• Robert P. Jones on the legacy of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad “Doctrine of Discovery.”
I’ll just add this: 99.99% of “discoverers” didn’t discover diddly squat. You can’t “discover” somebody else’s house. They live there. They’ve been living there long before you ever stumbled onto the place.
Bellingshausen and Bransfield were the first people we know of to see Antarctica. That was a legitimate “discovery.” No one had previously seen the land they saw. Nobody lived there. They didn’t pull up to some inhabited land and inform its inhabitants that, “Good news, you’ve been discovered.”
Just about the only other “discoverers” who legitimately discovered any place were the Polynesian explorers who discovered the then-uninhabited Hawaiian islands some 1,500-or-so years ago.
Those guys followed migrating birds out into the open sea in canoes, marked the date and their position by the stars, then paddled hundreds of miles back home. The next year, they left earlier, ahead of the birds, paddling out to the previous farthest point where they waited for the birds and then, again, followed them as far as they could, marked the spot, and then paddled all the way back home. Eventually, after years of this and thousands of miles on the open sea in canoes, they arrived at the bird’s destination: Hawaii. That’s how you discover a place.
• “Macarena Garcia Marin, a Webb project scientist with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (which manages the telescope’s science operations), told NPR in an email that the question mark is ‘a great example of how, with Webb, no matter what you are looking at, you can have surprises in the background.'”
• The Houston Chronicle follows up on the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with an article considering how the public airing of evidence about Paxton’s extramarital affairs will affect his support among the Good Christian People who make up the base of the Republican Party in Texas.
Charles Kuffner ain’t buying it. “I appreciate the thought that went into this story,” he writes, “but come on. Have we not been paying attention to the last seven years?”
It is amazing that journalists still treat the God-and-Family-and-Morality rhetoric of Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans as a good-faith statement of their values and priorities that must always be accepted at face value.
Look, in 2015 it was still possible and plausible to wonder if Good Christian People like Southern Baptists and other white evangelicals would be willing to support a candidate reputed and proven to be a sexually incontinent libertine. It made sense, then, to explore that question and to note the apparent contradiction between such potential support and their loudly stated claim that the sanctity of the family and sexual purity were among their highest concerns and their insistence that this was a non-negotiable, genuine, sincere core aspect of their religious belief and identity.
But we’ve now had eight years of relentless proof that this purported belief is not genuine, consistent, or meaningful in any way. So trying to give them some “benefit of the doubt” about this now is nonsense. Treating their claims as good-faith expressions of sincere belief now requires almost the same level of deliberate duplicity and dishonesty that they’ve demonstrated over those eight years.
Treating those purported concerns about morality as anything other than bad-faith bullshit is inaccurate. It is a factual error in any reporting on this.
• Chester County Pride: Here — via Alvin McEwen — is the trailer for the new biopic “Rustin,” about the nonviolent organizing genius from West Chester, Bayard Rustin.
Looking forward to that. One stipulation on this project though: Scenes from the actual march can and should show Martin Luther King Jr. delivering parts of his Promissory Note speech. But the movie absolutely should and must not include the One And Only Line White People Quote from that speech.
Many people still confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf, even after the latter went bonkers. I don’t have a doppelganger, but I’ve occasionally been confused with Frederick Clarkson. Reading Klein’s piece makes me grateful that Clarkson is a mensch and a pretty sharp guy. I never want to steal credit for any of his insightful research and writing, but it’s much nicer to be confused for someone doing such good work than it is to be Naomi Klein and have people thinking you’re the one now claiming that vaccinated people no longer “smell human.”
• The title for this post comes from the eternally groovy “96 Tears,” by ? and the Mysterians.
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