Your Moment of Law 'n' Order

 

MAGA morons tried to unfurl a giant Trump flag on 5th Ave. outside Trump Tower today….it didn’t go well 🤣

H/t @ScooterCasterNY pic.twitter.com/Yz3Dx9Unff

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) June 7, 2024

The MAGA folks are very in favor of law and order (uniforms, hassling the riff raff) except when it applies to them. 

Here in Pennsylvania, we actually had Republican state congressional members get real BIG MAD at the state house when confronted with the actual heroes of 1/6-Republican members get real BIG MAD at the state house when confronted with the actual heroes of 1/6--the police who put their bodies on the line for actual law and order, instead of responding to the whims of a con artist who wanted an insurrection because the Constitutional way of doing things wasn't good enough for him.  (The man who lied about the election he LOST and now wants to pretend the people who pepper sprayed and beat cops with improvised and purposefully brought weapons was political prisoners and heroes." 

Which shows how the GOP seems to feel about things. Being hypocrites and all. And this brings me back around to how the GOP still wants to defund the police--because they "feel" they are going after the wrong people. 

It seems like Republicans don't want to address the elephant in the room--they want cops to selectively ignore the "right (wing) people" and only pursue the "woke and broke". 

When they talk about anything being "free and fair"--I am not sure what they think either "free" or "fair" mean--they have whole other definitions for these things than the dictionary.  But I will assume from their ideas of freedom and fairness regarding their understanding of "equal treatment under the law" that they....

Mean nothing at all. 

One Nation Under a Threat

 

Nothing like taking your kids to Philadelphia for the 4th & running into literal Nazis. These scumbags belong to the group Patriot Front. That may or may not be my kids & I joining a growing crowd yelling at the spineless dickholes & chasing them away from City Hall. #fucknazis pic.twitter.com/bqYviUq1Bd

— Not Today (@SunnyDelight888) July 4, 2021

Sometimes people talk shit about what the price of freedom is, with some people (and I'm not casting judgment on them, only their home-training) saying that it's the blood of patriots. Fuck no. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If Jefferson didn't actually say it, it's still gospel to me. You have to be on the look-out for signs that freedom could be slipping. 

Like bully-boys thinking they can parade down the streets of a not especially white city demonstrating I don't even know what. That they exist, I guess. They weren't there to recruit. Well, it wasn't appreciated here, I can tell you that much. But why did they come to get rousted? (Did they think anything else would happen?) Were citizens in the birthplace of the US gonna look at these suburban mall-ass wannabees as something to get scared of? 

 Here's the thing, Philadelphians will fight anything. If you're a hitchhiking robot or Santa Claus, we've pretty much kicked your ass. We've even tried to excommunicate Columbus and Frank Rizzo--and they were both very much our kind of shit at one time. Maybe they came to get their asses kicked in to report that some cities in heathen America really needed to get fucked over, eventually. Because fascists love martyrs. Love them. Why else would "Who shot Ashli Babbitt?" be something Trump even echoed Saturday night?\

He Heard It

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump paid their respects to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a crowd booed and chanted "Vote him out." https://t.co/M7m7kEIBg7 pic.twitter.com/tWYfyKIdIF

— CNN (@CNN) September 24, 2020

Trump can maintain that he barely heard whatever the folks in front of the court were chanting, but I simply trust and believe he heard, and he will continue to hear it. (Awake and also dreaming.) I think he was there to maintain the appearance that he can perform respectability, but the people who most admired Justice Ginsburg's work are also the people who most likely recognize that Trump is, in many ways, the antithesis of what she had stood for. She stood for equality under the law; he supports the law for some and mere order for others. (This is more particularly stated by Frank Wilhoit in The Travesty of Liberalism: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect...") He can pay empty respects as easily as make empty promises, but he remains who he is.

Being people who appreciate the rule of law and the importance of democracy, what was chanted there was not "Lock him up!", but "Vote him out!"--which has a meaningful difference. Trump's crowd wants vengeance for unspecified wrongs while liberals will settle for remediation of wrongs very well understood. I'm a poor liberal and I also want him to spend his post-presidency in court on the other side of the bench and looking up until his neck hurts.

I don't think he leaves his bubble often, or he would know he'd get a cold shoulder there. I understand that White House staff bottleneck information so that he doesn't become the recipient of too much bad news. I can't imagine what it must feel like to understand that one's presence brings down the tone of a funeral, but I'd have to understand that as a normal person. And I can't fathom how that registers with Donald Trump.

I know he heard it. How that registers with him, I don't know.

Farewell, Justice

Ruth Bader Ginsburg later in life acquired the nickname "Notorious RBG" (which had to be explained to her as being a take-off on the deceased rapper, Christopher Wallace, AKA Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G.) because she was gangster in her dissents. In her dissent to Shelby vs. Holder, she lit up the premise of the decision, rephrasing MLK Jr.'s comment that the arc of the universe was long but inclined towards justice with the addendum that there must be a steadfast commitment to do the bending. In other words, it inclined towards justice because good people worked to do that. And had to keep doing that work. (And she was right, and that decision was wrong.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg did that work. When she was one of the very few female law students at Harvard in the 1950's, the Dean asked her what she was doing there, taking a man's place. That same man, Erwin Griswold, later described her work on gender equality by comparing her to Thurgood Marshall. She was a champion of equal protection under the law.

Her business was justice: even when dealing, as she did for decades, with the disease of cancer that took her mother from her when she was still young, and her husband after many years. She kept her spirit and her drive to do the right thing up to the end.

I don't care to blog right now about her replacement, because there are some people who in reality are not replaceable. She supported the rights of people whose marginalization made their rights subject to being disappeared. Her belief in equality under the law for everyone made her a champion for the disabled and for minorities, for women and LGBT people. She stood in the gap for folks to keep the idea of equality alive. She wanted the feet of government off the necks of people living their lives.  Her career and her life need to speak for themselves, without the spotlight of electoral politics for the moment coloring her magnificent career.

She was a person so deserving of the title "Justice". May her memory be a blessing.

A Pleasant Shock

News Analysis: LGBT rights leaders were stunned Monday when 2 conservative justices sided with the majority in one of the most sweeping gay rights decisions by the Supreme Court so far, write Adam Nagourney and Jeremy Peters https://t.co/l8xUm7XLKr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 15, 2020

I think there's something very bittersweet in the shock some felt that the SCOTUS decision affirmed that LGBT people should be treated equally under the law with respect to employment. It is the decision that should have been expected, in that the law speaks against discrimination on the basis of sex and how else would one define the nature of being gay or transgender without the concept of sex? But it's also unsurprising to see the dissent try to turn on quaint and outmoded definitions and social conservatives groan that they have been betrayed.

(As an church/state separation enthusiast, I'm heartened by the idea that there isn't much room for a religious exemption, in that businesses hire people to do a job, not live an identity. While it might make sense, for example, that a priest be Catholic to do a Catholic mass, or that a mohel be Jewish, I don't see what business it is of, say, a craft store, what their cashiers identify as or who they love or marry so long as they don't short their till and are good with customers.)

But in this day and age, I'll let the shock go and enjoy that there is some pleasant news for a change. I also wonder if this decision forms the basis for a challenge to the Trump Administration's decision this past Friday to permit healthcare discrimination for trans people. (Although I think it more likely it will just be reversed by the next administration before we find out.)

Are We Really Doing This?

Really? Because when employers fire someone because they are pregnant, they probably aren't going to commit that to paper--they might even advise the employee to resign to make it easy on themselves. Now, I know that all anyone has to do anymore to make a smear stick is say it out loud and let people's biases do all the work, but yes, women have been let go from employment because they were pregnant. Sometimes it was difficult to prove--and other factors might have influenced one's decision whether to fight it or not. I just don't feel like this is an absolute "gotcha!"

I totally get people on the right running with the idea that she's claiming a form of victimhood, but I think that isn't really the situation, here. She's describing an experience many women had at the time. It really seems to me like a case where people who experience sex discrimination can also run into factors making it difficult to prove or to fight--and honestly? That's not a news flash. I don't think her statements have been disproved, and I don't believe people on the left (even if they favor another candidate) should want to run with this.

Congratulations to the US Women's Soccer Team!

NOTHING GIVEN 🇺🇸
EVERYTHING EARNED 🏆#OneNationOneTeam pic.twitter.com/fbXkGKmaI6

— U.S. Soccer WNT (@USWNT) July 7, 2019

Winning their 4th World Cup victory is in itself, absolutely amazing--also having a stadium chant "Equal pay!" in honor of their off-field battle is another great accomplishment. It's one thing to be in favor of equal pay for equal work--but this team has been so dominant it's damn amazing work (I'm chanting "and then back pay to even this up", myself).

(And I will only parenthetically note a little political schadenfreude.)

Can Trump Take up This Cause?

President-Elect Donald Trump may have missed visiting the African-American Museum (if he ever was going to go there), but he did meet with the son of Martin Luther King, Jr. This comes after making negative statements regarding civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who I believe was just responding quite emotionally and truthfully in calling Trump "illegitimate" from his perspective as a Clinton supporter and having heard out the intelligence regarding the level of Russian assistance to the Trump campaign. If any of my gentle readers are Trump supporters, imagine how you might respond if the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Clinton herself who was the beneficiary of foreign-influenced news-fuckery. Rep. Lewis's outrage makes a lot of sense to me. It is how I feel, too. Trump came by his win under dodgy circumstances, and from here on out, his respect needs to be earned by showing he can relate to all his citizens.

We need leaders who will meaningfully counter voter ID laws that discriminate against ethnic and LGBT groups. We need leaders who will address poverty and how to raise up people by getting them not just jobs, but jobs with good wages and opportunities to advance, save money, afford healthcare.

All of these things have nothing to do with Trump's current cabinet choices or many of his stated policies. I don't think he has it in him, and while I know he is accepting people to "listen to", I don't even know for sure what he hears when they speak. I'd like it if I thought he would work with minority or marginalized populations in the US, but since he built his campaign on demonizing those exact people, I just doubt it.

Brooks can't lift Coates' Hat

Because David Brooks is a columnist of the paper of record, NYT, I think that their endorsement of him because of the content of what he writes is an endorsement of the quality of his output. In other words--I think they truly believe he produces quality content, despite the degree to which he serves as fodder for the Left, who mostly deride his privileged viewpoint and decry his generalizations about things according to his own limited and privileged perspective.

And, although I know scholars like Driftglass or Charles Pierce might do far better, I think I have to address the stupidity that is Brooks thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates. While white, like he could be anything but? I have but one statement to really address:

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

What constitutes "excessive realism"? Because, for black Americans, the US is comparable to Rwanda.

It would make sense for awake people to want to review that problem with as much realism as they needed. Because while David Brooks might be looking at Ta-Nehisi Coates' life to try and understand why this pessimism exists, maybe he needs to look at the story of Sandra Bland. The whole future was ahead of her. But then something happened to derail that.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it explode? Is it "excessive realism" that traps people? Or is it the grind of history being too real? Is it what happens to black girls when the rainbow is definitely not enough? Is it history? Is it something we all need to look at?

I think Brooks needs to get that his privilege isn't just a geas on how we talk about it--it's how we do something about it. Because if we don't-- The acid isn't realism--the acid is racism. The anger of awake people about what is eroding their future isn't a dissolution of a dream--but an awareness of what destroys all dreams on contact. We can not sleep on it, any of us. We need to read what is current, and act.