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Political Commentary

Notes on the coup

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Eighteen Points toward Strength and Solidarity in a Time of Fear and Despair by Mark R. Stoneman

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To Stop The Coup, We Must Be Clear About The Truth: Two Plus Two Equals Four by Mike Brock

This isn’t just wrong as a matter of law—it represents an attack on the very concept of law itself. If we accept that the president can unilaterally shut down congressionally established agencies, then congressional power to establish agencies becomes meaningless. If executive authority can override clear statutory mandates, then our entire system of checks and balances collapses.

This is precisely how democratic breakdown occurs—not just through the violation of laws, but through the corruption of the very language and concepts we use to understand law. When we accept arguments that two plus two equals five—that presidents can simply ignore congressional statutes at will—we’re not just making a legal error. We’re participating in the dismantling of constitutional order itself.

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Political Commentary Society

Read Women & Power

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Read Women & Power: A Manifesto

At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself.

In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template.

With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?

Strikingly, Beard opens this work with a scene from the Odyssey: Penelope tries to speak, and Telemachus instructs her to leave speech to men, to go upstairs to her loom. Him growing into manliness aligns with asserting his power to speak, and denying his mother’s. Throughout the book, Beard calls forward tales of women from ancient history, showing how much of our attitudes towards women’s speech holds true a few thousand years later.

There are a few dated references, like to Theresa May.

As an artifact, this book is pleasant to hold and read — a good size with wide margins, not too many pages, and selected illustrations.

Side note: It’s odd to me to read these essays as lectures; does she really speak like this when orating to a class? Feels more like a speech, but maybe I’m just so trained not to read from a script that the idea of having rehearsed wording this formal seems strange.

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Society

Women’s voices, women’s choices

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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After being demoted and forced to retire, mRNA researcher wins Nobel by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

The finding kicked off the field of mRNA therapeutics and spurred the formation of both Moderna and BioNTech, the two companies that would go on to develop lifesaving mRNA vaccines against COVID-19…

However, the finding received little fanfare among much of the scientific community at the time, and Karikó’s research and contribution continued to go largely unappreciated before the pandemic. In 2013, Karikó said she was forced to leave UPenn.

As Dan Killam writes, “We should wonder what excellent, transformative ideas are being back burnered because they’re too hard to get funded, hired or tenured with.”

(ETA: more details about Karikó’s career and the poor treatment she faced.)

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The Right to Listen by Astra Taylor

When I began filming “What Is Democracy?,” I cringed at my own voice, which sounds nothing like the voices of the men who generally occupy positions of cinematic authority. For better and worse, my documentary sensibility has been shaped by male directors, such as Errol Morris, Adam Curtis, and Werner Herzog, whom viewers can often hear offscreen, asking probing questions or providing erudite commentary. I had fully absorbed the sound of the male auteur and sage.

Meanwhile, Isaacson, chronicler of (mostly male) ‘geniuses,’ reveals himself as either unreliable narrator or poor fact-checker at best with his Musk biography. He wanted to listen only to Musk, and in doing so ignored the quieter voices pointing out the harm in Musk’s approach.

Over the centuries, we’ve been taught to believe that deep voices are deep. Margaret Thatcher, famously, took lessons with a speech coach at the National Theatre to learn how to lower her pitch; Theresa May has admitted to modulating her delivery in the House of Commons, lest she sound a “shrill note.”

The very pitch of our voices becomes an excuse to dismiss us. The emotion our voices carry becomes an indication we are merely hysterical, thus unreasoning. This makes writing an even more valuable outlet for women, where our words might receive more consideration (though perhaps not).

To defend our right to listen to one another, we must sometimes strain to hear voices that the powerful would drown out.

Emphasis mine.

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