Althouse |
- "I remember in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard, we used to say: it takes one to know one. That’s not … just a children’s saying or joke."
- "CDC relaxes distance requirements in schools from 6 to 3 feet/The change applies only to students, not teachers or other adult staff..
- "Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken down by Facebook were left-leaning... [Facebook] said it made room for satirical content..."
- "White brothers and sisters: Pocket that But I’m Not Racist! card. I don’t want to hear about your Black girlfriend in college..."
- "One of the things I had no idea about, coming from a working-class background, is that America's ruling class loves to celebrate how much power and money it has."
- Apparently, we need to be assured that Joe Biden is real.
- Have you been following the Madison, Wisconsin story about a city counsel meeting where somebody muttered "c*nt"?
- "Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use..."
- At the Thursday Night Café...
- Got my second shot.
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 08:51 AM PDT "We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And as a result we assess [a person's] activities and give assessments." Said Vladimir Putin, quoted in "'Takes one to know one': Putin-Biden spat escalates after 'killer' accusation/Officials in Moscow go on offensive after Biden says Russian president will pay price for election meddling" (The Guardian). Putin added, ominously: "I would tell him: Be healthy. I wish him good health. I say this without irony, without joking." |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 08:40 AM PDT NBC reports. The change comes amid a massive push to get kids back in the classroom, from lawmakers to parents. Multiple studies have shown increases in depression and anxiety among children during the pandemic. And a survey from NBC News and Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, found lower stress levels among students who have been able to spend time in the classroom, compared with peers who are virtual learning exclusively.  |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 09:16 AM PDT "... but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.... In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used 'satire' claims to protect their presence on the platform.... For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire. 'At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture'.... 'Removing someone from social media can end their career these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement'.... 'You just wake up and find you're in danger of being shut down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic'...." The headline is misleading as you should be able to tell if you read my excerpt carefully. It won't work for Facebook that has a rule against right-wing satire but allows left-wing satire. The quote "At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture" is from Emerson T. Brooking, "a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms." He's guessing that Facebook stopped accepting satire as a cover for disinformation and incitement. That worked against The Babylon Bee, as intended. Then, it had to apply the same rule to left-wing satirists. It's not that Facebook "didn't recognize irony." The "trouble dealing with satire" wasn't that it was humor-deaf and couldn't distinguish satire from serious things. It was that satire worked too well as an excuse to justify publishing things Facebook wanted to exclude. What kind of left-wing material got swept up in Facebook's censorship? The NYT describes a cartoon by "left-leaning cartoonist" Matt Bors. Titled "Boys Will Be Boys," it "depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be 'stabby guys' and to 'yell slurs at teenagers' while playing video games." I don't think the Times has a link to it, but I found it easily: here. And you can read more of Bors's cartoons here. I read his newest cartoon, and it begins with a false statement: "Minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for 45 years." But the minimum wage has only been $7.25 since 2009. In 1976, the minimum wage was $2.30. Yes, but the cartoon is set in the future. Get it?!  |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 07:01 AM PDT "... or your Black postman to whom you give fruitcake every Christmas, or that Black comp and lit teacher who totally, like, rocked your world. It doesn't matter if you are racist or not racist or antiracist; our society is racist." Writes Don Lemon, in his book "THIS IS THE FIRE/What I Say to My Friends About Racism," quoted in the NYT review of the book "Don Lemon's New Book Hopes to Guide America Through a Conversation About Race." The review is by Wesley Lowery, who notes that you can tell Lemon wrote the book himself because he has an "easily recognizable voice" and "Much like his show, the book jumps around in both content and tone." Lowery, "a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covers issues of race and justice," doesn't seem willing to say anything harsh about Lemon's book, but I don't think he has any respect for it. The review ends: [The book is] both direct in tone and obvious in content — the type of unsparing historical statement from an "openly Black" news anchor likely to prompt some white viewers to clutch their pearls even as Black viewers look at one another and unemotionally remark, "Yeah, we already knew that." As a factual matter, Lemon is right: We have not arrived at this moment, our "race problem" deeply unresolved, by mistake. What remains unclear is whether Lemon's white readers, and viewers, will be willing to believe it. Why does Lowery think he knows what how white people will think and feel if they read Don Lemon's book? Why wouldn't we look at one another and unemotionally remark, "Yeah, we already knew that"? Why does Lowery stereotype us as wearers of pearls? Why is he painting a picture of us shocked by things that are well-known? What does he think white people might not be "willing to believe"? This is casual smearing of a racial group. The assignment you took on was to review Don Lemon's book. Why won't you tell us what you actually think of it instead of turning to the potential readers, purporting to inhabit their minds, and insulting them?  |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 06:19 AM PDT "I call these 'masters of the universe' events, and they're held all over the country in fancy hotels, ski lodges and beach resorts. On this particular evening, my wife and I found ourselves at a roundtable with the CEO of a large hotel chain on our left, and a large communications conglomerate on our right. The Republicans, we're often told, are the party of the rich and famous. Yet nearly everyone assembled at this dinner simply loathed Donald Trump. He was the focus of nearly every conversation. And then the hotel CEO announced, 'Trump has no idea how much his policies are hurting business. I mean, we can't keep people for $18 an hour in our hotels. If we're not paying $20, we're understaffed. And it's all because of Donald Trump's immigration policies.' Let's pause for a second to appreciate one of the wealthiest men in the world complaining about paying hard-working staff $20 an hour. The only thing he was missing was the Monopoly Man hat and cane. His argument, while vile, was at least intellectually honest: 'Normally, if we can't find workers at a given wage, we just get a bunch of immigrants to do the job. It's easy. But there are so few people coming in across the border, so we just have to pay the people here more.' This is why the American labor movement opposed immigration expansion for much of the past century—until recently, when many labor unions decided that being woke took priority over protecting workers. My wife is not a political person, and I've never seen her as animated by a conversation about politics as she was at this 'masters of the universe' dinner. 'OK,' she told me later. 'I can understand why you can't stand these people.'... Nearly every major business and financial leader in this country is a supporter of the Democratic Party. They love illegal immigration for the simple reason that their livelihoods are subsidized by illegal immigration—while illegal aliens themselves are subsidized by the taxpayer. It's a redistribution scheme from the poor to the rich. More immigration means lower wages for their workers and easier access to servants for their decadent personal lives.... Whenever I criticize the Biden administration's immigration policies, someone tells me I'm 'racist.'... It's not racist to refuse to do the bidding of America's corporate oligarchy, and it's not compassionate to create a crisis on both sides of our southern border." Writes J.D. Vance (at Newsweek). It's absurd that it's become so easy to manipulate people with the accusation of racism. Vance makes the point that Trump was fearless and stood his ground and that other politicians should look to him as a role model.  |
| Apparently, we need to be assured that Joe Biden is real. Posted: 19 Mar 2021 05:39 AM PDT
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 06:24 AM PDT The Wisconsin State Journal reports: An independent analysis has failed to identify the person who called a local activist a vulgarity toward the end of a marathon online meeting in September that exposed deep divisions on the Madison City Council. At the same time, the report released Thursday by Phoenix-based USA Forensic identifies four men who might have said the word. And while the four include the man long accused in the incident, Ald. Paul Skidmore, it also suggests the culprit was, unlike Skidmore, wearing a headset and had a microphone that was activated at the time the word was uttered. So it sounds like it wasn't Skidmore. Yet the headline is "Accused Madison City Council member 1 of 4 suspects ID'd in report on misogynist slur." Why stress that it could still be him when it's more likely to be one of the other 3? We heard the word because the utterer had a voice-activated headset. You may think: I need to know more about the "deep divisions on the Madison City Council" and what all this has to do with Skidmore.
The headline on this article is really unjustified. And I'm guessing Neumeister initially asked only for voice samples from the males who had voice-activated headphones, so that Skidmore would have been absolved at that point. So why did Hass insist on including Skidmore? I guess because Skidmore had been accused, but why was he accused? The findings come a little more than two weeks before Skidmore faces voters in the April 6 election. He and Nikki Conklin emerged from a four-way primary last month. The woman who was about to speak when someone blurted out "C*nt!" was Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores, identified in the article as an "activist." She made a formal complaint against Skidmore. At the very end of the article, we get something of an answer:
He supported the police.  |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 04:51 AM PDT "... frustrating staffers who were pleased by initial indications from the Biden administration that recreational use of cannabis would not be immediately disqualifying for would-be personnel, according to three people familiar with the situation. The policy has even affected staffers whose marijuana use was exclusive to one of the 14 states—and the District of Columbia—where cannabis is legal. Sources familiar with the matter also said a number of young staffers were either put on probation or canned because they revealed past marijuana use in an official document they filled out as part of the lengthy background check for a position in the Biden White House.... A candidate's personal drug history, barring past convictions for possession, is largely based on the honor system, as well as supplemental interviews with family and friends by the FBI—although lying on the 136-page SF-86 form is a felony, and effectively bars a candidate from ever working for a federal agency.... Some of these dismissals, probations and remote work appointments could have potentially been a result of inconsistencies that came up during the background check process, where a staffer could have, for example, misstated the last time they used marijuana." It sounds as though you need to know the best answer to whether to lie on the form or not. Loathsome hypocrisy, whatever the answer is.
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| Posted: 18 Mar 2021 05:22 PM PDT ... you can talk about whatever you want.  |
| Posted: 18 Mar 2021 04:28 PM PDT So far so good.  |
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