Friday, February 19, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Rush Limbaugh, the "isolate."

Posted: 19 Feb 2021 06:52 AM PST

From "Rush Limbaugh's Complicated Legacy/He was a gifted entertainer and advocate, but in his later years certain flaws became more evident" by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: 

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding. 

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called "an isolate." Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers....

He wasn't just isolated, he was an isolate. Isolation wasn't just a characteristic of his, in this formulation, it was what he himself was. 

I've never noticed "isolate" — the noun — used to mean a type of person. Of course, people are often referred to as "isolated," but "isolate"? It seems like "introvert" or "incel." It's all the way deep into your being. 

Yet somehow you have close friends, close enough that one of them can be referred to as "one of his closest friends." Do you have enough close friends that there's someone who'd refer to himself as "one of" your "closest friends"?! Maybe your "closest friends" are fairly distant. A person with no truly close friends still has his "closest friends." These people might not even know him well at all, just well enough to observe that he is isolated, and coldly enough to call him "an isolate." 

The noun "isolate" is a term in social psychology: "A person who, either from choice or through separation or rejection, is isolated from normal social interaction; also occasionally an animal separated from its kind."

 

People say we've got it made/Don't they know we're so afraid?

"A single shot of the [Pfizer] vaccine is 85% effective in preventing symptomatic disease 15 to 28 days after being administered..."

Posted: 19 Feb 2021 06:05 AM PST

"... according to a peer-reviewed study conducted by the Israeli government-owned Sheba Medical Center and published in the Lancet medical journal. Pfizer and BioNTech recommend that a second dose is administered 21 days after the first. The finding is a vindication of the approach taken by the U.K. government to delay a second dose by up to 12 weeks so it could use limited supplies to deliver a single dose to more people, and could encourage others to follow suit.... "

The Wall Street Journal reports.

"Supplied with Cruz’s address by a knowledgeable friend, I drove the fifteen minutes from my Houston apartment to the uber-rich River Oaks neighborhood where Cruz lives."

Posted: 19 Feb 2021 08:30 AM PST

"From the street, Cruz's white, Colonial Revival-style mansion looked dark and uninhabited.... [T]hen I heard barking and noticed a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator's front door.... As I approached to knock, a man stepped out of the Suburban parked in Cruz's driveway. 'Is this Senator Cruz's house?' I asked. He said it was, that Cruz wasn't home, and identified himself as a security guard. When asked who was taking care of the dog, the guard volunteered that he was.... I took a photo.... Some on Twitter have questioned whether the dog is in fact a poodle, suggesting alternative breeds such as a Bichon Frise. I couldn't get close enough to tell, and I'm no canine expert, but 'Ted Cruz's poodle' just sounds funny. As soon as I posted the photo on Twitter, noting that Cruz 'appears to have left behind the family poodle,' all hell broke loose...."

From "Ted Cruz Abandons Millions of Freezing Texans and His Poodle, Snowflake" (NY Magazine).

It's creepy going to someone's house like that, and the dog is clearly better off at home with a trusted person taking care of him, but Ted Cruz's trip to Cancún at this time when his state is in crisis has been deemed the top story of the day, and everybody always wants to hear about dogs. 

Dogs are at the top of the list of things deemed newsworthy that are not in fact newsworthy. Get dogs in your story and you'll have masses of readers. It's especially good if a dog saves a child, but the very best is when a Republican does something that can be presented as hurting a dog, like when Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the roof of his car and when mean old Trump offended all of dogdom by failing to own a dog. 

Now, we have Ted Cruz not bothering his dog with needless plane trips and confinement in hotel rooms. The heartless wretch!

ADDD: "'Ted Cruz's poodle' just sounds funny." That is a microaggression! It is an old stereotype that a gay man would have a poodle. "'Ted Cruz's poodle' just sounds funny" is a homophobic microaggression. 

Here's a 2014 article in the Village Voice, "Fifi or Fido? New York's Gay Men Defy Worn-Out Canine Stereotypes": "The old stereotype held that like attracts like: the prissy hairdresser with a pampered, manicured poodle or Chihuahua; the growly muscle bear controlling a giant, ultra-butch Great Dane or mastiff...."

And years ago, Dan Savage, who is gay, told a story on "This American Life" about his anxiety about being seen with a poodle:

My dad liked to watch cop shows.... There was a recurring gay character on Barney Miller, one of the first on television. Very swishy, total stereotype, carried a purse, owned a poodle... And sitting in front of the TV, I made a resolution. I was going to be some kind of fag when I grow up, but I wasn't going to be that kind of fag.... I wasn't going to own a poodle. That's what I learned from television. Don't own a poodle. I made up my mind to be a different sort of homo, not like the gay people you saw on TV, which were the only gay people I ever saw....

Despite my exposure to all those swishy gay men walking poodles on TV during my formative years, I grew up to be a different kind of gay. And despite the girl-crazy little boys [Savage's young son] D.J. sees on the Disney channel, he may grow up to be a different kind of straight....

D.J. asked for a poodle a few years ago. And I know how awful that sounds. The son of two gay men begins to adopt the homosexual lifestyle, poodles and all. Purses are next. And he didn't want any poodle, he wanted a toy poodle. A poodle he planned to name Pierre.... Somehow, my straight son managed to get me out on the streets with a poodle.

AND: In case you're thinking of arguing that "'Ted Cruz's poodle' just sounds funny" isn't a microaggression because Ted Cruz is straight: 1. There is collateral damage, microdamage, to any gay men who read the article, if they are familiar with the old stereotype, 2. It is a targeted microaggression against the straight man who is supposedly not measuring up to a heterosexual stereotype.

It will be hard for the WaPo "fact checker" to give 4 Pinocchios to Joe Biden. He has to back off one Pinocchio because... well, why exactly?

Posted: 19 Feb 2021 07:20 AM PST

Here's Biden repeatedly asserting that "he's traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jingping": 

 

Biden is making a lot of misstatements of fact. The WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler, writes:

During his recent town hall on CNN, President Biden made a number of mistaken claims and assertions. He suggested racehorse owners receive tax breaks worth $9 billion, almost enough to pay for free attendance at community college — a claim that left tax experts scratching their heads. He said that the $7.25 minimum wage set in 2009 would be worth $20 if indexed for inflation, a statement that only makes sense if you are measuring from 1968. He wrongly stated that "vast majority" of undocumented immigrants were not Hispanic.

No Pinocchios assigned for any of that. It's all so obviously wrong that maybe it's not worth bothering to investigate. But Kessler's approach in these columns is, I think, to isolate one thing and figure out where it stands on the continuum from utter truth to bald-faced lie. Here, he's chosen the 17,000 with Xi Jingping assertion. 

The first time Kessler heard it, he says, it "seemed like a typical Biden malaprop." See? Biden gets graded on a curve. Unlike Trump, whose misstatements were judged against a stereotype that he's a huge liar, Biden gets the benefit of a presumption that he's always getting words wrong — as though it's some sort of disability, like his stuttering, and we ought to be charitable.

But Biden has repeated the assertion, as you see in the video clip, so the standard charitable allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the Biden brain was hard to use, and the fact checker has to fact-check at least some of the new President's statements. The feast on Trump is over, and the fact-checking enterprise must go on or at least seem to go on.

Here's Kessler:

[Biden has had] certainly an impressive amount of face time with Xi. But Biden's mileage number has kept us puzzling till our puzzler was sore....

Notice the interposition of a phrase from a children's book. ("And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.") 

Were Kessler's fact checks of Trump's misstatements ever leavened with cutesy phrases like that? 

Kessler figures out that Biden is saying he's traveled "with Xi Jingping" when he was traveling without Xi Jingping but on his way to or from visits with Xi:

A White House official conceded that Biden's line of "traveling with" Xi is not accurate. "This was a reference to the total travel back and forth — both internally in the U.S. and China, and as well as internationally — for meetings they held together," he said. "Some travel was in parallel, some was separately to joint destinations." 

But even using that ridiculous way of counting the traveling together, Kessler "still could not get the travel to add up to 17,000 miles." There are a few different ways to put the numbers together, but Kessler arrives at the options 3,300, 5,600, and 28,000. It's never 17,000. Kessler talked to a White House official and sought help with puzzling out some way to get to the magic number of 17,000, but he came up empty. And Biden repeats this number that's just obviously wrong. He must know it is wrong! So how many Pinocchios?

[Biden's] broader point is undisputed — that he's already spent an unusually large amount of time with Xi for someone who is just now taking office. So Biden's claim is not completely from whole cloth. He did meet Xi in various cities in China and United States, in some cases traveling substantial distances. But numbers are numbers. Biden is using a figure that cannot be verified in a misleading way. He correctly notes he spent hours in private talks with Xi, including outside the capital cities, on different occasions. Those are substantial bragging rights — which makes his apparent need to gild the lily with an invented figure so puzzling. 
The president earns Three Pinocchios.

So Kessler's puzzler is still sore. Me, I'm trying to puzzle out why that gets 3 and not 4. According to WaPo's explanation of its Pinocchio rating, 3 is supposed to mean "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.... 'mostly false'... [or] statements which are technically correct... but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading." The number is just plain wrong, not partly wrong. There's no explanation and the White House was asked for an explanation. It's a number. Nothing adds up even close to it, even when you use a ludicrous definition of what it means to travel "with" somebody!

Stop babying Biden! He's the damned President. If he needs to be babied, get him out of the presidency.

***

A footnote about malapropisms, from the Wikipedia article, "Malapropism": 

[P]hilosopher Donald Davidson suggests that malapropisms reveal something about how people process the meanings of words. He argues that language competence must not simply involve learning a set meaning for each word, and then rigidly applying those semantic rules to decode other people's utterances. Rather, he says, people must also be continually making use of other contextual information to interpret the meaning of utterances, and then modifying their understanding of each word's meaning based on those interpretations.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd said:

Biden having already spent a lot of time with Xi is a good thing, but Trump having any communication at all with Putin, or even mentioning Putin, was portrayed as evidence Putin owned and controlled Trump. And this in spite of the fact that Biden has been credibly accused of having been paid off by Xi whereas Trump's ties to Putin were exhaustively investigated and nothing improper was found. They aren't babying Biden. They're publishing propaganda.

I don't know about those accusations, but even assuming they're untrue, I would think that Biden's extensive time with Xi puts Xi at an advantage. Which man do you think is more able to gather useful knowledge of the weaknesses of the other? It's got to be Xi.

ADDED: I asked "Were Kessler's fact checks of Trump's misstatements ever leavened with cutesy phrases like that?" Glenn Kessler emails and points to an August 4, 2016 fact check of Trump that began "We have puzzled and puzzled over these remarks until our puzzler was sore" — the very same literary reference (to Dr. Seuss). 

Here: "Trump's absurd charge that Clinton raised $60 million in July from just 20 people." By the way, Trump got 4 Pinocchios for that. The explanation for the rating is: 

There's a huge difference between 900,000 and 20. In an effort to spin a narrative that Clinton is controlled by a small group of donors, Trump relies on innuendo and fantasy math. In reality, Clinton raised her campaign cash in July from a substantial base of small donors.

As with Biden's 17,000 miles, you've got a specific number and it's just wrong, but there's a rather absurd effort to explain it — "innuendo and fantasy math." If Trump deserved 4 Pinocchios for that, then why not Biden?

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