For the Record: Long COVID

This is just amazing, from Laura Loomer, the anti-Muslim activist, Project Veritas veteran, and frequent victim of cancel culture

from numerous social media platforms, payment processors, vehicles for hire, and food delivery mobile apps for various reasons, including violating policies on hate speech and spreading misinformation.^{[12][13][14][15]} She has also been banned and removed from events, and had press credentials revoked, for harassment and causing disturbances.^[15][16] After her 2018 ban from Twitter, she handcuffed herself to Twitter's headquarters in New York for two hours before police cut through the handcuffs at her request.^[5][17][18] Loomer was also banned from the March 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after attempting to heckle reporters and chasing them through the conference.^[19]

Really makes me wonder how many conservatives have no idea they got long covid pic.twitter.com/se4m06tvMQ

— Stop Cop City (@JoshuaPHilll) June 26, 2023

It'a not a fake—I checked:

For the Record: Parental Rights

 

From New Adventures of Superboy #1 (January 1980). Art by Kurt Schaffenberger, via Wikipedia.

When Republicans talk about "parents' rights", they don't mean parents' rights to support their kids in growing up--they mean parents' rights *against* their kids, rights of an owner over a possession.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2023

Pretty sure I really mean that. People affecting to believe in a big sociocultural wokery conspiracy trying to change "our society" (the society those gents thought they owned) are at bottom angry with their kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, for being smarter and stronger and better looking and eventually getting more sex no doubt (that's the human condition all parents must live with), but more particularly for challenging their authority—not just for being irreligious or sexually different, though those obviously matter when they happen, but especially for being broad-minded, not narrow, liberal for want of a better word, going beyond what the previous generation wanted to allow. I'm not saying all conservative parents are like this, either, or that only conservative parents have conflicts with their kids, but that this particular kind of conflict is directly connected to this particular kind of political conservatism.

Today in Conservatives Are Too Emotional

 

Image by Ben Allan/Political Quarterly UK.

Listen, I know it's a huge challenge to ask a conservative to think mathematically, but just make an effort for once. The reason it's called "affirmative action" is that it's not negative. It doesn't take anything away from anybody. https://t.co/w4mRTykC7Q

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 8, 2023

The Wokest of Us All

Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., LaVerne Watson, and David W. Bridell on Boston Common, ca, 1955, via Boston University. 

Hi, here with a couple of slightly novel ideas for my annual post on the content of your character and the annual Republican explosion of enthusiasm for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as an opponent of anybody ever referring at any time to anybody's race, especially when the subject is college admissions.

First, just to note that the argument is a fine example of what I have called the "Scalian Hermeneutic", the philosophical technique of totally divorcing a linguistic expression from its context before you attempt to analyze it, named after Justice Antonin Scalia's interpretation in Heller of 52% of the Second Amendment as if the other 48%, not to mention an entire history of the right to bear arms going back to the Glorious Revolution in England 1689 and a Bill of Rights that granted gun rights only to members of the established church, did not exist. 

The advocates of Conservative King, similarly, base their case on 2%, 35 words from the 1,667 words of King's fervent appeal of August 28, 1963, for racial justice and equality, a speech that frequently mentions people's races, as right at the opening,

For the Record: Lankford on Pronouns

 UPDATE AT BOTTOM

Oklahoma senator James Lankford's speech at the Family Research Council's Pray Vote Stand Summit in Atlanta offered what sounded like rhetorical gruel, warm but a little watery, almost David Brooks:

“Our Constitution, put together by our founders – I believe God led in that -- put together a structure and a system that has made us the most prosperous, most moral nation in the history of the world – when we follow it,” said the senator.

On top of reminding the audience about how many lawmakers do not follow the Constitution, he also stated, “One thing that we have lost. What is the first word in the Constitution? ‘We’ – hang on – actually, I work for ‘we’ [the people]. Because this selfish attitude has become more and more prevalent that the whole world is about me. And the power of our Constitution began with this very simple principle of ‘we.’”

Promotion of the speech on Twitter got me a little exercised, and some analysis made it look, in fact, kind of sinister:

Concern Trolling: A Sketch

 

What might help Republicans’ prospects? Backing individual rights over intrusive government.

(There's a connection with a previous installment)

It's looking more and more doubtful whether Republicans can pull off the traditional anti-incumbent wave in the midterm congressional elections. The FiveThirtyEight website now gives them only a 44% chance of taking the Senate, largely, they say, because of the preposterous candidates they are fielding in states they can't take for granted, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and as of last night Arizona, where they chose yet another Peter Thiel acolyte in the anti-Semitic election denier Blake Masters; Missouri GOP voters seem to have restrained themselves and gone for the lesser of the two Erics, but former moderate Eric Schmitt has promised to "take a blowtorch to the Biden agenda" and is doing his best to seem as wild as Vance or Öz (that's the correct spelling of the name, per Wikipedia, "Mehmet Cengiz Öz, known professionally as Dr. Oz").

The House, where the craziest candidates seem to be defending safe Republican seats, looks much better for them, but even there the outlook is darkening, as the generic poll is starting to show.

Alexander Boris and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This Jonathan Pie is a little long, but it's choice British invective:

"If you cared about integrity why did you put him in in the first place?"

All I wanted to say about the thing is sort of in there. There's an irritating tendency here on the tubes to make it all about us, an object lesson, showing how bad America is because their Tories are more "honorable" than our Republicans:

Of course Boris Johnson’s own party turned on him and demanded his resignation. He led an armed insurrection against parliament and tried to hang his own Vice President. He left his party no choice but to demand he resign. His party’s honor was at stake. Amiright? 😃

— FakeJoeBiden (@fake_biden) July 7, 2022

No, you are wrong. 

For the Record: Working the Ruffs

Republican reaction to the January 6 committee hearings continue to develop along not unpredictable lines, like this scumbag's bragging about how he hasn't read any of the indictments:

It didn't. Their move was planned well before. The Trump speech was intended to incite the more-or-less innocent mob of deplorables to follow the Proud Boyz as the latter broke into the building, providing the insurrection with cannon fodder, and it worked extremely well.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 11, 2022

Mulvaney has no suspicion, I guess, that Trump forces could plan anything without his help, like the way he set up Trump's extortion call to President Zelenskyy with the long months of denying Ukraine the congressionally mandated funding for the Javelins. He expected them to be paralyzed without him.

Then there's the. straight-out McCarthyism from our pal Senator Rubio:

The First Moral Majority

 

Denarius from 44 B.C.E., the year of Julius Caesar's death, showing Julius on the obverse and his claimed ancestor (and Aeneas's mother), the goddess Venus. Image by Classical Numismatic Group via Wikipedia.

Religion played a curious role in the beginning of the Pax Romana starting around 30 B.C.E. with the final victory of the person we think of as Octavian—though that's just an adjective, apparently, meaning "guy from the Octavius family"; he'd been going through a lot of names since the assassination of the great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar in 44 left him heir to two thirds of Julius's vast fortune and most of his political following, starting with Gaius Caesar and then, after the deification of Julius in 42, Divi Filius, "Son of the God"), and then Imperator Caesar, "General Caesar" without any forename, like a Star Wars character, and for a while Romulus, after the city's mythical founder and first king, another deified character. And finally in 27 got the Senate to grant him, alongside the political title Princeps ("First" in the Senate), a religious name, Augustus ("consecrated, sacred, reverend" according to Lewis and Short, reverendus being of course a Latin gerundive or future passive participle, "to be revered in the future"), which I take to be an announcement that he, like his great-uncle, would be a god when he died. As subsequently happened. 

Augustus was a political genius, without any doubt, and his aim to secure internal peace after a good 60 years of constant civil war in Rome and all across its enormous territories in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seems like a worthy one—especially since it really worked for 200 years, through unimaginably bad emperors and reasonably good ones, the institutions he created as a legacy being more durable than his frail human heirs. But there's something spookily familiar about the way he did it, putting a permanent end to the tradition of representative government in the Republic to take absolute power for himself, but selling that to the public as a conservative policy, a return to the good old, virile Republican virtues, the representation of a Moral Majority to replace a political one.

The Brooks of Wrath

David Brooks getting to know his deplorables. Image by Driftglass.

 

David F. Brooks, fan of data-heavy perspectives on policy issues, taking exception to a data-heavy perspective on a politics issue ("How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars"):

I’m a fan of FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at policy issues from a data-heavy perspective, but everyone publishes a clunker once in a while. In February, FiveThirtyEight ran a piece called “ Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The core assertion was that Republicans prevail because a lot of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum, and they believe the lies the right feeds them. The essay had a very heavy “deplorables are idiots” vibe.

(Reading FiveThirtyEight for its coverage of policy issues is a lot like reading Playboy for the arts criticism, eccentric to say the least—I can't believe Brooks said that, unless he actually doesn't know that "policy" and "politics" in English mean two different things. Everybody knows the sexy part is the horserace stuff.)

Is the core assertion of the piece (by Alex Samuels and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, inspired largely by Glenn Youngkin's victory in last fall's Virginia gubernatorial race) that Republicans prevail because "a lot" of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum so they believe the lies Republicans tell them? Well, no, it really isn't. It's that Republicans carefully choose issues to lie about that aren't really issues; things most Americans don't need to know much about, that can be exploited not factually but emotionally—

Pitch: Woke Pork

 

My forthcoming political gothic, Pajama Boy, recounts the adventures of Kyndle, a patriotic Christian blonde first-year law student at Rutgers (she should have gone to Princeton, but Law Students of Color had snatched up all the spots, with their heartrending sob stories of deprived youth in lieu of good LSAT scores, no doubt, not that hers was that great, but it just had to be better than most of them—why, most of them didn't even know they owed the Civil Rights Act to Republicans! Or asked her some of those snotty Critical Race Theory questions like "So, what parts of the Civil Rights Act do you support?" just because she happened to mention how she didn't like affirmative action and it turned out that was actually in the Civil Rights Act, which just shows how sneaky they've been all along.

Anyway, when Kyndle runs into Fivush, a skinny boy with too-curly hair and a flannel shirt she spots trying to register student voters on campus, she knows right away she's witnessing one of those voter fraud operations that steal elections from real Americans, and she's determined to stop it by any means necessary, and that's where the shenanigans start. Because it's so hard to figure out what he's doing that's illegal—no dead people or noncitizens showing up at his booth. In fact he even registers her, after she's openly told him she's a Republican, like he doesn't even care. She needs to go deeper and deeper underground, until she's somehow spending a winter weekend at his parents' house, in pajamas, drinking cocoa, and helping the old folks sign up for Obamacare, and before you know it she's finding out that Fivush has chest hair and she has a G-spot, and how's she going to explain that to Biff, the anal-oriented football player she's been dating since they were 14? Biff probably thinks a G-spot is a Bitcoin denomination!

And next comes the time when she's a couple of weeks late and Fivush just calmly says he's glad abortion law is so easy in New Jersey and it's against Jewish law to oppose abortion in any case. And he's really awed by the multiorgasmic thing but he's made a vow never to produce a child that's unambiguously white. Now what's she going to do?

I think I'm going to call the series "Woke Pork".

"woke pork" https://t.co/EN05DjhXev

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 13, 2022

A Game of Thrones

 

Via ESPN, October 2011. 

People saying The Former Guy incriminated himself last week with his remarkable statement wishing Pence had "overturned the Election" 

"If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had 'absolutely no right' to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"

are misreading the way he and his ghostwriter are thinking: the "overturning" he's talking about would not be a crime at all, but simple justice, to his mind, because he's better attuned to sports than democracy. 

The Lord works in mysterious ways

A piece on Dr. King's theology from this time six years ago holds up well, I think.  

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Panama, in keeping with our annual custom of running a picture of Dr. King in a hat. Via Relaford Club.

Let's not leave the long Martin Luther King Day weekend without our annual tribute visit to the Bizarro Dr. King who usually surfaces in the rightwing media around this time of the year, who if he had been alive would certainly have disapproved of the #BlackLivesMatter movement because they are the "sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton" (former moderately good detective novelist Roger L. Simon, via Shakezula), and of the ongoing imaginary War on Police (Fox & Friends, via David at C&L); and Donald Trump, at the Dr. King tributes at Liberty University in the appropriately named Lynchburg, VA., praised the size of the crowd that came to see him as

an honor in terms of Martin Luther King," Trump said. "We're dedicating the record to the late, great Martin Luther King." Trump made no other mention of the civil rights leader.

In my usual stomping grounds at the National Review they haven't been able to come up with anything new this year, but they reran a piece by Lee Habeeb from January 2013:

For the Record: Families of Color Playground Night

Image by Lia Kantrowitz/New Republic (with a splendid piece by Talia Lavin).

"Critical Race Theory"  witch hunter Christopher Rufo has a new horror story, a Colorado elementary school that hosts a "Families of Color Playground Night" on the second Wednesday of each month, and the rightwing noise machine is out in force to denounce it:

Did you hear that? I think MLK just rolled over in his grave.

Pretty sure there was a whole movement to get rid of segregated playgrounds back in the day.

— The Smallest Minority (@LetsGroupHug) December 15, 2021

Do you understand how dumb you sound projecting you know shit about my life? You may be pro segregation but I’m not.

— The Smallest Minority (@LetsGroupHug) December 15, 2021

Tippy-Top Student Flamboyance

Update: Hit "Publish" a little prematurely on this one, late at night, and it's now somewhat revised and extended.

Flamboyants, via disney.fandom.

Say, what's woke David Brooks up to these days? A little less woke, to put it bluntly, castigating the élites, of course, as you'd expect from a part-time New York Times columnist and Aspen-backed social entrepreneur! Well, some élites ("Democrats Need to Confront Their Privilege"):

One of the Democratic Party’s core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.

Democrats dominate society’s culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nation’s counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.

Look, I know we're all tired of this, but in the first place unless you're a very old-fashioned Marxist you don't envisage a two-party system where one party is the ruling class and the other one is the advance guard of the proletariat. Most people are not "the élite", by definition, so a true "party of the élite" wouldn't be able to win an election. For a majority, you need some non-élite voters.

1/6 Is What They Claimed 9/11 Was

 

Confederates under General Jubal Early in Maryland, getting uncomfortably close to the Capitol in 1864. Via Smithsonian.

With regard to that Spencer Ackerman op-ed ("How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6") that Steve is talking about this morning, I have a narratological take: namely, that Ackerman is right to bring the episodes of 9/11 and 1/6 together, but does it the wrong way when he treats one as the cause and the other as an effect. Rather, they belong to two entirely different stories, in paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic relation (that is, to be compared, not connected), and what we can learn about one from the other is not what Ackerman thinks.

The story of 9/11 is the story that begins in the years from 1979, when the USSR lost its war in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took the hostages in the US embassy, to 1990, when Saddam Hussein attempted to conquer Kuwait as the USSR hurtled toward dissolution; it's the story of how the American rightwing sought an enemy to replace the Cold War Soviets and discovered it in militant Islam. It was a terrible story, in its ignorance of the diversity and conflict among Muslims and its narcissistic certainty that everything is "about us", but when Osama bin Laden finally succeeded in destroying the World Trade Center in 2001 it seemed, for a while, to be really true.

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:

Pit Tea Party

Protesting against CRITICAL RACE THEORY in Loudun County, VA. Via.

Hello from outside of JCPS central office!

This is the first in-person protest against critical race theory in Kentucky’s largest school district. About two dozen folks here. pic.twitter.com/3LlH4CeuvF

— Olivia Krauth (@oliviakrauth) June 22, 2021

Jefferson County Public Schools, meaning Louisville, where the county board of education was having a regularly scheduled meeting, in which CRITICAL RACE THEORY was not on the agenda, although somebody did mention that

racial equity is a pillar of the district's strategic plan — 57% of JCPS students identify as a racial minority

which is apparently part of the problem. Not that the demonstrators feel "equity" is a bad thing, but they think it's a kind of stalking horse;

Unparliamentary Language

 

Erskine May, 1st Baron Farnborough, KCB, Under Clerk of the Parliaments from 1871 to 1886. Via Wikipedia.

Lovely buried lede in this Guardian story about Prime Minister Boris Johnson's inveterate lying, which is becoming increasingly hard for Britain to live with:

On Tuesday an exasperated cross-party group of MPs went to see [Speaker of the House of Commons Lindsay] Hoyle. Their message: the parliamentary protocols drawn up in Victorian times no longer work. “We need new rules for this Trumpian era of British politics,” Green MP Caroline Lucas told the Radio 4 Today programme. The MPs want to be able to call him out – and the charge sheet against him is long.

Under the ministerial code, an MP who makes a false statement to the Commons is supposed to correct the record. Johnson has repeatedly ignored this obligation, making a litany of inaccurate claims which he subsequently fails to fix. Seemingly, Erskine May, the sideburned baron who established parliamentary procedure, did not envisage a PM like Johnson.

Basically, they're asking permission to use unparliamentary language and call Johnson a liar, preferably to his face at Question Time.

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.