Culture Warriors category archive

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.

Via Job’s Anger.

The Arizona Republic reports that right leaning Arizona State Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick is worried. Here’s a bit of the story, which refers to the Trump maladministration’s arresting and detaining immigrants (and some American citizens thought to immigrants, likely because of the color of their skin), often without cause and with observing due process:

“As if this concept (due process–ed.) was created by rogue liberal judges to help illegal immigrants stay in the country,” Bolick said. “Due process is the most foundational legal principle protecting individual liberty in Western civilization. It dates back to the Magna Carta. It does not deserve to be in quote marks.”

Bolick said Miller’s comment about potentially suspending habeas corpus if the courts didn’t do the right thing could be seen as a way “to intimidate the courts to reach decisions that they favor.”

The entire report is worthy of your attention.

(Syntax error fixed.)

At Psychology Today Blogs, psychology professor Noam Shpancer argues that feeling too much patriotism can be harmful. Methinks we evidence that he is onto something every day, as illustrated by the two posts in today’s bloggery. Here’s a tiny bit (emphasis added):

Group affiliation, however, also has a dark side. For example, one way by which we tend to distinguish our group is by devaluing other groups. We are prone to believe that our group is special, and better, than others because thinking that our group is special makes us feel special. At moderate levels, this in-group bias may work to enhance our self-esteem and facilitate group cohesion. We can celebrate our group and benefit from membership without denying our group’s problems and weaknesses. We can remain aware of our in-group bias and manage it so as not to unjustly hurt outsiders.

Yet at the extremes, group loyalty may become harmful. We are capable of overdosing on our group identity, a process by which our loyalty becomes blind, our devotion rigid, and our relations with outsiders hostile. This is true in the local sense, regarding our proximal groups, such as, say, the local college football team. It is also true in the broader sense.

Methinks this a quite timely read.

The editorial board of the Miami Herald finds itself–er–somewhat taken aback at the delight that members of today’s Republican Party seem to be taking in Ron DeSantis’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and in the sheer mean for the sake of mean. Here’s a tiny bit from their piece:

After the tour, he (Donald Trump–ed.) tried another witty quip about how secure South Florida’s tent city will be: “A lot of body guards, a lot of cops in the form of alligators,” he told reporters. “You don’t have to pay them so much.”

Amid all of this hilarity, there’s rarely a mention of the detainees as human beings who have been plucked from their lives, sometimes without cause. There’s not even a whiff of compassion or nuance about how all cases are not the same.

Afterthought:

Uncouth injustice, the new American way.

At The Colorado Sun, Mike Littwin argues forcefully that Mitch McConnell’s legacy is, well, how shall I put this? somewhat contrary to the ideals of the Founders, who rebelled against a king, fought a war for independence, and attempted to establish a democracy, however imperfect it may have been at the time of its inception, as today’s Supreme Supremacist Court, created through McConnell’s duplicitous machinations, seems willing to crown a king.