As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license. Most have not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

I also don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:03 – Mon 09 May 2022

What we can deduce from a leaked PDF from Matthew Butterick

In sum—I’d suppose it’s a friend, spouse, or family member of a Supreme Court justice who has consis­tently opposed Roe v. Wade…

This confirms many of my own suspicions about the leak. My personal guess is that Alito had a family member leak it, in hopes of maintaining a splintering majority.

I hope that conservative ire against the leaker continues, and that they hound him to retire, showing him that he misplaced his fears in “the woke mob.” And once that dam cracks, Justice Thomas seems ineligible to sit on the bench, for attempting to aid the insurrection, based on the Fourteenth Amendment. And then we have three Justices—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—who have made themselves impeachable for perjuring themselves during their confirmation hearings.

It might be fantasy, but it would amuse me greatly if all the Republicans’ efforts to pack the Supreme Court with unqualified, right-wing ideologues led to winning them an 8-1 liberal majority.

12:05 – Mon 09 May 2022

Suppose you call a young gentleman of you acquaintance, boy—won’t he resent the insult?

Eng Bunker

9:05 – Tue 10 May 2022

How Marine Le Pen managed to gain ground with youth voters — and why her success isn’t being replicated by the US right from The Conversation

Over the last decade, she has undertaken a conscious process of “de-demonizing” the party in an effort to distance itself from its antisemitic past.

Oddly, the article overlooks how the right wing of American politics did replicate this process, but did so generations ago. At least Reagan and both Bushes came into office by playing down what their dog whistles meant and who their policies harmed. The Tea Party movement chipped away at that cultivated image, pushing more radical candidates and forcing out any Republican who expressed moderate views or compromised with Democrats, leading to the 2008 Republican primaries, where candidates tried to out-bigot each other.

12:01 – Tue 10 May 2022

I honestly fouled up the scheduling, here. Sorry!

9:04 – Wed 11 May 2022

Overturning Roe v Wade is just the beginning. They won’t stop at abortion from openDemocracy

This essentially invites bigoted state legislators to pass unconstitutional laws banning ‘sodomy’ and revoking same-sex marriage.

As I mentioned in my post on Sunday about abortion rights, the draft doesn’t “essentially invite” anything. The draft includes an explicit list of decisions that Alito says that the Supreme Court should overturn. He includes same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, sodomy, contraception, and many other issues, and I honestly don’t know why so many writers want to avoid that specificity, instead treating this like a normal overly broad decision that might eventually ripple into other legal areas.

12:04 – Wed 11 May 2022

We have our own virtues. We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show these on the screen? Why should we always scheme, rob, kill?

Anna May Wong

9:01 – Thu 12 May 2022

Nothing Is More Personal Than the Right to Control Your Own Body from OtherWords

Even if you don’t know it, you probably know someone who’s had an abortion. One in four women in this country have ended a pregnancy, whether because it was life-threatening, nonviable, unaffordable, or they simply didn’t want it.

Something else that I mentioned in the Sunday post, criminalizing abortion gives states the right to deprive voting rights to this quarter of women. Alito doesn’t mention repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, but we know that Republican-appointed Justices have not agreed with voting rights in the past, so we need to figure this in as a possible added motivation.

Likewise, under the Thirteenth Amendment, conviction of a crime does permit forced servitude as a punishment…

12:02 – Thu 12 May 2022

…alas the police interfered with the printers, intimidating them and calling on them every day and night to make a hundred troubles, simply to tire them out, and to induce them to refuse to print our paper. In this manner we were unable to publish for three months.

Sen Katayama

9:02 – Fri 13 May 2022

A Brazilian photographer registers the beauty of favela residents from Global Voices

Freire eventually revealed he enjoyed writing and that he sometimes took some pictures.

We don’t hear enough from Brazil, these days, certainly not good stories or stories about art…

12:03 – Fri 13 May 2022

Dream is no dream without silliness which is akin to poetry.

Yoné Noguchi

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Television Is in a Showrunning Crisis from VICE

Until fairly recently, it was a bit of industry jargon that denoted a combination of head writer and executive producer keeping the whole machine moving as it should; it was a flexible title that worked for whatever a particular show needed.

This reflects a lot of the feelings that I’ve experienced in the last few years watching television. I frequently find myself watching shows to boost the metrics—I want more shows like this one or that one—but I don’t really enjoy the time watching them, as the shows sputter through their season-long arcs, and often seem to forget what the characters have worked on. In science fiction in fantasy, the seasons lumber through complex ideas, to get to the fancy climax of CGI punching that…nobody cares about, because the animation directors stage and cut them poorly.

This goes a long way towards explaining it, beyond simply “I probably aged out of the demographic” or “the products of late-stage capitalism make me feel queasy.” Both of those explanations have some truth to them, of course, but “writers have nobody to steer” helps explain how pervasive the problem can often seem, even for shows that I enjoyed just a few years ago.

Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.