2023 archive
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin McDermott runs the numbers–and calls out the misdirection plays. A snipped snippet:
(snip)
For a while, a favorite strategy of the pro-industrial climate-change-denial crowd was to point at every cold snap as if it was incontrovertible proof of the “global-warming hoax,” as they called it. This is as idiotic as, say, showing footage of people milling around peacefully during lulls in the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and citing it as proof that there was no riot. Yet they got away with that skewed logic for a long time.
I fear for my grandchildren.
QOTD 0
William D. Andrews:
Ignorance, she had come to understand, was no bar to his pronouncement of truths.
Andrews, William D., Mapping Murder (Yarmouth, ME: Islandport Press, 2017) p. 44
Words (Sometimes) Have Meanings 0
F. T. Rea defines a term.
A Modest Proposal 0
At The Roanoke Times, Karen Gilbert, who survived the mass shooting at Virginia Tech a decade and a half ago (how much more numb have have become since then?), offers a modest proposal for dealing with American’s red tide of gunnuttery. A snippet:
She is an optimist if she thinks that, as a society, we are willing to learn from others, especially as regards (some) Americans’ fervid fetish for portable phalluses.
After all, America is exceptional; just ask it.
Exceptional in that we can’t even learn from ourselves.
Why would we learn from others?
The Offense 0
At the Nashville Tennessean, LeBron Hill argues that Tennessee Republicans decided to expel two young black progressives from the Tennessee House because they didn’t know their place.
Afterthought:
When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, growing up under Jim Crow and attending segregated schools, there was a term for this:
They were “being uppity.”
Over a century and a half after the Civil War, the Secesh are still with us, and they are rising again after all these years.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
As I’ve mentioned before, Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” has come full circle and consumed the Republican Party.
It is now the party of George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Republican Family Values 0
Michelle Goldberg is an optimist. She suggests that Republicans are starting realize that, in their crusade against abortion, they may have overreached.
She may be right, but my guess is that in order to retain the support of the right-wing evangelical they-call-themselves Christians, Republicans will double-down.