apparently the female members of NYU's Federalist Society board resigned after the group voted to host "anti-choice" speakers. which really makes me wonder what those ladies think the Federalist Society is
— Law Boy, Esq. (@The_Law_Boy) November 20, 2021
In the womens’ defense, we all did some stupid things when we were in college. (I mean, during my freshman year, I briefly hung around a feminist group planning to start a lesbian separatist commune, until they expelled me for not having the correct attitude… )
"as people who hold every reactionary position except for when they negatively impact us, we were appalled"
— Law Boy, Esq. (@The_Law_Boy) November 20, 2021
9 PM CST Waukesha PD & Emergency Services Update Press Conference
Yutsano
I mean…I know I should have some kind of reaction here, but I’m mostly just meh about this. These women were fine with the other goals of the Federalist Society until this? Something doesn’t add up here.
Alison Rose
They got too caught up in Cool Girl ™ Syndrome and now they’re like “wait what these guys are MISOGYNISTS???????”
Alison Rose
@Yutsano:
Their collective IQs to a 3-digit number?
eclare
The stupid…it burns.
Emma from Miami
It’s nearly 2 in the fucking morning, my poor dad’s painful leg cramps are keeping us both awake, and I have to deal ONCE AGAIN with folks that traipse blithely through life assuming that their privilege will protect them against all pain and all responsibility and are SHOCKED, I SAY, SHOCKED when they get slapped in their snout by reality.
My sympathy level is lower than the average coldest point in the asteroid belt.
eclare
@Emma from Miami: So sorry about your dad’s leg cramps, those can be so painful.
Emma from Miami
@eclare: Thank you. He has a knee replacement in his right leg, due to too many years of playing baseball in dirt fields, but the muscles are getting progressively weak. In his left leg he has a steel bar running from hip to knee to permanently brace is broken femur considered too weak to support him. Night time can be agonizing for the poor guy.
eclare
@Emma from Miami: Oh, that’s a lot to deal with. I hope you can both get some rest soon. Or at least have an easy day tomorrow.
frosty
@Emma from Miami: Meanwhile, all things considered, your sympathy level appears to be a bit too high. Recalibrate?
Emma from Miami
@frosty: frozen asteroid? 9th circle of hell?
opiejeanne
@Emma from Miami: I’m so sorry about your dad’s leg cramps, those are really miserable. I get them too when I’m a little dehydrated, mostly charley-horses in my calves. Once I decided that I needed to drink a bit more water in the evening even though it means I’ll have to pee around 4am, I haven’t had them. I was really motivated to do this when I had a cramp in my inner thigh one night and there was nothing I could do to make it stop. The muscle was just clenched so tight, and I couldn’t get it to relax and really thought I was going to need to go to the emergency room.
I wish it were as simple as this for you father.
opiejeanne
Has anyone here heard mention that the Covid shots can trigger arthritis? I seem to now have arthritis in my left shoulder, beginning the day after my booster.
Mary G
@Emma from Miami: That made me cringe just reading it. I’m a survivor of both a knee replacement and severe leg cramps at different times and I’d take the surgery over the cramps any day. You get drugs and know it won’t last forever. The cramps just keep coming and coming. Peace to you both and bless you for trying to help. I imagine just having someone to witness is a bit of comfort.
SectionH
Law Boy tried, but, srsly “ladies” Yes, he got… oh ffs. “female members” – so basically the story was from some guy who reports as well as he can and is clueless. He apparently can’t use the word “women”?
SSDD.
Mary G
@opiejeanne: Arthritis doesn’t develop overnight, but one of my side effects of the booster was a day of.intense pain in my arthritic joints and other people with RA I know reported the same. IANAD, but I suspect you’ve had it at a level lower than pain for a while and the shot just pushed it over the threshold. I am sincerely sorry because arthritis is a bitch.
JWR
From Sunday morning’s Background Briefing, November 21, 2021, Ruth Conniff on the Rittenhouse verdict, plus two more interviews, one on Joe Schmoe Manchin, and one on Israel’s cold war with Iran.
Conniff is rightfully alarmed. Also, I watched Sunday morning’s Face The Nation. First up was Kirsten Gillibrand, sounding hopeful on the education of Joe Manchin, followed by Teddyboy Cruz the Ooze, flapping his gums while saying nothing, (except, of course, “Hey, DJT! Looka meee!”) The guy’s gone over the deep end. Again! Margaret Sullivan seemed genuinely disturbed.
SectionH
@opiejeanne: well, as someone who know a great deal of arthritis in hands, knees, slight real shoulder thing, I’d just guess you’ve got sore muscles in your arm. If you’re noticing it now and it’s really arthritis, you may have not noticed it before. It’s possible you are feeling that kinda thing now, because your body’s noticing things it hasn’t noticed.
LongHairedWeirdo
The Federalist Society is actually an interesting thing for me.
I’ve heard it said that the founder(s?) explicitly said it was because soi disant “conservative” judges were giving “surprising” rulings. Or, in short, they founded the Federalist Society to *prevent* judicial surprises.
Now that, right on its face, suggests that the Federalist Society exists to create judges who are trusted not to surprise the people who appoint them. In point of fact, while we *know* the Federalist Society will *claim* to be advancing ideas and arguments, because it would be unethical, and probably illegal, to actually *promise* specific rulings in return for lifetime appointments.
In any sane and just society, the Federalist Society would be constantly answering questions about stuff like that. They’d be forced to operate on a skeleton staff of volunteers, and need to show proper transparency because it appears, on its face, to be an organization trying to build a corrupt judiciary.
It would also have to answer serious questions like “but the Voting Rights Act actually *says*, flat out, facially neutral voting laws and regs that nevertheless *result* in discrimination by race, are not allowed – why did you rule that the plain reading of the text meant something other than the plain reading of the text?” and “do you think your refusal to prevent large religious gatherings, during a pandemic, is the result of your completely stupid belief that Covid-19 isn’t that bad, or your inability to imagine a more dangerous pandemic? What? No, we’re not trying to mock you, we’re trying to understand your obviously, objectively, flawed decision.”
Instead we live in a world where Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy won’t recuse himself from a case, because OF COURSE we wouldn’t be so viciously partisan as to think a judge can’t be neutral around a friend and political ally. Oh, yeah, and where the “originalists” and “textualists” prove they’re just partisan hacks, but no one can really criticize them. I wonder why not….
I saw a lawyer say something that was excruciating, but funny – something to the effect that attorneys are supposed to pretend a noxiously biased ruling is not based on personal feelings, but the sincere desire to see the law applied properly. If that’s the case, the Republicans are taking advantage of it. If that’s not the case, seriously, dudes, the SCOTUS has enough rotten-egg rulings by now… it’s time to mention the stink.
Ruckus
@Emma from Miami:
I was having extreme leg cramps and I found that if I put an extra blanket folded up over the lower leg/feet the weight stopped the cramps. Also I found that Coq10 seems to help my neuropathy and the cramps. May not work for everyone but it seems to work great for me. I don’t have his issues but do seem to have similar symptoms. I’d check with his doc first but I’ve been months with no issues.
Mary G
@Yutsano: “I didn’t think the leopard would eat MY face.”
Like Serena Joy from the Handmaid’s Tale who develops all the fascist plans for her husband and shows up to the first meeting after the coup only to be told to get lost, little lady, this is men’s business.
I continue to be astonished by so many white women voting Republican when it’s obvious to anyone who looks that the boots will be on their necks too.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Yutsano: You’re kind of describing the reactions one might feel by the worst Republicans in the world.
See, there are the Trumps and Desantises. They’re evil, and awful.
Then, there are the Trump and Desantis remoras – the hangers own, who think “loyalty” means being in on the cover-up. They’re also evil, and awful, akin to the lawyers for gangsters who deliver orders that witnesses fail to appear. In a sense, they’re a bit worse than an evil mafioso, because they’re who let the mafioso operate without getting his hands dirty.
Then, there are the Republicans who are the worst in the world. They’re the people who won’t demand any standards of moral or ethical behavior, nor complain (why complain if you don’t have any standards?). They’ll just continue to pretend that what’s going on isn’t a big deal, and that the current scandal is just a “Democrat [sic] witch hunt” – i.e., “not only are people on my side innocent, they’re being *persecuted* by the EVIL LIBRULS!”
They’ll happily stand by as their fellow Grifting Oligarchical Party-hacks openly abuse the power of the Presidency, incite insurrection, and fail to protect the American people, resulting in tens of thousands of people dying.
And they might feel uncomfortable about these things, but, “oh, come on, if there was something really *bad* going on, I just know Republicans, who say they love this country and its Constitution, would not simply cover it all up, and pretend it was a partisan attack.”
It’s hard to express how seductive that feeling is – it’s even harder to express how hard it is to realize it’s false, “they aren’t just kidding any more, if they ever were.”
This is actually good news, if they’re truly sincere. No one can be as furious about the lies being spoken as those who were suckled on on those lies, before being betrayed by them.
Van Buren
Good morning from the local ER, where I am due to a sudden onset of excruciating back pain.
My body is falling apart. I have 2 surgeries scheduled for various issues and now this. They gave percoset, which helps, but it makes me very nauseous.
eclare
@Van Buren: Oh no! Do you know what is going on with your back?
Mary G
@Van Buren: That sounds terrible; I hope they can find something to help you soon.
Villago Delenda Est
The Federalist Society is all about bringing back feudalism. It should be annihilated.
Winston
The hype is building for the James Webb telescope launch next month.
This is actually one of the most exciting events of my life and I am glad I get to live long enough for the chance to witness it.
There are lots of videos on line now, depicting the launch, positioning and unfolding of what may be the most remarkable NASA achievement, rivaling ISIS, the Moon landing and Hubble. I thought it would be a good topic for front pagers to maybe focus on for a major post.
Here is an example: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/11/commissioning-jwst-1/
Mai Naem mobile
I am surprised the Federalist Society has women on the their board. I would have thought they would all be property owning white males. That is what they stand for right?
Winston
@Mai Naem mobile: Like other institutions in the past, The Federalist Society is going to have to change to be relevant in the future. Their rep is bad now and will continue to deteriorate unless they embrace diversity. IMHO
mrmoshpotato
@Van Buren: Sorry to hear that. Hopefully they can figure out what’s up and fix it.
Chris T.
@opiejeanne: Not so much “trigger” as “irritate existing”, but yes: anything that pisses off the ol’ immune system can do this.
mrmoshpotato
@Winston:
Narrator: HAHAHAHAHA!!!! They won’t change.
Steeplejack (phone)
@SectionH:
Or, hear me out, maybe he’s snarking a bit because he’s commenting on Twitter with the nym Law Boy.
Chris T.
@Van Buren: Backs (well, human ones) suck. The Stupid Designer [*] built them all wrong.
My horrible back pain was a ruptured disc … never formally diagnosed because I somehow managed to have a small kidney stone the same day, but there were some scans that suggested ruptured disc, and the eventual outcome lines right up with “ruptured disc”.
(They gave me an anti-inflammatory that I’d never heard of, Toradol, by IV and it was instant, albeit incomplete, relief, but unfortunately that’s not something you can keep taking, plus it only worked for a short while.)
[*] Anyone who argues “intelligent design” has to take this Supreme Being to task for all the idiocies. If there was a designer, he/she/it should have gotten a D- at best, in school. There are those who suggest that Satan’s actual sin was pointing out You know, with that spine, hardly anyone’s gonna get past age 50 without major pain…
Winston
@mrmoshpotato: I know they won’t change in my lifetime, which I admit is getting way too short every day. But if humanity is going to the stars, it won’t be because of someones sex or complexation. I think we are going to the stars or we are going to all die on this planet. The choice is stark. Not in my lifetime, however.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Law Boy. Wouldn’t make the cut for the Legion of Substitute Heroes.
;)
Winston
@Chris T.: Intelligent design isn’t the same as God’s creation, is it?
ETA: Ever watched the movie Prometheus? I think it’s on Prime. That’s what I think is a concept of ID. Kind of like evolution and ID, if you will, where the designers are always trying to make a better survivor and it turns out humans are not their best attempt.
AlaskaReader
@opiejeanne: I’ve heard of some cases of ‘frozen shoulder’ when location of the vaccination shot was too high up on the arm. I forget where the article was, either NYTimes or WaPo, one or the other.
NotMax
Should WaterGirl see this, it’s been (checks clock) 49 minutes since OTR appeared on front page, still no right side fly-out for it showing on this page.
Gvg
@NotMax: 21 minutes after your post, I see a fly out on the right side. Safari, iPad Pro
evodevo
@opiejeanne: I’ve had osteo for years, in various joints. My second Moderna side effects consisted of my arthritis going absolutely NUTS in every joint that has ever bothered me. Started a few hours after the shot, and continued all night and part of the next day. I finally took a tylenol and an ibuprofen, and it all calmed down. Just had the booster week before last, and…same exact thing. Didn’t affect Mr. Evodevo at all. So….
NotMax
@Gvg
Finally showed up here two minutes after I made the initial comment. It’s a frequent no-show, since maybe two or three months ago, and has been mentioned before. Just wanted to note it continues to happen.
Percysowner
I suspect the Federalist Society women bought into the media narrative that the FS didn’t really care about curtailing reproductive rights, it was using them as a way to pull in the rubes who do believe in it. SURPRISE! They want to keep you down too, Ladies!
geg6
@evodevo:
I had the same reaction. Took a couple days and lots of ibuprofen to go back to the usual level of arthritis pain.
geg6
Messed up my email address and have a comment in moderation, re-posting I reply to evodevo:
I had the same reaction. Took a couple days and lots of ibuprofen to go back to the usual level of arthritis pain.
Kay
We’re laughing at the Federalist Society but “I support X but also vote against X” it is apparently very common and it isn’t just women:
I bet if you polled Virginia “uphold Roe” would win by huge margins but that isn’t how they voted in the last election. “The public opposes” doesn’t mean anything without some kind of coherent action or committment on the part of the public. The Federalist Society women are among a huge group of people, both women and men, who say they support something or other yet when it comes time to take one single (and easy) action to express that support, voting, they vote the other way.
There’s no pro women’s rights vote in this country. There’s a committed and reliable anti-women’s rights vote and then a larger group who babble about “supporting” this or that but it doesn’t inform or influence their vote or actions in any way. The Federalist Society women have plenty of company.
Just One More Canuck
@SectionH: he bills himself as the world’s daintiest lawyer, so maybe ‘ladies’ is part of his schtick
lowtechcyclist
@Percysowner: They brought up the fact that the FS says it wants judges to rule on what the law IS, rather than what they think it ought to be.
They believed that? Really??
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Priorities. We have priorities and they have priorities. Conservatives value their right to be assholes, to see a boot on someone’s neck, more than they do any particular policy unless it directly and obviously affects them. Even when it does, they will look for excuses to convince themselves that it won’t hurt them because they really really prioritize the right to be an asshole. A lot of times they’ll even take the pain because assholery is more important. Leopards eating faces is more important than other stuff they want. Gotta own the libs, gotta put those colored folks back in their place, etc.
These ladies were enough on the edge that getting smacked in the face was enough to make them protest. Enough to make them stop voting Republican? Probably not. Priorities.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Very specific, useful information. Thank you!
Chris
A while ago somebody at LGM mentioned a concept he’d heard from one of his poli-sci professors which was that of the Able But Amoral students. While Able But Moral students who want to end up in politics either end up progressive or conservative depending on their specific worldview, the ABAs will simply join whatever party they perceive to be on the ascent (or best able to serve their ascent, at least).
I would speculate that a lot of those Federalist Society women were ABAs. They decided to go Republican for purely careerist reasons, and are currently being slapped in the face for the first time in their lives with the fact that the things their careerism requires them to support might actually have real-world consequences for them.
(This applies double if they’re New Yorkers. Blue states, especially on the East Coast, have an absolute epidemic of this kind of idiot; they’ve never had to experience the full blast of red state rule because there have always been enough Democrats in their state to prevent it from going full Trumpist, so concepts like having your abortions banned aren’t something that enters their calculations, because well that would never happen! And they safely and securely vote Republican for whatever idiotic reasons, sure that there’ll never be consequences for them from doing so).
Chris
Somewhat in their defense, college is when I attended an evangelical church for a while, which was one of the biggest educational experiences I ever had in terms of discovering how fucking loony our Republicans truly are.
When I say blue states have a lot of idiots who don’t understand how dangerous Republicans truly are, I’m very much not excluding myself. Growing up in suburban DC, “religion” to me was the multicultural post-Vatican-II community I grew up in, boring and preachy perhaps in the same way as any adults that want you to eat your vegetables and do your homework, but not in any way that would really trip any of my post-Enlightenment alarms. I was vaguely aware that there were idiots out there who still believed evolution was a lie and Harry Potter was witchcraft, but surely those people were just a minority of backwoods weirdos that nobody really pays attention to, right? … hahaha, nooo…
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Maybe.
I think college is still the moment for a lot of people where they’re still malleable enough that this sort of thing can hit hard enough to put them on a different path. I knew quite a few people, especially women, who were Republican when they came to college and had grown out of it by the time they left. Maybe that’ll happen to at least a few of these people.
Of course, when I say college, I mean undergrad. By the time you’re in a graduate institution like law school, a lot of that’s already gone and your worldview’s a lot closer to set in stone. So there’s that. (I didn’t catch whether the women in question were law students or pre-law).
Woodrow/asim
Not even then — there’s a great study on Reconstruction that showed adding free Blacks into the labor force improved the Southern economy — and that the backlash that removed them, harmed the same economy.
White folx didn’t care, then. They didn’t care that decades of Jim Crow harmed the Southern economy, either. Keep in mind — even if you were a businessperson in the South who was sympathetic to Blacks, and willing to engage their labor in an even-handed fashion that would see everyone win, the culture would have ripped you to shreds, damaging at a minimum your profits…and possibly more.
A lot like how Rittenhouse shot those White BLM protestors, in fact. That’s the power a lot of these folx either directly recall, or have been told about by their Parents. It’s within living memory, and it’s a memory of a time they have a lot of nostalgia for, as opposed to fear and loathing of the current changes.
This is not a fight about rational actors, y’all. If it was, the drug trade would have been legalized and taxed, decades ago.
opiejeanne
@evodevo: Thanks. I’ve had it in my hands for a couple of years now, and I figure I had it in this one shoulder but hadn’t noticed it until now. I had the booster in October.
Chris
@Woodrow/asim:
There’s a school of thought you see popping up in liberal circles from time to time to the effect that, well, the racists’ fears are at least rational, because given their position of privilege, more opportunities for blacks means less for them even if it levels the playing field…
And it’s like, no. That has literally never been how anything works. Integrating the Irish and Italians and Jews into the nation in the middle of the twentieth century did not make the economy worse for WASPs. As you say, briefly integrating blacks better into the Southern economy did not make the economy worse for whites. And today if you look at the towns that welcome immigrants, they’re largely the towns that are thriving, whereas the shitholes that refuse to let any outsiders move in or anything change are the ones stagnating to death.
Economics isn’t zero sum. The fact that one person benefits doesn’t mean another has to suffer. (That is, in fact, historically key to many people’s defense of capitalism). I realize the reactionaries are too stupid to understand that, but it’d be nice if other people didn’t share the same delusion.
currants
@Mary G:
@opiejeanne:
Yes! Well sort of. I do have arthritis in–at least–my hands. I had the Moderna vaccine, and the 2nd dose reaction was like having all my joints on fire (so maybe there’s arthritis elsewhere too). Got the booster Saturday, and same thing Sunday morning but to a much lower degree, and today I don’t notice it at all.
JAFD
@opiejeanne:
My sympathies. Had vunovdoze nights where you get up at 1:30 and 3 and 5, and at 8 try to get your leg cramps flexing enuf to make mug of tea
But am still ‘this side of the grass’. So am thankful this week, hope all of you are, too.
Richard
Ayup. Every few years this kind of story shows up, the last one I remembered was “Alt right girls think Alt right boys need to be less sexist”.
The idea that the Reichwingers will be entirely regressive on everything EXCEPT the thing which hurts you personally is ridiculous. They aren’t going to be feminist, because you’re one of the targets.
….and these people all think they’re smart.
Miss Bianca
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Feudalist Society?
Brantl
@Emma from Miami: Gatorade, can’t be stressed enough. GATORADE.
Emma from Miami
@Brantl: I’ll try it. I’ll try anything. The poor man is in agony 4 out of 7 days
Paul in KY
@Emma from Miami:
Delurking to say that giving him mustard (a spoonful) can ease the cramps. Has worked for me.