Greenness:
Pineapple shorts:
Perfection!
Pineapple shorts:
Perfection!
Monday 8 October 2018
"Carry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband..."
"... and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Since the 2016 Presidential election, countless numbers of them have set out to make hell howl—by disrupting government hearings, occupying federal buildings, scaling the Statue of Liberty, boycotting businesses, going on strike, coming forward with stories of harassment and assault, flooding congressional telephone lines, raising a middle finger at the Presidential motorcade, and attending protests by the millions, sometimes carrying with them representations of the President’s castrated testicles and severed head."
From "The Perils and Possibilities of Anger/After centuries of censure, women reconsider the political power of female rage" by Casey Cep in The New Yorker.
From "The Perils and Possibilities of Anger/After centuries of censure, women reconsider the political power of female rage" by Casey Cep in The New Yorker.
A New Mapping Platform is HERE
Stamen has been playing around with HERE's new map building platform XYZ. XYZ includes a range of tools of API's, SDK's and tools which can help you make interactive maps. HERE XYZ is a full stack of interactive mapping tools which allow you to create a spatial database and visualize & style that data on top of an interactive map.
Stamen has created a nice introduction to the HERE XYZ mapping
Tweeting Columbus Day.
Christopher Columbus’s spirit of determination & adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On #ColumbusDay, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, & celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. https://t.co/Mg3dxRfPuN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2018
I’m with you Amy https://t.co/OA32dUrKfs
— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) October 7, 2018
"False memories of sexual abuse lead to terrible miscarriages of justice/To avoid the innocent being convicted, police, lawyers and judges must understand the fickle nature of human memory."
No! That's not a new article. That's from 2010, in The Guardian, but I'm reading it now because my son John posted it yesterday on Facebook.
The Senators and pundits were operating under rules of engagement that put it off limits to inquire into whether Christine Blasey Ford might be lying. That led them into a lot of discussion of the mysteries of memory, and if the science got weak or bad, it might be because it stood in for something else that they were committed not to talk about. I'd like to see some serious defense of whatever good memory science there might be out there, but the WaPo article is not serious. It's propaganda, purporting to straighten us out on the science, but exploiting science in service to a political end.
Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur....For contrast, here's WaPo yesterday: "The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh."
During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.
On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.
Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.IN THE COMMENTS: Michael K said: "I initially thought she had recovered memories but I have come to the conclusion that she is lying."
“I guess the Republicans have been debating why does she forget getting home, but that sounds very plausible," she said. “It focuses the brain on whatever stands out at that moment. The things that are not standing out are even more ignored.”
Like other researchers, she could not recall a single case of a sexual assault victim misremembering a known attacker — save for rare instances in which people, often children, were coached into falsely accusing friends and family members....
The Senators and pundits were operating under rules of engagement that put it off limits to inquire into whether Christine Blasey Ford might be lying. That led them into a lot of discussion of the mysteries of memory, and if the science got weak or bad, it might be because it stood in for something else that they were committed not to talk about. I'd like to see some serious defense of whatever good memory science there might be out there, but the WaPo article is not serious. It's propaganda, purporting to straighten us out on the science, but exploiting science in service to a political end.
Brazil Election Maps
The extreme far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the most votes in the first round of Brazil's presidential election yesterday. However the candidate failed to win 50% of the vote and so he will now face a second round election on 28 October against the the left-wing Workers' Party candidate, Fernando Haddad.
Globo has created an interactive map visualizing the results of yesterday's election
"I hate babies. Is something wrong with me? I'm a female in my mid 20s and I find myself loathing babies."
"Is there anything wrong with me? No, I never had any traumatic childhood experience or something of that sort. Seeing baby photos and videos make me mad and want to squish their chubby cheeks to death. Of course, I wouldn't do that and I'll never try to hurt babies but I can't help but hate them. Is this some kind of mental illness like the psycho-freaks who hurt the animals for pleasure? Because I'm really bothered. Please no answers like 'Babies are the greatest gift on earth' or 'You were a baby once' or something of that sort. Other than that, I think I'm pretty compassionate about other things like animals, elderly, etc."
A serious question, asked at Reddit 2 years ago. Notice that she's mainly concerned with her own mental health: Is there something wrong with me if I don't have the feelings that seem to come naturally to others? And the naturalness of those feelings can be explained through evolution — a practical, not a moral explanation. One could also question the data: There are social constraints on expressing negative feelings about babies. The questioner may not be as unusual as she worries she is.
The top-rated answer points her to the subreddit childfree. I haven't read that, but I'd guess that there's a lot of material about the burdens of childcare as opposed to actually hating babies. Hating babies! It sounds so wrong. Imagine seeing baby photos and videos and getting mad, as the questioner describes. The questioner does come back to say:
A serious question, asked at Reddit 2 years ago. Notice that she's mainly concerned with her own mental health: Is there something wrong with me if I don't have the feelings that seem to come naturally to others? And the naturalness of those feelings can be explained through evolution — a practical, not a moral explanation. One could also question the data: There are social constraints on expressing negative feelings about babies. The questioner may not be as unusual as she worries she is.
The top-rated answer points her to the subreddit childfree. I haven't read that, but I'd guess that there's a lot of material about the burdens of childcare as opposed to actually hating babies. Hating babies! It sounds so wrong. Imagine seeing baby photos and videos and getting mad, as the questioner describes. The questioner does come back to say:
Okay. Maybe I don't hate them, reading these comments here made think that it might have something about the demand and expectations of people around me. Or probably because my Facebook timeline is full of children and babies since people my age are already starting their own families-- which makes my annoyance even worse. But in my head I'm like "Guys, stop it, I'll be polite and like your photo just so you don't think I'm mean but your babies aren't cute. :("I have the perfect "Friends" clip for that:
Of course, I feel bad about my distaste for babies.
A graphic depiction of the inane gender politics of The Washington Post.
Here's a screen selection of the upper right corner of the WaPo front page right now:
It looks as though they're hot and desperate to show the importance of women, but they've got next to nothing. This, after a week of centralizing women. These are the crumbs of regard we get on Monday morning? Another story about Melania's hat, and a dopey attempt to disqualify her because of what the hat means. Checking in with the #MeToo movement, going back to the same minor actress for accusations that the supporters aren't supportive enough. And above all...
"Can Taylor Swift, revered by young Americans, help lead Democrats out of the woods?"
The photo Swift is from 2016, so WaPo went out of its way to choose the platinum blonde, black-red lipstick look. Does it inspire "reverence" or hope that this is the person to "lead Democrats out of the woods"? Are the Democrats lost in the woods? I guess we've gone from presuming it's a big blue wave election to finding ourselves far from the beach and up in the woods.
The news is just that Swift put up an Instagram post that told her fans they should vote and endorsed 2 Democrats — Tennesseans Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Here's the post, with a photograph of Swift in much darker, longer hair. WaPo:
It looks as though they're hot and desperate to show the importance of women, but they've got next to nothing. This, after a week of centralizing women. These are the crumbs of regard we get on Monday morning? Another story about Melania's hat, and a dopey attempt to disqualify her because of what the hat means. Checking in with the #MeToo movement, going back to the same minor actress for accusations that the supporters aren't supportive enough. And above all...
"Can Taylor Swift, revered by young Americans, help lead Democrats out of the woods?"
The photo Swift is from 2016, so WaPo went out of its way to choose the platinum blonde, black-red lipstick look. Does it inspire "reverence" or hope that this is the person to "lead Democrats out of the woods"? Are the Democrats lost in the woods? I guess we've gone from presuming it's a big blue wave election to finding ourselves far from the beach and up in the woods.
The news is just that Swift put up an Instagram post that told her fans they should vote and endorsed 2 Democrats — Tennesseans Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Here's the post, with a photograph of Swift in much darker, longer hair. WaPo:
A black-and-white Polaroid was swapped in for a standard headshot.... By early Monday, more than a million Instagram users had registered their approval.A million? That's not impressive when you consider that Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram.
By characterizing the midterms as “an overall struggle for protecting human rights and dignity” rather than a partisan grudge match, Swift is speaking effectively to young people who have less fealty to the party structure, said William Fotter, the vice president of the University of Arizona Democrats. “Young people are less party-oriented and more issue-oriented,” said the 21-year-old political science and international relations major. “If Taylor Swift is able to convince millennials that their votes matter, that could make a huge difference,” he said....What if the young people are inspired by Swift to vote but not for Democrats? This danger is squirreled away deep in the article (which is so insanely padded that it would be weird if normal readers got this far, but it's the most interesting part):
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union scolded her for threatening to sue a California blogger who accused the singer of being associated with white supremacy. And in an editorial, the Guardian called her an “envoy for Trump’s values.”...Here's what the Guardian wrote last November:
[Swift and Trump both have] their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.As for those other 2 WaPo articles, what Rose McGowan said about entertainment industry #MeToo supporters was:
Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships.... The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway....
[N]otably her much-publicised “squad” of female models, actors and musicians is largely thin, white and wealthy. In a well-publicised Twitter exchange with rapper Nicki Minaj, she treated the discussion of structural racism as not only incomprehensible, but a way to disempower white people such as herself....
“I just think they’re douchebags.... They’re not champions. I just think they’re losers. I don’t like them.... I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.”As for Melania and the pith helmet — despite the headline, the actual article has some depth and nuance. I'll highlight the details that really ruin the hat-based attack on Melania:
In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park....So are pith helmets properly called — as in the WaPo headline — "a symbol of colonialism"? If you want to say yes, you'll have to attack James Meredith!
[P]ith helmets are worn by motorcycle taxi drivers in Hanoi, as well as police officers in Cameroon and Peru. In the U.S., postal workers wear pith helmets as part of their uniforms on exceptionally rainy or sunny days, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ marksmanship coaches wear them at shooting ranges....
In 1966, the civil rights activist James Meredith marched through Mississippi wearing a pith helmet while encouraging African Americans to vote. Charles W. “Hoppy” Adams, the legendary black DJ at WANN in Annapolis, Md., wore a pith helmet during live appearances in the 1950s and 1960s... And the rapper Andre 3000 of OutKast wore a straw pith helmet with a bow tie and overalls on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2006.
Sunday 7 October 2018
Brewers on the verge of winning the division series! [UPDATE: BREWERS WIN!!]
Orlando Arcia & @KeonDDBroxton go back-to-back in the 9th to extend the lead to 6-0! #OurCrewOurOctober pic.twitter.com/1OAf8NgOm5
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 7, 2018
What does "Come Get Your People" mean?
I had to Google that question as I struggled to understand the NYT op-ed, "White Women, Come Get Your People," by Alexis Grenell. The phrase "come get your people" does not appear in the text of the column, only in the headline. There's a subheadline, "They will defend their privilege to the death." I guess "They" is the white women, not "your people." Is coming and getting your people another way to say defending your privilege?
We see photographs of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, so I guess they're in the set of white women Grenell is addressing. Is Grenell white? It feels creepy to Google to check someone's race, but she made race relevant. The headline makes it seem as though she is not white, because why would you address a group as if they were other than you if they were not?
I've read the column already, and I found it strange and off-putting, so I'm going to read it again to examine my reaction and I'll also see if the meaning of the headline pops into clarity and, if not, examine what turned up in my Google search of the phrase "Come Get Your People."
It begins with melodrama and careless imagery:
Since when do people on the left think fairness to the accused should be sacrificed in the interest of fighting crime? That's traditionally what lefties call a right-wing idea.
I'm cutting a few sentences that lead up to this over-the-top statement:
Look at this logic:
Okay, I'll look at the stuff Google found for me. First, there's "Picking Up the Trash of White Supremacy," by Abby Norman in something called SheLoves:
If it's some specifically black slang, why not let black people have it? Speaking of white privilege. Do you think everything is yours?
We see photographs of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, so I guess they're in the set of white women Grenell is addressing. Is Grenell white? It feels creepy to Google to check someone's race, but she made race relevant. The headline makes it seem as though she is not white, because why would you address a group as if they were other than you if they were not?
I've read the column already, and I found it strange and off-putting, so I'm going to read it again to examine my reaction and I'll also see if the meaning of the headline pops into clarity and, if not, examine what turned up in my Google search of the phrase "Come Get Your People."
It begins with melodrama and careless imagery:
After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.I say careless because "rivers of blood" is a lot of blood to flow out of "women" — which women? how many? — and yet they only "all but slit their wrists"? So what did they do in this metaphor, to produce all that blood, if they didn't open wrist veins?
With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.So Murkowski counts as one of the good ones (despite the pairing with Daines). And Susan Collins, despite her beautifully brilliant speech, is deemed to have fought against the position she forthrightly took. Then, she "caved." She gave in to the men.
These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job.That's awfully presumptuous. The vote on Kavanaugh wasn't — at least not necessarily — a vote for or against "the patriarchy." I think this kind of overstatement and hyperventilating is repellent to a lot of women and men. "Gender traitors" is very insulting and closed-minded about what different women might be thinking. Feminists should offer women freedom, not more limitation.
The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out....Less revealing than T-shirts stating political messages, or did Grenell just flip into visualizing these women policing the display of sexuality in their offspring?
These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped.But being falsely accused is horrible! We rarely get the choice which misfortune will befall us, but it's not right to brush aside some misfortunes because we think other misfortunes are worse. But anyway, compare the least bad rape to the worst false accusations, and you will surely see an overlap. I think there are some men — you? — who would rather be raped than to have his 2 young daughters believe, falsely, that he is a rapist. Again, life doesn't work like that. You don't get that choice. But I think just the one effect, your 2 daughters believe you are a rapist, might be as painful as an actual rape, and I'm not counting all the other potential effects that Kavanaugh was looking at: loss of the Supreme Court appointment, loss of his existing judgeship, loss of his ability to teach and to coach, loss of his wife, loss of his friends, and even loss of his liberty (as some were arguing that he should go to prison for perjury). These are not trifles! And it's counterproductive to pretend that they are for the purpose of convincing people that rape is a terrible crime.
The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.She's reduced herself and others to an internal organ. Uteri cry out to other uteri: Sisters! But every young man is here because a woman was a mother, and the solidarity within a family is the strongest solidarity of all. That scares you? It scares you that mothers love their sons? The love of mothers toward their sons makes us want to see them free from false accusations AND want them not to be rapists. It's not one or the other. The 2 desires are mutually reinforcing. And it really is, as you say, stupid to think otherwise.
But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.
Since when do people on the left think fairness to the accused should be sacrificed in the interest of fighting crime? That's traditionally what lefties call a right-wing idea.
We’re talking about white women.Because black men are not susceptible to false accusations?! That's a ludicrously convenient assertion.
The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades....The effort to inject race into the Kavanaugh problem is embarrassing. We have enough racial problems without seeing them appropriated as a makeweight in an argument about women. And it's ridiculous and contemptuous toward women to say that when we vote we're just choosing whether to vote based on race or based on sex. Stop globbing us into big groups and ordering us what to do. It's not even effective persuasion, quite apart from its being plainly factually wrong and actively destructive.
I'm cutting a few sentences that lead up to this over-the-top statement:
So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies....I think by "minimizing violence against their own bodies" she means acting as if the violence against them isn't as bad as it really is, but the language is carelessly ambiguous in a way that doesn't serve her propagandistic agenda. The phrase could also mean doing things that lessen the extent of the violence. A woman who knows self-defense and keeps alert and aware of her surroundings is "minimizing violence." Perhaps Grenell is so focused on how women feel about what other people do to them that she didn't notice the double meaning that had to do with what women can do for themselves in this world. What's important is that the Democratic Party can endlessly offer to help women with their desperate, crying needs. And if you're a woman and you don't agree, you're a gender traitor.
Look at this logic:
During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness....A statistically significant relationship doesn't tell us what was in the voters' mind! White women voted for Trump to prop up their whiteness? How do you know they didn't vote because they hate abortion or because they wanted better trade deals or they don't trust the Clintons or, hell, maybe they still held out some insane hope of making America great again?
This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”Grenell is insulting women again. Because they're not on her political side, she disparages them as having no mind at all. Hypocritically, she's saying about them what she's accusing Trump of saying about them, that they're conned and witless. But that isn't what Trump is saying. He might be thinking it, but Grenell is saying it.
I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.
But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore...Due process is nonsense.
Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense...
... due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache....Grenell is presenting herself as a lunatic. She's doing that openly and intentionally. She's less aware, it seems, that she's also betraying the most treasured liberal values.
... as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.So it ends. Awful. She should fear that her histrionics and stark illiberalism will drive voters, female and male, into voting against Democrats. I don't like rivers-of-blood melodrama and race jammed in anywhere you can think of anything to say about it and contempt for the intelligence and independence of women. What an awful opinion piece! And I still don't know what "come get your people" means!
The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?
I fear we already know the answer.
Okay, I'll look at the stuff Google found for me. First, there's "Picking Up the Trash of White Supremacy," by Abby Norman in something called SheLoves:
Recently my friend Danielle has been tagging me in posts on Facebook about white people making unfortunate missteps, whether blatantly or accidentally, in the realm of racial reconciliation.Second, there's a tweet from Brittney Cooper (AKA ProfessorCrunk) that says:
“Abby Norman, you better come get your people.”
At first I laughed. What do you mean my people? I do not know these people. They do not speak for me. Why do you think every dumb white girl is my people, what are you trying to say?
What Danielle was trying to say was that as a white woman, with white privilege, it is my responsibility to educate other white people so everyone can live in a better world. Too often white women, and specifically I, have depended on black women to educate white communities about their lived experiences....
White Ladies, the white community is our space and our responsibility....
White feminists, when we say come get your people, we mean come get your girl, #PermitPatty, out here harassing little Black girls. This kind of thing makes me feel the opposite of non-violent.So there's this specifically racial meaning, it seems, that comes from black people who are tired of getting stuck fighting racism on their own and want white people to see it and to take the lead disciplining other white people. But Grenell isn't black, and though she tries, she's not really talking about race. She's a white woman demanding that other white women discipline white women, and not about race but about getting tripped up in the nonsense of due process rather than just automatically and uncritically believing a woman's accusations.
If it's some specifically black slang, why not let black people have it? Speaking of white privilege. Do you think everything is yours?
"Democrats will never be pulled down so low that we hate folk. We can’t hate Republicans. We need each other as Americans."
"We’ve got to lead with love. You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people – all the people."
Said Cory Booker, quoted in "Booker: 'We are not defined by a president who does not believe women'" (The Hill). I clicked through to that because the quote in the headline disturbed me a bit. As a woman, I felt otherized! It's weird to speak of "believing women." We're a huge group — the majority. How can you even think of the idea of "believing women" unless you first imagine us to be a different sort of animal from you, the men? We can't possibly all have the authority to command belief, so which ones of us are really getting the must-be-believed privilege? The ones with doctorates? The Democrats with doctorates? I really don't know, but I suspect that "does not believe women" is an insult and the real question is when do you use it?
I ended up selecting a different quote to feature in this post, though. The one I picked sounds nice. It's an aspiration. It's certainly not true that "Democrats will never be pulled down so low that we hate folk," but swap "will" for "should" and you've got something. "We can’t hate Republicans" is also literally false. You certainly can hate Republicans. You can and do. But to say that you shouldn't is a good idea.
I understand the rhetoric of making a simple declarative statement to express advice or desire. Maybe that's a notable feature of Cory Booker rhetoric. I associate it with adults training children how to act: We don't put our elbows on the table. If the child sees the potential to quip, Maybe you don't, but I do, he shouldn't say it, but if he does, the old-fashioned mother can respond, Children don't talk to their mothers like that, and he will get the message that a second quip in the same format is not a good idea.
Said Cory Booker, quoted in "Booker: 'We are not defined by a president who does not believe women'" (The Hill). I clicked through to that because the quote in the headline disturbed me a bit. As a woman, I felt otherized! It's weird to speak of "believing women." We're a huge group — the majority. How can you even think of the idea of "believing women" unless you first imagine us to be a different sort of animal from you, the men? We can't possibly all have the authority to command belief, so which ones of us are really getting the must-be-believed privilege? The ones with doctorates? The Democrats with doctorates? I really don't know, but I suspect that "does not believe women" is an insult and the real question is when do you use it?
I ended up selecting a different quote to feature in this post, though. The one I picked sounds nice. It's an aspiration. It's certainly not true that "Democrats will never be pulled down so low that we hate folk," but swap "will" for "should" and you've got something. "We can’t hate Republicans" is also literally false. You certainly can hate Republicans. You can and do. But to say that you shouldn't is a good idea.
I understand the rhetoric of making a simple declarative statement to express advice or desire. Maybe that's a notable feature of Cory Booker rhetoric. I associate it with adults training children how to act: We don't put our elbows on the table. If the child sees the potential to quip, Maybe you don't, but I do, he shouldn't say it, but if he does, the old-fashioned mother can respond, Children don't talk to their mothers like that, and he will get the message that a second quip in the same format is not a good idea.
"My son was born in 2002. I didn’t have an office job, so I was around a lot to get high and enjoy the cartoons."
"I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half.... In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was 'self-medicating' to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned...."
From "I'm Just a Middle-Aged House Dad Addicted to Pot/Cannabis should be legal, just as alcohol should be legal. But marijuana addiction exists, and it almost wrecked my life" by Neal Pollack (NYT). Despite the use of the present tense in the headline, Pollack quit ("cold turkey") and has stayed sober.
From "I'm Just a Middle-Aged House Dad Addicted to Pot/Cannabis should be legal, just as alcohol should be legal. But marijuana addiction exists, and it almost wrecked my life" by Neal Pollack (NYT). Despite the use of the present tense in the headline, Pollack quit ("cold turkey") and has stayed sober.
"Advise and consent" or "advice and consent"?
Which is it? I'm hearing "advice and consent" — the nouns — but I write "advise and consent" — the verbs. I prefer the sound of "the Senate's advise-and-consent role" (which I wrote here and here).
Kavanaugh, testifying, told the Senators, "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with search and destroy." He said "advice," even at the cost of losing parallelism. "Search and destroy" are verbs. If nouns and not verbs are called for, he should have said "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with searching and destruction."
A big reason to say "advice and consent" is that the Constitutional text — Article II, Section 2 s— ays:
Anyway, lest you think I'm a stickler for grammar, that's not why I've been preferring "advise and consent." I figured out the grammar after the fact, and I'm ready to hear anyone's explanation that I'm wrong about the grammar. I'm saying "Advise and Consent" because I read the 1959 best-seller "Advise and Consent" and I know the 1962 Otto Preminger movie!
Here's Wikipedia's plot summary of the book, which I'm setting out because there's some resonance with the recent activity in the Senate (boldface added):
Kavanaugh, testifying, told the Senators, "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with search and destroy." He said "advice," even at the cost of losing parallelism. "Search and destroy" are verbs. If nouns and not verbs are called for, he should have said "You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with searching and destruction."
A big reason to say "advice and consent" is that the Constitutional text — Article II, Section 2 s— ays:
[The President] with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint... Judges of the supreme Court....So maybe text should trump grammar, but if the text should so dominate how we speak, let's start saying "Judges of the Supreme Court." None of this "Justices" foolery.
Anyway, lest you think I'm a stickler for grammar, that's not why I've been preferring "advise and consent." I figured out the grammar after the fact, and I'm ready to hear anyone's explanation that I'm wrong about the grammar. I'm saying "Advise and Consent" because I read the 1959 best-seller "Advise and Consent" and I know the 1962 Otto Preminger movie!
Here's Wikipedia's plot summary of the book, which I'm setting out because there's some resonance with the recent activity in the Senate (boldface added):
A U.S. President decides to replace his Secretary of State to promote rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Nominee Robert Leffingwell, a darling of liberals, is viewed by many conservative senators as an appeaser. Others, including the pivotal character of Senator Seabright (Seab) Cooley of South Carolina, have serious doubts about Leffingwell's character. The book tells the story of an up-and-down nomination process that most people fully expect to result in a quick approval of the controversial nominee.You can add this book to your Kindle for $10. I think I read it because it was assigned reading in my high school history class in the late 1960s. I believe it's considered to be one of the best novels about the workings of American politics.
But Cooley is not so easily defeated. He uncovers a minor bureaucrat named Gelman who testifies that twenty years earlier then-University of Chicago instructor Leffingwell invited Gelman to join a small Communist cell that included a fellow traveler who went by the pseudonym James Morton. After outright lies under oath by the nominee and vigorous cross examination by Leffingwell, Gelman is thoroughly discredited and deemed an unfit witness by the subcommittee and its charismatic chairman Utah Senator Brig Anderson. The subcommittee is ready to approve the nominee.
At this crucial moment in the story, the tenacious Senator Cooley dissects Gelman's testimony and discovers a way to identify James Morton. Cooley maneuvers Morton into confessing the truth of Gelman's assertions to Senator Anderson who subsequently re-opens the subcommittee's hearings, thus enraging the President. When the President's attempts to buy Anderson's cooperation fail he places enormous pressure on Majority Leader Robert Munson to entice Anderson into compliance. In a moment of great weakness that Munson will regret the rest of his life, Munson provides the President a photograph, acquired quite innocently by Munson, that betrays Anderson's brief wartime homosexual liaison.
Armed with the blackmail instrument he needs, the President ignores Anderson's proof of Leffingwell's treachery and plots to use the photo to gain Anderson's silence.The President plants the photo with leftist Senator Fred Van Ackerman, thinking he will never need to use it. But the President has underestimated Van Ackerman's treachery and misjudged Anderson's reaction should the truth come out. After a series of circumstances involving Anderson's secret being revealed to his wife, the Washington press corps, and several senators, Anderson kills himself. Anderson's death turns the majority of the Senate against the President and the Majority Leader. Anderson's suicide and the exposure of the truth about Leffingwell's lies regarding his communist past set in motion a chain reaction that ends several careers and ultimately rejects Leffingwell as a nominee to become Secretary of State.
"Physical assault definitely violates most society's [sic] idea of a moral order, which perhaps explains why aggression plays some kind of role in most humor."
"Freud theorized that humor serves as a way to dissipate sexual or aggressive tension in a socially acceptable way. Thomas Hobbes argues in the Leviathan that laughter arises from feeling superior, and that it's an extension of a feeling of 'sudden glory' arising from recognizing someone else's comparative defect or weakness.... The brain gets its wires crossed when confronted by someone else getting hurt. As a pain-filled situation unfolds, a witness doesn't experience the negative emotional valence that the person in pain does, but the brain still registers an emotional arousal. It can mistakenly categorize the sudden spike in emotion as positive....."
From "FYI: Why Is It Funny When A Guy Gets Hit In The Groin?" — a 2013 Popular Science article — which I'm reading this morning after blogging about last night's "SNL" cold open which featured "Joe Manchin" punching "Chuck Schumer" in the balls. There was a lot more in that sketch, and I didn't find any of it too funny, but in the comments to my post, Meade wrote: "in this era of That's Not Funny, at least we still have male-on-male sexual assault to laugh at."
Is hitting a man in the balls a sexual assault? It depends on the meaning of "sexual." I remember the definition of "sexual behavior" used by Rachel Mitchell (the prosecutor) in questioning Brett Kavanaugh. It specified the outward behavior and excluded intent. If you were doing the behavior — e.g., rubbing your clothed genitals against another person's clothed genitals — it didn't matter if you weren't doing it for sexual gratification. It could be mere "horseplay," and it would be "sexual behavior." That's adopting a broad view of "sexual," and that was done, I think, to take the perspective of the person on the receiving end of the behavior.
What about the man on the receiving end of a hit in the balls? First, are we talking about real life or a comedy scene? Getting hit in the balls is extremely common in comedy — it has a TV Tropes article* — and that's one reason to avoid it. But let's think about whether it should be avoided because it's not taking sexual assault seriously. We don't laugh to see a woman hit in the genitals. I don't think I've ever seen that used in comedy. It's not a cliché, but why isn't it a hilarious twist on the old cliché? We know it's not. Violence against women! And now, remember the 1970s feminist ideology about rape: It's a crime of violence, not sex. Rapists are not doing something sexual. See how that fits with Rachel Mitchell's definition of "sexual behavior."
Now, let's get back to the Popular Science article:
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* It was all the way back in 1995, that "The Simpsons" was trying to instruct us that this form of humor is so bad that only Homer Simpson is laughing:
ADDED: A reader sends a link to this example of a woman getting kicked in the crotch:
"King of the Hill" felt it could get away with that, I suspect, because: 1. It's a cartoon, 2. The woman is portrayed as stronger than men (not having balls is a super-power).
From "FYI: Why Is It Funny When A Guy Gets Hit In The Groin?" — a 2013 Popular Science article — which I'm reading this morning after blogging about last night's "SNL" cold open which featured "Joe Manchin" punching "Chuck Schumer" in the balls. There was a lot more in that sketch, and I didn't find any of it too funny, but in the comments to my post, Meade wrote: "in this era of That's Not Funny, at least we still have male-on-male sexual assault to laugh at."
Is hitting a man in the balls a sexual assault? It depends on the meaning of "sexual." I remember the definition of "sexual behavior" used by Rachel Mitchell (the prosecutor) in questioning Brett Kavanaugh. It specified the outward behavior and excluded intent. If you were doing the behavior — e.g., rubbing your clothed genitals against another person's clothed genitals — it didn't matter if you weren't doing it for sexual gratification. It could be mere "horseplay," and it would be "sexual behavior." That's adopting a broad view of "sexual," and that was done, I think, to take the perspective of the person on the receiving end of the behavior.
What about the man on the receiving end of a hit in the balls? First, are we talking about real life or a comedy scene? Getting hit in the balls is extremely common in comedy — it has a TV Tropes article* — and that's one reason to avoid it. But let's think about whether it should be avoided because it's not taking sexual assault seriously. We don't laugh to see a woman hit in the genitals. I don't think I've ever seen that used in comedy. It's not a cliché, but why isn't it a hilarious twist on the old cliché? We know it's not. Violence against women! And now, remember the 1970s feminist ideology about rape: It's a crime of violence, not sex. Rapists are not doing something sexual. See how that fits with Rachel Mitchell's definition of "sexual behavior."
Now, let's get back to the Popular Science article:
Besides the Freudian implications of the aggressive and sexual tension in the situation, there's also the suddenness with which a blow to the 'nads can take down even an otherwise big, strapping man.... Add that to the theories already at play with physical humor—benign violations, mistaken commitments, aggression, emotional arousal....And you don't have women to tell you "That's not funny." It's male on male and the men are free to laugh fraternalistically.... until the women crack down on that too. And why wouldn't we? You're not taking sexual violence seriously. Or do you think it's not sexual? Maybe if we get you to think of it as sexual, you guys will stop laughing at other men's pain. And don't try to fend off the ire of women by purporting to take pride in man-on-man sexuality. The sexuality is on the rape continuum and therefore not funny in the Era of That's Not Funny.
_____________________________
* It was all the way back in 1995, that "The Simpsons" was trying to instruct us that this form of humor is so bad that only Homer Simpson is laughing:
ADDED: A reader sends a link to this example of a woman getting kicked in the crotch:
"King of the Hill" felt it could get away with that, I suspect, because: 1. It's a cartoon, 2. The woman is portrayed as stronger than men (not having balls is a super-power).
SNL's "Lindsey Graham" says: "Let's keep this horny male energy going 'til the midterms!"
The cold open shows GOP Senators celebrating their Kavanaugh victory in sports-locker-room style and "Chuck Schumer" weakly whining over the Democrats defeat and then getting punched in the balls by "Joe Manchin":
You can watch the whole sketch if you scroll back to the beginning, but I'm setting it to start at the depiction of Susan Collins, who, of course, can't be shown as a strong, principled woman who gave the best speech anyone can remember a Senator giving. No, she's a witless patsy, just vaguely realizing she's been had:
If it were funnier, I'd make a new tag, Kavanomedy. But it isn't funny. The main idea is that the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to Kavanaugh and are ferociously angry now and will let the clueless Senators feel their wrath in the midterm elections. If the Kavanaugh-haters who watch the show could really believe that, maybe they'd laugh, but there's no evidence that's what's happening out there in the real world. Oh, what am I saying? Who needs evidence?! Live within the fantasy for as long as you can, and "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble. Not much comic potential there, but who cares? It's the Era of That's Not Funny.
IN THE COMMENTS: gilbar — quoting my "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble — links to the "SNL" sketch that acknowledged the bubble within which it pictures its audience:
You can watch the whole sketch if you scroll back to the beginning, but I'm setting it to start at the depiction of Susan Collins, who, of course, can't be shown as a strong, principled woman who gave the best speech anyone can remember a Senator giving. No, she's a witless patsy, just vaguely realizing she's been had:
If it were funnier, I'd make a new tag, Kavanomedy. But it isn't funny. The main idea is that the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to Kavanaugh and are ferociously angry now and will let the clueless Senators feel their wrath in the midterm elections. If the Kavanaugh-haters who watch the show could really believe that, maybe they'd laugh, but there's no evidence that's what's happening out there in the real world. Oh, what am I saying? Who needs evidence?! Live within the fantasy for as long as you can, and "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble. Not much comic potential there, but who cares? It's the Era of That's Not Funny.
IN THE COMMENTS: gilbar — quoting my "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble — links to the "SNL" sketch that acknowledged the bubble within which it pictures its audience:
Saturday 6 October 2018
Dasom deals with Leeteuk and Tak Jae Hoon
"Because of my allergies, I could no longer have pets. I wish I had someone..."
"How about raising us two?"
"Can I neuter you guys, then?"
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Pann: Dasom deals with Leeteuk and Tak Jae Hoon
1. [+210, -3] There's also this one. They asked Bona to do the "oppa-ya" aegyo and Bona said, "but there's no oppa here?" ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Those ajussis need to stop doing this to female idols.
2. [+154, -0] Appropriate joke to this situation.
3. [+121, -0] ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ She targets them nicely~
4. [+57, -1] Tak Jae Hoon and Leeteuk's hosting is so boring ㅠㅠ My bias was on the show and the MCs kept cutting the flow with boring jokes, ugh.
5. [+49, -0] Am I the only one who doesn't find Leeteuk funny?
6. [+32, -0] So funny ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Sistar members are all girl crushes.
"The crowd in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is tiny, looks like about 200 people (& most are onlookers)..."
"... that wouldn’t even fill the first couple of rows of our Kansas Rally, or any of our Rallies for that matter! The Fake News Media tries to make it look sooo big, & it’s not!"
Trump tweets.
Also at Twitter, I'm seeing Jordan Peterson promoting (but not necessarily endorsing) the idea that Kavanaugh, confirmed, should step down. Responding to him is Scott Adams, who says, "This feels like a terrible idea to me, but because smart people are saying it, I’m open to hearing the argument."
Peterson replies: "I'm not certain that is the right move. It's very complex. But he would have his name cleared, and a figure who might be less divisive might be put forward."
And Adams says, "Quitting would clear his name? I'm not connecting any of these dots."
I agree with Adams and would add that a "less divisive" figure is a fantasy. If the Democrats dream of stopping Kavanaugh were to come true, they would be fired up to use any means necessary to stop the new nominee. I'm reminded of this passage in the Susan Collins speech:
Trump tweets.
Also at Twitter, I'm seeing Jordan Peterson promoting (but not necessarily endorsing) the idea that Kavanaugh, confirmed, should step down. Responding to him is Scott Adams, who says, "This feels like a terrible idea to me, but because smart people are saying it, I’m open to hearing the argument."
Peterson replies: "I'm not certain that is the right move. It's very complex. But he would have his name cleared, and a figure who might be less divisive might be put forward."
And Adams says, "Quitting would clear his name? I'm not connecting any of these dots."
I agree with Adams and would add that a "less divisive" figure is a fantasy. If the Democrats dream of stopping Kavanaugh were to come true, they would be fired up to use any means necessary to stop the new nominee. I'm reminded of this passage in the Susan Collins speech:
The President nominated Brett Kavanaugh on July 9th. Within moments of that announcement, special interest groups raced to be the first to oppose him, including one organization that didn’t even bother to fill in the Judge’s name on its pre-written press release – they simply wrote that they opposed “Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A number of Senators joined the race to announce their opposition, but they were beaten to the punch by one of our colleagues who actually announced opposition before the nominee’s identity was even known.
"We need to legalize this plant, this life-saving plant.... It's medicine, natural medicine, and the old 2 parties want to throw you in jail for using it. Vote Libertarian...."
From the Marijuana Harvest Festival on the UW Library Mall today. The video ends abruptly when one of the men on the stage calls out to me, "Ann!" I put the lens cap on the camera.
Actually, the camera continues to run, so I had audio of my reacting to getting run into by a man in an electric wheelchair, who came up behind me, ran into my foot, and kept his motor running with his wheel ramming into my foot as if to say, move your foot, I'm coming through.
Transcription from the audio: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Hey! Hey! Don't run into me. That's a crime. Don't run into people with a motor vehicle. That's wrong! That's wrong! You could be arrested for that! You need to be careful! There are children! There are animals! Don't do that! Don't do that!"
I really cared about impressing him that he could not drive like that on the pavement. He was acting like someone that other people let get away with whatever he wants to do, which I also think is wrong and, frankly, dehumanizing. Either he's capable of driving a motor vehicle or he isn't.
We went down to the University of Wisconsin Library Mall because we saw the announcement from our local socialists: "We must show the ruling class we are not going anywhere."
"If Kavanaugh is approved tomorrow it will only be the beginning of sustained mass movement that will come for more than the rapists and misogynists they put and hold in power. Down with Trump, down with Kavanaugh, down with the GOP, down with the patriarchy and down with capitalism!"
There are a lot of people milling around downtown Madison. It's a Farmers' Market day on the square. It's a big football Saturday, and the game's not until this evening. And there was the big annual Marijuana Harvest Festival right on Library Mall.
And this is what the Socialist flooding of the street looked like.
It's not as if anyone was gravitating toward the Democratic Party. People cut a wide swath around this table:
That's the Socialist crowd in the background. A few feet away the mall was teeming:
The Libertarians were there, hoping to divert the marijuana-oriented passers-by:
It wasn't hard to see what they had to offer:
There are a lot of people milling around downtown Madison. It's a Farmers' Market day on the square. It's a big football Saturday, and the game's not until this evening. And there was the big annual Marijuana Harvest Festival right on Library Mall.
And this is what the Socialist flooding of the street looked like.
It's not as if anyone was gravitating toward the Democratic Party. People cut a wide swath around this table:
That's the Socialist crowd in the background. A few feet away the mall was teeming:
The Libertarians were there, hoping to divert the marijuana-oriented passers-by:
It wasn't hard to see what they had to offer:
The Senate is about to call the roll on Kavanaugh...
... just as soon as these protesters can be cleared out of the gallery.
AND: That's it! Kavanaugh has survived the ordeal. 50-48, confirmation.
I was touched that Senator Murkowski withdrew her "no" vote in deference to Senator Daines who wanted — needed — to be present at his daughter's wedding, so that he did not need to rush back in the middle of the day to register the "yes" vote that was his to give.
AND: That's it! Kavanaugh has survived the ordeal. 50-48, confirmation.
I was touched that Senator Murkowski withdrew her "no" vote in deference to Senator Daines who wanted — needed — to be present at his daughter's wedding, so that he did not need to rush back in the middle of the day to register the "yes" vote that was his to give.
YG's Netflix show 'YG Electronics' faces criticisms
Article: 'YG Electronics', fans enraged by excessive self-diss... "Mocking the artists?"
Source: Star Today via Nate
1. [+1977, -39] So there's been no YG celebrity who completed active military service ever since YG was established in the 1998? Lee Chan Hyuk will be the first one to do so ㅋㅋ
2. [+1072, -21] What the hell is YG doing... This isn't going anywhere.
3. [+1042, -20] Yang Hyun Suk must've been desperate ㅋㅋ
4. [+93, -1] YG is going reckless now. This isn't even an agency, it's a pharmacy. They don't even write songs for Lee Hi anymore. No wonder why Gummy moved to CJ and she's doing even better with OSTs. The male celebrities always get sick for some reason and then serve in the public service. Do they not know how things work these days? Celebrities do well after completing their military service, come back with good projects, and promote without controversies. They must be full of idiots.
5. [+72, -3] Seungri is overdoing it. Instead, he should've enlisted with the hyungs and then have a group comeback. I don't know why he's doing this.
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Source: Naver
1. [+587, -12] YG must think this is cool but it's not trendy at all. These days, making sexual jokes or insulting others' looks can get you into big trouble. Eun Jiwon's part was also too much.
2. [+264, -10] You can't just use and mock artists who didn't even appear on the show. I can't believe they're doing things that hateful commenters and antis would do in their self-produced show. They need to edit Eun Jiwon's part out before it gets spread.
3. [+229, -3] Where are their manners for their artists? Do they think it's cool to make insults under the excuse of black comedy? Can the producers be sued for this? Before suing the hateful commenters, they should get rid of their inside enemies.
4. [+198, -5] This article is spot on. Insulting and mocking their own artists and calling it a B-level variety show is too much. I'm very disappointed with YG.
5. [+122, -5] The show isn't funny at all...
Ranking of K-pop album sales in 2018
(Twice, Wanna One, and EXO are still expecting to release new albums this year)
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Pann: Ranking of K-pop album sales in 2018
1. [+217, -8] BTS reached 4M with just two comebacks ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Amazing
2. [+157, -5] BTS is really amazing and so is Twice. Both groups' physical sales are a different world.
3. [+156, -12] Twice daebak ㅋㅋㅋ Seventeen also sold 700K... They're all amazing. BTS and Wanna One are always there and CBX did well despite being a subunit. They're still promoting so they'll sell more ㅋㅋ
4. [+133, -91] EXO is the only subunit one, really amazing...
5. [+74, -2] BTS ㅋㅋㅋㅋ How are you supposed to surpass that...
6. [+64, -2] BTS is outstanding
7. [+52, -5] Why are people defensive against Twice? Blame your bias' lack of popularity for not advancing into Japan. Is it wrong for Twice to advance into Japan and selling a lot?
8. [+44, -6] BTS, Twice, and Wanna One are the top tier right now.
A new WaPo trend — giving Trump credit?
It takes 4 journalists to see it, but, apparently....
... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius?
Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:
That's all in the article, but with no strongly stated bottom line, Trump haters can shrug it off and cling to their belief that Trump is an impetuous idiot.
... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius?
Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:
Again and again, President Trump was instructed not to do it. A cadre of advisers, confidants and lawmakers all urged him — implored him, really — not to personally attack the women who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.The reporters don't tie it all up. In fact the headline at the article is toned down from the one on the front page which you see in my image at the top of this post. At the article, there's less credit to Trump. It's just: "‘Willing to go to the mat’: How Trump and Republicans carried Kavanaugh to the cusp of confirmation." But the facts are there in the article. Trump critiqued Ford's testimony in clear powerful terms — something everyone else was afraid to do. He recognized that Kavanaugh's presentation on Fox News wasn't compelling (even though it was what the pushers of the "judicial temperament" argument claimed they needed to see). And during the hearing, after Ford testified, Trump performed a public routine of "seesawing" about whether Kavanaugh could make it, lighting the fire on him to shed his establishment guy/Bush guy demeanor and talk more like Trump.
So he did it anyway.
Addressing thousands at a boisterous rally in Mississippi, Trump relied on his own visceral sense of the moment and mocked Christine Blasey Ford for gaps in her memory, directly impugning the accuser’s credibility.
Establishment Republicans initially reacted with horror. But Trump’s 36-second off-script jeremiad proved a key turning point toward victory for the polarizing nominee, White House officials and Kavanaugh allies said, turbocharging momentum behind Kavanaugh just as his fate appeared most in doubt....
Trump had no particular personal affinity for Kavanaugh, although a dinner was arranged between the two men and their wives to cultivate a relationship. “I don’t even know him,” the president told the Mississippi crowd, “so it’s not like, ‘Oh, gee, I want to protect my friend.’ ”...
“Kavanaugh’s an establishment guy. He was a Bush guy,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referencing the nominee’s experience as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush. “There was a lot of pushback, you know — ‘Don’t go [down] that road,’ ‘That’s not why you won,’ and he said, ‘Wait a minute. I want to pick the best people to be on the court I can,’ and he said he was incredibly impressed by his background, just the whole package of Kavanaugh.”...
[Kavanaugh's Fox News interview] was widely criticized — “objectively a horrible idea,” in the words of one White House official. Kavanaugh appeared wooden and dispassionate, sticking only to a few talking points, and Trump, an avid consumer and critic of television news, thought he appeared weak and unconvincing....
[The Judiciary Committee hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh] left the president seesawing from fatalism to enthusiasm about Kavanaugh’s confirmation prospects.
When Ford had finally finished, [White House counsel Don] McGahn spoke privately to Kavanaugh, who had not watched, urging him to be passionate. “Speak from your heart,” McGahn advised the nominee, according to someone familiar with their discussion.
Kavanaugh roared into the committee room and shouted his opening statement, which he had personally written the night before with the help of one trusted clerk. The hotly defiant performance was so effective in the eyes of his advisers — and, perhaps most importantly, of the president — that a group gathered in Vice President Pence’s Capitol Hill office began to cheer and pump their fists. Some even had tears in their eyes.
The hearing galvanized activists on both sides and left jittery senators — including Flake, one of 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee — torn between competing accounts and party loyalties.... McConnell spoke with Trump and convinced him that the only option was to delay a vote and move forward with the FBI probe....
On the campaign trail... Trump ratcheted up the partisan warfare at his rallies. In Mississippi, the president — already fuming over a New York Times investigation into his family’s allegedly fraudulent tax schemes — felt the media was not properly scrutinizing Ford’s account and decided to engage.
“How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember,’ ” Trump said, reenacting Ford’s hearing. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”
The riff lasted less than a minute, but had lasting ramifications. The senators whose votes Kavanaugh was wooing said they were aghast at the president’s rally-stage behavior. But Kavanaugh allies saw a clear benefit: An argument by the president that bucked up Kavanaugh, discredited Ford and became a clarion call for conservatives.
More than two dozen Trump supporters interviewed at the president’s campaign rally Thursday in Minnesota said they wish he had not gone after Ford, fretting that doing so was not presidential. Yet many also acknowledged the president had simply spoken aloud what many of them thought privately.
That's all in the article, but with no strongly stated bottom line, Trump haters can shrug it off and cling to their belief that Trump is an impetuous idiot.
"Althouse: If you say 'Harumph' you must Link!"
Says Madison Man, in the comments to a post where I said "Harrumph!" He links to this:
Fantastic! My post has an embedded clip from "Putney Swope," because it has a line — "How many syllables, Mario?" — that I have held in my memory for half a century. But there's no chance that I'd have dragged up "Harrumph," because — can you believe it? — I have never seen "Blazing Saddles."
Is it "harrumph" or "harumph"? Double letters are the peskiest spelling problem. The OED says the double-r is correct. It's defined as "A guttural sound made by clearing the throat. Also fig. So as v., to make this sound; to speak in a rasping or guttural voice; to make a comment implying disapproval." One example is from The New Yorker in 1961, a cartoon, I'm guessing: "My goodness, Henry, you're much too young to be going har-rumph, har-rumph all the time!"
I put "Blazing Saddles" on my list of movies that came out during the period of my life when I pretty much went out and saw everything that was supposed to be excellent but that I never did see — not at the time and not in later years, when it became easy to see whatever I wanted on videotape or DVD. Also on my list: "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Picture Show." I think of those 2 because they are DVDs that I bought as soon as they came out because I assumed surely I'd watch them and that my previous failure to watch them was nothing but a chance omission. They've sat on my shelf for way more than a decade.
And I still don't feel like watching "Blazing Saddles." Harrumph!!
Fantastic! My post has an embedded clip from "Putney Swope," because it has a line — "How many syllables, Mario?" — that I have held in my memory for half a century. But there's no chance that I'd have dragged up "Harrumph," because — can you believe it? — I have never seen "Blazing Saddles."
Is it "harrumph" or "harumph"? Double letters are the peskiest spelling problem. The OED says the double-r is correct. It's defined as "A guttural sound made by clearing the throat. Also fig. So as v., to make this sound; to speak in a rasping or guttural voice; to make a comment implying disapproval." One example is from The New Yorker in 1961, a cartoon, I'm guessing: "My goodness, Henry, you're much too young to be going har-rumph, har-rumph all the time!"
I put "Blazing Saddles" on my list of movies that came out during the period of my life when I pretty much went out and saw everything that was supposed to be excellent but that I never did see — not at the time and not in later years, when it became easy to see whatever I wanted on videotape or DVD. Also on my list: "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Picture Show." I think of those 2 because they are DVDs that I bought as soon as they came out because I assumed surely I'd watch them and that my previous failure to watch them was nothing but a chance omission. They've sat on my shelf for way more than a decade.
And I still don't feel like watching "Blazing Saddles." Harrumph!!
"Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby’s."
Nice PR.
The NYT reports:
Reminds me of the 2-year-old who put her parents' $1,060 in cash through the family paper shredder, which we were just talking about yesterday. But the girl had no artistic intention — or did she?!! — so that's not the old idea I'm talking about. I'm thinking about stuff like "Erased de Kooning":
"It's not a negation. It's a celebration!"
The NYT reports:
The work, “Girl With a Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. It was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s.Theater. It's all already been done, but it's a charming iteration of an old idea. It's not as though anyone really wants or needs a painting of a sentimental notion, a girl with a balloon! The art is something other than that, and it's cute to do the destruction at the auction, with the money (almost) in hand.
“Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm the Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.”
The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby’s staff members, had been shredded by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame....
As the artwork shredded itself, a seemingly unperturbed Mr. Barker, the auctioneer and Sotheby’s European chairman, said, “It’s a brilliant Banksy moment, this. You couldn’t make it up, could you?”
Reminds me of the 2-year-old who put her parents' $1,060 in cash through the family paper shredder, which we were just talking about yesterday. But the girl had no artistic intention — or did she?!! — so that's not the old idea I'm talking about. I'm thinking about stuff like "Erased de Kooning":
"It's not a negation. It's a celebration!"
A retired law professor just unseriously hoped that Vox has hit rock bottom.
Here's what I'm looking at:
Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities. It's a choice to highlight similarities when there are also differences. For example I could say that there are similarities between Hitler's gesture in that screenshot and Melania's. There are also differences, and it would be a choice of mine to accuse Vox of juxtaposing those images as a way of saying Melania is like Hitler. I could just as well say those images were juxtaposed as a way to say Melania is different from Hitler. Or maybe there's no juxtaposing at all, and it's pure happenstance that Melania got tucked in over there, to the right of Hitler and underneath "Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good/It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years."
That's some hyperventilating by Matt Yglesias, and I don't know where he gets the authority to "wake up" America to what's really going on at the Supreme Court. You know, Vox touted that new essay about America and the Nazis precisely because it is written by "one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust." And now here comes Matt Yglesias, who is not an eminent and well-respected Supreme Court scholar, and he's eager to wake us up to the "reality" of the "radical right" that's been "run[ning]" the Supreme Court and to explain why it's good for the Supreme Court to be "delegitimized."
When the Supreme Court gives lefties outcomes lefties like, they want conservatives to stand down and accept that the Court is doing proper, even brilliant, legal work. It's analogous to what I call "civility bullshit." You propound belief in something when it serves your interests, but you violate it without a care when your interests go the other way.
I'm interested in this word "delegitimize." I wonder, is it "delegitimize" or "delegitimatize"? The OED doesn't contain the word "delegitimatize," but "delegitimize" is only a subentry, under the entry for the prefix "de-" and without a definition, just 2 historical examples, the oldest of which is from 1969. What a year, 1969! I can't link to the OED, but let me cut and paste this telling quote:
"Legitimatize" is defined as "To make legitimate; to serve as a justification for (something); spec. to make (a child) legitimate by legal enactment or otherwise." The OED tells us it's rare, but John Cheever used it in 1961:
Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities. It's a choice to highlight similarities when there are also differences. For example I could say that there are similarities between Hitler's gesture in that screenshot and Melania's. There are also differences, and it would be a choice of mine to accuse Vox of juxtaposing those images as a way of saying Melania is like Hitler. I could just as well say those images were juxtaposed as a way to say Melania is different from Hitler. Or maybe there's no juxtaposing at all, and it's pure happenstance that Melania got tucked in over there, to the right of Hitler and underneath "Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will delegitimize the Supreme Court — and that’s good/It’s time America woke up to the radical right that’s run the Court for years."
That's some hyperventilating by Matt Yglesias, and I don't know where he gets the authority to "wake up" America to what's really going on at the Supreme Court. You know, Vox touted that new essay about America and the Nazis precisely because it is written by "one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust." And now here comes Matt Yglesias, who is not an eminent and well-respected Supreme Court scholar, and he's eager to wake us up to the "reality" of the "radical right" that's been "run[ning]" the Supreme Court and to explain why it's good for the Supreme Court to be "delegitimized."
When the Supreme Court gives lefties outcomes lefties like, they want conservatives to stand down and accept that the Court is doing proper, even brilliant, legal work. It's analogous to what I call "civility bullshit." You propound belief in something when it serves your interests, but you violate it without a care when your interests go the other way.
I'm interested in this word "delegitimize." I wonder, is it "delegitimize" or "delegitimatize"? The OED doesn't contain the word "delegitimatize," but "delegitimize" is only a subentry, under the entry for the prefix "de-" and without a definition, just 2 historical examples, the oldest of which is from 1969. What a year, 1969! I can't link to the OED, but let me cut and paste this telling quote:
1969 C. Davidson in A. Cockburn & R. Blackburn Student Power 349 People will not move against institutions of power until the legitimizing authority has been stripped away... And we should be forewarned; it is a tricky job and often can backfire, de-legitimizing us.It looks like we're seeing the word coined right there! It works because we already know "legitimize." But is it "legitimize" or "legitimatize"? Both "legitimize" and "legitimatize" have been around since the 1600s.
"Legitimatize" is defined as "To make legitimate; to serve as a justification for (something); spec. to make (a child) legitimate by legal enactment or otherwise." The OED tells us it's rare, but John Cheever used it in 1961:
1961 J. Cheever Jrnls. (1991) 152 The most important thing he did for me was to legitimatize manly courage.Harrumph! Sounds right wing. Let's check "legitimize." The OED refers us to "legitimatize" for the definition but does not warn us that it's rare. I guess people don't like too many syllables.
If Car Companies Hadn't Lied About Diesel
In 2014 the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered that the diesel cars of a number of different car manufacturers exceeded legal levels for nitrogen oxide emissions. The result of diesel cars emitting higher levels of pollution than claimed by the manufacturers has been far higher levels of air pollution across the world. This has been starkly visualized by Da Standaard.
Last
"Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom."
From the Susan Collins speech in the Senate yesterday.
I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.
Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.
On this notion of "hitting rock bottom" — no, don't go to Urban Dictionary! — I found an article (in NY Magazine) by Jesse Singal, "The Tragic, Pseudoscientific Practice of Forcing Addicts to 'Hit Rock Bottom'":
It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?
I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.
Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.
On this notion of "hitting rock bottom" — no, don't go to Urban Dictionary! — I found an article (in NY Magazine) by Jesse Singal, "The Tragic, Pseudoscientific Practice of Forcing Addicts to 'Hit Rock Bottom'":
One of the many impressive things about Maia Szalavitz’s new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, is how effectively she debunks various myths about addiction and how to treat it. In fact, the book’s main argument is that many people are misreading what addiction is altogether: It should be seen not as a disease or a moral or personality shortcoming, but rather a learning disorder. “Addiction doesn’t just happen to people because they come across a particular chemical and begin taking it regularly,” she writes early on. Rather, “[i]t is learned and has a history rooted in their individual, social, and cultural developments.”American politics is shot through with us/them rhetoric and emotion right now. I don't know the way out, other than to resist it myself, as I continue my daily scribblings here. I like hope as much as the next person, but I don't think hitting rock bottom is the beginning of a path of recovery, and if I did, I'd need to believe that the Senate can't go any lower, and I don't think the musings of Susan Collins are going to turn anyone back.
Or, as Szalavitz put it to the Daily Beast: “If you don’t learn that a drug helps you cope or make you feel good, you wouldn’t know what to crave. People fall in love with a substance or an activity, like gambling. Falling in love doesn’t harm your brain, but it does produce a unique type of learning that causes craving, alters choices and is really hard to forget.”...
As Szalavitz explains, the idea comes from “one of [Alcoholics Anonymous’s] foundational texts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.” She pulls this excerpt:Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s, the remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything for a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.Since the first of the 12 steps an A.A. member must work through is to admit to “admit their powerlessness” over their addiction, it makes sense that the program would embrace a device like “rock bottom.” It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”
Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation.
Szalavitz explains that this is a totally pseudoscientific concept.... For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.”...
[W]hen it comes to “hitting bottom” and so many of the other pseudoscientific approaches to fighting addiction, the actual goal — or part of it, at least — has always been to marginalize the addict, to set them apart and humiliate them. There’s a deep impulse to draw a clear, bold line between us, the healthy people, and them, the addicts. What clearer way to emphasize that divide than to cast them down into a rock-bottom pit, away from the rest of us?
It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?
Friday 5 October 2018
"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.
"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."
Reported in "Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation" (NYT).
Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):
Full text (NYT):
Reported in "Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation" (NYT).
Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):
Thank you Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you Lisa Murkowski for standing up for women and against sexual predators. And how about you Susan Collins? Do you want to be the only woman in the Senate to put a man creditably accused of sexual assault against multiple women who has clearly demonstrated his intent in the very recent Jane Doe case to eviscerate, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade? It's time to stand with your sisters and vote "No!" to white male power and privilege to avoid responsibility for sexual misconduct by blaming and mocking the women.ADDED: Here's the Susan Collins speech:
Full text (NYT):
Informed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 76, I have interpreted [the Senate's advise-and-consent role] to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee’s philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee’s qualifications as long as that nominee’s philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought....
Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee.ADDED: I'm only quoting a portion of Collins's speech, which is quite substantial. Here is a much shorter speech from Senator Lisa Murkowski, the one Republican who is voting no:
Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.
In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.
The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.
This hasn’t been fair to the judge, but I also recognize that we need to have institutions that are viewed as fair and if people who are victims, people who feel that there is no fairness in our system of government, particularly in our courts, then you’ve gone down a path that is not good and right for this country. And so I have been wrestling with whether or not this was about qualifications of a good man or is this bigger than the nomination.
And I believe we’re dealing with issues right now that are bigger than the nominee and how we ensure fairness and how our legislative and judicial branch can continue to be respected. This is what I have been wrestling with, and so I made the — took the very difficult vote that I did.
I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s a good man. It just may be that in my view he’s not the right man for the court at this time. So I have taken my vote here this morning, I’m going to go back to my office and write a floor statement that is more fulsome and have the opportunity to have that.
But this has truly been the most difficult evaluation of a decision that I have ever had to make, and I’ve made some interesting ones in my career. But I value and respect where my colleagues have come down from in their support for the judge, and I think we’re at a place where we need to begin thinking about the credibility and integrity of our institutions.
What Melania did was "like showing up to a meeting of African-American cotton farmers in a Confederate uniform."
What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White Hat" (NYT). The NYT says a few nice things, deep in the article:
Why does the headline say "Another White Hat"? I think it's because there was a lot of talk last April about a white hat she wore in France. See "Melania Trump, White Hat/The first lady’s choice of headgear made quite a statement on the second day of the French state visit" (NYT). The NYT fashion critic struggled to find meaning:
AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):
Mrs. Trump has seemed at ease... She has posed for photos with babies and children, often murmuring the same things at each stop — “Beautiful!” and “Hi, guys!” — while holding their hands or waving at the cameras.... On Friday, she looked happy as she visited a red clay feeding pen for orphaned elephants at the Nairobi National Park. She administered them formula in oversized baby bottles, patted the animals on their heads and inspected their floppy ears.We're told she wore a white shirt and that the shirt did not get dirty as she fed the baby elephants.
Why does the headline say "Another White Hat"? I think it's because there was a lot of talk last April about a white hat she wore in France. See "Melania Trump, White Hat/The first lady’s choice of headgear made quite a statement on the second day of the French state visit" (NYT). The NYT fashion critic struggled to find meaning:
In the iconography of the Western, the good guys wore white hats... It’s possible Mrs. Trump is not aware of this.... Except she has something of a history of using white suits to send what seem like fairly pointed messages; see her decision to wear white — associated with women’s rights in the form of the suffragist movement, as well as Hillary Clinton — to her husband’s first State of the Union address, which happened to be her first high-profile appearance with him after the Stormy Daniels scandal broke....Whatever. We know Melania's most famous fashion message: "I really don’t care. Do U?"
AND: In getting pushed around by a baby elephant, compare Ava Gardner (in "Mogambo," suggested by commenter rcocean):
