The war in Ukraine seemed to enter a new phase this week. Russian forces have pulled back from their attempt to encircle Kyiv, and appear to be starting a new offensive in the east, attempting to secure the two Ukrainian provinces Russia has recognized as independent states.
As Ukrainians retook territory north of Kyiv, evidence of Russian war crimes against civilians came out. Russia, of course, claims this is fake news. I had my doubts at first, recognizing how useful war-crimes charges are to the Ukrainian effort to get more help from NATO. But punishing the civilian population of Ukraine lines up perfectly with the kind of rhetoric currently coming out of the Putin regime. I’ll explain that by quoting extensively from an article by a Russian political scientist that was published by a pro-Putin Russian news outlet. My post is called “Why the Russians did it”. It should come out around 9 or 10 EDT.
I’m still undecided whether there will be a second featured post. The most insightful thing I read this week was an interview with Masha Gessen, discussing not just Russia and Ukraine, but the rising tide of autocracy globally. I’ll either write an article about that or quote extensively from it in the weekly summary.
The weekly summary also has Judge Justice Jackson’s confirmation to cover, including Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious back-and-forth with MTG. A Nebraska legislator really cut loose against Christian religious extremism as she successfully filibustered a radical anti-abortion bill. Alabama passed two similarly radical anti-trans and anti-gay laws. A Texas woman who miscarried was charged with murdering her fetus. The pandemic spun its wheels as one surge faded while another began. Disney is now a right-wing political target. And I’ll close by quoting the Five Laws of Stupidity.
I’m running behind today, so the summary may not appear until after 1.
The Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings this week were an embarrassment for the Senate, as Republican senators pandered to Q-Anon with specious claims that Jackson was somehow pro-pedophile. But they also served a valuable purpose: The senators’ concerns pointed to the issues the Court’s culture-warrior majority will pursue after it overturns Roe v Wade in June.
Same-sex marriage, access to birth control, interracial marriage, and many other currently recognized rights are all based on the same constitutional interpretation as Roe, a doctrine called “substantive due process”. Reversal of Roe will call substantive due process into question, and bring these other rights into the Court’s crosshairs. This week’s featured post “Where Does the Religious Right Go After Roe?” explains how Roe fits into the web of other rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution, and how Roe’s reversal might ripple outwards.
That post should be out shortly.
The weekly summary covers the week’s developments in Ukraine, the Jackson confirmation hearings, the dangerous “grooming” rhetoric of anti-gay and anti-trans extremists, the Ginny Thomas texts, Trump’s crazy new lawsuit, and the apparent bottoming out of Covid case numbers. That should post before noon EDT.
We may be glued to our TVs watching Ukrainian President Zelensky speak to Congress, but the war really starts to affect most Americans’ lives when we go to the gas station. Gas prices hit a record about a week ago, and haven’t fallen much since, even as the price of oil dropped back near pre-invasion levels.
Cars have a special place in the American psyche, so gas prices produce emotional reactions out of proportion to their practical impact. Rather than grumble and pay, as we do when other prices rise, we want to blame someone and take revenge when filling the tank costs more than we think it should.
So this week’s featured post looks at gas prices: How high are they really? What caused the increase and what (if anything) can be done about it? That post should be out a little after 9 EDT.
The Ukrainian War produces such a big chunk of notes for the weekly summary that I was tempted to break it out into a second featured post, but decided not to. The pandemic regains some of the attention I didn’t give it the last two weeks: Case numbers continue to drop, as if we were about to beat Covid for good. But at the same time, a new surge is mounting in Europe and China, and there are a few ominous signs emerging here.
Hearings on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson start tomorrow, and we can expect to hear any number of scurrilous attacks from Republicans like Josh Hawley.
Other notes include Georgia Senate candidate Hershel Walker saying one of the dumbest things ever about evolution, the Cleveland Browns deciding that 22 sexual-predation lawsuits aren’t really a big deal for a franchise quarterback, and a few other upsetting things. After writing them up, I decided we could all use something soothing, so I’ll close with a video of an otter getting combed. Nobody can yawn like a comfortable otter.
The weekly summary should post around noon.
This week I’m releasing a post that has been sitting unfinished in my draft pile for months: “How did Christianity become so toxic?”, subtitled “Six ways conservative theology undercuts the teachings of Jesus.”
I started writing this piece to explain what I see as a paradox: Any time you’re out there working to make the world better in some way, chances are that you’re elbow-to-elbow with somebody who goes to church and is trying to live by the Sermon on the Mount. But at the same time, organized Christianity is your biggest enemy. The people who are either creating the problem you’re working to solve, or making it worse, claim to be championing “Christian values”.
How the Hell did that happen?
My answer is that Jesus’ enigmatic, person-to-person teaching style left room for subsequent generations to build a structure around his teachings, one that offers simple answers rather than mysteries and challenges. By now, the structure that got built in Evangelical churches has Jesus completely walled off.
I pick out six particular ways that works, like “Focusing on the Devil opens people to conspiracy theories.” I also explain how denial of evolution blazed a path for denial of climate change, of Covid, of systemic racism, and just about anything else people don’t want to believe. Stuff like that.
Anyway, this article that started with a paradox is itself a paradox: It’s simultaneously a denunciation of Christianity and the most Christian thing I’ve ever written. Go figure.
I’ll try to get it out by 10 EDT. The weekly summary should follow noonish.
This week the news seemed scattered to me: Lots of things are happening, but I’m not able to fit them together into some larger narrative. So this week I’ll post a lot of short notes rather than a long featured post.
Standing in for a featured post are all the notes I have about the war in Ukraine, which is happening on multiple fronts: the military fronts in Ukraine itself, but also the economic front in Russia, and the information/disinformation fronts around the world. That post should be out between 9 and 10 EST.
The weekly summary has a lot else to cover: Biden’s first State of the Union address, the anti-gay and anti-trans laws being pushed in various red states, the continuing effort to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, the racism Judge Jackson is going to have to overcome to make it to the Supreme Court, and a number of other things. That should be out by noon.
One policy of this blog is that I try not to spread my ignorance. If I don’t know anything, I don’t say much; and if I do repeat rumor and speculation, I try to label it correctly. Over the last few weeks, that policy has kept me from devoting many paragraphs to the biggest story in the news: the possibility that Russia might invade Ukraine.
But this week the invasion actually started, and suddenly the problem is that there’s too much information. Every network has correspondents talking over the roar of bombs and artillery. In multiple countries, government officials are announcing specific actions, rather than deflecting questions about actions they might take in response to events that might not happen.
In addition to watching and reading my usual news sources, I spent much of the week glued to the #Ukraine hashtag on Twitter, where ordinary Ukrainians posted videos shot on their phones and retweeted stories they found important. It presented the usual problems of raw intelligence — for about half an hour I believed hackers from Anonymous had taken over Russian state TV — but it was also incredibly moving. (I really hope this young couple is still alive.) Some of it was also funny, like the clip of the Ukrainian motorist who passed an out-of-fuel armored car and offered to tow it back to Russia.
So anyway, I’m going to try to sort through all that in this week’s featured article, which may not be out until 10 or 11 EST.
With all that going on this week, who even noticed that Biden made a historic Supreme Court nomination? Or thought much about Covid? (“This decade is kinda sucking so far, no?” one of my Facebook friends commented.) Or the January 6 investigation? Or the baseball lockout? Or any of a hundred other things. I’ll get to all that in the weekly summary, which might not appear until after noon.
I just checked CNN, and the Ukraine invasion seems not to have started yet. That seems to be where we’ve gotten to.
A standing principle of the Sift is that a weekly blog can’t do breaking news, so I don’t try. I wish I had something deeply insightful to tell you about this situation, but I really don’t.
Instead, this week I’m taking a step back to try for a wider view of the Critical Race Theory, Don’t Say Gay, and book-banning controversies. Following a hint I gleaned from one of those helpful-conservative articles about what Democrats should do next, this week’s featured article takes a speculative leap: What if the long-term goal is to abolish the public schools?
That post should appear between 9 and 10 EST.
The weekly summary does indeed say a few things about Ukraine, but I don’t try to give the topic the coverage it deserves. In addition I cover Trump’s really bad week, the phony Hillary-spying story, the decline of political comedy, the end of the Olympics, and a few other things, before closing with a video of some guy who watched way too much curling. That should be out around noon.
This is an I-do-your-homework week. If you want to make a difference in the November mid-term elections, who should you be sending money to or volunteering for? I’ll go through Senate races, House races, and governorships, while reminding you not to lose sight of state legislatures and school boards.
That should be out maybe around 10 EST.
The weekly summary covers the Canadian “Freedom” Convoy, the latest Trump revelations, Omicron’s continuing fade, Super Bowl commercials, and a few other things. That should be out maybe noonish.
Probably there was more important news than football this week, but to me the Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL was a shiny object I couldn’t put down. It’s been common knowledge for years that Black coaching candidates face an uphill struggle in the NFL, a league where 69% of the players are Black. But an “oops” text message from Bill Belichick provided Flores with a smoking gun, and now he has a viable discrimination case.
I decided to give the story what I think of as “the Rachel Maddow treatment”. (It might also be called “the Heather Cox Richardson treatment”.) In other words, I’m going to take a long historical perspective and talk about the role of sports in America’s racial debate, going back to Jack Johnson’s heavyweight boxing championship in 1908.
Short version: NFL coaching isn’t just the usual hard-to-break-into-management problem. When Black athletes like Jesse Owens and Joe Louis started proving that Whites aren’t a superior race, racism retreated into a fallback position: Some Blacks might be gifted with awesome animal physicality, but Whites compensate with superior intellect and character.
In the NFL, this created the Blacks-can’t-be-quarterbacks myth that persisted into the 1980s. The continuing prejudice against Black coaches is the current battle line.
Anyway, I’ll try to get that article out by 10 EST.
That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: censorship, more 1-6 revelations (and pushback from Trump and the GOP), the retreat of the Omicron surge, more good economic news, Ukraine, and so forth. That should appear a little after noon.
A week ago, I did not anticipate that I would spend so much of this week thinking about the Holocaust. Sure, Thursday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, but that usually comes and goes without me paying much attention. This year, though, a Tennessee school board’s decision to take the Pulizer-winning Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus out of their curriculum went viral, and for a couple days that was all anybody on my social media feeds wanted to talk about.
A lot of people jumped to one conclusion or another, but it turned out that you didn’t need to speculate that much about what was going on: The minutes of the board’s meeting were available online, and so were PDFs of Maus. I do my best to sort it all out in “McMinn County’s Maus Problem”, which should be out by 10 EST.
Not that the week lacked for other news: Justice Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, so the partisan wrangling over his replacement has already begun. Every day brings new speculations about whether the Russians are about to invade Ukraine. The Omicron wave of Covid began to recede. A blizzard hit the Northeast. GDP and inflation numbers came out.
So the weekly summary has a lot of ground to cover. I’ll try to have that out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 