Culture Warriors category archive

Dwight Eisenhower was president when I was a young ‘un. He was good and decent man.

Were he alive today, he would appalled, embarrassed beyond recognition even, to learn that his Republican Party has become the party of the Secesh.

Someone told him how to get to Sesame Street:

“Elmo’s X account was briefly compromised yesterday by an unknown hacker who posted disgusting messages, including antisemitic and racist posts. The account has since been secured,” a spokesperson for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, said in a statement to ABC News on Monday.

Via Job’s Anger.

Grung_e_Gene rips off the mask, and what he sees ain’t pretty.

PoliticalProf cites a rhyme.

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*Mark Twain.

At the Tampa Bay Times, Elizabeth Bird hears something from the past that sounds eerily like “Alligator Alcatraz.”

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*Mark Twain.

Heaven forbid that university students might have to–gasp!–think about ideas.

Separation of church and state. Fuggedaboutit.

Farron parses the prevarication.

The editorial board of the Bangor Daily News is–er–somewhat taken aback by Trump maladministration’s and today’s Republican Party’s embrace of mean for the sake of mean.

The spirit of George Wallace lives on in today’s Republican Party.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laura A. Cariola explores how media portrayals affect our notion of immigrants. She focuses on British studies, as she is British, but I suspect her findings are equally applicable here, as the Trump maladministration persists in demonizing every other it can target.

Here’s a bit:

Ryan and Tonkiss (2022) explored a combined visual analysis of British tabloid newspaper coverage of refugees. Their findings showed that men are portrayed through a criminal lens, with the vast majority of lone adult men depicted as police mugshots, within a courtroom setting, with handcuffs, and words such as “criminal,” “suspicious,” and “guilty.” In contrast, refugee women were depicted with children at a campsite or inside a tent, thus positioning women as maternal, passive, and vulnerable, and infusing a sense of genuineness of their refugee status compared to the representations of men. These gendered representations highlight the dichotomous representation by oversimplifying complex lived experiences between “good” refugees who are deserving of protection and “bad” refugees who are a threat to national security and social order.

Emma and the crew make a compelling case that ICE is being turned into, for want of a better term, my words, not theirs, America’s Stasi.

Via C&L, which has commentary.