JIM GERAGHTY ON THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC DEBATE: Booker and Castro Thrive, Warren Coasts, and Beto Crashes. “It’s time to call it – he’s thoroughly underwhelming as a debater and wildly overrated as a public speaker. Answering the first question in Spanish, unprompted, looked like a pandering gimmick. He had some better moments as the night progressed, but he was hit so many times by so many other candidates he must have felt like . . . a piñata.”
Heh.™
IF YOU LIKE YOUR PLAN, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR PLAN: Bill de Blasio Slams Beto O’Rourke: ‘Why Are You Defending Private Insurance?’
FROM THE “BURN IT ALL DOWN” SCHOOL: Sure, cancel student debt. Then cancel college. Higher education has been massively devalued over the past decade.
BREAKING NEWS FROM 2003: Tim Ryan: The Democratic Party Has a ‘Perception Problem’ as ‘Coastal, Elitist.’
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Julián Castro Says ‘Reproductive Justice’ Means a ‘Trans Female’ Can Get an Abortion.
IT’S REALLY IMPRESSIVE HOW SILICON VALLEY HAS MANAGED TO MAKE ITSELF UNIVERSALLY HATED, LEFT AND RIGHT: Democratic Debate Opens by Declaring Big Tech and Corporations as the Enemy.
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FLASHBACK: We’re At War, But Let’s Talk About Sex.
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.
I QUITE ENJOYED OUR ECLIPSE IN KNOXVILLE A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO: One Week Until the Great South American Total Solar Eclipse!
I won’t be heading to this one, but my friend David Baron — who has a professional interest in the subject — is on his way.
BOB MCMANUS: Now even knitting has to be political in Trump age.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, and it’s spectacularly sad.
WHY ARE LEFTIST-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ENTITLEMENT AND DISRESPECT? Rutgers chancellor apologizes after being caught on video berating campus cops.
SENATE APPROVES EMERGENCY AID FOR SOUTHERN BORDER: “The Democrat-controlled House can push to pass its bill or compromise with the Senate in a conference committee. If neither is accomplished, the humanitarian crisis will again be left waiting until after Congress’ week-long July 4th recess.”
UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi rejects Senate’s bipartisan border bill.
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FLASHBACK: Hillary Clinton’s Cash-For-Access Diplomacy.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Busting the college-industrial complex.
Yet even as reformers have pushed to remove a variety of barriers to employment, the biggest and most significant barrier to employment in American life — the use of the college degree as a default hiring device — has gone blithely unremarked. Indeed, even as reformers target employment obstacles for felons and florists, the pervasive use of college-degree requirements, despite its dubious legality and profound costs, has bizarrely escaped serious consideration.
At its best, higher education can be a powerful engine of opportunity and socioeconomic advancement. And that’s the way it’s almost universally described — at least in college brochures, think-tank reports, campaign stump speeches, and legacy media. Nevertheless, for too many Americans, the truth is that post-secondary education is principally a toll: an ever-more-expensive, increasingly mandatory, two-, four-, or, more accurately, six-year pit stop on the way to remuneration.
Which is profitable for the toll-takers.
DISPATCHES FROM THE WORLD OF JACOBIN KNITTING: How Tech Bias Became A Kitchen Table Issue.
Ravelry announced yesterday that they would ban all pro-Trump material from the site, in a statement that was brutally accusatory of all his supporters.
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Now, of course Ravelry’s within its rights to do this. It would be within the rights of any platform or community to do this. Any private community could legally make the same announcement tomorrow if they wanted.
But we should pause to appreciate how incredibly toxic this behavior is, and the negative ramifications for our culture and our communities. Some of the more foolish analysts are apt to argue that the biases of digital are just a representation of grievance culture, unimportant to normal Americans.
Developments like this show how wrong they are. This is not a conversation limited to activists or media members when families are talking about mom losing her income and her friends.
Knitting communities often bring together people with very different politics. Some of our writers who have used Ravelry for years experience it as a community that exists outside of the political arena, one that lowers the walls between factions.
A step like this raises those walls back up, and while there is some backlash, the size of Ravelry as a player in the market means there isn’t an obvious “just build your own” dynamic. Conservative pattern makers who paid money and built a following are being booted from the community they helped build, losing content they paid for, and find themselves in an instant sealed out of the single biggest market for their creative wares.
Somebody should write a book about social media’s increasingly toxic politics.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Louis CK’s Audience Must Be Punished.
Last weekend, disgraced comedian Louis CK made a surprise appearance at the Skankfest comedy festival in Brooklyn. It was bad enough that the fallen funnyman dared to show his face in public, after being banished from society in 2017 for sexcrime. But what happened next was simply unacceptable.
The crowd cheered for him.
Cheered.
Let that sink in.
Now the festival’s venue, Brooklyn Bazaar, has reacted to this hate crime on their premises:
And thus begins yet another self-induced Maoist struggle session. “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play,” as the computer said at the end of the movie War Games.
And speaking of movies: Judi Dench Defends Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey’s Work: “Are We Just Not Going to See All Those Films?”
“What kind of agony is that?” Dench told the latest issue of Radio Times, The Guardian reported. “Are we going to negate 10 years at the Old Vic [the London theater where Spacey served as artistic director] and everything that he did – how wonderful he’s been in all those films? Are we just not going to see all those films that Harvey produced?”
Dench added: “You cannot deny somebody a talent. You might as well never look at a Caravaggio painting [the painter was sentenced for murder after a brawl]. You might as well never have gone to see Noel Coward [who was accused of harassment].”
To slightly revise and extend a remark by Ray Bradbury, there is more than one way to burn a book or a movie. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.
COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Star Wars’ Mark Hamill Weighs in on Claim Luke Skywalker Carried Out Terrorist Attack Killing 300K People.
One of the more iconic lines from the Star Wars saga is Obi-Wan saying in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi that he wasn’t factually incorrect when explaining to Luke Skywalker that his father was “killed” by Darth Vader. Kenobi’s confession, “So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view,” is often used to justify any difference in opinion among the series fandom, with a book of short stories even borrowing the phrase as its title to depict a number of stories featuring ancillary characters’ perspectives of iconic events. Mark Hamill couldn’t help but use this familiar phrase when replying to a humorous meme about how Luke Skywalker could be considered a villain in the franchise.
I’m sympathetic. Between Luke Skywalker and the voice of the Joker, Hamill’s career is built around portraying mass-murdering terrorists — and in Skywalker’s case a communist-inspired slave-owning religious fanatic to boot. Even for an actor, it’s got to get to you after a while.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less.
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