State of the Discussion

TP: Most of it has to do with race. Frex: 1) I get his point about the DEI/merit debate. He went too far IMHO naming specific people (Michelle Obama et al) and essentially calling them not so bright. They apparently all admitted that affirmative action helped them in one way or another. But he was unkind and it detracts from his argument. 2) I think it is wrong to throw out MLK's impact due to his personal character issues, as bad as those have been alleged to have been. 3) I understand his argument with respect to the Civil Rights Act, and agree to a point (that it has led to unconstitutional DEI programs and, as some say, has become a "second constitution" unto itself). However, its initial impact was so very good and important and I didn't see him acknowledging that. In short, while he reached out to, encouraged and mentored many young black conservatives, these comments were, at best, tone deaf.

I also diverge to a point on immigration. I think his position is rational (enforce the law) and I largely agree with that. I would personally soften the edges somewhat of what can lawfully be done under the conditions we face now due to Biden's open border policy.

I would have more exceptions for abortion.

There are other issues, and I think Charlie had other rough edges, but it seemed to me that he was a work in progress. He was still quite young. I think marriage and kids was good for him. And now we won't see what he might have become.

In the "Kuzushi and Charlie Kirk" thread I wrote: I give Saint Charles of Kirk credit for one thing: unlike the gun fetishists we used to joust with on the old ObWi, he was willing to admit that an occasional massacre is the unavoidable cost of, and an acceptable price to pay for, our god-given 2nd Amendment. And I meant it. Although his position disgusts me, I really do appreciate the honesty of it. Here's the "full clip", to avoid accusations of quoting him out of context.

I mention it because this, from bc, caught my eye:
There was a lot I didn’t agree with, and some of his interactions somewhat resemble what was described.
Out of sincere, no-fooling curiosity, I wish bc would mention one or two of those things he didn't agree with. We might have common ground, somewhere.
--TP

It's ironic that this post is "uncategorized" because I wonder if the spectrum itself is a construct of the human predilection for categorizing rather than a discovered phenomenon.
For example, let's suppose that we had a high need for athletic skills in order to be even moderately successful in life. Let's suppose that those without the high level skills were viewed as outliers. Would we have categories of lower skilled people? Would they be considered handicapped? Once labeled, would they become a focus and/or target (beyond the usual targeting that people get for being outliers of any kind)? Would we fail to notice anything special about people on the functional end of the autism spectrum but be highly concerned about the clumsy guy who can't dance well or the one who hits his thumb rather than a nail? What about people with poorly developed sense of spatial relationships?
Humans exist on multiple spectrums and human development from fertilized egg to viable baby is extraordinarily complex. People come out all kinds of ways.
I understand that there are conditions of life that mean an individual truly cannot survive, let alone thrive, without extensive support; however, I also wonder sometimes if we categorize too much and think that maybe if we as a culture put more emphasis on being accepting of variations the categories wouldn't be necessary.
I also think we should consider the possibility that some of our categories aren't grounded in anything that actually matters, the equivalent of saying that birds with red breasts should be a category, not birds that perch.

I'd say the word 'autism' stems from the same root as the original Greek 'idiot', i.e. a self-centered person and loner who does not take part in communal activities. Epicureans were almost by definition idiots in the original sense, since they kept out of politics etc.
But man is a zoon politikon, a 'political animal', and thus being 'idiotic' or 'autistic' was seen as abnormal and - again in typical human fashion - of course stupid.
Kennedy (is it allowed to call him a moron*? ;-) ) sticks to that peiorative understanding.

*or moran in the meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/get-a-brain-morans

lj: The Horst Wessel comparison came first.

Ahhh, got it. I'll have to slap Hartmut on the wrist /joke/

In my defense, I was more suggesting that Lei Feng was closer (and I wish I had remembered Stakhanov) and saying that all four have some commonalities. While I appreciate taking time, the difference between Kirk and the other three is that only in the US case were people fired from their jobs.

Even though I cannot tell you how letdown I am by Ezra Klein's recent stuff and I have found Corey Robin to be a bit glib, this youtube dialogue between the two is quite good (here's the deadtree link, though it may disappear behind the paywall soon)

Here's a bit
Klein: What we were talking about with the Red Scare, it took a long time to build that. The Trump administration is speed-running this — very fast.

Robin: This is the scary part of the story: The Second Red Scare succeeded.

Part of what deprived McCarthy of oxygen wasn’t just that he went after the military. It was that they had really drummed out — at the level of what their ambitions were, they had succeeded in stopping the New Deal from where it was heading. His electoral returns were diminishing to some degree.

The parallel I would highlight is just as the Red Scare came about to stop the New Deal, the MAGA movement has come about to erase all of the things that AOC listed.

bc - AOC’s response starts out strong but then devolves and illustrates two things: 1) My point above, that it wasn’t really what was in the proclamation but what wasn’t; and 2) her penchant for taking things out of context. I do see her point, but similar things could have been said about Hortman’s legislative agenda.

AOC's statement (https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-statement-charlie-kirk-resolution-and-trump-administrations) deserves a bit of close reading and analysis because I don't think that she said anything out of context. Her argument is pretty straightforward and does not stray into anything that is not relevant to the resolution. AOC says:

House Republicans today brought to the floor a resolution ‘honoring the life and legacy’ of Charlie Kirk. I voted NO.

Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter – one that is especially important to help stabilize an increasingly unsafe and volatile political environment where everyday people feel at risk. We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing. That is a bedrock American value.

These are the grounds for her argument. In divisive political moments where the civil peace is breaking down, it falls to our representatives to come together and denounce the act in a way that is not divisive.

It then only underscores the majority’s recklessness and intent to divide by choosing to introduce this resolution on a purely partisan basis, instead of uniting Congress in this tragedy with one of the many bipartisan options to condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder, as we did with the late Melissa Hortman. Instead, the majority proceeded with a resolution that brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.

Here she is pointing out the "nettlesome" nature of the praise that the resolution authors included in the text and says that this creates division where the situation calls for some unifying theme - a reaffirmation of common cause.

“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.

These examples are not a shift into an ad hominem attack on Kirk. She is providing support for her argument that the majority's statement is divisive. Her examples are chosen to support her earlier claim that "millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry" are being nettled because Kirk's statements that she highlights here do not promote unity. But it's not Kirk's statements that she is objecting to, it's the mischaracterization of him "‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority." And her use of "We" at the beginning is an important qualifier that limits her context. We means "we representatives issuing this resolution" not "we as a society."

Which is why her final paragraph is about the surrounding rhetorical context that has been created by Trump and his FCC.

I don't see anything that is out of context or lacking in relevance to the resolution.

And the FB poster’s joke was more an illustration of how I wouldn’t rely on him for information about Kirk...

I wasn't relying on him for information. I linked to him because he wrote something that expressed what I was already thinking and did so in a better way than I probably could have. (I could have copied and pasted what he wrote in full and pretended to have written it myself. Then you'd be left researching my history to discredit me.)

lj: The Horst Wessel comparison came first. And the FB poster's joke was more an illustration of how I wouldn't rely on him for information about Kirk than on the extremely bad taste of the joke itself. He seems to think Kirk and the CEO deserved it.

nous, I agree with your assessment of the proclamations and your use of "nettlesome." Still, AOC's response seems to show that it is more what was not in the proclamation (and the same case could have been made for Hortman). But your point is well-taken.

GftNC, AOC's response starts out strong but then devolves and illustrates two things: 1) My point above, that it wasn't really what was in the proclamation but what wasn't; and 2) her penchant for taking things out of context. I do see her point, but similar things could have been said about Hortman's legislative agenda.

bc, maybe I'm misreading, but it looks like you brought up Hitler by talking about Godwin's law. I found the 'felon love' facebook post, but why is that something that puts what he wrote off-limits rather than a joke that missed the target? I won't go back to the archive, but unless you have never complained that liberals can't be such snowflakes, well, physician, heal thyself.

I'm not sure how much we weigh the various eulogies and such. Is Trump's proclamation and flying flags at half mast, along with the resolution in the house when none of these steps were done for Hortman indicative of something? Why did/does the right's reaction to what seems to be much more like politically motivated violence not rise to being a "turning point"? Or is the phrase under trademark now?

It's no surprise that this plugs into a belief of might is right. It also suggests that you can't deal with folks like that by reasoning, you just have to show them a bigger stick.

Looking at the Disqus agreement, you retain the ownership of your comments, you give Disqus a license to handle them in order to provide their service. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they could use them for AI under the guise of giving you better service. I realize that this is probably a losing battle (and it's not like they can't scrape these comments) but at least they would have to go thru a few more steps. The whole model is set up to track for ads and allow commenters to keep track of their comments on multiple sites, which just lends itself to big data shenanigans.

This Politico piece talks about that.
It’s clear the 54-year-old Texan is wagering that at some future date, when he’s still young enough to run for president again, his party will drift back to its free market and free speech moorings. I know Cruz well enough to hear him saying it on the stump at some future Pizza Ranch stop: Look, folks, I think Trump did a lot of good and his critics never gave him a fair shot, but I stood up for our conservative values when it wasn’t totally popular in our party. (And, yes, it’s also no coincidence that Cruz has used his two major critiques to target other actors in the administration rather than Trump himself.)

One thing that I'm struck by about Cruz' defense of free speech (and Rand Paul's I think) is not that we do this because strength comes from a diversity of opinions, but because the liberals might do it to us. This suggests that if there wasn't that argument, he's be all in.

Several decades ago, I read To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu. It was interesting, though I don't remember much of it now.

The link profiles of thirty people who were prominent or became prominent after their internment.

Japanese American Internment Legacies

Am I really going to be the first to mention that love makes a house a home? I've read that in more than one kitchen. Come to think of it, I've also read that home is where the heart is on a few house walls. I guess that logically means that love puts the heart in a house, though I've never seen it put that way in a cutely decorated kitchen.

I used to make pilgrimages to Glacier National Park but no more: climate change and crowds. I used to go to Yukon Territory but no more: climate change. I got married in front of the Tree of Life on the coast out at Kalaloch and my husband and I have gone there annually for over 20 years. This winter will be our last trip. The Tree of Life has fallen over--victim of climate change. Most of the bluff cabins have been torn down because of bluff failure, also climate change. I am planning a pilgrimage to Escalante in Utah. I've been going there for the hiking since the 1970s but this will be my last trip. Too crowded. Zion and Bryce get over a million visitors each summer and the spill over is reaching the Boulder area. When I first went there, the trails were barely developed, the roads were gravel and there was barely anything in the way of tourism. Now the area is being promoted by the state and the wonder and adventure is gone.

"I ain't got no home in this world anymore."

One more response to Ezra Klein's response to the response that was given to his Charlie Kirk eulogy.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/

But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”

What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding.

Worth a read and a bit of rumination.

CaseyL: it's hard to convey intonation in text! They said "home is wherever WE are", i.e. surely as long as your parents are here, it's home. And that's not right, as my sibs and I know all too well. My upbringing had many privileges, and wonderful, character-forming experiences, but it did not give a certain kind of security and stability which I see in friends who never changed country, and often lived in the same house their entire childhood. My parents, apart from (I suppose) being people of their generation, were both born and brought up in the same country until well into adulthood, so I guess they had no concept of the kind of deracination which can result from the loss of e.g. a culture, pets, etc etc.

GftNC - Home is not "wherever we are," though being able to feel at home wherever you are is a gift.

I have lived in Seattle since the mid-1970s (aside from a few years interregnum when I had to go back to Florida), and have been in my current house for nearly 30 years. I agree with you whole-heartedly that the thought of moving is fairly horrifying.

OTOH, if I ever do have to relocate, I hope I have the grit and spirit to make an adventure out of it.

I wish you did belong here, hsh!

I was dragged around a lot as a child (4 countries), homes changed and parents said "but darling, surely home is wherever we are?" (for clever and worldly people they were remarkably clueless about children's psychology), so I have now lived in the same apartment in London for 47 years - longer than almost anybody I know has lived anywhere. I lived in LA for a year in the 90s, but kept my apartment and it was always "home". Even when I married, I split my time fairly equally between the North Country and my London pad, and since my husband died eight years ago I have been permanently in London. The idea of moving is fairly horrifying to me. I wish I were more flexible, but I have just turned 70, so maybe that's that.

As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.

Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.

Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.

But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.

My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.

But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.

All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.