Among all the misogyny and pettiness of that WSJ op-ed on Jill Biden, this little, lazy falsehood stands out to me: " In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league."
This is vastly not the case. Whether professors with doctorates are usually referred to as "Dr." or "Prof." varies regionally.
In California, where I grew up as a faculty brat, I knew of nobody in the humanities and social sciences (or the sciences, for that matter) who styled themselves "Dr." It was always "Prof. so-and-so"
Here at the University of Oklahoma (and at the University of Missouri, where I taught before moving here) the opposite is the case. People call themselves and each other "Dr. So-and-so" and virtually never "Prof. So-and-so."
I suppose there's some irony in fake anti-elitists like Richard Epstein (and the folks at the WSJ who decided to publish him) asserting that coastal usage is universal, while ignoring the general practice here in flyover country/"Real America."
But a grift is a grift. And I suppose there's no use wishing that the lazily dishonest did more research before engaging in lazy dishonesty.
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This is one of those moments in which serious bits of Left Twitter are distingushing themselves pretty clearly from less serious bits: the former are offering actual analysis of Biden's economic team; the latter are melting down over Neera Tanden, History's Greatest Monster.
This is a perfect illustration of the idiocy of Tanden obsession, courtesy of two of the usual suspects.
The price of real political reconciliation is real repentence.
This country has made the mistake of attempting reconciliation without repentence. That what happened after Reconstruction collapsed in 1877.
We cannot afford to do that again.
And the problem is that we all know that there will be no repentence on the part of the people in power who led and enabled Trump, i.e. all Republican elected officials.
And there will be very little repentence on the part of the voters who supported them.
There will be little to no repentence because none of them think they did anything wrong.
They supported white supremacy and policies that have killed a quarter of a million of their fellow Americans in less than a year.
Is there a common political take that is lazier than the argument that an election that results in divided government means that Americans want divided government?
To begin with, the Senate does not remotely reflect popular will (nor is it even designed to do so). And even the House, which in some sense is so designed, is gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
However disappointing the results of congressional races in this election were for Dems, more Americans cast votes for Dem House candidates than GOP House candidates. And the same is true for the Senate as a whole (though I'm not sure about the 1/3 that is being elected now).
I've already seen a bunch of Republicans suggesting this was an unusually close election. But it really wasn't. Biden will likely end up with both very solid wins in both the electoral college and the popular vote.
That an unusually large number of states were very close (and more _looked_ very close than will likely end up that way) made for a lot of tv drama but ultimately didn't make the election unusually close, at least for this young century.
Both 2016 and 2000 were clearly closer elections than this one. And 2004 (which could have flipped with one close state, OH, going to Kerry) was arguably closer, too.
This piece is practically journalistic malpractice. The US has long lines because the GOP wants fewer people, especially people of color, voting. And when it controls state governments, it does what it can to make voting more difficult. Long lines are an intentional outcome. 1/
Long lines at polling places are not a technical problem. There's no mystery at all in how to eliminate lines. Plenty of (blue) states do so. Solving the problem of long lines will involve either shoring up the constitutional right to vote or simply defeating Republicans. 2/
Unfortunately, the latter solution is at best temporary and the former solution can always be undone by a GOP Supreme Court, as the Roberts Court turned the 15th Amendment's enforcement clause into dead letter in Shelby County. 3/
At the start of the year, PM Jacinda Ardern was in danger of losing the next election in NZ. But she just won a historically large victory, likely allowing Labour to be the first party to govern NZ alone since 1993, when NZ reformed its constitution to encourage coalition govts.
Nobody should be surprised that the key to Ardern's victory was her successful response to COVID-19.
If Donald Trump loses in two weeks, many will blame the pandemic for his defeat. But this would be getting things precisely wrong.