Fred Kaplan is normally a very moderate, voice-of-reason kind of guy. He says it's time to panic now about Bolton.
For anyone who used Trump's alleged dovishness to justify insufficient loathing of him,* I think we can put that bit of bullshit to rest.
*Probably best if we don't look in the archives for comments by me on this subject. At least I can confidently state that I never favorably compared him to Hillary.
It's obviously time to panic. I have a friend who relies on me to reassure her that everything will be okay. Today I just lied to her. We are so fucked.
OK, here's your reassuring argument: Trump is afraid of Putin and would never do anything to cause him annoyance if he could help it; Russia's biggest ally in the Middle East is Iran; therefore as long as Trump is president, Iran is safe.
It's Pence plus Bolton that's the scary combination.
And reassurance number two: it has now been fifteen years since people on the left started being seriously worried that the US was poised to go to war with Iran, and people on the right started being seriously worried that Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. FIFTEEN YEARS. And neither of those things have happened.
Past results are not indicative of future performance.
It's time to panic.
Not that this isn't terrible news, but we're talking here about an administration that took a year to get a tax cut through a Republican congress.
But Josh Bolton is a fucking lunatic. He was too lunatic for the Republicans to keep him even as Ambassador to the UN. Kelly barred him from the White House to keep him away from Trump. Trump is a brain-damaged moron who listens to the last person he talked to, and Bolton is a lunatic. Maybe Kelly will keep him in check, or maybe Trump fires Kelly.
"Fifteen years"? I don't think anyone worth listening to worried Obama was going to provoke war with Iran.
It is good to remember all the years we spent worried about GWB doing the same did not pan out. But his foreign policy team (if still horrible and leading us to where we are today) had, in retrospect, many more voices of reason and caution than the present one. I'm not much reassured.
On the bright side, Trump listens to Fox News to get his opinions and now Bolton won't be on Fox as much.
6: Foreign policy is a whole different ball of yarn. The President can pretty much do whatever they want.
OPINIONATED US CONSTITUTIONAL LAW has some insight into why 6 shouldn't, by itself, be particularly reassuring on this issue.
I'm definitely in camp "we're doomed, lots of people will die" but I dunno if there's a precedent for a President this unpopular, in a US this polarized, starting an (unprovoked or mostly unprovoked) war. Whatever happens with Iran/North Korea/whoever Bolton wants to bomb, it's not going to be like 2003.
The scariest thing for me is a "legitimate" provocation. If Hezbollah for some reason thinks this is a good time to blow up US airplanes, God help us all. Fortunately I think that their leaders may be more rational than Trump or Bolton.
9: Yes, I'm sure they'll get someone perfectly sane to take his place.
7: John Bolton, not Josh Bolton. Hard to picture an elderly mustachioed warmonger named "Josh" for some reason.
Josh Bolten is a different person, I don't know who he is or why I know his name let alone how I know that it's spelled with an E, and I refuse to find out.
13: Bolten plays bass guitar in a band called the Compassionates and enjoys riding his Harley Davidson Fatboy motorcycle
Also was chief of state under W.
As their Boomer market dies off, Harley Davidson is reaching out to Millennials with their new Phat Boi.
14: Thought that was the most important thing to point out, because John Bolton would never associate himself with a band called the Compassionates.
Foreign policy, yes; but starting a war would require an AUMF, no? And this administration really profoundly doesn't have its shit together, even to do things Trumps wants the most. Though of course there will be crises to fuck up.
Weird. A friend of mine on FB said "Josh" and I assumed I remembered wrong. FB really is a menace to national security.
Foreign policy, yes; but starting a war would require an AUMF, no?
No, not really.
I don't think anyone worth listening to worried Obama was going to provoke war with Iran.
Well...
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2008_06_01.html#008835
In which ogged posted
"Via Stras in the comments, Barack Hussein Obama, who totally is too a Muslim, feels the fiercely urgent urge to sell out his people."
And then quoted the Washington Post's Dana Milbank:
"A mere 12 hours after claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday -- and changed himself into an Israel hard-liner.
He promised $30 billion in military assistance for Israel. He declared that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force has "rightly been labeled a terrorist organization." He used terms such as "false prophets of extremism" and "corrupt" while discussing Palestinians. And he promised that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
Vowing to stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon, the newly minted nominee apparent added: "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally, Israel. Do not be confused.""
A Lawfare contributor on Bolton from a personal perspective.
Probably our best hope at this point, besides massive street action, is that Trump is going to dignity-wraith Bolton the same way he does everyone and stymie his agenda. Bolton did come up through the conventional DC structure - the linked piece says he's a "masterful bureaucratic tactician"; I read elsewhere James Baker originally mentored him but later opposed his UN appointment - which suggests little more facility with handling Trump on a day-to-day basis than anyone else who's tried to latch onto him.
Above baseless speculation is transmitting @onlxn's who puts it more picturesquely: "what happens when Bolton diabolically engineers a pro-war proposal that Trump then uses to wipe up a Frosty spill? we don't know"
20: What are the conditions, exactly? I've forgotten the War Powers Act and I'm lazy.
Is it clear that the War Powers Act is constitutional? I thought previous Presidents never really challenged it. I thought the only tool Congress had was to cut off funding.
The WPA can be waived if there's an emergency. Guess who gets to decide if a situation is an emergency? Also, the act has never really been tested.
25: The Supreme Court will stay the fuck out of it regardless. I don't think they're any more likely to say the act is unconstitutional than they are to start issuing orders to U.S. troops to pull out of somewhere.
that Trump is going to dignity-wraith Bolton the same way he does everyone and stymie his agenda.
Yes; I think this is the best-case scenario (and basically an extension of Moby's observation of his not being on Fox as much in the future). Am halfway through Fire and Fury* and I think it is highly unpredictable who will prosper and who will wither within the eye of the shit storm.
That said, my concern is that Bolton's pathologies potentially will mesh with Trump's in a very dangerous way. Big guy is raging that he gets not respect? John B will ready with an evergreen pick-me-up solution.
*Forget the stupid pissing match with the fucking media fuckheads, it is worth a read--although with huge grains of salt. For instance need to deconvolve Bannon's self-enhancing spin but it is pretty transparent. No different than any "access to seat of power" article or book. (And much better than the kind of crap Woodward, for instance, published about the Bushies.)
4. It isn't Bolton starting a war with Iran that scares me (well, it does, but not so much) but Bolton starting a war with the DPRK. Numerous self appointed pundits appear to agree with me on this. Can anybody offer a plausible refutation?
27: Can they stay out of it, if Trump announces that it's unconstitutional and he's not bound by it? I guess Congress can just choose not to challenge it.
Well...
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2008_06_01.html#008835
In which ogged posted
"Via Stras in the comments, Barack Hussein Obama, who totally is too a Muslim, feels the fiercely urgent urge to sell out his people."
OK, you got me. There was some of that. Still on a very different level, more reflecting the bloodthirstiness of the groups Democrats have to pledge fealty to, and once we saw how he was actually conducting foreign policy any worry along new-major-war lines died down. Obviously he didn't tamp down the bloodthirstiness either, continuing and in some ways expanding the War Without End.
30: The court has pretty much always stayed out of foreign policy. Plus, who is going to have standing to sue? Maybe somebody deployed, but I don't think anybody has tried that.
I think every president says he's not bound by the WPA, even when they follow it. Something like, "Here's this report I'm submitting to Congress on this use of force that is on going. It looks like the kind of reporting required by the WPA, but that's just a coincidence. I'm doing this because I wanted to."
DPRK didn't have nukes and ICBMs the last time Bolton was in office? Straws, I clutch them.
Wait, stras was worth listening to?
I am still shaken a bit by the events of last weekend with regard to McCabe. At some level who cares*, but the extent to which it shows the Trumpians getting their fingers deeper into the workings of DOJ/FBI is concerning.
*I am completely unconvinced by the fucking "institutionalists" who keep talking about how respected the IG and personnel office are. Any process where the prez tweets aspecific taunt about someone's pension 90 days out and it comes to pass is utterly, irretrievable corrupt. Those self-righteous fuckwads (Comey for instance)are extremely susceptible to this kind of thing. ... But of course they are currently maong our only hopes. yay.
My fucking is insisting on streaming the lying assholes at the bill signing so I have to flee for a bit.
If Hezbollah for some reason thinks this is a good time to blow up US airplanes, God help us all. Fortunately I think that their leaders may be more rational than Trump or Bolton.
Trump is keeping us safe!
That was "my fucking wife."
A lovely person actually.
It's the madman theory, with actual madmen!
I thought previous Presidents never really challenged it.
Previous presidents ignored it.
Neocon Chic and Mau-Mauing the Spycatchers.
Starting an external war to unify the country is the new having a baby to save the relationship, except for the part about creating new life.
47: People always say that, but does that ever actually happen? Starting a war, or cock-waving, for an election bump, maybe. But for the sake of unity? The closest example I can think of is Urban II and the First Crusade, but all the details are so medieval I don't think that's at all comparable to modern states.
For clothing to wear on the First Crusade, the devout shopped at Urban Outfitters.
"I hacked my way to the Holy Sepulchre and all I got was this shitty little embroidered cross."
Like Fascism, maybe at some abstract theoretical level, the purifying fury of war or whatever, but AFAIK the actual policy decisions behind their wars weren't about that.
Maybe Napoleon III's Italian intervention when he was just President.
Speaking personally, I didn't really think we should be invading Panama in 1989 but the US military's willingness to use weaponized Van Halen against Noriega gives me a warm glow thinking about it. Unity!
29 - well, Trump probably won't want to go blow North Korea up before he gets his meeting with little rocket man, and maybe little rocket man butters Trump up enough (what with the big parade with synchronized flag waving and so on) to keep on his good side.
Granted "election bump" and "unify the country" are (widely separated) points on the same continuum, and of course tit could happen, but it seems to me to be in fact a very rare cause of wars.
52: Really, I've never read anything about the decision-making process in the Reagan Administration that lead to the decision to invade Grenada, but my vague sense was that it was seen by the hawks then in power as a first step in the process of overcoming "the Vietnam Syndrome". But that's not the same as fighting a war to unify the country. So, I guess I was just goofing.
They made a Clint Eastwood movie about it.
He would say "Left turn, Clyde" and his orangutan would punch a Cuban military advisor.
61: That movie was also part of the process of overcoming "the Vietnam Syndrome".
I agree with 59, and am not sure how to disaggregate the two in practice given what we know.
And it worked! Clint ripped out the earring of that funny but undisciplined Mario Van Peebles and he ended up making a great Marine.
I think Joe Biden is our only hope. He has to keep taunting Trump, going on about how he can whup him, until Trump decides he has no choice but to issue a formal challenge, and then Don King gets involved, and it's going to be the biggest PPV event ever, and Trump is completely focused on how huge this is and completely forgets about being President and decides he has to put together a Rocky montage, and then he gets a heart attack trying to run up those steps in Philadelphia.
If you run up the steps and don't have a heart attack, you have to look at art.
67: I don't remember that scene in Rocky.
It is good to remember all the years we spent worried about GWB doing the same did not pan out.
They wanted to go to Iran. They just didn't expect Iraq to be anything more than a speedbump on their way.
Trump is afraid of Putin and would never do anything to cause him annoyance if he could help it; Russia's biggest ally in the Middle East is Iran; therefore as long as Trump is president, Iran is safe.
What better use would Putin have for an "ally" than further degrade US capabilities and standing?
70 was me.
In defense of those who insufficiently loathed Trump, Clinton kicked off her campaign criticizing Obama for not doing enough stupid shit abroad.
I think the Franco Prussian war of 1870 was, on Bismarck's side, exactly a war to unify his country, indeed to create it.
On topic: Lying shit-faced rats who work for lying shit-faced rats are the happiest lying shit-faced rats.
72: Huh. That's a really weird case, considering the other parts of the country were still independent, but ok, I'll take it. That's 3 election bumps and one (weird) unification in 140 years. Any more takers.
You all aren't clear on the concept of "the new", what with your old-fangled history.
You just ruined somebody's weekend when you could have saved it until Monday.
I think the fall 2002 run-up to Iraq was way more about the midterms than it was about Iraq. But they ended up winning the midterms, and didn't know how to climb down, when everyone knew there weren't WMDs. At which point they had to go ahead anyway and hope it would work out.
If the 2006 midterms had gone the other way, we might well have ended up in Iran.
Bolton won't make that mistake again.
|| Have folks watched Tin Star? Violent start, but great scenery. We're only 2 eps in. |>
This may be absurd optimism, but I cling to the thought that Trump likes threatening to do stuff, he's a bully and it's his stock in trade, but (as with Kim, say) his threatening to do x isn't a sign of the intention to do x, it's a substitute for doing it -- it's basically free money, you can do it over and over and up the ante indefinitely so long as you don't have to follow through. And is there any real evidence that Bolton isn't the same type?
The other thought I cling to is that nobody involved with this administration really seriously cares about anything but money. If the US goes to war it'll be in a way that makes Erik Prince richer and gets oil stocks out of the toilet, rather than for any other purpose, so I won't panic until I've heard exactly how the wars currently in view will accomplish that.
||
I'm at a film revival thing and probably the youngest people in the audience are sitting behind me. One just said, "1937, that's pre-Code right?"
|>
I think Trump cares about adulation. Ivanka has apparently neglected to tell him that enacting universal single payer is the one true road.
Update to 83: what I overheard of their film analysis after the end of the double bill was kind of garbage.
Also, I don't expect everyone to know what time period is covered by pre-Code, but people with their phones out waiting for a film to start could just look it up. The only pre-Code film on the program is Heroes for Sale. I was kind of disappointed there wasn't more.
85 What did you see? What's on the program?
First two films of this festival. I'd seen Black Legion* before, but never Try and Get Me, which is misleadingly titled. It turns out to be another fictionalization of the same case Fritz Lang's Fury is based on.
*Not pre-Code, much more explicitly moralizing at the end than I'd remembered it. Definitely a movie I'd been thinking about with the recent revival of anti-immigration sentiment.
I think Edna k is right, fingers crossed.
If Mattis tells Trump North Korea might be able to nuke Washington, I can't imagine him going to war. He's used to not being accountable, he's not bold.
Another WTF this week was the Austin police emphasizing the sad life aspect of the bomber's confession rather than the part where he says his plan was to go to a crowded McDonald's and blow himself and others up if he thinks he is about to be arrested.
Are folks here going ot marches today? We will be doing the Pittsburgh one.
Yes, here in my the city that's not your neighborhood.
I'm going to Chicago for reasons related to show tunes.
It is chilly for outside speeches in Rome, NY. Nevertheless, I've turned out.
There's one in Anchorage but I'm actually in Juneau and I haven't heard about one here.
Went to my local march. Good turnout for a cold, rainy day. Only saw one open-carry asshole.
Also good turnout here. Rain let up pretty early and the sun came out. Nothing like the Women's March though.
Nice turnout here as well. Well done with crisp to-the-point speeches.
(Also a cameo appearance--but not a speaking part--by Conor Lamb who has been walking a tightrope on this issue.)
Turns out there was one in Juneau. We saw some people with signs earlier but we seem to have missed the main event.
We had a number of electeds including Rep. Eric Swalwell. He said something I thought notable, and the local news did too, enough to quote it: "I've made the mistake of giving false equivalence to the Second Amendment, I'm done doing that, nothing is more important than the right to live." (I think of him as centrist; the ideology scores seem to put him right in the middle of congressional Democrats.)
V proud of kid who worked hard to help organize SF march, although missed marching with him. ❤❤❤❤❤
Some asshole sent American Gothic to New York.
Actual Roman art has way more wangs than Caesar's Palace Roman art.
THE POPES CUT THEM ALL OFF TO SUPPRESS THE ANCIENT FEMININE MYSTICS.
I'm going to Chicago for reasons related to show tunes.
To sit alone in your room or alternately put down the knitting, the book and the broom, come hear the music play?
To kiss today goodbye, the sweetness and the sorrow?
To make your entrance at last with your usual flair, sure of your lines?
Nude with Pitcher.makes me want to call the cops on Picasso.
Venus de Milo with Drawers is a killer idea, but I think Restoration Hardware pulls would have been more useful than fur.
110: Drop the family at Hamilton, find a bar for three hours.
Also, that sounds like a cry for help.
The canal has life rings at intervals along the bank, but no apparatus to blow tobacco smoke up the ass of a drowned person to revive them. I question the commitment of the city to human life.
Also, a Taco Bell that serves beer seems compatible with human happiness but not human life.
103: Speaking of which, this just pooped up in my Twitter feed today: The real couple from American Gothic posing next to the picture.
In conclusion, at the same temperature, Chicago is colder than Pittsburgh.
Also, the Chipmunks don't wear pants, but the Chipettes wear skirts that are too brief to cover their genitals if they had genitals.
The Art Institute liveblogging sure took a surprising turn there.
I wish you'd told us you were going there in advance - I went there a dozen times over the last couple years.
Highlights off the top of the head:
- the section with people like Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Favorite painting: Franz Marc's "Bewitched Mill"
- Chinese pottery
- religious art of South America during the colonial period (this was a temporary exhibit, but I think they kept a room dedicated to it)
- the weird hall of neoclassical statuary by US sculptors of roughly a hundred years ago (now there's a movement that didn't last)
- also in the US area, the room with a bunch of small paintings of Hopi elders.
- Peter Blume's "The Rock"
- the new contemporary art area, which is basically a sampler with 1 or 2 things by everybody, but includes almost a whole room of great Cindy Sherman pictures (mixed with unnecessary pictures by that Marlboro/breasts appropriator guy)
- the new armor area
- the giant tapestries by Eduard Vuillard, (making giant tapestries instead of giant paintings: another movement that didn't go anywhere)
- the Toulouse-Lautrec room
- the early Renaissance painting of St. Augustine with a weird bird on his desk, and that whole area of paintings like that
I didn't know I was going until about fifteen minutes before we went in.
Oh, and the room of US folk art, like whirligigs and weathervanes and things carved from cigar boxes. It's hidden in a weird area off the middle of the big staircase.
Anyway, they give you a lot of art for $25.
The Carnegie is only $20, but they have very little art from people you've heard of. If it wasn't for the dinosaurs and taxidermy, it would suck.
the Chipettes wear skirts that are too brief to cover their genitals if they had genitals.
That is true of the live-action movies but not the original show, and the live-action movies are NOT CANON.
Peter Blume's "The Rock"
That's a fucking weird painting.
I saw that. I thought it was Salvador Dali.
126: And what taxidermy it is! That one piece is problematic in at least three excitingly different ways. And it's based on a painting by Delacroix, so it's at least tangentially related to a big-name artist.
NMM to Zell Miller
Zell Miller's wife is still alive, so she could probably finish his term.
129: It's in the American section! Near the giant hideous painting of a door that was used in a Vincent Price movie, I think.
And he took about 5 years full-time to make it, where Dali just churned things out.
Oh, hey, here's some Friday WTFuckery of a more positive kind: On Friday I interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a job that starts on Monday. It's a short-term thing but a good fit for where I am at this point, both literally and metaphorically.
A staff job in the state legislature.
The King Clerical Adviser in the North!
Alaska geography trivia question: Alaska is roughly equally divided into 3 regions which each of which is closest to a different foreign capital (none of which are Washington DC).
138: based on Google Earth: Tokyo, Ottawa and Helsinki?
Close. Reykjavik instead of Helsinki.
I am relying on the work of this guy.
Sounds good!
Tokyo, Ottawa and Reykjavik?
Come on people, congratulations Teo and all, but focus on the topic here: your favorite things in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Good luck Teo.
OT: Is everybody who watches "Adventure Time" either my son or stoned?
148.2 I love "Adventure Time" and I'm neither of those things.
Maybe you should look into marijuana. I've heard good things.
It makes me paranoid. Besides, it's not something you want to get caught with in these here parts.
Thanks, everyone. First day went well.
||
For years on end he held no court audiences to discuss key political events, gave up his studies of the historical and philosophical texts that lay at the heart of Confucian learning, refused to read state papers, and even stopped filling the vacancies that occurred in the upper levels of officialdom.|>
The result was that considerable power accrued to the court eunuchs
The dean of the Michigan State medical school has been jailed. Charges are not specified.
Locking him up or not specifying the charges to a journalist?
Dat be my man Johhny Spence dissing the Wanli emperor.
156: the latter. If he's been locked up, presumably there was a trial, and trials are public events with their records publicly accessible, aren't they?
Remanded without bail? Though that sounds unlikely for a white middle class guy in the US of A.
He hasn't been arraigned yet. That'll happen today, I guess. Just arrested and held in the jail. Not sentenced to jail. From the story I read, it was caught by a reporter reviewing the lockup's logs.
Ah, OK. That makes sense. (Divided-by-common-language: I don't think we'd say "jailed" if we just meant "arrested and held prior to charge and trial". )
Attn ajay, there's a tv show by the name of "The Terror" which looks both excellent and also very much your kind of thing in case you hadn't heard of it yet.
Attn ajay, there's a tv show by the name of "The Terror" which looks both excellent and also very much your kind of thing in case you hadn't heard of it yet.
Apparently it's not coming out in the UK until late April.
Thanks! I had literally just seen a review of that on Vox. It looks rather good; I've read the book it's based on, which is OK and well researched if not a classic.
||
Can anyone recommend a history of the Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45? I'm interested mostly in the military level.
|>
Yes. I recommend you read a history of the Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45.
Thanks Mobes. I knew I could count on you.
John Toland's "The Rising Sun" covers the war. IIRC it is like "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" except about Japan, but of course much of it is about the lead up to the Sino-Japanese war (lots on the rise of Japanese militarism as an independent force, etc.) and the war itself, but then Pearl Harbor happens and the focus shifts. I read it a long time ago but I recall it as being good and full of detail. Not a "scholarly tome," but the size of one.
171: Thanks. That's been on the reading list for a long time anyway.
|| My wife and I are going to be in London Friday the 19th of April to Tuesday the 24th of April, piggybacking off of a work trip she's taking. Any interest in a meetup? We're probably going to be staying somewhere around Covent Garden but are open to anywhere we can get via the tube. No plans yet, so any day's fine but I'm likely to be loopy with jetlag on Friday. My email's in the link. |>
162. The Strampel guy has now been charged.
I guess I hadn't been paying attention enough, but he wasn't just charged with covering up for Nasser. He has his own direct crimes.
175: If I'm reading this correctly, the charges against him have nothing to do with Nassar.
I think, from reading other news sources, that he was also charged with "neglect of duty" for basically ignoring the condition placed on Nasser's ability to see patients.
Oh boy, it sounds like the guy might have been covering up for Nassar without having the first clue what Nassar was doing, just because any investigation might lead to heightened scrutiny in general and Strampel's little peccadillos would be discovered. Now he finds out what Nassar was up to AND they get lumped together. Sounds like one of those psychological horror movies.
173: I will be around but only until the Sunday when I enter my economy class wardrobe en route for Narnia.
I think 178 is probably at least partially right.
"This guy doesn't look some somebody who would commit sexual crimes and believe me, I should know."
Being in the news as the faculty perv who grabs asses at parties and keeps photos of students as masturbation fodder: Bad
Being in the news as the accomplice to the guy who spent decades molesting beloved Olympic champions, betraying those who saw him as their only friend in an otherwise nightmarish and abusive environment: Worse
|| Hey LB, what's this I hear about The Wing being under investigation? Who's in charge and what are they trying to accomplish? |>
I don't even know what The Wing is? More proper nouns?
And on googling, it's this: From The Cut.
Reading the article, it's the NYC Human Rights Commission, not the state where I work, so I wouldn't know anything about it. (I mean, I mostly wouldn't know anyway. The Civil Rights bureau is with us in the Division of Social Justice, but I don't have contact with them beyond the occasional happy hour.)
A single gender social/professional club is obviously going to be questionable under non-discrimination laws, but I don't know details.
What if they let men if on the condition they agreed to be castrated?
My understanding is that the objection is to men, rather than just to testicles. But I could be wrong.
I was just thinking of how Hooters got around ever having to hire men.
I had no idea. Surely there are labor laws that cover that sort of thing.
Labor laws and orange shorts that are too tight.
Well, yeah, I wasn't looking for you to reveal the secrets from your workplace. You're a woman living in NYC, reasonably alert to your surroundings.
It's very good news, though, that with 6 million stories in the naked city, or however many, the discrimination against men by this club bubbles up onto the priority list for the human rights advocates. Racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism etc having been stamped out!
Legally, under the city Human Rights Law, it comes down to whether The Wing is a "public accommodation" (HRL Sec. 8-102(9)). If it has over four hundred members, it's a public accommodation, or if it sells goods or services regularly to non-members. Otherwise, it might be exempt as 'distinctly private'.
193: Eh. Rules are rules, and it's hard to argue that gender discrimination is prohibited by law if you've got a high-profile business advertising explicitly that it discriminates by gender. (And I may be a woman in NYC, but I'm not that kind of woman in NYC. A club that got its membership list by inviting individually selected business leaders and artists? No reason at all I'd have heard of it.)
I wouldn't belong to any club that wouldn't invite me to be a member.
And this story says that the 'founding members' list was 300, which suggests strongly that total membership is over 400. That's a public accommodation, at which point they need to install a men's room and let them join, or shut down. Not a lot of investigation necessary.
Not on topic except I noticed it from other stories at the links above: You can now buy buttons saying "Unqualified Lesbian" from the Nixon* campaign unless you're Anne Heche.
* I want Cynthia Nixon to win just so I can see the name "Nixon" without a first name in headlines again.
I know we hate MRAs and redpillers and Jordan Peterson and everything, but 193 sounds like the criticism of the ACLU for defending unpopular/evil causes. If the organization has had a longstanding apparatus for suing professional networking clubs that bar women, shouldn't they also sue this professional networking club, or else set a bad precedent?
You know she went to my high school? Two years before my big sister, so neither of us remember her. But it makes the prospect of voting for her pleasing. (I mean, I'd vote for a rat off the subway tracks before I voted for that dirtbag Cuomo, but Nixon seems like a positively good option.)
199: Yeah, I'm not sure what Charley's thinking. If it's a straightforward violation of law, which it looks like it is, what's the issue?
200: I assumed you'd be voting for her, but I did not know about the high school. There's only maybe a dozen people from my high school I'd trust with any kind of responsibility, but it was a very small school.
199 It's not the ACLU, it's the government, but that's a fair point. It's just that hugely underfunded bureaucracies operating in an environment where discrimination of all kinds is rampant -- and, with the mess in DC (and Trump Country) getting worse, this is an odd priority.
I don't know the law on this. I will say that I think a women's club and a men's club are very different things, to anyone other than a caveman cave-person robot.
Who says it's a priority? It's just "a thing that NY State is doing". New York is a big place. I'm sure they can do lots of things at once.
Otherwise, why investigate The Wing when racism still exists? Why investigate racism when assault still exists? Why investigate assault when murder still exists? Why waste your time negotiating international standards for air conditioning units when nuclear proliferation exists?
Now I'm picturing John Barrymore being told "This club is for ladies".
Every time I've been to NYC, I've been a witness to at least 100 straight-up violations of law (traffic mostly) every day. We elect leadership to decide how to deal with that. I wonder if the choice to look at this outfit is conscious by someone with a particular agenda, or auto-pilot.
Why waste your time negotiating international standards for air conditioning units when nuclear proliferation exists?
To be fair to the people negotiating international standards for air conditioning units, they probably have no nuclear weapons among the whole lot of them.
179: That'd work for us. I'll make some more noise a week or so beforehand to see if there's any more interest.
As for the women's club, this seems like the sort of thing where discrimination laws having some conception of privilege differentials might be a good thing. Given increased wokeness*, is it possible that they might tend that way in coming decades?
* Noteworthy if only for the pun that one of our commenters is a social justice lawyer.
It's a business that's having admiring magazine pieces written specifically about how it's violating the law. There's no investigatory effort required. If you want to fly under the radar with minor, excusable violations of law, you should probably stay away from reporters.
I will say that I think a women's club and a men's club are very different things, to anyone other than a caveman cave-person robot.
Kind of a robot here, but I get very jumpy about this argument. Largely because of the ammunition it gives the MRA types. Letting a glossy women-only club where you can get a wheatgrass smoothie and a blowout, or whatever the current luxury is, operate in blatant violation of law really makes all the "White men are really the ones oppressed in the tech industry" nonsense more plausible. The benefit from having a convenient place to get my makeup fixed before a night out without icky boys around really does not at all seem worth abandoning the moral high ground on gender non-discrimination.
208: I want the Division to make "Social Justice Warrior" t-shirts so badly, but no one else thinks it's funny.
The article in 197 makes it sound like the membership is very much at the top end of any privilege differential. Maybe the NYC Human Rights Commission should crack down on the Junior League and the Daughters Of The American Revolution too.
"It's a business that's having admiring magazine pieces written specifically about how it's violating the law. There's no investigatory effort required"
But the traffic laws, LB! THE TRAFFIC LAWS.
212 You means the laws enacted to prevent people from getting killed? Yeah no reason to care about those.
209 Ok, yeah, I guess they'll have to figure out a way to comply.
211: Oh my god this is so great. I was thinking that the DAR might get by under an exception noted in the law I linked above -- it doesn't apply to organizations incorporated under the "Benevolent Orders Law", which I figured had some definition of what a Benevolent Order was. But no: it's just a list of the benevolent orders recognized by New York State law.
Some familiar sounding ones, like Masons and Elks, but also
The Home Nest or any subordinate nest of the Order of Owls duly chartered by and instituted according to the general rules and regulations of the Home Nest of the Order of Owls;
A council of the Degree of Pocahontas of the Improved Order of Red Men, duly chartered by and instituted according to the general rules and regulations of The Great Council of New York State, Degree of Pocahontas of the Improved Order of Red Men.
A county or department organization of Le Boutique des Huit Chapeaux et Quarante Femmes, duly chartered according to the regulations of that organization.
And lots more.
213: Seriously, installing a men's room, letting men join if they want, and keeping all the advertising barring 'no men allowed' exactly the same would probably be 99% effective at keeping men from joining.
If the men's room had a trough urinal, it wouldn't even cost much.
214 The best part of that is the care with which they're designated the correct nouns for the subdivisions of each organization.
There are Knights Templar in New York?
They only torture-murdered the French ones.
Breaking news: The Wing has legally reorganized to claim status as the Red Hook branch of Le Boutique des Huit Chapeaux et Quarante Femmes. The huit chapeaux will be beanies.
I was in the Junior League Auxiliary.
Who knew? I mean, there might not be. I never looked at this law before, but I worked on a case challenging the ban on mixed martial arts, and the statute was kind of like this one. It was structured as "Fighting is illegal under the penal code, except if it's boxing as regulated by the boxing commission, or some particular martial art as regulated by a martial arts organization on this list: World Karate Association and so on". Except that almost all the organizations on the list no longer existed, and from what I was told lots of them hadn't even when the law was passed, which wasn't that long ago.
If you can't gender segregate the mixed martial arts class, you'd have mixed mixed-martial arts.
But how do the other thirty-two women cover their heads?
If you drew some pictures of unsegregated MMA classes, they'd be mixed mixed-martial arts arts.
I'd never heard of the 8 and 40 or 40 and 8, so it was worth finding out it has to do with the boxcars in use by the French railroad in 1917. I'm sure this comes back to the Templars somehow. The Wing should join the Templars, though.
The Wing should, for obvious reasons, join the Polish Hussars.
The D.A.R. were on my mind because last night was my annual night to suddenly get interested in genealogy and poke around on the internet discovering ancestors, and I discovered one (who I'm sure one of my aunts already knew about) who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Unfortunately the main anecdote available about him on the internet is about an incident where one of his slaves was shot publicly for no reason by one of his Revolutionary War buddies who had reportedly descended into madness. At least the crazed acquaintance was jailed and prosecuted (then died before trial).
Why can't these be fun anecdotes I can post on Facebook?
You can join the SAR, then, and tell the story to the folks there.
My family doesn't go back to D.A.R. The best we can do is G.A.R.
re: 173
I think I'll be around some of that period.
I want the Division to make "Social Justice Warrior" t-shirts so badly, but no one else thinks it's funny.
They're wrong. SJW was my first thought when I read the name of your division. T-shirts would be awesome.
OT: Twenty-five years haven't made me like Roseanne any better.
I can only stand John Goodman and the dark-haired daughter. And I think I'm projecting from The Big Lebowski when I think about Goodman.
I also can't stand White Russians. You should only mix diary products with liquor at Christmas.
Everything horrible from my childhood is coming back (senile Republicans, Roseanne, Full House, etc.).
Russians trying to destroy everything....
Anyway, it looks like I'm going to end the 2010s the same way I ended the 80s, drinking too much and avoiding white people.
240 seems like a decent enough life strategy. You should give it some fancy name and monetize it!
I just need a therapist to sign off on the plan.
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So, imagine you Quantum Leapt back to this day in 1998, 20 long years ago. And you walked by a newsstand and saw the cover story of "The Atlantic" or maybe one of the secondary ones on the cover of "Harper's" titled "Donald Trump and the Party of Morality" -- what would it be about?
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An alliance with Republicans to suppress Reservation casinos in New York?
Kind of a robot here, but I get very jumpy about this argument. Largely because of the ammunition it gives the MRA types.
The structure of this argument is suspiciously like, "Why can't I use the n-word when the black folks do it all the time." And it's true that the rappers, in some sense, are giving ammunition to the racists.
But different things are different. (I know I'm not stating some profound truth that other people in this thread don't recognize. When Colbert says "I don't even see race, everybody here gets the joke.)
So okay. Maybe you have to crack down on The Wing in the interest of false consistency. But still, The Wing is not the same thing as a men-only New York club.
I also can't stand White Russians.
What are you, some kind of communist?
240 seems like a decent enough life strategy. You should give it some fancy name and monetize it!
There is some prior art; I think it's basically what Kurtz did.
-- "When you find Moby, infiltrate his ecletic online magazine by whatever means available and terminate his commenting privileges."
-- "Terminate?"
-- "IYKWIM. AITYD."
FOR HATE'S SAKE, GET YOUR PARALLELS STRAIGHT.
KURTZ IS THE MANIAC, NOT THE WHALE!
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Good friend and cousin in law killed by a truck last night aged around 45. Leaves wife and college age daughter.
Why can't some of the bastards get killed if somebody has to?
|>
235: Did the show start last night?
Yesterday I saw and responded to a tweet of hers (subsequently deleted) where she responded "NAZI SALUTE" to a video of David Hogg's speech witht he soundtrack replaced with Hitler.
I liked Roseanne a lot back in the day. I guess Moby's judgment is just superior to mine.
I do agree about Full House and White Russians.
Possibly on topic: The best thing about this story isn't the pitcher (bowler?) shoving the evidence into his pants on camera. The best thing is that the disgraced captain of the Australian team playing in South Africa managed to find and wear a Boston Red Sox hat for his perp walk.
Maybe you have to crack down on The Wing in the interest of false consistency. But still, The Wing is not the same thing as a men-only New York club.
Oy. I really, really like having objective laws where it's workable at all: if you're going to prohibit discrimination by gender, do it across the board. I'd agree that The Wing looks super harmless, and honestly I bet it could be run as effectively women-only just by keeping the advertising femme. But I want an argument for high-profile, commercial, advertised law-breaking to be better than 'this thing is harmless' and into 'this thing, with the lawbreaking, is necessary,' which a glossy club for rich women isn't. There has to be some discretion in the system, but when you introduce it and rely on it when it's not necessary, you're usually going to enable its use in the service of power.
I thought it was supposed to be "Oyez".
Anyway, I assume that out of pure spite a bunch of sexists went around using the laws against gender discrimination to shut down women-only institutions that in no way were damaging them or society. I don't think it reflects well on them, but I don't know how you stop it. Which is to say 261 is right.
FT article about the Wing last year, depicting it as very much a political organisation - not from the start, but that's how it ended up after November 2016. Also making it clear that it's a profit-making enterprise, and one which has raised a shitload of venture capital, so maybe "club" is the wrong way to describe it?
Gelman is self-aware enough to admit that for all the feminist idealism of its members this is also a moneymaking venture. "It's . . . challenging. Like any other male-owned co-working space, we're similarly rooted in capitalism."
https://www.ft.com/content/4438cbda-4ab8-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791d43
263: All you have to do is put in a men's room -- there really aren't a lot of public accommodations that need to be single-sex by rule, as opposed to focused on serving the wants and preferences of women, which is still a fine thing to do. There are a million Drybars in New York where you can stop in to get your hair professionally blowdried before a night out. I'm sure they're willing to serve men, but I'm also sure that it doesn't come up very often at all.
Or maybe with a perm, you don't need to blowdry to get that look?
I thought it was supposed to be "Oyez".
Or, regionally, "Oyinz".
I think it might just be "Hear yinz". I don't recall from the one time I was in a local court (as a potential juror).
Every so often I wonder if a professional with a blowdrier would be likely to make anything happen to my hair that would make me happy. And then I stop wondering.
My company's old offices were taken over by a women-oriented coworking space that had trouble paying the bills. The founder made purchases and hires assuming she'd get another wave of funding that didn't come through, leading to lawsuits against her in multiple states. I think they accepted all genders, but their advertisement and social-media presence was very femme and I never saw any pictures of men in their space.
I had no idea blowdrying, as a separate thing apart from cut/style, was a thing.
I feel like I've talked about this before. Massachusetts had a gadfly-type lawyer who sued the Healthworks chain of women's gyms on gender discrimination/public accommodation grounds and won; the state legislature reacted by carving out an exception for gyms (1998 or so). This popped up on my radar because of the advertising for the ride-sharing service Safr, which seems like it's right on the edge of gender discrimination issues in employment and accommodation.
I'm going to start a startup re-inserting the missing vowels in brand names. We'll start with a Chrome extension and work our way up to augmented reality.
Female taxi drivers should definitely join the Templars.
276: emvowelere
(first extra 'e' is free as in beere)
The premium version will re-insert sentence case.
Case Emvowelere, a division of Naming, Inc.
275: That seems like the right way to do it -- general laws, evenhandedly applied, against discrimination, and specific legislated exceptions where the arguments in favor are persuasive enough that the legislature will go for it.
What if your legislature is full of assholes?
Just, you know, hypothetically.
I just watched Spaceballs for the first time in 30 years. Everyone here is an asshole!
Asshole - like jerk - seems to have drifted in meaning over the years. They use it to refer to the guy who can't aim because he's cross-eyed (but not malevolent.) I think by 1987 that was a dated usage.
What do they call the guy who used "1234" as the combination on his luggage?
Good question. I'll find out over the next 500 viewings.
I think it was "moron", but it might have been asshole.
The movie "The Jerk" is truly bizarre these days. Using "jerk" to mean a good-hearted ignoramus must have been obsolete no more than 5 years after it came out. Meanwhile such films as "Mean Streets" 40 years ago used "douchebag" in the same way we use it today.
Asshole - like jerk - seems to have drifted in meaning over the years.
Speaking of swear words I was just reading this review which was surprisingly fascinating:
The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people's experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, 'demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most murders'.
...
There was compelling proof that Edith Swan was the author of these letters, even the ones she received. The police searched the house where she lived with her parents and two of her brothers and found a piece of blotting paper which contained clear traces of some of the letters. Swan protested that the blotting paper had been found by her father in the washing house. A still more devastating piece of evidence was that Swan had been seen by a policewoman throwing one of the letters into the garden her family shared with their neighbours. Gladys Moss, the policewoman, was keeping watch on Swan through a slit in a garden shed when she saw her throw a folded piece of buff-coloured paper in the direction of the Mays' house. The paper was addressed to 'fucking old whore May, 49, Western Rd, Local'.
As in the 1923 trial, the judge simply refused to accept the evidence of Swan's guilt. Sir Clement Bailhache was not convinced by Moss's testimony because it conflicted with what his eyes told him: that Edith Swan was the kind of Englishwoman who was incapable of swearing. 'If I were on the jury, I would not convict,' Bailhache announced. The jury followed his guidance.
...
As well as being obscene, the libels were also 'decidedly strange', as Hilliard remarks. This was swearing as a foreign language by someone who had the vocab but was not sure of how to fit the words together. The phrases 'poxy ass' and 'foxy ass' often pop up in the libels. The 'foxy' in question did not mean 'sassy', Hilliard points out, but decaying like a foxed book. The phrase 'piss country whore', a favourite in Edith's letters, is not one that Hilliard can trace to any known usage. He wonders whether she perhaps misheard the phrase 'piss-factory', meaning a pub. Often, she piles up an excess of adjectives for effect: 'bloody flaming fucking piss country', where 'bloody country' on its own would do.
Correction: "Mean Streets" was 45 years ago. Wow!
292.last No, "bloody flaming fucking piss country" is exactly what is called for.
I was taken to watch spaceballs by my then small son when it came out. I had then never seen a star wars film. Spaceballs did not make very much sense to me.
Redoubled, obviously ...
I am in principle around for Dalriata, and I guess Ume too. But we should get closer to the time. It might be fun to try a meetup on a Saturday. Has there ever been one?
Chris, I'm so sorry. Just now reading backwards.
292: I want to read that book now, but it's not at the library and $30 on Kindle.
303: If you do, tell me if Rowling ripped it off in The Casual Vacancy.
I totally tried to read The Casual Vacancy, but failed. Maybe I should try again as when I failed, my ability to concentrate was still rebounding from the small-screaming-child years.
It's great! Vicious, poisonous, bilious, hilarious.
My son is now reading "The Wizard of Earthsea." He seems to find it gripping.
It is gripping. Did you finish Atuan?
Yay! I love those books so much.
It's the best, for my money.
300: I should be OK for that Saturday.
304/5: I enjoyed The Casual Vacancy, but at the same time the remorselessness with which she exposes the hypocrisies and embarrassments and in some case the downright evils of all the characters (only letting off some of the teenagers a bit more lightly) left a sour taste. She must really have hated the town where she grew up.
300/314: Great. I'll bring it up again a week or so before then, or feel free to email me if you all would rather coordinate that way (email in sig).
292: Thanks, Nick! That review was great! I would have mixed feelings about it if I was the author of the book - it hardly seems necessary to read the book after reading that review.
I think that's the last Narnia book.
Speaking of sex discrimination (which we were, above), the local Tilted Kilt is closing. I'm going to assume it's because of a sudden surge in good taste.
Don't we just blame millennials for this sort of thing?
Unlike Gen X, they can't be aroused by somebody wearing plaid?
Thanks, Nick! That review was great! I would have mixed feelings about it if I was the author of the book - it hardly seems necessary to read the book after reading that review.
Yay. I assume that the sort of person writing local microhistory isn't depending on book sales for income and is just happy to have people engaging with the work.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for joy of people engaging with the work."
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Conditioned perhaps by their state's history of feverish speculative venture, Florida investors eyed this reservoir and formed the short-lived Antarctic Colony Associates in the early 1950s to prospect a gilded path in Antarctica.|>
Does the "Pagford" in The Casual Vacancy have something to do with the Pagford where Tallboys is in Sayers' books? If yes, is it the kind of thing I should avoid googling to avoid spoilers?
They are also the only two authors I'm aware of to ever name any character "Hermione," so it's probably just a hat tip.
It's not a murder mystery, no. Or any kind of mystery AFAICR.
It's not? I think I have it confused with one of the "Robert Galbraith" books.
So, there's a guy who dropped dead, but nobody seems to regard it as mysterious.
Honestly, some of these people probably wouldn't complain if they were murdered.
I would be very keen to know the source of 326.
334: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137507860
(That's as good as it gets, unfortunately.)
Thanks. Looks interesting but not $70 worth of interesting.
But I still want to read it because now I know that my next short story is going to be about highly leveraged Florida land speculators who decide to get out of their financial troubles by inflating a land bubble in Antarctica.
There's no detail on it. I'll try to scratch up the references if you want.
I read The Casual Vacancy when it first came out. I found it fascinating as a skewering of middle-class hypocrisy towards the poor, without the racial dynamics such a novel would almost certainly have if set in the US. Rowling's sympathies are clearly on the side of the poor, although she does get a little heavy-handed at a couple of points (like the scene where one guy goes off on how Methadone clinics for the poor just encourage irresponsibility, a few minutes after he was boasting about beating a drunk driving rap). She does a good job of showing how precarious her main protagonist's life is, by showing how vulnerable she is to the consequences of what is essentially a single random event in the first chapter.
Often, she piles up an excess of adjectives for effect: 'bloody flaming fucking piss country', where 'bloody country' on its own would do.
This just sounds like a British person swearing. The reviewer has fallen prey to the same prejudice they are attacking here:
As in the 1923 trial, the judge simply refused to accept the evidence of Swan's guilt. Sir Clement Bailhache was not convinced by Moss's testimony because it conflicted with what his eyes told him: that Edith Swan was the kind of Englishwoman who was incapable of swearing. 'If I were on the jury, I would not convict,' Bailhache announced. The jury followed his guidance.
This just sounds like a British person swearing
In my experience this is universal. Swearing is all about an "excess of adjectives for effect".
This just sounds like a British person swearing. The reviewer has fallen prey to the same prejudice they are attacking . . .
The reviewer is British, the publication (and editors) are British, the author of the book is quoted as calling the usage "decidedly strange."
The long phrase quoted in the paragraph that I excerpted makes sense by itself, but the review also gives a longer quote which did seem odd to me (though that might be just due to differences in era).
You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor.
344: I don't have a serious disagreement with the reviewer, but that one sentence did seem off to me. Of course, you could just say "bloody" and leave out the rest of the obscenities, but piling on obscenities is pretty much the whole point.
Maybe it sounds like a British person swearing out loud, but writing a private note?
Of course, you could just say "bloody" and leave out the rest of the obscenities, but piling on obscenities is pretty much the whole point.
I don't have a strong opinion. I agree that piling on obscenities can be the point. I also think part of what's odd about the excerpt is the juxtaposition of the list of adjectives with the flat "drain" and "fish box". From a style point of view I'd think that once you've started to build up elaborate constructions the following sentence should have some of that florid energy. De gustibus . . .
I would add, for people who didn't click through to the review, that the letter in response is great (speaking of British usage).
Bee Wilson's mention of soldiers' routine use of the word 'fucking' reminds me of my training days in the Royal Engineers (LRB, 8 February). 'Do you know why you're learning the slow march, you little bar-stards?' the sergeant major shouted at us across the parade ground. 'No, sir,' we shouted back in unison.
'It's RESPEK FOR THE FUCKING DEAD!' he bellowed.
I'm picturing the musical output of a British jam band from the late 60s, the Fucking Dead.