• Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” for the Marshall Project. This was well-deserved. It’s one of the most compelling and thorough pieces of journalism I’ve read in recent memory. It’s horrifying and infuriating and important. Read it now.
• The 21st-century version of eugenics gets a boost from a Christianity Today op-ed by spanking-apologist James Dobson, who frets that feminism is creating a “demographic nightmare” that must be countered with a new baby-boom among the right kind of white Christians. Tobin Grant notes that Dobson’s claims are not true. Not even close.
(Christianity Today is a publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are “destructive to society.” But they’re cool with letting Dobson push a bunch of fake statistics in defense of white Christian demographic supremacy.)
• UC Davis reconfirms the Streisand effect: “UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet.”
• Donald Trump is a racist, misogynist liar who has enriched himself for decades by exploiting the gullible and preying on the vulnerable. He is a horrible human being. He would be a lawless, abusive official, and there are 10,000 reasons not to vote for him for president. But one of those reasons is not that he accidentally said “7-Eleven” instead of “9/11.”
Candidates misspeak. Let’s not pretend they should be judged on the words they mix up. Let’s judge them based on what they do and say when they mean it.
• I appreciate the aims of Democracy Spring, but they seem confused when describing their tactics. “Over the past week, activists have demonstrated outside the U.S. Capitol, demanding that Congress get big money out of the political system. More than 1,000 demonstrators have been arrested during acts of civil disobedience,” Justin Miller reports — inaccurately — for the American Prospect. This was not civil disobedience. These protesters were arrested for trespassing. That’s only civil disobedience if you’re protesting laws against trespassing.
The power of civil disobedience comes from demonstrating that an unjust law is unjust by violating that unjust law. This forces authorities to enforce that law and thereby forces others to witness and recognize the injustice of it.
This is something different — this is the orchestrated process of “getting arrested” in an attempt to draw media attention to a concern. That demonstrates an admirable courage and commitment, and decades ago it was an effective way of provoking a wider conversation. But it no longer commands attention the way it originally did, and it has always lacked the power of civil disobedience. No one’s conscience is pricked or awakened by seeing trespassers arrested for trespassing.
• Pop music can be weird. Here’s an odd little artifact from “The Globetrotters,” which wasn’t an actual band. This was an attempt by Don Kirschner to imitate the success of the Archies with a cartoon “band” meant to accompany CBS’ Harlem Globetrotters Saturday-morning cartoon show. (The cartoon featured the voices of Scatman Crothers and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and yet was still awful.)
For this track — a Neil Sedaka song — Kirschner tapped J.R. Bailey and the Cadillacs, the 1970 version of a ’50s doo-wop group that had changed personnel and dropped in an out of the business multiple times. From what I can tell, that means Teddy Pendergrass was the band’s drummer at the time.
The song doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It seems to be about rain and sunshine and, um, bells. But whatever, it’s still catchy and cheerful as all get out. Dare you not to smile.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In