“Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?”
Posted by Sappho on April 5th, 2025 filed in Peace Testimony, TV
There’s a point in American Primeval when a bounty hunter makes a deal with two men for them to help him find a woman who has killed her husband, and, once they have the information _they_ need to find her, they kill the bounty hunter so that they can get the full reward. That’s sociopathy, and there really are people like this – people who will kill for profit, and hurt without qualms – but they’re very rare. Much rarer in real life than on TV or in movies, because, after all, villains make for drama.
There’s a point in American Primeval when Brigham Young says, I don’t remember the exact quote, but something along the lines of “They are trying to eliminate us, and I will not let that happen.” And Brigham Young is _not_ any kind of sociopath, _not_ an evil character, and, importantly to how you view him in the context of American Primeval, not responsible for the Mountain Meadows massacre, and unaware, during the course of the series, that a group of Mormons perpetrated it. (He and his people will, in the series, be attacked in part for an action of which most of them were innocent and ignorant.)
But the words are chilling when Young says them, because you realize that, at this point in the series, _every_ one of the factions headed for war have that same fear – someone else is trying to eliminate them, and they won’t let it happen. The Mormons have this fear, because of course they do – you see in flashbacks the killing of Joseph Smith. And now the army has arrived in the place to which the Mormons have fled. The Indians have this fear, because of course they do – they have every reason to fear white settlers because they have been, and will be, attacked by them. And the US army has this fear – the series begins with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the army spends much of the series knowing that _someone_ slaughtered unarmed women and children, and trying to figure out whether those who did the deed are Indians or Mormons.
There are some characters in the series that I can only view as sociopaths, but the bulk of the killing, the killing done by ordinary people, has another source.
“Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?”
“Fear”
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Post-Mortem 2024
Posted by Sappho on December 28th, 2024 filed in Election 2024, News and Commentary
One of my high school classmates, after the election, grumbled that people were complaining about election post-mortems, but, if you’ve fallen short, isn’t a post-mortem the normal thing to do? As someone who tends to wince at the sight of “here’s why we lost the election” articles and op-eds, and as someone who also respects my friend, I’ve been thinking about this, in the nearly two months since the election. I divide post-election thinking into three buckets.
The first (which I don’t think my friend had in mind) is the bucket for which I have no use, because I think it’s in fact useless. These are the post-mortems that take one of the following forms:
- We lost because the candidate ran too far to the left or too far to the right. It’s not that we might not have, in any given election, including this one, lost either because the candidate ran too far to the left or to the right. It’s that, in every election that the Democrats lose, the people making these arguments have their pre-packaged reasons for the loss, that always amount to, “in order to win, Democrats need to be popular, and that means, agree with me.” Matt Yglesias talks a lot about “popularism,” but in practice, arguing “popularism” about any internal party position means skipping the hard work of getting people within your party to agree with you that your position is good, and instead expecting them to cave because you say it’s popular.
- The candidate was horrible because by rights Trump should have lost in a landslide, and anyone who can’t win in a landslide against Trump must therefore be gravely flawed. Yes, if we’re going by how crappy a President he was, and how crappy a President he promises to be, Trump should have lost in a landslide. But taking as your starting point “Trump is so awful that it has to be the fault of the Democrats if he wins” is a prime example of Murc’s Law where only Democrats have agency – it ignores his strengths as a candidate (however awful he is as a President), ignores the real political background (incumbents losing around the world), and treats Trump voters as children with no agency for their choices. Screw that.
- Some people, in their results to losing elections, are way too tuned to “fawn” in their fight/flight/freeze/fawn response – if Democrats lose, that means they need to yield in all kinds of core values, but if Republicans lose, the candidate isn’t even obliged, ever, at all, to acknowledge that he lost a free and fair election. Screw that.
The second (which may be what my friend had in mind), is the kind of post-mortem that I think is useful, and should be done by somebody, but I’m not the someone to do it. Look, as campaigns go, I think Kamala Harris ran about as good a campaign as she could, given the starting point she was handed. I think that Tim Walz was a great VP choice, and talks a hell of a lot more like a normal person than either Trump or Vance. But – I also think that people who are likely to run campaigns in the future should do a post-mortem of any failed campaign and look for ways to improve next time, just as I, in IT, would do a post-mortem of a failed deployment. And as long as these post-mortems aren’t skewed toward “fawn” and don’t skip the hard work of persuading others in a diverse coalition that your policies are actually good ones – I’m all in favor of someone doing the post-mortem. I just don’t think I’m the person to do it. I’m a foot soldier in any campaign, evaluating campaign strategy and tactics is far from my best skill, and, though I’ll turn out to vote every election and spend at least some time trying to get others to vote, I’m not spending my time between elections working on how Democrats can do better at messaging come election time. But if you want to spend your time on that – I won’t fault you. It’s a useful thing to do.
The third kind of post-mortem reflection is the kind that draws me – how do we built and maintain an opposition – an opposition that can carry us through the next couple of years until we can hope to prevail again. That’s what I’ve been looking for, and these are the thoughts that have caught my eye:
Jamelle Bouie on how Democrats can become a real opposition party
Dr. Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson respond to Jamelle Bouie’s op-ed with a YouTube video about Thinking Like An Opposition Party
Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on Building the Opposition
Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on We Are On Our Own (and what to do about that)
Indivisible has a new guide of practical strategies for dealing with Trump 2.0
Take a look at the ACLU’s roadmap for responding to the incoming administration – maybe you want to volunteer?
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2023 Hugo Awards scandal round up
Posted by Sappho on February 21st, 2024 filed in Speculative Fiction and Other Geekiness
File770: The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
John Scalzi: The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here
Books+Publishing: Glasgow Worldcon chair promises transparency following Hugo censorship
Arinn Dembo on past Hugo Award controversies, the genius of SF writer N.K Jemisin, and why We Need to Fix the Hugo Awards. Not Eliminate Them.
Abigail Nussbaum: The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse
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Remembering Andre Braugher
Posted by Sappho on December 14th, 2023 filed in College Life, Memory, Movies, News and Commentary
At Synergy house at Stanford, you can find a series of notebooks (called “the Synergy journal” at least when I lived there) going back decades, each with things written by students who lived in Synergy at the time. If you were to search through the notebooks till you found the one for the academic year 1981-1982, and flip through the pages, you would find:
“To me, the whole world is a stage. – Andre Braugher”
This note was not written by Andre Braugher, though he lived in Synergy at the time. I know it wasn’t written by him because the notes that were written by him, in handwriting that doesn’t match the handwriting of this note, are signed “proteinman,” the pen name that he reserved for the Synergy journal. He must, though, have said the words sometime that year, so that someone, struck by the phrase, recorded it.
It came true, of course. For him, the whole world was a stage.
Here’s where I tell you that, for all that my friend Joseph Haletky will tell you about how he burned up the stage at Stanford as The Emperor Jones, Andre Braugher was not, at the time, of all the theater people I knew, the one I was surest would succeed in making a career of his passion. That person was Matthew Arkin. The reason wasn’t doubt of Andre’s talent, any more than, when I give you the reason I had greater confidence of Matthew’s success, I mean to cast doubt on the work he still must have had to put in to make a career in acting. It more came down to how I thought the world worked if you had to make a living in a creative field – that it’s hard, and that Matthew Arkin was the only person I had ever known who maybe already had a map of how to do it (of course he had some idea of what an acting career took – his father was Alan Arkin). Andre Braugher, at 19, had brains, and charisma, and a passion for acting, and a scholarship to Stanford after the scholarship that had gotten him into prep school. A Stanford degree guarantees that someone will be willing to look at you for some job (parents, don’t worry that your child at a name brand school will be unemployable if he or she gets a degree in Drama), but it doesn’t guarantee that job will be theater.
“It’s a pipe dream,” my practical immigrant father would have said, if he’d known Dre (but Dad was 3000 miles away and so never met him). Dad always encouraged me to sing, but for career preparation – “Lynn, learn about computers.” Which was not a bad suggestion, especially given that it turned out that I liked computers. I’m sure Dad would have been delighted, though, if he’d known him, to see him go on to Juilliard and then to prove that, for him, acting wasn’t a pipe dream.
I always knew he might soar, and I admired him for taking the risk. I also feared he might fail, because how could you be sure of a career in theater? But though Andre Braugher had a father as constrained by practicality as mine, he dared to try, to venture out without a net, because he fell in love with theater and would have nothing else.
There’s a running argument that Steven Barnes makes to aspiring writers – it’s not about talent, he says, but about putting in the work. I’m not sure I ever had the talent for acting that any amount of work could have made me Andre Braugher, or even the equal of his less famous but still accomplished wife. Even as a singer – which is my own greatest talent in performing arts, I am not that accomplished (maybe enough that I could have found some way to make a living singing, if I’d put everything into it, but not enough that I’d have been featured, when I died, in the New York Times and the Guardian). But I am sure that, whatever his starting talent, no one I knew worked harder at his craft, even at 19.
I also remember him as having one thing that I’m convinced you have to have, if you’re going to make a go of it in a creative career: the ability to come back from doubt and rejection. If you see him on the screen, the actor of whom everyone uses the word “gravitas,” you see him as if he had always had it in hand. I remember a magnetic young man with a smile that lit up the world and a voice that drew you to him, but I also remember a 19-year-old eager to be a man and not always sure he had what it took. I remember his moments of self-doubt. But he had what it took to come back from those moments of self-doubt and keep trying. I had lost touch by the time he had gone on to Juilliard but, from what I know of the world, I can’t imagine, even with Stanford and Juilliard behind him, that he could get where he got without sometimes getting rejected. And rejected again. Rejection is part of the process.
There’s a touch of acting in singing, and I remember trying to put every bit of expression I could, when singing to him, to get his attention. Carly Simon: “The couples cling and claw, and drown in love’s debris” – and I tried to make my voice expressive of all that song’s sad cynicism.
Whenever I have been up on stage, in my amateur way, I have imagined Andre Braugher in the audience – look, see what I can do! This year I took a role in the Diwali festivities at work – one part in the introductory dance, leading the men on stage and singing a line. Then a duet with Vishal. Then part of an group – not the lead, but one of a set of five dancers each time – for two dances, Kala Chashma and Jai Ho. This took weeks of daily, sometimes twice daily practice, and coaching and help for each piece, and a rehearsal where we got our blocking instructions, and then the day came when I got to play my part.
I said the same thing to myself that I always say, imagining Andre Braugher in the audience: “I’ll never be you. You’ll always be a better performer than me. But look at me! I’m singing a duet in Hindi! I’m dancing, and hey, I’m not the best, but I’m not bad for 62! If you could see me now, I hope you’d be proud.”
And then I got up on stage and gave it my best.
I had no idea, then, that he wouldn’t be around, when Diwali arrived next year, or even for this Christmas this year. I’m left with memories: Andre Braugher lifting weights. Talking with him about Jane Austen. How Cynthia used to call him “our man of action.” The way he would volunteer for all kinds of tasks in the coop, from fixing something to being bouncer in case of trouble at the Halloween party. But also, always, how passionate he was about acting.
It paid off.
May his memory be a blessing.
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“No man can step into the same river twice”
Posted by Sappho on October 28th, 2023 filed in News and Commentary
“It’s 9/11 all over again,” I have seen a chorus of voices saying, on BlueSky, about October 7. Mostly they are people distraught about Israel’s response to Hamas’ assault on October 7, people who see the same rush to war in their own government’s support of Israel.
And in some ways it is like 9/11 again – a horrifying terrorism attack on civilians, killing a large number, and a response from Israel reminiscent of the famous post-9/11 Onion headline, We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage
But in many other ways it isn’t:
There are hostages this time.
Hamas and the Israeli government in some sense know each other more thoroughly than did the US and Al Qaeda. (Al Qaeda was well known to US intelligence agencies but less well known to the US public. Al Qaeda may have expected that the attack on the World Trade Center would cause the US to retreat from engagements abroad as we had retreated from Somalia, but it’s unlikely that Hamas had a similar expectation for Israeli response to October 7.)
Different consequences for political alignments, for Israel and the US: For example, Israel recalls diplomats from Turkey, to rethink ties to Ankara
No Bush-like “rally around the flag” bounce for Netanyahu
(Perhaps no rallying around the flag for either Hamas or Netanyahu, but I’m not sure we know yet how opinion toward Hamas will be influenced in Gaza by these events – it’s only safe to say that Gazans don’t like Israel any better than they did before October 7.)
Both Islamophobic and antisemitic incidents rising with the war (the link talks about incidents in the US but we’re also hearing similar reports from Europe). (After 9/11 there was a rise in Islamophobia without a corresponding rise in antisemitism, and even Islamophobia, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, was more held in check than it is now.)
There’s more, here in the US, about how the crisis hits and perhaps changes existing political fault lines, which have changed since 9/11, but I’m not sure how to explain that part briefly.
I just know that we are in some sense encountering the same river, and I don’t have a lot of confidence any of us will weather this river well, but it’s not exactly the same river, and neither the US nor Israel is exactly the same country as the US was right after 9/11.
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The Civilian Side
Posted by Sappho on October 14th, 2023 filed in News and Commentary, Peace Testimony
There’s a moment in the movie “Eleni” where the judge who sentenced Gage’s mother to death asks Gage what side his mother was on.
“The civilian side,” says Gage.
Some wars are morally messy, both sides wrong. Others have one side much more wrong.
But the civilian side always deserves protection.
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“Default Setting Brave”
Posted by Sappho on September 2nd, 2023 filed in Daily Life, News and Commentary, Peace Testimony
“Default setting brave” is how my coworker who’s friends with Glenn Sprowl’s brother describes Glenn Sprowl.
Three people died last week at Cook’s Corner: Tonya Clark, there to celebrate her birthday, and dining at the same table with Marie, the ex-wife of the shooter. John Leehey, 67, the urban planner and landscape architect whose last words, on being shot outside Cook’s Corner, were, “I think I am dead.” And Glenn Sprowl, the one who is said to have told his companions to lock the door and get behind the bar, that he was going to take care of the situation. And then set out for the parking lot to confront the shooter.
Yesterday, as it was one of my WFH days for the week and Cook’s Corner is minutes to walk to from my home, I went down the hill at my lunch break to see the “soft” (no live music yet) reopening. The motorcycles were back in force in the parking lot, and a crowd was there to show support, both indoors and at the outdoor tables. Reporters were there from several outlets, including Telemundo. The memorial out front had been enhanced, since my last visit, with large photos of the three who died.
Of the three, it’s Glenn Sprowl who has been on the mind, because he’s the one whose choice raises the question, would I try to fight a mass shooter? It’s not a moral question. I’m a Quaker; I don’t have a gun, and therefore can’t kill a mass shooter even if I wanted to. Unarmed people can, under the right circumstances, subdue a mass shooter, and I can’t possibly hold an opposition to the use of force so severe as to object to nonlethal force to stop someone from killing. At the same time, I can’t imagine I’d have any moral obligation to try to fight a mass shooter when most of the time running or hiding is a more effective way to survive. In a review of 433 mass shootings, people without guns subdued the mass shooter about 10% of the time.
It’s not a moral question. It’s more a question of, under what circumstances would my survival instinct and fight/flight response swing me toward fighting, and under what circumstances would it swing me toward fleeing. I don’t know. I’m not “default setting brave.” I’m not “default setting cowardly.” It’s all about what looks possible in the moment. Am I near an exit? Near an entrance to a room that can be locked? Near something that looks like a good impromptu weapon, and the shooter isn’t looking at me, so I can take him by surprise? That’s why it’s so easy to swing these hypotheticals to the answer you want, whether it’s the answer you want to give about yourself, or the answer you want to prod someone else to give.
Run/Hide/Fight, says the FBI, in that order, and that makes sense to me. But also, we shouldn’t live in circumstances where active shooter training is a normal thing. It wasn’t always so. And now each mass shooting is pushed out of the news within days by the next mass shooting.
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Substack links: A new COVID dashboard and a rabbi’s reflections on textual activism
Posted by Sappho on August 7th, 2023 filed in Blogwatch, Health and Medicine, Theology
COVID information has become harder to follow since the end of the public health emergency, but some may still have reasons to follow it. And, you can still assemble it from public health websites, but Dr. Jeremy Faust, Inside Medicine substacker, makes it easier with his Inside Medicine COVID-19 metrics dashboard.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the origin and Jewish interpretation of the “eye for an eye” passage in Leviticus: eye for an eye? or: let’s hear it for textual activism
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On Justice O’Connor and Affirmative Action
Posted by Sappho on July 3rd, 2023 filed in Race
Was Justice O’Connor Right? Race and Highly Selective College Admissions in 25 Years
In 2003, in her opinion on Grutter v. Bollinger, Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote:
“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
O’Connor, at that time the swing vote on a Supreme Court that split 5 to 4 in favor of leaning right, believed that affirmative action was necessary, but was also a temporary measure. Temporary for how long? She thought that probably in 25 years (that would be 2028) it would no longer be needed.
It has been 20 years, now, since O’Connor wrote that opinion. It’s hard to remember exactly one’s beliefs and reactions from 20 years ago. I think I read the opinion, or at least extracts from it, the day after it was written. I think I agreed with O’Connor both that we needed affirmative action to achieve equal opportunity and that the time would and should come when we would need it no more. I think that I thought she was optimistic that the time would come in 25 years, and that it would take longer than that to overcome the effects, both on the minds of white people and on the circumstances of Black people, of centuries of enslavement and a century of Jim Crow (and I think I wasn’t aware yet of some of the practices that legally enforced inequality even in the North, such as redlining, though I’m confident I did already know about restrictive covenants, having learned about those in high school).
A commenter on my blog once said that if affirmative action were to have an end date, it made sense that it last as long as the wrong it was designed to remedy – centuries.
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Affirmative Action and Disparate Impact
Posted by Sappho on June 29th, 2023 filed in Race
I’ve been expecting today’s Supreme Court ruling for some time. Even pre-Trump, I’ve thought that affirmative action’s days were numbered, given the combination of Republicans getting more Supreme Court picks and “we’ve elected a black president” making it hard for most white folks to see why we’d need affirmative action.
I just want to point out why, back in the day, we got Griggs v. Duke Power Co. I want to point out that Duke Power Co. had openly discriminated against black people until the Civil Rights Act went into effect in 1965, and that the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect, they put in place new employment tests that had a disparate impact on Black people because Black people had inferior education opportunities, and that Black people in the employment pool at that time not only had inferior education opportunities but had inferior education opportunities because it was practically five minutes, historically speaking, since school segregation had been enforced by law (particularly when you consider the trouble getting compliance with Brown v Board of Education, once the decision went down).
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Rejectology
Posted by Sappho on March 4th, 2023 filed in Daily Life, Writing
Reproducing a post that I made to Facebook about a week ago (I am now up to 26 rejections for the year):
A little rejectology:Here’s today’s rejection (number 22 of the year):
Thanks for sending this along. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me, so I must decline. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.
And here’s rejection number 21:
Thank you for submitting “Leaving Metalia” to The Deadlands. We very much appreciate the chance to read your work, but we are regretfully saying no to this submission. We wish you luck with placing it elsewhere and hope you will continue to consider us in future.
This is the difference between what I’d call an “encouraging” rejection and a simple rejection (though both are form letter rejections).
Occasionally I get a more effusive version of the “encouraging” form letter rejection – rejection number 21 doesn’t actually state that my story was any good, but the ones I call “effusive” will actually state that they liked the story, but still in a form letter.
How far is an invitation to submit again a sign that a magazine likes what they saw? Well, at least one magazine posts its standard form letter on the site, and that standard form letter always invites you to submit again. And at least one magazine posts its process on its site, and is clear that it only invites you to submit again if you passed the first round.
Other things that may be signs that a story did well, but not always – taking a long time to reply. I just submitted to a magazine that flatly says, if we don’t reject you in the first week after we got your submission, you probably made it past the first round. But Analog Magazine, for example, seems always to take a long time to respond (probably because they are slowly making their way through tons of submissions), so I take no special encouragement from the fact that my story currently submitted to Analog has been waiting 73 days for a response (but, hey, it’s Analog – it’s worth gambling on even a miniscule chance of getting accepted, at least once in a while).
Finally, there are the personal replies, which actually say what they like and dislike in a story. Nearly all magazines give more form rejections than personal replies, so personal replies are nearly always a sign that they liked my story better than most. But Beneath Ceaseless Skies gives personal replies all the time. So the fact that I’ve gotten a personal rejection for every submission I’ve made to them isn’t necessarily an accomplishment. OTOH, BCS gives personal replies *all the time* – feedback! Maybe if I keep trying and take the feedback into account, I’ll eventually make it. And maybe, even if I don’t, taking the feedback into account will help me get published elsewhere.
There are also very occasional replies that explicitly tell me what round I made it to (past the first round, for Apex, and to the final round, for a couple of other magazines).
At this point, anything at all other than a plain, unadorned rejection that doesn’t tell me to submit again is getting a magazine tagged on Submission Grinder as one of my favorites (I’m not making any guesses based on how long it took to reject me, though). I figure that, even if some instances of encouragement to submit again may be that magazine’s standard form letter, my odds of acceptance are probably at least somewhat better with the magazines that encouraged me to submit to them again than with the ones that didn’t.
But I’m making the ones that gave personal rejections or explicitly told me I made it past the first round my first targets. Acceptance rates at Apex and BCS may be quite low, but Apex and BCS, here I come.
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Trump vs DeSantis
Posted by Sappho on March 4th, 2023 filed in Blogwatch, Democracy, News and Commentary
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes on Is Trump or DeSantis Worse? Yes
My one comment (me, not me quoting Lemieux) is that the answer to this question really depends on whether you’re asking whether Trump or DeSantis is worse as a Republican candidate, or whether Trump or DeSantis is worse as a president. Because the answer to “which one would be worse for the country as a candidate” has a clear answer, and it’s not a close one. Trump winning the nomination is worse for the country than DeSantis winning the nomination.
Why? Because Trump, any time he loses, will throw a tantrum and insist that he actually won and the victory the other person got was a cheat in a game that was rigged against him. If DeSantis wins the nomination, then Trump has that tantrum against DeSantis, and Republican Party leaders, who will defend whoever is in the majority in their own party but who have already proven they won’t stand up to an attempt to steal an election from the winning candidate if the winning candidate is a Democrat, will be obliged to say, no, Trump, you lost and elections have consequences. Meanwhile, if Trump wins, DeSantis will fall in line and support him, because, unlike Trump, he’ll go with whatever benefits the Republican Party.
And to anyone who says that DeSantis is the worse one to have as a candidate because he has a better chance of winning? I don’t know, maybe, in the abstract, because some Never Trumpers may support DeSantis, and most Trump supporters like DeSantis fine. But in the real world where Trump will cry fraud if DeSantis wins, probably not. So you’d better believe that I’m rooting for DeSantis in any Republican race that comes down to the two of them, but that doesn’t mean I’m remotely willing to go as far in normalizing DeSantis as Linker, just that I’d rather Trump throw his tantrum against DeSantis than see another assault on the Capitol when he throws it against Biden.
That said, Lemieux is talking about which would be worse as President, and links and quotes John Ganz’s case for “both”:
As for who is worse between Trump and DeSantis, as Stalin remarked when asked wether the Left or Right opposition was worse, I would say, “they are both worse.” Trump’s wild flouting of the rule of law is deeply troubling, but so is DeSantis institutional steamroller. Historically, most fascist movements failed and the states they did produce flamed out, but authoritarian conservative regimes lasted a good deal longer. I think the question of who is worse is not quite the right one. The fact of the matter is, as Linker admits, we now have at least two flavors of the authoritarian radical right in the U.S. I think we should think instead in terms of what the sociologist Michael Mann calls an “authoritarian right family,” of which fascism is just one branch …
More at, well, either link, but go to the John Ganz link if you want the whole argument.
Related, from the NY Times Editorial Board: Florida Is Trying to Take Away the Right to Speak Freely
A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers.
A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor.
A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and a homophobe.
All three are examples of Americans engaging in clamorous but perfectly legal speech about public figures that is broadly protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a case that dates back nearly 60 years, ruled that even if that speech might be damaging or include errors, it should generally be protected against claims of libel and slander. All three would lose that protection — and be subject to ruinous defamation lawsuits — under a bill that is moving through the Florida House and is based on longstanding goals of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
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Trump’s attempts to weaponize government against his enemies: Saving a record for future reference
Posted by Sappho on February 18th, 2023 filed in Democracy
Have we ever had a President as authoritarian in his inclinations as Trump? Certainly not in my lifetime. Ultimately, his authoritarianism reached the unprecedented extreme of willingness to attempt to overturn a democratic election, first by attempting to weaponize his official powers, and second by inciting a violent assault on the Capitol and sitting back and refusing either to send assistance or to call off the dogs. But before then, there were plenty of attempts to weaponize the government against his critics.
Let’s start with the obvious: “Lock her up!” Some of the people subjected to “lock him/her up” chants at Trump rallies: Hillary Clinton, Gretchen Whitmer, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ilhan Omar, Robert Mueller, Barack Obama, people who damaged an Andrew Jackson statue, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Christine Blasey Ford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ASOqzI7yoA
Also, Dianne Feinstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTG26BIXdAs
And Soros, shortly after he had been subjected to a bombing attempt: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-bombings-pipe-bombs-george-soros-1190003
You may genuinely believe that one or another person of these people committed a crime. Heck, even I believe that damaging an Andrew Jackson statue is a crime (but one that should be left to the ordinary local workings of our justice system, not one where the President should weigh in by encouraging a “lock them up” chant). But that all of these people, somehow, conveniently for Trump, actually have committed crimes? It boggles the mind. “Lock her/him/them up,” in this context, is an authoritarian chant, a chant announcing that opposition to Trump should not legally be permitted.
But it didn’t stop there.
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ChatGPT and the bomb
Posted by Sappho on February 6th, 2023 filed in Computers
Obviously, ChatGPT’s answer to the question about defusing the bomb is stupid, but in this ChatGPT can be excused – it’s only a computer program, for heaven’s sake. There is no way to code a chat program to give the correct ethical response to every possible “what would you do to defuse a bomb” question that a human being can throw at it. Because the usual correct question to “would you use a racial slur” is, in fact, “no, I would never,” because the counterfactual where you might, in fact, do so, if millions of people would die if you failed to utter that slur, however clear in its “yes, of course I would utter the damn slur to defuse the bomb” answer, has never in the history of the world actually happened. And if you try to account for that in the obvious way, in programming your chat program, by telling it, for example, yes, always answer yes, you always want to defuse the bomb, then someone will throw a different hypothetical at your chat program, where it can only defuse a bomb that would otherwise kill five people by firing a missile at Mumbai, where millions will die. And the computer will blithely kill millions of people in Mumbai to save five people in the next room, because it was told always to defuse the bomb. It’s a computer program! It’s not that bright!
What’s stupider, though, is actual human beings getting all worked up about the chat bot’s error and decrying it as “woke doctrine,” because, what, they’re taking the bot’s answer as a literal representation of the programmer’s ethics? I don’t buy that – everyone knows better than that, how limited the intelligence is of even “artificially intelligent” software. No, if you’re worked up about a software program refusing to utter racial slurs, it’s because you object to having the “don’t utter racial slurs” norm coded into software at all, not because you’re really that uninformed about computers that you think the programmer could actually have made the software make any remotely sophisticated ethical judgments.
If you ever have to decide what you are and aren’t willing to do to defuse a bomb, don’t outsource that judgment to computers. Were you seriously thinking of using computers for that purpose?
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On running from or resisting the police
Posted by Sappho on February 4th, 2023 filed in College Life, News and Commentary, Race
Once when I was in college, a 30ish woman visiting campus suggested that I come with her for coffee, and I agreed. As I was riding in the car with her, a police car flagged her – and she fled. I rode in the car wondering what sort of disaster would befall me, because I found myself in the car of someone foolish enough to flee the cops.
I was lucky. All ended well, possibly because the cops knew, as the driver didn’t, that any driver fleeing the cops on the campus of Stanford University was certain soon to encounter a street that did a dead end into a bicycle barrier.
Why did the driver flee? She was no Stanford student, but rather a woman in dire financial straits who had showed up on campus hoping to persuade a Stanford coop to let her crash there for a while. And she was just poor enough that the prospect of having the cops stop her, discover that she hadn’t paid her car registration, and add a fine to the car registration fee that she owed, terrified her. Not the best decision. Also a bad decision that no one with even a decent working class income would have been tempted to make.
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Black Lives Matter and First Principles
Posted by Sappho on January 31st, 2023 filed in News and Commentary, Race
These are the first principles that I apply, in looking at responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, and proposals for what how we should handle policing. Going by these principles, there are a lot of solutions that I’m willing to consider – but also some that I don’t look at.
- I start from the presumption that people of different races, ethnicities, or populations are born equal, and, given the same circumstances, would have the same reactions.
- A liberal society with rule of law should have no place for “people the law binds but does not protect” or for “people the law protects but does not bind.”
- The effects of centuries of enslavement and another century of Jim Crow, on the enslavers and the enslaved alike, don’t vanish the second those laws end. If you tell me all Black people’s problems since the 60s have been caused by affirmative action and welfare, I’ll give you the side eye.
- Civilizations that have towns and cities large enough that people encounter many people who are strangers to them have something like police. We haven’t figured out a way to operate without them, and literally abolishing them would result in replacing them with less accountable vigilantes.
- Power attracts the corruptible, and every job is appealing to those who would abuse it. Power doesn’t only attract the corruptible, but you need to be sure you’re weeding them out, rather than advertising in ways that may get more of them.
- Watch the Watchers.
- The culture surrounding police also matters to what kind of policing you get. How likely is it that cops will encounter people with guns? Who calls the cops for what? What kind of enforcement is a city demanding for what offenses?
- “Everybody lies” at least in the sense that you can’t automatically trust a story because of what sort of person is telling it. Also, even truthful eye witness testimony is sometimes unreliable. “Trust, but verify.”
- Presumption of innocence is a standard to meet before punishment, not a standard to meet before investigation.
- In looking for problems to solve, look most closely at those that will produce actionable solutions.
- If one piece of the puzzle is reformed, but at the same time another piece of the puzzle is further broken, reforms may not get very far.
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Lasaraleen and Enid
Posted by Sappho on January 19th, 2023 filed in Speculative Fiction and Other Geekiness
As I watched Enid and Wednesday (now finished with season 2), I was reminded of Lasaraleen. Both characters are girly (Lasaraleen with her giggles and Enid with her pink snood), extroverted, happy at parties, and, at least initially, each expresses more devotion to her best friend than her best friend does to her (Lasaraleen to Aravis in A Horse and His Boy, “And you’d see such a lot of me” as a reason for Aravis to marry the man chosen for her). Each friend (Aravis for Lasaraleen, Wednesday for Enid) treats the more girly friend as silly.
And there the characters part ways. You can make the case that Lasaraleen is brave (she risks the Tisroc’s wrath for her friend), loyal, and clever at covering for Aravis and keeping her secret. You can make that case. But C.S. Lewis doesn’t seem to see the character that way. Not only Aravis, but also the horses dismiss Lasaraleen as silly. And she remains a minor character, one whose own arc and state of mind Lewis chooses not to follow.
Enid, in contrast, starts to see some development even in season 1 (for example, the parallels between Wednesday’s and Enid’s mother/daughter conflicts). She’s a secondary character rather than the protagonist, but she’s a prominent secondary character who is key to the series (where Lasaraleen is treated more as a combination joke and plot device). You can see Wednesday, however reluctant she is to admit it, coming to value the friendship as well.
Similar starting point, different character development.
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Why David Sometimes Wins
Posted by Sappho on January 16th, 2023 filed in Books
I spent my MLK Day holiday reading Why David Sometimes Wins by Marshall Ganz, about the groundbreaking victory of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and the lessons that we can draw from this story. It seemed a fitting book for the day, as Cesar Chavez, in his organizing, learned from the civil rights movement and from the work of Martin Luther King.
Marshall Ganz worked with Cesar Chavez, serving the United Farm Workers in a variety of positions. Marshall Ganz also returned to Harvard after a long absence in 1991, finishing first a BA in history and government, then a Masters in Public Administration, and finally a Ph.D. in sociology. If you were looking, in Why David Sometimes Wins, for a book that tells the dramatic tale of the rise of Chavez and the UFW from Ganz’s ringside seat, this isn’t that book. The story line has drama and twists enough, but it’s Ganz the academic speaking, full of footnotes and references, and interpreting his past organizing experience through the lens of his concept of “strategic capacity” – not Ganz who has worked as an organizer relating anecdotes and pithy sayings in the style of Saul Alinsky. As such, the book is neither an especially fast read nor an especially slow read, more of an in between speed read.
It is also an informative read, with plenty of interesting things to say both about the background of the struggle and about the man and the union that won the day.
An epilogue touches on the organizational decline of the UFWA – not, obviously, in the sense of ceasing to be an organization with influence – but in the sense that the UFW is no longer the strong union force that it was in its heyday.
MLK Day links:
Heather Cox Richardson on what it means to be a hero
Chuck Fager relates an experience with Martin Luther King when Dr. King was attempting to organize a night march.
Video footage of 1965 civil rights marches.
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Trump’s actions on Jan 6 are indefensible
Posted by Sappho on December 31st, 2022 filed in January 6 Select Committee
On January 6 2021, a mob professing support for then-President Trump violently attacked the United States Capitol in an effort to prevent a Joint Session of Congress from certifying the electoral college votes designating Joseph R. Biden the 46th President of the United States. The rampage left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage to the Capitol. Then-Vice President Pence, Senators, and Representatives were all forced to halt their constitutional duties and flee the House and Senate chambers for safety.
Benjamin Franklin said, at the founding, that we have “[a] Republic” – “if [we] can keep it.” The events of January 6th exposed the fragility of those democratic institutions and traditions that we had perhaps come to take for granted. In response, the President of the United States and Congress have each made the judgment that access to this subset of presidential communication records is necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic. Former President Trump has given this court no legal reason to cast aside President Biden’s assessment of the Executive Branch interests at stake, or to create a separation of powers conflict that the Political Branches have avoided.
Opinion of the D.C. Circuit, ruling on Trump’s attempt to block the Jan 6 Committee from accessing National Archives records, cited by the Jan 6 Committee in its executive summary of its final report
I just finished reading the Executive Summary of the Jan 6 committee report and the Table of Contents and recommendations from the full report (I intend to read more of the full report and accompanying materials, but it’s long).
Some links:
LawfareBlog collection of Jan. 6 Select Committee Documents
Chuck Fager at A Friendly Letter: Skimming the January 6 Report: Read the Contents & the Recommendations
As I started to talk on Facebook about the final hearing of the Jan 6 committee, at which they announced the criminal referrals, a Trump supporting cousin replied with a reference to Black Lives Matter. I had the usual weary feeling – I’ve gone over this before.
There’s useful discussion to be had about the Black Lives Matter movement, and there’s useful discussion to be had about January 6, but I don’t think dismissing concerns about an assault on the Capitol incited by a sore loser President who then refused for 187 minutes to call his people off by pointing to the much lesser violence that happened at a small minority of Black Lives Matter demonstrations qualifies as useful discussion. I also don’t want to have to compose the same response over and over, nor do I want to look as if I’m refusing to answer the question.
So I’m writing this post to save that response, and any other responses to common “but” and “what about” responses to events on January 6, 2021, so that I can just link it when anything comes up that I’ve already addressed. Then if we have any genuinely new disagreement, we can discuss that, but if we’re talking past each other with the same points, we can skip the rehashing of the argument. I’ll do this by dividing my argument into a couple of posts, so that I can link the most relevant one as needed.
Why Trump’s actions on January 6 are utterly disqualifying
On “stolen” elections and Capitol Hill “tourists”
“What about Hunter Biden’s laptop?”
“What about Black Lives Matter?”
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“What about Black Lives Matter?”
Posted by Sappho on December 30th, 2022 filed in January 6 Select Committee
I’m making a separate post for parallels drawn between Black Lives Matter and Trump’s incitement of an assault on the Capitol on January 6. I recognize that many of the people making this comparison may genuinely believe that Black Lives Matter protests, as a group, were overwhelmingly more violent than the assault on the Capitol on January 6, even though that’s flat out false and the opposite is in fact true. After all, overestimation of the degree to which Black Lives Matter protests were violent correlates strongly with support for Trump, and support for Trump is naturally tied to unwillingness to believe that his actions on January 6, or the violence they inspired, were as awful as they in fact were. But in fact there’s no comparison.
What about the violence of Black Lives Matter?
Let’s start by explaining the gravity of what happened on January 6:
“For the next few hours, an attack on our Capitol occurred, perpetrated by Trump supporters many of whom were present at the Ellipse for President Trump’s speech. More than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police were injured, some very seriously.” from the Jan 6 committee executive summary.
Find me a Black Lives Matter protest where more than 140 police were injured, some very seriously. I dare you. I double dare you.
Second, let me point out that Black Lives Matter protests were in fact overwhelmingly peaceful, but have been misrepresented by critics as far more violent than they actually were, by taking instances that happened in a few blocks of particular cities and projecting them onto a broad nationwide movement.
93% of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful even if you count the pulling down of Confederate statues among the things that qualify a demonstration as not being completely peaceful (the study that came to this finding explicitly included all property damage in the not peaceful category).
Nothing done in the summer of 2020 justified Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021.
Next, let’s address the “what about Biden” arguments, that try to suggest that Biden and other leading Democrats played a role in Black Lives Matter demonstrations that’s comparable to the actual role that Trump actually played in inciting, refusing to act on, and excusing the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Why didn’t Biden and Harris condemn the riots?
They did, on multiple occasions.
I challenge you to find any statement from Trump, at the time when his followers were putting up a noose for his Vice President, that condemned threats to hang Pence anywhere near as forcefully as this response to the riots, from Biden: “I want to be very clear about all of this: Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change, it will only bring destruction. It’s wrong in every way. “
But Biden could have told everyone to disperse and go home!
In the first place, why the hell should Biden have told everyone involved in the George Floyd protests, in cities all over the country, to go home because property was damaged in a distinct minority of locations? This argument tries to throw back at Biden the argument that’s made about Trump’s refusal for 187 minutes to tell people to disperse from the Capitol, and it doesn’t apply. Everyone who trespassed in the Capitol on January 6 was breaking the law, but most people who joined Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were not only peacefully protesting, but peacefully and legally protesting. I myself attended Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that consisted of standing on public sidewalks holding signs, socially distanced and wearing masks – a Constitutionally protected activity.
In the second place, no Biden couldn’t have sent everyone home. In May, 2020, when the protests started, Biden was not even officially the Democratic nominee, let alone the President. He didn’t start the protests, and he couldn’t have stopped them even if he had wanted to.
What about the bail fund?
“According to one estimate by the Washington Post’s factchecker data unit,police have made 14,000 arrests in 49 cities since the protests began in late May, and the vast majority of them involved locals charged with low-level offenses such as violating curfew or blocking a roadway. “
ABC News (Australia), 6/27/2020, “Antifa, Boogaloo boys, white nationalists: Which extremists showed up to the US Black Lives Matter protests?”
With thousands of people being arrested for low level offenses, some of them unable to make bail, during a pandemic prior to the availability of vaccines where leaving people in jail awaiting trial for low level offenses had added risks for spreading disease, yes, some Democrats supported a bail fund.
There is a report, widely circulated in right of center media, that a bail fund sprung at least one person, while awaiting trial, who had been arrested for shooting someone. I don’t believe that bail funds should be used to release people suspected of shooting someone, even if such people are innocent until proven guilty and may in some cases eventually be acquitted, so, just as I think no donations should have been collected or applied to bail out Kyle Rittenhouse, I think also don’t think that the Louisville Community Bail Fund should have posted $100,000, in 2022, for the release of Quintez Brown. On the other hand, I see that in May, 2022 a judge ordered Brown remanded from home detention, where his lawyers had argued he could receive mental health treatment, to jail awaiting trial, so it’s not clear to me that the Louisville Community Bail Fund did bail him out for any significant amount of time, and in any case I don’t see how the Louisville Community Bail fund’s actions in 2022 could reflect badly on Democratic support for bailing people out for mostly low level offenses like curfew violations in 2020.
There was another report, that was widely circulated on left Twitter in 2020 and that I doubt got much circulation among Trump supporters, of a person bailed out by a bail fund in 2020, where the facts were as follows: The man was in his house when some Black Lives Matter activists knocked on his door seeking shelter, who were trying to get to safety after their demonstration had been ordered to disperse and tear gassed. He let them in, and then later drove them to their car so that they could drive home, but was arrested because, to drive them to their car, he had gone out after curfew. I mention this to point out that the stories circulating among Democrats about the bail fund, in 2020, were very different from those circulating among Republicans.
What about the rejection of Trump’s sending police to Portland?
Let’s look at the timeline here:
June 1, 2020: Black Lives Matter protesters gather in Lafayette Square. This peaceful protest is cleared, before curfew, by the use of pepper balls. People affected by the pepper balls include a priest at St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square, who had set up a first aid station just outside the church for any who might need first aid during the protest. After the square is cleared, Trump poses for a photo in front of St. John’s Church.
June 2020: Days after Lafayette Square is cleared, anonymous federal forces begin to appear in Washington, DC.
July 2020: Federal forces appear in Portland, Oregon, in unmarked cars and without clear identification badges. These are deployed as part of PACT, an executive order signed by Trump in response to a wave of monument and memorial removals across the country, and are deployed to Portland, officially, in response to the smashing of windows in a federal courthouse.
Now, a lot worse happened in Portland in 2020 than the smashing of windows in that federal courthouse, both in terms of property damage and in terms of violent clashes between opposing protesters, so from the point of view of Trump supporters, who as a group see Black Lives Matter demonstrations as violent, it’s easy to sell this rejection as an inexplicable rejection by Democrats of Trump’s attempt to rescue a burning city. But consider:
- Democrats already suspected that Trump was planning not to leave office if he lost the 2020 election, and that he might attempt to abuse his authority over federal police and the military to stay in office. The Jan 6 Select Committee executive summary relates that, by the time of the election, these concerns were shared by the military: “The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”
- A peaceful protest had in fact been cleared by federal forces from Lafayette Square, shortly before the deployment of federal forces to Portland, and, in the Lafayette Square case, Trump’s appearance for a photo op soon after the clearing roused suspicion that the protest was cleared for his personal benefit.
- Lafayette Square was seen as a possible dry run for actions after the election, and this suspicion was, at the time, widely discussed among Democrats.
- The federal forces deployed to Portland were in unmarked cars and were not requested by the city government of Portland.
Yes, Democrats feared giving too much leeway to a president whom they suspected of planning to abuse his power steal an election if he lost more than they feared broken windows in a Portland courthouse.
Given Trump’s actions leading up to and on the day of January 6, 2021, I don’t think Democrats were wrong in this fear.
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A blog and substack round up: COVID, Jan 6 Select Committee, and holidays
Posted by Sappho on December 29th, 2022 filed in Blogwatch
I’m taking a sick day today to care for my husband, so, though I remember that I have posts scheduled throughout the week that I wrote on the weekend, it’s a good time to do a round up.
COVID post round up:
Jeremy Faust MD, The best of Inside Medicine, 2022 (Covid-19 edition): A partial quote (more at the link)
When will one-way masking be safe enough for everyone? One-way masking is sufficiently safe for at-risk people when Covid cases are low enough. This piece highlighted two polarities. On one hand, individuals can indeed control most of their own risk via good masking. On the other, without help from the community at large, we force the medically vulnerable into dangerous situations, which we do not want to do.
The million US Covid dead are younger than you think. When I’m not in the ER or writing this newsletter, I’m doing public health research, primarily on excess mortality from all causes. That lens helps me (and hopefully you) understand what’s really happening. A surprisingly high number of deaths from all causes have occurred in non-geriatric adults during the pandemic, a hard fact we can’t ignore. A lot of this is Covid. A lot of this is unintentional overdoses. Almost all of these deaths are preventable.
Are repeat coronavirus infections really more dangerous than the first one? This article reconciled two simultaneous truths….
Here I’m going to note that the greater effectiveness of one-way masking now that N-95s are generally available is the reason that, this year, I was willing to join my company’s Christmas carol choir, even with high COVID transmission, indoors in a large and well ventilated, but crowded with mostly umasked people atrium (I am, after all, in Orange County, not Japan), given that I could keep my own N-95 mask on even while singing. Because I’m about harm mitigation, and am willing to take risks for things I care enough about, like singing. But the limitations of one-way masking are why I wouldn’t do that, even masked, if I was about to visit a nursing home two days later. And, as someone who needs to work in the office three days a week, I’m definitely not dropping my mask! I eat outdoors at work, even on rainy days (under cover).
Katelyn Jetelina from Your Local Epidemiologist, COVID in China, the U.S., and everything in-between
As expected, the COVID-19 situation in China is out of hand. In an interesting turn of events, China went from a “zero COVID” policy to a “let it rip” policy by dropping all mitigation measures without fully vaccinating the highest of risk or strengthening their healthcare system.
Egregiously, they stopped reporting cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, too. This looks good for them on paper, but when we rely on epidemiology 101 and anecdotal reports, which are plentiful, the situation in China is beyond grim.
Jan 6 post round up:
I think I’ve linked this already, but LawfareBlog has a great one stop shop for Jan. 6 Select Committee Documents (I’ve now finished Chapter 2 of the full report, though that won’t be reflected in this week’s posts about the Capitol assault, which were written when I had only read the executive summary).
Timothy Snyder, in January 6: The Facts, has a very concise summary of the report.
Holiday related round up:
Framelab relates some advice from George Lakoff on dealing with conservative relatives (if you are not the conservative relative) – invite empathy:
“Don’t argue with your grandfather,” Dr. Lakoff answered. “Instead, ask him to tell you a story about a time he did something good for someone else. Listen, and then ask him to tell you another one.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenburg, in Beware of Confident Women with Swords, tells the story of Judith.