Mossy Character writes: Nine English African traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

I learned about this in the course of the Black Panther thread but didn't find a good hook to hang it on.

The bold, bright fabrics associated with West and Central Africa, known as pagne, are in fact something of a newcomer to the region. Based on Indonesian batik techniques, their mass production was perfected by the Dutch and British in the colonial era. From the 1870s, the fabrics were sold on African markets via local female distributors, who also passed back vital market and design information. A century later, Chinese manufacturers arrived on the scene, mimicking the European pagnes.

Heebie's take: I am really curious about what the designs being revived from the 1870s look like.

Also I find it stupidly hard to keep track of which sides of continents are the east and west sides, on different parts of the globe. I keep having to rederive it from my mental map, because my intuition is roughly "east is the near side and west is far away" which is not a good heuristic.

I hope that we, as a nation, can pull off this maneuver, even if not with such elan.

Boystown video of the day. pic.twitter.com/88kdiEA6Yj

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) June 23, 2019

Snarkout writes:

I know I am being rather a bore about this case; but the stakes are high, and the Fifth Circuit panel's offense is rank. The decision was not simply lawless, but insolently so."

The moral of this story, of course, is that the real threat to freedom of speech is undergraduates offended by racism and homophobia.

Heebie's take: The gist:

The pace of legal news in the third year of the Trump administration is dizzying; sometimes it seems as if our legal system is shaking itself to pieces, like a car driven too fast too long. So you can be forgiven if you missed two news developments earlier this month: first, a decision by a federal district court in California to dismiss federal indictments against four members of the neofascist Rise Above Movement (RAM), and, second, a petition for rehearing of a decision upholding a federal civil suit in Louisiana against DeRay Mckesson, one of the organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement.

There is no universe in which both of these decisions are correct. The California judgment was right; the Louisiana decision was grievously, horribly, scandalously wrong.

As long as we're discussing the unraveling of the court system, Jennifer Bendery has been pretty good about documenting Senate confirmations of federal court judges over the past two years, and it is depressing.