Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Right?

Also, if god is so great, why couldn’t god have delivered a decent morality then? Why is all this nervous updating necessary? Hmmmmmm?

We know why. Plato (or Socrates, or both) knew why. It’s obvious why.

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Jeb Bush’s brother George gave a talk in New York this morning rebuking the many flaws of Donald Trump without actually saying he was talking about Donald Trump.

It’s funny about George. He’s the pretend folksy guy, and Trump is the real thing. George is from the upper crust, and Trump is from Queens. George fakes a Texas drawl, and Trump is stuck with a Queens snarl. Both grew up rich; both profited from a big boost from their daddies.

Former President George W. Bush never mentioned his name but delivered what sounded like a sustained rebuke to President Trump on Thursday, decrying nationalism, protectionism and the coarsening of public debate while calling for a robust response to Russian interference in American democracy.

In a speech in New York, Mr. Bush defended free trade, globalization and immigration even as Mr. Trump seeks to raise barriers to international commerce and newcomers from overseas. He condemned the “casual cruelty” he sees in public discourse and denounced white supremacy two months after Mr. Trump suggested that “both sides” were to blame at a neo-Nazi rally that turned violent in Virginia.

Bush and his friends prefer a more genteel form of conservatism, that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer but is polite about it. I have to admit that so do I; probably so do most of us.

His speech on Thursday seemed a clear rejoinder to Mr. Trump in various ways. Asked by a reporter as he left the hall whether his message would be heard in the White House, Mr. Bush smiled, nodded slightly and said, “I think it will.”

The Bush family has never been fond of Mr. Trump, who beat former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida for the Republican presidential nomination last year. Neither the former president nor his father, former President George Bush, voted for Mr. Trump last November. But advisers said the younger Mr. Bush has been deeply troubled by the state of the national debate under a president who routinely demonizes his adversaries on Twitter.

“Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry and compromises the moral education of children,” Mr. Bush said in his speech. “The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”

Mr. Bush, who issued a statement with his father condemning white supremacists after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in August, returned to the theme. “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed,” he said.

Well, that depends which American creed we’re talking about. For centuries of course white supremacy in the most literal form imaginable was at the core of the American creed.

But still. What he said is welcome.

Also interesting: Rice and Albright explained that diplomacy is not some frivolous luxury.

The conference also featured a panel with two former secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine K. Albright, joining Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Ms. Rice, who served under Mr. Bush, and Ms. Albright, who served under President Bill Clinton, seemed to gently coach Ms. Haley, urging the Trump administration to rethink its cuts to the State Department budget and its approach to the United Nations, to protect rather than attack the news media and to make a stronger response to Russian meddling in last year’s election.

Ms. Albright said the disparity between the Pentagon and State Department budgets was “crazy” and deprived the president of necessary resources. “We do not have a lot of tools,” she said. “It is necessary to have a functioning diplomatic service.”

Ms. Haley said the president’s budget proposal to slash the State Department budget by one-third was not meant to be enacted in its original form. “It was just his conversation point,” she said. “He was starting a conversation.”

Oh stop that. Pouring contempt on the value of diplomacy is not “starting a conversation.”

There was a protest march against al Shabaab in Mogadishu yesterday.

Thousands of Somalis have demonstrated against those behind the bombing that killed more than 300 people at the weekend, defying police who opened fire to keep them away from the site of the attack.

Wearing red headbands, the crowd of mostly young men and women marched through Mogadishu amid tight security. They answered a call to unity by the mayor, Thabit Abdi, who said: “We must liberate this city, which is awash with graves.”

You know what most of the victims of Islamist violence are? Muslim.

The attack in the heart of Mogadishu on Saturday has been blamed on al-Shabaab, the local violent Islamist group, and was one of the most lethal terrorist operations anywhere in the world in recent years.

The Somali capital has suffered scores of bombings over recent years but not on this scale.

“We are demonstrating against the terrorists that massacred our people. We entered the road by force,” said Halima Abdullahi, who lost six of her relatives in the attacks.

There were two trucks involved in the attack. The other one, a minivan, was detained by security before the explosion and the driver has been talking to the police.

Officials described the driver as a veteran militant who had been involved in previous attacks in Mogadishu, including one on the Jazeera hotel in 2012 in which eight people died.

He has been cooperating with the investigation. Officials said the man was proud of what he had done. “He says it is for jihad,” one said.

Killing more than 300 people, most of them adherents of the same religion, is “for jihad.” The ways of god are mysterious.

John Nichols at The Nation hints that Jeff Sessions may be less than fully honest.

Jeff Sessions is a liar.

Strongly hints.

As President Trump’s nominee to serve as attorney general of the United States, the veteran senator from Alabama and early supporter of Trump’s presidential bid was asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee if he had met with Russian officials during the course of the 2016 campaign. He claimed that he had not—in response to a written question from the senior Democrat on the Committee, Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, and then under questioning from Minnesota Senator Al Franken.

Those were lies.

Well maybe so, but he gets very cross when Al Franken asks him about them.

And the Republicans of course shrugged and confirmed him anyway. A perjured Attorney General; what could go wrong?

After Sessions took charge of the Department of Justice, it was revealed that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the course of the campaign; that he had, in fact, met more than once with the ambassador.

Sessions was outed as a liar. Because he had lied to senators during the course of the confirmation process, he was accused of perjuring himself. There were calls for his resignation.

Instead he recused himself from the Russia investigation. Oh that’s fine then – having a perjured AG is no problem at all.

He should have been thrown out after Trump fired Comey, but he wasn’t. Committed racists like him are worth gold.

Only on Wednesday did the attorney general finally face an accountability moment with the Judiciary Committee. Leahy asked about the questionnaire, which specifically inquired about whether Sessions had contact with anyone connected to the Russian government. “You answered emphatically, no,” said Leahy. “You answered no, you concealed your own contact with Russian officials at a time when such contacts were of great interest to the committee.”

Sessions is pissed off.

Showing no sign of remorse, let alone respect for the Senate, Sessions concluded that the questions he was asked on Wednesday were “totally unfair to me.”

That was another lie. As a former member of the Judiciary Committee, Sessions well understands that there is nothing unfair about asking an official to explain his wrongdoing. What is unfair is that Sessions is being allowed to remain in a position that he obtained after lying to the United States Senate.

Jeff Sessions has proven himself to be unfit for office. He has, with deceptive responses to questions from senators, and with his involvement in the Comey firing, committed what the founders understood as “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He should now be held to account, using the tool that the Constitution affords members of Congress to impose accountability on officials who lie in official settings: impeachment.

But they’re Republicans, so they won’t.

I didn’t realize the policing of Young Adult fiction was a thing until I read about the Kirkus fubar. It’s a thing.

The Black Witch, a debut young-adult fantasy novel by Laurie Forest, was still seven weeks from its May 1 publication date, but positive buzz was already building, with early reviews calling it “an intoxicating tale of rebellion and star-crossed romance,” “a massive page-turner that leaves readers longing for more,” and “an uncompromising condemnation of prejudice and injustice.”

The hype train was derailed in mid-March, however, by Shauna Sinyard, a bookstore employee and blogger who writes primarily about YA and had a different take: “The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read,” she wrote in a nearly 9,000-word review that blasted the novel as an end-to-end mess of unadulterated bigotry. “It was ultimately written for white people. It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.”

The Black Witch centers on a girl named Elloren who has been raised in a stratified society where other races (including selkies, fae, wolfmen, etc.) are considered inferior at best and enemies at worst. But when she goes off to college, she begins to question her beliefs, an ideological transformation she’s still working on when she joins with the rebellion in the last of the novel’s 600 pages. (It’s the first of a series; one hopes that Elloren will be more woke in book two.)

It was this premise that led Sinyard to slam The Black Witch as “racist, ableist, homophobic, and … written with no marginalized people in mind,” in a review that consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book’s racist characters saying or doing racist things. Here’s a representative excerpt, an offending sentence juxtaposed with Sinyard’s commentary:

“pg. 163. The Kelts are not a pure race like us. They’re more accepting of intermarriage, and because of this, they’re hopelessly mixed.”

 

Yes, you just read that with your own two eyes. This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book.

Erm…I guess Sinyard is unfamiliar with how fiction works, which includes the convention that some characters may say things that the writer of the fiction doesn’t agree with, as for instance when there are Villains or Flawed People or Caricatures…like, say, Iago, or the Murdstones, or Mr Collins, or the Duke and the Dauphin. If you’re writing a fiction about a stratified society then you’re likely to have some characters saying the kind of thing one learns to say in a stratified society.

In a tweet that would be retweeted nearly 500 times, Sinyard asked people to spread the word about The Black Witch by sharing her review — a clarion call for YA Twitter, which regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading. And while not every callout escalates into a full-scale dragging, in the case of The Black Witch — a book by a newcomer with a minimal presence online — the backlash was immediate and intense.

Based almost solely on Sinyard’s opinion, the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release. Its publisher, Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book. The Black Witch’s Goodreads rating dropped to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it. Twitter threadsdamningthe novelmadethe rounds, while a Tumblr post instructing users to “be an ally” and signal boost the outrage racked up nearly 6,000 notes. Sinyard kept a running tally of her review’s circulation; “11,714 views on my review of THE BLACK WITCH and .@HarlequinTEEN and .@laurieannforest have not commented,” she tweeted. (That number eventually swelled to 20,000.)

Oh, man. That’s disgusting.

Positive buzz all but died off, as community members began confrontingThe Black Witch’s supporters, demanding to know why they insisted on reading a racist book. When Kirkus gave the novel a glowing starred review, dozens of commenters demanded a retraction; the uproar was so intense that Kirkus ran a follow-up essay by editor Vicky Smith on the difference between representation and endorsement: “The simple fact that a book contains repugnant ideas is not in itself, in my opinion, a reason to condemn it,” Smith wrote. “Literature has a long history as a place to confront our ugliness, and its role in provoking both thought and change in thought is a critical one.”

Ya think?

But a growing number of critics say the draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”

Many members of YA Book Twitter have become culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations. The result is a jumble of dogpiling and dragging, subtweeting and screenshotting, vote-brigading and flagging wars, with accusations of white supremacy on one side and charges of thought-policing moral authoritarianism on the other.

Representatives of both factions say they’ve received threats or had to shut down their accounts owing to harassment, and all expressed fear of being targeted by influential community members — even when they were ostensibly on the same side.

I’m sure the result will be fewer but better books.

[I]t’s worth noting that my attempts to report this piece were met with intense pushback. Sinyard politely declined my request for an interview in what seemed like a routine exchange, but then announced on Twitter that our interaction had “scared” her, leading to backlash from community members who insisted that the as-yet-unwritten story would endanger her life. Rumors quickly spread that I had threatened or harassed Sinyard; several influential authors instructed their followers not to speak to me; and one librarian and member of the Newbery Award committee tweeted at Vulture nearly a dozen times accusing them of enabling “a washed-up YA author” engaged in “a personalized crusade” against the entire publishing community (disclosure: while freelance culture writing makes up the bulk of my work, I published a pair of young adult novels in 2012 and 2014.) With one exception, all my sources insisted on anonymity, citing fear of professional damage and abuse.

None of this comes as a surprise to the folks concerned by the current state of the discourse, who describe being harassed for dissenting from or even questioning the community’s dynamics. One prominent children’s-book agent told me, “None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted. But if children’s-book publishing is no longer allowed to feature an unlikable character, who grows as a person over the course of the story, then we’re going to have a pretty boring business.”

Boring and thought-killing.

Yes, North Korea, yes, Iran, yes, Yellowstone and global warming and the toxic gas emanating from the White House – but also antibiotic resistance.

England’s chief medical officer has warned of a “post-antibiotic apocalypse” as she issued a call to action urging global leaders to address the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.

Professor Dame Sally Davies said that if antibiotics lose their effectiveness it will spell “the end of modern medicine”.

Without the drugs used to fight infections, common medical interventions such as caesarean sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements would become incredibly “risky”, she said.

And transplant medicine would be a “thing of the past”, she added.

It will be the way it was before penicillin, when an ordinary bacterial disease could kill you at any time.

Health experts have previously warned that resistance to antimicrobial drugs could cause a bigger threat to mankind than cancer.

In recent years, the UK has led a drive to raise global awareness of the threat posed to modern medicine by antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Around 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria.

If no action is taken, it has been estimated that drug-resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

Dress warmly, get enough sleep, cook chicken thoroughly.

Being a journalist who investigates corruption is one of the more dangerous professions. Daphne Caruana Galizia is one who has been silenced.

The car bombing that killed investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia has left Malta in shock, alarmed that organised crime and political vendettas may have spiralled out of control.

“There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in her last blog post, published shortly before her car exploded.

Caruana Galizia, 53, died near her home in Bidnija, a village in northern Malta.

She had relentlessly accused various Maltese politicians and other officials of corruption in her popular Running Commentary blog, and had been sued several times.

Now she won’t be doing that any more.

She was seen as one of Malta’s most influential writers, commented Herman Grech, Times of Malta online editor.

About 3,000 people honoured her in a candle-lit vigil in Sliema, near the capital Valletta, the night after she died.

The night after she was killed.

In his condemnation of the murder a German Green MEP, Sven Giegold, said“such incidents bring to mind Putin’s Russia, not the European Union”.

Her son Matthew, himself an investigative reporter, castigated the police on Facebook, accusing the authorities of negligence for failing to prevent the “assassination”.

He called Malta “a mafia state” where “a culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government”.

He described rushing to the scene and finding “my mother’s body parts all around me”.

Yet he’s not silent.

The culture police strike again.

When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.

We can tell what’s coming. There’s a But.

None of this, as it turns out, was enough to protect American Heart from becoming the subject of the latest skirmish in the increasingly contentious battle over representation and diversity in the world of YA literature. American Heart won’t be published until January, but it has already attracted the ire of the fierce group of online YA readers that journalist Kat Rosenfield has referred to as “culture cops.”

And that was before the starred review.

The backlash escalated last week, when Kirkus Reviews gave American Heart a coveted “starred review,” which influences purchases by bookstores and libraries. Kirkus’ anonymous reviewer called the book “by turns terrifying, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and touching,” and praised its “frighteningly believable setting of fear and violent nativism gone awry.” The book’s critics were not pleased with the commendation. “Kirkus Reviews of books reinforce white supremacy,” author and activist Justina Ireland, who had posted a critical review of the book on Medium, wrote on Twitter. “I’m sick to my stomach over this, and I’m so sorry Muslim folks have to contend with one more reminder that their humanity is negotiable.”

Their humanity is negotiable? Because a non-Muslim wrote a story with a non-Muslim protagonist and a Muslim major character? That’s making humanity negotiable?

Kirkus, apparently, was listening. Over the weekend, the publication took down the brief review and replaced it with a remarkable three-paragraph statement from editor in chief Claiborne Smith. He pointed out that the original reviewer was a woman, a Muslim, and an expert in children’s and YA literature—the kind of profile that would privilege her opinion of the book in many circles. Nonetheless, “while we believe our reviewer’s opinion is worthy and valid, some of the wording fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity, and we failed to make the thoughtful edits our readers deserve,” Smith wrote.

The whipping will be very gently administered.

Trump, sniffing the air for more people to harm, has found them: welfare recipients.

President Donald Trump said Monday his administration will start to consider reforming the welfare system in the United States, saying that some people are “taking advantage of the system.”

The comment comes as the Trump administration struggles to get any sweeping legislation through Congress, despite Republicans controlling both the House and Senate. Trump failed to pass health care reform earlier this year and is currently working — without much success so far — to pass tax reform.

Trump was never trying to pass health care reform – he was trying to destroy the ACA’s attempt at providing health insurance for everyone. That’s not reform; it’s nihilism. Trump wants poor people and middling people (not poor but far from rich) to be unable to get health insurance, because it’s too expensive.

“People are taking advantage of the system and then other people aren’t receiving what they really need to live and we think it is very unfair to them,” said Trump, flanked by Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a Cabinet meeting. “Because some people are really taking advantage of our system from that standpoint.”

Nah. He doesn’t care about those other people who “aren’t receiving what they really need to live” – he just wants to take it away.

“We are going to be looking very, very strongly, therefore, at welfare reform,” Trump added.

How do you look at something “strongly”? Let alone “very, very strongly”? His vocabulary is so exiguous that he has to fall back on that idiot repetition.

Welfare reform was not something Trump emphasized on the campaign trail, but his first budget proposal — unveiled earlier this year — proposed sweeping cuts to food stamps and welfare programs by restricting those who are eligible for such programs.

See? He just wants more people to go without. It makes him happy. I bet he thinks about it while he’s eating his two scoops of ice cream (and his guests are eating their one).