Sanchez made the comment during a taped interview for public affairs show “Conexión” that aired Friday on Univision 19 in Sacramento. The remarks follow a blistering statement Sanchez issued after the endorsement earlier this week, accusing the president of being part of the nation’s “entrenched political establishment.”Sanchez beat "B-1" Bob Dornan for the seat in 1996 when I lived in the district, marking the first significant inroad of the Democratic Party to what had been safe Republican territory for over a generation. While Sanchez's remarks here are comparatively tepid — she doesn't exactly claim race was an overriding factor — it's clear she thinks it is a factor. For all that Donald Trump rightly gets press for being divisive, the Democrats themselves have chosen a politics of divisiveness: division by race, by sex, by sexual preference. Yet we appear to enter an era when minority status may no longer provide political advantages; witness Asian-Americans successfully quashing renewed efforts to resume affirmative action in UC admissions two years ago. The politics of victimhood end with the realization that not everyone can be a victim.
In the interview, the congresswoman noted that Obama and Harris have been longtime friends, but said that race was also a factor in his endorsement:
“I think they have, what he said they have, is a friendship of many years. She is African American, as is he. They know each other through meetings,” Sanchez said in Spanish during the interview.
There are two different questions here. One, does Milo deserve sympathy and support? And two, is Twitter's enforcement of anti-harassment rules politically biased, rife with favoritism, and generally inconsistent?(The TL;DR answers are: not so much in this case, and yes.) Young observes that "his online conflicts tended to escalate into nasty personal attacks", viz. this one about former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro on the occasion of his son's birth:
Milo is a very smart, talented, charismatic man. I still believe he was on the right side when he joined the fight against the crypto-totalitarian "social justice" cult. But I've always thought that, unfortunately, any backlash against "progressive" cultural politics was likely to be a magnet for actual racism, misogyny, and other bigotries. Today, Milo is actively boosting these malignant forces. As his "Daddy" Donald Trump would say: Sad!Even though Twitter hasn't commented on the matter more extensively, it seems almost certain that the problem stemmed, in part, from faked tweets he posted, purported to be from Jones, which in turn "was both impersonation, a severe violation of Twitter rules, and a pretty clear move to pour more fuel on the fire."
These attacks on Ms Jones speak to something more than the raucousness of Twitter, which can often be a good thing, certainly to the extent that it allows unheard, eccentric and potty voices to be heard. It speaks, more importantly, to the derailment of the important task of challenging PC. Tragically, for those of us who want to prick PC from a genuinely liberal and pro-autonomy perspective, the anti-PC mantle has in recent months been co-opted by the new right, or the alt-right, as some call them. These lovers of Trump (they call him ‘daddy’) and conspiracy theorists about feminism (whose wicked influence they spy everywhere) have turned being anti-PC from a decent, progressive position into an infantile, pathological, Tourette’s-style desire to scream offensive words out loud, like the seven-year-old who’s just discovered the thrill that comes with saying ‘f**k’.Yet simultaneously, as Freddy DeBoer points out, it's pretty obvious that Yiannopoulos got the boot at least in part because he's not in the club (emboldening mine):
When Emmet Rensin was suspended from Vox for following liberal logic on Trump to its obvious conclusions, it was trivially easy to find Vox employees who had said far worse things on Twitter, while Vox employees, with absolutely no consequences. The #WeAreTheLeft debacle was made extra funny/sad by the fact that so many of the signatories of that letter were objectively guilty of the kinds of behaviors the letter indicted. People who gleefully trashed Justine Sacco complain about pile-ons; people who say doxing is wrong get others fired from their real-life jobs. There are no principles; there’s only who you’re cool with and who you aren’t. I’ve been for saying this for years, 8 in fact, and the response has always been a kind of muttered shiftiness, a desire to change the subject. Because most people know I’m right. They always have. But for some reason, there’s this dedication to maintaining the pretense, this addiction to plausible deniability. Nobody really thinks this stuff is about principle, but to be a member in good standing, you have to go through the motions. That hasn’t changed.Which is what makes this so frustrating, and why all defenses of free speech ultimately grow tiresome, because they tend to involve the defense of sometimes terrible behavior. As Ken White recently wrote at Popehat, "nobody needs free speech rights to protect admirable speech by people we like." Anita Sarkeesian, Yiannopoulos' longtime #Gamergate foe, appears to have finally won the game started when she landed on Twitter's "Trust & Safety" board. But let us assume that she and her like-minded cohorts indeed turn Twitter into a mammoth echo chamber, a place where orthodoxy and adorable cat pictures are the only permissible tweets. Where will she go to gin up the death threats so central to her shtick?
As of the time of writing, the film’s scores from female reviewers are considerably higher, with 84 percent of women giving the movie a thumbs up. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek comments, “The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.” Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes that it’s “cheerfully silly” and Kate Muir of U.K.’s The Times says it’s a “rollickingly funny delight.”In other words, Salon's Nico Lang holds men accountable for some "right" opinion of a film, i.e. the one she presumably holds. She goes on, not to see if there's a general split by sex in films, but to discover heresy:
On the flip side, 77 percent of the critics who gave the film a thumbs down are male. Roger Ebert’s one-time sidekick, Richard Roeper, called it a “horror from start to finish,” while David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter referred to “Ghostbusters” as a “bust.” That disparity has hampered the film’s reception: Currently, there’s a 10 percentage point difference between male and female opinion on the movie. If reviewing were left up to male critics alone, “Ghostbusters” would have a 74 percent approval rating.
These gender gaps were static across the board: On average, men were overrepresented in negative reviews by a six percentage-point margin—with 82.1 percent of “rotten” ratings coming from male critics. These films include “Suffragette” (78 percent of negative reviews came from men), “Julie and Julia” (80 percent), “It’s Complicated” (76 percent), “Hope Springs” (78 percent), “Mamma Mia” (80 percent), and “The Iron Lady” (79 percent). The latter was the only film to receive harsher reviews from female critics, in which Streep played Margaret Thatcher. Just 43 percent of female critics liked it.Again: the "correct" opinion, and male haters. (Also notice she does not measure the same thing on each side, i.e. what is the actual percentage difference between genders?) Perhaps one day it will dawn on Ms. Lang and her similarly-inclined friends that men are a large portion of the moviegoing public, too, and are entitled to their opinions as anyone; the old saying about opinions being like assholes still applies. That is not to say that there shouldn't be movies tailored to specific audiences. One of my focuses in that regard is that people who complain of specific underserved markets need to go out and fill them, and reap the rewards — and bear the costs. If the 2016 Ghostbusters goes on to long success, I'll tip my cap; that's how capitalism works. Yet it may come to pass that this one becomes a cult film among women, but not well regarded more broadly, i.e. it won't be the blockbuster the original was. That's fine, too. None of us owes an opinion of a particular work to someone else, save in Stalinist dystopias.
“Suffragette” (73 percent Tomatometer):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 82 percent
“The Devil Wears Prada” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 82 percent
Female critics who liked it: 80 percent
“Julie and Julia” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 85 percent
“It’s Complicated” (57 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 76 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent
“Hope Springs” (75 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 78 percent
Female critics who liked it: 79 percent
“Ricki and the Flash” (65 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 85 percent
Female critics who liked it: 76 percent
“The Hours” (81 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 97 percent
Female critics who liked it: 97 percent
“Mamma Mia” (54 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 80 percent
Female critics who liked it: 60 percent
“August: Osage County” (64 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 86 percent
Female critics who liked it: 68 percent
“The Iron Lady” (51 percent):
Negative reviews that came from men: 79 percent
Female critics who liked it: 43 percent
Don’t believe the hype. The Ghostbusters publicity campaign has used puling fanboy misogyny — which is always worth ignoring — to whip up a furious counter-reaction promoting the film as a feminist cause célèbre.In that, the overall pre-release publicity stunting of the film reminds me of nothing so much as the original The Blair Witch Project, in which bad editing and cinematography substituted for actual plot and writing, amplified by a relentless and visionary PR campaign that defined "viral" before many of its modern appurtenances existed. Say what you want about Feig as a director, he really seems to understand how to knot together the cultural and business aspects of filmmaking.
It’s worked like a charm. Earnest think pieces have excoriated despicable “Ghost Bros” for wrecking the dreams of women everywhere by blaming the female leads when the “the worst trailer ever” was released. Platoons of solemn interviewers have asked Feig how he’s weathering the terrible storm surrounding his film, as if controversy doesn’t typically help a movie’s box office returns.
People forget that the Ghostbusters brouhaha is just a pumped-up variation of the same publicity scam that attended the opening of Bridesmaids, 2011’s “feminist triumph,” a women-centered comedy also directed by Paul Feig and starring Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy in a large female ensemble.
The reasonable person. The reasonable cop. The reasonable whoever. These are the sorts of rules that courts love to embrace when confronted with hard, maybe even insurmountable, problems and they can’t develop a principled test that would actually inform people what they can do without getting prosecuted.Also worth reading: "The First Rule of Policing And Alton Sterling".
And you love these rules. Well, not so much lawyers, but the rest of you. Because “reasonable” sounds so, well, reasonable. And as Seth Godin asks, who isn’t reasonable?
Update 3: Why are ex-military given priority for civilian police jobs? Is this begging for factory-installed undiagnosed PTSD? (Not saying this was a factor in this or the I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-so-damn-soon-after-but-yeah-it-is Philando Castile shooting.)Now let's see how these pigs defend this. RIP #AltonSerling #BLACKLIVESMATTER pic.twitter.com/35SIWwTruJ— R. Blanco (@illygirlBreA) July 6, 2016
"BLM said they did not tell organizers about their plan to hijack the parade, an act that has since been called a “win” by the group, but widely criticized by many others.Pride president Mathieu Chantelois called BLM's hijacking of the event the mere opening of negotiations:
“Yesterday, we agreed to have a conversation about this. We agreed that we will bring this to the community and to the membership, but at the end of the day, if my membership says no way, we want to have police floats, they decide.”Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a flood of hate mail aimed at BLM, whose behavior is simply inexcusable and childish. BLM went on to complain about this as "pink-washing":
Relations between the petulant BLM protesters and city hall appear to be still surprisingly good, as the city planned on giving them a race relations award, part of a pattern of collapse in the face of organized protest, no matter how childish.Charges of "pinkwashing" are invariably some mixture of eyewash, brainwash, and hogwash. #PrideTO https://t.co/90V9Y8su0k— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 6, 2016
The short history of Black Lives Matter in Toronto proves that so long as you’re the victim group du jour, bullying and intimidation can win you obeisance from officials, to say nothing of reverential coverage in the media. When they staged a sit-in outside police headquarters to protest police racism, the Toronto Star depicted them as freedom fighters. After they demonstrated outside the home of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, she met them on the steps of Queen’s Park and declared, “I believe we still have systemic racism in our society.” When they accused the city of racism for shortening the schedule of an African music festival (the neighbours had complained about the noise), the city hurriedly restored it. In response to their demands, both the city and the province have called for investigations into the racist practices of the police – despite the obvious fact that Toronto is one of the most racially peaceable cities in all of North America.As much as I'd like to think the Pride organizers will win this one over time, I'm not entirely convinced.
"Pride Toronto never agreed to exclude police services from the Pride parade... We have had, and will continue to have, discussions with the police about the nature of their involvement as parade participants," the organization said in a statement.One wonders just how much longer they will adhere to the other, less visible but still significant terms inflicted on them. While the tantrum's outcome drew praise from many quarters, it appears from this vantage that it was nothing short of a commercial shakedown of the sort American race hucksters have engaged in for decades. Intersectionalism means there's always someone more privileged than you, if you just try hard enough; converting that to money and power is always the goal.
"Frankly, Black Lives Matter isn't going to tell us there's no more floats in the parade," Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois told CP24 earlier in the day.
