If you can't eat your plant-based meat substitute, you can't have any gluten free pudding.

I rarely have much interest for anything the New Yorker publishes these days, but this Q&A with San Francisco's School Board president, Gabriela Lopez, is fascinating, to say the least. As you may have heard, the board recently voted to rename a number of its schools due to their allegedly problematic namesakes, such as Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln, and even good old Diane Feinstein.

Whether you think the name changes are warranted (and whether you think it's even an appropriate subject to which to devote time and resources, in light of ongoing school closures), Ms. Lopez's comments are remarkable not so much for their substantive content, if any, but for their vapid expression. Her answers are a bizarre melange of bureaucratic platitudes about "processes," New Agey happy-talk about "experiences" and "conversations," and authoritarian defensiveness over whether being factually accurate is tantamount to "discrediting" the hard work done by the committee responsible for the renaming. It's all topped with a thick layer of Millennial rhetorical nerfing, e.g., lots of for-mes and I-understand-buts. I have not done sufficient research to determine whether Ms. Lopez, 30, is herself a product of an American public school system in the 21st Century. But I know the New Yorker does not often publish interviews with news-makers in question-and-answer format, unless the exact words are worth parsing for one reason or another.

I've pasted a sample here, but the whole interview must be read to fully appreciate the absurdism. Though I cannot confirm that Ms. Lopez speaks with the famous San Francisco "uptalk," it helps if you imagine her every sentence ending with a question mark.

[Q:] So none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?

[A:] No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to. And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.

[Q:] I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.

[A:] I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.

 

 

The Atlantic is now your one-stop shop for all your favorite hot takes!

Being in total lockdown seems to have given our brightest minds time to wander farther off the reservation than ever before, and The Atlantic wants to hear from them. Recently, the Internet gave the once-venerable source of lengthy pieces about the manliness of sailing the collective gas face when it published a "think" piece essentially saying, Maybe what we need is more fascism?

I guess to appease people fond of the other extreme of tenured idiocy, come now law prawfs Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods to argue that AKSHUALLY totalitarian government surveillance and censorship are GOOD.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

 The authors' premise is that because privately owned corporations do this to some extent anyway, we might as as well give the government -- which, the authors forget to mention, has the power to seize property and imprison and execute people -- all the keys because of the three R's: Russians, Ring, and 'Rona.

Goldsmith and Keane provide a bit of the old false equivalence:

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings, which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

And also a bit of the old assuming facts not in evidence:

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply. [Emphasis added.]

I'll leave it to the good people of the Commenteriat to marinate on this. Meantime, I've got to finish up my own Atlantic submission: a think piece explaining how, actually, primogeniture ensures the divine right of kings stays within only the purest bloodlines.