"The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context."

"The Stanford History Education Group, a research organization, has developed a curriculum called 'Reading Like a Historian,' which assembles material from various chapters of American history and poses a thematic question for students to answer. For example, to answer the question of what John Brown was trying to do when he raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, they read several accounts, including one by Brown’s son, an excerpt from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and a speech and letter from Brown himself. The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.... Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.... The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.... The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently predicted that the novels of the next 10 to 15 years 'will be awful … Art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that’s uncomfortable'..."

Writes George Packer, in "The Grown-Ups Are Losing It/We’ve turned schools into battlefields, and our kids are the casualties" (The Atlantic).

"By intent or blunder, the left and right are colluding to undermine the noble, elusive goal of giving American children the ability to think and argue and act together as citizens."

Concludes George Packer in "Can Civics Save America?/Teaching civics could restore health to American democracy, or inflame our mutual antagonisms" (The Atlantic). 

Civics is at the heart of the struggle to define the meaning of the American idea. Think of the battle lines as 1619 versus 1776—The New York Times Magazine’s project to reframe American history around slavery and its legacy, and the Trump administration’s counterstrike in the form of a thin report on patriotic education....

It's obvious to Glenn Greenwald that "the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status."

1/ Regarding the apparent fact that the Letter’s organizer wanted to have me sign but the luminaries actually in control cancelled me (I was never asked), it’s been obvious from the start that the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status, not the principles. https://t.co/HfeMi8Gtzd

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 18, 2020

He continues in a series of tweets:

2/ I’ve been defending these principles for decades, as a lawyer & journalist — **not** as a way of protecting honored elites from criticism, but by defending those with no power punished for their views: often by people like those who signed The Letter: [link to "GREATEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH IN THE WEST: CRIMINALIZING ACTIVISM AGAINST ISRAELI OCCUPATION"]

3/ That large numbers of the Letter’s signatories don’t give the slightest shit about principles of free speech & discourse — many have been at the forefront of “cancelling” — but are only petulantly objecting because they now hear criticisms is obvious. Dozens of them are frauds

4/ All that said, that many of the Letter’s signatories are frauds does not impugn the principles they’re cynically invoking for their petty, self-absorbed interests. I devoted our show yesterday to this: it’s the marginalized that need these protections: [link to the video "Elites are Distorting the 'Cancel Culture' Crisis - System Update with Glenn Greenwald"]

Also, in that thread, Matt Yglesias responds:

I’ll just say I had nothing to do with deciding who was and wasn’t asked, had no idea who else was signing it, but think the obvious spirit of the enterprise was that they should welcome as many co-signers as possible.

Greenwald answers Yglesias:

I’m sure that’s true. TCW has been clear that he worked with a small handful of people — 4 in particular — to help spearhead the letter and I’m sure they’re the ones who played the key role (“outvoted” as he put it re: me). I’m almost sure I know who did it but won’t speculate.

Poya Pakzad asks:

I think Chatterton was being unclear about who did the voting. In that interview he said they were five ppl that did the reaching out to people. Were it those five people that out-voted you and didn't want to associate with you, or were it some of the signatories?

Greenwald answers:

Yeah, one was George Packer. He and I have had harsh criticism of each other’s work over the years. I’m sure it was stuff like that that drove it. But that’s kind of ironic, no? They were all proud of themselves, claiming they wanted to sign with those they disagree with.

The most interesting sentence in George Packer's musing about whether Trump is insane enough to be removed under the procedure set forth in the 25th Amendment.

"The gaudy gold drapery of the East Room contributed to the impression that at any moment Trump might declare himself President for Life, and a flunky would appear from behind the curtain to pin the Medal of National Greatness on his suit jacket, while, backstage, officials and generals discussed his overthrow."

So let me get this straight — who's crazy?

"The fact that so many informed, sophisticated Americans failed to see Donald Trump coming, and then kept writing him off, is... a sign of a democracy in which no center holds."

"Most of his critics are too reasonable to fathom his fury-driven campaign. Many don’t know a single Trump supporter. But to fight Trump you have to understand his appeal. Trump’s core voters are revealed by poll after poll to be members of the W.W.C. His campaign has made them a self-conscious identity group. They’re one among many factions in the country today—their mutual suspicions flaring, the boundaries between them hardening. A disaster on this scale belongs to no single set of Americans, and it will play out long after the November election, regardless of the outcome. Trump represents the whole country’s failure."

Writes George Packer in "Hillary Clinton and the Populist/The Democrats lost the white working class. The Republicans exploited it. Can Clinton win it back?"

Packer challenges his readers — New Yorker readers — to understand the identity group Trump was able to see and willing to rouse to self-consciousness. With references to Thomas Frank's "Listen, Liberal" — a book I've blogged here, here, and here — Packer blames the Democratic Party for letting this group slip out of its hands.

To President Bill Clinton, speaking in his last SOTU in 2000, "[e]ducation was the answer to all problems of social class."

(His laundry list of proposals to Congress included more money for Internet access in schools and funds to help poor kids take college-test-prep courses.)

“My fellow-Americans,” the President announced. “We have crossed the bridge we built to the twenty-first century.”

In our conversation, Hillary Clinton spoke of the limits of an “educationalist” mind-set, which she called a “peculiar form of élitism.” Educationalists, she noted, say they “want to lift everybody up”—they “don’t want to tell anybody that they can’t go as high as their ambition will take them.” The problem was that “we’re going to have a lot of jobs in this economy” that require blue-collar skills, not B.A.s. “We need to do something that is really important, and this is to just go right after the denigration of jobs and skills that are not college-connected.” A four-year degree isn’t for everyone, she said; vocational education should be brought back to high schools.

Yet “educationalist élitism” describes the Democratic thinking that took root during her husband’s Presidency. When I asked her if this had helped drive working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party, she hedged. “I don’t really know the answer to that,” she said.

"Identity politics, of a different brand from Trump’s, is also gaining strength among progressives."

"In some cases, it comes with an aversion toward, even contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know. White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio. The growing strain of identity politics on the left is pushing working-class whites, chastised for various types of bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively toward Trump."

From "Head of the Class/How Donald Trump is winning over the white working class" by George Packer in The New Yorker.

That reminded me of the wonderful old passage from "The Brothers Karamazov":

"I love mankind... but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.  In my dreams... I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience.  As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom.  In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me.... On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole."

"The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance."

"But, once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them — how to think freely at all — and ideas perish at conception. Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy had more to fear than most of us, but they lived and died as free men."

The last paragraph of George Packer's New Yorker essay titled "Mute Button."

ADDED: I looked at the blog after publishing this post and saw that it sat atop a post about an American law professor who insisted that it was necessary for him to hide his Christianity in the United States.

Here's a Bible verse for timid Christians: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."

"(He declined to be interviewed for this article.)"

The most telling parenthetical in George Packer's "Cheap Words/Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?"

"He" = Jeff Bezos.

Lots of fascinating things in the article, which feels quite biased against Amazon and in favor of all the publishing industry people who have lost out and who did submit to interviews. Sample:

The New Yorker's George Packer takes aim at Andrew Breitbart.

Some of this is interesting, but watch out for distortion:

It was fun! Telling the truth was fun, having the American people behind him was fun, fucking with the heads of nervous journalists and helping the mainstream media commit suicide was fun. Breitbart went on Real Time With Bill Maher and stood up for himself and Rush to the politically correct hometown mob of an audience, and it was an incredibly committed moment in his life. He found himself the leader of a loose band of patriotic malcontents, and right in front of him was the same opportunity that the Founding Fathers had had—to fight a revolution against the complex.

And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side play fair? Anyway, Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. That was why Breitbart was winning, with ample help from his media enemies, and why he must have been at least semi-sober during his college classes on moral relativism.

Just the opposite? Packer answers the question he attributes to Breitbart: did the other side play fair? Obviously not. Packer's side is playing and is playing unfairly.

ADDED: George Packer has been unfair to me (discussed here and here).

AND: Professor Jacobson details what's so wrong about Packer's "deceptively edited video."

Via Instapundit, who says: "Sorry comrade, but what you’re offering is mere bourgeois truth, concerned with tedious facts. The higher truth is 'revolutionary truth,' which is any narrative that advances the revolution."

"Now the South is becoming isolated again."

"Every demographic and political trend that helped to reëlect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition.... The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone."

Writes some guy from a region where they use umlauts.

"The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously."

"In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name."

Is that fair? What about the time he said "What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over" — 3 weeks before election day? "McCain can make the substantive case for his broadly centrist conservatism." That was provocative.

UPDATE: From the NYT:

“It was mutual agreement,” Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said in an interview. “We discussed this before the election, and decided that we would end now.”

As for whether The Times would find another conservative voice for its Op-Ed page, Mr. Rosenthal said: “Sadly, I can’t answer that question, except to say stay tuned. We have some interesting plans.”

That article uses the same quote I used above in my post title. So maybe the NYT is reading this, perhaps to consider me as a replacement for Kristol. I did temp there once, on the op-ed page, you know. In any case, the quote is from the New Yorker's George Packer, and I suddenly remember I have a feud with that guy... not that I remember the reason. Oh, here.

ADDED: A little straight talk. Kristol wasn't an exciting, traffic-winning commentator, like Dowd or Rich. Even in a conservative, the NYT has to demand that. It's a dog-eat-dog world here in political media, and the employees of the NYT, however glorified, must drag in the readers. How you do that with mere words, who knows? But it must be done, and the employers must demand it.

Obama's judges. Althouse's obsession with linking.

WaPo's Ruth Marcus quotes me in her column, which is aimed at allaying fears about what Obama might do to the federal judiciary, fears stoked by Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi in that op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the other day. Marcus quotes Calabresi and National Review's Ed Whelan -- linking to both -- then asserts that it's "easy to exaggerate the impact of the next president" on the courts.

First, she quotes and links to Terry Eastland of The Weekly Standard, who, she says, "has managed not to succumb to the fevered worries of his fellow conservatives" and says that "a Democratic president would probably simply be doing 'maintenance work' on the Supreme Court, at least in his first term, replacing one liberal justice with another." The direct quote from Eastland is: "Obama couldn't create a liberal majority unless at least one conservative, or man-in-the-middle [Anthony M.] Kennedy, were to step down, and that looks doubtful, at least in the next four years." Marcus thinks Eastland "understates" how much McCain could do to tip the Supreme Court with conservatives to replace the liberal Justices. Eastland aptly noted that McCain will need to appoint people that the Senate will confirm, so he won't be able to go as far as avid conservatives would like.

But how far to the left will Obama go in picking judges? Here, Marcus looks at Obama's July 2007 statement (dicussed in Calabresi's op-ed): "we need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

Marcus writes:

This stance, Calabresi said, is tantamount to requiring “the appointment of judges committed in advance to violating” the oath they take to dispense justice impartially. But as University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, no wild-eyed liberal, pointed out, Obama “is not saying that judges should distort the meaning of law so that people they empathize with can win cases. He's saying judges need to understand the realities of the world, most significantly, what life is like for people.”

Now, the first thing I notice there is that Marcus did not link to my blog post, which you can find here. As you may remember, I got quite angry at The New Yorker's George Packer for writing about something from my blog without linking, depriving his readers of quick access to the complete context. Packer was especially irksome because he insulted me and clearly meant to damage my reputation as a law professor. But Marcus, distinctly differently, means to take advantage of my reputation as a law professor. She has chosen the statement of mine that best suits her argument and intends for my status as a law professor to bolster the statement. (By the way, Marcus dropped the italics I had on the 2 words, and I put them back above.)

Why no link? She linked the other writers she quoted. I see 2 possible reasons (aside from simple inattention to detail).

One reason would be to deprive readers of the context. Marcus picked the quote she wanted. She goes on to argue that "the suggestion that electing Obama threatens the rule of law, representative democracy and liberty itself is so unhinged it is hard to take seriously" and admits that conservatives won't like Obama's judges. My comparable assertion is: "I don't doubt that Obama will appoint liberal judges and that the Senate will approve them. But there is a limit to what judges can do, and if Obama appoints anything like the hemorrhaging hearts Calabresi envisions... there will be a mighty backlash," a GOP resurgence in 2010 and 2012. It's possible that Marcus wants to keep her readers from seeing that. I come out and say I think Obama's judges will be liberal, and she only says they probably won't make conservatives happy.

The other reason is that if she were to link to my blog, I would be transformed into Ann Althouse, the blogger, who might be writing some odd, bizarre thing at any given moment. Perhaps she stopped by at 10 a.m. yesterday when the top post was a picture of terrified eggs and the second one was titled "Priapism? That's the least of your worries!" Not so helpful in credibility-boosting as University of Wisconsin law professor. On the other hand -- let's be honest -- University of Wisconsin law professor connotes a person who would enthusiastically welcome the most far-left judges. What a dilemma! Oh, well, shore that up with "no wild-eyed liberal." What are you going to do? Write identifed as "right-wing" by The New Yorker?

IN THE COMMENTS: Trey writes:

Since I have highly developed empathy I am a shoe in [sic] for a high level judge appointment by He Who Must Not Be Criticized, dare I hope for SCOTUS? I dare!

After my appointment, I will have empathy for your distress Ann, and I will legislate from the bench. I will make quoting without linking to blogs written by women a federal hate crime.

I feel your distress.

Aha! Marcus linked to all the males she named and failed to link to the one female. Let's get the jump on the law of the future and think like a judicial-empath.

UPDATE: Email from Ruth Marcus, quoted with permission:

Dear Prof. Althouse,

I'm sorry about the missing link, but the explanation is a lot less interesting than the one you conjured up. The boring truth is that I'm a (relative) techno-idiot, and new to blogging. When I wrote the post in a word file, I was rather proud of myself to have put in hyperlinks, including to your post. But my email wouldn't let me attach the document to send to editors (yes, we still have editors here), and when I copied the documet into the body of the message, the links disappeared. My editors dug up the links themselves, but apparently neglected yours. I guess that makes them part of the grand conspiracy, but now that it's been unmasked, I'll ask them to put it in. Also your italics, which I suspect were the victim of the same word to e-mail copying.

It's probably more fun to impute motive to people, but a quick email to me would have gotten the link inserted pronto. Of course, it wouldn't have made for a blog post. And by the way, no wild-eyed liberal was my effort to try not to pigeon-hole you, to avoid the kind of resorting to cartoonish labels that you rightly criticize without going into a lengthy explanation. No good deed, I guess.

Best,
Ruth

I got so mad at George Packer last night.

As expressed in this post and its comments. Here I am in the comments:

I don't mind people attacking me for doing that post itself ["[I doubt that] Obama wore an earpiece that was clearly visible on HDTV"], which was done at the end of a long session of live-blogging. But what angers me are these broad statements about how insular and narrow-minded I've been, when I have spent the last year (and more) being incredibly balanced, to the point where my readers really didn't know which candidate I was going to vote for. [Links added.]

You know, I'm going to vote for Obama (94.67% chance), but these assholes make it a really distasteful exercise.

Later, I added: "Now I feel like voting for McCain... and pushing the inside the ear transmitter theory..."

That was after reading this, from Original George:

Before dismissing the idea that Sen. Obama was wearing or does wear a hearing device, in less than 60 seconds on the net, I found many, many websites advertising CIC hearing aids. Go here.

They fit entirely inside the ear canal. They cost about $1,000. They're the size of a large seed or piece of corn. Probably sold by every audiologist.

So....could there be a radio receiver that size? Why not?

And, lo and behold, another five seconds on Google, and up come many in-the-ear-canal radio receivers...like here.

The mistake the Professor made, if she made one, was not to invest a few minutes research. Best thing to do would be to call two or three manufacturers of these gizmos and see what they think.

Heck, if I were running for President, I'd use a radio so I could be fed reminders and tips, and I'd be gobbling Provigil. Anything for an undetectable edge. Lifts in the shoes, hair dye, Wheaties, whatever.

A night's sleep put me at some distance from my rage so that, even with harassment from the excessively early-rising marching band, I was feeling cool-headed enough. And then, reading more deeply into the comments, I was cheered by our little friend, our favorite insect, blogging cockroach:

i don t know about sir archy or even titus
but i am a 100 percent sorta brown blooded
american cockraoch born right here
in cambridge mass if you want to count
that as america which i am sure some of you don t
and i ve got to say i think that hatchet job
done to professor a was terrible
that s the trouble with blogging
it s supposed to be easy and breezy
but there are people who deconstruct every
breadcrumb that gets stuck under the letter r
for example that really happened and i couldn t
write a damn thing with r

railroad crossing look out for the cars
can you spell it without any r s...

anyway soon people started to say
i broke my right front leg off and other
stupid theories and my blog went to hell
until tommy came back from camp
and fixed the keyboard

tommy is the boy whose computer i use

anyway tommy and i took the blog private
and maybe i ll start again
but this sure is a cautionary tale

i have a confession to make
tommy subscribes to the new yorker
oh the shame
he s very bright and sophisticated for 12
hell he s bright and sophisticated for 34
so he started reading the new yorker
in the office of his fancy private school
and next thing he had to have a subscription
mom and dad got him one for his birthday

i m glad that hit piece is only online
as i would have to find and eat the page
if it were in the magazine
so tommy wouldn t see it
and while there are some magazines
with yummy casein coated glossy paper
i only eat the new yorker as a last resort

I am shocked at the substandard ethics displayed by The New Yorker's blogger George Packer.

This New Yorker blogger, George Packer, names me and slams me, but doesn't link, so there's no way for readers to see the context. The context is here.

I didn't "push[] the plastic-device story," I genuinely thought I saw something, something that wasn't a "story" anywhere else -- I took my own freeze-frame photograph. Within 5 minutes, I looked more closely in the surrounding frames and decided it wasn't there and said so. That's all my post was. So what the hell is George Packer talking about?

Shame on you, George Packer! That is truly sleazy! You are so eager to push your little theory that you have lost sight of ethics and fairness. Packer writes:

The problem isn’t lack of education—it’s that of a self-isolating political subculture gone rancid.

Look in a mirror, man. Look in a damn mirror, loser.

ADDED: What Packer seems to have done is to have adopted another blogger's summary of what a lot of bloggers, including me, have done over the course of the election season. That other blogger paid no attention to my year of balanced blogging, under an explicit vow of cruel neutrality. And Packer, I bet, did not perform an independent check to figure out what my blog is really like. It is this failure, even more than the failure to link to the particular post he purported to describe, that is really a failure of ethics. What absurd irony that he behaved like this to reach the conclusion that the other side of the blogophere is "self-isolating" and "rancid"!

Packer, I demand an abject confession of your self-isolation and rancidity.

ADDED: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. There's also a separate post called "I got so mad at George Packer last night."