Berkeley commencement speech delivered by President Theodore Roosvelt in 1903. The speech resulted in a "mighty cheer".
A person should not hold back on their deeply held opinions, but a person ought to remember where they are.
Lummis forgets where she is.
Cynthia Lummis, United States Senator, R-Wyoming, was the graduation keynote speaker at the University of Wyoming's general graduation ceremony last Friday.
The first question to ask there is, frankly, why?
Now, I ought to not that I'm pretty cynical about graduation speakers, and I've become highly cynical about politicians.[1]. My cynicism about politicians is more recently earned, but my cynicism about graduation speakers goes way, way, back.
The first graduation speaker I ever heard speak, I'll note, was Governor Ed Herschlar, who spoke at my mother's Casper College graduation in the 1970s. I can only vaguely recall that, and I don't know if it was a good speech or not. Ed Herschler was a blunt man whom, prior to being Governor, was a lawyer in far western Wyoming who practiced real courtroom law. Prior to that, he was a World War Two Marine Raider. He likely gave a good speech, or perhaps I just recall that my parents liked the Democratic Governor.
The first graduation speech I somewhat remember, however, was my own high school graduation. The speaker was the new University of Wyoming football coach.
Now, right there, that inspired cynicism. It's not like we, the graduating class of that year from central Wyoming, really were in love or admired the football coach at the university. Some of us probably did, but for that matter the local community college basketball coach, Swede Erickson, was probably a lot better known to most of us. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure we hadn't chosen him to speak. He'd been chosen for us.
Evidence of that, to some degree, comes in the form of the class song. I don't remember what it was. I remember which song won the pole to become the class song, however, which was the Ramone's Teenage Lobotomy.
Now, clearly you can't have that song, which one of our extremely smart classmates was boosting. My friends and I boosted Turning Japanese by the Vapors, which came in second.
Somebody picked the class song for us. And the speaker too. A more mature person who was not a student, probably.
I don't know who the speaker was when I graduated from Casper College in 1983 as I didn't go to the ceremony. As I was graduating with an AS in geology, which had no marketable value whatsoever, and had to go no to a BS, I figured there was no point. Indeed, I actually started UW that summer after I was done working, taking a short geomorphology class offered through UW/CC
I also would not know who was the speaker when I graduated with that BS. The last class I had to take as a geology student was Summer Field Camp, which I took that summer. As I couldn't graduate until I had the class, I didn't think going to a graduation ceremony made sense, or for that matter was even a possibility. One of my lifelong good friends did, however. He actually had a class to take that following fall, but he went through the spring graduation ceremony. He later received permission to take the one class from his home in Casper, but he never did. I've always felt bad about that. He should have done it. To go so far, and then let it go, is a type of tragedy.
Anyhow, I don't know who the speaker was that year either.
I do know who the speaker was, or rather I can recall the speaker, from when I graduated law school. Law school is a smaller school, so you know everyone graduating to at least some degree, and so its natural that you wouldn't miss that one. High school graduations are enormous by comparison. Anyhow, there was a committee whose job it was to invite speakers.
Whomeever was invited, the actual speaker was an ancient lawyer from a really big firm in Denver whose firm was under investigation at the time. He was a UW graduate, I guess, and at least one of my colleagues suggested he'd been a major donor, and that's why he was the speaker.
He was awful. Basically, his speech was "I'm a lawyer and I love me, so you should love everything about the law too" except that it went on for an extended time.
An effective speaker could have delivered an effective speech about loving the law, but it wasn't him.[2].
I don't know who chose Cynthia Lummis to deliver a commencement speech this year at UW, but it was a bad idea.
And I'm saying that perhaps not for the reason a person might suspect, but rather for a variety of reasons. I'll criticize Lummis speech too, but not for the reason that you might suspect.
There may be politicians who could deliver great and meaningful graduation speeches this year. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, provides a good example and for obvious reasons. Maybe Sanna Marin, the 34-year-old Prime Minister of Finland, would be another, in no small part due to her youth. And, frankly, Liz Cheney, as controversial as she would be, who had taken steps which must be regarded as principled and brave, although many Wyomingites would disagree with that. Lynettte Grey Bull would have sparked controversy as well, but she provides another example. This year, maybe Cale Case also does.
That's frankly about it right now.
In this polarized atmosphere, any other politician of any stripe is going to be a bad choice, and anyone inviting them should know that. This would have been particularly obvious, you'd think, of Lummis, who was immediately associated with an effort to question the election which returned her to office.
A lot of UW students, we should note, are not Wyomingites, and many who are, are pretty liberal, if only briefly. I went to UW for most of the 1980s, and it wasn't a conservative town then. It was particularly liberal when I was an undergrad, during which Ronald Reagan was President. Reagan may be admired by many now, but at that time he was hated by the left, and that included much of the UW student body. If you admired Reagan, you kept it to yourself. And this was in an era in which the right wing of the politics wasn't nearly as far left as it is now, and for that matter, the left wasn't nearly as far left.
Inviting Lummis to speak, therefore, was a bad idea, if it was going to be assumed that politics of any fashion was going to creep into her speech.
And that it would, should have been assumed.
Lummis isn't a great speaker, we'd note. She isn't horrific, but she's not great, and she read her speech. No really good speaker ever does that, and quite frankly its a rare great speaker who even sticks to any text they've written. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" was largely extemporaneous, for example. Lincoln's Gettysburg address departed from his prepared notes. Good speakers do that, and therefore have a natural delivery. Bad speakers don't, and therefore do not.
What Lummis stated that's gotten her so much negative attention, is here:
Text wise, what she said was, "even fundamental scientific truths, such as the existence of two sexes, male and female, are subject to challenge these days.”
Now, I'll be frank that I’m not a Lummis fan, and that's due to January 6. But she's absolutely correct here. Scientifically, there are only two sexes beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it's worth noting that. But you also have to know your audience.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
A person shouldn't shield their opinions, but to be effective you have to have effective delivery and know your audience. Lummis clearly didn't know her audience, which shows, perhaps, that she's been too isolated in Wyoming Republican politics recently, or that she wanted to spark a controversy. She didn't seem, however, to want the latter. Rather, it strikes a person as if she thought she was speaking to an audience that wasn't liberal in any sense.
The same statement could have been made, although making it in a commencement speech is questionable, in a much more different fashion if the object of a person's statement was to persuade. Again, doing that in a commencement speech would be a curious choice. If, however, a person wished to deliver a point about the seemingly constant shifting of long held opinions, a person could have delivered it in yet another fashion, and then have made a point about the value of education, or the uncertain nature of the times. If that was the goal, it was badly delivered.
A bad delivery, and not knowing your audience, and not being a great speaker in the first place, is just a recipe for spoken disaster.
It ought to also serve as a lesson in actually inviting somebody who matters to the audience, or somebody who can deliver a really meaningful speech.
Freed from the official line.
Speaking of politicians, and indeed one already mentioned, one thing the state GOP's attack on Liz Cheney seems to have done is to set her free to say things she really thinks, to wit:
May 17, 2022
It seems that getting attacked by the Republican Party has freed Liz Cheney to say things that we normally wouldn't have expected, to wit:
The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.
leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.
That was a bold thing to say, concerning the Buffalo, New York shooting that occurred over the weekend. It also puts squarely in issue the factor of the more extreme elements of the GOP (which is not to say that the Democrats don't have their own far left members), and certain conspiracy theories that have been circulated in recent years. Now Hageman, who likely doesn't share those extreme views internally, but who is extreme enough on a state policy level, is placed in the position of either denying they exist, endorsing them (which she will not do), ignoring the matter entirely, or trying to deflect the issue, the latter being the most likely approach for her.
Wow.
I would never have thought I'd hear Liz Cheney going after the GOP that way, although she's long had a streak of independence. She's right, however. The House GOP leadership has gone down a path that has encouraged such views. It's not 100% responsible for it, but there hasn't been a time since the 1850s that one entire political party was either endorsing such views, or silent on them, to a large degree. Now we're there again.
No renunciations so far, I'd note.
Don't know much history.
NPR's Politics touched on this, and the guest, Odette Yousef, made an excellent point. Part of the reason we're in this cycle of weird violence in the US is because we don't study history. An historically educated person wouldn't have acted this way.
We need to.
Any student of American history would know that African Americans are the second-oldest non-native demographic in the country, with a history nearly as long as what in inaccurately referred to as "whites". The first non-native immigrant group would be English, of course, which actually isn't the same demographic group as, say, Irish, or Italians, or other "white" groups. That aside, the shooter was apparently an 18-year-old adherent of a certain theory proceeding in ignorance that African Americans share the same culture as the oldest demographics in the country, and indeed share the same Anglo Celtic culture, due to the legacy of slavery, that white Southerners do. Lashing out at them as some sort of non-European culture due to their skin is blisteringly historically ignorant for that reason, as well as boatloads of other, besides being evil in general.
There are a lot of reasons to study history besides that, and there are a lot of additional reasons our society needs its citizens to be historically educated, but this provides one tragic example. People are believing a lot of made up facts these days, including historical ones.
Cultural Colonialism and the Woke
Back to the point, sort of, that Lummis was trying to make, I guess, and on the topic of making things up, one of the ironies of the modern gender definition saga is that there's fairly good reason to believe that the classifications that people are now arguing about, other than male and female, are cultural and not much more. People hate that idea.
It comes up, however, in the context of, ironically enough, cultural colonialism. And ironically enough, it comes up in the context of an entity long accused of cultural colonialism, the National Geographic.
While these debates have been going on in the West, it's hardly been noticed that in quite a few cultures around the globe the cultural classifications regarding same sex attraction aren't the same as in the West. In much of the Orient, for example, homosexuality is regarded as purely a Western thing and something absent in their own cultures. Other cultures have other treatments of the topic. The cultural colonialism thing comes up, however, as certain cultures have long-established examples of men who dress as women. Apparently they're being cited as examples of transgenderism in other cultures of a long-lasting nature.
It turns out that these individuals don't view their status this way at all, and it really pisses them off. In at least one Asian culture that exhibits this, the men who dress as women turn out to very definitely regard themselves as men, but with a different attitude. They have no desire to switch genders and regard it as abhorrent, and a recent citation to them as transgender examples by the National Geographic makes them angry. They make, moreover, the excellent point that Westerners have no business pigeonholing them into a category that they feel they don't belong in, thereby placing them into a Western model they don't really recognize.
An example of this is in Samoa, in regard to the categories of fa’afafine and fa’afatamas, which literally mean "men who dress as women" and "women who dress as men". All sorts of Western press have discovered them and declared that Somoans recognize four genders, or maybe three.
Not so at all. Samoans in fact recognize only two genders, men and women, and fa’afafine and fa’afatamas are miffed that people misrepresent them. They know that they're men and women. Indeed, it turns out that their view on sex doesn'st involved same sex attraction at all, but is more in the nature of asexual. They just don't want the traditional male and female roles that would otherwise be expected of them.
This is very close, I'd note, to another island culture in the Pacific in which young men basically drop out, as boys, of the male society. They don't dress as women, but they join a social class in which leadership and being a warrior are just not expected of them.
Indeed, such examples show up in Native American cultures as well, with an example occurring in the Dene people (whom we usually call the Navajo) of the nádleehi. Nádleehi means "effeminate man", and they tended to be treated in the same way by Western commenters, but in their own culture their position is much more complex and may not involve same sex attraction at all, although it might. It has more to do with their societal role, however, and it is expressed in the way that they dress.
And, indeed, there's no reason to suspect that their own concept of this situation isn't at least as accurate, if not more so perhaps, than the current Western one, which is of much, much shorter duration.
It doesn't every seem that such categories existed in the West, and where there's sometimes an attempt to force that conclusion it's often based on very bad historical analysis. Modern Western campaigners have liked to cite all sorts of past examples that are often hugely misconstrued, particularly in regard to post Reformation Western society. The often cited example of the ancient Greeks, for example, is probably way off.
That some same sex attraction was occurring is of course well known. St. Paul roundly condemns homosexual sex, along with all sex outside of marriage, as a mortal sin. He also uses a word, however, that would seem to apply to men who make their appearance effeminate. This cannot, of course, be ignored.
All of this, however, brings us to this point that in the West, and indeed everywhere, seems largely to be missed, except by a few astute students like Fr. Hugh Barbour, which is this.
There are, in fact, only two genders. That's a biological scientific fact. Same sex attraction does exist, but so does asexualism and near asexualism. People who are asexual, or nearly so, are not necessarily homosexual by any means. And these impulses, for lack of a better way to put them, are psychological in nature, not biological. Their expression, however, is cultural in nature.
In other words, while same sex attraction, and nearly no sexual attraction at all, have always existed in a small minority of people, how that expresses itself is not uniform. Indeed, as Barbour notes, and as Samoans are complaining about, current Western concepts force people into cultural categories, and then into behavior, that they'd not really want to otherwise engage in, just as the Sexual Revolution forced huge numbers of Westerners into heterosexual sexual libertinism that was both destructive and unwanted.
Barbour does an excellent job of noting that in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century this often expressed itself entirely differently. Women, for example, who would fit into the sexual active, or presumed sexually active, "lesbian" role today were in many cases attracted to what was then called a Boston Marriage, which was something quite different. And many men who were effeminate were instead just regarded as very gentle, meek men, and lived conventional lives.
At least in the 20th Century there has long been, particularly in regard to female homosexuality, some who were aggressively so, although indeed even here at one point that may have had a very political feature to it. The difference now, however, many be that a fairly large percentage of the very small demographic that we're discussing, is now subject to a massive cultural campaign, largely dominated by the remnant WASP class, that insists on the most radical definitions.
The left rediscovers the female gender.
Interestingly, at the same time, some debates have been going on that go right back to the existential nature of being a woman.
One of these has been coming up on the now revived debate on abortion.
As recently as the recent Judiciary Committee hearing, the nominee hesitated to define what a woman was, even though we all know that she knows what women are, she being one herself. What she was seeking to avoid was a trap on the "legal definition" of a woman, which is the odd territory we now find ourselves in. I.e, can a person whose DNA defines the subject as male make himself have the external appearance of being female, with the help of surgery and pharmaceuticals, and then have the legal status of being a woman? That's part of the very debate which Lummis was referencing.
We can leave that for some other day, but the irony here is that the very left that says you can do that, now suddenly really knows what women are as they don't want "men" telling "women" what they can do with their "wombs" or "ovaries". It would seem that, as a society, if we can't tell what's a woman and what's a man, at law, we don't know what's a human at all, and obvious protecting the rights of everyone would preclude abortion. Nope, says the left, in this are we're dead certain what a woman is, as they're the ones that can get pregnant.
Part of that, we all know, is that women are equipped to feed infants through their own bodies, and men are not, which seemingly we all know, and which is now also the subject of its own odd debate, which is reflected in this item:
Moms seeking formula tired of those who say, just breastfeed
So says a headline that's ran across the country in newspapers and on the net.
As we don't have kids that age anymore, and haven't for, well, a couple of decades, this is a story that caught me off guard and I still haven't researched it. Suffice it to say, this is a genuine crisis.
And it's also a crisis where some really tone-deaf comments have been made, and some pretty stupid ones at that, from the left and probably the right. "Just breastfeed" is one of those.
To back up a yet again, we have people like Bernie Sanders who, pretty much every day, says something about the government funding the warehousing of kids à la Tyson Chickens, at government expense, as a social kindness as it means mothers can get off their lazy asses and get back to work.
No, he doesn't say it in that fashion, but that's probably how it's largely received. Mothers would rather stay home with their children to a large extent, save if they're from the post 1970s Cosmo feminist generation which wanted all women, tall, skinny, flat, and childless in the office. Things didn't really turn out that way, and in spite of what people may socially advocate for, as already noted in this post, people continue to be people.
Part of that being people means that people still have babies, but the joint project between the left and the right means that the economy has become less efficient so that now women must work, to a large degree, irrespective of whether they have children or not. And that means, in part, that formula isn't really an elective food for a lot of them.
For that matter, it's always been the case that not all women could successfully really breastfeed their children. It's one of the aspect of our biology that not every woman is able to efficiently do this. In times long gone, women who could, would end up serving as wet nurses for those who couldn't. Once other options came in, that tended to go away, albeit very, very slowly. There's been, for example, an early vessel discovered in Europe that was obviously designed to provide cow's milk to an infant, so substitutes have been going on for an extremely long time.
Nonetheless, you have folks like Bette Midler, who later apologized for the comments, saying things like:
"TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand,"
That didn't go over well, hence the apology, but the entire topic is irritating women who are now being told what to do.
Things being what they are, it wasn't long until the political left recovered to make one of its repeated and bogus stalking horse arguments, that being "if men. . . then", in this form:
That item was brought to our attention via the Twitter feed of Kasie Hunt, who obviously is close to the issue. I wasn't able to read the article, but as breastmilk obviously isn't an invention, the story might relate to what she otherwise noted here.
“Donated” breast milk kept babies alive for generations, in one form or another, for generations before formula. Now our experts advise against it. But our modern formula system is failing moms who need it. What to do??
She was referring to this:
Why pediatricians don't recommend sharing breast milk
Amid the ongoing baby formula shortage, some parents are relying on donated breast milk from other moms. CNN's Elizabeth Cohen reports on why the American Academy of Pediatrics says this isn't a good idea
I think "donated" breastmilk would be milk from a wet nurse. We certainly have managed to make it a complicated world.
The return of female chattel slavery.
Staying in the same neighborhood, in a way, something quite notable and really disturbing is a leap backwards into the pre-Christian presentation of women. This is expressed, interestingly enough, by this headline:
Ariana Grande Wore A Bra Top To Her Brother's Wedding.
Now, this tells us a few interesting things, some deeper than others. In the shallow end of the pool, what it tells us is that Ariana Grande is an exhibitionist.
But she's not alone by any means. Just a few days after that headline ran, a photo ran on Twitter of two women in Los Angeles going to the grocery store wearing high boots, underwear, and long coats, unfastened.
In the book They Never Surrendered: Bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madres 1890-1935, there's a really good description of young Apache women who recently lost their husbands in battle collectively dancing in an evening ceremonial dance nude, around a fire. The reason is a simple, straight forward economic one. These women were now in a bad situation due to the death of a provider in a resource tight society, and the traditional way in which they'd become wives had been disrupted by early death. The Apache were largely monogamous, but polygamy was tolerated, particularly sororal polygamy, but warfare no doubt disrupted that too. Essentially, therefore, they were putting themselves on display, as they were on the market.
This sounds shocking, but it isn't meant to be. The reason that it shocks at all is that the modern concept of male/female relationships is largely Christian in the first place. The adoption of Christianity pushed marriage ages way up when it was adopted, as the Church required consent by both parties. Arranged and forced marriages, of any kind, were out. Families couldn't sell or give away daughters. And the lower your economic class, the more this was true. Medieval courting, if you will, was much like what it's been for most of modern history at the village level.
The Sexual Revolution, and the ongoing left wing attack on the Christian inspired advances in society, is really reversing this, to the detriment of women in particular.
The advance of Christianity freed women from being chattel and ultimately that lead to a co equal, if not identical, role in society, reflected best perhaps by the granting of the franchise to women. That didn't make society perfect overnight by any means, and indeed society hasn't ever become perfect. But starting with the onset of the Sexual Revolution, and disguised as advances in women's rights, we've gone retrograde.
Women are now back dancing around the fire, on display.
Footnotes
1. Not all politicians by any means, but events running now for over a decade have been particularly dispiriting in this area. Lummis it might be noted contributed to this by being openly disdainful of Trump when he first ran for President, and then figuring as a central character in the effort to deny Pennsylvanian of its electors when truly she must know better. Acts like this, in liberal Laramie, probably made her a poor speaker choice from the onset.
2. One slight thing I'd note here is that a 120 year old speaker whose only known claim to fame is that he occupies the same occupation you are about to is not really that intersting to a group of people in their 20s.
Sometimes you are offered several chances to fulfill a goal, but with any such scenario, there comes a final one. I'm not sure exactly how to put it, but there's that one last promotion board in which you might go from Lt. Col. to full General, or that one last season in the minors where maybe they'll pick you up for the majors, or maybe, or your last shot at the heavyweight title, or that last chance to be drafted by the NFL. In all of those circumstances, and many others in life, there's a lot of random fate at work.
This is particularly so in modern life, as we don't live in as much of a meritocracy as we like to imagine. We never really have. In earlier eras, connections of all kinds mattered a great deal, and to add to it a person's race and gender mattered a lot. I.e., if you were a white, protestant, male you were a lot more likely to "go places" than if you were anything else. If you were a black, or Native American, female, well your fate was pretty much picked out for you no matter what your talents or desires were.
And that wasn't right.
Currently, we oddly live in a bit of the reverse, although it is nowhere near as much of the reverse as some would like to imagine. In some fields, the emphasis on diversity now operates that if you are part of an old favored class, you are actually a bit disadvantaged now. There's an emphasis to correct the errors of the past demographically, and achieve societal justice in a hurry, all of which, ironically, means that injustice of a type can be meted out on an individual basis.
Monday seemed to go well at first, but by mid-afternoon it was obvious that it wasn't going to complete that way. Those swinging for the fences should expect not to hit at all, as that's the true, and therefore not be disappointed when the ball doesn't connect.
But that can still mean that there's no joy in Mudville, individually, so to speak.
So there was the disappointment.
By the following day, when the results were in, there was shock, and not just on a personal level. It was as if the Majors had gone down to semi pro teams, sort of. Nobody knew who they were. A person could somewhat guess the reasons, maybe, they'd been picked up, but only somewhat, and that was speculation. It was hard not to be mad, actually.
Tuesday morning I went and got my second COVID booster. I'd been meaning to for a while, and my wife had been urging me to. She wanted me to get it on a Friday on the basis that I'd be feeling under the weather the following day, but Tuesday was the day that worked, so I went. I didn't really expect a problem.
The following day I had to drive to a distant town and meet a witness.
This proved my wife's warning correct. By morning, I did not feel right, which has tended to be the case with the vaccinations I've received so far.
Now, I don't want to over exaggerate this, and I'll be frank that I absolutely do not grasp why people forego getting vaccinated. The vaccines are safe for the overwhelming majority of people, and COVID 19 is not a disease to be taken lightly. And my reactions to the vaccines have not been severe by any means. By the afternoon of the shots I have a sore arm, and the next day I just feel sort of not well. That clears up by noon.
But this is the first time that I opted to drive halfway across the state, early in the morning, after getting the shot. I never felt severely ill, but I felt somewhat icky, and I'm worried what sort of odd impression I may have made on the witness. He didn't seem to act as if I was suffering from the flu or that I appeared to have taken two shots of Jim Beam first thing in the morning (which I did not, of course), so hopefully it was noticeable only to me.
This morning, the dog got me up at 4:00 a.m. I've been sleeping later than that for several months, so that wasn't welcome.
All these, in context, are minor defeats. Indeed, in my analogy, maybe it's more like Al Smith not making it to President. He was a great man and is admired today, and you can't really expect to be elevated like that.
But all defeats are relevant only internally, really. So if they matter, it's the individual who determines that.
Archibald "Moonlight" Graham.
The movie Field Of Dreams is all about such defeats. The Black Sox and Shoeless Joe Jackson, etc. In the film, the protagonist Ray Kinsella at one points takes an author, who himself has suffered personal defeats, to a baseball game and receives the message that he's to go find Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. Probably most of the viewers of the film don't realize that Graham was in fact a real character, and just like the character in the movie, he appeared in a single major league game before leaving the game, albeit the next year in reality, going on to practice medicine in Chisholm, Minnesota. The actual Graham had completed his medical degree the same year as his single major league appearance. As a practicing physician, he worked to provide free glasses for the children of Iron Range miners. He was, therefore, much like the character that is portrayed in the film, first located by Kinsella in Chisholm in a time travelling night in 1972 (after the real Graham's death), where he informs Kinsella that he can't travel to the field due to his duties of a doctor. Kinsella replies that it would "kill some men" to be so close to their dream and not touch it, to which Graham replies that it would be a tragedy if he had only been a doctor for one day, rather than only have been a baseball player for a day.
I don't know. I must be too self focused, or too something else, as I always end up viewing the tragedy as being the opposite, which I guess is why I don't find It's A Wonderful Life to be heartwarming the way other people do.
Some liberal pundits, including Robert Reich the economist, whose really misguided comments on inflation are causing me to respect him less and less, are using the oddly illogical argument that those outraged by the leaking of the Supreme Court opinion which, in draft form, reverses Roe v. Wade have misplaced outrage and its merely camouflage for not being properly outraged about the opinion.
We'll comment more on the opinion in the future, but this is a very badly illogical argument that people like Reich and Kasie Hung (whom I do like) are making.
Here's why the leak matters in regard to this opinion in particular.
In spite of what people may think, there's no real basis to believe that this is the final opinion. Draft opinions famously don't end up as final opinions fairly frequently.
Now, if that happens, the final opinion will receive no respect at all. In a highly polarized environment in which about 1/3d of the country already believes, wrongly, that Democrats conspired to steal the last election, if this doesn't go the way it seems to be headed in the draft, the argument will be "well, there you go again, they conspired to leak the opinion to pressure the justices".
We don't need that.
Additionally, if the opinion does change, it'll forever be presumed that whomever change their view, and however it changed, was a result of the public protest. Courts should be immune to protest. Politicians, who depend on the voters' votes, can react to protest, but courts should not.
Indeed, courts shouldn't be persuaded by trends either, which has been part of the problem here in the first instance. We'll get to it later, but the draft assertion that Roe was always wrong isn't wrong itself. But that brings up other issues, better addressed elsewhere.
For those who hope that the leak will pressure somebody to change their mind, the justices have shown an inclination to go the opposite direction of where they are pushed, just like mules. Earlier this year, there was a leak that suggested that two of the justices were on the outs about something. In reaction, they pulled together. This is a 5 to 4 decision, apparently, but we really don't know what the remaining four think, yet. If somebody hasn't penned their dissent, they might not, choosing instead to issue a concurring opinion on different grounds, or a partially concurring opinion. In other words, while we know what the presumed majority thinks, we don't know what the presumed minority thinks, and they can move in secret.
Indeed, the presumed majority might already have done so. If one of the five is pondering changing his opinion, perhaps to align more with Chief Justice Roberts, and indeed if one may already have done so, the desire not to appear subject to public protest may push them right back. The intent of the leaker, therefore, which is presumably to torpedo the opinion, may result in the polar opposite.
And then there are the implications to the system. We don't know who the leaker is, but its probably not a Justice. If it were, and of course there's the chance that it is, that person will be discovered, probably, and will be sidelined to irrelevance forever. They won't resign, Supreme Court justices don't do that, but they'll not much matter after this. They won't be assigned opinions, they won't really be consulted much, by anyone.
Of course, it's pretty unlikely a Justice is the leaker. Somebody in the loop is, and it's probably a clerk. That person's clerking days are over, if discovered. They'll go on, however, to a position in some left wing cause type of law firm, but the damage they will have done will be significant. The habit of hiring clerks and how it is done will be reassessed. Clerks will remain, but they'll be vetted to the n'th degree. Perhaps the lock on clerkships by the Ivy Leagues will end, which will be welcome. Perhaps it'll become the job of established lawyers, professionals who can be relied on not to be swayed by their political views and emotions, which in states courts has been the trend for many years.
And then there's the press. This is a press coup, to be sure, but the press taking a role that's ultimately destructive, really. A draft opinion isn't the Pentagon Papers.
And that leads to the political process. Right now, this is being used as fodder by politicians, some of whom know better and some who do not. Vice President Harris was heard to say yesterday:
How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can do and not do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her in determining her own future?
Harris is a lawyer, and she knows this is a falsehood. What the draft opinion would do is to send this issue back to the state legislatures, or potentially to the national legislature, so that the legislators have to vote on the issue. That's it. A rational response by somebody with her views would be to state "well, here's a difference between us and the GOP and this is a reason to vote for Democrats.". That's not my view, but that would be a rational response. Instead, it's going to result in months of more false arguments before we needed to be hearing them, inserted into a political era in which boatloads of false arguments are already in circulation. The entire country didn't need that.
She was a contestant on Ukraine's "Ukraine's Got Talent", kids edition, in 2017.
Seems like every nation in the world has some variant of this.
Jimmy Akin posted this on his Facebook Feed, noting how cheerful this prewar performance was, which it is. I think she was 11 at the time she sang this, and she's awesome.
I will note that yodeling isn't really a Ukrainian thing, as so far as I know, but she's super at it. Some of the lyrics here are in English, which shows how dominant English has become globally as well, and contrary to what people will claim about there being no accents in sung English, her Ukrainian accent is thick.
Well, with pipes like that, she's tried to keep a singing career up, and she ought to. She has a really good voice, and a command of it.
As recently as 2020, the yodeling thing was still going on. Here's an example from that year, at which time she was apparently 14. Here she sings in German. I can grasp some German, but not enough to be able to tell if her Ukrainian accent is equally thick in German.
You probably can't make a career of being a Ukrainian yodeler, I'm guessing, and her YouTube page shows some odd attempts at covers, such as John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads. Anyhow, here's one from last year that's clearly an attempt to cross over into being a Ukrainian pop star (heck, maybe she is a Ukrainian pop star).
As a non-Ukrainian, I have to say that this piece is both very pop, and very, even oddly, Ukrainian.
Here's a more "pop" one.
What about now?
And check out the evolution of the music, particularly the lyrics.
And this one could be right out of the Second World War.
So there you go. How to go from a kid singing "What Does The Fox Say" to ballads about killing the Russians.
Really good job there, Putin. Getting your country into a war you can't win, over dreams of imperial glory, and making a people that didn't like yours in the first place, probably hate you for another generation.
