Let's not pretend that museums didn't bring an ideological lens to their work before Trump. It's just that most progressives agreed with the earlier version of the 'dominant narrative,' and now not so much. Most museaum goers troop through without reading the carefully worded wall cards and are more interested in seeing Lincoln's hat than the curators' spin on things, so it never much mattered what they think or say.
I see this a lot in some spaces, including this comment section. Trump has absolutely no intention of bringing museum exhibits closer to the truth. Public health officials who issued confusing directives in 2020 aren't going to be replaced by people giving out better advice. The wokesters won't be cowed into giving reasonable (to you) prescriptions on things. It's about power. It's only about power. That's literally the only thing in the world that Donald Trump gives a solitary fuck about, and every one of his followers just wants a little piece of it.
Yes, but the myth we need to interrogate is the idea that our side wasn't also trying to exercise power in its inversion of the earlier, more conventional narrative. You may consider their attempts to popularize an anti-colonialist interpretation as more benign or more representative of an evolved society, but one wasn't a neutal, dispassionate historical accounting while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda. It's always about power - turtles all the way down.
Now that I think about it, you're right! My belief that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect is exactly like Stephen Miller's belief that certain peoples are inferior and should be ethnically cleansed. Truly these are both equally valid perspectives and who can say which of us has the right to impose our moral understanding on others.
Holy fuck, now is not the time to go on a soul searching journey where we critically reevaluate liberal excesses.
I am somewhat curious who you think is "our side?" I would not have considered museum curators to be on "my side..." but yes that is proportionally a liberal group. OTOH Trump also fired a bunch of generals presumably to replace with loyalists, put a goon in charge of the FBI and fired the totally nonpartisan head of the bls. So while I think you can say perhaps museum curators are generally liberal, it's not like being a conservative spared Chris Wray (a career Republican law enforcement guy).
sorry for the self reply but I would also say it is EXTREMELY common for Democrats to cede defense, security and policing positions to either non-partisan generals or straight up Republicans (Jim Comey, Robert Gates, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel).
Republicans used to extend a similar level of forebearance by appointing relative moderates to positions like EPA Administrator (Christine Todd Whitman) though this is no longer really true.
So while it's true that the Smithsonian is probably presenting content that is more "liberal" than the center of American politics, I don't think it's correct to think about it that way, since historically Republicans do not power maximize toward federal/govt cultural institutions and Democrats do not power maximize toward security institutions.
Yes. I think it's important that people of good faith and reason not use the actions of Trump to litigate arguments with their co-partisans--like "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad." Trump's first term had some semblance of a desire to improve people's material living standards. Trump's second term seems to be purely about immiserating people he views as hostile. Anyone who Trump attacks deserves at least not to be piled on.
I think this is essentially correct, I don't disagree directionally, and the sooner Trump his ilk are consigned to the ash heap of history the better (so long as the rest of us aren't all along for the ride) but nevertheless the one--and likely the only--meaningful devil's-argument you can make in favor of "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad" is that there is not (yet) a plausible a trajectory under which the Democrats could be trusted to actually walk back (X) liberal policy. Not expand? Sure. De-prioritize? Maybe. But actually affirmatively roll back? Never.
That said, one could quite reasonably prefer a damped rather than a boosted pendulum swing, rather than Tokyo Sex Whale's pithy and extremely apt formulation of "Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse."
It should be noted that Trump, his ilk, and his enablers — many of the latter having started this movement themselves decades ago — have been waging a decades long propaganda campaign to undermine trust in Democrats ever achieving any given value of (x), and also lying about any time a Democrat achieves anything remotely resembling (x).
I think this is substantially more true for economically-inflected issues than culture-war inflected ones, where the left basically ran the table until, like 2022 at the earliest. Not all of those have been federalized issues but some of them may have been appropriate for federalized de-escalation in the interests of solving the first-mover problem (diversity statement requirements for physics sort of stuff. Which is probably more controversial than I intend it to be but is on the order of things-I-expect-much-of-the-SB-commentariat-agrees-were-excessive-without-too-much-contentiousness without being so abstract and vacuous as to make it unclear that there's even a referent here).
It’s not just broadmindedness, it’s trying to learn from the mistakes of the past. Of course what trump is doing is worse, but you can’t really understand how we got to this moment if you don’t think of it as a reaction to the previous cultural moment
I was a conservative debate bro through most of the Obama admin. I know exactly where the cultural grievance comes from. I got over it. How about you "moderate pragmatists" take your own advice and stop indulging in masturbatory self-criticism when there are more pressing matters that need your attention?
I do think there's a difference in degree to what the Trump administration is doing, but the Biden administration definitely also issued executive orders that ordered national parks and monuments to change their programming (e.g. EO 14121-Recognizing and Honoring Women's History). I don't think there's any getting around the fact that the narratives we tell at publicly funded institutions will be subject to politics. Ideally, we'd agree on some universal maxims such as "factuality" or "importance" when it comes to these sorts of things and leave the implementation to be handled at the lowest possible level, but we're clearly not there right now.
They're both very heavy-handed and maybe even equivalent in their deviation from historical fact. But one is intended to expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible while the other is trying to restrict that identity to only those who swear fealty to the ruling party.
Come the fuck on people, you cannot be this dense. This move has very obvious and disturbing ethnonationalist overtones. What the fuck are we doing here?
Telling 98% of Americans they live on stolen land is definitely trying to "expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible" and not favor one ethnicity over the others.
What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest? It’s factually true America conquered its land and even when it made nominal payments like under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo it was under military coercion. What we choose to do with that is up to us but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a shared cultural identity based on say acknowledging that we benefitted from this conquest and thus have an obligation to use these benefits to make things better for others.
Land acknowledgements seem a lot more common in Australia and it actually builds trust, when I see someone with it in their email signature it feels like okay this guy is probably won’t screw me because he’ll feel bad about it.
The Right of Conquest exists in reality regardless of what the Kellogg-Briand pact or UN says. Denying that is acting like Michael Scott when he declared bankruptcy.
Do you idiots think you're deep? Yes, the right of conquest exists in the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had the "right" to abuse and kill victims up until he lost the mandate of heaven and the cops found him out. Is this your first time hearing about free will?
Yes but in the telling these morons want, these people were annointed saints who had the perfect ideas for all things, not people who talked a big game about life, liberty, and property until those people over there looked weak and there's some free land to be had.
Being bent because someone pointed out the totally banal fact that we (and everyone else on the planet) lives on stolen land really is quintessentially Conservative. No idea how a previously normal political coalition ended up so thin-skinned.
I like to imagine that it was Donald, “they said mean things about me,” Trump who spearheaded the pussification of the Republican Party, but it really did start earlier.
A bunch of these people sound like they're about to OD on second-option bias. "B-but the Lakota were also invaders! They forcibly expelled other tribes and took over their hunting grounds! They stole land too!" Yeah, and that wasn't nice of them either.
Hang on...that wasn't what was claimed in the above comment, or cited to the executive order? What action by a democratic presidential administration are you referencing here?
As I said, there's a difference in degree. That being said, I don't actually think there's anything in the content of the Smithsonian EO that is explicitly ethnonationalist. Many things about the Trump administration are (e.g. immigration enforcement policy) and they should be called out as such. Asking museums to replace, "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions," is not that though, especially when you consider the people carrying out this EO are museum curators, not ICE agents.
You shouldn't extend any intellectual charity to the Trump administration. At the same time, you shouldn't hyperventilate about an anodyne and legitimate use of political power
Please read for comprehension. My point is not that there's anything wrong with the Biden admin's changes, my point is that there's clear precedent for a president to order executive agencies to change their priorities in museum programming. For Biden, that was prioritizing women in history. For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language. Neither of these things is particularly comparable to Chinese censorship, especially given both were democratically elected
“For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣 LOLOLOL
If you believe that, you probably also believe that Trump’s actions against universities are motivated by his sincere love of the Jewish people and opposition to anti-Semitism.
Somewhat relatedly, when I was in the Louvre a few months ago I read multiple signs in the small section on Ancient Carthage that historians are "uncertain" as to whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, when in fact there is a lot of evidence that Carthage and their Phoenician ancestors did practice child sacrifice. Museums should present the facts, even if they are uncomfortable. And this goes for whatever Trump wants to do too.
You'll have to go find one of the few people in Tunisia with Punic ancestory and ask them.
Many progressive historians and archeologists have a major blind spot when it comes to child sacrifice and human sacrifice in general. There is also a group that denies the Aztecs and Incas practiced it.
Like I alluded to in my other comment, stop being so tone deaf in your fact-checking mission and consider the intent. The French left is not trying to empower a neo-Carthaginian Empire. Just the opposite, they're worried acknowledging archaic customs might give credence to racist smears. They're naive, not dangerous. Putin's historical revisionisms are dangerous.
I cannot believe liberals are allowing themselves to be so trivially defeated by "no u" moral relativist type arguments.
Unsure. The signs are in English, which means they are newer than the most of the signs on Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek artifacts, which are only in French and have visible wear and tear.
The piece I link is from 2014 (though I'm sure people continue to debate it, because people debate everything, until the folks who were wrong die off/retire).
My good friend (alas, no longer with us) did part of his archaeological training for the University of Chicago on the big Carthage dig and he assured me that, yes, the Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice children.
Curators not being perfectly able to excise their own biases from their work isnt equivalent to a dedicated campaign to inflect the Nation's museums with a particular ideology.
This is type of equivalence is absurd. At this point, it should be one of those named fallacies.
It feels like a variant of the politician’s fallacy (We need to do something, X is something, therefore we should do X) to me. Wokeness is bad and we should do something about it, letting Trump replace wokeism with Donald Trump Thought is something, therefore what he’s doing is good and we shouldn’t complain about it.
In a broader historical perspective, “legitimating an ideological project of some kind” is one of the main reasons that museums (and especially history museums) exist in the first place. And yeah, I think that my particular objection to the Trumpian modification here isn’t that it has some ideological content, but that the ideology is bad and implementing it will require censorship of a lot of fairly straightforward historical facts.
My sense is that in many ways a lot of the worst identitarian art- especially high contemporary art- is solely supported by government, and there’s basically no real market for it.
I don’t know how the French manage to build a sense of taste around contemporary art. But it seems they have much stronger armor against “if you don’t like it you’re racist” than our institutions.
Most high contemporary art is supported by money laundering. Even when a piece is entirely legit, the general price level is high because of the dynamics of money laundering.
Oh I agree! It’s just various French Demi millionaires would rather buy the latest piece by whoever Gagossian is fucking now and stash it in a Freeport than an artist experiencing diversity.
It’s a different medium but I mean I have to wonder how well attended some of the more obvious pandering performances at the Kennedy center over the past few years were (and there’s a lot of pandering now it’s just the opposite valence, and I have the same question)
Do you also think the President should be able to decide what federally-funded science gets published or which political ideas can be spread on government-supported college campuses? The implication that there’s a world of facts where experts remain protected is naïve and frankly disappointing, given what we’re seeing the government doing to economic statistics and the hard sciences. Who thinks this in 2025, and why are so many people liking it?
Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump. NIH probably spent too much time and money supporting research on the ameloid protein theory of Alzheimers' initiation, and this didn't happen in a vacuum. I'd speculate that this arose out of groupthink in the neuroscience community and lack of better ideas, but it's absolutely fair to 'blame' the head of NINDS for letting too many research dollars reach those studies. Koroshetz worked for Becerra who worked for Biden - their arguably bad choices were neutral with respect to political valence, which is probably good, but they weren't neutral with respect to 'best science' or most promising cure. I agree that meddling in research is worse now, but we shouldn't mythologize the past.
>> Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump.
Yes, indeed.
How about we talk about the long history of the Texas Board of Education spreading the Lost Cause Lie across the country?
After all, one of the few verifiably neutral facts in this country is that the South started the Civil War over slavery; they said so in their secession declarations.
I agree with you, and your initial point that curators were exercising political control in unpopular ways that hurt their public standing is also true. But these are issues facing the Ezra Klein-listening cosmpolitan elite. They are not Trump's motivations and they do not inform the decisions of his administration. It's important not to try to paper our own (valid) complaints over those of an almost alien political machine.
If it were just a question of downplaying political beliefs, I would agree with you in principle. But the Trump administration is overriding the facts, judgements, and opinions of experts of any kind, and popular support or hatred of different groups of experts is not guiding his decision making.
It wasn’t dictated top down by the President before. Of course people should be allowed to have political views, but the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy.
I think the big thing about this is that in the past these would of course be political decisions but in the end political decisions would be tempered by working with civil society. So sure the Smithsonian would be more "liberal" than the average American but that's because museum curators are liberal and also liberals care a lot more about how history is presented.
In fact Republicans felt there was such an issue with latent liberalism among federal judges they created their own civil society organization to credential and promote federal judges. But you wouldn't just want to give a federal judgeship to some right wing talk show host.
In all cases you would want someone with some level of credibility inside their professional community, even if that's established through some astroturf organization that's largely fake--the astroturf kind of serves to validate the principal that an actual reputation should be developed prior to getting a leadership role even though presidents have wide authority to do whatever they want with their appointments.
I'm sure historians and museum curators are more liberal than the average American. Republicans are frustrated that a LOT of civil society groups generally have liberal members, and I think it drives a lot of distrust. That said, if you just no longer weigh professional reputation in any way when doing stuff or appointing people you end up with a bunch of people who have no professional prospects outside the administration. I don't disagree that some liberal orgs need to "touch grass" and get more politically in touch with the broader populace. But an institution governed by a (liberal) professional board is just not equivalent to plebiscitary rule with JD Vance going through all the museum text to make sure it's sufficiently patriotic.
Unrelated to museums, but the French actions remind me a lot of how the NBA was coerced by China to sanction Daryl Morey for his support of the protests in Hong Kong. And it's always been that moment where I think Matt really turned a corner on having a more hawkish attitude toward China.
The NBA is hugely popular in China. James Harden just got a basketball court with an illustration of him on it which I find hilarious. Some clips from this summer:
His peak was on the Rockets who are especially popular in China due to Yao Ming (Morey was GM of the Rockets when he made the HK comments).
Doesn't make the NBA taking explicit pro Chinese governnent actions right though. Matt has said this but corporations cannot be relied on to be anti-authoritarian.
When I visited China it was common for Chinese people who looked at my passport to notice that my visa was issued at the Houston consulate and say "I like Rockets!" or "Yao Ming!"
Don't even get me started on this! Beyond the censorship, the government is not even honoring its contracts. I work with several places that were awarded grants for the current fiscal year, and have made their own contracts with various businesses to help fulfill the goals of the grants. Now the funds have been canceled. Some places received initial payments before the cancelation, some have not. Some are in limbo - "we aren't sure what we are doing with your grant."
One place is a county historical society that does the usual county historical things. They received $400,000 - a huge amount for them - to help build an education center. Their buildings are in a neighborhood that 200 years ago was an estate for a rich family. Over the years, it has evolved, and now it is a mostly low-income Black neighborhood. There is also an Underground Railroad site within walking distance that the historical society collaborates with. But they are too "woke" because they provide programs on the Underground Railroad and other prominent Black people who were connected to the neighborhood. Grrrr.
I don't even understand how cancelling already awarded grants is allowed to happen.
Canada is a real outlier here. We have been rocketing in the other direction for a decade now. Canadian officials are doing their level best to rewrite the founding of Canada as a catastrophe for everyone except white men with property.
I'm reading that the specific case of burning down that church was not linked at all (https://globalnews.ca/news/8746415/surrey-bc-church-arson-sentence/). They couldn't find definitive motives for the other arsons but they clearly occurred after the unmarked graves news.
No one knows what is in the soil disturbances yet. It could be graves. But that didn't stop Justin Trudeau from basically calling Canada a genocide state. Usually not what leaders of countries do.
To be fair, after the illusionary epidemic of black church burnings in the US some decades ago, I remain skeptical of where there was actually even an increase in church arsons in Canada, let alone whether they were attributable to the mass graves hoax.
"Fake mass graves" yeah right. They werent fake. This wasnt just Canada this stuff happened to (or even First Nations!) The Catholic Church has done this shit world wide. Ireland is a prime example. Fake my ass
“… give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.”
I find land acknowledgements tedious and pointless, along with other forms of breast-beating.
But I don’t think the only options are giving back the land or shutting up. You can also always just tell the truth. Especially if you are a park, museum, or educational institution, you have an obligation to make an accurate record of what happened.
It doesn’t have to be breast-beating, just accurate.
You can also say, accurately, that the people of Canada have no intention of returning the land in question.
So, there are many options between giving back and shutting up.
There is a church in my area that has a "This church is built on stolen land" sign on the door. You're supposed to look at it and be silent and sad.
I really truly do want them to give the land back or else shut up. The sign is adding insult to injury. "We stole your land and now we're going to have coffee and doughnuts on it and sing Christian hymns on it." Were I an indigenous person of the relevant tribe, I think I'd be telling them to stuff it.
I'm willing to take your point about parks, museums, and maaaybe educational institutions (which ones? All of them? Because they're all built on stolen land in the U.S.). But the land acknowledgements that just pop up in random places is pure virtue signalling.
This is similar to my view. I'm 100% in favor of teaching a "warts and all" version of history.
I think land acknowledgements are bad for a few reasons. They're certainly tedious and pointless, and I think the idea that ethnic groups have some moral claim to land is both harmful and wrong.
The Canadian public history thing that I find most personally interesting as an American is all of the Quebecois-specific narrative stuff. There’s a really interesting combination of a sense of grievance against Anglo-Canada and an ambivalence about a lot of the historical institutions that differentiated Quebec from Anglo-Canada (the social dominance of the Catholic Church; the dominance of a Francophone landed gentry class with relatively little interest in commerce or industrialization). The Quebecois are clearly proud of their “Quiet Revolution”, but their public explanations of it are kind of confusing— in part because it was both a Quebecois particularist movement and a decisive rebellion against the control of Quebec’s distinctive reactionary elites, and they don’t seem to be fully comfortable with the tension there.
Someone who thinks everyone in the past is irredeemably evil shouldn't work in a museum. But lots of museum staff clearly have that deeply misanthropic view.
Scott Alexander has any intresting but unforunatley paywalled article on whether you should hate everyone in Ancient Rome if you time travelled back there. I feel 50 years ago every museum curator if they got a chance to meet Ceasar would ask "What was it like to triumph at Alesia?", while a significant share of modern staff would ask "why were you an evil slave trader boasting of killing a million Gauls?"
You have a wildly optimistic view of museum curators if you think faced with Caeser they would ask anything of the sort, when any such insult would very obviously result in their deaths.
I call my friends “my dude” all the time! What’s good my dude?? It never would have occurred to me that the phrase would be anything other than a term of endearment. I wonder if this is one of those phrases that has been overused by people on cultural-politics-twitter.
I'm sure many of you have seen the clip by the comedian Marc Maron saying progressives have to deal with their buzzkill problem, a problem that has annoyed the average American into fascism?
Does someone like Halina get how annoyed the average voter gets when Mt. Vernon becomes all about the evils of slavery? Where every exhibit at the National Gallery is a retrospective examination of the struggles of handicapped lesbian eskimos?
Does everyone understand how we annoyed the average American into fascism and is that really the best course of action?
It really doesn't, I'm 100% with you. But what good does it do to deny reality? These people are the median voter - you need to deal with them as they are.
What's your solution? To just harangue them more? Do you think all it takes is a little more haranguing?
I think we can agree that it doesn't seem like it's working.
I’ve read that 1/3 of the population has authoritarian tendencies. So not quite the median voter, but a disturbingly large fraction all the same.
ETA: no, not haranguing. Inspiring? I don’t know, I’m a weirdo nerd and probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people. That which appeals to the average person repels me, and vice versa (with some exceptions; I love superhero movies).
First thing I’d do is question the statements about Mt. Vernon and the National Gallery of Art.
For example, going to the National Gallery’s website, there’s a catalogue of their current exhibitions (https://www.nga.gov/calendar?tab=exhibitions). Seems pretty reasonable to me.
You can do something similar with Mt. Vernon. Sure there’s going to be an exhibit on slavery because Washington owned slaves. But otherwise it seems like the standard stuff—Washington’s life, the farm, the tombs, collections of artifacts, etc.
I think what happens is a minority of people don’t want there to be any acknowledgement of stuff like that at all and want whitewashed history. And so they kick up a fuss. When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good.
I mean specifically in the context of museums which is what this was about. Most people, the vast majority, will listen to the part of the tour where the docent explains how Washington owned slaves, they were responsible for much of the work done on the plantation, and Washington struggled with the morality of slavery given the contradiction between his humanist views and economic livelihood. They’ll nod sagely, and then move on to look at the interesting artifacts in the next room. They won’t have a fit about woke history or whatever. A tiny minority will throw a fit and go on podcasts and complain about how it’s all anti-white propaganda.
Do you think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a buzzkill? I found it heavy, but inspiring. Is a realistic but depressing treatment of slavery alongside a ton of stuff about the civil rights movement, and Black American contributions to American culture a buzzkill? I don't really think so. But I guess part of what Trump supporters want is for interesting things they do not like to no longer exist.
Oh it's amazing. But it ends with - we are the greatest nation in history. It doesn't end with struggle session navel gazing about every one of our flaws.
Post hoc, do you think these types of races are even predictable with polling? 26 points of error, 16 unaccountable for by demographic weighting seems like an impossible challenge
I want to be transparent about how much I do and don’t know so my honest answer is that I’m not sure! I think it is possible to get the weighting closer to right (though of course not perfect) if one knows a lot about elections in NYC and the typical patterns there. That’s much easier said than done, obviously.
But I do know that the prediction markets were moving towards Mamdani during early voting, which suggests that the ex ante expectation should’ve been a lot closer than Cuomo+14.
This was very informative. However as a nitpick the characterization of “Non-responders” as the seemingly atypical demographic given that response rates are 9% seems a little odd —
“Moreover, modern non-responders differ from their contemporary responder counterparts: people who do not answer the phone tend to have lower social trust and are less politically active, which today correlates with being a Republican.”
In view of the fact that 91% of people don’t respond, isn’t it more accurate to say that 9% of people have pathologically high social trust and are easy targets for phone scams?
Also re “ Opt-in panels also weight their results; the key difference is that while RDD surveys start from a sampling frame that includes almost the whole population (everyone who owns a landline)” — uh, pretty sure that 75% or so of people *don’t* have a landline….
1. The estimable Ann Selzer missed Iowa 2024, so you are in good company ;)
2. ”Ecological inference models show that these shifts were driven by groups such as Asian voters, as Trump won 50% of their votes, a 40-point shift to the right." Holy mackerel. TIL!
I live practically across the street from a historical Black cemetery. I walk my dog there almost every day.
At the entrance is a plaque about a period of Jim Crow racial violence in the late 19th century. It provides a detailed narrative of what happened. When I read that, I didn’t feel shame for my nation’s history. I felt optimism for the fact that we have overcome it.
Yeh that's like the African American History Museum - it starts off with the little kid handcuffs from the slave ships and ends with Obama. You leave thinking - this is truly the greatest nation in the history of the world.
But the message was about what we've overcome not endless struggle session navel gazing about all our perceived flaws.
I agree. It is extremely obnoxious to be surrounded by people who are more interested in navel-gazing self-critique than addressing actually important matters.
I wish they had more culture in the museum than just the top floor. There’s not a lot of reason to go back a third time, though a second time was great.
I find it amusing how China and Turkey are both very aggressive when it comes to censorship/oppression, but super quick to play the victim card when anyone questions them. For example, Erodogan’s successful campaign to change the spelling of Turkey in English. I say change the spelling when they acknowledge the Armenian genocide.
I found this super annoying. Dude, it's our (well, Britain's) language, you can't just insist we add umlauts at your whim and fancy! We also call it "Germany" instead of "Deutschland", and they deal. Like, I am sorry that the word for your country is more commonly used to describe our Thanksgiving dinner and you're a little sensitive about it, but you're free to change the Turkish word for "United States" to "goat's anus" in retaliation if you'd like. Insisting upon new grammatical entrants to the English language is a bit much though.
As I think about it, the English spellings for most non-anglophone countries are different from the spellings in the native language. The ones where the English spelling and the local spelling are identical seem to be rare. Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, France, and Angola are some of the few examples. Even countries with languages very close to English (e.g. Norway, Netherlands) have different spellings.
When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles
It's really hard to get traction on this stuff with the general public because the general public pretty much agrees academia has over reached with liberal politics. It's just not going to break through as an issue that anyone outside of The Atlantic subscriber base is going to care about. Unless Trump does something truly insane like make an exhibit called Slavery Never Happened, then it won't matter.
So anyone else listen to Ezra Klein do an hour and forty five minutes of, like, weird, confused hand wringing over the definition of genocide on his show today? Was that supposed to be enlightening about anything? Did I miss something or did we all experience it as a kind of full blown collapse into neurotic, navel gazing, self indulgence?
I haven't listened to it yet, but I am quite certain that unless and until I understand what the definition of "genocide" is then I will have no opinion on whether what is going on in Gaza is bad.
The discussion is at least good for providing THAT. The guy he was interviewing did a good job articulating the issues I had with calling it genocide at first, and the problem of South Africa bringing the case when they did. It was a good discussion.
I had to turn it off. I was pessimistic when he started his intro in that doomy, tear-stained voice, and his part didn't get better. I thought his guest was okay, talking about the origins of the contemporary concept of genocide, but eventually I was just saying "Get to the point!"
Did he ever talk more about the evolution of his own perspective? Because he was pretty pro-Israel shortly after Oct. 7.
I thought it was a useful and riveting discussion as like many liberals, I have wanted to hear for a while now, a technical argument on the use of the term "genocide" from someone who knows what they are talking about and Ezra brought on Philippe Sands a literal ICJ lawyer.
The main message I took away from it is that the ICJ has made proving "genocide" almost impossible because the judges there chose a high bar regarding intent. International actors are better off focusing on other charges like "War Crimes" and "Crimes against Humanity" that seem like obvious slam dunks at this point if the goal is to try to stop the atrocities in the near term.
So basically while we will not be able to stop people colloquially screaming "genocide!" the legal standard is unlikely to be met and we should not use "genocide" as a litmus test in US politics to determine how committed one is to Palestinian human rights.
That's interesting. I guess I should have listened further. But Sands also said:
"But it was different in this way also: Until 1945, a state was basically free to treat anyone subject to its jurisdiction as it wished. There were no restrictions. There was nothing called human rights law. Under international law, the only international crimes were in relation to war crimes. There was no such thing as crimes against humanity or genocide. These things were invented in 1945 for the famous Nuremberg Trial, and the ideas that came to fruition then basically said for the first time — it was a revolutionary moment — that the freedom of the state is not absolute. The emperor doesn’t have absolute power. The king doesn’t have absolute power."
Now wait a damn minute! I don't think the U.S. started saying that "the freedom of the state is not absolute" in 1945! There were lots of restrictions on actions of the state that started from the get-go. And plenty of other liberal democracies were the same.
It is possible to argue that international law is not natural law. Had Pearl Harbor never happened and the US never joined WWII, would there have been a Nuremberg? There was no Nuremberg after WWI, and the Kaiser's army did not exactly play nice with Belgian civilian populations, among others. Not to go full Dick Cheney, but international law only exists to the extent a majority of nations agree it does.
It's not like international law even exists in some kind of quasi democratic "most countries agree" kind of way. International law only exists to the extent of the will and military capacity to enforce it, which is too say, mostly not at all.
Admiralty law exists and is generally followed. But that is like the exception that proves your point, because admiralty law is built upon hundreds of years of tradition, handshake agreements, and the physical reality of being at sea rather than on land. It wasn't "imposed" by dictat.
Individual states of course had human rights going back at least to Magna Carta if not longer but I suppose countries/sovereigns could not bring human rights charges against one another?
Sands goes on to mention that the US did not argue for genocide against the Nazis because they were worried that under Lemkin's conception of it, the US itself would be guilty of genocide against Native Americans and African American slaves. Under colonialism there were many instances of human rights violations that would fall under a broad enough definition of "genocide" as Lemkin argued for.
So, everyone decided to (pragmatically) start the clock in 1945 and not to look too far back in the past.
Doesn't this objection apply to almost anything under the sun? Most of what we are doing sitting here is just navel gazing and ruminating about problems far away because we happen to be lucky enough to not be in the middle of a calamity ourselves.
For me personally I would like to know what to make of a situation even if I have no hope of influencing it (which is the case 99.999999% of the time).
I will say I was convinced by his argument about being able to make the determination of genocide before you get to the mechanized extermination. Also the Serbia example was good.
I’ve always felt that Israel was allowing genocide to occur in the West Bank. But Gaza didn’t count until Israel caused a famine.
Do I have to call it the Xizang Autonomous Region, or does Xizang Region suffice?
As Sir Humphrey would say calling it autonomous would "cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear"
Let's not pretend that museums didn't bring an ideological lens to their work before Trump. It's just that most progressives agreed with the earlier version of the 'dominant narrative,' and now not so much. Most museaum goers troop through without reading the carefully worded wall cards and are more interested in seeing Lincoln's hat than the curators' spin on things, so it never much mattered what they think or say.
Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse.
The fuck is this shit? Goddamn, liberals really are too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel.
I see this a lot in some spaces, including this comment section. Trump has absolutely no intention of bringing museum exhibits closer to the truth. Public health officials who issued confusing directives in 2020 aren't going to be replaced by people giving out better advice. The wokesters won't be cowed into giving reasonable (to you) prescriptions on things. It's about power. It's only about power. That's literally the only thing in the world that Donald Trump gives a solitary fuck about, and every one of his followers just wants a little piece of it.
Yes, but the myth we need to interrogate is the idea that our side wasn't also trying to exercise power in its inversion of the earlier, more conventional narrative. You may consider their attempts to popularize an anti-colonialist interpretation as more benign or more representative of an evolved society, but one wasn't a neutal, dispassionate historical accounting while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda. It's always about power - turtles all the way down.
Now that I think about it, you're right! My belief that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect is exactly like Stephen Miller's belief that certain peoples are inferior and should be ethnically cleansed. Truly these are both equally valid perspectives and who can say which of us has the right to impose our moral understanding on others.
Holy fuck, now is not the time to go on a soul searching journey where we critically reevaluate liberal excesses.
That's not what Jeremy said.
It’s not, but the false equivalence needs to be acknowledged.
I am somewhat curious who you think is "our side?" I would not have considered museum curators to be on "my side..." but yes that is proportionally a liberal group. OTOH Trump also fired a bunch of generals presumably to replace with loyalists, put a goon in charge of the FBI and fired the totally nonpartisan head of the bls. So while I think you can say perhaps museum curators are generally liberal, it's not like being a conservative spared Chris Wray (a career Republican law enforcement guy).
sorry for the self reply but I would also say it is EXTREMELY common for Democrats to cede defense, security and policing positions to either non-partisan generals or straight up Republicans (Jim Comey, Robert Gates, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel).
Republicans used to extend a similar level of forebearance by appointing relative moderates to positions like EPA Administrator (Christine Todd Whitman) though this is no longer really true.
So while it's true that the Smithsonian is probably presenting content that is more "liberal" than the center of American politics, I don't think it's correct to think about it that way, since historically Republicans do not power maximize toward federal/govt cultural institutions and Democrats do not power maximize toward security institutions.
Trump did appoint RFK...
Amusing how even when he's being less partisan, Trump still manages to screw it up.
>while the opposite is ethno-nationalist propaganda
but that's what Trump wants, and it's certainly worse than an "anti-colonialist interpretation". what are you even arguing here?
Yes. I think it's important that people of good faith and reason not use the actions of Trump to litigate arguments with their co-partisans--like "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad." Trump's first term had some semblance of a desire to improve people's material living standards. Trump's second term seems to be purely about immiserating people he views as hostile. Anyone who Trump attacks deserves at least not to be piled on.
I think this is essentially correct, I don't disagree directionally, and the sooner Trump his ilk are consigned to the ash heap of history the better (so long as the rest of us aren't all along for the ride) but nevertheless the one--and likely the only--meaningful devil's-argument you can make in favor of "Trump is bad but at least it's walking back (X) liberal policy which was bad" is that there is not (yet) a plausible a trajectory under which the Democrats could be trusted to actually walk back (X) liberal policy. Not expand? Sure. De-prioritize? Maybe. But actually affirmatively roll back? Never.
That said, one could quite reasonably prefer a damped rather than a boosted pendulum swing, rather than Tokyo Sex Whale's pithy and extremely apt formulation of "Once again, the Trump Administration addresses a problem by replacing it with something much worse."
It should be noted that Trump, his ilk, and his enablers — many of the latter having started this movement themselves decades ago — have been waging a decades long propaganda campaign to undermine trust in Democrats ever achieving any given value of (x), and also lying about any time a Democrat achieves anything remotely resembling (x).
I think this is substantially more true for economically-inflected issues than culture-war inflected ones, where the left basically ran the table until, like 2022 at the earliest. Not all of those have been federalized issues but some of them may have been appropriate for federalized de-escalation in the interests of solving the first-mover problem (diversity statement requirements for physics sort of stuff. Which is probably more controversial than I intend it to be but is on the order of things-I-expect-much-of-the-SB-commentariat-agrees-were-excessive-without-too-much-contentiousness without being so abstract and vacuous as to make it unclear that there's even a referent here).
… which is why so many of us here find Jeremy’s complaints to be specious and misplaced.
It’s not just broadmindedness, it’s trying to learn from the mistakes of the past. Of course what trump is doing is worse, but you can’t really understand how we got to this moment if you don’t think of it as a reaction to the previous cultural moment
I was a conservative debate bro through most of the Obama admin. I know exactly where the cultural grievance comes from. I got over it. How about you "moderate pragmatists" take your own advice and stop indulging in masturbatory self-criticism when there are more pressing matters that need your attention?
I do think there's a difference in degree to what the Trump administration is doing, but the Biden administration definitely also issued executive orders that ordered national parks and monuments to change their programming (e.g. EO 14121-Recognizing and Honoring Women's History). I don't think there's any getting around the fact that the narratives we tell at publicly funded institutions will be subject to politics. Ideally, we'd agree on some universal maxims such as "factuality" or "importance" when it comes to these sorts of things and leave the implementation to be handled at the lowest possible level, but we're clearly not there right now.
They're both very heavy-handed and maybe even equivalent in their deviation from historical fact. But one is intended to expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible while the other is trying to restrict that identity to only those who swear fealty to the ruling party.
Come the fuck on people, you cannot be this dense. This move has very obvious and disturbing ethnonationalist overtones. What the fuck are we doing here?
Telling 98% of Americans they live on stolen land is definitely trying to "expand our shared cultural identity to as many people as possible" and not favor one ethnicity over the others.
What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest? It’s factually true America conquered its land and even when it made nominal payments like under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo it was under military coercion. What we choose to do with that is up to us but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a shared cultural identity based on say acknowledging that we benefitted from this conquest and thus have an obligation to use these benefits to make things better for others.
Land acknowledgements seem a lot more common in Australia and it actually builds trust, when I see someone with it in their email signature it feels like okay this guy is probably won’t screw me because he’ll feel bad about it.
"when I see someone with it in their email signature"
I hope you're kidding about that being a thing . . . .
And about the assumption it entails, lol.
The Right of Conquest exists in reality regardless of what the Kellogg-Briand pact or UN says. Denying that is acting like Michael Scott when he declared bankruptcy.
Do you idiots think you're deep? Yes, the right of conquest exists in the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had the "right" to abuse and kill victims up until he lost the mandate of heaven and the cops found him out. Is this your first time hearing about free will?
Yes but in the telling these morons want, these people were annointed saints who had the perfect ideas for all things, not people who talked a big game about life, liberty, and property until those people over there looked weak and there's some free land to be had.
Wow. Very different world. I see it in someone's sig file and I just roll my eyes, hard.
"What’s the alternative? Museums teaching there’s a right of conquest?"
Is there not?
We decided it was a bad idea after we got nukes
That IS our shared cultural identity, though. Well, 98% of us. Whether you like it or not is immaterial.
I don't live on stolen land. If you do, you should probably move and give it back to it's rightful owners.
Being bent because someone pointed out the totally banal fact that we (and everyone else on the planet) lives on stolen land really is quintessentially Conservative. No idea how a previously normal political coalition ended up so thin-skinned.
As online commentators were fond of pointing out during Trump 1.0: “The F YOUR FEELINGS crowd sure has a lot of feelings!”
I like to imagine that it was Donald, “they said mean things about me,” Trump who spearheaded the pussification of the Republican Party, but it really did start earlier.
A bunch of these people sound like they're about to OD on second-option bias. "B-but the Lakota were also invaders! They forcibly expelled other tribes and took over their hunting grounds! They stole land too!" Yeah, and that wasn't nice of them either.
Damn, you're right. We really do need to be wary of that 2% native population installing a fascist regime that exterminates the non-native infidels.
You do seem to think the role of government funded museums is to advocate for your chosen political party, which seems kind of authoritarian.
I was a Republican up until 2016. You're damn right I think my liberal values are more legitimate than fascism.
Yes, because it seeks to not unduly favor the ethnicity that stole the fucking land, KEN.
Hang on...that wasn't what was claimed in the above comment, or cited to the executive order? What action by a democratic presidential administration are you referencing here?
As I said, there's a difference in degree. That being said, I don't actually think there's anything in the content of the Smithsonian EO that is explicitly ethnonationalist. Many things about the Trump administration are (e.g. immigration enforcement policy) and they should be called out as such. Asking museums to replace, "divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions," is not that though, especially when you consider the people carrying out this EO are museum curators, not ICE agents.
Gosh, you're right, the Trump administration has definitely earned the right to be assessed in good faith. /s
You shouldn't extend any intellectual charity to the Trump administration. At the same time, you shouldn't hyperventilate about an anodyne and legitimate use of political power
They’re not dense, they’re collaborators.
Yup, nothing more un-American than women. Damn commie leftists!
Please read for comprehension. My point is not that there's anything wrong with the Biden admin's changes, my point is that there's clear precedent for a president to order executive agencies to change their priorities in museum programming. For Biden, that was prioritizing women in history. For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language. Neither of these things is particularly comparable to Chinese censorship, especially given both were democratically elected
“For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language.”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣 LOLOLOL
If you believe that, you probably also believe that Trump’s actions against universities are motivated by his sincere love of the Jewish people and opposition to anti-Semitism.
"For Trump, the priority is removing divisive language."
That word does not mean what Trump thinks it means.
Somewhat relatedly, when I was in the Louvre a few months ago I read multiple signs in the small section on Ancient Carthage that historians are "uncertain" as to whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice, when in fact there is a lot of evidence that Carthage and their Phoenician ancestors did practice child sacrifice. Museums should present the facts, even if they are uncomfortable. And this goes for whatever Trump wants to do too.
Have the ancient Carthaginians formed a grievance group or something?
You'll have to go find one of the few people in Tunisia with Punic ancestory and ask them.
Many progressive historians and archeologists have a major blind spot when it comes to child sacrifice and human sacrifice in general. There is also a group that denies the Aztecs and Incas practiced it.
Like I alluded to in my other comment, stop being so tone deaf in your fact-checking mission and consider the intent. The French left is not trying to empower a neo-Carthaginian Empire. Just the opposite, they're worried acknowledging archaic customs might give credence to racist smears. They're naive, not dangerous. Putin's historical revisionisms are dangerous.
I cannot believe liberals are allowing themselves to be so trivially defeated by "no u" moral relativist type arguments.
Aztec thing is much more fraught as they’re essential to the Mexican national myth. More incentive to gloss over the sacrifice.
Carthage? No clue why they’d gloss that over
How old were the signs? I think that historically there's been a pretty strong 'the claim by the Romans that their enemies literally sacrificed babies are probably bullshit' strain in the history, until archaeological digs and analysis concluded pretty clearly that they did (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children).
Came here to say this. Sean is unfairly ignoring the modern consensus that we don't take every single ancient historian's writing at face value.
Unsure. The signs are in English, which means they are newer than the most of the signs on Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek artifacts, which are only in French and have visible wear and tear.
The piece I link is from 2014 (though I'm sure people continue to debate it, because people debate everything, until the folks who were wrong die off/retire).
My good friend (alas, no longer with us) did part of his archaeological training for the University of Chicago on the big Carthage dig and he assured me that, yes, the Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice children.
This is foolish and naive.
Curators not being perfectly able to excise their own biases from their work isnt equivalent to a dedicated campaign to inflect the Nation's museums with a particular ideology.
This is type of equivalence is absurd. At this point, it should be one of those named fallacies.
How did the Smithsonian come to have a DEI office if not being deliberately inflected with ideology? E.g.,
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/e-carmen-ramos-national-gallery-of-art-chief-curator-1234592791/
It feels like a variant of the politician’s fallacy (We need to do something, X is something, therefore we should do X) to me. Wokeness is bad and we should do something about it, letting Trump replace wokeism with Donald Trump Thought is something, therefore what he’s doing is good and we shouldn’t complain about it.
Both-sides-ism?
Well put. They absolutely brought this on themselves by turning into far-left propaganda factories on the taxpayers' dime.
I do not think the Smithsonian is a far left propaganda factory.
Also, was there any significant public outcry about the content of the museums outside of right wing media?
In a broader historical perspective, “legitimating an ideological project of some kind” is one of the main reasons that museums (and especially history museums) exist in the first place. And yeah, I think that my particular objection to the Trumpian modification here isn’t that it has some ideological content, but that the ideology is bad and implementing it will require censorship of a lot of fairly straightforward historical facts.
"Lost Cause" mythology is almost certain to resurface... Maybe a facelift on the original America First movement is also a possibility.
My sense is that in many ways a lot of the worst identitarian art- especially high contemporary art- is solely supported by government, and there’s basically no real market for it.
I don’t know how the French manage to build a sense of taste around contemporary art. But it seems they have much stronger armor against “if you don’t like it you’re racist” than our institutions.
Your sense is wrong, Mr. Dead-For-Forty-Years.
Most high contemporary art is supported by money laundering. Even when a piece is entirely legit, the general price level is high because of the dynamics of money laundering.
Oh I agree! It’s just various French Demi millionaires would rather buy the latest piece by whoever Gagossian is fucking now and stash it in a Freeport than an artist experiencing diversity.
It’s a different medium but I mean I have to wonder how well attended some of the more obvious pandering performances at the Kennedy center over the past few years were (and there’s a lot of pandering now it’s just the opposite valence, and I have the same question)
Do you also think the President should be able to decide what federally-funded science gets published or which political ideas can be spread on government-supported college campuses? The implication that there’s a world of facts where experts remain protected is naïve and frankly disappointing, given what we’re seeing the government doing to economic statistics and the hard sciences. Who thinks this in 2025, and why are so many people liking it?
Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump. NIH probably spent too much time and money supporting research on the ameloid protein theory of Alzheimers' initiation, and this didn't happen in a vacuum. I'd speculate that this arose out of groupthink in the neuroscience community and lack of better ideas, but it's absolutely fair to 'blame' the head of NINDS for letting too many research dollars reach those studies. Koroshetz worked for Becerra who worked for Biden - their arguably bad choices were neutral with respect to political valence, which is probably good, but they weren't neutral with respect to 'best science' or most promising cure. I agree that meddling in research is worse now, but we shouldn't mythologize the past.
>> Once you start to push on it, it's hard to find this world of neutral facts that somehow evaded the vicissitudes of the human instinct to exercise control before Trump.
Yes, indeed.
How about we talk about the long history of the Texas Board of Education spreading the Lost Cause Lie across the country?
After all, one of the few verifiably neutral facts in this country is that the South started the Civil War over slavery; they said so in their secession declarations.
I agree with you, and your initial point that curators were exercising political control in unpopular ways that hurt their public standing is also true. But these are issues facing the Ezra Klein-listening cosmpolitan elite. They are not Trump's motivations and they do not inform the decisions of his administration. It's important not to try to paper our own (valid) complaints over those of an almost alien political machine.
If it were just a question of downplaying political beliefs, I would agree with you in principle. But the Trump administration is overriding the facts, judgements, and opinions of experts of any kind, and popular support or hatred of different groups of experts is not guiding his decision making.
It wasn’t dictated top down by the President before. Of course people should be allowed to have political views, but the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy.
"...the government shouldn’t get to dictate orthodoxy"
That's why we have the First Amendment. Don't fuck it up.
I think the big thing about this is that in the past these would of course be political decisions but in the end political decisions would be tempered by working with civil society. So sure the Smithsonian would be more "liberal" than the average American but that's because museum curators are liberal and also liberals care a lot more about how history is presented.
In fact Republicans felt there was such an issue with latent liberalism among federal judges they created their own civil society organization to credential and promote federal judges. But you wouldn't just want to give a federal judgeship to some right wing talk show host.
In all cases you would want someone with some level of credibility inside their professional community, even if that's established through some astroturf organization that's largely fake--the astroturf kind of serves to validate the principal that an actual reputation should be developed prior to getting a leadership role even though presidents have wide authority to do whatever they want with their appointments.
I'm sure historians and museum curators are more liberal than the average American. Republicans are frustrated that a LOT of civil society groups generally have liberal members, and I think it drives a lot of distrust. That said, if you just no longer weigh professional reputation in any way when doing stuff or appointing people you end up with a bunch of people who have no professional prospects outside the administration. I don't disagree that some liberal orgs need to "touch grass" and get more politically in touch with the broader populace. But an institution governed by a (liberal) professional board is just not equivalent to plebiscitary rule with JD Vance going through all the museum text to make sure it's sufficiently patriotic.
Unrelated to museums, but the French actions remind me a lot of how the NBA was coerced by China to sanction Daryl Morey for his support of the protests in Hong Kong. And it's always been that moment where I think Matt really turned a corner on having a more hawkish attitude toward China.
The NBA is hugely popular in China. James Harden just got a basketball court with an illustration of him on it which I find hilarious. Some clips from this summer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1mmxkfy/james_harden_pulled_this_insane_crowd_at_the/
https://youtube.com/shorts/kO5S7HD1yCg?feature=shared
His peak was on the Rockets who are especially popular in China due to Yao Ming (Morey was GM of the Rockets when he made the HK comments).
Doesn't make the NBA taking explicit pro Chinese governnent actions right though. Matt has said this but corporations cannot be relied on to be anti-authoritarian.
When I visited China it was common for Chinese people who looked at my passport to notice that my visa was issued at the Houston consulate and say "I like Rockets!" or "Yao Ming!"
Corporations can be relied on to be anti-authoritarian so long as that's profitable.
Don't even get me started on this! Beyond the censorship, the government is not even honoring its contracts. I work with several places that were awarded grants for the current fiscal year, and have made their own contracts with various businesses to help fulfill the goals of the grants. Now the funds have been canceled. Some places received initial payments before the cancelation, some have not. Some are in limbo - "we aren't sure what we are doing with your grant."
One place is a county historical society that does the usual county historical things. They received $400,000 - a huge amount for them - to help build an education center. Their buildings are in a neighborhood that 200 years ago was an estate for a rich family. Over the years, it has evolved, and now it is a mostly low-income Black neighborhood. There is also an Underground Railroad site within walking distance that the historical society collaborates with. But they are too "woke" because they provide programs on the Underground Railroad and other prominent Black people who were connected to the neighborhood. Grrrr.
I don't even understand how cancelling already awarded grants is allowed to happen.
Generally, the answer is that the government can terminate contracts/grants for convenience (https://www.grfcpa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Termination-for-Convenience-Whitepaper.pdf) but it has to pay termination costs...which is why usually folks try to avoid it, as you often eat a significant portion of the total project costs to get...nothing.
Oh, interesting. . . . Thanks so much!
"...made their own contracts with various businesses..."
Do not those contracts contain the standard language about funding?
Canada is a real outlier here. We have been rocketing in the other direction for a decade now. Canadian officials are doing their level best to rewrite the founding of Canada as a catastrophe for everyone except white men with property.
https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/parks-canada-chooses-identity-politics-over-giving-sir-john-a-macdonald-his-due-patrice-dutil-in-the-hub/
So are they going to give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.
No, but they did fake a lot of First Nations mass graves that led to a bunch of church arsons.
Imagine being a Coptic Egyptian persecuted by ISIS, moving to Canada, and then having your church burned down by a confused white Canadian lady.
The head of the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association actually encouraged Canadians to do just that! She promptly resigned following the uproar.
I'm reading that the specific case of burning down that church was not linked at all (https://globalnews.ca/news/8746415/surrey-bc-church-arson-sentence/). They couldn't find definitive motives for the other arsons but they clearly occurred after the unmarked graves news.
She did say burn them "all" down as I recall. Odd thing for a civil libertarian to say.
No one knows what is in the soil disturbances yet. It could be graves. But that didn't stop Justin Trudeau from basically calling Canada a genocide state. Usually not what leaders of countries do.
https://jonkay.substack.com/p/the-courage-to-dig
It was a weird summer.
To be fair, after the illusionary epidemic of black church burnings in the US some decades ago, I remain skeptical of where there was actually even an increase in church arsons in Canada, let alone whether they were attributable to the mass graves hoax.
There is no doubt about it.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2040397/at-least-33-canadian-churches-have-burned-to-the-ground-since-may-2021-only-2-were-accidents
"Fake mass graves" yeah right. They werent fake. This wasnt just Canada this stuff happened to (or even First Nations!) The Catholic Church has done this shit world wide. Ireland is a prime example. Fake my ass
We could find out, if the people involved were willing to actually dig.
Nah, we know they're mass graves
To date, there have been zero mass graves found at former residential schools in Canada.
Oh.
“… give it back to the indigenous peoples? If not, they can shut up.”
I find land acknowledgements tedious and pointless, along with other forms of breast-beating.
But I don’t think the only options are giving back the land or shutting up. You can also always just tell the truth. Especially if you are a park, museum, or educational institution, you have an obligation to make an accurate record of what happened.
It doesn’t have to be breast-beating, just accurate.
You can also say, accurately, that the people of Canada have no intention of returning the land in question.
So, there are many options between giving back and shutting up.
There is a church in my area that has a "This church is built on stolen land" sign on the door. You're supposed to look at it and be silent and sad.
I really truly do want them to give the land back or else shut up. The sign is adding insult to injury. "We stole your land and now we're going to have coffee and doughnuts on it and sing Christian hymns on it." Were I an indigenous person of the relevant tribe, I think I'd be telling them to stuff it.
I'm willing to take your point about parks, museums, and maaaybe educational institutions (which ones? All of them? Because they're all built on stolen land in the U.S.). But the land acknowledgements that just pop up in random places is pure virtue signalling.
This is similar to my view. I'm 100% in favor of teaching a "warts and all" version of history.
I think land acknowledgements are bad for a few reasons. They're certainly tedious and pointless, and I think the idea that ethnic groups have some moral claim to land is both harmful and wrong.
Maybe?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/b-c-supreme-court-takes-an-axe-to-private-property-rights
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/cowichan-title-ruling-could-impact-private-property-owners-across-bc-lawyer-says/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/wolastoqey-title-claim-court-decision-1.7387471
The Canadian public history thing that I find most personally interesting as an American is all of the Quebecois-specific narrative stuff. There’s a really interesting combination of a sense of grievance against Anglo-Canada and an ambivalence about a lot of the historical institutions that differentiated Quebec from Anglo-Canada (the social dominance of the Catholic Church; the dominance of a Francophone landed gentry class with relatively little interest in commerce or industrialization). The Quebecois are clearly proud of their “Quiet Revolution”, but their public explanations of it are kind of confusing— in part because it was both a Quebecois particularist movement and a decisive rebellion against the control of Quebec’s distinctive reactionary elites, and they don’t seem to be fully comfortable with the tension there.
A much better way to think about Canadian history right here: https://faceintheblue.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/how-would-every-canadian-prime-minister-fare-as-hockey-goons-in-a-bench-clearing-brawl/ "How Would Every Canadian Prime Minister Fare as Hockey Goons in a Bench-Clearing Brawl?"
Someone who thinks everyone in the past is irredeemably evil shouldn't work in a museum. But lots of museum staff clearly have that deeply misanthropic view.
Scott Alexander has any intresting but unforunatley paywalled article on whether you should hate everyone in Ancient Rome if you time travelled back there. I feel 50 years ago every museum curator if they got a chance to meet Ceasar would ask "What was it like to triumph at Alesia?", while a significant share of modern staff would ask "why were you an evil slave trader boasting of killing a million Gauls?"
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/can-you-hate-everyone-in-rome
You have a wildly optimistic view of museum curators if you think faced with Caeser they would ask anything of the sort, when any such insult would very obviously result in their deaths.
Is it possible to address someone as “my dude” without being condescending?
Do you or do you not surf?
Tubular.
Do you surf safely?
https://youtu.be/axjQR7c2nMg?si=nN4BDK3ggBqhnjkP&t=4
Surely depends on existing level of familiarity between the parties, plus tone of voice/other context cues?
Okay, is it possible to address a stranger etc.?
Sure, but you're going to need to sound really sincere/sympathetic and probably would work much better in person than on-line.
If someone who regularly talks like crush the sea turtle does it, yes.
But usually no.
I call my friends “my dude” all the time! What’s good my dude?? It never would have occurred to me that the phrase would be anything other than a term of endearment. I wonder if this is one of those phrases that has been overused by people on cultural-politics-twitter.
My Gen X son and his friends do it all the time. Now I am going to be thinking about this comment.
If you’re a mountain biker, yes. https://youtube.com/@mahalomydude
Yes, but only on wednesdays
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du-TY1GUFGk
Do you consider saying something ironically to be condescending?
starting at 0:14
https://youtu.be/RwBW3do9yqc?si=Y2ccL4tOeQEaiCjL
I'm sure many of you have seen the clip by the comedian Marc Maron saying progressives have to deal with their buzzkill problem, a problem that has annoyed the average American into fascism?
Does someone like Halina get how annoyed the average voter gets when Mt. Vernon becomes all about the evils of slavery? Where every exhibit at the National Gallery is a retrospective examination of the struggles of handicapped lesbian eskimos?
Does everyone understand how we annoyed the average American into fascism and is that really the best course of action?
“We annoyed the average American into fascism” really doesn’t say much good about the average American.
How do you even say that with a straight face? It’s like saying “the Jedi Council annoyed Anakin into mass-murdering younglings.”
It really doesn't, I'm 100% with you. But what good does it do to deny reality? These people are the median voter - you need to deal with them as they are.
What's your solution? To just harangue them more? Do you think all it takes is a little more haranguing?
I think we can agree that it doesn't seem like it's working.
I’ve read that 1/3 of the population has authoritarian tendencies. So not quite the median voter, but a disturbingly large fraction all the same.
ETA: no, not haranguing. Inspiring? I don’t know, I’m a weirdo nerd and probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people. That which appeals to the average person repels me, and vice versa (with some exceptions; I love superhero movies).
"probably the last person you should ask how to appeal to people"
Wait, are you also the chair of the DNC? Ken - Ken Martin - is that you?
🤣
Yes! And you really need to keep that in mind.
Just harangue more might not be the best course of action.
It doesn't say much good about the average American, but it seems to be true for some non-trivial segment of the population!
First thing I’d do is question the statements about Mt. Vernon and the National Gallery of Art.
For example, going to the National Gallery’s website, there’s a catalogue of their current exhibitions (https://www.nga.gov/calendar?tab=exhibitions). Seems pretty reasonable to me.
You can do something similar with Mt. Vernon. Sure there’s going to be an exhibit on slavery because Washington owned slaves. But otherwise it seems like the standard stuff—Washington’s life, the farm, the tombs, collections of artifacts, etc.
I think what happens is a minority of people don’t want there to be any acknowledgement of stuff like that at all and want whitewashed history. And so they kick up a fuss. When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good.
"When in reality most people are fine with taking the bad with the good."
No, most people are not deep thinkers and therefor don't want too much to think about.
I mean specifically in the context of museums which is what this was about. Most people, the vast majority, will listen to the part of the tour where the docent explains how Washington owned slaves, they were responsible for much of the work done on the plantation, and Washington struggled with the morality of slavery given the contradiction between his humanist views and economic livelihood. They’ll nod sagely, and then move on to look at the interesting artifacts in the next room. They won’t have a fit about woke history or whatever. A tiny minority will throw a fit and go on podcasts and complain about how it’s all anti-white propaganda.
Right - but you have to know people have very little tolerance for that and if you over do it it pushes people i the wrong direction.
Don’t want too much to think about? It’s. A. Museum.
Do you think the National Museum of African American History and Culture is a buzzkill? I found it heavy, but inspiring. Is a realistic but depressing treatment of slavery alongside a ton of stuff about the civil rights movement, and Black American contributions to American culture a buzzkill? I don't really think so. But I guess part of what Trump supporters want is for interesting things they do not like to no longer exist.
Oh it's amazing. But it ends with - we are the greatest nation in history. It doesn't end with struggle session navel gazing about every one of our flaws.
Hear, hear!!
Postmortem: https://open.substack.com/pub/yalepolling/p/postmortem-why-we-got-the-new-york?r=ghokk&utm_medium=ios
TL;DR: weighting is tricky
Post hoc, do you think these types of races are even predictable with polling? 26 points of error, 16 unaccountable for by demographic weighting seems like an impossible challenge
I want to be transparent about how much I do and don’t know so my honest answer is that I’m not sure! I think it is possible to get the weighting closer to right (though of course not perfect) if one knows a lot about elections in NYC and the typical patterns there. That’s much easier said than done, obviously.
But I do know that the prediction markets were moving towards Mamdani during early voting, which suggests that the ex ante expectation should’ve been a lot closer than Cuomo+14.
This was very informative. However as a nitpick the characterization of “Non-responders” as the seemingly atypical demographic given that response rates are 9% seems a little odd —
“Moreover, modern non-responders differ from their contemporary responder counterparts: people who do not answer the phone tend to have lower social trust and are less politically active, which today correlates with being a Republican.”
In view of the fact that 91% of people don’t respond, isn’t it more accurate to say that 9% of people have pathologically high social trust and are easy targets for phone scams?
Also re “ Opt-in panels also weight their results; the key difference is that while RDD surveys start from a sampling frame that includes almost the whole population (everyone who owns a landline)” — uh, pretty sure that 75% or so of people *don’t* have a landline….
Good point on non-responders, you’re correct that you can phrase it either way.
Sorry landline = telephone.
Just got off the phone with David Shor, he and Mamdani agreed you are going to have to do this for 2 hours in Times Square in the spring of 2026 as part of NYC's new Restorative Justice approach to bad takes/polling: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/theoffice/images/a/ad/Thecoup.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20061010194047
1. The estimable Ann Selzer missed Iowa 2024, so you are in good company ;)
2. ”Ecological inference models show that these shifts were driven by groups such as Asian voters, as Trump won 50% of their votes, a 40-point shift to the right." Holy mackerel. TIL!
I live practically across the street from a historical Black cemetery. I walk my dog there almost every day.
At the entrance is a plaque about a period of Jim Crow racial violence in the late 19th century. It provides a detailed narrative of what happened. When I read that, I didn’t feel shame for my nation’s history. I felt optimism for the fact that we have overcome it.
Yeh that's like the African American History Museum - it starts off with the little kid handcuffs from the slave ships and ends with Obama. You leave thinking - this is truly the greatest nation in the history of the world.
But the message was about what we've overcome not endless struggle session navel gazing about all our perceived flaws.
I agree. It is extremely obnoxious to be surrounded by people who are more interested in navel-gazing self-critique than addressing actually important matters.
I wish they had more culture in the museum than just the top floor. There’s not a lot of reason to go back a third time, though a second time was great.
I find it amusing how China and Turkey are both very aggressive when it comes to censorship/oppression, but super quick to play the victim card when anyone questions them. For example, Erodogan’s successful campaign to change the spelling of Turkey in English. I say change the spelling when they acknowledge the Armenian genocide.
I found this super annoying. Dude, it's our (well, Britain's) language, you can't just insist we add umlauts at your whim and fancy! We also call it "Germany" instead of "Deutschland", and they deal. Like, I am sorry that the word for your country is more commonly used to describe our Thanksgiving dinner and you're a little sensitive about it, but you're free to change the Turkish word for "United States" to "goat's anus" in retaliation if you'd like. Insisting upon new grammatical entrants to the English language is a bit much though.
As I think about it, the English spellings for most non-anglophone countries are different from the spellings in the native language. The ones where the English spelling and the local spelling are identical seem to be rare. Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, France, and Angola are some of the few examples. Even countries with languages very close to English (e.g. Norway, Netherlands) have different spellings.
When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles
For some reason, China hasn't insisted we call them "Zhongguo"
It's really hard to get traction on this stuff with the general public because the general public pretty much agrees academia has over reached with liberal politics. It's just not going to break through as an issue that anyone outside of The Atlantic subscriber base is going to care about. Unless Trump does something truly insane like make an exhibit called Slavery Never Happened, then it won't matter.
"a global trend toward state oversight of cultural, intellectual, and artistic institutions."
The Smithsonian is a creation of the state. Its board is appointed by Congress. It has its own police force.
There is nothing about it that is not subject to state oversight. That's got nothing to do with any trend.
Based on my visit to the US postal museum, there’s a big gap between the propaganda and my experience with the Us mail system.
You know what LEO you never fuck with? A United States Postal FUCKING Inspector, that's who.
What has your experience been?
I can't even figure out what everyone is fighting about this evening.
It's about whether addressing someone as "my dude" is respectful.
I’ve been addressed as far worse.
So anyone else listen to Ezra Klein do an hour and forty five minutes of, like, weird, confused hand wringing over the definition of genocide on his show today? Was that supposed to be enlightening about anything? Did I miss something or did we all experience it as a kind of full blown collapse into neurotic, navel gazing, self indulgence?
I haven't listened to it yet, but I am quite certain that unless and until I understand what the definition of "genocide" is then I will have no opinion on whether what is going on in Gaza is bad.
The discussion is at least good for providing THAT. The guy he was interviewing did a good job articulating the issues I had with calling it genocide at first, and the problem of South Africa bringing the case when they did. It was a good discussion.
Really? In what way would the outcome of this rhetorical debate sway your assessment of events?
Damn. Forgot the "/s" at the end of my comment.
I suppose I'm too bemused by the whole discussion to detect sarcasm at this point.
I had to turn it off. I was pessimistic when he started his intro in that doomy, tear-stained voice, and his part didn't get better. I thought his guest was okay, talking about the origins of the contemporary concept of genocide, but eventually I was just saying "Get to the point!"
Did he ever talk more about the evolution of his own perspective? Because he was pretty pro-Israel shortly after Oct. 7.
His factually questionable doomy intro was basically all the actual assessment of the situation he offered.
I thought it was a useful and riveting discussion as like many liberals, I have wanted to hear for a while now, a technical argument on the use of the term "genocide" from someone who knows what they are talking about and Ezra brought on Philippe Sands a literal ICJ lawyer.
The main message I took away from it is that the ICJ has made proving "genocide" almost impossible because the judges there chose a high bar regarding intent. International actors are better off focusing on other charges like "War Crimes" and "Crimes against Humanity" that seem like obvious slam dunks at this point if the goal is to try to stop the atrocities in the near term.
So basically while we will not be able to stop people colloquially screaming "genocide!" the legal standard is unlikely to be met and we should not use "genocide" as a litmus test in US politics to determine how committed one is to Palestinian human rights.
That's interesting. I guess I should have listened further. But Sands also said:
"But it was different in this way also: Until 1945, a state was basically free to treat anyone subject to its jurisdiction as it wished. There were no restrictions. There was nothing called human rights law. Under international law, the only international crimes were in relation to war crimes. There was no such thing as crimes against humanity or genocide. These things were invented in 1945 for the famous Nuremberg Trial, and the ideas that came to fruition then basically said for the first time — it was a revolutionary moment — that the freedom of the state is not absolute. The emperor doesn’t have absolute power. The king doesn’t have absolute power."
Now wait a damn minute! I don't think the U.S. started saying that "the freedom of the state is not absolute" in 1945! There were lots of restrictions on actions of the state that started from the get-go. And plenty of other liberal democracies were the same.
It is possible to argue that international law is not natural law. Had Pearl Harbor never happened and the US never joined WWII, would there have been a Nuremberg? There was no Nuremberg after WWI, and the Kaiser's army did not exactly play nice with Belgian civilian populations, among others. Not to go full Dick Cheney, but international law only exists to the extent a majority of nations agree it does.
It's not like international law even exists in some kind of quasi democratic "most countries agree" kind of way. International law only exists to the extent of the will and military capacity to enforce it, which is too say, mostly not at all.
Admiralty law exists and is generally followed. But that is like the exception that proves your point, because admiralty law is built upon hundreds of years of tradition, handshake agreements, and the physical reality of being at sea rather than on land. It wasn't "imposed" by dictat.
Admiralty Law! I Do Not Enter Into Joinder With You! SIRRAH! I am Lapsed Pacifist the Man, not a Corporation!
I was trying NOT to go “full Dick Cheney,” haha!
"It is possible to argue that international law is not natural law."
Not merely possible; it's positively mandatory.
"international law only exists to the extent a majority of nations agree it does."
Correct.
Individual states of course had human rights going back at least to Magna Carta if not longer but I suppose countries/sovereigns could not bring human rights charges against one another?
Sands goes on to mention that the US did not argue for genocide against the Nazis because they were worried that under Lemkin's conception of it, the US itself would be guilty of genocide against Native Americans and African American slaves. Under colonialism there were many instances of human rights violations that would fall under a broad enough definition of "genocide" as Lemkin argued for.
So, everyone decided to (pragmatically) start the clock in 1945 and not to look too far back in the past.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the value in all the hypothetical hair splitting. None of these definitions have any import of substance on events.
Doesn't this objection apply to almost anything under the sun? Most of what we are doing sitting here is just navel gazing and ruminating about problems far away because we happen to be lucky enough to not be in the middle of a calamity ourselves.
For me personally I would like to know what to make of a situation even if I have no hope of influencing it (which is the case 99.999999% of the time).
I didn't listen to it. Is there some sort of obscurantist academic definition of genocide that is not broadly known, like there is for "indigenous?"
I think there were like 3, but I don't think it was ever clear what they were.
Basically, the court definition of genocide is a much higher bar than a lot of people’s definition of genocide.
While simultaneously being a lot lower than an even larger group's idea of a mechanized extermination.
I will say I was convinced by his argument about being able to make the determination of genocide before you get to the mechanized extermination. Also the Serbia example was good.
I’ve always felt that Israel was allowing genocide to occur in the West Bank. But Gaza didn’t count until Israel caused a famine.
That was the expertise of his guest, but his guest was pretty long-winded.
Do I have to call it the Xizang Autonomous Region, or does Xizang Region suffice?
As Sir Humphrey would say calling it autonomous would "cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear"
Poland is now Polska
I would like one delicious Polska kielbasa, please.
And a pierogi
Relatedly, I will be dead and in my grave before I call the Czech Republic "Czechia" or Swaziland "Eswatini" or spell Turkey "Türkiye."
And don't get me started on Abyssinia or Ceylon!
Siam punching air rn.