Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Wyoming Republican Party: Politicians can't challenge the party line

In January 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as chair of the House Republican Conference, voted along with the majority of House representatives (232–197) to impeach President Trump for "incitement of insurrection." On February 9, the state party in Wyoming passed a resolution to censure Cheney for this vote. (The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump several days later.)

Despite being censured by her party, Cheney went on to serve as Vice Chair of the House January 6th Committee which investigates the insurrection. In November 2021, the Wyoming Republican Party voted to cease recognizing Cheney as a party member, citing the language it had used in its February censure.

This outcome is hardly surprising, but what I want to note here is the odd language use by the Wyoming party. The party said that evidence for impeachment needs to be "quantifiable" (clearly, it does not, since not all evidence is expressible in numbers) as well as "undisputed" (which again, it does not, since if it were undisputed there would be no purpose of a House vote on whether to bring charges, nor of a Senate trial regarding the charges. Precisely because the truth might eternally remain disputed, the majority decision is used to determine the outcome.)

So how should we make sense of what the Wyoming Republican Party is saying? Looks like they really mean: All Republican politicians are expected to have a united front; they are not permitted to dispute the position that their party's leadership assumes for them.

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Monday, November 15, 2021

Castration in 'The Temple of My Familiar' by Alice Walker

Two stories in Alice Walker's 1989 novel The Temple of My Familiar discuss castration.

The first is an origin myth of womb envy that leads to misogyny.

"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man's mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women." The men try "to show their worshipful intent" and bring the women "feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws" (since the women are mostly vegetarian and don't cultivate hunting skills). The men finally observe "that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves," and the men raise the boys. Finally they discover "that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had." The men chose to become priests, "that they could be the ones through whom life passed! They began to operate on themselves, cutting off and flinging away their maleness, and trying to fashion a hole through which life could come." The men died, and they learned to "cut off the balls," and "not the whole of the genitals," and to abandon the task of creating "the hole through which life passes." Instead: "What they remembered was that they must be like women, and if they castrated themselves at a certain age — the time of puberty, when they chose or were chosen for the priesthood — they could sound like woman and speka to the universe in woman's voice." This was the meaning of being a priest in those days. With these castrations, their pain seemed to last longer than women's pain in childbirth, and they complained and resented women, developing "hatred of woman."

Mr. Hal tells a story:

"Lulu was the name Lissie had had when she was part of a harem in the northern pan of Africa... how happy she was in the harem, because themaster was old and sickly and had hundreds of women it tired him just to see, not to mention to try to do anything to, and Lissie (Lulu) had had two lovers. One of them was another woman in the harem, named Fadpa, and the other was one of the eunuchs, named Habisu, whose job it was to keep the women from running away. They used to all sit around and plot about how to run away together, but Habisu was afraid to leave the safety of the harem, and he liked the sweets the women shared with him and the colorful clothing he got to wear. He was from a poor family, and he thought it wasn't such a bad thing to give up his nuts for such pleasant room and board. Now I don't know whether this was really the truth or whether Lissie was committing slander on poor Habisu." Eventually Lulu and Fadpa "became devoutly religious" and "could perform miracles." They prayed for their freedom for 80 years and were finally freed from the harem at ages 96 and 103." In a different part of the story, later, he says: "I could see in her [Lissie's] eyes the hundreds of times she had suffered in giving birth, and I swore it would never happen again, and my desire for her, for sex with her or with any woman, died, and I became a eunuch myself. I just knew I would never be able to deal with making love to a woman ever again."

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UN Secretary-General on COP26 conference: 'We did not achieve these goals'

As reported by Annabelle Timsit in The Washington Post yesterday:

“We must end fossil fuel subsidies, phase out coal, put a price on carbon, protect vulnerable communities from the impacts of climate change and make good on $100 billion climate finance commitment to support developing countries,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in a video after the agreement won approval from nearly 200 nations. “We did not achieve these goals at this conference...”
George Monbiot wrote that,:
just as the complex natural systems on which our lives depend can flip suddenly from one state to another, so can the systems that humans have created. Our social and economic structures share characteristics with the Earth systems on which we depend. They have self-reinforcing properties – that stabilise them within a particular range of stress, but destabilise them when external pressure becomes too great. Like natural systems, if they are driven past their tipping points, they can flip with astonishing speed. Our last, best hope is to use those dynamics to our advantage, triggering what scientists call “cascading regime shifts”.

A fascinating paper published in January in the journal Climate Policy showed how we could harness the power of “domino dynamics”: non-linear change, proliferating from one part of the system to another. It points out that “cause and effect need not be proportionate”, a small disturbance, in the right place, can trigger a massive response from a system and flip it into a new state.

Monbiot says: "We could use this property to detonate positive change." With actions today, "small interventions by government could trigger cascading change." While "we should never underestimate the power of incumbency, and the lobbying efforts that an antiquated industry will use to keep itself in business," change is possible.

But that change did not come from COP26.

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Friday, November 12, 2021

Found on Twitter: People crowdsource book recommendations

Seen on Twitter recently. People ask for book recommendations. Click into the thread and you'll see the replies.

Eugene Ivanov artwork
Čeština: Nebeská etapa, 2007. Art by Eugene Ivanov. Creative Commons license

Google doc: Wandering, Meditative, Plotless [or Peripatetic] Books

Google doc: Poetic, Beautiful, Slim novels

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Saturday, November 6, 2021

Pink News explains the problems with the BBC's coverage of trans topics

Yesterday, Pink News published this Twitter thread. It explains why people are upset about recent BBC coverage of trans topics.

Please also note that the BBC made this podcast series.

Update: Here's what's happening at the New York Times in 2023:

"The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth.

* * *

The NewsGuild of New York, which represents Times journalists, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that Times employees have been called into 'investigatory meetings' related to their participation as signatories. An informed source says that disciplinary actions are underway.

The tough talk from management prompted a rebuke from Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild, which is in the midst of contentious collective bargaining negotiations with the Times. The coherence of the don’t-attack-your-colleagues rule is questionable, noted DeCarava, since the paper in 2020 published a critique by op-ed columnist Bret Stephens of the Times’s own 1619 Project."

— "The New York Times newsroom is splintering over a trans coverage debate." (unpaywalled) Opinion by Erik Wemple. Washington Post. 24 Feb 2023.

abstract green color
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Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Podcasts on reading and writing

Resources found on Twitter. You have to click into the Twitter thread to see any/all replies.

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Monday, November 1, 2021

Marcus Aurelius: 'Always think of the universe as one living organism...'

"Always think of the universe as one living organism with a single substance and single soul, and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse..."
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. Maxwell Staniforth, 4:40. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964. Quoted by Jacob Needleman. Why Can't We Be Good? New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. p. 143.

"The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them."
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970 (originally 1949). p 190.

"The new view is based on solid research...their findings lead to the conclusion that separateness is out of the question in Nature. The biosphere is all of a piece, an immense, integrated living system, an organism."
Lewis Thomas, Foreword to Microcosmos. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. California: University of California Press, 1986, 1997. p. 9.

“Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.
It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?”
"The Crane Wife." CJ Hauser. The Paris Review. July 16, 2019.

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