Katya Sedgwick | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 4
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Author: Katya Sedgwick

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Katya Sedgwick

Mom. Wife. Writer. Mom. Grad school dropout. Wrong kind of immigrant.

As the Great American War on Monuments is still raging, I would like to nominate a contender for removal. It’s not that I object to the sculpture on ideological grounds—I deplore the ideology behind socialist realism, for instance, but I admire some of the state-sponsored Soviet art despite it—but because the work in question does not transcend ideology . . .  and is exceptionally ugly.

It probably all started as a rhetorical question, but came off as passive-aggressive.  A New York-based writer, Rebecca Serle, asked why women are still taking their husband's names.

Gross! A 26-year-old California sex coach who goes by Demetra Nyx splattered pictures of herself smeared with menstrual blood all over Instagram to celebrate her "beautiful and powerful" periods. She said:
I used to spend my time worrying about what other people thought of me… And yet. It turns out none of that was ever necessary.  I don’t do anything I do now for anyone’s approval…

If I'd never send my children to political rallies, it's partly because I expect something like the Covington boys pile-on to be the outcome.  I protect my kids from political ephemera and encourage them to read the great works of fiction. In the minds of deep blue America, if some children can headline the anti-gun rallies in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, surely other children can be held responsible for smirks and MAGA hats.  If David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez can organize (well, allegedly) nationwide grade school protests last year, then how come Nick Sandmann is attending March for Life?  He has to face an adult consequence.

Institutional anti-Semitism in the Women's March, the most celebrated political movement of Trump era so far, has been in the news lately, with many opinion-makers calling for the boycott of the upcoming January 19 nationwide protest. Many of us knew that the national co-chairs were fans of Louis Farrakhan; many noted the curious absence of condemnation of anti-Semitism in the intersectional organization's Unity Principles.

This is the time of the year when certain Jews (thinking of you, Julia Ioffe) like to complain about feeling left out of the general merriment. Me, I went to Target a couple of days ago, to return the defective skateboard I'd given my son for Hanukkah.  Having driven in circles looking for parking, I don't feel left out at all.

That dog whistles are now a hot topic of discussion is easily the dumbest thing about 2018. When CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill over his speech at the UN where he talked of freeing Palestine from river to the sea, it was said that the expression in question was a dog whistle.

The New York Times recently published an Op-Ed with an eye-popping claim: for all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.

This was not the first piece published by the New York Times exploring the Alleged glories of socialism as they relate to women. In August, anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee attempted to answer the greatest question of the 20th century, in Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism (oh — you weren’t wondering that?).

There is a nagging suspicion among us conservatives that Democrats want to game the electoral algorithm to produce the snapshot of the electorate most favorable to themselves, and that they will continue tweaking it to improve their results in real time. Many on the left, of course, sincerely believe that they are fighting voter suppression or championing innovation.  One of the examples of their innovation is the ranked choice voting that adopted by the city of Oakland, CA in 2006.  In 2010, after a complicated campaign in which candidates vied for second and third place, Oakland has elected Mayor Quan, even though she performed poorly after the first round was tabulated.  A little more than a year later, Quan, who was nobody's first choice, pissed virtually everyone in town with her lackluster handling of the Occupy camp.  One would think this experiment was enough to show that traditional voting arrangements work better, but no.  Other municipalities, and the state of Maine, have adopted the system, and Utah is slated to do it.