[guest post by Dana]
Today:
Remember how Republicans howled when Trump-supporters were referred to as deplorables? Sure you do:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
So, what say you now, Republicans? Hillary Clinton was lambasted for insulting Americans, and rightly so. It’s even more worthy of condemnation when the egregious insult comes from President of the United States.
P.S. Oh, yeah, pick your poison: Are you a “deplorable” or are you “human scum”? Remember, you have to pick one because … it’s a binary choice. Them’s the rules!
(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)
–Dana
[guest post by JVW]
Last spring I wrote about the kerfuffle surrounding a new book from feminist author Naomi Wolf. Her tome, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, which was an outgrowth of her 2015 doctoral dissertation at Oxford, traced the history of persecution of gay men in Victorian England and made the shocking assertion that criminal executions of gay men for sodomy continued in the British Empire for decades after the Crown had supposedly brought them to a close.
It turned out, however, that her thesis was based almost entirely on Ms. Wolf’s misunderstanding of a slightly-archaic legal term used in Victorian jurisprudence, a fact that was inconveniently pointed out to the author when she appeared on a BBC Radio programme (I myself would almost never use that spelling of the word, but I thought it fit in nicely in context) to promote the book shortly after it had been released in the UK. The American publication of Outrages was put on hold just before the 35,000 copies of the first printing had reached bookstores, and the respective publishing houses, Virago in the UK and Houghton-Mifflin on this side of the Atlantic, both pledged to correct any mistakes but still move forward with the book.
Virago did in fact release an amended version of the book, but yesterday Houghton-Mifflin announced that they would not be publishing a U.S. edition, despite Ms. Wolf’s vigorous attempts to rehabilitate the book and, by extension, her reputation as a scholar. Apparently a book about how the Crown was mean to gay men over 150 years ago is far less likely to sell than a book about how the Crown had a predilection for executing them. Furthermore, The Telegraph mentions in passing that Ms. Wolf has been in contact with Oxford regarding making corrections to her doctoral thesis, a move which could conceivably (though is highly unlikely to) cause her degree to be revoked.
Such is the life of the celebrity author in a hyper-woke academic field.
(h/t to Powerline)
– JVW