“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite to your neighbors.
Aside:
One more time, “negligent” and “accidental” are not synonyms.
Also, if you can’t tell whether a double-aught buck shotgun shell is still chambered, it’s time for you to pack it in.
The Christmas Police 0
As my mother would say, the nerve of some people.
Unbalanced Balance 0
In a fascinating column, David Leonhardt explores his reaction to another writer’s article about “centrist bias.” I commend it to your attention.
Here’s a bit (emphasis added):
In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. . . .
But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.
Methinks Leonhardt is onto something here.
The type of blind loyalty to centrism as he describes it does not admit the possibility that either (or both) polar position(s) may be just wrong, wrong, wrong and limits discourse to the narrow swath of landscape visible through the Overton Window.
The Propagation 0
The Des Moines Register’s marvelous Reka Basu looks at the effects of three years of Trumpery. A snippet:
At high school sports events, fans have used the chants to intimidate opposing teams’ nonwhite players. In 2017 after a high school girls’ basketball varsity game between Mediapolis and Columbus Junction (which has a large Latino population), a message saying “Go back to the border” and “Go Trump” was scribbled on a whiteboard in a locker room.
Close Encounters 0
In The Seattle Times, Elisabeth Becker Topkara recalls her grandmother’s warning her that antisemitism would not go away during her granddaughter’s lifetime. She offers proof that her grandmother was correct.
Follow the link for the rest.
A Boxing Day Wallpaper 0
Thus endeth the season of self-indulgent screenshots.
Facebook Frolics, Elevating Evil Dept. 0
I find the DOD’s action particularly repulsive, as my father’s unit was captured during the run-up to the Battle of the Bulge and spent the rest of the war in German POW camps.
Like most soldiers who actually see combat, my father seldom alluded to his experiences during the war, much less actually talked about them, but I recall one time: As we watched the opening of The Great Escape on television, he said, almost to himself, “That’s exactly what it looked like.”