The Weekly Sift

Last week’s “Is an Intelligent Discussion of Cancel Culture Possible?” led to a discussion in the comments that (I have to admit) was quite intelligent. I learned a lot. I’m tempted to write a post this week summarizing the best points, but that would be three weeks in a row with cancel-culture posts. I’m starting to worry that I have taken the conservative bait and gotten distracted from more important issues. So I’ll get back to it, but not this week.

Something else that caught my eye this week was the attempt to stigmatize critical race theory, and more-or-less any telling of American history that isn’t totally rah-rah. An important piece of the stigmatization process is abstraction, so I thought I would bring the discussion down to specifics. This week’s featured post is “Race in US History: 4 Facts Every American Should Know”. It should be out around 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, the Atlanta murders raised the issues of anti-Asian racism and misogyny. (It hasn’t — but should have — raised discussion of how repressive religious doctrines turn ordinary lust into dysfunctions like “sex addiction”.) Reports came out that underlined just how blatantly Trump administration people lied to us about Russian and Chinese interference in the 2020 election, about voter fraud, and about the Capitol insurrection. The Covid new-case rate has flattened out again, and is shooting upwards in a few places like Michigan — even as vaccination continues apace. I couldn’t resist commenting on the week’s two biggest cancel-culture stories: Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust and sacking the Teen Vogue editor. And an Icelandic volcano went off for the first time in 6,000 years (which I think is before God is supposed to have created the world).

A fun virus story — hard to believe I just wrote that phrase — is a collection of vaccine-related parodies of “My Shot” from the Hamilton musical. There’s some other stuff to throw in, and I still need a closing, but you get the idea. That should be out noonish.