A Curious Little Blog

According to Elizabether Warren, “It is not enough to have a good heart … we are called to act,” Warren said. ”We are on the moral side of history.”  And Cory Booker is even more emphatic:  “I’m here to call on folks to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment, there is no bystanders,” he said. “You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”  (Quotations cited in The Hill .) What is this great evil?  Genocide?  Slavery?  No, it is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Are they angry because of the sexual assault that Christine Ford accuses Kavanaugh of?  No, these quotations are from July, long before anyone (other than Dianne Feinstein) was aware of those accusations. Democrats often complain that Republicans inject religion into politics, but if you listen to their language, they are the ones speaking in terms of religion....

I am always willing to have an argument with someone where there is a reasonable point to debate.  However, sometimes a point is so blatantly self-interested that there is no point in discussing it -- it is clearly being made purely for political purposes and not to advance a better understanding.  This happens on both sides, of course.  What astonishes me is how otherwise intelligent people seem to be so unaware of their own biases; how they, in other words, take a completely unreasonable point that their side is making for political purposes and treat it, like everything else coming from their side, as gospel truth to be defended. Perhaps I will soon find a good example among Republicans, but for today I want to discuss a post I read relating to Christine Blasey Ford and her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh.  I'll just put the image here rather than retype the text: Let's start with the details of this assertion and work our way back to the broader point....

I don't go to see many movies, but "Peppermint" is definitely a kind I enjoy.  I would have appreciated a lot more backstory such as "Man on Fire" had.  Even the line from the trailer, which explains the film's title, is missing from the final cut.  I definitely see the limitations of this movie, but the reaction among the literati has been predictably misguided.  According to the New York Times review , "the film plays dangerously into violent Latino stereotypes. One blood bath takes place in a piñata warehouse, where Riley mows down Diego’s unsuspecting gang one by one...All of the dead appear to be Latinos (save for a couple of Korean mob allies), but she leaves the sole white guy working there alive in order to interrogate him." (The following may contain spoilers.)  Let's start with the obvious problem:  all the dead are Latinos except the ones that aren't?  It wouldn't be credible to attack the idea of a Latino drug gang in ...