Subway

36th Street station on the D line was also the site of a slashing incident in August. Uncredited photo via WPIX TV.

I don't really have anything vital to say about the shooting incident in Brooklyn this morning except to think about how much time I spent in that station, 36th Street at 8th Avenue, when we lived 20 blocks west of there in Brooklyn's Chinatown in the later 90s and it was the best stop for changing between the R local and the D express on the way to and from Manhattan, through the toddlerhoods of two kids, often in an unfolded stroller hung around the handles with plastic bags from shopping, which I had to wangle up and down the stairs (occasionally with the unexpected assistance of some friendly volunteer out of nowhere). It's just such a profoundly ordinary place.

End gun violence, please.

New Bottle For Old Whine

 

Graphic by The Heckler, June 2011, in honor of legendary Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, quoted as saying, "Surprisingly, my tears are slightly peachy with a touch of licorice."

People somewhat exercised by this big article in The Atlantic by a psychiatrist, Sally Satel, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left":

In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychologicalmakeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster.” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion....

Actually Adorno was not a psychologist but offered a sociological perspective to the team, and made a relatively small contribution (to five of the 23 chapters). And I don't think it's correct to say they "concluded" that authoritarianism was found only among conservatives; rather, rightwing authoritarianism was what the mostly American psychologists ( Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford) set out to study, carefully weeding out the contrast with revolutionary leftism that was a key to the original Frankfurt School project:

You Know Me Al

YouTube screen capture, from the Sessions confirmation hearings.

I only wrote one brief post on Al Franken's resignation from the Senate, not saying much more than, "I really hate everything. I certainly hate Al Franken, though I obviously hate Roger Stone a lot more," with reference to the clear indications that ratfucking was involved, and archratfucker Roger Stone was somehow involved in it:

I'm guessing same way he knew "Podesta's time in the barrel" was coming in August 2016? https://t.co/2OOdM1kj5k i.e. ratfucking he was personally engaged in, with or without Assange and the Putinist mob.

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2017

And with the understanding that Franken had set himself up for this, which quickly began to look more and more unfair as the character of the ratfucking exposed itself in more depth, and I found myself hating him a lot less. As I put it last spring, with reference to attacks on Joe Biden for his disturbing-uncle behavior:

I also thought and continue to think Al Franken was essentially innocent, in similar ways and indeed still more so (in the sense that his dopey comedian behaviors are less creepy than the Biden massages and hair sniffings), but nevertheless right to resign from the Senate, because what loyalty to the party demanded at the moment of accusation was to not allow that to become an issue for diluting the party message on sexual assault...

So that I was fully prepared, as many of us must have been, for Jane Mayer's excellent New Yorker report, though maybe not for how angry I'd start to feel as I began to appreciate how obvious Franken's innocence should have been from the start, whenever we learned who the accuser LeeAnn Tweeden was (conservative radio "host", Fox figure and Hannity friend, and an inveterate liar about a large number of subjects, including that USO tour); what Tom Arnold of all people was able to report accurately in early December 2017 must have been possible for the press to check out, and I don't know why they didn't.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer investigated the sexual misconduct allegations against former Sen. Al Franken. "Almost NOTHING His Main Accuser Said checks out," she tweeted. https://t.co/IMYBdz2kPU

— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) July 22, 2019

I still think Franken was right to resign (agreeing with the conclusion, if not many of the premises, of Matt Yglesias)—even though he seems to be second-guessing himself at this point—and I'm not going to scream at the Democratic Senators who did what they felt they had to do, including Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer in the leadership roles they took, though I'm glad Gillibrand's never going to be president after reading about this slightly Frank Underwood moment:

at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal. 

Still, politics is ugly, and nobody's indispensable. But I miss him, shooting barbs in the Senate Judiciary Committee and representing exactly the kind of progressivism the whole party has begun to move toward. I hope we get him back in public life.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

In which I agree with Bari Weiss

Photo by Robert Cherny for The Frisc.

Sort of. "From the left," as you might say, with Weiss's views ("San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History") on

the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

It's about the 13 fresco murals painted in 1936 inside George Washington High School in San Francisco by Victor Arnautoff, a Communist student of Diego Rivera, under the auspices of the WPA, depicting a less sanitized version of the life of George Washington in which the Father of Our Country is shown managing the enslaved workers on his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon (not cotton, as too many reports including Weiss's claim), and as a land speculator pushing the colonization of the frontier literally over the dead body of a murdered Native.

Notes from the Gawker spawn

Nothing says "perfect candidate to lead the most powerful nation in the world" like "I have no empathy"

— The Mars Travolta (@Anarchopriapism) May 3, 2019

So Mr. Bret Stephens ("Dear Millennials: The Feeling Is Mutual") has taken offense at @anarchopriapism, a 20-year-old from Northern Ireland with 258 followers in her Twitter account (that's up from 64 since Mr. Bret's column came out), and her suggestion that it would be a good thing for the leader of the most powerful nation in the world to able to experience empathy

My own reactionary reaction was different. O.K., I thought, I could definitely vote for Joe — provided he has the mettle to stand his ground.

Though Mr. Bret doesn't actually come out and explain what's wrong with empathy, or empathy for the younger generation, or empathy for

Normless and Gormless

Teddy Gormless.

It's an odd moment, the week a criminal defendant making his guilty plea claims, under oath, that he was directed to commit a couple of his crimes (exceeding the federal campaign contribution limit by something like 1000% in unreported donations that he carefully, though not very effectively, tried to conceal) by the beneficiary of the contributions, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, who thus enters the court record as an alleged co-conspirator (and let's just stipulate that we know it's true because we've all heard the fucking tape in which, rather than saying, "Christ, man, you're getting Pecker to pay McDougal $150,000 to kill the story? Is that legal?" he only says, "Pay with cash") for the first but clearly not the last time—

An odd moment, I was going to say, for Charles R. Kesler of the Claremont Institute to issue an op-ed piece in The New York Times on how

Most of President Trump’s alleged transgressions offend against the etiquette of modern liberal governance, not the Constitution.

and that's a good thing: