Twitter, Musk, and Trump
Musk says that if and when he owns Twitter he will allow Trump to return:
Musk said Tuesday he would reverse Twitter’s ban on former President Donald Trump if his acquisition goes through.
“Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts… I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said at FT Live’s Future of the Car conference. “I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
That’s an odd way to put it. Would it have been okay if it had been effective in resulting in Donald Trump not having a voice? Would it have been okay if it hadn’t been permanent?
I was interested enough in the answers to these questions that I watched the part of the Musk interview involving Twitter in order to see if I could figure it out. Here’s the relevant portion, and it’s still not clear. Seems to me that when the oh-so-superior interviewer asked him a question that stated that Trump (see *NOTE below) had incited the crowd to riot on January 6th, Musk didn’t push back on that at all. It also seemed – at least, this is my interpretation – that Musk might have banned Trump at least temporarily at that point if Musk had been in charge. As I said, it’s really not clear:
It may end up being moot, because – as Musk points out – there’s still a chance the deal will fall through, and Trump has also stated he’s not coming back to Twitter no matter what. Of course, that was a few weeks ago and before Musk said he’d lift the ban.
Surprisingly, considering its performance in recent years, the ACLU supports the return of Trump to Twitter. My opinion is that Trump might end up returning; he certainly loved Twitter for a long time and used it most cleverly.
[*NOTE: Musk’s supercilious FT interviewer in that clip calls Trump “the toupeed elephant in the room.” However, Trump doesn’t wear a toupee; here are various theories about what’s going on with his odd hairdo. And Elon Musk has almost certainly had one or two hair transplant procedures (or perhaps even wears a toupee, but certainly has had some sort of hair intervention).
That interviewer shows both his ignorance and his condescending arrogance in assuming he knows what he doesn’t know, and possibly annoying Musk into the bargain – although Musk’s expression doesn’t reveal any obvious reaction, his eyes go from looking down to suddenly looking straight at the camera right after the interviewer makes that comment about Trump’s supposed toupee. But in that interview Musk changes eye position right before answering many of the questions, not just that one (often he looks up when reacting, however).
I’ve often heard people say they can always tell when a person is wearing a toupee. But I think that’s a stupid thing to say. Sometimes you can tell, with a badly made toupee. But how would you know if you’re detecting all toupees if you’re by definition not spotting the really good ones? You wouldn’t know you had missed any, unless you had an official registry of all the toupee-wearers in the world.
Hmmm, maybe I’ll write a future post about toupee-spotting arrogance.]
“Reproductive health” = abortion
Commenter “Another Mike” has a question:
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the pro-abortion crowd uses the term “reproductive health” when abortion is actually anti-reproduction?
It doesn’t seem odd. It seems rather typical of the left, which likes to call things by names that are at least somewhat Orwellian if not full Orwellian and that mean something different than their titles would imply.
For example, the term “reproductive health” is similar to the term “Planned Parenthood” in some ways. That latter organization’s name has an interesting history. It was initially called the more straightforward, “American Birth Control League,” but:
Some found the ABCL’s title offensive and “against families”, so the League began discussions for a new name. In 1938, a group of private citizens organized the Citizens Committee for Planned Parenthood to aid the American Birth Control League in spreading scientific knowledge about birth control to the general public. The BCCRB merged with the ABCL in 1939 to form the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA). In 1942 the name of the BCFA was changed to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The emphasis became parenthood, as though it was some sort of fertility clinic rather than a dispenser of birth control (and later also of abortion). And yet the name wasn’t exactly a lie, because most people who use birth control do intend to become parents some day and that day will hopefully be planned.
The term “reproductive health” for the pro-abortion crowd is something like that. It’s at least half true in that the death rate for women who undergo legal abortions is lower than the death rate for women who give birth. Obviously, that statistic only focuses on the pregnant woman and ignores the enormous fact that the woman’s fetus is being killed in the process, a fetus which had the extremely likely potential to be born as a baby and whose life is being snuffed out instead. But I think that the different death rates for women undergoing abortions versus those who give birth would almost certainly be the core of an argument someone might mount to justify the term “reproductive health” for abortion.
But, as “Another Mike” points out, what’s “reproductive” about it? Well, nothing really, no more than birth control is about “parenthood.”
But the term “reproductive health” also has the advantage of being quite generic and non-specific. Listeners may not even realize that it’s abortion that’s being discussed. In their minds, it could certainly include birth control, and they may even believe that implies that a person who’s against abortion would be likely to be against birth control, although that combination presently applies only to a small minority. But hey, what kind of monster would be against something as innocuous as “reproductive health” for women (or pregnant people, or whatever nomenclature they’re promoting to replace the word “women” these days)?
The term “reproductive health” for “abortion” is also akin to euphemisms such as “undocumented” for “illegal,” and so many other such labels that seek to soften and reframe the thing that is actually being described. The left doesn’t consider this a side issue of little importance, it considers the naming of things to be extremely important in shaping perceptions and in leading people to support the left’s desired political and policy decisions.
In fact, all political parties are interested in what things are called; it’s certainly a common propaganda tool. I think the left is generally far better at it than the right, though, and far more duplicitous.
Norman Podhoretz on Donald Trump and ex-friends
After writing about Midge Decter’s death yesterday, I looked up her husband Norman Podhoretz. I was pretty sure he was still alive, and sure enough, he is – at 92. Decter was 94. So there’s a lot of longevity in that couple.
I also recalled that Norman Podhoretz was one of the so-called “neocons” who thought Donald Trump was a good president, and I wanted to check that out, too. Sure enough, he was. I think he’s worth quoting on the subject:
Podhoretz, who initially supported Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican primaries, remarked about the primary campaign:
“I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative… They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on.”
Podhoretz says his views however, have caused him to lose ex-friends who were anti-Trump, saying: “Well some of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether.” Of Trump, he argues: “he fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left… His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America.”
Those remarks have stood the test of time. Norman Podhoretz’s statement about his “new set of ex-friends” is a witty reference to a book he’d written earlier (2000) entitled Ex Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. It described a process with which many of us are familiar: ostracism from the left when someone leaves the fold, steps out of the circle dance. Podhoretz had done that on a much larger and more public scale than most of us.
This is from a review highlighted at Amazon:
Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hanna Arendt, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman – among the other things these writers and intellectuals all had in common is Norman Podhoretz. With them Podhoretz was part of “The Family,” as the core group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and 60s came to be known. And in Ex-Friends, he has written the intellectual equivalent of a family history – a sparkling chronicle of affection and jealousy, generosity and betrayal, breakdowns and reconciliations, and ultimately of dysfunctions impossible to cure. Ex-Friends is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman Podhoretz’s career as a writer and editor and above all one of the leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and bruised egos. Indeed, while Ex-Friends has some of the elements of a personal diary, it is also a journal de combat describing the intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped redefine America’s intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends.
That takes intellectual and social courage, which Norman Podhoretz most definitely had. By supporting Trump he lost some of his newer supposedly conservative friends such as Bill Kristol, who indeed appears to be one of those who have “lost their minds altogether.” I’ve not read the book, but perhaps I should.
Norman Podhoretz wrote another book I’ve never read but that sounds interesting, entitled Why Are Jews Liberals? (2010). Many commenters here have asked that question and speculated on the answer. Podhoretz has an answer, but I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is.
Open thread 5/11/22
Yesterday the weather was beautiful and the waves were very very big:
On the constitutionality of “codifying” Roe
That seems to be the new buzzword on the left: we’re going to “codify” Roe – meaning pass a statute making it illegal for states to ban or modify abortion except in whatever ways the Congressional statute allows.
This seems to be unconstitutional to me, if Roe is declared unconstitutional on the basis of abortion regulation being a state power rather than a federal one. Why would a statute be any different? And yes, they would try to say it’s a regulation of interstate commerce, but I don’t think that would hold up with the conservative justices on the Court these days, nor should it.
At any rate, the Democrats know the bill won’t pass. It can’t get past the filibuster and the filibuster apparently will hold, plus not all the Democrats would vote for it (looking at you, Joe Manchin) even if it somehow were to get past the filibuster. And if Republicans take over the Senate, they could just repeal it again.
The proper avenue would be a constitutional amendment, as I’ve stated before. But the country is too split for that to work out, as far as I can see, and I think the Democrats and also the Republicans see it too. There’s a history of trying, however – on the part of the Republicans post-Roe.
One of those anti-abortion amendments was supported by guess who in 1973:
After Biden joined the Senate in 1973, he voted for a failed constitutional amendment that would have allowed states to overturn the court’s Roe ruling. In a Washingtonian magazine interview at the time, he said of Roe: “I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
If you’re interested in the various efforts to pass a Human Life Amendment, please see this.
Roundup
(1) Jen Psaki lies again about inflation. Well, isn’t lying without a qualm one of the main qualifications for the press secretary job in this administration?
(2) Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appears to call for civil war.
Ah, but Lightfoot’s got triple intersectional creds – Democrat, black, and a lesbian – and so it doesn’t matter that she is using rhetoric that implies the need for violence against conservative SCOTUS justices. By the way, I would interpret her words as metaphor, but that’s not the way the left would see it if someone on the right had said those same words about justices on the left.
(3) And speaking of Lightfoot and fighting rhetoric, there’s this:
Birth of Abortion Tourism: Chicago To Pay for Pregnant Women to Travel to City for Abortions
“We are soldiers. We are soldiers prepared to fight…” [said Mayor Lightfoot]
Lightfoot pledged to use $500,000 in public money to make Chicago a “safe haven” for those seeking abortions…
The money will go toward transportation, lodging, care “and, if necessary, safe and legal access to an abortion procedure,” Lightfoot said.
I guess Chicago city government is flush with cash.
(4) True the Vote plans to release more of the information underpinning the film “2000 Mules.”
(5) What on earth? “Passengers say Lufthansa threw all visible Jews off NYC-Budapest flight because some weren’t wearing masks.”
RIP Midge Decter
My first thought on hearing that Midge Decter had died was mild surprise that she had still been alive. And yet it turns out she wasn’t all that old, just 94 – an age that sounds increasingly young to me. I’d not known all that much about her anyway, except that she was one of the original old-fashioned neocons and Norman Podhoretz’s wife and John Podhoretz’s mother.
I’d picked up a book of her essays in the 1980s. I think it was on a remainder pile, and it had some sort of title that intrigued me (I no longer remember what it was). I read it thinking it was pretty good, and only later learned that she’d been a political changer (a term I didn’t use at the time) and was on the right. Little did I know I’d follow suit in less than two decades.
In one of several essays in memory of Decter that I’ve read in the last few days, this statement of hers caught my eye and made me chuckle at its aptness:
The 1980 election was a watershed moment for Decter. She and Podhoretz supported Reagan, whom they had first met in 1978. By now, Decter had broken with the Left, and though she did not love the Republican Party, she recognized that it was more aligned with her worldview. “There comes a time when you need to join the side you’re on,” she said.
There comes a time when you need to join the side you’re on – that’s the way it finally becomes for left-to-right changers (neither Decter nor I were ever really on what you’d call the left, but I’ve used “left” as a convenient shorthand here). Many people cannot make that switch, however, as I wrote in this post about political affiliation as a sort of “birthmark.”
Decter also said this:
In 1983, when some of the old crowd tried to revive the CDM in advance of the 1984 elections, she was not interested: “We tried to wrest the Democratic Party back from the left, and we failed.”
Boy, did they ever.
RIP Midge Decter.
[NOTE: I was curious but unable to find anything about Decter’s opinion on Trump, but I recall that her husband was for him and her son mostly against him.]
Open thread 5/10/22
Apropos of yesterday’s Kentucky Derby thread, I bring you the mysterious belly-flop of Devon Loch, circa 1956:
Putin celebrates Victory Day…
…not with a bang but a whimper:
The smaller number of marching units, the absence of the “Z” sloganeering, any air units, and the elite of the Russian Army all gave the parade a more subdued air. It was not a victory or an on-the-cusp-of-victory celebration. Putin’s speech was a departure from previous statements on the war. He seemed reflective on the cost. In light of the propensity of Putin and his lackeys to casually threaten nuclear war, I think the absence of the “doomsday plane” that had been previewed only a couple of days ago and of any mention of nuclear weapons by Putin is a sign that Russia has weighed the “escalate to de-escalate” option and found it to be unworkable.
I sure hope so.
There were bangs plenty yesterday, however, when a school in Ukraine was bombed:
As many as 60 people are feared to have been killed when a bomb struck a village school in eastern Ukraine, the regional governor said on Sunday while Russian forces continued shelling the last holdout of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined southeastern port of Mariupol.
Luhansk region Governor Serhiy Gaidai said the school in Bilohorivka, where about 90 people were sheltering, was hit on Saturday by a Russian bomb, setting it ablaze.
NOTE: The poetic reference in my first sentence is to this:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar….This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Misconceptions about Roe
I’ve long thought that if I were to poll my acquaintances, most of them except the lawyers among them (and maybe even some of the lawyers too) would say that repealing Roe would make abortion illegal. That answer is incorrect, of course; it would merely make it possible for a state to pass a law making it illegal in that particular state.
In reality, I doubt that all that many states would make it completely illegal, and they would almost certainly be very red states. The very blue states would probably make it completely legal on demand at any point in a pregnancy, and all the other states would limit it in some way.
Now I see that someone has actually done a poll on the question I’ve wondered about. In this article, Marc Thiesson references the study:
A 2019 study reported that 65.7 percent of Americans incorrectly believe that if Roe were overturned, abortion would be illegal everywhere in the United States.
The only surprise there for me is that the figure isn’t higher. Why do so many people misunderstand? I think the Democrats have made it their business for people to misunderstand, and a certain portion of the MSM has cooperated in that endeavor. But I also think that most people are bored by the finer points of legal argument and it’s easier to think in either/or terms.
It is possible that overturning Roe might lead to a correction of these misperceptions, something that frightens the left:
But a Fox News poll released this week finds most Americans agree with the Mississippi abortion law at the heart of the Supreme Court case. The survey found that 54 percent favor state laws banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of a medical emergency — exactly what the Mississippi law does — while just 41 percent oppose such a law. This is consistent with the results of a 2018 Gallup poll that found most Americans want abortion restricted to the first trimester (the first 12 weeks of pregnancy), while only 28 percent support allowing abortions in the second trimester and just 13 percent in the third trimester.
So, if Roe is overturned, Americans will wake up the next morning and discover that the justices have not in fact banned abortion nationwide but have simply upheld the right of states to impose restrictions — including restrictions that most of them support. That is unlikely to spark the kind of popular outrage Democrats are hoping for.
That Mississippi law is the statute that SCOTUS is being asked to rule on, and it might end up being the conduit for the end of Roe as overarching US legal doctrine. It may even be that, as a result, the majority of Americans will come to a better understanding of the law of abortion. One can hope.
A mindboggling Kentucky Derby upset
I love this story. I love an underdog (underhorse?) winning, and this is one of the most dramatic ever. I’m sorry I didn’t see long long longshot Rich Strike win the Kentucky Derby live, but fortunately we’ve got all kinds of videos.
The first one is an aerial view, which makes the situation most clear:
Next we’ve got the ordinary view of the race, with the announcer’s comments. Note, when Rich Strike makes his successful move, how jockey Sonny Leon urges him on and how excited the jockey becomes when he realizes that yes, this really might happen. Here’s some background on the jockey:
“You know we had a difficult post but I know the horse,” Leon said. “I didn’t know if he could win but I had a good feeling with him. I had to wait until the stretch and that’s what I did. I waited and then the rail opened up. I wasn’t nervous, I was excited. Nobody knows my horse like I know my horse.”…
Adam Beschizza had ridden Rich Strike in his only previous victory, a maiden claiming race last September at Churchill Downs. But after riding him to a fourth-place finish in the March 5 John Battaglia Stakes at Turfway Park, Leon dismounted and declared, “This is a Derby horse.”
Apparently.
And here’s the owner, somewhat stunned but very happy: