Shande

 

Children waiting to receive food in Gaza,  Tuesday, photo by Mahmoud Issa/Reuters via Haaretz.

So you're maybe 13, 14 years old, in a tent somewhere in southern Gaza, watching your parents die of hunger, maybe your grandparents, and you haven't eaten anything yourself for three days, and they all try to stop you from heading out to one of the three or four distribution sites of the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the southwest of the territory, perhaps four or five miles away, from which you might be able to bring back a box of pasta and rice and lentils and some cooking oil, if you're lucky (and have access to cooking gas, and water, which the displaced hardly do). Because that's not a sure thing; there's never enough there for the people who need it, and there are gangsters there with muscle to take more than others get, and the Israeli Defense Forces mobilized nearby who might start shooting live ammunition at any moment, that's a constant at all of the sites—the IDF say they're just firing "warning shots" but dozens are getting killed that way every day. Of course you're going to go anyway.

Via BBC.

And the American mercenaries, nobody knows who's paying them, armed as well, with bullets as well as stun grenades and pepper spray:

For the Record: Why I Hate The New York Times

Photo by Money Sharma/Getty Images via Wired.

But first, Pompeo's farewell. Only a few short years ago I thought it would be safe to say there would never be a worse secretary of state than Rex Tillerson, and I was wrong. But in his departure, he really transcended himself:

It's kind of an alternate to "saying the quiet parts out loud": the silence of where they belong is even louder. Indeed it's monoculturalism, the suppression of difference. Everybody's supposed to be Mike Pompeo. Or in the original German, "Ein Land, ein Volk, ein Führer."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 20, 2021

For the Record: Fart Act and Other Disasters

Trump had to double down, of course, and say it was done on purpose, a message to the Fake Media, though he obviously couldn't say clearly what the message was ("Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares"), or explain why her communications director had said there was no message and her stylist was completely unfamiliar with the jacket. He's really trying to convince us that he was in control of whatever it was. I believe Trump would rather be accused of almost anything, no matter how gross, than admit that a woman got out ahead of him. 

Trump is about to blow up the global trading regime with an unsettling FART Act. https://t.co/tgDZxQSE2V

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 1, 2018

When I was first working in Singapore, the National University moved from the ancient hill of Bukit Timah to a new campus in the south of the island, everything very shiny and new, and in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences every office door was equipped with a bright brass plaque displaying the room number, ASS 1, ASS 2, etc. As a representative American, I quietly let the Dean know he had a problem, and the faulty acronym was replaced with something else, with Singaporean efficiency, basically overnight, before we moved in.

This kind of thing can happen in a densely multilingual society, where people up and down the hierarchy share enough languages to give and receive orders but not necessarily the ones they need to get the job done. In my later career as a magazine editor I found that the art direction staff were always graduates of Chinese-language schools, while the editorial were inevitably from English-language ones, and crucial miscommunications could take place, though none quite that funny.

For the record: The last of Sanger

Still from Margaret Sanger's lost 1917 film Birth Control. dramatizing her arrest and jailing for violation of the Comstock Act by providing contraception to patients at her Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn, 1916. Via Margaret Sanger Papers.

A kind of last word on the subject of Margaret Sanger and her support for sterilization of the "feeble-minded" popped into my head, right out of real life.

Her highest priority was for CHOICE (except for the intellectually disabled she believed were unable to choose, which I agree was wrong)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

That cliché demurrer at the end won me a like from my interlocutor, but I didn't really feel good about it.

Still, when you think about it long-term birth control was unavailable then. I have a somewhat severely retarded nephew in his 30s...

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

they've been together a long time, it's good for them. Having a kid really wouldn't be.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

We say girls—young women beneath the age of statutory consent—can't "make a choice" to have sex. This is why we prosecute their seducers for rape. Similarly lots of states have statutory rape laws dealing with sexual abuse of women with intellectual disabilities. The legal standard focuses on when such women have the "capacity of consent". We can have a discussion of whether they can consent to sex but we can't discuss whether they can consent to having a child?

They didn't have hormonal birth control in Margaret Sanger's time, or IUDs, just condoms and cervical caps, and using those was against federal law after the 1873 Comstock Act, which was being rigorously enforced by the beginning of the 20th century. Sanger's great cause was to change that, and give women of all classes the ability to make their own choice as to whether to have a child or not, positive and negative.

The "feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic" were a pretty peripheral part of her quest, and I don't know whether she thought it was a good thing for them to have sex, as I do, but she knew that they would, and she didn't contemplate trying to stop them. At the same time she didn't believe they should have to "make that choice", so she thought it was a good idea to give them tubal ligations or vasectomies and didn't think it was necessary to ask their consent (keep in mind that the concept of informed medical consent didn't exist, either—it only dates back to 1957). Even if she did use the language of "racial betterment", she absolutely rejected the concept of racial or religious identity as grounds for sterilization, unlike Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and Calvin Coolidge and the rest of the eugenics movement. I really can't see any more how her thinking has anything to do with Nazis and their plans for Jewish and Roma genocide. It has to do more with my nephew.

Trump gets a little less comical

This may not look quite as strange when there's somebody in it, but I'm not sure. Via.

So, this happened: faced with a fan who denounced President Obama as a "Muslim" and "not even an American", Donald Trump didn't stop him (that's the official narrative—actually it was a lot worse than that, as we'll note below). Was he out of line? Nah, according to all sorts of people, including some of his rivals:

“It’s not my job, it’s not Donald Trump’s job, it’s not anybody’s job to police a question,” former Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum told reporters about Trump’s refusal to correct the man in New Hampshire who called President Barack Obama a Muslim. “The questioner can say whatever he wants, it’s a free country.”

Or as the Trumpster himself put it,

For Armenia

Not in the mood today, but don't want to miss what might be the only time I ever get a chance to agree with noted foreign policy wonk Kim Kardashian. Yes, it was genocide, by any plausible criterion, and I wish President Obama would use the word (as Bundeskänzlerin Merkel and Papissimo Francesco, both of whom have tenser and more fraught relations with the Turkish government than we do, have done).

Kanye, Khloe, Kim, and Knorth at the Kardashians' ancestral home in Gyumri, north of Yerevan. Hello Magazine.

Also clicks.