In sports, as in so many other things, it isn't "politics" unless you disagree with it. I've managed for decades to ignore the obvious traditional politics of big-time sports and focus on the game. But I knew it was there. I didn't much mind when different kinds of politics popped up now and then, but I didn't care much about it, either. I can't disagree with a network executive whose market research tells him that his audience doesn't want the kind of politics it recognizes as politics, as opposed to the kind of politics it doesn't recognize as politics, but just "normal," dammit, and acting accordingly. But let's not kid ourselves.
On my block are two women who wear classic burkas all the time. I can tell they are two different women only because I have seen the two of them together and seen each of them separately with a different man. I have no idea whether they dress like that because they want to (for some value of "want") or think they have to (for some value of "have to"). I know neither of them more than to nod politely when I see them in the street, so it would be rude of me to ask and presumptuous to intervene if I knew. I also saw a woman wearing a hijab and, despite the warm weather, clothing that covered her from wrists to feet, but tight enough to show off a lush and enticing body. Struck me as religiously confused, but it's her religion, not mine, and it's not my place, or in my interest, to correct her.
I may be enjoying this thread for all the wrong reasons.
Depends on how hot the model is. I've seen and enjoyed plenty of pictures of gun-toting bikini models elsewhere and have hunted myself, though not in a bikini. I leave to SI whether it thinks gun-toting bikini models would appeal to its audience.
I was a huge fan of I, Claudius when it came out. (Yes, I'm that old. Hell, I knew some of the characters from real life.) I have long wanted to run across Patrick Stewart on the streets of Brooklyn, where he can sometimes be found, gape, point, and, just when he's thinking, "Oh no, not another Trekkie asshole," sputter out: "You're -- you're Sejanus!"
I'm not sure who is arguing with whom in the real world. Among my very wide circle of ideologically and ethnically diverse acquaintance, the only opinion I have heard anyone express about the SI burkini model is "Damn, she's hot," with which I heartily concur. If Muslim women are looking for ways to be both hot and modest, more power to them. Nobody owes me revealing clothing and lots of skin, however much I might appreciate it when offered. How or whether the sexy burkini fits with common -- I avoid "correct" because there is no such thing in religious matters -- understanding of Islam is for them to work out. That SI might want to appeal to a growing demographic is perfectly understandable and uncontroversial.
Given that states can't have their Senate representation reduced, even by Constitutional amendment,without their consent, making representation proportional to population is a non-starter. A work-around might be a designated number of at-large Senate seats, which would not reduce any state's representation.
Gee, pillsy, where have we read such stuff before? And how have our efforts to tease some concrete meaning out of it gone?
Until someone actually steps up and says something specific enough to wrestle with, I'm writing this sort of thing off as: "I hate Trump, and will gladly vote for the Democrats if only they would nominate a Republican."
This makes good sense. That said, it might be the case -- I don't say it is because I haven't looked at it -- that the dominance of white, western maleness in science may skew the topics of interest or favor certain techniques of investigation, to the detriment of advancing scientific knowledge. This is a topic that could be profitably explored, and has nothing to do with "ways of knowing."
Seconded. Roberts, unlike so many other conservative lawyers, with academic or government or wingnut welfare backgrounds, had a serious and lucrative private legal practice fighting for the actual pocketbook interests of paying clients. He continues to serve his former paymasters, in a more sophisticated and effective way than many of his nominal allies, rather than pursue ideological fantasies. Sadly, that's what's good about him.
No, we haven't "established" it, we have simply put the question and called for actual argument and evidence for why one view is more likely correct than the other. I think that process has been run into the ground on this particular thread, and readers can judge for themselves what the evidence is and how the arguments hang together.
Nothing strange about that. As a lawyer who handles discrimination cases, this is how I spend most of my working days, figuring out whether "it's not because he's black" is a reasonable response. That takes actual thought and work, gathering and sifting of evidence, and assessing it in the light of what we know about human nature. You can't just make s**t up.
No. My point is that Sullivan was vulnerable in ways the others aren't. There isn't anything meaningful -- outside the usual guff criminal lawyers face -- that anyone inclined to punish the others could do. (The scenario that some random restaurant owner might recognize Baez or Mackey, or Sullivan for that matter, and refuse to serve them is too fanciful to consider and, most importantly, there is no reason to think that Baez or Mackey would face such treatment and Sullivan wouldn't.)
What's "weird" is asserting, on the basis of exactly nothing, that Baez and Mackey are getting away with something that Sullivan isn't because they are not black, rather than that Sullivan is vulnerable in a way the others aren't.
I haven't expressed an opinion about whether any of them ought to be punished, beyond enduring what all criminal defense lawyers endure all the time, and I don't plan to.
The Democratic Party has been the centrist party for a long time. There is no significant left party. I won't argue with anyone's feelings about that, or, for that matter, express my own, but it is the fact.
My father's second wife was Japanese and brought a young son to the marriage. One year, my wife and I were doing Christmas shopping and we were trying to find something for Eddie. We passed a display of plastic giant reptile monsters. One of them was Godzilla. I reached for it, remarking: "Japanese kids love Godzilla." My wife gave me a look, and I grabbed another, less recognizable monster.
When we opened presents, Eddie looked at what we had brought and said: "Oh, boy, just like Godzilla!"
Well, there's an argument for you. Maybe you'll tell us what the sanction is. Criminal defense lawyers constantly face criticism for representing sleazebags, whether they are white, black, Hispanic, or -- especially interesting in this case -- female. No reason to think it isn't happening here. They don't face "market" sanctions for zealously representing sleazebags because their customer base is sleazebags. They don't have to worry about bar association sanctions; quite the opposite, bar associations will defend them for doing their jobs. Their firms won't lose enough talented young lawyers to matter. And they don't, unlike Sullivan, have side-gigs where they have to answer to a constituency that might object to their representing sleazebags.
So basically, nobody is in a position to do anything to Baez and Mackey beyond what countless noisy folk do every day to criminal defense lawyers for defending criminals. Do you think the usual isn't happening to Baez and Mackey? Or that it would be newsworthy if it were? Do you think somebody with some ability to do more than the usual is holding back because they are Hispanic or female rather than black? Do you really think -- and do you have some basis for thinking -- that Sullivan would have skated if he had been white?
The other Weinstein lawyers: Jose Baez -- note that he's Hispanic -- and Pamela Mackey -- note that she's a woman.
My original point, which you keep ducking, is that there isn't any "sanction" available to hit them with. That's the relevant difference between them and Sullivan. Sullivan had a side job from which he could be fired. Baez and Mackey, and Sullivan as well, almost certainly took the usual s**t from people who don't like lawyers defending slimy clients, but only Sullivan had something else on the table. What else could anyone do to Baez and Mackey?
Of course you're allowed to "notice" anything that, for whatever reason, strikes you as worth noticing. And, for whatever reason, you "notice" that he's black. But if you put it out there as some sort of insight, you ought to have some basis -- other than the desire to troll -- for thinking it mattered.
"a single one" of what, or whom? How do I "look up" any or all of the criminal defense lawyers who get criticized for defending criminals, and why would anyone do that? (I know of a few from personal experience, but then so does everyone else.) How would one look up prominent criminal defense lawyers who never even dared to run for public office precisely because they were prominent criminal defense lawyers and, therefore, probably unelectable?
If your question is what have the other Weinstein lawyers, specifically, suffered, well, they can't get fired from jobs they don't have. I doubt that they have suffered anything more than the generic unpleasantness prominent criminal defense lawyers generally face when they represent some high-profile bad guy, like F. Lee Bailey, or Alan Dershowitz, or Roy Black, or Ben Brafman. They aren't complaining, so no reason to research which asshole at what cocktail party told them yet again what they have heard so many times before.
[L1] More than once, I have seen an irate arrestee yell at the cops: "You didn't read me my rights!" Once, I heard the cop answer: "I didn't ask you anything, asshole."
Who would sanction the other lawyers, and for what? They are all private legal practitioners. None of them has any other institutional affiliation that might, even arguably, be compromised by their representing Weinstein. (I knew him in college, and none of what he has been accused of surprises me.) As private practitioners, they are subject to the sanction of private market forces, but criminal defense lawyers rarely suffer in the market for criminal defense services from vigorously defending exactly the sort of folks who would normally seek their services. They probably do suffer some sanction in the court of public opinion. When was the last time a prominent criminal defense lawyer, who represented really bad people and sometimes got them off, got elected to public office? To suggest that race played a part in this is just trolling.
As far as the underlying controversy is concerned, I know no more about it than anyone else, but I suspect that two things are simultaneously true: (1) the Sullivans weren't doing a good job; and (2) this might not have come to light without the Weinstein controversy. Ward Churchill is on line 2.
Very likely. Fagin would then be a loathsome character who merely happened to be a Jew. And if called on it for that fact alone, Dickens's response, that he had no desire to offend Jews and had simply modeled Fagin on real-life models who happened to be Jews, would have been more persuasive.
Indeed, he is, but he is based on Arnold Rothstein, a real, loathsome, but colorful Jew. I wouldn't be surprised if Fitzgerald weren't at least a casual anti-Semite -- that would have been the safe bet regarding any Christian of his generation if you had no other information to go on -- but the loathsome Wolfsheim doesn't tell us much about that.
That's a hard one. There doesn't seem to be anything about Fagin's Jewishness that is relevant either to the plot or to his evil character. In that sense, his being Jewish can be seen as incidental. He had to be something, and there may have been a Jewish real-life model. But if that were all there were to it, like mafiosi being Italian or Irish cops throwing around anti-Italian ethnic slurs, then what you would expect is that references to his Jewishness would either be early straight exposition of a biographical fact, or slurs coming from people who would be expected to talk like that. Instead, where most authors would say "Fagin" when speaking as the narrator, Dickens frequently refers to Fagin as "the Jew" in contexts where his Jewishness isn't relevant. (The novel was published serially, and he did this frequently in the early sections, but stopped in the later installments after a protest that he seems to have taken to heart.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “She Wore a Very Modest Not Demean-y Controversial Sports Illustrated Burkini”
"Cuddle parties?" Do I want to know?
"
In sports, as in so many other things, it isn't "politics" unless you disagree with it. I've managed for decades to ignore the obvious traditional politics of big-time sports and focus on the game. But I knew it was there. I didn't much mind when different kinds of politics popped up now and then, but I didn't care much about it, either. I can't disagree with a network executive whose market research tells him that his audience doesn't want the kind of politics it recognizes as politics, as opposed to the kind of politics it doesn't recognize as politics, but just "normal," dammit, and acting accordingly. But let's not kid ourselves.
"
On my block are two women who wear classic burkas all the time. I can tell they are two different women only because I have seen the two of them together and seen each of them separately with a different man. I have no idea whether they dress like that because they want to (for some value of "want") or think they have to (for some value of "have to"). I know neither of them more than to nod politely when I see them in the street, so it would be rude of me to ask and presumptuous to intervene if I knew. I also saw a woman wearing a hijab and, despite the warm weather, clothing that covered her from wrists to feet, but tight enough to show off a lush and enticing body. Struck me as religiously confused, but it's her religion, not mine, and it's not my place, or in my interest, to correct her.
I may be enjoying this thread for all the wrong reasons.
"
Depends on how hot the model is. I've seen and enjoyed plenty of pictures of gun-toting bikini models elsewhere and have hunted myself, though not in a bikini. I leave to SI whether it thinks gun-toting bikini models would appeal to its audience.
On “Tenshot: I, Claudius”
I was a huge fan of I, Claudius when it came out. (Yes, I'm that old. Hell, I knew some of the characters from real life.) I have long wanted to run across Patrick Stewart on the streets of Brooklyn, where he can sometimes be found, gape, point, and, just when he's thinking, "Oh no, not another Trekkie asshole," sputter out: "You're -- you're Sejanus!"
On “She Wore a Very Modest Not Demean-y Controversial Sports Illustrated Burkini”
I'm not sure who is arguing with whom in the real world. Among my very wide circle of ideologically and ethnically diverse acquaintance, the only opinion I have heard anyone express about the SI burkini model is "Damn, she's hot," with which I heartily concur. If Muslim women are looking for ways to be both hot and modest, more power to them. Nobody owes me revealing clothing and lots of skin, however much I might appreciate it when offered. How or whether the sexy burkini fits with common -- I avoid "correct" because there is no such thing in religious matters -- understanding of Islam is for them to work out. That SI might want to appeal to a growing demographic is perfectly understandable and uncontroversial.
On “Mitch McConnell on SCOTUS Vacancy: “Oh, we’d fill it””
Given that states can't have their Senate representation reduced, even by Constitutional amendment,without their consent, making representation proportional to population is a non-starter. A work-around might be a designated number of at-large Senate seats, which would not reduce any state's representation.
On “The Democrats’ Trump”
Gee, pillsy, where have we read such stuff before? And how have our efforts to tease some concrete meaning out of it gone?
Until someone actually steps up and says something specific enough to wrestle with, I'm writing this sort of thing off as: "I hate Trump, and will gladly vote for the Democrats if only they would nominate a Republican."
On “Ways of Knowing”
This makes good sense. That said, it might be the case -- I don't say it is because I haven't looked at it -- that the dominance of white, western maleness in science may skew the topics of interest or favor certain techniques of investigation, to the detriment of advancing scientific knowledge. This is a topic that could be profitably explored, and has nothing to do with "ways of knowing."
On “Wednesday Writs for May 15”
Seconded. Roberts, unlike so many other conservative lawyers, with academic or government or wingnut welfare backgrounds, had a serious and lucrative private legal practice fighting for the actual pocketbook interests of paying clients. He continues to serve his former paymasters, in a more sophisticated and effective way than many of his nominal allies, rather than pursue ideological fantasies. Sadly, that's what's good about him.
"
No, we haven't "established" it, we have simply put the question and called for actual argument and evidence for why one view is more likely correct than the other. I think that process has been run into the ground on this particular thread, and readers can judge for themselves what the evidence is and how the arguments hang together.
Nothing strange about that. As a lawyer who handles discrimination cases, this is how I spend most of my working days, figuring out whether "it's not because he's black" is a reasonable response. That takes actual thought and work, gathering and sifting of evidence, and assessing it in the light of what we know about human nature. You can't just make s**t up.
"
No. My point is that Sullivan was vulnerable in ways the others aren't. There isn't anything meaningful -- outside the usual guff criminal lawyers face -- that anyone inclined to punish the others could do. (The scenario that some random restaurant owner might recognize Baez or Mackey, or Sullivan for that matter, and refuse to serve them is too fanciful to consider and, most importantly, there is no reason to think that Baez or Mackey would face such treatment and Sullivan wouldn't.)
What's "weird" is asserting, on the basis of exactly nothing, that Baez and Mackey are getting away with something that Sullivan isn't because they are not black, rather than that Sullivan is vulnerable in a way the others aren't.
I haven't expressed an opinion about whether any of them ought to be punished, beyond enduring what all criminal defense lawyers endure all the time, and I don't plan to.
On “The Big Dog Or The Biggest Choke”
The Democratic Party has been the centrist party for a long time. There is no significant left party. I won't argue with anyone's feelings about that, or, for that matter, express my own, but it is the fact.
On “The King of the Monsters”
My father's second wife was Japanese and brought a young son to the marriage. One year, my wife and I were doing Christmas shopping and we were trying to find something for Eddie. We passed a display of plastic giant reptile monsters. One of them was Godzilla. I reached for it, remarking: "Japanese kids love Godzilla." My wife gave me a look, and I grabbed another, less recognizable monster.
When we opened presents, Eddie looked at what we had brought and said: "Oh, boy, just like Godzilla!"
On “Wednesday Writs for May 15”
I had words after my answer of “dunno”. I’d like to think that those other words were meaty enough to provide stuff to work with.
You might like to think so. I think I'll leave the matter to the readers.
"
There's only so much anyone can do with "dunno," other than suggest that if you really "dunno" there isn't much to say, or much reason to say it.
"
Of *COURSE* there is!
Well, there's an argument for you. Maybe you'll tell us what the sanction is. Criminal defense lawyers constantly face criticism for representing sleazebags, whether they are white, black, Hispanic, or -- especially interesting in this case -- female. No reason to think it isn't happening here. They don't face "market" sanctions for zealously representing sleazebags because their customer base is sleazebags. They don't have to worry about bar association sanctions; quite the opposite, bar associations will defend them for doing their jobs. Their firms won't lose enough talented young lawyers to matter. And they don't, unlike Sullivan, have side-gigs where they have to answer to a constituency that might object to their representing sleazebags.
So basically, nobody is in a position to do anything to Baez and Mackey beyond what countless noisy folk do every day to criminal defense lawyers for defending criminals. Do you think the usual isn't happening to Baez and Mackey? Or that it would be newsworthy if it were? Do you think somebody with some ability to do more than the usual is holding back because they are Hispanic or female rather than black? Do you really think -- and do you have some basis for thinking -- that Sullivan would have skated if he had been white?
"
Criminals are generally stupid.
"
The other Weinstein lawyers: Jose Baez -- note that he's Hispanic -- and Pamela Mackey -- note that she's a woman.
My original point, which you keep ducking, is that there isn't any "sanction" available to hit them with. That's the relevant difference between them and Sullivan. Sullivan had a side job from which he could be fired. Baez and Mackey, and Sullivan as well, almost certainly took the usual s**t from people who don't like lawyers defending slimy clients, but only Sullivan had something else on the table. What else could anyone do to Baez and Mackey?
Of course you're allowed to "notice" anything that, for whatever reason, strikes you as worth noticing. And, for whatever reason, you "notice" that he's black. But if you put it out there as some sort of insight, you ought to have some basis -- other than the desire to troll -- for thinking it mattered.
"
"a single one" of what, or whom? How do I "look up" any or all of the criminal defense lawyers who get criticized for defending criminals, and why would anyone do that? (I know of a few from personal experience, but then so does everyone else.) How would one look up prominent criminal defense lawyers who never even dared to run for public office precisely because they were prominent criminal defense lawyers and, therefore, probably unelectable?
If your question is what have the other Weinstein lawyers, specifically, suffered, well, they can't get fired from jobs they don't have. I doubt that they have suffered anything more than the generic unpleasantness prominent criminal defense lawyers generally face when they represent some high-profile bad guy, like F. Lee Bailey, or Alan Dershowitz, or Roy Black, or Ben Brafman. They aren't complaining, so no reason to research which asshole at what cocktail party told them yet again what they have heard so many times before.
"
[L1] More than once, I have seen an irate arrestee yell at the cops: "You didn't read me my rights!" Once, I heard the cop answer: "I didn't ask you anything, asshole."
"
Who would sanction the other lawyers, and for what? They are all private legal practitioners. None of them has any other institutional affiliation that might, even arguably, be compromised by their representing Weinstein. (I knew him in college, and none of what he has been accused of surprises me.) As private practitioners, they are subject to the sanction of private market forces, but criminal defense lawyers rarely suffer in the market for criminal defense services from vigorously defending exactly the sort of folks who would normally seek their services. They probably do suffer some sanction in the court of public opinion. When was the last time a prominent criminal defense lawyer, who represented really bad people and sometimes got them off, got elected to public office? To suggest that race played a part in this is just trolling.
As far as the underlying controversy is concerned, I know no more about it than anyone else, but I suspect that two things are simultaneously true: (1) the Sullivans weren't doing a good job; and (2) this might not have come to light without the Weinstein controversy. Ward Churchill is on line 2.
On “Fagin, Bigotry, and “Cancel Culture””
Very likely. Fagin would then be a loathsome character who merely happened to be a Jew. And if called on it for that fact alone, Dickens's response, that he had no desire to offend Jews and had simply modeled Fagin on real-life models who happened to be Jews, would have been more persuasive.
"
Indeed, he is, but he is based on Arnold Rothstein, a real, loathsome, but colorful Jew. I wouldn't be surprised if Fitzgerald weren't at least a casual anti-Semite -- that would have been the safe bet regarding any Christian of his generation if you had no other information to go on -- but the loathsome Wolfsheim doesn't tell us much about that.
"
That's a hard one. There doesn't seem to be anything about Fagin's Jewishness that is relevant either to the plot or to his evil character. In that sense, his being Jewish can be seen as incidental. He had to be something, and there may have been a Jewish real-life model. But if that were all there were to it, like mafiosi being Italian or Irish cops throwing around anti-Italian ethnic slurs, then what you would expect is that references to his Jewishness would either be early straight exposition of a biographical fact, or slurs coming from people who would be expected to talk like that. Instead, where most authors would say "Fagin" when speaking as the narrator, Dickens frequently refers to Fagin as "the Jew" in contexts where his Jewishness isn't relevant. (The novel was published serially, and he did this frequently in the early sections, but stopped in the later installments after a protest that he seems to have taken to heart.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.