Thursday, March 18, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"Their passion for nature cuts to the heart of what Scandinavians call friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv)."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 11:28 AM PDT

"The expression literally translates as 'open-air living' and was popularised in the 1850s by the Norwegian playwright and poet, Henrik Ibsen, who used the term to describe the value of spending time in remote locations for spiritual and physical wellbeing.... Today, the phrase is used more broadly by Swedes, Norwegians and Danes to explain anything from lunchtime runs in the forest, to commuting by bike (or on cross-country skis when the snow falls) to joining friends at a lakeside sauna (often followed by a chilly dip in the water) or simply relaxing in a mountain hut. The concept is also linked closely to allmansrätten, the right to roam. Scandinavian countries all have similar laws which allow people to walk or camp practically anywhere, as long as they show respect for the surrounding nature, wildlife and locals....  Swedish data confirm that the amount of time young people are active outdoors has dipped slightly over the past three decades, with around 25% now spending time in the countryside or forest at least once a week, compared to 29% in the early 1980s."

From "Friluftsliv: The Nordic concept of getting outdoors" (BBC). That's a 2017 article. I got there after googling "friluftsliv," which I encountered in a new article, "One Tank Getaway: Late winter in Door County offers great food, welcome respite" (On Milwaukee).

"I Am an Absolute God in Bed. Women Seem Alarmed When I Reveal This."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 11:04 AM PDT

 Headline on an advice column at Slate — paraphrasing the letter-writer.

In case you're wondering...

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 10:50 AM PDT

... yes, I got rid of the Google AdSense ads on purpose. 

I'd only put them back recently because I'd thought, for my own protection, I should open up the flow of information from Google about whether it is getting complaints that this blog — on Google's Blogger — is offensive. 

Yesterday, I got email from Google that 3 things had been reported, and I just found it too annoying to look into. Two things were supposedly "sexual" and the other was something I didn't want to waste time trying to understand — a page didn't "behave" properly? 

I can't be bothered, and I don't like seeing the ads. Too messy!

Anyway... I'm sure no one will miss the ads, and thanks to everyone who uses the Amazon portal or who contributes through PayPal. (Look at the sidebar to see how to do that.)

"For years I’ve told my clients to avoid talking about politics on the first date, but in D.C., and in a year like this one, that’s somewhat impossible. Plus, for Claire..."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 09:45 AM PDT

"... who worked on the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton and is passionate about progressive issues, where someone lands on the political spectrum is very important. So, she flat-out asked him, 'Who did you vote for in the Democratic primary?' Ben stammered a bit. He revealed he admired Andrew Yang's ideas but didn't end up voting in the 2020 primary.... By this time, the conversation had started to drag and Pistachio needed to go outside to do her business. Ben asked for Claire's number and texted her while they were still on the date to make sure she received it. A few minutes later, they said good night and signed off.... Claire had a burning question that couldn't wait: 'I had to know what he thought of Andrew Yang running for New York City mayor.' She texted Ben that one question after the date. Not surprisingly, as part of the Yang Gang during the presidential race, Ben declared his admiration for Yang and confidence that he could be the right person to run the city. Then he followed up with, 'Totally fair question but only if you share your thoughts as well.' Feeling that there are many other candidates (in particular women of color) who would make better mayors, Claire was put off again by Ben's politics and couldn't bring herself to reply."

Writes dating coach Damona Hoffman, in "Date Lab: Talking politics on a first date is usually a no-no. But it couldn't be avoided after a year like this one" (WaPo).

Pistachio is a dog, supposedly a Chihuahua, though it's huge. By the way, "Date Lab" sounds like a dog.

Anyway, throughout this article, before I even got to the part I'm quoting, I thought Ben was much better than Claire. In the end, he gave the date a 4.25 (out of 5) and she gave it a 3.5. They had no further contact.

Ben's statement "Totally fair question but only if you share your thoughts as well" is a bit devious. He's already answered the question, so there's no option to withdraw the question. She can only answer or be deemed unfair. And she doesn't answer! The truth is it's not about fairness. She genuinely only wants someone who shares her politics. That could have been known before the date was arranged, so she wasted his time. 

And maybe if he'd just been asked would you like to go out with a woman who will only be interested in you if you share her politics, he might have said no — even without first hearing what her politics were.

Today's walrus.

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 10:04 AM PDT

ADDED: Is this image a fake? Snopes dealt with it in 2019, and that particular image is fake, but there really was a walrus sleeping on a Russian submarine in 2006 and these pictures of it are not fake:

"Trump’s a liberal New Yorker. Why would we listen to him either?"

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 08:45 AM PDT

Said one guy quoted in "Oklahoma Diner Customers Tell CNN They Won't Get Vaccinated Even If Trump Told Them to: Why Listen to a 'Liberal New Yorker' Like Him?" (CNN). 

I'm making a new tag for this: "Trumpism without Trump." 

Hypothesis: Trump the Man was only ever a man stepping into The Idea of Trump, and that man can step out again, or he can try to stay in but not measure up, and somebody else can take on the Trump role and become real embodiment of The Idea of Trump while Trump the Man melts back into his ordinary human life, and the Trumpsters can continue as true believers whether there is a person in the role of Trump or not.

"For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 08:09 AM PDT

"Ronald Reagan portrayed Black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to 'a woman in Chicago' as the 'welfare queen.'... And the tension between the working class and the poor was easily exploited: Why should 'they' get help for not working when 'we' get no help, and we work? By the time Clinton campaigned for president, 'ending welfare as we knew it' had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs.... Yet when COVID hit, public assistance was no longer necessary just for 'them.' It was needed by 'us.'... The CARES Act, which [Trump] signed into law at the end of March, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000... But the real game changer... is the breadth of Biden's plan.... Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this bill unites them in its sheer expansiveness... Over 70 percent of Americans support the bill... The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. It's clearer than ever.... Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone."

Writes Robert Reich in "How Bidenomics Can Unite America" (Newsweek).

"[N]ot all massage businesses provide sexual services... To suggest as much, as the suspect in the Atlanta area attacks did, is a 'racist assumption.... It ties specifically to the fetishization of Asian woman'...."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 07:57 AM PDT

According to Esther Kao, "an organizer with Red Canary Song, a New York-based collective of Asian and Asian American advocates for massage parlor workers and sex workers," quoted in "Fetishized, sexualized and marginalized, Asian women are uniquely vulnerable to violence" (CNN). 

From the article: 

The way their race intersects with their gender makes Asian and Asian American women uniquely vulnerable to violence, said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum.

The perceptions of Asian and Asian American women as submissive, hypersexual and exotic can be traced back centuries. Rachel Kuo, a scholar on race and co-leader of Asian American Feminist Collective, points to... the Page Act of 1875... enacted seemingly to restrict prostitution and forced labor. In reality, it was used systematically to prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the US, under the pretense that they were prostitutes.

US imperialism has also played a significant role in those attitudes, Kuo said.American service members, while abroad for US military activities (including the Philippine-American War, World War II and the Vietnam War), have a history of soliciting sex workers and patronizing industries that encouraged sex trafficking.

That furthered denigrating stereotypes of Asian women as sexual deviants, which were memorialized on screen. All of those perceptions "have had the effect of excusing and tolerating violence by ignoring, trivializing and normalizing it," Kuo said.Those stereotypes also feed into perceptions of "Asian women as cheap and disposable workers," said Kuo....

ADDED: This analysis functions to characterize the murderer as racially motivated even if it is true that he was, as he's said, motivated by tormenting sexual addiction. Why did he think killing these women had to do with sex? As Kao, puts it, above, it is racially prejudiced to look at these masseuses as see them as prostitutes.

"On the day the Capitol was stormed by pro-Trump rioters in January... his phone began to buzz with text messages and phone calls from friends and colleagues, predicting that Clearview AI would be critical..."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 07:36 AM PDT

"... for identifying participants...  One of Ton-That's salespeople called because a police officer wanted free access. 'I said we could because it was an emergency situation,' [said the chief executive of Clearview, Ton-That]. And in fact, the next day, the company saw a surge in searches from law enforcement. The F.B.I. wouldn't discuss whether Clearview AI was being used for its investigation of the riot.... There had been a time when public opinion seemed set firmly against facial recognition. But suddenly — with people showing their faces while rampaging through the Capitol — Clearview and similar products seemed quite appealing. Ton-That and I talked on the phone just a couple of days after the riot.... While he was clearly taken aback by the events unfolding in his adopted country, he also seemed keenly aware it could demonstrate the utility of his company's product, and perhaps sway those on the fence if it played a role in finding and punishing the people involved. 'You see a lot of detractors change their mind for a somewhat different use case,' he said. 'We're slowly winning people over.'"

From a long NYT article, "Your Face Is Not Your Own/When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open."

"Asian-Americans are AMERICANS/They have nothing to do with a repressive Communist Party or with a virus that originated 7000 miles away on the other side of the world/Anyone without enough common sense to understand that is an idiot."

Posted: 18 Mar 2021 06:27 AM PDT

Tweeted Marco Rubio yesterday. I'm reading that quoted in a WaPo article: "Democrats link Atlanta massacre to anti-Asian rhetoric during pandemic." 

From the article: 

Authorities investigating the spasm of violence in Georgia say early signs pointed to a disturbed suspect who claimed he was a sex addict and who saw the spas as "a source of temptation that needed to be eliminated." Authorities said it was too early to know whether the killings were also racially motivated. 

But many advocates and Democratic lawmakers said it was hard to separate Tuesday's killings from the recent increase in anti-Asian animus, including rhetoric from President Donald Trump.... While many Democrats were quick to condemn the shooting and link it to Trump's rhetoric, Republicans remained mostly quiet....

Trump repeatedly blamed China for unleashing the virus on the world — and tanking the United States' economy. During the tirades, Trump repeatedly used racially insensitive names like "China virus," "Wuhan virus" and "kung flu."...

An Asian American schoolteacher and her husband found a slur spray-painted on the side of their Nissan Altima after leaving a movie theater. An Asian American man on his way to a boba tea shop was told, "Thanks for covid." Across the nation, authorities have investigated roughly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian abuse, advocates say....

Rubio's tweet is important. Imagine a new rule against criticizing China! But how many of us Americans are the "idiots" Rubio is talking about? These "idiots" are on both sides, politically. Trump, criticizing China, didn't highlight the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry. And Trump's antagonists enthusiastically blurred the distinction. 

I put "idiots" in quotes for 2 reasons:

1. I don't use that word, because it risks collateral damage to people who have lesser intellectual gifts.

2. Many of the people blurring the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry are intelligent and devious. To call these people "idiots" is to let them off the hook.

From the Online Etymology entry for "idiot": 

early 14c., "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning;" also in Middle English "simple man, uneducated person, layman" (late 14c.), from Old French idiote "uneducated or ignorant person" (12c.), from Latin idiota "ordinary person, layman; outsider," in Late Latin "uneducated or ignorant person," from Greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" (see idiom).

In plural, the Greek word could mean "one's own countrymen."... 

Ha ha. That took a funny turn. 

ADDED: I read this post out loud to Meade, and he said: "We're idiots, babe/It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And: "From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol."

Source material:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull 
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol... 
Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats 
Blowing through the letters that we wrote 
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

At the Muskrat Café...

Posted: 17 Mar 2021 06:34 PM PDT

IMG_2973

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