Who made the decision to legally lynch him?
[Wednesday morning update]
Note that almost all of the discussion in comments is peripheral to the point of this post, which is about how Zimmerman has been falsely demonized by assorted community organizers, media and public officials.
Yes, apparently race does matter:
For all the president’s condescending talk daring Rice’s critics to come after him instead, we should note that Rice herself apparently welcomes being in the arena. Here is what she undiplomatically remarked about potential critics in an interview for a book earlier this year: “People know not to mess with me. And if they haven’t learned, and they try, then they will learn.” So it is left to her supporters to make the case that Rice had an inspired diplomatic career in the Clinton administration, or that her current tenure at the U.N. has been characterized by adroit diplomacy, which we perhaps saw on display with the U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.
It also was recently announced that Susan Rice reported a net worth of somewhere between $30 and $40 million – information that appeared in the popular media only after one of the nastiest campaigns in modern memory, whose central theme was that Mitt Romney and his supporters were 1 percenters whose affluence was prima facie proof of some sort of moral or legal failing.
But don’t point that out, because…racist.
I agree:
It’s hard to know whether to cheer their disappointment or commiserate.
My natural inclination is to tell them to S*** *** **** ** considering that they have subjected us to four more years.
Exactly.
A day and a half to go for your last chance to be part of the Kickstarter project. I’ve put up a small excerpt from the book in my latest update, to drum up support in the last couple days.
…from an advice columnist.
All of this reverse racism from pseudoliberals gets quite tiresome.
Is it becoming obsolete?
I have no nostalgia for it, myself. I’ve always considered dragging a writing implement across paper to be sheer physical drudgery, and if I didn’t have a keyboard, I wouldn’t be a writer.
This is the key point:
Although these historical tidbits are fascinating—the chapter on the absurdly indecipherable script prevalent in Germany before Hitler banned it helps demonstrate how arbitrary and cultural our writing conventions are—they have one point in common. Every innovation in handwriting was designed to improve the speed and legibility of human communication. And here is where Hensher’s quixotic defense of the hand stumbles. For what is faster and clearer than typing? Weren’t you slightly relieved when the handwritten paragraphs in this review came to an end, leaving you on the sturdy shores of a new thought expressed in Microsoft Verdana? Isn’t it easier to catch my meaning, to pay attention, when you are staring at a nice clean block of type?
My emphasis. The other issue that she doesn’t really get into is that by “handwriting,” what is really being discussed here is cursive script, which I learned as a child, but abandoned for just printing around junior high, because I found it too time consuming. I never bought, and still don’t buy, the notion that by eliminating the need to lift the pen, it somehow sped up the process. Both my printing and my cursive are illegible to anyone but me, but printing goes faster, because I don’t have to spend time worrying about the loops and flourishes. I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when I took my GRE, it said that I had to write (not print) a pledge on the cover. It had been so long since I’d written cursive that it took me a couple minutes to slowly remember how to form the letters in the single sentence required.
I do think that being able to write down thoughts, old school, traditional tech, will always be a valuable skill (well, barring the Singularity). But there’s no reason for most kids to learn cursive these days. That could just be a hobby or art, like calligraphy. Typing is a much more important skill.
The historical whitewash. As with Jefferson, it’s all about rewriting history.
Time to call it.
Derek Webber writes that settlement has to be an objective of our space policy.
The Augustine panel noted that if the goal isn’t space settlement, there’s no point in having a human spaceflight program at all. The private people (such as Elon Musk) get this, but Congress continues to fail to do so.
“Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.”
So do I. The notion that the nation could have been founded as one without slavery is profoundly historically ignorant. The Founders did the best they could do under the circumstances, and even with such an atrocious flaw it was still the best design of a government in human history up to that time.
Or since, despite the fact that about half the nation seems willing to abandon it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related.
