Triliteral Commission

Today, President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — a jurist with a written track record of disagreeing with the Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Vote like your health care is on the ballot — because it is. https://t.co/TDBQOVLP4K

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 26, 2020

If there was an intersection between students of linguistics and conspiracy theorists, one of the things they could fantasize about would be a Triliteral Commission of people trying to dominate the world by spreading the use of three-letter short names for famous people like GBS, BHL, JFK and LBJ, and so on, which would account for Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who's out today ("The Meaning of Amy Coney Barrett") rejoicing in advent of justice-to-be Amy Coney Barrett not as human being but as cultural symbol replacing the Notorious RBG—

if elevated to the Supreme Court, she will probably enjoy more celebrity than the typical justice. She’ll be more of an R.B.G.-style cultural symbol — as A.C.B., Glorious or Notorious — with her own distinctive, if considerably smaller fan base, plus a certain type of critic who regards her fecundity as threatening or irresponsible, her claim to any kind of feminism a cheat. (Obviously if she plays a role in changing the court’s abortion jurisprudence, the latter antagonism will be sharpened.)

And what she's going to be a symbol of is "conservative feminism":

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Brooks Gets a Big Thing

Photo via CafeMom.

Ladies, rejoice! David F. Brooks ("Two Cheers for Feminism") thinks you're OK! I mean, not on the unpleasant issues like demanding equal pay, or impeaching Brett Kavanaugh, but:

I disagree with academic feminism a lot — with those vague oppressor stories about the patriarchy, with the strange unwillingness to admit inherited-gender differences and with the tone of faculty lounge militancy. But academic feminism is right about the big thing.

Which turns out to be—uh, what? What does the hedgehog of academic feminism know that the rest of us foxes are missing?

The big thing is that for thousands of years social thinking has been dominated by men — usually alpha men — who saw life as a place where warriors and traders went out and competed for wealth and power.

What? The big thing is that academic feminists have spent millennia in the wilderness? I don't want to quibble here, but that sounds more like a big meta-thing, not about the findings but about the methodology, and it also sounds like a vague oppressor story about the patriarchy.

So not exactly: there's a big thing about the big thing, which is that the academic masculists have been missing something important:

I'd say: The Damore Memo

Image via Phawker.

David Brooks ("Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google's C.E.O.") picking villains:

There are many actors in the whole Google/diversity drama, but I’d say the one who’s behaved the worst is the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai.

Am I alone in thinking there's something weird about conducting an examination of this case around the question "who has behaved the worst?" There are many actors in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I'd say the one who behaved the worst was Polonius. What a dick that guy is. I'm glad he's dead.

No, I'd say the job is to understand what happened and what, if anything, it means. I'm fond of worrying through the argument of who was the worst person in the George W. Bush administration (on the whole, I go for Wolfowitz, who was better intellectually equipped than Cheney or Rumsfeld to know what they were doing and thus has a greater responsibility than those two simple-minded sociopaths), but only in the context of a broader analysis of the story.

What happened at Google was that sometime in July a software engineer called James Damore attended a mandatory company diversity training session that made him really mad (he said it was "secretive" and "shaming"), so on a flight to China, to while the time away and assuage his hurt feelings, he wrote a lengthy note under the title "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber"

Dear women, Ur doing it wrong. Yours affectionately, David Brooks

Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely in One Week (1920), via.

Shorter David Brooks, "After the Women's March", January 24 2017:

The Women's Marches on Saturday in protest against the incoming Trump administration were a phenomenal success that left their participants feeling energized and hopeful, but unfortunately they failed to aim at uneducated white men, so they weren't successful after all. Too bad!

In the first place, they shouldn't have been focused on issues such as reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, and action on climate change, because while these are all important issues, this is 2017, and ethnic populism is rising around the world:

First Feminist

Photo via the Politics and Elections Portal.

Watching the proceedings on MSNBC last night, and after the Big Dog spoke I was interested and puzzled by the way the station's Tough Babes, Rachel and Republican Nicole, dismissed him for that long lingering nostalgic wedding-toast intro taking the audience in some detail from his first cute meet with the candidate to their dumping of Chelsea in the dorm 20-odd years later (he stood at the window concealing his tears while Hillary worked to perfect the environment). "Weak" and "meandering", they thought, though the audience plainly mostly loved it.

It was a remarkably limited view, it seemed to me, as if there's only one thing a speech can do—to overwhelm everybody and be the winner—and a kind of unfeminist view, too, with its assumption that if Bill wasn't the powerful winner of the evening then he was a failure.

a note of sub-Lakoffian semiotics here: Bill's speech had a particular rhetorical purpose that isn't maybe appreciated. (By @maddow...)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2016

Cheap shots and hot pursuits

Update 4/22: Welcome Mike's Round-Up Readers! Thanks, Batocchio!

Via Wikimedia Commons, attributed to M.Z.D. Schmid.

The worst thing about Donald Trump, per David French at National Review: He encourages feminism.

The masculinity of Trump is exactly the caricatured, counterfeit masculinity of the feminist fever dream. It takes the full energy of manhood and devotes it to sex, money, and power. It’s posturing masquerading as toughness and anger drained of bravery.... he breathes new life into a feminism that is so extreme, so hysterical, that even a majority of women reject it.

That must be pretty darn extreme and hysterical, if even the wimminz are against it.

The misogyny. Used to be so much better quality back in the day.

Uncredited image found at A Daring Adventure.

Did you ever see a laddie go this way and that? David Brooks did:

[The Civil War colonel Robert McAllister] lobbied and preached against profanity, drinking, prostitution and gambling. Some of the line officers in the regiment, from less genteel backgrounds, rebelled. They formed an organization called the Independent Order of Trumps. In sort of a mischievous, laddie way, the Trumps championed boozing and whoring, cursing and card-playing.

But he's unable to communicate what a laddie way is. (One of my first and most splendid views of what an unspeakably awful writer Brooks is when he's making an effort to be a good writer was when he described Shakespeare's Prince Hal as belonging to "a lewd and unsupervised laddie culture".)

The Perils of Feminism

Gloria Swanson in Clarence Badger's Teddy at the Throttle (1917). Image via Bangor Daily News.

The Camille Paglia of the Washington establishment:

Maureen Dowd, January 23 2016:

Sarah Palin Saves Feminism

Maureen Dowd, February 14 2016:

When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism

Happy Valentine's Day, Red! I guess she must have done the dirty deed just in the last couple of weeks, huh? Because it was OK when Palin last saw it.

Well, maybe she was just being sarcastic on that:

It's just logic. Feminists are the real sexists.

Parisian resistance fighter Simone Segouin, who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with her submachine gun, via Crafty Kryptonite Alpaca. Ann Althouse feels she is practically the same person because she's pretty rebellious too.

Hillary Clinton, asked by Lena Dunham whether she considers herself a feminist:

Yes... Absolutely. I’m always a little bit puzzled when any woman of whatever age, but particularly a young woman, says something like, ‘well, I believe in equal rights but I’m not a feminist.’ Well, a feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights.

Ann Althouse's comment:

Who writes the definition? We're still saying what X is "by definition" after all these years of scoffing at the anti-same-sex-marriage people who kept saying, tediously, marriage is by definition between a man and a woman?