Open Mic for the week of 10/21/2024
On this day in 1959, the Guggenheim opened.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
It is apparently a thing in Further Left circles to compare 10/7 to Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion. I have really no idea why they believe this is a persuasive argument. Even many people who don’t like Israel that much hate Hamas. 10/7 was clearly organized by Hamas. The Further Left basically exists in their own headspace on this issue and refuses to deal with reality.Report
Ta-Nehisi reads the situation as Oppressed vs. Oppressors and it’s probably difficult for him to look at the dynamics as anything other than what he sees them as.
Dude was a moral authority for a lot of people during a troubled time.
And there’s a history of “the left” (however you want to define it) as seeing “The Underdog” as having the moral authority in a conflict.Report
I realize how they read it but for most normie liberals, trying to treat Hamas as anything but a vile organization is dumb even if they don’t like Israel that much. Even on the other blog, many otherwise critical of Israel people were strangely fine with Sinwar departing this mortal coil and one even said they hoped his death hurt a lot. This was not written by somebody that was sympathetic towards Israel. The use of high academic language by Pro-Palestinian Westerners hurts the Palestinian cause more than it helps them.Report
“The Media Shouldn’t Overlook Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism”
https://reason.com/2024/10/17/the-media-shouldnt-overlook-kamala-harris-plagiarism/
I didn’t even know she wrote a book, but I guess a lot of politicians do, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
“This is such a well-worn trope by now the one might have expected mainstream media institutions to take greater pains to avoid it, if only to deprive conservatives of ammunition. And yet The New York Times write-up of the Harris plagiarism accusations is headlined: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.”
The article itself minimizes the extent of Harris’ wrongdoing, and cites a plagiarism expert, Jonathan Bailey, who claims that Rufo was “making a big deal” out of relatively minor transgressions. The Times did not share with him the full list of plagiarized passages in the book, however; on his website, Bailey noted that after reviewing all the allegations, the case is “more serious” than he first thought, although he maintains Harris did not engage in “wholesale fraud.””
I thought that was the best part. The NYT gives a reviewer part of the info, he reaches a conclusion more favorable to the candidate, but later revises it down when he gets the info the paper withheld. Nice work NYT. I wonder if that fact was reported in the paper.Report
My guess is there’s probably a ghost writer somewhere in the mix who is likely the culprit.Report
Yeah, the name is called out in the article:
“Christopher Rufo, who contends that Harris and co-author Joan O’C. Hamilton plagiarized several passages.”
But guess what. You claim authorship, or even co authorship, you own the errors not just the accolades. Nobody with any ounce of awareness / intelligence thinks Harris, or any other notable, really wrote the book themselves. Harris was SF DA at the time. OFC she didn’t have time to write a book.Report
Where people get bad ideas about the economy, a theory in one paragraph.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/684da1fc3502e015f647ac113375d8c3ceb14dd6adced8eb0673d4c236bf69ca.jpgReport
On October 10, 2024, Garland held a press conference and announced that TD Bank had illegally laundered over $670 million of drug money. “By making its services convenient for criminals, TD Bank became one,” Garland declared. According to Garland, TD Bank admitted that “at various times high-level executives, including the person who became the bank’s chief anti-money laundering officer, knew there were serious problems with the bank’s anti-money laundering program,” but “failed to correct them.” TD Bank, Garland said, “chose profits over compliance.”
https://popular.info/p/td-bank-executives-oversee-670-billion
What’s noteworthy is how utterly ordinary this is.
Confirming the assertion that a poor person stealing a bottle of soda is a violation of the social order, while a rich person breaking the law IS the social order.Report
Will President Trump even charge this guy with a crime?Report