Antifa assaults journalist in Portland

The New Neo Posted on by

Another ominous occurrence in a sea of them, letting us know that Antifa’s closest relations are the Brownshirts, with the Orwellian twist that Antifa bills itself as being anti-Fascist:

An Oregon photojournalist who covers Portland’s frequently violent protest scene was taken to the hospital Saturday after being attacked by black-masked antifa activists.

Andy Ngo, an editor at the online platform Quillette, said he was struck on the head and face “multiple times” by antifa protesters, who also threw objects and a milkshake at him as he tried to walk away.

“I just got beat up by the crowd — no police at all — in the middle of the street,” Mr. Ngo said in the post. “And they stole my GoPro. And they punched me several times in my face and head, and I’m bleeding.”

And the left’s answer seems to be “He provoked them by reporting on what they do.”

As for the attack itself and the lack of police response, one wonders why there were no police present at a demonstration. One possibility (there are others) is that the Portland police force has adopted what might be called the Canadian model of crowd control, which is to monitor the whole thing from afar through video surveillance and then swoop in after the fact once a disturbance has broken out.

I first experienced that method of crowd control during a visit to Vancouver around 2000, and I was singularly unimpressed with its efficacy.

An unexpected handshake

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump loves to surprise people. That’s part of his power; he doesn’t like to do the expected. And the handshake with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ, and Trump’s stepping over the line into North Korean territory, certainly came as a surprise for most people.

The visuals were strange. Kim looked like an overgrown child next to Trump, but no child he. Those in charge of security were very agitated, running around and pushing other people out of the way. There was a really nervous energy in the crowd.

The event was ceremonial and symbolic, but of what? What will it lead to? Perhaps nothing—except, inevitably, criticism from Trump’s usual opponents. But man, what a showman Trump is.

I think part of the idea is to play to Kim’s massive ego and desire to be treated like a bona fide world leader. Will that backfire? Your guess is as good as mine.

Intermezzo

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a revised version of a previous post.]

Some time ago I was taking a walk, listening on my iPod to some ballet music, and I suddenly wondered—for no particular reason—whether the Eliot Feld ballet “Intermezzo” might have finally made its way to YouTube.

During the 70s I had seen the ballet in person many many times, with the original cast. Certain passages from it are among the most beautiful choreography I’ve ever witnessed, casting an overwhelmingly romantic spell.

The Brahms music was no small part of it, but it was really the choreography that created the emotional effect of a bygone era of grace and lush romance. Three couples dance in a series of vignettes, sometimes all together and sometimes just spotlighting one of the couples. Their movements are marked by dramatic and inventive lifts that are never circus-y despite their breathtaking daring, while still managing to express the mood of an old-fashioned ballroom where couples court and smoldering feelings are kept in check by decorum.

I didn’t really think the ballet would be on YouTube—but when I checked, lo and behold, there it was, the entire thing (including a few parts that are comic, although for me they are very much overshadowed by the serious sections).

The picture is blurry and small. And the dancers are not the original dancers (this version was recorded in 1985).

But there it was and there it remains, after all these years without it. And even though it’s somewhat like watching a gossamer, translucent, diminished ghost of the past, it’s still a very beautiful ghost that stirs up very beautiful memories, all the more precious because I didn’t think I would ever see it again in any form.

I will reproduce the full-length ballet here (in two parts) at the end of this post. But first please indulge me and let me talk a bit more about my memories.

Central to those memories is the extraordinary Christine Sarry from the original cast. Sarry didn’t look like any other dancer I’d ever seen, before or since. She was so small as to be almost midget-like, with a childish body and legs that were also short for a dancer. And she even had short hair, which is highly unusual for a ballet dancer even today and most assuredly was unusual back in those days.

But oh, what amazing attack she had, what speed and calm, what a way of timing her movements and giving them just the right emphasis, breath, and shape without ever being schmaltzy or overdone. Words cannot describe her—well, they don’t have to describe her, because I found a very small clip of her in a portion of a rehearsal, and then a tiny bit of a rehearsal-type performance in the ballet. In the rehearsal Sarry isn’t even dancing full-out. And in the rehearsal-type performance she is not in costume—no puffy romantic skirts to give the requisite light and cloudlike feel—but instead is garbed in leotards in a private rendition for potential backers in 1969, when the ballet was newly choreographed and hot off the press.

It’s easy to spot Sarry—she’s the tiny one with the short hair. This is nowhere near as lovely as a real performance by her. And it doesn’t feature any of the speed for which she was known, and which was fully showcased in other sections of “Intermezzo.” But I still think it conveys some of the special quality of her movement, which Feld exploited by inserting many quick changes of direction where the dancer’s impetus leads one way and then suddenly (and gracefully rather than jarringly) reverses and goes the other way. I’ve cued it up to show a brief part of the rehearsal, and then there’s a small part of the performance. At the end of the rehearsal and before the section with a bit of the performance, the bald man talking to Feld is the great British choreographer Anthony Tudor. If you listen closely, you’ll hear that he is praising Sarry:

Today, Sarry is still affiliated with Feld, although she once called him, “The most difficult person I’ve ever worked with.”

And here is most of the full-length ballet, in costume with the later cast from 1985. The fast parts were Sarry’s, and as I watch this I can see her in my mind’s eye—with her lightening speed, sharp-yet-smooth emphasis, and exquisite phrasing. But these dancers are pretty darn good, so enjoy:

SJWs and the Wayfair beds

The New Neo Posted on by

SJWs are boycotting Wayfair for selling beds to groups that help to furnish border detention centers:

Wayfair drew political criticism and calls from some customers for a boycott after employees protested the company’s apparent sale of $200,000 of mattresses and bunk beds destined for a Texas detention camp for migrant children.

Under the hashtag #BoycottWayfair, customers and businesses took to Twitter to announce they were canceling orders from the online home goods retailer, returning purchases and boycotting the retailer until the company apologizes. One employee estimated that 500 workers walked out of the company’s Boston headquarters in protest at 1:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, holding signs that read “solidarity with migrant families” and “people not prisons.”

Wayfair sold roughly 1,600 mattresses and 100 bunk beds to Baptist Child and Family Services, a nonprofit that works as a federal contractor managing some of the camps along the southern border, according to a copy of the June 13 sales receipt obtained by CNBC and verified by an employee. The merchandise is destined for Carrizo Springs, Texas, where the group is running an emergency influx shelter to house up to 1,600 unaccompanied children who have migrated across the U.S. border.

In what universe does this make sense? It seems the SJWs have gone stark raving mad, doesn’t it?

Well, these are the ways in which it makes sense:

(1) as virtue-signaling
(2) as a response to relentless propaganda from the Democrats and the press, saying that under Trump all immigration/detention is bad, even if it involves something that happened under the Obama administration
(3) as a signal to other companies of the power or potential power of the left to harm them unless they toe the leftist line
(4) as a way to get publicity for a leftist cause

I think (at least I hope) that to most people this will seem an absurd move. After all, this is a group providing beds. Would the SJWs prefer the children to be bedless?

Well yes, of course—the better to take heartrending photos of detained children. Sleeping on the floor, or worse!

Just like the concentration camps, right?

Do the candidates believe their own bs?

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this in the comments last night from “Sergey” (quoting J. Frank Bullitt):

Every candidate lined up in Wednesday’s debate is living in a fantasy world where they are convinced their decrees can yield a utopia just because they say so.

And commenter “AesopFan” replied:

Well, Obama did it first, and it worked for him!

It did work for him. But did he really believe his own (to put it crudely) bullshit? I’m using that word for a reason; it’s a direct quote from Obama.

Remember this?:

But perhaps the most telling quote in terms of what Obama believes or doesn’t believe is true comes from Obama himself. It occurred during a conversation with journalist Richard Wolffe, and appears in Renegade, a book published in 2009 and based on Wolffe’s coverage of Obama’s 2008 campaign:

“Every now and then in Renegade, a moment arrives when it seems Obama might reveal something, some tiny thing, about himself. ‘You know, I actually believe my own bullshit,’ Obama told Wolffe with a smile. But what for a nanosecond seemed like candor – would the candidate actually examine his own B.S.? – was just another talking point, as he explained to Wolffe that he truly wanted to bring change to America for better health care, for better schools, and especially for ‘the kid on the streets.'”

There’s much about this quote that’s revealing. First, there’s the serious message Obama is trying to deliver within the joke about bs: “I truly believe that I can make people’s lives better.” But if he really does believe that, then why insert a subtle disclaimer (it’s all “bullshit”) inherent in the casually deprecating tone that seems to negate its seriousness and casts an ironic and juvenile eye on the entire enterprise?

And then, of course, there’s the more subtle message beneath. Obama seems to be admitting that, at least at the moment when he utters whatever bullshit he happens to be spewing, he does believe it. That trick of believing and yet not believing is one of the exercises at which narcissists and con men are skilled. In order to sell a product convincingly, it’s necessary to believe your own bullshit, if only temporarily.

But there’s also another level operating here, one that was described very well by Hilton Kramer. In the following quote he is speaking of Stalinists, but what he says is applicable to the majority of leftists such as Obama as well:

“It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others, but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth.”

So Obama’s ability to lie, and his relationship to his own lies, is multiply-determined: by his narcissism, by the fact of his being a president who is protected from the harsh truth, and by his leftism. He believes and does not believe at the same time, and shifts between the two depending on the strategic value of one or the other attitude at any given moment.

Is that true of the current crop of candidates? I can’t speak for all of them, but my guess is that it’s true for many or even most, but not all. Some really really do believe their own bullshit. Some are well aware that it’s bullshit, but they think it’s tasty bullshit that will sell. One of the reasons we’re seeing more of this, post-Obama, is that he showed how very very successful it could be in the right hands.

I think this is especially the case with the career politicians among the current crop of Democratic candidates. Even if career politicians start out believing, it probably doesn’t take long for a lot of it to become a game.

I think the phenomenon transcends party affiliation, but I also have observed it to be especially marked with the left, because they tend to promise the moon and they must know it’s fiscally impossible. They’re playing to a combination of the gullible, the wishful, the idealistic, the ignorant, and the greedy.

I think that what most career politicans (and some new ones as well) really really really want is power, whether that was their original motive or not. And the way they believe they can get it is to be elected. And they say what they think they need to say to reach that goal.

Crime and religion

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday there was a lot of back-and-forth in the comments of this post about the relation between violent crime and religious belief. One of the comments was by Richard Saunders, and it went like this:

If I don’t believe in God and some kind of judgement and reward or punishment after death, why should I not give into my basest impulses, take a room on the 34th floor of a Las Vegas hotel, and open fire onto a concert below, and then kill myself?

It’s a somewhat rhetorical question, because of course Richard Saunders isn’t saying that most atheists are mass murderers. It’s really asking whether religion is a major force that stops people who would otherwise be committing violent crimes from following through and actually doing it.

The answer is that we don’t know, but there have been attempts to find out. And, as with most social science research, it’s hard to get a clear idea of what’s going on.

Later in the comments, Roy Nathanson responded to Richard Saunders this way:

In fact, there is a negative correlation [between violence and religious belief] at all levels. The most secular countries are also the least violent. And the prison population in the U.S. has a far lower percentage of atheists than the general population.

The same commenter later added (on the specific topic of the religious beliefs of mass shooters), after some further back-and-forth:

…[I]t turns out that mass shooters do have a strong tendency toward a lack of religiosity. In this case, I think that the lack of religiosity is simply one more symptom of the root cause, which is a near total isolation from society. The people who commit mass shootings are typically isolated loners. It isn’t that they don’t go to church, it is that they don’t engage in any social interactions that would reinforce their natural empathy for other people. They see everyone as “them” and no one as “us”.

It was the statements that Roy Nathanson offered on violent crime in general as it correlates with religion that interested me enough to write the present post: in particular, that “the most secular countries are also the least violent” and that “the prison population in the U.S. has a far lower percentage of atheists than the general population.”

As both participants in that discussion know (and as I’m assuming just about everyone here knows), correlation is not causation. Just to take one example, religiousness is more common in less educated people, and violent crime is more common among them as well. So is it something about religion that reduces violent crime, or something about education—or is it some other factor they have in common?

In addition, crime in the US is far more prevalent in certain ethnic groups, and those groups also happen to have much lower rates of atheism. But that doesn’t mean atheism vs. religiosity is an important independent variable for those groups.

So we have this sort of discussion about religion and murder, for example:

And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be the highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be the among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon.

But what else is different about those two groups of states? The low-murder states are richer and they are whiter (those are not the only differences, of course).

Louisiana is about 1/3 black, and it is the 48th richest state (in other words, one of the very poorest). Alabama is the 46th richest state and it is a little over a quarter black. Both states are highly religious, with up to 90% of the population reporting being affiliated with a religion.

In contrast, Vermont is the 21st richest state and it is 1.27% black, and 63% of its people are religiously affiliated (still rather high, actually). Oregon is number 26 in wealth and has 1.9% black people, and 69% religiously-affiliated people. Very similar to Vermont.

So what causes those high crime rates in those two states? It certainly can’t be ascribed to being religious, just from those figures. All was can see are the correlations.

For that matter, we don’t know why black people have higher crime rates, either, although the issue certainly has been studied rather heavily. Some say it’s because the police are bigoted and target black people. Some say it’s poverty. Or family breakdown. Or any number of other things.

I’m not about to be able to answer the question. But I would wager very strongly that the cause is not the higher rate of religious affiliation among black people.

An interesting study would compare, for example, the violent crime rates of religious black people with the violent crime rates of non-religious black people, matched for socio-economic levels and education. Then you’d be getting somewhere, although I doubt you’d get a definitive answer. But the data at least would be more relevant.

Apparently there hasn’t been a ton of previous research on that sort of thing, but here’s an excerpt from a 2014 review of the picture. It seems to support the thesis that religiousness is negatively correlated with violent crime rather than positively correlated with it:

Chamlin and Cochran’s (1995) state-level analysis finds that, among other indicators of the strength of non-economic institutions, state religious participation dampened the criminogenic effect of poverty. Similarly, Jang and Johnson (2001) find that individual religiosity moderates the effect of neighborhood disorder on drug use by augmenting the social control of youth living in disadvantaged and disorganized communities, just as Pearce et al. (2003) observe that personal religiosity reduces the criminogenic effect of exposure to neighborhood violence.

That same article contained new research as well, by doing a county-by-county and race by race comparison of crime rates and religious affiliation rates, with some interesting results [emphasis mine]:

The dependent variables in this study are county-level White, Black, and Latino violent index arrest rates (sum of arrests for homicide, aggravated assault, forcible rape, robbery) averaged across the 1999-2001 period…

We focus on three unique dimensions of the religious contexts in our sample of counties. First, total religious adherence is measured as the proportion of the county’s population that adheres to a religious institution recorded by the RCMS, as indicated by affiliation or regular attendance in a congregation. Second, civically-engaged religious adherence is measured as the proportion of the county’s population that adheres to a religious institution recognized as being more civically-engaged than the national average according to the General Social Survey (see Tolbert et al. 1998; Lee and Bartkowski 2004). Third, religious homogeneity is measured as the relative diversity of the religious adherents within a county…

Additionally, we include four race/ethnic specific disadvantage indicators – poverty, unemployment, education, and female headship – that have emerged as important macro-structural characteristics in criminological theory and prior empirical research…

First, total religious adherence is negatively related to violent crime for Whites and Blacks, net of other key measures. That is, the greater the proportion of a county’s population that is religious, the lower the violent crime rate for Whites and Blacks (we note also that the effect for Latinos is in the expected direction, though not significant at p< .05). However, there are no significant differences across Whites, Blacks, and Latinos in the relationship between total religious adherence and violence. F-tests for differences were all non-significant (p>.10, two tailed), suggesting that religious adherence has roughly equivalent associations with violence across race/ethnic groups.

Second, civically-engaged religious adherence has a statistically significant, negative association with White violent crime (p< .001), but not Black or Latino violent crime…

Third, religious homogeneity is associated with statistically significant reductions in violence for Blacks (p< .05) and Latinos (p<.01), but not Whites. Put another way, Black and Latino violence is lower in counties where adherents belong to similar types of religious institutions…

Fourth, other key macro-structural characteristics, particularly concentrated disadvantage, have the expected criminogenic (positive) association with violence for all three racial and ethnic groups. That is, a greater confluence of poverty, unemployment, female headship, and low education in a county is associated with increased violent crime rates for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. Likewise, racial/ethnic heterogeneity (or the diversity of a county’s population) also has important criminogenic effects for Whites in all three models, but appears to reduce Black violence net of religious contextual characteristics and other key controls.

Much more at the link.

So there you have it. What little data we have seems to indicate the religious affiliation reduces violent crime somewhat. Once again, though, we don’t know whether there is some other variable that differentiates religious people from non-religious people that is really what is influencing the statistic. After all, religiousness is not randomly distributed in the population.

Kim Philby: did he ever have regrets?

The New Neo Posted on by

People like the patrician British double agent Kim Philby fascinate me. Are they natural cons who are drawn to the game aspect of spying? Are they True Believers? Psychopaths? Idealists? Narcissists? Some of the above? All of the above?

Kim Philby had an excellent education, and in fact it was at Cambridge that he became enamored of Communism. Nothing dissuaded him; not the excesses of Stalin, and not even—if you believe what he told the KGB after defecting in 1963—actually living in Soviet Russia, and seeing firsthand the mess there and the misery of its citizens:

Speaking as if from beyond the grave – his voice recorded during a talk he gave for KGB officers in 1977, 14 years after defecting to the Soviet Union – Philby is heard saying: “There is an awful lot of work for us to do it seems. I have no regrets whatsoever about the past, just the mistakes I made doing it.”

Quoting the Russian revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky – founder of the KGB’s forerunner the Cheka – Philby closes his speech in Russian by saying: “If I had a chance I would do it all again. I would do it exactly the same way.”

Lie? Truth? Rationalization? I think it’s the inability of most fanatics to change a fundamental set of beliefs, especially after betraying one’s country for the cause. It would take a lot more courage and a lot more honesty than Philby was likely to have possessed to have said: “I sold my country out for something horrific.”

There are some clues there about what happened in the beginning, though. For example, as with most and perhaps all Communist fanatics, Philby was an atheist. Lack of religion is replaced by quasi-religion:

in his talk Philby admitted to being a rebel from an early age, shocking his grandmother by announcing he did not believe in God and growing up with what he called a greater affinity for the poor than the previledged.

He said: “In the year 1929 I was enrolled at Cambridge University at the age of 17. I already had a deep emotional connection to the weak, poor and less priveliged compared to the strong, rich and arrogant. I began my rebellious nature at a very early age. I scandalised my grandmother by informing her there was no god.

“Early rejection of Christianity probably had something to do with my early rejection of the bourgeois state.”

I do believe Philby is telling the truth when he cites his “rebellious nature” and his atheism.

Philby’s Russian/Polish wife tells a different tale about his last years in Russia:

Kim Philby, the most successful of the Cambridge spies, tried to drink himself to death in Moscow because he was disillusioned with communism and tortured by his own failings, his last wife has said in an interview…

Rufina Pukhova, his Russian-Polish wife, said Philby struggled to control his drinking by downing only two glasses of cognac a night and then handing her the bottle to hide…

His habit was fuelled by his sorrow over what he saw around him, she added. “Kim believed in a just society and devoted his whole life to communism. And here he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. He said, ‘Why do old people live so badly here? After all, they won the war.'”

Maybe if he’d spent a little more time in Moscow before taking up spying, he’d have learned more about the regime he was helping. I doubt it would have mattered, however. He would have just offered this familiar excuse:

“He saw people suffering too much,” but he consoled himself by arguing that “the ideals were right but the way they were carried out was wrong. The fault lay with the people in charge.”

Sound familiar?

The law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head once again

The New Neo Posted on by

Medicare for All! says Elizabeth Warren and de Blasio. End private medical insurance!

So, how might this work in the real world? Take a look:

More often than not, when a politician declares that the only thing preventing some particular plan from going into place is political will, it’s a sign that there are uncomfortable practical questions they would like to paper over. So it was when Warren explained her support for a single-payer health care in which the government takes over nearly all of the country’s health care financing…

As former Maryland Rep. John Delaney pointed out just a few moments later, Warren’s plan—which is to say Bernie Sanders’ plan—would probably result in a sharp contraction in the number of hospitals.

“If you go to every hospital in this country and you ask them one question,” Delaney said, “which is how would it have been for you last year if every one of your bills were paid at the Medicare rate? Every single hospital administrator said they would close. And the Medicare for All bill requires payments to stay at current Medicare rates. So to some extent, we’re supporting a bill that will have every hospital closing.”

It’s probably an overstatement to say that every single hospital would close. But Delaney is right that under a single-payer plan paying current Medicare rates, some, and perhaps lots, almost certainly would. And many of the hospitals that stayed open would likely shed staff and services.

Medicare pays far, far less than private rates, and the higher rates from private payers is part of what keeps hospitals afloat financially.

Of course, you can raise Medicare reimbursement rates. But then Medicare would become far far more expensive than projected. Politicians like to sweep math under the rug and pretend it’s all just a matter of do-goody willpower or the lack thereof. But in the real world, math dictates what services can be provided for a given amount of money.

The second Democratic debate

The New Neo Posted on by

Like most Americans, I didn’t watch it.

But I have read about it (like most Americans?), and the consensus in the press is that Kamala Harris was the winner. My guess is that, at this point, it matters but not all that much. Harris was already somewhat of an MSM darling, and the front runners were always going to be the group of people who have at least some national political standing: Biden, Warren, Harris, and maybe a few others. Will they also be the last ones standing?

The more important takeaway from last night is that Democrats—virtually all of them—seem dedicated to outdoing each other in the amount of free stuff they are determined to hand out to illegal immigrants. I can’t believe that’s a winner, but the voting public has surprised me before.

And Harris’s big moment apparently came when she was advocating for forced busing ordered by the feds. Is there some huge constituency favoring such a policy? If so, I’ve missed it.

But again, I don’t think most people are paying attention yet.

For some background, here is a long piece I wrote about forced busing. And here’s a discussion (not mine) of Harris’s position on busing in the debate last night. An excerpt:

Go ahead, Kamala, you brave truth teller, you survivor of segregated Berkeley discrimination. Tell all those Dem voters how busing is what America’s schools need to achieve the necessary diversity. Tell them how you’ll appoint judges who’ll overrule Milliken, allow states to mandate integration across districts.

Tell white working class voters the Dems still need in order to win, all those rich white progressives who purport to love people of color so long as some other school is being integrated, not theirs. Tell low income African Americans to forget about those charter schools they like so much, because your great integration plan means they’ll be unnecessary. Trumpet your plans to mandate school systems like San Francisco, where racial quotas determine where and how far each child will be sent away from home. While you’re at it, explain how this system resulted in far more segregation.

Go ahead and tell people that your plan will end segregation as the government sorts populations based on race, just like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 planned all along.

But best of all, go tell Asians all about your great plans. Tell all those parents at those 80, 90% Asian public schools you plan to yank half of the kids out and send them into the inner cities with all sorts of poor black and Hispanic kids. Go ahead and tell Asian immigrants that they can’t cluster and dominate in certain schools, tested or otherwise.

Much much more at the link.

A rabbit ear hat story

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday commenter “charles” wrote:

The closest I have ever come to knitting was to think those little “pussy cat ears” hats were cute.

That was before they became a political thing.

Now, I think they are downright ugly!

Well, I’ve got a story—not about pussy cat ears hats, but bunny ear hats. For little children.

Many many years ago I was visiting someone who lived in Costa Rica. Although I’d taken high school Spanish, my skills were incredibly rusty. And I’m very shy about speaking foreign languages anyway; it’s not my forte.

So I kept trying to find a moment to say something in Spanish, but I was too self-conscious. Finally, I saw what I thought was my opportunity.

There was a group of women in the neighborhood, and one was holding a little girl who had on a hat someone had knit which had little bunny ears. Very cute kid, cute hat. So I decided to say, “Gloriana looks like a rabbit.”

“Gloriana” was the child’s name.

Now, you might say that’s not much of a comment and not all that witty. But hey, it was my maiden voyage. I was just going to get my feet wet. And I was quite nervous.

So I screwed up my courage and said, “Gloriana se parece un conejo.”

At least, that’s what I meant to say. That what I intended to say.

But instead it came out like this: “Gloriana se parece un cojone.”

I was met with shocked stares, and realized what I had said. That was the last time I tried to speak Spanish.

SCOTUS rules on citizenship census question and political gerrymandering

The New Neo Posted on by

Several SCOTUS decisions came down today. I got somewhat of a late start, and have less time than I’d hoped to delve into them in any detail, so I’ll refer you to the following:

Court punts for now on the citizenship question:

From Legal Insurrection

From SCOTUSblog:

Holding: The secretary of the Department of Commerce did not violate the enumeration clause or the Census Act in deciding to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire, but the district court was warranted in remanding the case back to the agency where the evidence tells a story that does not match the secretary’s explanation for his decision.

There were a great many parts to this decision, with different concurring and dissenting justices. So it’s a bit difficult to sort out; read those two links if you’re interested in the details. But the gist of it seems to be that a citizenship question on the census would be okay if the motives for including it were pure rather than political.

If that’s a correct interpretation on my part, it seems to be a somewhat troubling extension of a recent tendency of quite a few courts lately to elevate motives over process.

This ruling also means that as a practical matter it would be difficult to get the question on the 2020 census even if the Court later rules in favor of it, because the forms must be printed soon.

I can also add, from having done some genealogy research using censuses, that this question was long a staple of census questionnaires.

One more big ruling today—actually, a potentially more influential one—from SCOTUS involved politically partisan gerrymandering. You can find some of the details here:

At SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court issued a decision today that could have a significant and long-term effect on elections and legislatures across the country. By a vote of 5-4, the justices ruled that courts should stay out of disputes over partisan gerrymandering – that is, allegations that redistricting maps were drawn to favor one political party at another’s expense. The practice of partisan gerrymandering may be distasteful, the court concluded, but it is a problem that politicians and the political process, rather than courts, should solve.

At Legal Insurrection:

The lower court cases are to be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction:

“The judgments of the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina and the United States District Court for the District of Maryland are vacated, and the cases are remanded with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.”

This is a sweeping rejection well beyond what would have occurred with a substantive evaluation of partisan gerrymandering. There will be no wiggle room for district court judges to try to get involved somehow. For better or worse, partisan gerrymandering is subject to the partisan political process, not the sometimes seemingly partisan judicial process.

This isn’t just saying that SCOTUS can’t rule on the fairness of any particular case of political gerrymandering; it’s saying that district courts can’t rule on it.

And what about state appeals courts? Remember Pennsylvania? See this if you don’t. That ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court probably resulted in quite a few more Democrats being elected to the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania than would have otherwise been the case without court interference.

But the present SCOTUS ruling can’t go back and undo it. The present ruling applies to the cases it was ruling on today, and to future cases.

This SCOTUS ruling can cut either way, of course, in the political sense. Sometimes gerrymandering is done to favor Republicans, sometimes Democrats. It depends on who’s in control of the process at the time in a particular state.

But the courts won’t be able to have much say in the matter—at least, for political gerrymandering. I am pretty sure, however, that if it’s done to favor one race or another, rather than one party or another, the courts will still be able to be involved. And of course, race can be highly correlated with political affiliation, particularly for minorities.