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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The holiday, TikTok and from men to boys [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-19
We begin today with Kiden-Aloyse Smith of the Mississippi Free Press pulling no punches about how she feels about tomorrow’s confluence of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
I’m not sure whether you can call it poetic or horrific that Martin Luther King Jr. Day takes place on Inauguration Day. If Kamala Harris had won in November, the happenstance would’ve been a momentous occasion that signaled how far we’ve come: let freedom ring, poetic justice—all that. But that’s not where we’re at, so I’ll just say it’s horrific. This day, which is meant to honor a civil-rights legend whom a white supremacist assassinated, is now the day when racial progress is assassinated. This isn’t me being purposefully dramatic, I’m really not one for hyperbole. [...] Although his message has been co-opted into being solely about integration, his stance on poverty, equal wages and education made him a villain. He wasn’t just calling for integration; he was calling for a collective psychological mind-shift. All throughout my K-12 education, we were taught the “I Have A Dream,” speech and that Martin Luther King Jr., simply died—because racialized murder is too radical for school. [...] What we witness every MLK Day is America’s attempts to rewrite history. And as we know, if you fail to remember history, you are doomed to repeat it. And we’re repeating it and repeating it.
Aaron Pellish and Brian Stelter of CNN reports on the U.S. TikTok ban affecting 175 million users of the app and the likelihood that TikTok will receive a 90-day reprieve from the tacky shoe salesman.
TikTok’s action comes after the Supreme Court on Friday upheld a ban that was passed with broad bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law in April by President Joe Biden. The law prevents American companies from hosting or serving content for the Chinese-owned social media platform unless it sells itself to a buyer from the United States or one of its allies. But TikTok may not be gone for long. The company suggested it could be back soon – perhaps as early as Monday. “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office,” the company posted in its pop-up message to users who opened the app beginning late Saturday night. “Please stay tuned!” President-elect Trump said he will “most likely” delay a ban on TikTok for 90 days after he takes office on Monday, adding that he has not made a final decision in a phone interview with NBC News on Saturday.
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times says that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s invocation of “masculine energy” is nothing more and nothing less than the desire of a transformation from men to boys.
When Zuckerberg speaks of “masculine energy” and “aggression,” he seems to be imagining the “masculinity” of an older teenager or a younger adult. The masculinity of someone unburdened by duty, obligation or real responsibility. More Jordan Belfort in “Wolf of Wall Street” than Ed Tom Bell in “No Country for Old Men.” There is no apparent interest, from either Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or anyone else bemoaning the current cultural cachet of masculinity, in cultivating an image of responsible manhood. We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys. But then this is exactly what you would expect in a country where the standard-bearer for the “return” of masculinity to the political and cultural world is Donald Trump, a selfish, petulant and narcissistic man-child who celebrates his rejection of the traditional masculine virtues of duty and restraint and who has done so for his entire career on the public stage. Trump stands for masculinity as misogyny, dominance, exploitation and — as per Zuckerberg — aggression. More concretely, Zuckerberg and like-minded tech moguls have direct material interests in cultivating Trump’s good favor by performing his brand of manhood. Meta, for instance, wants to undermine its competitors, suppress regulation and free itself from the threat of antitrust enforcement. Other tech billionaires want to leverage state power to secure their investments in artificial intelligence, ahead of a potential collapse in the value of A.I. stocks. If the bubble pops, they want Uncle Sam — and thus the American taxpayer — to be the one holding the bag. Their pose and presentation, then, are all obviously strategic.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review reviews what President Joe Biden actually did about the information ecosystem as a sitting president.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic looks at what a phone call between the tacky shoe salesman and Danish president Mette Frederiksen unleashed.
What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux. [...] In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida. At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”
Finally today, Kwame Anthony Appiah answers a question in “The Ethicist” column of The New York Times Magazine from a person who goes to church and but does not believe in the dogma and creeds.
..But boy, oh, boy, do I love the artistic output of Christianity. Bach’s B-minor Mass, the Fauré Requiem, St. Paul’s Cathedral — all these lift my spirit. I love a beautiful Christian service.(Where else do you hear an organ like that?) Actors talk about ‘‘working from the outside in,’’ in which a physical position unlocks inner emotions. For me, kneeling does this. I don’t pray, but the act creates humility and gratitude. It does me good. Then there’s the lovely sense of community in a congregation. I’ll never be converted. So I guess I’m lying when I turn up at a service and recite the Creed and sing the hymns as lustily as anyone else. Am I hurting anyone by doing this? Is it, for want of a better word, a sin? — Name Withheld [...] From the Ethicist: [...] Of course, you could always visit churches, like those of the Unitarian Universalists, that explicitly reject creeds and that expect some members of the congregation to be atheists. They have hymns, too. But if the way of beauty leads you to the Catholic services of your upbringing, you shouldn’t feel as if you don’t belong, however deep your doubts. There’s no saying what a service means to any one of its participants. So your presence and participation can hardly be taken as a declaration of any particular creedal commitments. If the issue of faith comes up, you can freely tell your fellow congregants, ‘‘I’m not really a believer, but I love these services.’’ They’re unlikely to object to your being there. Some might be in your situation; some might hope that your attendance could, contrary to your expectations, change your mind. Many clerics advocate ‘‘meeting people where they are.’’ They may think that you’re appreciating God’s work in your own faltering way.
I’m strongly considering returning to regular church attendance for most of the same reasons. Even as a child, I enjoyed going to church even if I believed very very little that I was being told about god.
I know people who do exactly this activity, whether it’s for service opportunities, the community, or to join the church choir. (I was in the choir of the Catholic Church affiliated with my middle school even though I was non-Catholic).
Try to have the best possible day that you can, difficult as that may be.
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