Category Archives: culture

Works for Me

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Russian-supporting (emplaced?) rebel leaders (they’re not separatists) in the Russian occupied Donbas region of Ukraine are encouraging “civilians” to evacuate the area in the face of Russian-supported shelling of civilian villages. And to go east, to Russia.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea. The bulk of those Donbas civilians are Russians who are either immigrants, legal aliens, illegal aliens, or nominal citizens of Ukraine. A significant fraction of those folks still favors Russia over their host nation. Such an evacuation, were it actually to occur, would take some of the teeth out of one of Putin’s rationalizations for invading Ukraine—Anschluss­.

Slander

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Former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin lost her slander suit against The New York Times (after the presiding judge telegraphed to the jury, while it was deliberating, that he’d set aside the jury verdict, but that’s for a story about judicial malfeasance). The Wall Street Journal‘s article centered its reporting on the premise that Palin had failed to pass the high bar reserved for celebrities and other public figures: she had to show actual malice in order to have a case, and she didn’t succeed in the judge’s opinion.

But case brings up a larger matter regarding the malice standard itself.

There’s no reason at all why some Americans should be prevented by that high bar from defending themselves against slander, while other Americans are not so prevented. The 14th Amendment to our Constitution is quite clear on this: No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The courts’ and the Court’s differential treatment of groups of Americans based solely on their social or political standing plainly violates that equal treatment clause.

What are my Pronouns?

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The Wall Street Journal actually had a lengthy article on how to answer that question when asked. That prompted a series of Letters in the WSJ‘s Letters section. The article and responding letters tended in the right direction, but not completely so, IMNSHO.

The correct initial response is simply to ignore the question altogether and get on into the conversation. If pressed, the correct response then becomes to state clearly that the questioner and I do not know each other well enough to be on a first name basis, and from that, we don’t know each other well enough for his question to be anything other than a rude imposition of a level of familiarity that doesn’t exist. Then I close my response with, “Mr Hines works just fine.”

Genocide Olympics

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Chen Weihua, China Daily European Union Bureau Chief and well-known and highly placed apologist for the Communist Party of China, is showing his manufactured anger over the Holocaust Museum’s comparison of the People’s Republic of China government’s ongoing genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province (and anywhere else they can be rooted out and rounded up).

What the Museum said:

At the #Olympics you’ll see a well-known tradition—the torch relay—which the Nazis used at the 1936 Olympics for propaganda purposes. Today, we witness how the Olympics can still be used to distract from atrocities, such as the persecution of the #Uyghurs.

What Chen said:

Shame on the Holocaust Museum. Are you saying Nazi Holocaust of Jews was nothing but vocational training? More than 30,000 Jews sought refuge in Shanghai during the war and this is now your appreciation to the Chinese people?

That’s not the comparison, as Chen knows full well. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, and the PRC’s CPC is murdering millions of Uighurs. If there’s any vocational training going on, it’s solely by the CPC’s minions being trained in mass murder.

As Chen also knows full well, the anger over the PRC’s governing CPC behavior is directed at those persons of the PRC government and CPC, not at the Chinese people.

If Chen and his ilk don’t like being criticized over their genocide against Uyghurs, then they need to stop committing the genocide.

Voter Discrimination

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Alabama, pursuant to the latest decennial census, has drawn its electoral map, and the outcome supposedly yields a House delegation of six white Republicans and one Black Democrat for the Federal Congress.

Opponents of the map say it disadvantages black voters. So far, the map stands, as the Supreme Court ruled that the map mustn’t be changed this close to an upcoming Federal election, but it’s a temporary ruling: the Court said it will hear the full case in its next term, starting in October. Thus the map will be the one in effect for next November’s midterms.

The “disadvantages black voters” bit rings hollow to me. There’s no doubt that the map is gerrymandered to favor one group of Americans over another, but that’s what gerrymandering does, and both parties have been doing it, for good or ill, ever since there were two dominant parties in our Republic.

What makes the beef ring hollow though, it the bit about disadvantaging one group of Americans over another. That suggests, strongly, that it would be OK to advantage that group of Americans over the other, currently advantaged. Or even merely to seek some version of “equity” or “equality.”

Either way—explicitly targeting one group of Americans separately from another, regardless of purpose—is nothing but rank identity politics. While there remains bigotry afoot in our republic, this is no longer the 1950s. We have come far closer today to realizing our ideal—as carved into the Supreme Court building—of all Americans being equal under law, just as we are—as acknowledged in the opening sentences of our Declaration of Independence—equal under God.

There is no need, any longer, to explicitly carve out districts to favor any race or ethnicity over any other: we’re all the same voters; we’re all American voters.

The answer, of course, for all that it’ll be easier written than done, is to do away with gerrymandering altogether. Divide each State up into squares of substantially equal populations of citizens, beginning at the State’s geographic center, and deviating from straight-line district boundaries only at the State’s boundary with an adjoining State.