It's all a propaganda game for the television channels

I forgot to include a something in my discussion of the book Gay Like Me yesterday. That is the author, Ritchie Jackson, doesn’t engage the statement said by many conservatives that being gay is a choice. He ignores the statement because the usual answer is to say I didn’t choose being gay. But that implies if one had a choice one would not be gay, that one would rather be straight. And for him that is not true. If he had a choice he would choose gay. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed a big shift in how pundits have been talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Early in the war Julia Ioffe appeared on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show and said the best outcome (least destruction, fewest deaths) is for Russia to swiftly install a puppet regime and scare Ukrainians to keep them quiet and not have another revolution. Then withdraw. The new best choice was mentioned by Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia, writing in the Washington Post. His take is that since Ukraine will ultimately defeat Putin’s army the best thing for the West is to make that happen as quickly as possible. Give Ukraine what it needs to win. Not draw to a stalemate. To win. That’s currently the best way to save lives. An amazing shift of perspective in the last month. Sumner reported that while the US military is not in Ukraine, US soldiers are. There are a number of countries, including the US, who have reported soldiers who have gone AWOL. And no one is in a hurry to find them, under the assumption they’ve gone to Ukraine to volunteer. Several Americans have appeared in the front lines. I mentioned yesterday that a Russian ship suffered an explosion in the Black Sea port of Berdyansk. Sumner, in an update to a summary post by Hunter, wrote that the ship has sunk and that it was done by the Ukrainian military and not a Russian accident or friendly fire. Kos of Kos commented on an idea that’s making the rounds. The idea: Putin needs to provoke the West because losing to NATO is more honorable than losing to Ukraine (which is humiliating!). So, as noted above, Ukraine has enough soldiers. Keep the military gear flowing. Kos noted a couple consequential tweets. One said that the US will work with the EU to supply Europe with natural gas to reduce what they now buy from Russia. The other says Germany plans to cut its use of Russian gas in half by summer and to zero by the end of this year. This is Putin’s only reliable supply of income. And the goal is to cut it off more quickly than anyone thought possible. I’ve discussed a couple threads by Kamil Galeev discussing how Russia works. Here’s another one. A lot of what happens in Russia doesn’t make legal/illegal or human sense. Some of it is absurd (see Kafka). Instead, one should look for the procedural sense. One procedural requirement is to convict someone of a crime one needs a confession (acquired any way possible). During the Stalin years a bunch of students mocked the Dear Leader. When questioned they said we’re loyal, we wouldn’t mock Stalin. Two students who observed the group snitched on their fellows – and they were the ones taken to jail for listening to treasonous talk. As for the mockers – no confession, no jail. Another example happened during the Great Purge of 1937. A guy who belonged to the hereditary nobility knew he would be arrested and extorted for a confession. So he went to a store, broke a window, filled a bag with valuables, and waited for the police to arrest him. He was a regular criminal and survived five years in jail. But as a regular criminal he couldn’t be a political criminal, which would have led to his death. The poor believe they are dealing with humans and they get sucked into the procedures and suffer. The rich know they are dealing with procedures and figure out how to hack them. The poor see the rich as getting special treatment, which is true. The confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, the nominee for the Supreme Court, have concluded. I’ve seen some liveblogging of the hearings, but not all of them. I also didn’t listen to NPR’s live coverage of the hearings. No need to listen to the dreck from the Republican members of the committee – which seems to have drawn the worst of the bunch – Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, and Graham. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos said they pulled out the worst of what they can do because their real goal was to get airtime on Fox News and to boost their Twitter following. The more they were seen as strong white guys verbally beating up a black woman the better their chances. Pennyfarthing included tweets from Nolan McCaskill and Kent Nishimura, both of the Los Angeles Times that confirmed that after Cruz’s time of demanding answers to stupid questions he was seen sitting with his head down and checking Twitter for the response. Hunter of Kos discussed the part about doing it to get on Fox News. Some of what he wrote:

All of the weird questions suggesting a Black American represents some vague sexual threat to “our children”? Those were asked because a very large swath of the Republican base has heard that same language all their crusty racist lives, and they eat it up. Ted Cruz nearly standing on a table as he harangued Judge Jackson, belittled her, lied about her? An attempt to goad a Black woman into being “uppity” in the face of white Republican men. ... For those of you keeping track: Ted Cruz can do whatever Exorcist-style projectile-vomiting racist cabaret routine he wants during an official confirmation hearing for a new Supreme Court justice, and it won't be considered “attitude.” A Black woman raising an eyebrow in confused response? Now that's attitude. ... It's all a propaganda game for the television channels. The message being delivered is that the Black American is a threat to your white conservative children, because the Black American might go easy on Republican pedophiles like Dennis Hastert, etc. When faced with a fountain of racist diarrhea, the Black woman continued to breathe—surely a sign of attitude. It was meant to be racist. Everyone involved knows very, very well that their attacks were meant to poke the long-standing grievances of white supremacist assholes, and everyone involved knew that success would lead to Fox News publicizing their performances to give their sweaty white supremacist audience some good clips of white racists sticking it to a Black woman at a venue in which the Black woman was explicitly required to not talk back.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included late night commentary. An example:

In Washington they're holding confirmation hearings for Joe Biden's Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. These hearings give a number of our Republican senators a chance to compete in one of their favorite events: the Subtle Racism Jamboree. Judge Jackson will be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. She doesn’t need any Republican votes to get confirmed because the Vice President is the tiebreaker. That would be the GOP's ultimate nightmare—having this decided by two Black women whose names they can't pronounce. —Jimmy Kimmel