Blog Ipsa Loquitur

Stephanie McFeeters, in the Boston Globe, on the protestors and counter-protestors at a museum exhibit about a collection of Japanese kimonos:

A playful attempt by the Museum of Fine Arts to engage summer visitors has triggered a controversy that is mushrooming beyond expectations, with protesters taking to the museum’s “Kimono Wednesdays” event in increasing force each week, and a group of kimono-wearing counterprotesters joining the fray. […]

It all began with a celebration last month for departing director Malcolm Rogers, when the museum invited visitors to “channel your inner Camille Monet” trying on kimonos and posing for photos next to Claude Monet’s painting “La Japonaise.” Art historians consider the 1876 work, which depicts Monet’s wife wearing a kimono, to be a witty poke at Parisians’ fascination with Japan.

But the event, originally accompanied by a “Spotlight” talk titled “Claude Monet: Flirting With the Exotic,” drew the ire of protesters, who argued that “Kimono Wednesdays,” scheduled to run throughout July, constituted a form of cultural appropriation and racist “exotification” of Asian culture.

As a white guy, I have absolutely nothing to add to the substance of the discussions and protests going on. However, I’m fascinated by how the for and against sides seem to break down by age as much as anything else.

I thoroughly enjoyed this Tim Alberta article in the National Review about the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican Party. Essentially, he does to the Tea Party what the Tea Party did to the Republican Party:

“What they’re doing is exactly what [the Tea Party] criticized establishment Republicans for doing all these years: succumbing to so-called political realities and setting aside principles to gain power for the party,” says Tim Miller, a prominent GOP operative and leader in the Never Trump movement. “That’s what they killed Boehner and McConnell for. And maybe those criticisms were fair. But sacrificing principle for power is exactly what they’re doing now.”

Why?

To answer that question is to accept that pragmatism is being practiced by individuals who were willing to shut down the government to prove a philosophical point; to appreciate that congressmen survive by satisfying the whims of their constituents; to understand that Republicans are desperate to avoid blame for a November defeat that many view as inevitable; and to acknowledge that Trump has taken over the Republican party by annexing many of its most conservative voters, proving that their anti-government rage is not necessarily a mandate for ideological purity.

Succumbing to political realities, as seen here, used to be known as governing. Alberta and his establishment interviewees can barely hide their amusement at the way the Trump wing of the Republican Party is holding the Tea Party wing hostage. ​

There are too many good bits to choose from. ​Here’s the sobering realization that most of the Tea Party voters weren’t interested in any particular policy position so much as anti-government everything:

“A lot of us [predicted] the anti-establishment wave,” Mulvaney said. “We’d seen it in 2010 and 2012 and 2014, so we knew it was coming to a crest. We just never expected it to take the form of Donald Trump. We like that he’s anti-establishment, we like the fact that he’s kind of blowing up the internal party politics as we’ve known them. We’re just not sure if he’s a conservative.”

And their constituents aren’t sure if it matters.

​And because this is the National Review, there’s this gem, which I’m not sure is ironic:

The Freedom Caucus is a diverse cast of characters, markedly different in their geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds.

Fun stuff.

Sam Kriss, writing in VICE UK, recently attended an event hosted by the Young White Men Obsessed with ‘Free Speech’:

The Young British Heritage Society is the latest half-formed thing to rise out of our increasingly stupid free speech wars. Its general secretary, Jamie Patel, used his brief speech to announce that “cultural Marxists have hijacked the country’s institutions.” […] Keynote speaker Milo Yiannopoulos remarked that “if you question feminism you can find yourself thrown out of university.” The impression from all sides was that we’re now living in a society under politically-correct totalitarianism, where any opinion that falls outside the academy’s liberal dogmas is ruthlessly silenced. […] If the PC police really are trying to shut down free speech, they’re not doing a very good job of it.

Free speech here doesn’t really mean free speech. These are, after all, people from the same alt-right milieu who in “ Gamergate” threw an extended tantrum over video-game journalists writing things they didn’t approve of, with the implicit prescription that these things should not be allowed to be written, and then another one over an all-women Ghostbusters film, with the implicit prescription that this film should not be allowed to have been made.

Today, Leslie Jones, one of the stars of the new Ghostbusters movie had her personal web site defaced by hackers who posted nude photos of her, as well as copies of her driver’s license and passport. Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter for inciting harassment against Jones a month ago.

Elected Governor of California in 1990, Pete Wilson faced an uphill battle in his re-election four years later. His approval ratings were down and he was a 20-point underdog as his campaign began. A wildly divisive ballot proposition was placed before voters in 1994, months before election day. I’ll let Charles Fraser tell it:

Proposition 187 would bar publicly funded health care, public education, and social services to illegal immigrants, and would require public servants to report people they suspected might be illegal immigrants. Prop 187 was immediately popular, and Governor Wilson ran hard on it, promising vigorous enforcement.

Prop 187 passed with an 18 percent margin, and Wilson won re-election by 15 percent. But the campaign prompted two very important and closely related long-term changes in California politics. First, Prop 187 impelled legal Hispanic residents of California to become citizens and register to vote in unprecedented numbers. Second, Prop 187 all but eliminated political diversity among California’s Latinos. After Prop 187, Hispanic Californians largely abandoned any interest in the Republican Party, committing themselves to the Democrats.

In other words, the shrinking non-Hispanic white population chose to alienate and unify the fastest-growing demographic in the state.

Wilson’s support among Hispanic voters was at a respectable 47% in 1990; while they were a rapidly growing part of the electorate in 1994, Hispanic voters were just 26% of the electorate. White folks were still the majority (57%) of voters. Fraser goes on to describe the lasting repercussions of Wilson’s campaign on Prop 187 for Californian politics, and how profoundly a single campaign can poison the future of the state Republican party. Sad!

Fraser’s a recent addition to my RSS feeds, and his political commentary is sober, insightful, and always interesting. Strongly recommended reading for the interesting political times we live in.

Ed Sheeran’s having a lousy summer. He’s a pop star and defendant in a couple of copyright infringement lawsuits filed in June and August. The lawsuits claim he stole the melody for two of his hit songs, “Thinking Out Loud” and “Photograph.” One of these lawsuits is well-written, and the other is about to get tossed out of court.

Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter does some great legal reporting and lawsplains the situation:

Get past the lawyers involved. (The plaintiff in the “Photograph” case is represented by the victorious attorney who convinced a jury that “Blurred Lines” was lifted from Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” while confusingly, the one now fighting to protect Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” is a Florida attorney without much of a reputation in entertainment circles.)

Just focus on what was actually filed in court. The contrast is pretty stark. Here, for example, is the way that Sheeran allegedly infringed “Let’s Get It On.” It comes from the plaintiff’s complaint:

That’s pretty much it. How is the melody, harmony and rhythm similar? No word. That will likely become a problem for plaintiffs as copyright law only protects expression — not generic ideas. A failure to specify the striking similarity leaves the plaintiff open to a challenge for not pleading a plausible claim of infringement. Emphatic underlining hardly cures this fault. (The case is being brought in New York federal court, which isn’t particularly friendly to copyright plaintiffs.)

Gardner includes screenshots of the actual complaints, and compares and contrasts the draftsmanship behind the two lawsuits. I wish everyone who reported on lawsuits was so thorough.

Charlie Warzel, for Buzzfeed News, outlines the continual and systematic failure of Twitter to address abuse on its platform in“A Honeypot For Assholes”:

Part of what makes Twitter so powerful is its ability to level the communication field; tweets from a non-famous, little-followed user, are, in theory, just as easy to surface as a celebrity’s. Simply, Twitter is built differently than most social networks. Two accounts don’t have to follow each other to interact, and once a tweet is out in the world, the original tweeter doesn’t have the ability to moderate responses, like they might on an Instagram or Facebook comment. This unique design is responsible for some of Twitter’s most revolutionary and serendipitous moments; it’s also perfect for abuse.

“For years, it allowed this equal footing, where a troll you didn’t follow and your best friend who you follow and interact with all the time were given equal weight, and that’s crazy,” a former senior employee said. “Seriously, if you were an alien and you came down to look at this thing, you’d say, ‘Oh, the product was basically built for maximum ease of trolling.’ Like, they must have built this for trolls.

Warzel talked to ten former high-level employees to try to make sense of Twitter’s inability to keep its platform troll-free. He notes that while executives keep saying they want to combat abuse on their platform, Twitter has a philosophical commitment to free speech that’s just fundamentally incompatible with tapping certain users on the shoulder and saying “hey, knock that off.”

Part of this internal conflict stems from the fact that most of the people involved in these values judgments at Twitter aren’t subject to the kind of sustained harassment that makes their platform unusable for so many people. That’s not necessarily fatal unless you also ignore your users when they say your platform is infested with trolls, because you’re in love with the idea of completely unrestricted speech.

Unless you post a six-second video of an Olympic event. For God’s sake, show a little humanity.