Apes rather than monkeys, but that’s a minor quibble:
Separated at birth?
Maybe Musk will now start reading NewNeo to guide him through the transition to voting Republican
The title of this post is tongue-in-cheek; I don’t expect Musk to be interested in what I’ve written about political changers and left-to-right political change. But he’s a classic example of the phenomenon in this announcement:
Elon Musk, admitting he had voted “overwhelmingly” for Democrats in the past, has changed his mind.
Musk is registered as an independent voter; he announced the switch over video link at a tech summit in Miami, Florida, hosted by the All-In podcast.
“I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically,” Musk acknowledged. “Like I’m not sure, I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear. Now this election I will,” Newsweek reported.
One of the classic changer elements Musk is demonstrating is the need to emphasize his past solidarity with Democrats in order to let the left know he’s not a bad person, not one of those terrible people on the right. And he’s also implying that maybe the switch is just for this election rather than being permanent (I suppose that could even be true). I know that, at the beginning of my change when I would discuss it with friends, I would emphasize that I’d never voted for a Republican before and was not a Republican now.
No one seemed to care. Actually, I think it only infuriated those whose politics were such that they were inclined to be infuriated. My past bona fides only made my “conversion” more threatening and more pernicious to that group. No one likes an apostate – or at least, many people on the left don’t. And I don’t think Musk parading his past liberal bona fides will impress those on the left, either, who now see him as the archenemy.
Judge Jackson won’t denounce the Dobbs leak or the protesters at justices’ homes
A lot of people are writing about this Andrew C. McCarthy article in which he reports the following:
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court after the current term ends in a few weeks, sat for an interview by the Washington Post…
Here’s the relevant excerpt from the interview:Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?
A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.
Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?
A: I can’t answer that.
Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?
A: I don’t have any comment.
This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.
Why would anyone be surprised by this? The Democratic Party and the current administration is leftist, and leftists almost never condemn anything the left does, and don’t feel they have to explain. Usually the MSM obliges them and doesn’t even try to make them explain.
What’s more, Justice Jackson is younger than the other liberal/left justices on the Court, and she came up in a law school environment (graduated Harvard Law in 1996) that was almost certainly more influenced by the theory that law is not objective, and cannot be objective, but is actually power politics by another name masquerading under the guise of objectivity (if you’re interested in an excellent book on the subject take a look at Beyond All Reason, written in 1997 and describing how the approach had taken over legal education.) I am fairly sure that Jackson has been heavily influenced by that sort of thinking, and that this will be the approach of Democrat-nominated justices in the future unless something occurs to make the Party steer away from the leftism it espouses and promotes today.
Looking at the quoted portion of the interview itself, I see some interesting things. McCarthy writes, “[Jackson] first expressed shock over the leak, so it was clearly a topic she was willing to weigh in on.” But did she? What she said was a very very careful, “Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.” But there is no “I” statement there. The implication is that she is familiar with such things and that she also was shocked. But she doesn’t say that, and since she is a lawyer and judge I think it’s pretty clear she chose her words carefully in order to present the appearance of saying that without actually saying it. Then she follows up by refusing to express any judgment on it (does she need to consult a lawyer, in much the same way that she said she needed to consult a biologist to define “woman”?).
The interviewer than asks Jackson not about protests at justices’ homes but specifically about peaceful protests at justices’ homes. Interesting. Jackson would not weigh in on it, and I think we can safely conclude that it’s because she knows that these are her constituents. She may or may not have an opinion, but she certainly has no need to voice it and arouse ire within the base of the Democratic Party.
Jackson also probably suspects that the right isn’t going to do the same to her and picket her dwelling place. I’m not 100% certain that they wouldn’t, but it’s not their usual m.o. although the left loves that sort of thing when it’s the left doing it to the right. I also would guess that Jackson believes that if it did happen to her, the DOJ would be on it in a heartbeat, and the MSM minions would waste no time in falling all over themselves to condemn it.
It’s nice to have so many institutions on your side.
The spam filter is a bit underactive and a bit overactive these days
Lately I’ve noticed that a few spam comments have been escaping the filter and getting posted. I get rid of them and I also have certain additional ways of blocking them before they even appear. Hopefully my methods will bear fruit soon.
In addition, I’ve noticed that a slightly-increased number of bona fide comments are getting filtered out by that very same span filter. Just now, I liberated three or four of them from the last week and they should be showing. That’s the rate I’m talking about; it’s not high. But if you notice that you’re having difficulties of that nature with a certain comment that has no obvious offensive content, just email me and I’ll try to find it and fix it. But there may be a time lag.
For the most part, the spam filter is still working quite smoothly.
Boring inside-baseball stuff, I know. But there’s always a certain amount of that sort of thing with a blog, usually kept behind the scenes.
Open thread 5/17/22
Nice going, Putin old boy, say Finland and Sweden
Finland will apply for membership in the NATO military alliance, the country’s president, Sauli Niinisto, confirmed on Sunday, in a historic policy shift prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow, which shares a 1,300 km (800 mile) border with Finland, has said it would be a mistake for Helsinki to join the 30-strong transatlantic alliance and that it would harm bilateral ties.
Sweden is also expected to follow suit as public support for membership has grown amid security concerns.
Sunday’s announcement comes after Niinisto and Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, said on Thursday they both favoured membership in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), giving a green light for the country to apply.
Interestingly: “Putin said he thought the move would be a mistake, but did not repeat earlier threats that any such move would trigger countermeasures from Moscow, the Finnish leader said in an interview with CNN on Sunday.”
And then there’s Poland:
A Russian lawmaker has issued a fiery warning that Warsaw is next in line for “de-nazification” after Poland’s Prime Minister penned an op-ed calling Russia’s imperialist “Russkiy Mir” ideology a “cancer” consuming Russian society and a “deadly threat” to other countries.
Poland is a NATO member, so I don’t think Russia is contemplating much fake “de-nazification” there, despite “lawmakers” issuing “fiery warnings.”
By the way, this video has been posted many times at YouTube, and recent comments tend to follow the sarcastic “This aged well, didn’t it?” One person wrote, “Not so funny now is it Mr. President?”:
Horrific shooting in Buffalo
What is there to say anymore about a racist murder such as this most recent one, in a Buffalo supermarket – hasn’t it all been said before, so many times?
I’ll say this: that each such murder is an outrage and must be punished to the full extent of the law. That sometimes the perpetrator is a white person who hates black people and that sometimes it’s a black person who hates white people. That the MSM goes on and on and on about the first type of murder, trying to link it to the GOP, and that it is mostly silent about the second type and tries to pretend that a car did it, or insufficient gun control did it, or some other garbage.
I think this guy sums it up rather well:
RIP to the victims.
Abortion, angry women, and “choice”
I was walking in a certain town in New England this past Saturday and I happened on a pro-abortion demonstration. I heard it long before I saw it. There was a lot of yelling and honking, and a crowd composed mostly but not entirely of women, many of them carrying signs.
One that especially caught my eye was this: “ANGRY WOMEN WILL CHANGE THE WORLD.” My immediate thought was they already have, for the worse. What are they so all-fired angry about? What they see as the potential loss of the right to abortion? In most states, that right will remain, although some of the demonstrators probably aren’t even aware of what Alito’s draft actually said or what it actually meant, and are therefore highly susceptible to leftist propaganda about it.
Another large sign I saw read, “Impeach Alito.” For what? My guess is that the bearer of that sign probably neither knew nor cared what impeachment is supposed to be about. To her it may simply be a synonym for “removing someone whose decisions and policies I don’t like.”
The idea that any state could ban or severely limit abortion – not just their own state, but any state – is unconscionable to these demonstrators, both men and women. A leftist-favored “right” once created, however poorly-reasoned the opinion that creates it, can never be allowed to be taken away. The ratchet only works in one direction for leftists, and any reversal is an anathema.
I also noticed two posts at Legal Insurrection (this and this) in which people who are asked about abortion or outright killing of viable infants, even full-term infants, respond by repeating as a sort of mantra that women have the “right to choose.”
Here’s an example from that last one. The man being interviewed is New York’s mayor Eric Adams:
“Do you think there should be any limitation on abortions?”
NYC MAYOR ADAMS: “No, I do not.”
“None? Day of birth, totally fine?”
NYC MAYOR ADAMS: “No, I do not. Women should have a right to choose” pic.twitter.com/zvyIq4iLsQ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 15, 2022
Right after that, he adds, “Men shouldn’t have the right to choose how women should treat their bodies” (see this video, which can’t be embedded here).
Eric Adams’ statement is both nonsensical and horrifically amoral. But that’s where the Democratic Party has arrived, whether all its voters realize that or not. And that’s what the “right to choose” and “pro-Choice” are meant to hide. Who isn’t for liberty, for the right to choose? But the right to choose is not absolute – in other words, we can choose to steal or murder or to assault someone, but those acts are unlawful and if the legal system was working correctly we would pay the price. Someone like Adams and the women demonstrating for unlimited abortion are saying that there should be no such limits on abortion even if states decide democratically to limit it. And to label the killing of a viable child “abortion” and “choice” is an assertion way way down the slippery slope to evil. Calling it “choice” does not mitigate the evil, although to some it hides that evil rather effectively.
But that’s why people defending abortion and especially late-term abortions keep repeating the word “choice.” It is a smokescreen employed to hide what they are actually saying. And adding the idea that men have no right to “choose how women should treat their bodies” introduces two absurdities. The first is that a person can only opine on and vote for or against a question that can directly affect that person. What about post-menopausal women? Do they still get a vote on this, or does their right to vote on it end with the cessation of menstruation? What about trans men; are they allowed to vote on it?
The second absurdity is, of course, the idea that a full-term baby is a part of a woman’s body and that she gets to choose to murder it if she so desires. And “absurdity” is a word that’s way too kind – it’s actually an abomination.
[NOTE: The other day the name Peter Singer came up the comments, because he is a “bioethicist” who advocates infanticide in some circumstances. I have written extensively about Singer in 2015, in a three-part series. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here.]
Open thread 5/16/22
The story of my left eye – so far: Part V
[Part I can be found here.
Part II can be found here.
Part III can be found here.
Part IV can be found here.]
I can’t remember much about the drive home from the surgery, except that I was tired and some combination of relieved and apprehensive. My eyesight hadn’t cleared from the surgery yet, but this was expected. I’d read – both in the handouts the surgeon had given me and also in material from other doctors – that by the next morning I might expect a great improvement.
But the next morning when I woke up what I saw was a thick fog, much worse than the day before and certainly worse than my cataract had been. Panicked, I phoned the doctor (he had a policy of allowing texts and phone calls and returning them in a very timely fashion). He called back quite quickly, and I explained that what I saw was a pea-soup fog.
“It’s normal,” he said, “especially because I had to do much more work on your eye than usual. It will clear.” And clear it did, that afternoon. Fortunately, I also had a follow-up appointment with him that afternoon, and as we drove (my ex-husband drove; I was a passenger) through the freeways of southern California, I experienced something remarkable.
I know that people whose sight has been compromised by cataracts often ooo and ahhh afterwards at how clear things are and how bright the colors. But I think that my sight had been poor for longer than most; I’m not even sure how many years but at least eight, and I don’t even really remember what it was like to see clearly. Eyeglasses really had not corrected it to any extent at all, and although I could still see colors pretty well (or maybe my brain and imagination filled them in, so I didn’t perceive much deficit there) I lived in a blurry world where all sharp edges were smoothed and almost nothing had detail. I knew trees had leaves, but until I got up close they were like impressionist paintings with blobs of color rather than separate leaves. Same with the petals of flowers: just blobs. The hills in the distance likewise – blurry, and the trees on them were mere suggestions of trees.
And street and traffic signs? Blobs again. I had stopped driving at night and stopped driving distances of more than a mile or two in familiar territory, because street signs were also a blur unless I was right on top of them – sometimes they even remained so when I was on top of them. I either knew the way or I relied on my GPS to tell me where to turn. I could see the street and the other cars, so I wasn’t really endangering anyone, but I was very much in danger of getting lost without my GPS and I certainly wasn’t driving at night, when the glare became a psychedelic light show that was interesting but so distracting that driving was not recommended at all.
And the supermarket, with its enormously bright fluorescent lights, was a booming buzzing confusion of blur. The signs in the aisles were little help unless I was a few feet from them, the labels were hard to read too, but I knew my way around my familiar supermarkets and had gotten used to the whole thing.
But this ride a day after surgery made my jaw drop. The hills of southern California were alive with – not the sound of music – but the sight of grasses and trees and bushes sharply etched. Even the dirt was sharply etched. And the branches of trees (not all the trees had leaves yet) were black.
A word about the color black. Things had gotten gray for me rather than black. The print in books was gray, which made it harder to read even with my reading glasses. The computer likewise. Years ago I thought my font color had changed and went to “settings” to try to change it back to black, and was surprised to see that it already was on black. Street signs and signs in the market looked gray as well, even though I couldn’t read them well.
I had forgotten what black looked like, especially in small sharp things like branches and letters. But here it was – so intense and so clearly defined it stunned me. The same with the signs. I kept exclaiming about the signs, “I can read them! I can read them!”
I realized also that I hadn’t allowed myself to really deeply imagine what it would be like to see more clearly again; I had had so much negativity fed to me by the doctor in Boston that I had lost track of that.
But even more importantly, this was different than I might have imagined. I did not remember seeing this way, even in childhood, and I had had very good vision most of my life. As a child I know it was 20/20, and for many years as an adult it was no worse than 20/30. But what I remembered from then was different than this. It was never as sharp, and the light now was overpowering, so bright that I really felt the need for the sunglasses I was wearing.
My theory now is that an artificial lens really does make a person see differently than a natural lens, even the healthy natural lens of a young person. Maybe most people don’t perceive the difference, but I do (at least, I think I do).
My appointment was reassuring. The doctor said everything looked good. He explained once again how he’d had to free my eye of the extra membrane and the adhesions, and he told me that one little bit had remained and he’d had to snip that part of the iris, and also that he’d had to “reconstruct” my pupil. That gave me pause, but he added that my pupil now looked great, and showed me my “before” and “after” photos.
Quite something.
So now my task was to take my eye drops, and heal.
[To be continued – more to the story, of course…]
Roundup
(1) Buh-bye, Jen Psaki:
Psaki is now headed to MSNBC to host a primetime show, a plan she’s had in place for months while still manning the podium in what can only be called a massive ethics breach.
Psaki: “[A]s I look back, I hope I followed the example of integrity and grace that they have set for all us and do set for all of us everyday…There is a Biden family that has extended and expanded far beyond the Biden name…They have integrity, grit, commitment…”
(2) On the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary race, in which Kathy Barnette is now taking heat.
(3) On the Sussman case (Russiagate) and where it’s at. Yes, it’s from Andrew C. McCarthy, who’s been variable lately. But on this sort of thing he’s still quite good, I think.
(4) Get your ultra-MAGA T-shirts. Maybe it’s even better than “deplorable”?
(5) A look back at a public health policy paper that was ignored in the response to COVID. I originally wrote a post about this paper in August of 2020.