When Sánchez said "La posición del Gobierno de España se resume en cuatro palabras: 'No a la guerra'" he wasn't seeking to tell us how many words there are in 'No a la guerra'. He might have said "en pocas palabras" but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier.
If one translates it as "...in four words: 'no to war'" the thought induced in the reader is first that the count is wrong, second (in a reader with some familiarity with romance languages) that there must have been a definite article in the Spanish. That is not the message Sánchez intended.
One should translate to give the message, not literally word by word.
More seriously, I thought about the translation going from a 4-word Spanish phrase to a 3-word English phrase as uncontroversial because it best conveyed the intended meaning. But with the preceding reference to the number words in the phrase, going from "cuatro" to "three" wouldn't convey the intended meaning. It's just no longer the correct number of words after the translation.
I don't know if there's a convention for translating in that kind of situation, but somehow translating a word that has a more or less perfect analog for the intended meaning in another language to a different word seems fundamentally wrong to me. Words for numbers are about as exact in meaning as language can manage. There's no selecting for sense or feeling or inference.
Pro Bono - In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Yes, Spanish is the same. "Tengo que trabajar los domingos" is literally "I have [that] to work the Sundays," but idiomatically it's " I have to work on Sundays."
I think it's fun that the translation nods towards the actual Spanish construction, but can see how that might be confusing (or annoying) to someone who does not know Spanish. Changing the "four" to "three" preserves the sense. Adding "the" to make it four words creates ambiguity and introduces confusion because the definite article signals opposite things in the two languages.
These sorts of translation issues remind me of one of the challenges I ran into during the Spanish translation exam I took as part of my Ph.D. qualification. The Spanish word in one of the sentences was "patria" - the most literal translation of that would be "fatherland" or "land of my fathers," but it could also be "home" or "homeland." The writer could have chosen "pais" - "country," or "nación" - "nation" in place of "patria," but those would have lost the romantic, familial sense of "home," and the sense of patriotism.
Because it was a book about the Spanish Civil War, and the person being written about was a member of the CNT/FAI and not a Nationalist, I decided to use "motherland" in place of "fatherland" in order to avoid the fascistic connotations of "fatherland" in American English (which might have led to the person being associated with Franco rather than the anarchists if the reader didn't know much about the person, but knew just enough about the war to lead themselves astray), and dropped a footnote into the translation to explain that choice.
Spanish tends to use about a third more words than English to express the same thing. Japanese is also less information-dense than English. Vietnamese and spoken Chinese are more information-dense.
I'm kind of surprised that my college Spanish, which I haven't used in forty-five years, still allowed me to stagger through his speech. But, once you figure out some basic coding, Spanish is not that far a stretch from English. At least, not for the kind of language people use in speeches. Literature, I assume, would be beyond me now.
What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words.
I read that and just assumed that the phrase in Spanish had four words. That kind of difference between languages being not at unusual.
See, in German (because you studied that), "von dem" ("from the") being rendered as "vom" -- two English words becoming one in German. Differences between English and Japanese can be even larger, as I'm sure lj can attest.
I can’t be alone here in finding their absurd cosplay military posturing (Department of War, our “warriors” etc) the perfect illustration of arrested adolescent males desperately grasping for proof of their machismo quotient.
It takes me back to my college days. The instant reaction back then would have been "frat boys." (Which might, even then, have been unfair to many fraternity members, but the stereotype had a really solid basis.) The behaviors differ only in the scope now available them. These are just the guys who never grew up.
Just idle curiosity, but I wondered what did the translation:
In short, the position of the Government of Spain can be summed up in four words: no to war.
What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words. Dumping the statement into different tools produced either "no to war" or "no to the war". In English there's a subtle difference in the meaning of those. I don't speak Spanish, so don't know if there's the same article vs no article thing (and the original has an article).
And completely off topic, the one thing I regret about my education choices over the years is spending four semesters on German in college. Four of Spanish would have been much more valuable for me, in practice. Unfortunately, at that time and place and my majors, the College would only let me count German or Russian.
You know, I really don't think there's that much disagreement here on this. It was clear from the piece that Butcher's repeated results were largely to do with her empathy and care for her dogs, and as a result it's great to see that her example has changed norms in that sport.
All I was trying to say was that it would be reductive to imply (which nous did not) that any female excellence in sport, or artistic pursuits, was because of the fact that women intrinsically have more care and empathy than men. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. We'll never know unless and until on a large scale boys and girls are brought up the same, with the same expectations, from birth.
Meanwhile, on the question of soft=weak, I imagine that most of us find the behaviour of the Trump administration as pathetic as I do. Leaving aside their anti-DEI initiatives, which have a complicated twining of ideological motivations in addition to this equation, I can't be alone here in finding their absurd cosplay military posturing (Department of War, our "warriors" etc) the perfect illustration of arrested adolescent males desperately grasping for proof of their machismo quotient.
there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak.
Something that anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Aikido would know is nonsense.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
That's of a piece with their seeing everything as transactional. If you treat every interaction as unrelated to every other, then you have no allies. Merely temporary and expedient cases of aligned goals. If you have no allies, then soft power is meaningless, whether it is an oxymoron or not.
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.
La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.
Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.
There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn't really do justice to all of the ins and outs)
Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.
GftNC - I don't think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher's accomplishments by saying that she was being too "soft," where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama's boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.
And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It's why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.
But in Butcher's case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.
I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of "negging" she was illustrating in that book... "Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man."
lj, I'd be delighted (and the world would be a better place) if everyone demonstrated care and empathy, and I'm definitely not talking about "giving women an out". But when I used the word "necessarily", I was talking about the implication that these characteristics are a prerequisite for strength and excellence in women whereas, although in my opinion they are important and hugely desirable in human beings, it is possible for a woman to be a strong, excellent performer of whatever sport, art form etc without those qualities being the obvious basis or baseline for the talent. "Caring" and "empathy" are so stereotypically part of what constitutes femininity in the world in which we live, that I think it important to retain the idea that women, like men, can be exceptionally good at something without a particularly high credit balance of those qualities.
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
But journalists who have been covering the Trump administration were quick to point out that there is in fact evidence Trump knew about the ad campaign ahead of time.
[...]
During her tenure at DHS, the secretary earned the name “ICE Barbie” for her camera-ready costume changes, including cosplaying as an ICE agent, pilot, rescue boat captain, and firefighter.
She and Trump “had several meetings during the transition, talking about it,” she said of the ad campaign, according to The Atlantic.
She recalled the president telling her, “Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota. They had Mount Rushmore. I want you to do those for the border.”
He also said, “I want you in the ads. And I want your face in the ads. I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” according to Noem, with the goal of telling the world that the U.S. had a new leader.
I imagine her trying to wrap her head around getting fired for something Trump explicitly told her to do and smile.
I notice Lindsey Halligan is already under investigation by the Florida Bar….
Oops! In today's NYT (it's not worth a gift link - it's early in the month and I only get 10):
Florida Bar Retreats From Statement Saying Lindsey Halligan Was Under ScrutinyThe Florida bar said that it had “erroneously” made that assertion, disclosed in a letter last month, and that no investigation into Ms. Halligan was pending. The Florida Bar, which examines attorney conduct in the state, retreated on Friday from its earlier assertion that it was investigating Lindsey Halligan, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia who brought politically charged cases against some of President Trump’s foes.
The bar, in a letter dated Feb. 4, told a nonprofit organization called Campaign for Accountability that it had opened an investigation after the group filed complaints about Ms. Halligan related to her work as a federal prosecutor.
The letter said: “We are aware of these developments and have been monitoring them closely. We already have an investigation pending.” The New York Times and other news organizations reported on the letter, and the Florida Bar told outlets like CBS News that “it does not provide comment on active cases.”
But on Friday, a spokeswoman for the bar, Jennifer Krell Davis, said that in writing the letter, her organization had “erroneously” stated “that there is a pending bar investigation” of Ms. Halligan.
“There is no such pending bar investigation,” Ms. Davis said in a statement, adding that her organization had received a complaint against Ms. Halligan, and “consistent with standard practice, the bar is monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings underlying the complaint.”
After Ms. Davis’s statement was sent, Ms. Halligan texted a New York Times reporter, stating that the article published in the outlet a day earlier was erroneous. She added that the bar had clarified that no investigation was pending.
Ms. Davis declined to comment further when asked why the bar had taken a day to determine that the statement was erroneous, what led to the determination and whether she had been contacted by Trump administration officials.
After the letter was disclosed on Thursday, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, responded on social media, saying, “It’s time to end partisan law-fare and re-evaluate the need for a unified Florida Bar.”
And on Friday, responding to the bar’s backpedaling, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that the “‘investigation’ of Lindsey Halligan is totally fake news.”
“Lindsey not only did nothing wrong — she did a great job!" Ms. Bondi wrote.
The question of ethics investigations into Trump administration lawyers drew attention earlier this week when the Justice Department issued a proposal saying it would seek to pre-empt state bar investigations into ethics complaints against department lawyers.
Some lawyers considered that action a veiled threat to usurp the authority of state courts and bar disciplinary bodies to police the conduct of lawyers.
Campaign for Accountability had filed complaints in Florida and Virginia against Ms. Halligan over her work as an interim U.S. attorney last fall. While in office, she convinced grand juries to indict the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Both indictments were later thrown out by a judge who found that Ms. Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. Other federal judges raised questions about statements Ms. Halligan made to grand jurors, and questioned her signing of court documents as U.S. attorney even after a judge had ruled her appointment invalid.
The executive director of Campaign for Accountability, Michelle Kuppersmith, said on Friday that she had not heard directly from the Florida Bar, but questioned its latest remarks.
“It’s hard to reconcile this latest statement with the bar counsel’s previous letter saying there is an investigation pending,” she said. “If there is no longer an investigation into Halligan, the question is why not, given that three judges indicated she engaged in conduct that appears to violate ethics rules.”
That's an interesting piece, nous, and I was glad to learn about Butcher. She sounds great. But I am slightly uneasy about any suggestion (which to be clear you weren't making, but which seems to be behind the last sentence you quote) that the strength and excellence of women should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy, which after all are qualities that are considered traditionally "feminine". Now clearly, these qualities were considered by men to be antithetical to the world of the Iditarod until eventually the results spoke for themselves. But if the main point you are making is that men should/can no longer see themselves as the gatekeepers of "the rules" in traditional pursuits, then you get no argument from me.
“You can’t just stop funding the Pentagon!”, I hear you cry? Fine. Just don’t pretend you’re serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
Fine. Just figure out a way to do it without hanging the troops out to dry. They don't deserve collective punishment here, and a lot of them are paycheck to paycheck.
“You can’t just stop funding the Pentagon!”, I hear you cry? Fine. Just don’t pretend you’re serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
Just make sure you find a way that doesn't hang the troops out to dry. They didn't make this mess (however many might have voted for Trump), and they don't deserve to collectively suffer here.
The deMAGAfication of the US government needs to be the sole priority of the Democratic Party as soon as it regains any sort of power. In particular, if Democrats take the House, they must refuse ANY funding for the "Department of War" until the Department of Homeland Security is abolished and its agencies returned to their original departments. Except ICE: abolish it and replace it with a new, MAGAt-free organization.
"You can't just stop funding the Pentagon!", I hear you cry? Fine. Just don't pretend you're serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
--TP
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A little language practice”
Not right.
When Sánchez said "La posición del Gobierno de España se resume en cuatro palabras: 'No a la guerra'" he wasn't seeking to tell us how many words there are in 'No a la guerra'. He might have said "en pocas palabras" but decided, rightly, that giving the actual number of words is pithier.
If one translates it as "...in four words: 'no to war'" the thought induced in the reader is first that the count is wrong, second (in a reader with some familiarity with romance languages) that there must have been a definite article in the Spanish. That is not the message Sánchez intended.
One should translate to give the message, not literally word by word.
"
More seriously, I thought about the translation going from a 4-word Spanish phrase to a 3-word English phrase as uncontroversial because it best conveyed the intended meaning. But with the preceding reference to the number words in the phrase, going from "cuatro" to "three" wouldn't convey the intended meaning. It's just no longer the correct number of words after the translation.
I don't know if there's a convention for translating in that kind of situation, but somehow translating a word that has a more or less perfect analog for the intended meaning in another language to a different word seems fundamentally wrong to me. Words for numbers are about as exact in meaning as language can manage. There's no selecting for sense or feeling or inference.
Four is just f**king four, right?
"
"Pro patria mori" (in Latin) is usually translated "To die for one's country".
"
This is such a square bunch on this blog. The Spanish play it fast and loose when it comes to counting. Just relax and go with it.
"
Pro Bono - In French, it’s compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction – “non à la guerre”. cf. “vive la France”. I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed “four words” to “three words” in the translation.
Yes, Spanish is the same. "Tengo que trabajar los domingos" is literally "I have [that] to work the Sundays," but idiomatically it's " I have to work on Sundays."
I think it's fun that the translation nods towards the actual Spanish construction, but can see how that might be confusing (or annoying) to someone who does not know Spanish. Changing the "four" to "three" preserves the sense. Adding "the" to make it four words creates ambiguity and introduces confusion because the definite article signals opposite things in the two languages.
These sorts of translation issues remind me of one of the challenges I ran into during the Spanish translation exam I took as part of my Ph.D. qualification. The Spanish word in one of the sentences was "patria" - the most literal translation of that would be "fatherland" or "land of my fathers," but it could also be "home" or "homeland." The writer could have chosen "pais" - "country," or "nación" - "nation" in place of "patria," but those would have lost the romantic, familial sense of "home," and the sense of patriotism.
Because it was a book about the Spanish Civil War, and the person being written about was a member of the CNT/FAI and not a Nationalist, I decided to use "motherland" in place of "fatherland" in order to avoid the fascistic connotations of "fatherland" in American English (which might have led to the person being associated with Franco rather than the anarchists if the reader didn't know much about the person, but knew just enough about the war to lead themselves astray), and dropped a footnote into the translation to explain that choice.
"
Spanish tends to use about a third more words than English to express the same thing. Japanese is also less information-dense than English. Vietnamese and spoken Chinese are more information-dense.
"
In French, it's compulsory to use an article in that sort of construction - "non à la guerre". cf. "vive la France". I guess that Spanish is similar.
I would have changed "four words" to "three words" in the translation.
"
I'm kind of surprised that my college Spanish, which I haven't used in forty-five years, still allowed me to stagger through his speech. But, once you figure out some basic coding, Spanish is not that far a stretch from English. At least, not for the kind of language people use in speeches. Literature, I assume, would be beyond me now.
"
I read that and just assumed that the phrase in Spanish had four words. That kind of difference between languages being not at unusual.
See, in German (because you studied that), "von dem" ("from the") being rendered as "vom" -- two English words becoming one in German. Differences between English and Japanese can be even larger, as I'm sure lj can attest.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
It takes me back to my college days. The instant reaction back then would have been "frat boys." (Which might, even then, have been unfair to many fraternity members, but the stereotype had a really solid basis.) The behaviors differ only in the scope now available them. These are just the guys who never grew up.
On “A little language practice”
Just idle curiosity, but I wondered what did the translation:
What caught my eye was the obvious inconsistency of referring to a three-word phrase as four words. Dumping the statement into different tools produced either "no to war" or "no to the war". In English there's a subtle difference in the meaning of those. I don't speak Spanish, so don't know if there's the same article vs no article thing (and the original has an article).
And completely off topic, the one thing I regret about my education choices over the years is spending four semesters on German in college. Four of Spanish would have been much more valuable for me, in practice. Unfortunately, at that time and place and my majors, the College would only let me count German or Russian.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
You know, I really don't think there's that much disagreement here on this. It was clear from the piece that Butcher's repeated results were largely to do with her empathy and care for her dogs, and as a result it's great to see that her example has changed norms in that sport.
All I was trying to say was that it would be reductive to imply (which nous did not) that any female excellence in sport, or artistic pursuits, was because of the fact that women intrinsically have more care and empathy than men. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. We'll never know unless and until on a large scale boys and girls are brought up the same, with the same expectations, from birth.
Meanwhile, on the question of soft=weak, I imagine that most of us find the behaviour of the Trump administration as pathetic as I do. Leaving aside their anti-DEI initiatives, which have a complicated twining of ideological motivations in addition to this equation, I can't be alone here in finding their absurd cosplay military posturing (Department of War, our "warriors" etc) the perfect illustration of arrested adolescent males desperately grasping for proof of their machismo quotient.
"
Something that anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Aikido would know is nonsense.
That's of a piece with their seeing everything as transactional. If you treat every interaction as unrelated to every other, then you have no allies. Merely temporary and expedient cases of aligned goals. If you have no allies, then soft power is meaningless, whether it is an oxymoron or not.
"
Apologies for the side jaunt thru my own thoughts, but that word, 'necessarily' is the one that I'm chewing on a bit. I've restarted my martial arts, and the biggest problem I'm having is to reacquire the requisite 'softness' that I need. While I don't want to engage in Orientalism or start spouting Zen koans, I'd argue that softness and hardness have to be combined to create strength and there is a tendency in the West to assume that soft=weak. Even with something that would appear to be simply applying force, like weight lifting, flexibility (something I'm sorely lacking at the moment) and pacing are essential to producing the best result.
You can see that in the current administration, where the whole idea of soft power is considered an oxymoron, so much so that they have gone to eliminate any agency that might engage in it.
On “A little language practice”
That elision is reveals a bit more about the Spanish politics involved.
La ciudadanía española siempre repudió la dictadura de Sadam Hussein en Irak, pero no por ello apoyó la guerra de Irak, porque era ilegal, porque era injusta y porque no supuso una resolución real a casi ninguno de los problemas que pretendió resolver.
Del mismo modo, nosotros repudiamos al régimen de Irán que reprime, que mata vilmente a sus ciudadanos, particularmente a las mujeres.
There is a little back story to the Iraq part, Spain was part of the coalition of the willing in 2003 and the PM, Aznar, a conservative and a staunch ally of Bush, but there were train bombings in Madrid that the ruling party first blamed on ETA, but was later revealed to be a home-grown Islamist cell, something that seemed to be suppressed by the government because they knew it would f-up support for the deployment. (that summary doesn't really do justice to all of the ins and outs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
Aznar was kicked out for Zapatero, the socialist candidate, who had campaigned against the deployment and withdrew Spanish troops when he got in office.
"
Not a bad speech for a socialist economist. Listening to the lisp was good for my Spanish too. He lost me here:
La pregunta, en cambio, es si estamos o no del lado de la legalidad internacional y, por tanto, de la paz . . .
Pero al mismo tiempo rechazamos este conflicto y pedimos una solución diplomática y política.
IMHO, si, son ingenuous. Time will tell.
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
GftNC - I don't think that the author was trying to assign some sort of essential caring nature to women. I saw her as arguing that the men around her were attacking Butcher's accomplishments by saying that she was being too "soft," where soft is the devalued side of the binary under patriarchy, and thus belonged to women and other varieties of deficient people (children, mama's boys, homosexuals, etc.). They hated her because her success undermined their paradigm of how to be a winner as a man.
And that patriarchal paradigm (as youknow) is still very much with us. It's why work associated with emotional labor (nursing, teaching, child care, human resources) is still coded as female and is still assigned less economic value.
But in Butcher's case at least, the recipe for how to be a successful musher did change to reflect the importance of caring in creating a good dogsled team, and male mushers had to look to other aspects of their sport if they wanted to use it as a way to assert their masculinity.
I feel like I should mention Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing here as well, since this is an excellent example of the sort of "negging" she was illustrating in that book... "Yes, she won, but she was too easy on her dogs and the dogs would have won by more if they were being mushed by a man."
"
lj, I'd be delighted (and the world would be a better place) if everyone demonstrated care and empathy, and I'm definitely not talking about "giving women an out". But when I used the word "necessarily", I was talking about the implication that these characteristics are a prerequisite for strength and excellence in women whereas, although in my opinion they are important and hugely desirable in human beings, it is possible for a woman to be a strong, excellent performer of whatever sport, art form etc without those qualities being the obvious basis or baseline for the talent. "Caring" and "empathy" are so stereotypically part of what constitutes femininity in the world in which we live, that I think it important to retain the idea that women, like men, can be exceptionally good at something without a particularly high credit balance of those qualities.
"
I might be misunderstanding, but I kind of feel that the strength and excellence of _all_ people should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy and the challenge is to extend that to men rather than giving women an 'out' for not exhibiting those traits.
While I understand that we have to think about neurodiversity and understand that people have different brain chemistries and such, I feel like I'm dealing with some people who put out a self diagnosis as an excuse for not being empathetic. I find this happening with a few Westerners that I interact with here in Japan, so I don't know if they are picking up signals here of a system that is being imperfectly adopted here, or if this represents something in the system.
I realize that this creates the classical double bind that women and minorities always have to deal with, but I don't think the solution is to have people in those categories behave without caring and empathy, but to make sure that caring and empathy be something that is more or less required of all people.
On “The Last Noem Standing”
More schaden on my freude
https://www.thedailybeast.com/evidence-mounts-that-donald-trump-double-crossed-ice-barbie-kristi-noem/#user-comments
But journalists who have been covering the Trump administration were quick to point out that there is in fact evidence Trump knew about the ad campaign ahead of time.
[...]
During her tenure at DHS, the secretary earned the name “ICE Barbie” for her camera-ready costume changes, including cosplaying as an ICE agent, pilot, rescue boat captain, and firefighter.
She and Trump “had several meetings during the transition, talking about it,” she said of the ad campaign, according to The Atlantic.
She recalled the president telling her, “Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota. They had Mount Rushmore. I want you to do those for the border.”
He also said, “I want you in the ads. And I want your face in the ads. I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” according to Noem, with the goal of telling the world that the U.S. had a new leader.
I imagine her trying to wrap her head around getting fired for something Trump explicitly told her to do and smile.
"
I notice Lindsey Halligan is already under investigation by the Florida Bar….
Oops! In today's NYT (it's not worth a gift link - it's early in the month and I only get 10):
Florida Bar Retreats From Statement Saying Lindsey Halligan Was Under ScrutinyThe Florida bar said that it had “erroneously” made that assertion, disclosed in a letter last month, and that no investigation into Ms. Halligan was pending. The Florida Bar, which examines attorney conduct in the state, retreated on Friday from its earlier assertion that it was investigating Lindsey Halligan, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia who brought politically charged cases against some of President Trump’s foes.
The bar, in a letter dated Feb. 4, told a nonprofit organization called Campaign for Accountability that it had opened an investigation after the group filed complaints about Ms. Halligan related to her work as a federal prosecutor.
The letter said: “We are aware of these developments and have been monitoring them closely. We already have an investigation pending.”
The New York Times and other news organizations reported on the letter, and the Florida Bar told outlets like CBS News that “it does not provide comment on active cases.”
But on Friday, a spokeswoman for the bar, Jennifer Krell Davis, said that in writing the letter, her organization had “erroneously” stated “that there is a pending bar investigation” of Ms. Halligan.
“There is no such pending bar investigation,” Ms. Davis said in a statement, adding that her organization had received a complaint against Ms. Halligan, and “consistent with standard practice, the bar is monitoring the ongoing legal proceedings underlying the complaint.”
After Ms. Davis’s statement was sent, Ms. Halligan texted a New York Times reporter, stating that the article published in the outlet a day earlier was erroneous. She added that the bar had clarified that no investigation was pending.
Ms. Davis declined to comment further when asked why the bar had taken a day to determine that the statement was erroneous, what led to the determination and whether she had been contacted by Trump administration officials.
After the letter was disclosed on Thursday, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, responded on social media, saying, “It’s time to end partisan law-fare and re-evaluate the need for a unified Florida Bar.”
And on Friday, responding to the bar’s backpedaling, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X that the “‘investigation’ of Lindsey Halligan is totally fake news.”
“Lindsey not only did nothing wrong — she did a great job!" Ms. Bondi wrote.
The question of ethics investigations into Trump administration lawyers drew attention earlier this week when the Justice Department issued a proposal saying it would seek to pre-empt state bar investigations into ethics complaints against department lawyers.
Some lawyers considered that action a veiled threat to usurp the authority of state courts and bar disciplinary bodies to police the conduct of lawyers.
Campaign for Accountability had filed complaints in Florida and Virginia against Ms. Halligan over her work as an interim U.S. attorney last fall. While in office, she convinced grand juries to indict the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Both indictments were later thrown out by a judge who found that Ms. Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. Other federal judges raised questions about statements Ms. Halligan made to grand jurors, and questioned her signing of court documents as U.S. attorney even after a judge had ruled her appointment invalid.
The executive director of Campaign for Accountability, Michelle Kuppersmith, said on Friday that she had not heard directly from the Florida Bar, but questioned its latest remarks.
“It’s hard to reconcile this latest statement with the bar counsel’s previous letter saying there is an investigation pending,” she said. “If there is no longer an investigation into Halligan, the question is why not, given that three judges indicated she engaged in conduct that appears to violate ethics rules.”
On “Yuja Wang, networking, transactionality and that guy”
That's an interesting piece, nous, and I was glad to learn about Butcher. She sounds great. But I am slightly uneasy about any suggestion (which to be clear you weren't making, but which seems to be behind the last sentence you quote) that the strength and excellence of women should necessarily be grounded in their caring and empathy, which after all are qualities that are considered traditionally "feminine". Now clearly, these qualities were considered by men to be antithetical to the world of the Iditarod until eventually the results spoke for themselves. But if the main point you are making is that men should/can no longer see themselves as the gatekeepers of "the rules" in traditional pursuits, then you get no argument from me.
On “The Last Noem Standing”
“You can’t just stop funding the Pentagon!”, I hear you cry? Fine. Just don’t pretend you’re serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
Fine. Just figure out a way to do it without hanging the troops out to dry. They don't deserve collective punishment here, and a lot of them are paycheck to paycheck.
"
“You can’t just stop funding the Pentagon!”, I hear you cry? Fine. Just don’t pretend you’re serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
Just make sure you find a way that doesn't hang the troops out to dry. They didn't make this mess (however many might have voted for Trump), and they don't deserve to collectively suffer here.
"
The deMAGAfication of the US government needs to be the sole priority of the Democratic Party as soon as it regains any sort of power. In particular, if Democrats take the House, they must refuse ANY funding for the "Department of War" until the Department of Homeland Security is abolished and its agencies returned to their original departments. Except ICE: abolish it and replace it with a new, MAGAt-free organization.
"You can't just stop funding the Pentagon!", I hear you cry? Fine. Just don't pretend you're serious about opposing the Trump Regime.
--TP
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