Fluid Imagination“I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form,” [Democratic Senator] Manchin said. “I don’t fault any of [my fellow Democrats] who believe that they’re much more progressive and much more liberal. God bless ’em. … For them to get theirs — elect more liberals.”
West Virginia: Please take Senator Manchin up on his suggestion and vote the stonewalling fucker out.
From The Framers Would Have Wanted Us to Change the Constitution:
Some believe that we should refrain from tampering with the Framers’ handiwork. Others suggest that amending the Constitution is impossible or think it wiser to spend political capital and resources on more attainable goals. None of these responses is new. Throughout history, advocates of an unworkable status quo employed the language of constitutional idolatry and pessimism to oppose sorely needed change.
From The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe:
The day Thurgood Marshall retired, he issued a furious dissent to a decision that strengthened the death penalty. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall wrote, dissenting from the majority opinion in Payne v. Tennessee. “Neither the law nor the facts … underwent any change in the last four years, only the personnel of this court did.” The same is true of every precedent overturned by the Roberts Court.
From How Humans Lost Their Tails:
Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists.
The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches, and more likely for those falls to be fatal. It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.
And losing a tail could have brought other dangers, too. Mr. Xia and his colleagues found that the TBXT mutation doesn’t just shorten tails but also sometimes causes spinal cord defects. And yet, somehow, losing a tail proved a major evolutionary advantage.
“It’s very confusing why they lost their tail,” said Gabrielle Russo, an evolutionary morphologist at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the study. “That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?”
From Progressive Pressure Over the Budget Reconciliation Bill Is Creating Establishment Pushback:
It seems that a prerequisite for a TV anchor job or a Beltway reporting gig at a corporate media outlet is an ironclad commitment to standing in the shadow of a Mount Everest–sized pile of corporate campaign cash, and insisting with a straight face that politics is just a battle of ideas between earnest statesmen presenting different visions for the country’s future.
Jacobin follows the money. You should too.
From The Great New England Vampire Panic:
Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks….
“People find themselves in dire situations, where there’s no recourse through regular channels,” [Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell] explains. “The folk system offers an alternative, a choice.” Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope, he says.
From The Cancel Culture Panic and Middle-Aged Sadness:
Many people I know over 40 — maybe 35 — resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain….For the individual, this may be a source of anguish [but] that doesn’t make it a political emergency.