Althouse

Here's how Pantone presents its color:

"I go, I platform my uncle every Thanksgiving. And by the way, I love him. He's a three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire, things about him. And we've lost that. We've lost the ability to love people, because we litmus test at every point."

Said John Stewart.

For a contrasting opinion, here's Ben Shapiro savaging Tucker Carlson for platforming Nick Fuentes:

Politico reports.

"If [Harvard] wouldn't recognize Klansmen or if it wouldn't recognize a group of sexists who called for the end of equality for women, then it shouldn't recognize the pro-Hamas National Lawyers Guild.... If this were the 1950s and there was a university say the University of Mississippi — Old Miss — that was forcibly integrated and it was allowing... some of the Klansmen who were students to harass black students, and the federal government came in and said 'Unless you stop Klansmen from harassing black students we're going to cut off federal funding,' people would be applauding that.'..."

"And Greenlanders come from a different culture. They're part of this wider Inuit community that lives in the Arctic Circle in Alaska and Canada and parts of Russia. They have their own language, their own traditions, their own history of how they survive in this very hostile environment. And I met a number of people who said that they were mistreated, they were made fun of, that they were called racial slurs. I also heard a lot about the colonial legacy and things that Denmark had done when Greenland was a colony. They destroyed local traditions. They outlawed some of the religious practices that Greenlanders had been doing for centuries. And there was this scandal in the 1960s and 70s where Danish doctors were inserting IUD birth control devices into Greenlandic girls as young as, like, 12 in an attempt to keep the population down. And they did this to thousands of girls without them really understanding what was being done to them. And this was kept secret until just a few years ago. And when this scandal broke and the news spread that all these women in Greenland had been subject to this, it caused a lot of anger towards Denmark, all these things together. That's what brings us to this moment where just about everybody now wants independence."

"This glitch has sparked discussions across social media platforms, with some users interpreting it as intentional bias. Apple is reportedly addressing the issue to ensure accurate dictation."

Funding for racist baby training is canceled https://t.co/M7H1ks4Vbr

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 15, 2025

"We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that."

Tweeted JD Vance.

What did this guy write? NBC News has this:

The Wall Street Journal said it reviewed archived posts from a deleted X account used by [25-year-old Marko] Elez in which he posted messages such as “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity... Normalize Indian hate.”

ADDED: Do not refer to Elez as "Big Balls"! Big Balls is Edward Coristine, and he's only 19 years old. So maybe you shouldn't be calling him that. You creeps.

"... and is now caught in its glare.... There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding.... Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs [at the Center for Antiracist Research].... In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division.... 'When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,' he told me.... Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with [Robin] DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers 'white identity' to be 'inherently racist,' while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations... that racism is 'prejudice plus power.' Kendi thinks of 'racist' not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description.... Racist and antiracist are 'peelable name tags,' Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool...."

"... because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against. I’m being indicted for you, the American people. I’m being indicted for you, the Black population. I am being indicted for a lot of different groups by sick people, these are sick sick people.... Some of the greatest evils in our nation's history have come from corrupt systems that try to target and subjugate others to deny them their freedom and to deny them their rights. I think that's why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what's happening to me happens to them.... My mug shot — we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population. You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know, they do shirts and they sell them for $19 apiece. It’s pretty amazing — millions by the way."And here's some edgy racial humor. I think it's a reversal of the old (and stupid) observation that black people are hard to see in the dark: White people are hard to see in the light....

Trump: These lights are so bright in my eyes I can't see people... I can only see the Black ones. I can't see any white ones. That's how far I've come. That's a long way isn't it? pic.twitter.com/CBBJWJRxnH

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 24, 2024

ADDED: At the same event, Trump does a pretty funny imitation of Biden:

"You put other white people down, trash their work or behavior, or otherwise dismiss them. You righteously consider yourselves white people who have evolved beyond our racist conditioning. This is another level of denial. There are no 'exceptional white people.' You may have attended many anti-racism workshops; you may not be shouting racist epithets or actively discriminating against people of color, but you still experience privilege based on your white skin color. You benefit from this system of oppression and advantage no matter what your intentions are. This distancing serves only to divide you from potential allies and limit your own learning."

That's the "reality check" on item #21 of a DEI handout called "Common Racist Attitudes and Behaviors That Indicate a Detour or Wrong Turn into White Guilt, Denial or Defensiveness."

"Elon, an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in school and had a tendency to call other kids 'stupid'; he was also very often beaten up, and his father frequently berated him, but when he was ten, a few years after his parents divorced, he chose to live with him. (Musk is now estranged from his father, a conspiracist who has called Joe Biden a 'pedophile President,' and who has two children by his own stepdaughter; he has said that 'the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.' Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail, that 'with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.')..."

Writes Jill Lepore, in "How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillain/Walter Isaacson’s new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself" (The New Yorker).

I'm reading a movie review in the NYT. I haven't been paying much attention to descriptions of new movies, but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist. It made me think of school shootings. I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z. 

1. "2 Wisconsin Republicans want 14-year-olds to be allowed to serve alcohol in restaurants" (Insider). There's currently a labor shortage, and the bill would only allow the 14-17-year olds to serve alcohol to those who are seated at tables, not those at the bar. Oddly enough, in Wisconsin, underage kids can drink alcohol, even at the bar, if they're with a parent! Anyway, 14-17-year olds already work in restaurants and wait on tables. To let them deliver the drinks to the table would simply enable them to do all the ordinary tasks that are part of the job. What are we afraid of? Child labor? But they're already waiting on the tables. That they might, if entrusted with a small tray of drinks, surreptitiously sip on one? It can't be that we feel a need to protect them from a drinking environment, because they are already working in restaurants. They already see people imbibing. It's not as though we're letting them see an orgy.

I'm reading "Musk defends 'Dilbert' creator, says media is 'racist against whites'/The Tesla and Twitter chief blasted media outlets for dropping Scott Adams’s comic strip after the cartoonist’s rant against Black people" by Will Oremus (WaPo).

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.”... 

In further tweets Sunday, Musk agreed with a tweet that said “Adams’ comments weren’t good” but there’s “an element of truth” to them, and suggested in a reply that media organizations promote a “false narrative” by giving more coverage to unarmed Black victims of police violence than they do to unarmed White victims of police violence.... 

Here's the Musk tweet, responding to someone who tweeted that the MSM had concluded that Adams is racist:

"Brigham Young University said Friday that it had completed its investigation into accusations of racial heckling and slurs at a volleyball match against Duke University last month and found no evidence to confirm that the behavior took place."

Newsweek reports.

"... when they cut him off in pickup trucks and threatened him with guns in a Georgia neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020. The government presented evidence from 20 witnesses, many of whom testified about racially derogatory text messages, social media posts and remarks from the three men in which they disparaged Black people. 'All three defendants told you loud and clear, in their own words, how they feel about African Americans,' prosecutor Tara Lyons told the jury, made up of eight White people, three Black people and one Hispanic person. 'Yes, race, racism, racial discrimination — those can all be very difficult topics to discuss. But the facts of this case are not difficult.'... The McMichaels and Bryan were convicted on state murder charges in November 2021 after a trial in which prosecutors did not make race a central focus of their case.... Under sentencing guidelines, in the absence of a plea deal, the men are expected to serve their sentences in state prison...."

From "Killers of Ahmaud Arbery found guilty of federal hate-crimes charges" (WaPo). There was no plea deal because the Arbery family objected to it.

"The fan was seated across the court from the UW bench and adjacent to the Northwestern student section. A video was posted on social media of him standing up flipping off the student section then making a racist gesture." 

I wondered what racist gesture? The article does not say, but there was a link to the video, and it wasn't what I'd pictured. The fan got ejected from the game, so I'm not sure why this is front-page news. Is it to decry racism or to stimulate the belief that racism is raging in America today?

Just saw this video on TikTok of this incredibly racist Wisconsin fan going at the Northwestern student fans.

Glad to see a Northwestern employee and a police office force him to leave. Do better people. Don’t be like this guy. pic.twitter.com/5noQ7XPqh9

— Xavier Sanchez (@Xavier_Sanchez4) January 19, 2022

A column by John McWhorter (NYT). 

The later 20th century Klan emerged gradually in the wake of the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915, and only became a national phenomenon starting in 1921. In Wisconsin in 1919, when March was inducted into his group, it was possible to have never heard of the Ku Klux Klan that was later so notorious.... 

Even Madison’s chancellor, Rebecca Blank, has written that March had “fought the persecution of Hollywood artists, many of them Jewish, in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee” and that March “took actions later in life to suggest (he) opposed discrimination.”...

So... it was 4 years after "The Birth of a Nation." And "it was possible to have never heard of the Ku Klux Klan"? But why was it called "the Ku Klux Klan"? McWhorter says there's "no evidence" that it's the same Ku Klux Klan. But the name is some evidence, and the lack of any other explanation of the name, and the fact that "The Birth of a Nation" had been out for 4 years are at least some evidence.

I agree with McWhorter that March shouldn't be tarred as a racist for something he did for a year as a young man and that might have been genuinely racist. But the question is whether his name should be used to name the campus theaters. We have a much more important theater-related alum — Lorraine Hansberry. I'd put her name on the theaters. Update the honoring.

Back to McWhorter:

This witch-burning mentality is something most of us less concur with than fear.... The students who got March’s name taken off those buildings made a mistake, as did the administrators who again caved to weakly justified demands, seemingly too scared of being called racists to take a deep breath and engage in reason. The University of Wisconsin must apologize to March and his survivors. His name should be restored to both of the theaters now denuded of his name, including the Madison building, which he in fact helped bring into being and funded the lighting equipment even before the building was named after him. This must happen in the name of what all involved in this mistake are committed to: social justice — which motivated March throughout his life.

ADDED: As someone who has taught the law school course called Evidence, I rankle at the phrase "no evidence." Evidence is anything that makes a fact of consequence either more likely to be true or less likely to be true. There is clearly some evidence that March affiliated himself with a racist group. It's fine to say there's not enough evidence to justify removing March's name from these buildings, especially when we also have evidence that March was an anti-racist. That's all you need to say. 

AND: This isn't a trial of March where his accusers must meet a burden of proof and the question is whether he ought to be convicted of racism. That ought to fail because he has a constitutional right to be a racist. We wouldn't even go to trial. But if it did, there wouldn't be enough evidence to convict him. But the important point here is that the question in issue is whether his name ought to be on campus buildings today. What should the burden of proof be and is it met? That's the way to analyze this controversy.