State of Disunion

Listen, lady, your party had a response coming up in an hour, and this ain't the Bronx. Now that I think about it, even the most vociferous residents of the Bronx don't advertise their arsenals and threaten those they disagree with.

• As I remarked not long past, I will happily disrespect the state-level Jackass party leaders in rural-dominated Iowa and pasty-white New Hampshire if the "first" primary moves to a slightly-less-unrepresentative state like South Carolina. Iowa gave us Carter, and made Clinton respectable. New Hampshire fell for the Canuck letter and threw the election to Nixon. And I'm not forgiving the antiintellectual "plain folks" bullshit all that quickly, either.

  This is just tweaking an immensely flawed, self-defeating process that serves not the electorate but the party bosses. In that sense, and for that reason, I'm somewhere between schadenfreude and utter apathy.

• At least the Iowa and New Hampshire back-room dealmakers aren't failing to outlast a head of lettuce by blaming a (completely mythical) "left-wing economic establishment" for their failings. You moron — admittedly, that's rather redundant with "Tory Party Leader" — there is no "left-wing economic establishment" in England. There are a few slightly-left-of-center economists, but the economic establishment is solidly right of center (if, perhaps, to the left of your backroom bosses, Ms Truss); Maggie and her henchcreatures and Brexit ensured that. Ms Truss would have been better off blaming creatures under her bed at Whitehall — they're much more believable (and probably scarier, even to inherited wealth) than a "left-wing economic establishment."
• Here's a fascinating bit of obtuseness on, well, "free exercise" that — at least on its face — has nothing to do with reproductive rights. A Ukrainian cathedral in Chicago was vandalized, and the dean doesn’t know who would want to target the cathedral. Well, let me posit a few possibilities:
  • There's a substantial Russian population in Chicago, and there's this little conflict ongoing between Russia and Ukraine at present, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been a significant center of resistance against the Muscovite Soviet Russian invasion (which is what it is, no matter what it's also called as a matter of political expediency).
  • Some people just vandalize things. Maybe it's individuals; maybe it's one or more gangs asserting territorial primacy.
  • Maybe someone really has a personal grudge against this church, or all churches; calling a church "a place of peace" doesn't always reflect reality.
  • Maybe it was a violent newly-unemployed architecture critic.

  It never ceases to disappoint me when people in positions of power or authority presume that because their own self-image is favorable, everyone else must hold exactly the same views and must accept exactly the same symbolic meaning of their position. (I'm disappointed a lot.) The darker variant is the "Ugly American" problem… and the broader "colonial master/overseer" problem. And this certainly does apply to religious power and religious authority — just ponder being a non-christian in 1980s Oklahoma City (it wasn't a lot of fun).

  So I find Koranda's puzzlement itself rather puzzling… but, in many ways, entirely expected.

• But that's not nearly as coffee-snorting, or keyboard-endangering, as the thought of a "cancel culture" in Big Law. If there is a cancel culture in Big Law, it's aimed at atheists and veterans! I know the firms identified in Mr Willis's response to the claptrap (Kirkland & Ellis; Hogan Lovells; in a photo, Jones Day) rather well from crossing swords with them on more than one occasion, and having to pick up the pieces from their prior work even more often. Mr Willis's hypothetical regarding a law firm defending a bank's redlining practices is just a little bit too on the nose regarding one of them…
• That's almost as disunified, even disloyal, as chickenhawks (who never served) legislating against "wokeness" in the military. Frankly, I'd rather have a military that's too woke than somnabulant (even more than naming them after Confederates, these guys were almost uniformly losers)… and unlike those chickenhawks, I did serve and have an inkling of why a "wokeness" campaign in the military would be a good thing, if that is what it had (and it doesn't).