. Unpossible!

Boris Johnson has invoked some of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic stereotypes in a book he wrote when he was a Conservative shadow minister. He describes “Jewish oligarchs” who run the media, and fiddle the figures to fix elections in their favour.

Hi It's Stupid: Impeachment

(No Bruckner, a composer I really can't stand, but this Wagner, conducted by Levine to last a full minute longer than Wilhelm Furtwängler's version, illustrates the kind of agonizing drawing-out alluded to in the reference below.)

Hi, it's Stupid to say I've been completely wrong about the dangers of moving into full impeachment mode over the past few days, because I could probably change my mind again in about 20 minutes, but my main objections to the way it was going forward seem to have been answered: we are not moving to impeach the president over a single phone call where he probably acted like a gangster, and we're not going to rush to get it over with before the New Hampshire primary.

The phone call, or rather the whole effort from the Ukrainian election in April to now to put the squeeze on President Zelensky to do something to harm Joe Biden or risk the US funding of the Ukrainian effort to hold off Russian conquest, which I still think is more Giuliani's baby than Trump's, is important for a couple of genuine reasons, as veteran Carl Hulse puts it at The Times, not just because of the exceptional clarity of the case itself but also because of the exceptional illegality of the White House response to public questions about it:

Hi It's Stupid: Medicare For All

The Doctor's Visit. Jan Steen, 1663-65, via Hetkoen International.

Hi, it's Stupid to say you shouldn't call it Medicare For All just because it isn't Medicare. Or at least that was the upshot of a conversation with Nathan Newman, probably the smartest person I know on Rose Twitter, who was rosesplaining why I was wrong until I had to give up and come over here before he decided I was stupid for real.

So why use the brand name "Medicare"? This has bothered me from the start.

— Purview From the Bridge (@Yastreblyansky) July 31, 2019

That's why it gives me the willies. "Smart" isn't the first word I'd choose.

But seriously people are going to find out it isn't Medicare long before they get a chance to find out they like it.

— Purview From the Bridge (@Yastreblyansky) July 31, 2019

Hi it's Stupid: Racism

From Safely Endangered.

Hi, it's Stupid to say getting everybody to call the president a racist isn't such a big achievement. I mean, I'm very glad the House Democratic Caucus has been able to build some unity out of all being on the same page, the hierarchy and the Squad, and voted to censure him for his wicked attacks on the Squad leaders, and that NPR has started boldly referring to his "racist tweets", but there came a point for me where I got uncomfortable, when newsperson Chris Cuomo hopped on the train:

I'd say, "That's a good start, Mr. President. Now let's talk about the things you could do to change that." #daydream https://t.co/HxpItpiejf

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 17, 2019

That I actually did have a problem with, as I said. Cuomo's idea, so very TV news, is that you ought to be able to trap the criminal into a confession so that everybody can condemn him, with the implication that this is the way to extirpate racism from our society, one shunned individual at a time, which is not the case. Racist individuals aren't the problem!

Hi It's Stupid: White Working Class edition

Cooperative Congressional Election Study 2016.

Hi, it's Stupid to say there's no such thing in the United States as "the white working class", but there's an elegant new way of saying it, from Thomas B. Edsall, the New York Times columnist so colorless that nobody even knows whether they hate him or not, but I often kind of like him, when I remember to take a look, as in this case, where it's right in the headline: "There Are Really Two Distinct White Working Classes".

The idea, which is drawing on polling for the AFL-CIO that I think I don't have access to, is that when you look at the polling category of white people without college degrees (standing in for the hopelessly ill-defined "white working class" category), which would be an enormous group if it was in fact a bloc, from 48% to 54% (see above chart) of the electorate, they are very sharply divided by political behavior, around 40% of them being Democrats or Democrat leaners, and about 50% Republicans or Republican leaners (the leaners being pretty small groups on both sides), with the balance being true independents.

They're also distinct in other demographic ways, as you might expect. The non-college white Democrats are a lot younger, twice as many of them under 38 or so as the Republicans, and a lot more female (59%-41%, as opposed to 51%-49%). They are markedly less Christian, and less evangelical/born-again in particular. Edsall doesn't give any figures for income, but I think these factors make it obvious that the Democrats have a good deal less money, and from there I would speculate, on lines I've talked about before, that the non-college white Democrats are much more likely to be low-level employees, while non-college white Republicans are the ones who have mastered the art of getting rich without a college degree, the proprietors of small or tiny businesses. Hold that thought for a few minutes.

It's the stupid, economy!

Hi, it's Stupid to say that it's still the economy, whatever David Brooks may think.

Shorter David Brooks, "It's Not the Economy, Stupid", New York Times, 29 November 2018:

The US economy is the best ever, so if you're not happy there must be something wrong with you, like not going to church or getting married often enough. This explains why life expectancy has declined three years in a row for the first time since 1915-18. It's your fault.

Looks like he thinks the Republicans might lose the election two weeks ago, but only time will tell. Disclaimer: I am not writing this because I think there is anything interesting or worth responding to in the Brooks argument. I think it's dumb, and we've dealt with it before. But he's got some new errors and deceits and instances of terrible writing and he still has a gig with the New York Times, so I don't have any choice.

We’re enjoying one of the best economies of our lifetime.

Are you now? It looks delicious. Did you get it at Ottomanelli's?

The gains are finally being widely shared, even by the least skilled. As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute recently noted, the median usual weekly earnings for workers who didn’t complete high school shot up by 6.5 percent over the past year. 

Hi, it's Stupid: Election Edition

Haruspex examining the entrails of a sacrificed bull, after a drawing by the painter (Pierre?) Vauthier. Via.

Hi, it's Stupid to say the Democrats could win the Senate contest. Ask anybody!

But somebody's got to do it. I'm not saying they will win, or are likely to (I'm no good at handicapping anyway, but if I were to place a bet it would be for a 50-50 split), but in fact we know it's not impossible, Nate Silver is saying a 15% chance, and what I want to say here is that in the unlikely event that it does happen, I'm going to know why.

What Silver is saying now in prose, as opposed to the charts, is that if it does happen it will mean there's a "systematic error in the polling" he's working with:

By a systematic polling error, I mean one that occurs in a correlated way across every race, or in certain groups of races — not merely errors that happen on a one-off basis. Our models account for the possibility of several different types of systematic errors, but in this article, I’m going to focus on the simplest type of systematic error, which is a uniform swing that applies to every race.

Hyperreality TV

Undertale: Jungle Cruisin' by Joyous Lemons/DeviantArt.

Hi, it's Stupid to say I'm going to be disappointed if Omarosa ends up being what drags Trump down in the end.

I mean, it's true that the writers who thought up this plot twist are trivializing the issues we're watching the show for, the apparent collapse of the Constitution in the face of flagrant illegality in the White House, the pervasive corruption throughout the executive, the treacherous dealing with foreign governments, in favor of what? The backstabbing intriguer motif, the person everybody always votes off the island, who might get brought back on to revive interest as an underwritten storyline starts to sputter and flag, but in this case the storyline wasn't flagging at all, if anything there was far too much going on already without her. Isn't there too much Sopranos-style personal stuff as it is, with the mental illness theme, and the endangered marital and family relationships, and Trump's fraught backstory with his retainers like Cohen and Manafort and Lewandowski and Scavino and the rest, and the bizarre intimacy and crudeness of his connections with his fellow sovereigns Trudeau and Merkel and Macron and Putin and Abe and Kim and Xi and Erdoğan and MBS and Sheikh Tamim, as detached from all the millions of people it affects as if it were taking place in a treehouse?

The avant-garde art of the deal

Nothing Trump builds in North Korea is going to top this ship-hotel above the beach of Jeongdongjin on the Pacific coast in northeastern South Korea. Via Rough Guides.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Trump failed to wring any concessions out of North Korea. I mean it's true they only agreed that they would "work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" meaning, as you know, North and South and all the US troops and their nuclear-capable vessels and missiles and B-1 bombers, as opposed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear weapons program, on which the US has long insisted as a sine qua non, and with no timetables, verification methods, or fucking any reason to think they will actually do it, in return for diplomatic recognition and on top of the photo op that we understand is what Kim Jong-un was really longing for and, in a gratuitous deal sweetener Trump apparently threw in orally after the document was signed, a cessation of the defensive joint exercises with the South Korean military that the US has conducted regularly since the cease-fire (like a guy closing the sale on his apartment who shakes hands with everyone after everything's signed and stamped and then says to the new owner, "Hey, why don't you take my girlfriend too?").

Plus China's already throwing the idea of sanctions relief out there, as a participation trophy: