Sunday roundup

Poland can do better than coal.

It's not too late to walk the dog back (in Crimea), but it's all about institution-building.

Valenti on rape culture.

As discussed in the next thread (see Cancel-Colbert, below), censoring conversation is not the answer, and Theater J is not the enemy.

The incident is but one of many examples of how the Jewish community labors under a not-so-hidden loyalty test regarding what one can and cannot say about Israel...
I understand what’s behind this atmosphere of fear and retribution. Israel is increasingly treated as a pariah nation despite being the only true democracy in the Middle East and having a far better human rights record than its neighbors. While powerless to change the antipathy of so much of the world toward Israel, some Jews try to demand of their co-religionists a loyalty to the country that allowed the Jewish people to reconstitute itself after the Holocaust. Yet with the passage of time, fewer and fewer Jews carry these memories, and their ties to Jewish solidarity weaken. Attempts to enforce communal discipline and to require a non-critical assessment of Israel not only cannot succeed in America, they also are likely to alienate the very Jews the community hopes to engage.

and

One gift Nelson Mandela gave the world was the understanding that no healthy nation can be built on the back of a historical injustice without a process of truth and reconciliation in which all parties come to grips with the past. There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides. Until the parties to the Middle East conflict are ready for such a process, perhaps art will have to suffice.

***
Maryland's motto has some interesting language. Actually, that story speaks to what has turned into the Cancel-Colbert debacle (or what sparked it: language needn't have been nefarious or known to be so at the time a name or phrase was coined, but names and phrases should adapt with the times). But, back to cancel-colbert, I will quote Erin Gloria Ryan:

This isn't to say that fights against perceived racism or injustice should only be fought if they're guaranteed to succeed. But, you know, is this the hill you want to die on? Trying to get a guy who owned the shit out of President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents' Dinner fired from a 9-year-long Emmy-winning show because you don't understand how TV show Twitter accounts work? Good luck.

and

People have contexts that extend further than the paragraph containing a sentiment. Colbert, for example, has starred on a show that has run for almost a decade, four nights per week, with scattered breaks. His show exists to poke holes in the absurdity of sexism, racism, the media industry, American imperialism, celebrity, warmongering, homophobia, and every other archaic -ism most left-leaning people would be glad to see banished from society. He succeeds 99% of the time, which means he's better at comedy than most doctors are at medicine. He's on our team. Sometimes people on our team make, or appear to make mistakes, or have some growing to do. That's okay, because no person is 100% perfect all the time.

While we're on the topic of giving people a break, even Kathleen Parker says everyone should back off of Michelle O.

Steven Pearlstein devotes an entire column to the idea fact that it's really not cool to shut down the nation's capital every time it snows.