Even he eventually learned
Leonard Pitts on what's behind the statements of Judge Roy Moore.
In June, it will be 52 years since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.
It happened at the University of Alabama, where two African-American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, were attempting to register. In facing down three federal officials demanding that he stand aside and honor a court order allowing the registration to proceed, the bantam governor of Alabama sought to make good on a noxious promise: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
The upshot is that if you go to UA today and look out from where Wallace stood, you will find yourself staring, not at George Wallace Plaza but, rather, at Malone-Hood Plaza, erected in honor of the two students, both of whom would go on to earn degrees from the school. Wallace was wrong morally, wrong constitutionally, wrong in the eyes of history. After half a century, his actions remain an indelible stain on the state’s honor.
You’d think Alabama would learn. ...
That Moore, as your humble correspondent once wrote, “isn't fit to judge a dog show” should be manifestly plain to anyone with eyes. How he became not just a judge but the state’s chief judge, is a mystery on a par with Stonehenge.
That said, there is nothing new here. History reminds us that whenever social change comes too fast for the South’s taste — which is to say, whenever social change comes — there seems to invariably arise some demagogue to decry the “tyranny” of having to obey the law and follow court orders. The South always resists.
Naturally, you should not pass the holy orange squiggle without going to read the rest of Pitts' column.
Done? Then come on in...
Frank Bruni wishes there was less god-talk in politics.
God had a busy week. Alabama alone was a heavy lift, what with all those God invocations by state leaders trying to cast out the demon of gay marriage, then London called as well. Scott Walker was on a trip there, and he tugged God into the picture when he was asked about evolution and declined to answer, as if embracing it would be a heathen outrage.
... Faith and government shouldn't be as cozy as they are in this country. Politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, shouldn't genuflect as slavishly as they do, not in public. They’re vying to be senators and presidents. They’re not auditioning to be ministers and missionaries.
... while a creed can rightly be a personal compass, it’s wrongly deployed as marching orders or a governing strategy. Politicians’ religions — and I use the plural on purpose, because there’s no one religion that gets to trump the others — should be a source of their strength and of their empathy, not of their agendas.
But that’s not the way it works out in this country, especially not among Republicans, who can’t quit their fealty to the religious right and who, because of that, drive away many independent voters who are otherwise receptive to an ideology of limited government, personal responsibility and muscular foreign policy.
Read the rest, if only for a reminder of just how nuts Rick Perry went during the 2012 campaign.
Ross Douthat... Ross Douthat... Ross Douthat has an opinion on Fifty Shades of Gray.
In a society where almost every cultural phenomenon ends up interpreted through an ideological lens, the success de scandale of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — the books, the movie, the branded cuffs and whips — has left culture warriors a little bit confused. Is this another transgressive breakthrough — the latest blow to whatever remains of traditional morality, the mainstreaming of a lifestyle long locked away from view? Or is the now-famous story, with its alpha male gazillionaire and his punished female prize, actually a reactionary fairy tale, encouraging submission to the latest version of the patriarchy?
... viewed from another angle, that same revolution looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. ...
... the essential dream of our age isn't conflict; it’s a synthesis, in which the aristocratic thrills of libertinism are somehow preserved but their most exploitative elements are rendered egalitarian and safe.
My dream is even more difficult to achieve. It's that most of what I read, whether drawn from a bookshelf or the NYT editorial page, be written with both a sensitivity to the human condition and a knowledge of how structure and vocabulary can serve rather then obscure the meaning of the text. Clearly both
Fifty Shades and Douthat have let me down. By the way, Douthat's ultimate admission: he likes it.
Bill Adair and Maxime Fischer-Zernin on lying and lie detecting in the media.
Lying may be an age-old part of politics, but it’s becoming easier to spot the fibs, fictions and falsehoods. A growing army of fact-checkers around the world is busy debunking falsehoods from presidents, prime ministers and pundits — and if their results are indicative, 2014 was a banner year. Some of the claims were so absurd that fact-checking groups honored them with awards, like Australia’s Golden Zombie and Italy’s Insane Whopper of the Year.
Hey when's the last time I handed out that Bad Pundit of the Year award? What was it called? The Dowd? The Will? I'll have to look it up... then give myself one for forgetting. In this international list, there was one United States lie that topped the chart.
Exaggerations about Ebola
Rather than name a single falsehood, PolitiFact (which one of us, Bill Adair, founded) honored the many falsehoods and exaggerations about Ebola, including the claim by the columnist George F. Will that the disease can be spread by sneezing or coughing (false), the claim by Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, that Ebola is “incredibly contagious” (mostly false), and a Georgia congressman’s statement that there were reports of people carrying Ebola across the southern border of the United States (so ridiculously wrong we rated it “Pants on Fire” — not remotely true).
And then elections proved that ludicrous fear-mongering... worked again.
Stephen Marche on the evils of anonymity.
A part-time delivery driver named Peter Nunn was recently sentenced to 18 weeks in a British prison for tweeting and retweeting violent messages to Stella Creasy, a member of Parliament. He never saw his victim but the consequences of his virtual crime were real enough. In a statement, Ms. Creasy described fears for her physical safety, going so far as to install a panic button in her home. Mr. Nunn has been physically separated from the rest of society for posting abusive words on a social media site.
The fact that the case ended up in court is rare; the viciousness it represents is not. Everyone in the digital space is, at one point or another, exposed to online monstrosity, one of the consequences of the uniquely contemporary condition of facelessness.
When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate.
Last year, the cybercrime unit in a neighboring county arrested over 300 men and women for crimes in which they touched not one person or thing, and where (in over 200 of those cases) the "person" they were talking to was actually a team of police officers trained to get them to say what they eventually said. Minimum sentence: five years, day and date, with ten or more being common. 95% of them were first offenders. Let's just say my feelings toward the policing of "cyber crime" are definitely mixed.
The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything.
Dana Milbank has a tribute to Kayla Mueller.
The world knew too little of Kayla Mueller, the American aid worker just killed in captivity in Syria. ...
Since her death was confirmed this week, the news has been mostly about how she died (almost certainly not in an allied airstrike, as the Islamic State claims), what else might have been done to save her (probably nothing), ...
Lucky for us, and too bad for these barbarians, Kayla can still tell her story, through the letter she wrote to her family from captivity in the spring of 2014, and in earlier writings from before her kidnapping, released by her friends and family since her death. Her words provide a vivid contrast with the heartless actions of her captors. ...
Now that no further harm can come to Kayla, it can be told what an exceptional person she was. She joined the campus Christian ministry at Northern Arizona University and plunged into social action: She volunteered nights at a women’s shelter, protested genocide in Darfur and started a chapter of Amnesty International. She volunteered at a summer camp for young African refugees in Israel, and she went to Israel’s occupied territories to show support for the Palestinians. She protested torture in Guantanamo Bay, and she went on a humanitarian mission to Guatemala. In India, she taught English to Tibetan refugees and to poor women and children.
An absolutely extraordinary young woman, and a model many of us should seek to emulate.