Blog Archives
Some of you may recall, not all of the students at Liberty University were happy to board the Trump Train:
The group, Liberty United Against Trump, released a statement earlier this week arguing that the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., had linked the school and Trump. The group noted that any member of the school’s faculty would be fired for bragging about kissing and groping women the way that Trump has.
“A recently uncovered tape revealed his comments bragging about sexually assaulting women,” the statement, which also serves as a petition, reads. “Any faculty or staff member at Liberty would be terminated for such comments, and yet when Donald Trump makes them, President Falwell rushes eagerly to his defense ― taking the name ‘Liberty University’ with him. ‘We’re all sinners,’ Falwell told the media, as if sexual assault is a shoulder-shrugging issue rather than an atrocity which plagues college campuses across America, including our own.”
Junior Fallwell responded diplomatically. There have, however, been other incidents surrounding the schism between Falwell and the rest of the school. The first involves a former regent who opposed Trump and later resigned. The second involved a newspaper column the university pulled for “redundancy.”
This lead to some calls about college political correctness and “Why aren’t the anti-SJW people condemning this!!!!!”
The regent who quit is a non-issue as far as this goes, but the newspaper column story is pretty sketchy (as it pertains to free speech). I guess I do hold Liberty to a lower standard because, contra its name, you know what you’re getting when you’re going there. It’s not Pensacola Christian College or anything, but it is what it is. And it’s private. Yes, I also hold Oberlin to a lower standard for those reasons. State universities, and elite future-leaders-of-our-country universities, though, deserve more scrutiny.
All of that said, I’m totally cool making Liberty University the exemplar of the Safe Space mentality. When the University of Michigan does something questionable, we can call it “Acting like Liberty U.”
Sound fair?
The secret history of the graphic novel.
The sincerity and suffocation of life in the midwest.
The walking dead (in their own mind).
The US government is looking in to how to confront space weather.
“There are some basic questions to consider before you make the decision to take on a wedding loan.”… like whether or not you are fiscally responsible?
What it’s like to date a sugar mama.
Phil Zuckerman looks at our hatred of atheists.
A fight breaks out when a husband comes home and finds his wife with another penguin. pic.twitter.com/9ejYGcJ5TJ
— Nat Geo Channel (@NatGeoChannel) November 4, 2016
Everybody has a theory on where the Republican Party goes from here, but all of the theories are based on incomplete information. Not just because predicting the future is hard, but also because we still don’t know what precisely propelled Trump to the nomination. We know the combination of things, but not how important each aspect of it was. Would a disciplined nationalist have been able to accomplish it? Would a True Conservative with an aggressive middle finger have accomplished it? Would Mark Cuban have been able to do it? Hulk Hogan? This is important because nobody will be able to bring the exact same set of ingredients to the table, and we don’t know how transferable Trumpism is to people who are not Donald J Trump.
In addition to what has brought the Republican Party here, there is also the question of how its leaders respond. A lot of them are clearly uncomfortable with Trump, but not to the point that they are willing to break party protocol. It is unlikely that Trump’s priorities are shared by a majority of elected officials, but they are also unlikely to stand in the way of an oncoming truck. It’s also not clear which aspect of Trump they are uncomfortable with (or most uncomfortable with). Some could align with Trump Nationalism (defined here as a white ethnocentric opposition to immigration, trade, and a globalist system that is believed to be disadvantageous to the US) without the vulgarity. Some don’t care about the vulgarity as long as it gets votes and they can sneak in some tax cuts and/or goodies for their supporters.
So the machine contains many moving parts, some at odds with others. There is no central brain to it all and nobody to decide where things go from here, save perhaps the voters. We don’t know exactly what the voters want, we don’t know what the electeds will tolerate, or what the donors will contribute to. Trump has no obvious successor or united organization, nor does his opposition have a singular spokesperson or organization. There is no obvious path forward, only potential paths with reasons that they may occur or may not. So rather than predicting the future, we should evaluate potential futures. (more…)
This meme factory product is weirdly compelling:
It’s hard to explain why, precisely. As Michael Brendan Dougherty says, it gets a transistor in the brain and plays with it. He also suggests that some of the Russia hate is culture war, though I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it’s mostly… politically convenient. Which is disturbing in its own way. I’ve disliked Putin and believed him troublesome going way back to when George W Bush said he saw an honorable soul in him. I didn’t think Romney was ridiculous in 2012 when he named them our #1 geopolitical rival. At the same time, there’s this.
Ironically Comey put himself on the same side as Putin.
— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) October 29, 2016
Which I think Lyman manages to nail on the head:
Guys I really love the "anything bad for Clinton is a Russian plot" meme. Definitely a positive political development. https://t.co/3bnAH3GDwy
— Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) October 29, 2016
Though there were some interesting connections early on, Donald Trump is not an agent of the Kremlin. He is likely to pursue policies that are friendly to the Kremlin and that would represent a very unwelcome pivot, but the upshot is that he would avoid war with Russia (and not by nuking Mongolia) and that’s not such a bad thing. I don’t think Clinton would take us to war against Russia unnecessarily, but the turning up the temperature is not helpful. And if it were Mitt Romney doing it, even with the data set we currently have (as opposed to four years ago), a lot of people would be freaking out.
I think a lot of people are going to feel pretty silly for the sheer degree of bear-baiting they did this election. At least, I kind of hope so.
It’s always comforting to hear that there is no slippery slope, but while campaigners demand graphic warnings on alcohol and researchers look into plain packaging for food, the world’s top nanny states are getting on with the job of transferring anti-smoking policies to other products. San Francisco recently introduced cigarette-style health warnings on cans of pop and Ireland has dipped into the tobacco control playbook for its new idea of ‘booze curtains’.
The Public Health (Alcohol) Bill is a piece of good old-fashioned temperance legislation with the modern twist that the Irish government set up its own sockpuppet lobby group specifically to campaign for it. It includes a sky-high minimum price of €1 and extensive advertising restrictions. As the Department of Health explains, the aim is to ‘reduce visibility, accessibility and availability of alcohol’. To that end, it wants to protect shoppers from the untold trauma of seeing beer and wine in convenience stores.
Source: Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: The alcohol display ban – another slip down the slope
Steve Chapman explains how tobacco companies core business remains cigarettes. From there, he gets here:
There is now a small group of experts in public health who are now openly or covertly collaborating with the tobacco industry over e-cigarettes. They are being comprehensively played. In mouthing its newfound concern for tobacco’s harms, the industry’s harm-reduction division personnel can now cosy up to a suite of naïve or historically amnesic public heath urgers who lend Big Tobacco a credibility it craves.
Meanwhile, down the Big Tobacco corridor in the cigarette divisions, the harm-reduction staff’s colleagues continue promoting smoking and attempting to thwart effective tobacco control as usual.
Notably, the link goes to the Times article that has launched lawsuits and has resulted in at least one apology from the Times:
The irony here, of course, is that Chapman and “Big Tobacco” are on the same side here, more or less. Both see ecigarettes as a threat to their respective interests. It’s probably that one of them is wrong, however. Most likely it’s Chapman. Chapman, as do many anti-vaping advocates, frames ecigarettes as the latest attempt by Big Tobacco to sell a not-safer product (like low tar cigarettes). This leaves aside some important things, such as that ecigarettes were largely started by third-parties and coopted by ecigarette companies.A group of scientists and public health experts are to take legal action against the Times newspaper after it reported claims from a leading charity that they were in the pay of the tobacco industry.
The experts, who work in fields that aim to limit deaths and health complications caused by smoking, are looking to sue the Times for defamation following a story that termed them “experts making a packet”.
The Times has published an apology to one of the scientists cited, Clive Bates, the former head of Action on Smoking and Health. The correction stated that he had funded his own travel and accommodation costs at an industry-sponsored tobacco forum in Brussels and had not received any funding from tobacco or nicotine companies.
But other scientists say that the same apology was not extended to them and they claim they have been falsely accused of accepting “tens of thousands of pounds from tobacco companies to carry out research into e-cigarettes”.
Lewis Silkin, a legal firm specialising in libel, will be acting on behalf of five scientists, including professor Karl Fagerström, an expert in addiction science. “My life’s work has been built on helping reduce the death toll from tobacco smoking. Yet The Times has portrayed me and my colleagues as hirelings of big tobacco,” he said. “The Times has chosen to traduce our reputations. Now it is time for the paper to profusely apologise or face a battle it will not win.”
What Chapman fails to investigate is why Big Tobacco doesn’t view vaping as its future. There are multiple answers, most of which don’t really correspond with what he’s saying. For example, ecigarettes may not be as addictive as cigarettes, therefore the customer base is less captured. There is also the fact that, contra the picture he paints, many big market participants aren’t tobacco companies and so the competition is more stiff., which would indicate that Big Tobacco’s cigarette margins remain as high as they are because tobacco controllers have placed enormous barriers to competition.
I do actually share Chapman’s concerns that Big Tobacco want ecigarettes to function primarily as a dual-use bridge. A future in which Big Tobacco controls the industry is one in which ecigarettes likely remain weak and comparatively ineffectual as quitting aides. It’s just a shame that the FDA has so recently made their job a lot easier. With innovation stifled, it may become harder to have a real cigarette replacement.
Both Chapman and Big Tobacco are fine with that.
Saturday Night Live hit a home run with this one:
The initial response was along the lines of The Hill, wherein it say that Hanks was “mocking” Trump supporters. But the portrayal is clearly affectionate to at least some degree and it really took some blinders not to see that. Or, it takes the assumption of a blue collar cadence as inherent mockery.
Then there was a round of people saying that it was about unity. Which goes off a bit too far in the other direction, because it ends on a bit of a dour note. After forming passerby-relationships with the host and other contestants, the subject of Black Lives Matter (implicitly) came up. Before we can see what happens, the skit ends. Jamelle Bouie describes the importance of the ending well:
Because the bulk of the sketch is this humanizing back-and-forth between Doug, the black host, the black contestants, and the black audience, it’s easy to read the message as a plea for tolerance and understanding. There’s more that unites us than there is that divides us. You can even add a class analysis: Black Americans share more than just common culture with some Trump supporters; they share common interests. There are important limits to this, beyond the universe of SNL: Because of its roots in the South, black culture shares an affinity with the rural white life that Doug represents. It’s not clear this would exist between, say, a black audience and a Trump-supporting professional from outside Milwaukee. But at this point, the sketch’s argument seems barely implicit: We need to work together instead of pitting ourselves against each other.
Then comes the final punchline, “Lives That Matter.” Obviously, the answer to the question is “black.” But Doug has “a lot to say about this.” Which suggests that he doesn’t think the answer is that simple. Perhaps he thinks “all lives matter,” or that “blue lives matter,” the phrasing used by those who defend the status quo of policing and criminal justice.
The only real disagreement I have (except with some slightly different priors) is that I don’t know that they really went into it wanting to make much of a point at all. It was funny because it was intended to be, as opposed to en route to an explanation of the human condition. We assign meaning to it because (for some of us, at least) it rang true. The humor required elements of truth, and it delivered. But beyond that, I think it was mostly a humorous portrayal of the commonality as well as, as Bouie says, the divisions.