Gilead
White Christian nationalism (Trumpism)
Fig. 2. In terms of geographic area, Pennsylvania is very much a white Christian nationalist kind of place. Photograph by author, January 5, 2023.
There are some problems here. Among other things,
[‘Dilbert’ creator Scott] Adams said Black people are a hate group, citing a recent Rasmussen survey which, he said, shows nearly half of all Black people do not agree with the phrase “It’s okay to be white.”[1]
Relying on notoriously right-wing Rasmussen surveys is a problem. Relying on surveys is a problem. Relying on a single study, with improbable results unreplicated, is a problem. Generalizing from “nearly half” to all is a problem.
I have little doubt that some Black people do indeed hate white people, just as I have little doubt that some white people hate Black people. One question is how many in each group. A second is whether that number is sufficient to label the entire group a ‘hate group.’ I would suggest that by the logic Scott Adams employs,[2] men could be labeled a ‘hate group’ against women, and white people could be labeled a ‘hate group’ against Black people and people of Latin, indigenous, and Asian ancestry.
Chris Quinn, “We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 24, 2023, https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html
Academic repression
Fig. 1. “The Evolution of Intellectual Freedom.” Comic by Jorge Cham, 2011, via Episyllogism[3] fair use.
I’ve been much too slow getting to this, but Marymount University’s proposal to cut nine “liberal arts” majors—they’re counting mathematics and economics as “liberal arts”—seems reminiscent of Saybrook University’s decision to cut its Human Science program.
True to our mission, all university programs will continue to be grounded in the liberal arts and focused on the education of the whole person, but [Marymount University] cannot financially sustain offering majors with consistently low enrollment, low graduation rates, and lack of potential for growth.[4]
The problem with this rationale is that it relies on reductive analysis, assuming that each of these majors has limited impact on the university as a whole, indeed that you can sustain a “ground[ing] in the liberal arts” without the liberal arts scholars and the emphasis that these programs ensure. What I saw with the Human Science program at Saybrook was that it was at the core of Saybrook’s curriculum; ripping it out untethered the university and turned it into just another California “new age” institution.
The path that Marymount follows will likely be different, but the loss of these programs no less detrimental.
Julian Roberts-Grmela, “9 Liberal-Arts Majors Are on the Chopping Block at Marymount U.,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/9-humanities-majors-are-on-the-chopping-block-at-marymount-u
Peoples Park
It’s amazing that all these decades later, the University of California at Berkeley is still trying to develop Peoples Park—they’ve been at it since the 1960s—and folks are still fighting to preserve it as a park.
UC Berkeley “failed to assess potential noise impacts from loud student parties in residential neighborhoods near the campus, a longstanding problem that the [environmental review] improperly dismissed as speculative,” the final ruling said.[5]
I don’t know where the University gets off calling such impacts speculative. I traversed UC Berkeley a fair amount in the final years of my time in the San Francisco Bay Area and it is clearly a university where almost anything except academics receives emphasis. So-called “Greek life” clearly predominates in the neighborhoods surrounding the campus and traffic to and from football games hopelessly snarls traffic on narrow streets.[6] What I see here is everything university administrators use to attract students, alumni, and money, everything, that is, except scholarship.
Teresa Watanabe, “Court ruling halts UC Berkeley from building student housing at People’s Park,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-24/court-ruling-halts-uc-berkeley-from-building-student-housing-at-peoples-park
Criminal injustice
One of the biggest reasons reforms are needed is that the current system allows prosecutors to use “impermissibly coercive incentives” to get defendants to agree to plea bargains — even when they’re innocent, according to the [American Bar Association] report.
Tactics that include imposing harsher sentences on defendants who choose to go to trial, holding those who reject plea deals in pretrial detention and selecting charges that offer prosecutors bargaining power are just some of the ways defendants are coerced into pleading guilty, the report says. . . .
Concerns about innocent defendants pleading guilty are heightened by the fact that in many states, defendants are barred from challenging their convictions based on new evidence of their innocence once they have accepted a guilty plea, according to the report. . . .
There are significant racial disparities when it comes to prosecutors’ decisions to drop or reduce charges, with white defendants being 25% more likely than Black defendants to have their most serious charge dropped or reduced as part of a plea deal, according to [Belmont University College of Law professor Lucian E.] Dervan.
Black defendants are also more likely than white defendants to be held in jail before trial, increasing the likelihood they will take a plea deal, according to the report.
Plea bargains also make it difficult to uncover that racial bias and other police and prosecutorial bias or misconduct, the report added, because such misconduct is usually unearthed through pretrial litigation or at trial.[7]
Jack Karp, “Use Of Plea Bargains Undermining Justice, ABA Report Says,” Law360, February 22, 2023, https://www.law360.com/access-to-justice/articles/1578138
Ukraine
Fig. 2. “The atomic cloud over Nagasaki 1945.” Photograph from Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Overseas Operations Branch, New York Office, News and Features Bureau, (12/17/1942 – 09/15/1945), by Charles Levy, August 9, 1945, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I could see why [Hanna] Hopko was so angry at the divergence between what Western leaders declared publicly and what they said privately. There were a couple off the record events I went to, so I can’t say who they were with, but the distinct sense I was starting to get from them and as I left Munich was that for all the talk of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” the West was fundamentally not comfortable helping Ukraine to win on Ukraine’s terms. There was a very realistic and accurate assessment that [Vladimir] Putin’s nuclear threats were not empty and that he very well might act on them if the Russian military collapsed or if Ukrainians took Crimea. That is, Putin would go nuclear if Ukraine won the war.
Putin has made this war existential. He cannot lose it and survive as the leader of Russia. At that point, everything is on the table, and given my conversations with Moscow, that still very much includes a potential tactical nuclear strike on the battlefield. That, from everything I’ve heard in my conversations with people in the Biden administration, would force the United States to get directly involved. Does that mean that the U.S. and Europe can’t let Russia lose and Ukraine win?[8]
Robyn Dixon and Catherine Belton, “Putin, czar with no empire, needs military victory for his own survival,” Washington Post, February 19, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/20/putin-czar-with-no-empire-needs-military-victory-his-own-survival/
Maria Katamadze, “Can Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin challenge Putin?” Deutschewelle, February 19, 2023, https://www.dw.com/en/can-wagner-head-yevgeny-prigozhin-challenge-putin/a-64744266
Anton Troianovski and Valerie Hopkins, “One Year Into War, Putin Is Crafting the Russia He Craves,” New York Times, February 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-putin.html
Anne Applebaum, “Biden Went to Kyiv Because There’s No Going Back,” Atlantic, February 20, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/biden-trip-ukraine-kyiv/673134/
Missy Ryan et al., “Biden makes surprise visit to Ukraine ahead of Russian invasion anniversary,” Washington Post, February 20, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/20/president-biden-kyiv-ukraine-visit-war/
Marc Santora, Peter Baker, and Michael D. Shear, “Biden Visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s Embattled Capital, as Air-Raid Siren Sounds,” New York Times, February 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/us/politics/biden-ukraine-visit.html
Ishaan Tharoor, “Biden in Kyiv and Warsaw is a reminder of who really leads Europe,” Washington Post, February 20, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2023/02/20/biden-leader-europe-kyiv-trip/
Evan Vucci et al., “Biden in Ukraine ahead of war anniversary: ‘Kyiv stands,’” Associated Press, February 20, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-biden-f00af220669457d5ba07127c7e57a27b
Julia Ioffe, “Peace & Gossip in Munich,” Puck, February 21, 2023, https://puck.news/peace-gossip-in-munich/
Tom Nichols, “Putin’s Desperate Hours,” Atlantic, February 21, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/02/putins-desperate-hours/673150/
Ann M. Simmons, “Putin Suspends Nuclear-Arms Treaty Between Russia, U.S.,” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-suspends-new-start-nuclear-arms-treaty-with-u-s-6498b44
Evan Vucci, John Leicester, and Zeke Miller, “How do you sneak a US president into a warzone without anyone noticing?” Associated Press, February 21, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-biden-kyiv-politics-74c9de636c489393c86ad115e5cbcb48
Ed Pilkington and J Oliver Conroy, “Putin aiming to divide US public opinion with nuclear treaty pullout, experts say,” Guardian, February 22, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/22/putin-biden-us-nuclear-new-start-treaty-russia-ukraine
- [1]Chris Quinn, “We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 24, 2023, https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html↩
- [2]Chris Quinn, “We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 24, 2023, https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html↩
- [3]Bob Lane, “Academic Freedom,” Episyllogism, November 3, 2016, https://boblane.com/2016/11/03/academic-freedom/↩
- [4]Irma Becerra, quoted in Julian Roberts-Grmela, “9 Liberal-Arts Majors Are on the Chopping Block at Marymount U.,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/9-humanities-majors-are-on-the-chopping-block-at-marymount-u↩
- [5]Teresa Watanabe, “Court ruling halts UC Berkeley from building student housing at People’s Park,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-24/court-ruling-halts-uc-berkeley-from-building-student-housing-at-peoples-park↩
- [6]David Benfell, “Women’s lives are still expendable,” Not Housebroken, October 22, 2017, https://disunitedstates.org/2017/10/22/womens-lives-are-still-expendable/↩
- [7]Jack Karp, “Use Of Plea Bargains Undermining Justice, ABA Report Says,” Law360, February 22, 2023, https://www.law360.com/access-to-justice/articles/1578138↩
- [8]Julia Ioffe, “Peace & Gossip in Munich,” Puck, February 21, 2023, https://puck.news/peace-gossip-in-munich/↩