Larry Colburn died a week ago. He was the last survivor of the crew that intervened to stop the massacre at My Lai.

Mr. Colburn was the last surviving member of a three-man helicopter crew that was assigned to hover over My Lai on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, to identify enemy positions by drawing Vietcong fire.

Instead, the men encountered an eerie quiet and a macabre landscape of dead, wounded and weaponless women and children as a platoon of American soldiers, ostensibly hunting elusive Vietcong guerrillas, marauded among defenseless noncombatants.

They dropped smoke flares to mark the wounded so that the soldiers on the ground could find and help them; when they came back around they found all … Read the rest

Have the cats of Istanbul.

Hundreds of thousands of Turkish cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they’ve wandered in and out of people’s lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich. Claiming no owners, the cats of Istanbul live between two worlds, neither wild nor tame –and they bring joy and purpose to those people they choose to adopt. In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to the people, allowing them to reflect on their lives in ways nothing else could.

Critics and internet cats agree – this cat documentary will charm its way into your heart and home as you fall in love with the cats in Istanbul.

William Easterly also (i.e. like me) has disdain for this habit of making stupid generalizations about massive geographical “groups” – groups in scare quotes because they’re not the groups the generalizers say they are. “Coastal elites” versus “flyover country” – how meaningless can you get?

I was born in West Virginia and spent all of 10 days there as an infant before my family moved to Ohio.  Perhaps that’s a license for me to say why Appalachians are poor, drink too much, and voted for Donald Trump. The best-selling and widely praised “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by J.D. Vance, proceeds along those lines. But I shouldn’t single out that book: Sloppy

And then there’s Mark Lilla’s piece from November 28.

He starts by saying the US is diverse, without saying what he means by “diverse.”

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

Is that right? So it’s more “unifying” to revert to the … Read the rest

So let’s read those two “down with identity politics” pieces written by people who don’t need “identity politics.”

First Kristof May 7.

WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

That’s a silly observation. It’s a category mistake. Progressives think women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims and so on shouldn’t be systematically excluded from various societal goods simply on the basis of who they are. That … Read the rest

A Nature editorial urges us to do the impossible – ” fight discrimination in all its forms” while not “excluding conservative voices from debate.”

How possible or impossible that is of course depends on what is meant by “excluding from debate.” That activity tends to be used in different senses depending on where the user is in the paragraph. It tends to mean one thing in its first appearance and another thing in the next sentence and a third in the one after that. Or, in other words, it tends to be deployed as a nice respectable goal in airy generalizations, without much effort to explain how it actually works.

Nature was prompted by a couple of Times think pieces, … Read the rest

A remark said to be by Hitler in Mein Kampf – although, oddly, when I look it up on Google I find it quoted (and attributed to Hitler in Mein Kampf) in a wide array of books but not in MK itself. I would think normally the original source would be the first result. So this is said to be Hitler:

The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that
in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new
movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of
being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater
community, something that has a strengthening and encour-
aging effect on most people.

Today in Parliament:

MPs have voted to pass a bill to improve domestic violence support services and provision in the UK.

The bill has now passed its second reading and will be sent to committee for further consideration, before it can receive a third reading by MPs and then become law.

But there was opposition. Yes, really: actual opposition to a bill to improve domestic violence support services.

During the vote in parliament earlier today, anti-feminism MP Philip Davies attempted to block the bill by speaking for over an hour against it. Campaigners said that while he spoke, survivors of domestic violence who were present in the gallery above the chamber, stood up and turned their backs in protest.

Here’s a striking fact:

The 17 people who US president-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.

Affluence of this magnitude in a US presidential cabinet is unprecedented.

Well that’ll show the coastal elites in their bubble a thing or two.… Read the rest

The Hill reports that Ivanka Trump is going to have an office in the White House that’s usually kept for “the First Lady.” Julia Ioffe, a political journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and until yesterday wrote for Politico, tweeted about the hint of skeeviness in the story:

Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?

Crude, but then it’s impossible to write honestly about Trump without crudity. Trump himself oozes crude from every pore, and that means that putting his words and actions into more genteel language is likely to misrepresent them. He is crude, he is a pig, he does see the world in such contemptuous and libidinous terms. He did, after … Read the rest

The bubble talks back.

This column is for Bernard Gibson, a good man from the state of Indiana. Late last month, NPR went out to Vigo County there to explain why it flipped from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Gibson was one of those interviewed, and here is what he said: “These are real people here. These are not New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. You know, these are real people that live every day from hand to hand, just have to work to make a living and everything else.”

Oh.

Richard Cohen adduces some facts about his background – not privileged – and says life in the bubble wasn’t just handed to … Read the rest

It wasn’t just the presidential election that Russia hacked. It wasn’t just the Democratic candidate for president that Russia sabotaged. It was also Democratic candidates for Congress. We’re in for a reactionary shitstorm thanks to Russian hacking.

In south Florida for instance

a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.

“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan