Althouse |
- "Former President Donald Trump is planning to launch his own social-media platform within the coming months..."
- "Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year..."
- Why do white people want to use the N-word?
- "[Yasmin] Benoit is determined to ensure other asexual (or 'ace') people don’t feel broken or alone in a world in which lust and desire pulsate through our entire culture...."
- "CUNY law school dean cancels herself after ‘slaveholder’ comment."
- "Threw my stimmy into the stock market and damn, it’s been a beautiful morning."
- Ice update.
- "Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation."
- "Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions..."
- "In March last year I was sectioned and went to a psychiatric ward for six weeks, I had been diagnosed with suffering from a Psychotic episode...."
- Brains.
- At the Sunrise Café...
- "Tall, with short-cropped hair and distinctive glasses, Peretti was both mercurial (she allegedly threw a fur coat into a fire when arguing with Halston) and minimal."
- "Leaders of the British group LGB Alliance warn that lesbians are 'going to become extinct’ as individuals increasingly identify as trans..."
- "Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime..."
- "By 1979, he was managing the lots, a job that came with the keys to an inconspicuous entry and an empty concession stand in left field..."
- "I feel strongly that the longstanding tradition of having one’s father or other prominent male figure walk a woman down the aisle is a tradition worth tossing."
- At the Friday Night Cafe...
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 04:38 PM PDT "... longtime Trump adviser Jason Miller said during a Sunday appearance on Fox News 'Media Buzz.' 'I do think we're going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform... This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media. It's going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does, but it will be his own platform'..."  |
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 03:43 PM PDT "... and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade.... The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans' good-faith participation.... ...Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002... that Congress needs to... [create] a third-party verification system for business income.... Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.... The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard.... Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent.... The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.... The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let's start by collecting what they already owe." Says the Editorial Board of the NYT.  |
| Why do white people want to use the N-word? Posted: 21 Mar 2021 03:16 PM PDT Question flipped:
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| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 08:27 AM PDT "And while many aces, such as Benoit, are also aromantic, meaning they have no interest in romantic relationships, others feel differently. [Angela] Chen, for example, is biromantic (attracted romantically to both genders) and has a long-term boyfriend with whom she has sex. She says she has sex with her partner for emotional reasons only – to feel close to him – but adds: 'I could go the rest of my life being celibate and I would be perfectly happy.'... If you remove sexual desire, what's the difference between romance and an intense platonic friendship? Research suggests key differences, says Chen, with romantic attraction leaving individuals wanting to change their life for their partner, being infatuated with them and becoming possessive.... When many people envisage an 'asexual' they picture a nerdy, androgynous white male – think Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory – but as a black female model, Benoit is taking on these stereotypes...." From "'I don't want sex with anyone': the growing asexuality movement" (The Guardian).  |
| "CUNY law school dean cancels herself after ‘slaveholder’ comment." Posted: 21 Mar 2021 07:55 AM PDT
She was trying to take blame, but she's not as blameworthy as a slaveholder, so the analogy to a slaveholder taking blame, was... was what? She was taking blame for something racial — disparate racial impact — but disparate racial impact is much less bad than slavery, so in making the analogy, she was exaggerating her own blame. Then, she got blamed for that exaggeration, and she reacted by canceling herself — firing herself into retirement — which is another dramatic exaggeration. The original offense was to exaggerate, the exaggeration was then exaggerated, and in response to the exaggeration, she performed an additional exaggeration. It's a perfect storm of self-dramatization. But I don't have the inside view, only Bilek's reaction. I can only attempt to imagine how the other people at CUNY School of Law behave.  |
| "Threw my stimmy into the stock market and damn, it’s been a beautiful morning." Posted: 21 Mar 2021 07:20 AM PDT Said some guy, quoted in "Recast as 'Stimmies,' Federal Relief Checks Drive a Stock Buying Spree/The government set out to prop up the economy. It may also be propping up the market" (NYT).
Play money? I suppose the government expected us to buy items of merchandise and restaurant meals. I would have thought that saving your money is the most dull, conservative thing to do, and if you save, aren't you supposed to invest and not just leave your money in your bank account? Also, "propping up the market"? Propping? Didn't look to me like it was sagging.  |
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 06:50 AM PDT Yesterday, at sunrise:
Today (note the same tree):
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| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 06:25 AM PDT "In other words, uncool. The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president's guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.... They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.... In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.... So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don't put their foot on the gas.... Obama's failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.... Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen...."  |
| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 04:46 AM PDT "1. An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; 2. A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3. The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel)." Wrote Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" (1979), quoted at the Wikipedia entry "Graphomania." "Graphomania" is a word I looked up after writing the previous post, about Mr. Doodle. What if anything distinguishes obsessive writing from obsessive drawing? I don't know, but back in 2005 there was a show called "Obsessive Drawing" at The American Folk Art Museum. Holland Cotter wrote about it in the NYT:
Yeah, who even hears about that anymore? On the internet, who's the outsider? Mr. Doodle didn't need the Folk Art Museum to embrace him. He just put himself out there on social media. Archaic prose from Cotter's article:
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| Posted: 21 Mar 2021 04:30 AM PDT "It's basically like an overspill of your brain's 'stress bucket,' when your mind can't handle it any more. In my case I went through a wave of hallucinations and delusions from thinking that I was speaking to God to being hired to doodle all over Donald Trump's wall to believing that I had become the video game character Crash Bandicoot. In the psychiatric ward I believed I had met and become friends with Banksy and Kanye West and that we were destined to doodle the world together, in reality these were nurses and patients. It was amazing how convinced I was that these things were all true, it was as if I was living in an alternate reality dream world and I just couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what wasn't.... I was under a lot of pressure mainly from the administrative side of my work, the contracts and legal stuff got on top of me and there were too many things to deal with at once. I am much better now... and I am able to doodle better than ever before!" Writes Mr. Doodle on Facebook. You can see a lot of his work there too — here. Instagram — here. Sample: Here's an Artnet article about him from 3 weeks ago: "How an Artist Named Mr. Doodle Became a Multimillion-Dollar Auction Sensation With a Bunch of Squiggles and 'Like'-able Branding/Powered by towering sales results in Asia and millions of social followers, Mr. Doodle has quietly taken the auction market by storm."
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 09:26 AM PDT
ADDED: Turley took down the tweet Kruse mocked. He's reposted like this, so that it no longer depicts Rousseau as speaking of "eating the rich" in 1793.
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 08:37 AM PDT
... you can talk about whatever you want.  |
| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 08:33 AM PDT "'Take away, take away,' is how she described her process to Vogue in 1986.... Peretti led an ascetic, unhurried, and happy existence in Catalonia (perhaps somewhat akin to that of Georgia O'Keeffe in Taos, New Mexico), that she found conducive to creation. 'Of course, I'm slow,' she told Vogue. 'I have to crystallize a form, find the essence. It's a continual training to be essential in your work, and then you have to be essential in your life, too.'" From "Jewelry Designer Elsa Peretti Has Died" (Vogue). I've loved Elsa Peretti since the 1970s, and she is the only jewelry designer I've ever cared about. Here's all the Elsa Peretti jewelry at the Tiffany website.  |
| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 06:20 PM PDT "... a fear echoed both by trans-exclusionary groups and by lesbian feminists who in other ways advocate for trans rights. Feminist writer Aimee Anderson frets about 'the extinction of an entire people,' and CherrÃe Moraga worries that butch lesbians, self-actualizing as transmasculine, might 'become a dying breed.' Tomboys, too, have become a point of contention, seen by some as a 'rarer and rarer species' that is 'going extinct' as more tomboyish children identify as trans and/or nonbinary.... As a lesbian researcher of tomboyism trained in queer theory, I find claims like these at once absurd and frightening. Extinction anxieties have long fueled nationalist, fascist and white-supremacist movements and often beget eugenicist agendas. Indeed, tomboyism as we know it arose in concert with eugenics.... Child-rearing manuals began advocating for exercise and comfortable clothing, instead of the restrictive and harmful corsets then common, as means of making White girls fit to produce healthy White offspring.... Lesbians are not a species, and we feed existing racist, ableist and homophobic agendas when we invoke extinction...." From "The latest form of transphobia: Saying lesbians are going extinct" by Lynne Stahl (WaPO).  |
| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 07:57 AM PDT "... fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement's version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the 'real' motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are. Mass killers, if they are motivated by bigotry or hate, tend to let the world know.... When the cops reported the killer's actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany: 'The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy, misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this 'explication' from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is also a willful erasure.'" From "When The Narrative Replaces The News/How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres" by Andrew Sullivan (Substack). Sullivan brings up a second issue:
He doesn't mention the big lawsuit that's knocking on the door of the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. This is an effort to overrule the case that permits race to be taken into account in admissions decisions, and it is premised on the problem of discrimination against applicants with Asian ancestry. I've been wondering about mainstream media's intense focus on anti-Asian sentiment. Do WaPo and the NYT not notice that this newfound empathy for Asian Americans threatens to undermine affirmative action at this moment in the development of constitutional law? Now, I'd like to see the news told straight, without bias one way or the other, but if narratives are chosen, why are they chosen? Are they chosen carefully, with attention to collateral effects? Maybe WaPo and the NYT just plunged headlong into its narrative because it seems to work as anti-Trump or to continue the momentum of Critical Race Theory, but if you really took Critical Race Theory seriously, you'd worry that these powerful institutions were fortifying white supremacy. In that light, I'm pointing out that there's a real risk of losing affirmative action. Also visible in that light is the question whether affirmative action itself is (and always was) a mechanism of white supremacy. Does deviousness outweigh recklessness? I really don't know.  |
| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 06:02 AM PDT "Mr. Garvey estimated that the space, whose ceiling sloped down with the 300-level seats above it, was about 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. He created a hallway of cardboard boxes to disguise the apartment from the door. 'I open the door and it looks like a storeroom,' said Mr. Bradley, the former Eagle. 'But if you walk down between the boxes, it opened up into one of the neatest apartments I think I'd ever seen.' There was AstroTurf carpet, a bed, some seating, a coffee table and lamps. Devices included a toaster oven, coffee maker, space heaters and a stereo.... Mr. Garvey called it 'cozy,' with 'everything a guy would want.' Bathrooms were across the hall, employee showers downstairs.... In his book, Mr. Garvey describes 'an off-the-wall South Philly version of "The Phantom of the Opera,"' including encounters with the Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, the Sixers legend Julius Erving and the Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw.... 'It was euphoric.... It was like a form of meditation for me. It just — it helped me a lot.' He hid in plain sight: Everyone knew him, he said, and his job gave him a reason to be around at any hour, every day of the week. 'It was right in front of their eyes, they just couldn't believe it... I wouldn't believe it myself. The disbelief is the key to how I got away with it.'" Here's Garvey's memoir, "The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, a surreal memoir." ADDED: Here's The Philadelphia Inquirer article on the subject. It has some additional details:
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2021 04:05 AM PDT "This tradition always felt frankly gross to me, deeply rooted in patriarchy, and the notion that a woman must belong to a man." Said Lauren Nolan, a recent bride, quoted in "Walking Down the Aisle Alone/Meghan Markle did it. Many other brides choose to do the same, often because of the sexist origins of the tradition." In the case of Meghan Markle, she was estranged from her father. Is there a trend of women who love their living, ambulatory father choosing to walk down the aisle alone? Instead, Ms. Nolan said, when she met her fiancé at the altar, she was making a joint decision to combine their lives, rather than participating in a handoff between men. If it's a matter of the man and woman in exactly the same position, fully independent human beings joining their lives together, why is he standing at the altar while she takes a long, slow walk for the assembled crowd? Isn't that also a relic of the sexist tradition? If you keep the bride's walk and the groom's positioning at the altar, why are you excluding your beloved dad from the old-time-y spectacle? What does it mean for the groom to stand at the altar and watch his bride slowly approach? Is that really devoid of sexism? But you want to deprive Dad of a profound moment that he may have dreamed of all your life? Why? If the honest answer is that you don't have a sufficiently worthy dad, fine. Do your solo walk. But don't make other women feel they need to sideline their dear dad to prove their feminist mettle. Your solo-walk wedding isn't solidly founded on feminism. It's selective feminism — cafeteria feminism. Show us a sacrifice you're making for feminism, and maybe you'll have some moral standing. Even still, people putting on the theatrical show that is their wedding should figure out their own values. They don't have to put feminism first. But if they're going to preen about putting feminism first, they'd better actually do it. Let the bride and groom walk separately down the side aisles and meet in the middle. Let the groom wear an outfit as gaudy and eye-riveting as the bride's. Let petals be scattered in his path. Give him a veil too. Let them lift each other's veils simultaneously. And so on.  |
| Posted: 19 Mar 2021 06:55 PM PDT ... you can talk about whatever you want.  |
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