‘Abortionist’ is a dehumanizing term. Any judge who uses it has an agenda.

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [‘Abortionist’ is a dehumanizing term. Any judge who uses it has an agenda.]( ‘Abortionist’ is a dehumanizing term. Any judge who uses it has an agenda., The Grammarian, The Philadelphia Inquirer Two weeks ago, Kacsmaryk — who is not a doctor — ruled the FDA’s September 2000 approval of the pill was invalid. In doing so, he jeopardized the availability of mifepristone nationwide. Questionable language abounds in not-doctor Kacsmaryk’s decision, but perhaps none so rankling as his persistent use of the word abortionist — 11 times in the document’s 67 pages. I read all of them. It’s very Handmaid’s Tale, though at least Margaret Atwood is a better writer. When Alito’s Dobbs decision leaked almost exactly a year ago, I wrote why the term abortionist (as opposed to abortion doctor or abortion provider) was so explosive: The abortion part of abortion doctor is a modifier, so the term is softer. Any straight, unmodified noun — like abortionist — hits harder than one that’s qualified with a modifier. “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” Strunk and White admonished in their Elements of Style. “It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.” Anti-abortion activists want abortion to sound more vulgar than medical; abortionist helps. - [A White man was ‘scared to death’ of Ralph Yarl. For Black boys, this isn’t new.]( A White man was ‘scared to death’ of Ralph Yarl. For Black boys, this isn’t new., Rachel Hatzipanagos and Timothy Bella, The Washington Post When Ralph Yarl rang the doorbell of Andrew Lester’s Kansas City, Mo., home by mistake last week, the 84-year-old White man was “scared to death,” he told police. [...] ...researchers say Lester’s description of Yarl, who is 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds, according to his family, fits a pattern among shootings of young Black males. Lester said the teenager was a “Black male approximately 6 feet tall” — several inches off Yarl’s actual height, according to the criminal complaint. “Lester stated that it was the last thing he wanted to do, but he was ‘scared to death’ due to the male’s size.” Similar language has been used in other cases, reflecting the fear people of other races sometimes feel upon seeing Black people, researchers say. In multiple studies, people who were asked to judge the size of Black people tended to see Black men as bigger and stronger than they actually were, and gave Black children the attributes of adults. The result is that they are seen as more dangerous, researchers say. “This is another case where we see these questions of size and formidability [lead to] perceptions of dangerousness,” Kurt Hugenberg, a professor in psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, said of Yarl. - [Daily Kos needs your help. In hopes of offsetting some revenue deficits, we had to increase our fundraising goals. Can you chip in $5?]( - [Why are Americans being shot for knocking on the wrong door?]( Why are Americans being shot for knocking on the wrong door?, Francine Prose, The Guardian In the past week, two people have been shot, in separate incidents, for making an innocent mistake. In Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph Yarl, 16, was shot in the head and critically wounded by 84-year-old Andrew Lester, whose door Yarl knocked on, in error. Yarl had come to pick up his younger brothers, who turned out to have been with friends at another house with a similar address. In rural upstate New York, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed when she and her friends, having lost their way, drove up Kevin Monahan’s driveway. The car was turning around to leave when Monahan, 65, fired two bullets through the car window. [...] Race may well have determined a white octogenarian’s decision to shoot the Black child who’d come to the wrong address, but we can’t assume that without knowing more about the shooter. Age might have played a part, too. There’s no indication that drugs or alcohol factored in either of these two cases, but these substances can fuel the paranoia that might inspire a driveway or a front-porch shooting – road rage without leaving the house. Everything we hear, read and observe for ourselves about the deep divisions in our country comes with a more or less veiled threat: the other side is out to get us. While the right confronts the specter of Ruby Ridge, of Randy Weaver’s wife and child killed by FBI agents, the left is haunted by racially motivated murders and random mass homicides. Anyone could start shooting at any moment as we remain locked in a series of struggles: red v blue, white v Black, men v women. - [How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat]( How Gamers Eclipsed Spies as an Intelligence Threat, Jonathan Askonas and Renée DiResta, Foreign Policy While the trajectory of the documents may seem novel, a closer look reveals that many significant intelligence leaks over the past 15 years have been substantially motivated by online reality. These leaks are not the product of espionage, media investigations, or political activism, but 21st-century digital culture: specifically, by the desire to gain stature among online friends. Beginning in 2021, for example, secret information about weapons systems design and performance has repeatedly been posted to forums related to War Thunder, a massively multiplayer combat video game featuring highly realistic weapons. Hoping to win arguments about such details as a tank turret’s rotation speed or cajole developers into improving the realism of virtual weapons, players have posted classified armor blueprints, restricted manuals for F-16 fighter jets, and Chinese tank specifications. War Thunder’s developers have had to implore users to stop posting classified materials to the game’s forums. Even where ideological commitments have motivated leakers, internet culture has often played a major role. U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning’s involvement with WikiLeaks began when she started monitoring—and then actively participating in—the forum’s chat channel. Her decision to leak diplomatic cables was initially motivated by debates about Icelandic politics on the WikiLeaks channel. When one looks at Manning’s conversations with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others on the channel, they read very much like someone trying to connect with and impress her new internet friends; later, it was a similar desire to connect online that led to her arrest. Edward Snowden, too, attributed his decision to leak documents about National Security Agency surveillance programs to his concerns that they undermined the values he cherished as an avid denizen of early internet forums and chatrooms: anonymity, self-expression, and the right to reinvent oneself. (Snowden is now a Russian citizen living in Moscow.) - [Daily Kos hats are here just in time for spring. Click here to get yours.]( - [Dominion v. Fox News: What Just Happened?]( Dominion v. Fox News: What Just Happened?, Daniel Novack, The Hollywood Reporter I insisted from the outset that this case was fated for settlement. Fox News had too much to lose and Dominion too much to gain. But the case persisted, limping along to trial despite Judge Davis’ evisceration of Fox’s legal defenses weeks earlier. When a judge calls your evidence “crystal clear,” that puts cartoon dollars signs in your eyes as a plaintiffs’ attorney. Given that gale force winds were at its sails, it’s unlikely that Dominion blinked first. I’ll leave it to others to speculate why Fox softened at the last possible moment, but a week earlier it quietly settled an election fraud defamation suit with a Venezuelan businessman, indicating that it was more flexible than steadfast — if the price was right. [...] Ultimately, the decision to settle the Dominion dispute likely reflects that Fox’s chief concern is damage to its brand, not its coffers. The game that Fox News has played over the past few years is to have one strategy on TV and another in court, not unlike the kayfabe in pro wrestling. When Tucker Carlson accused Karen McDougal of extorting Trump, the network beat a defamation suit by arguing his show isn’t factual. The case was dismissed before any documents or testimony could be obtained, allowing Tucker and Fox to preserve their facade. WWE wrestlers like Hulk Hogan (real name: Terry Bolea) used to take great pains to never let viewers see them as their real selves, to the point where Bolea had to explain to a jury why Hulk has a larger penis than Terry (in reference to an interview he gave in character) in his invasion of privacy suit against Gawker Media. Fox has always said “we’re the real news” but, just like in pro wrestling, the talent behaves differently when they’re off the clock. This case tested the entire edifice of cable news kayfabe. Fox News viewers are not sealed off from the internet. Once the fourth wall is broken, you can’t get it back. - [I Want to Be the Old Man With the Orange Socks]( I Want to Be the Old Man With the Orange Socks, Charles Blow, The New York Times I believe that the ways we construct our visual environments, including the ways we present ourselves in the world, are reflections of ourselves. And insisting on bringing beauty into lives that can sometimes feel like an unremitting series of horrors is the only way some of us can survive. I have seen this up close my whole life, growing up in a poor family in a poor community. I saw it in my grandmother, the way she painted the modest house her husband built daffodil yellow and made flower beds from old tires. I saw it in the way her church hats seemed to get bigger and brighter as she got older. I saw it in my mother, who made most of her own clothes so that she could afford to buy most of ours. I saw the way she studied the pattern books and ran her hands across the bolts of fabric. I saw it in the way she considered which buttons to buy and which trim. Her sense of style was never about fashion as we consider it now — the consumption of things, the obnoxious accumulation of conspicuous class markers. It was about honoring the choices we have to make in the everyday, about the irrepressible human need to express creativity and the pride of wanting to demonstrate craft. ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [After Kristi Noem tells NRA audience they're not just old white guys, the camera points to ...]( - [Ukraine Update: The next offensive is coming, and Russia may be f'd]( - [The Clarence Thomas scandal keeps growing]( Want even more Daily Kos? 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