My notional first item is omitted because my doctor says I don’t need to touch any third rails today.
Abigail Shrier is Exhibit A for the proposition that “it is unforgivable to speak truth about matters of sexuality when the elite are pushing lies.”
This item appears because I sometimes ignore my doctor.
Why I Wouldn’t Recommend Adjunct Teaching at Law Schools Now.
Note well the second reason.
But cancel culture doesn’t exist. No sirree!
Rod Dreher has broken out of his Covid den and finds there’s still life, and hope for the counter-cultural causes he champions (likely paywall). And Freddie deBoer reads mainstream journalists the riot act from his perch at Substack (an odd place for a communist, but a guy’s gotta eat, right? Possible paywall.)
Putting these together (the building of Benedict Options and the collapsing of the media that have been taken over by wokesters) gives me hope that the cultural pendulum be reversing toward equilibrium (before overshooting in the other direction).
There is law school lore about “alternative pleading.” Smith sues Jones, alleging that “Jones borrowed Smith’s bucket and returned it with a hole in it.”
Jones replies:
- Jones did not borrow Smith’s bucket.
- There was no hole in the bucket when Jones returned it.
- The hole was in the bucket when Jones borrowed it.
Trump’s “Kracken” lawyer Sidney Powell’s lawyers apparently went to law school, too:
Powell pushed a variety of conspiracies before settling on her foreign-intervention fantasy. “There has been a massive and coordinated effort to steal this election from We the People of the United States of America, to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, to manufacture votes for Joe Biden,” she told Maria Bartiromo—and millions of Fox Business viewers—on November 8. “They have done it in every way imaginable, from having dead people vote in massive numbers, to absolutely fraudulently creating ballots that exist only voting for Biden. … They also used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip. And they used the computers to flip those votes from Biden to—I mean, from Trump to Biden.”
But Powell may have flown too close to the sun. She was hit with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit in January from Dominion alleging she spread her false claims about the company’s machines deleting or flipping votes “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.”
Now that Powell is facing real consequences for her rhetoric, she is singing a different tune. Seeking to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit, the pro-Trump lawyer and her legal team filed a motion on Monday arguing that “no reasonable person would conclude that [Powell’s] statements were truly statements of fact.”
…
Powell’s legal team went on to argue that the case involves “a matter of public concern,” and that Dominion had “already been subject to scrutiny” well before Powell entered the scene. Plus, they made the case that Dominion failed to prove Powell knew her statements were false. “In fact,” the motion reads, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.”
The Morning Dispatch: The Kraken is Backtrackin’.
Although I think the press and the politicos are overplaying the race angle on the Atlanta shootings, a surge of violence against Asians, racially motivated, apparently is real.
Be it suggested hereby that our former President’s smash-mouth about “China flu” (and relentless rhetorical debasement of people he disliked) bears much responsibility for that.
I don’t give a [insert vulgarity here] what his supposed “policies” were. A President who comports himself that way is irredeemable by good policies because a President’s toxicity debases the whole body politic.
Speaking, however, of the Atlanta shootings, David French has a Sunday column on a weird Evangelical subculture that may have contributed. I don’t want to jump to a conclusion on that, but some of the shooter’s reported comments reflect the “purity culture” mentality, experienced as condemnatory by one whose impurity troubled him mightily.
Side note: The Bill Gothard David French alludes to was allowed to mentor me and my classmates at Wheaton Academy in the Fall of 1966 (so dated because (1) I remember that Mellow Yellow was on the charts and (2) Wikipedia). He was a little strange, but the full-blown flakiness hadn’t yet emerged — unless some of my female classmates have stories they haven’t told me.
I later noted that he had become a kind of under-the-radar cult figure for Evangelical homeschoolers and couldn’t quite grasp it, since I don’t recall much charisma.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 