Monday, March 29, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:58 PM PDT

IMG_3232 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to... but right now, I'm scared."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:44 PM PDT

"We have come such a long way...just please hold on a little while longer. I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there, just not quite yet." 

Said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky:

Not long after that, as the NYT reports:

President Biden on Monday called on governors and mayors to maintain or reinstate mask-wearing orders, saying that because of "reckless behavior," the coronavirus was again spreading fast, threatening the progress the nation has made so far against the pandemic. "People are letting up on precautions, which is a very bad thing," he said. "We are giving up hard-fought, hard-won gains."...

Asked if states should pause their reopening efforts, the president replied simply, "Yes." He said that governors, mayors, local officials and businesses should demand mask-wearing, calling it a "patriotic duty" that is crucial to the nation's fight against the virus.

"Here's how the full moon helped free the stuck ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:08 PM PDT

Space.com explains.
"We were helped enormously by the strong falling tide we had this afternoon," Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, the salvage firm charged with freeing the Ever Given, told The Associated Press. "In effect, you have the forces of nature pushing hard with you, and they pushed harder than the two sea tugs could pull."

"The uproar over Michael Tomasky’s hiring at TNR underscores the extent to which any institution that isn’t explicitly right wing now faces enormous pressure to go 'woke.'"

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:04 PM PDT

"Tomasky is a through and through liberal but is being cast as a villain simply for not being further left." 

That's a tweet by Thomas Chatterton Williams, quoted in a Substack piece John Ganz titled "The Dumbest Tweet I Have Ever Seen/Not Really, but C'mon."

Ganz writes: 

Is there a political aspect to the disappointment with the situation at The New Republic? Certainly. Have some of the things written online about Michael Tomasky been uncharitable to him, not even giving him a chance before he gets started? Also, certainly. But the reality of the situation is not some grand ideological clash, the constant invocation of which is growing monotonous, to say the least. The fact is, first of all, people are worried about their jobs. It's that simple. Some are having an emotional reaction, which might appear excessive, but it's ultimately about their livelihoods, after all....

What was happening at TNR is exactly what anti-woke culture warriors say they miss in media and magazines: ideological and perspectival diversity.... [F]rom my perspective, the attitude in that Tweet is just an example of anti-intellectualism, a total lack of interest in the world, an unwillingness to care about or engage with anything but one's pet issues, myopia, laziness, hopeless decadence and corruption of the mind etc. Whatever you want to call it, it's just bullshit. I'm getting pretty tired of it.

"The Louvre museum in Paris said Friday it has put nearly half a million items from its collection online for the public to visit free of charge."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 01:42 PM PDT

"As part of a major revamp of its online presence, the world's most-visited museum has created a new database of 482,000 items at collections."  

Yahoo reports.  

Here's the site.  

Here's the first thing I looked for:

I wanted to see that because I have a strong memory of drawing it (in person) and only remembered my drawing (blogged before, here): 


ADDED: Oh, no, wait. It's this one — an older, nakeder Voltaire. This is the "portrait absolument fidèle" that I drew:

"'There is no political or social cause in this courtroom,' Mr. Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, says. He is trying..."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 08:53 AM PDT

"... to focus the jury on the specifics of the evidence and steer them away from the wider issues of race and policing in America that the case symbolizes to the world outside the courtroom." 

From "Derek Chauvin Trial Live Updates: Lawyers Present Case in George Floyd Killing/The murder trial of the former police officer begins Monday in Minneapolis, 10 months after Mr. Floyd's death set off protests across the nation" (NYT). 

The defense will try to argue that Mr. Floyd took a fatal amount of fentanyl, but now [the prosecutor, Jerry W.] Blackwell is saying that is not true, that he had built up a tolerance and was not exhibiting signs of overdose. "Mr Floyd had lived with his opioid addiction for years… he was struggling, he was not passing out."... 

The prosecutor is trying to head off arguments from the defense that George Floyd's size had anything to do with his death — "his size is no excuse," he said. George Floyd was already more than six feet tall in middle school and he rapped under the name Big Floyd with popular DJs and rappers in Houston. 

Mr. Chauvin's lawyer begins his opening arguments with the notion of "reasonable doubt." He needs one juror to buy in to the idea that drugs killed Mr. Floyd, not Mr. Chauvin's knee, to hang the jury and force a mistrial.

Here's a live feed of the trial:

"I was repulsed and even a little afraid (I could easily imagine that the homeowner belonged to a militia group) but also fascinated..."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 08:51 AM PDT

"... perhaps because he plainly also wanted very much to connect, to declare himself, to put forth his vision as any storyteller would. It also seemed as though he wanted to make people laugh, or at least smile. Because, as the display evolved over time, it became clear that he wasn't just putting up political signage; he was directing a subtly changing Kabuki entertainment for the neighborhood. Some days you'd go by and the white-guy doll would be wearing a scowling Trump mask; then he'd be himself again. Some days there'd be a huge Trump figure sitting in the driver's seat of one of the vehicles out front; some days not. One day in the fall, an outer-space creature with glittering green eyes appeared beside the male doll, wearing a Trump 2020 hat; later, the alien returned from whence it came and was replaced by a benign Yoda type, who also supported Trump. A friend who stayed at our house while we were out of town for about a month told us that at one point she saw the male doll and the green-eyed alien embracing; she later said she wasn't sure she really had seen this—which reminded me of my husband's impression of the fist pulling back the flag. Something about the tableau actively engaged your imagination and made you think you saw things that weren't there (or possibly were there, who knows—maybe the alien and the male doll did embrace). Which was, I guess, why I came to enjoy the tableau and to secretly root for its creator. Although the content expressed a political view that I didn't share, the form was artistic, with art's inherently apolitical ambiguity...."

From "A Trump Tableau/Politics and art in a Catskill front yard" by Mary Gaitskill (in The New Yorker).

Sunrise.

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 05:57 AM PDT

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IMG_3222

"Stay home Patrick of Tennessee. We don’t need maga anti-vaxers spreading pestilence across our country. As a matter of fact, don’t even leave your trailer park."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 05:34 AM PDT

"Board the doors shut and stay inside with your AR-15. I think all of these anti-vaxers should be required to have 'do not resuscitate' tattooed on their foreheads." 

Says the top-rated commenter on a Washington Post article, "'Vaccine passports' are on the way, but developing them won't be easy/White House-led effort tries to corral more than a dozen initiatives." 

The commenter is responding to this: 

There is evidence vaccine passports could motivate skeptical Americans to get shots. Several vaccine-hesitant participants at a recent focus group of Trump voters led by pollster Frank Luntz suggested their desire to see family, go on vacation and resume other aspects of daily life outpaced fear of the shots, particularly if travel companies and others moved to require proof of vaccination....

Some attendees dissented and warned that requiring a credential would backfire. "I would change my travel plans," said a man identified as Patrick of Tennessee.

Is the developing opinion that only troglodytes resist vaccine passports? Because I just noticed this:

Don't conflate resistance to vaccine passports with resistance to getting vaccinated. That's what I think the WaPo commenter did. Patrick of Tennessee objected to "requiring a credential," not to getting vaccinated.

ADDED: I think Wolf may be an anti-vaxxer, so her warning isn't scary.

SO: Let's look at the Guardian article she links to, "Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport/The prime minister's 'papers for pints' scheme is nothing less than a national ID card by stealth." 

Obviously, that's the UK, and in the U.S., the "passports" would probably be handled at the state level, like our other IDs. I can imagine the question of vaccine passports in the U.S. getting swirled up into the voter ID drama. Is getting an ID oppressive or something everyone should gladly, willingly do? 

From The Guardian: 

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: "This isn't just about cost savings, it's actually about the principle, it's about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that's what the new coalition government is doing."...

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections....

Aha! It is already mixed up in the voter ID matter in the UK. 

[T]here would be no need to make photo ID mandatory at elections if people could simply use their "vaccine passport" – because, once we've built a system that links our identity to our health data and made this a condition of re-entering pubs, cinemas or concerts, or even our workplace, we could link it to other data too, public or private. This could be used by more than just pub landlords or election officials. The data on our vaccine passports could be used by the police, just as Singapore's authorities admitted in January to using contact-tracing data.

All this – effectively, as I say, a stealth national ID card without the necessary debate – when we don't even know if vaccine passports would help to solve our biggest problem: stopping the spread of the virus....

In January, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: "We are not a papers-carrying country." Yet, here we are, with the government reviewing plans to become just that. Only last month, the vaccine minister, Nadhim Zahawi, ruled out vaccine passports, arguing that they could be "discriminatory" since it is not compulsory for people to get the vaccine.

But some Americans (like the commenter at WaPo quoted above) are enthusiastic about discriminating against anti-vaxxers.

Israel, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark are all countries that have introduced, or plan to introduce, vaccine passports for domestic use. There is a key difference: all of them already have a national ID card system. If we are to follow their example, we would first need an evidence-based explanation as to how vaccine passports will help to stop the spread of the virus.... 

The pandemic has made armchair public health experts of us all, but we need to hear from the real ones to know which trade-offs are necessary, and which are not, as we move into whatever phase is coming next....

I don't think that public health experts can be the last word on "trade-offs," and I don't even know if they can be considered experts on vaccine passports. The issue is whether, given the level of immunity we've already built up, we should limit certain facilities to people who've had the vaccine and, if so, whether we need  them to prove their status with an official government document? 

And what are the collateral effects of this document? Are we concerned about government surveillance and losing our privacy? Are we collaterally enthused because the document could become the voter ID?

"But maybe what you need is... to give families more money and parental benefits and to give them a long economic expansion whose gains are widely shared."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:21 AM PDT

"Call this the Joe Biden-baby-boom hypothesis, which we may be about to test: If you spend on family benefits and run the economy hot enough, maybe fertility rates will finally begin to float back up. This is the ideal scenario for pronatalist liberals, because it would mean more kids without more social conservatism. The second scenario for a fertility recovery, though, involves exactly that: a kind of neo-traditionalist turn, answering the socially liberal swing of the last two decades, that leads to people marrying earlier and having more kids for reasons of values rather than just economics.... [A] third possibility is that a deep fertility decline is more likely to end gradually, through a kind of slow selection process rather than abrupt conversion. By selection I mean that as fewer people have children, the ones who do have kids will be an increasingly distinctive population — not specifically conservative or religious, necessarily, but couples who will have written new scripts for romance, discovered new models for child rearing and burden-sharing, in a cultural and technological landscape that's torn the older models up. So then the children and grandchildren of these trailblazers, inheriting both the new models for family formation and the world itself, would be the ones who drive some future baby boom."

From "How Does a Baby Bust End?/Three scenarios for a more fertile American future." by Ross Douthat (NYT).

From the comments at the NYT: "It should tell Mr. Douthat something that most of the top comments are from women. Guess what. Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids. And if there is anything the planet doesn't need, it's more humans than existing sociopolitical forces are already grinding out. The real problem is to empower those women in oppressive, patriarchal, monotheistic cultures to have the economic, psychological, and political power to say NO more kids than they themselves want. Not to figure out how to con Caucasians (because that's Douthat's subtext) into having more."

"Though they circumcised their daughter, her parents were relatively liberal by the standards of the time and believed that all their children should be educated regardless of gender."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 03:04 AM PDT

"When El Saadawi was ten they tried to marry her off in accordance with local custom, but her mother supported her when she resisted. El Saadawi allegedly deterred other suitors by smearing aubergine on her teeth to make them black.... After graduating in 1955 El Saadawi returned to her home village to work as a doctor, turning her experiences into a novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. She also married her second husband, Rashad Bey, a lawyer, but swiftly divorced him when he proved too 'patriarchal.' He threw the manuscript of one of her novels out of the window, tore up her Medical Association card and once tried to throttle her.... El Saadawi's anger was not just directed at Egypt, Islam and the Arab world. She was also a harsh critic of western hypocrisy, colonialism, militarism, capitalism and US support for Israel. She considered the Islamic veil to be a 'tool of oppression' but also condemned the make-up and clothes worn by women in the West. 'Women are pushed to be just bodies — either to be veiled under religion or to be veiled by make-up,' she said. 'They are told they shouldn't face the world with their real face.'" 

From "Nawal El Saadawi obituary/Prolific Egyptian author and fearless campaigner for women's rights who became the 'Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world'" (London Times).

Icelandicness.

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 02:51 AM PDT

"The cause of justice demands proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations,' and we object to these kinds of piecemeal and misleading labels."

Posted: 29 Mar 2021 02:14 AM PDT

"True reparations only can come from a full-scale program of acknowledgment, redress and closure for a grievous injustice."

Write A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity Jr. in "Evanston, Ill., approved 'reparations.' Except it isn't reparations" (WaPo). The Evanston program only offers $25,000 grants for repairs or down payments on real estate.

The authors demonstrate their "proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations'" by spelling out 4 necessary elements: 

1. Careful delineation of eligibility — including, necessarily, a requirement of an ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S., and self-identification as black on an official document for at least 12 years before the program starts.

2. Erasure of the black/white wealth gap. The authors think $14 trillion is needed.

3. Direct payments to individuals. Not programs like Evanston's, which centers on home ownership.

4. Paid by the federal government. Only the federal government has the kind of money that is demanded, so state and local government should be excluded from using the word "reparations."

Here's a good comment over there: "By describing 'true' reparations as only something that is both politically and practically unachievable, the authors reveal that they are more interested in maintaining the 'systemic racism' grievance industry then helping the country move past its issues with race."

By the way, I don't think I'd ever seen the word "proprietariness" before. It doesn't mean "propriety." The word is not in the OED, but I can see that the "-ness" ending is making a noun out of the adjective "proprietary," which means property-owning or relating to property. It's an unusual word. A google search on it is dominated by references to "male sexual proprietariness" (a man's sense of owning his wife's sexual and reproductive functions). I couldn't find 1 use of the word in the NYT archive, but I did find 6 uses in The Washington Post archive, including a piece from last October about reparations in California:

William Darity Jr., a Duke University economics professor and reparations expert, told the website Cal Matters that no single state could launch an action large enough to be called "reparations." 

 "I have a sense of proprietariness about the use of the term reparations, because I think people should not be given the impression that the kinds of steps that are taken at the state or local level actually constitute a comprehensive or true reparations plan," Darity said in Cal Matters. "Whatever California does perhaps could be called atonement, or it could be called a correction for past actions."

"Reparations" is a brand. There is a claim of ownership over the word itself, and politicians attempting to use the brand for their programs will be pushed back by those who have this sense of proprietariness. 

At the Sunday Night Café...

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 05:58 PM PDT

... you can talk about anything you like.

"... a 14-year-old Midwestern boy who suddenly began experiencing psychosis-like symptoms after being scratched by his cat."

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 06:15 AM PDT

I'm reading "'Cat-scratch' bacteria linked to schizophrenia, study says." 

"Historically, prior to psychiatric symptom onset, the boy was socially, athletically, and academically active, as evidenced by participation in national geography and history competitions, and a lead actor in a school play, winning an award in fencing and achieving excellent course grades," a 2019 study by [Edward] Breitschwerdt reported about the boy, who was initially diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was once placed on a psychiatric hold for a week after saying he was an "evil, damned son of the devil," according to a report at the time.... After receiving antibiotics to treat the infection, the boy made a "full" recovery.

The pathogen, Bartonella, is more commonly known as the cause of "cat-scratch" disease. That disease has symptoms like swelling and malaise. This newly reported link to schizophrenia is something else. 

Here's the new study.

"... simultaneously transforming into hyperventilating country club snots with sweaters tied around their necks in 1980s movies."

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 05:59 AM PDT

I don't know who "the Bruenigs" are, and I haven't paid too much attention to the metamorphosis of Yglesias, but I have been following the transformation of Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan, and these tweets strike a chord.

I've got to hypothesize that this has something to do with the financial incentives at Substack, where Yglesias, Greenwald, and Sullivan have relocated. Again, I have no idea about "the Bruenigs." 

It's possible that when Yglesias/Greenwald/Sullivan says something that jibes with conservative ideology, it gets massive linkage that translates to cold hard cash. Imagine trying to think with such static. 

Or do you have more of the Samuel Johnson view of it? "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Maybe it's hard to imagine writing without feeling that your fingers tapping on the keyboard are printing money? It's the definition of professional.

I have no idea, really, what Yglesias/Greenwald/Sullivan are doing — what they consciously believe they are doing, what they want deep down, how they really lean politically, and whether they're authentic in their writing. I can only decide what sort of thing I want to read — what to invite into my head.

I like this TV show "Midnight Gospel."

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 05:29 AM PDT

 

Here's Duncan Trussell talking to Joe Rogan about it: 

"In the station, shadows pool in the basins of hundreds of concrete coffers lining the domed catacomb, as if each one holds something secret."

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 05:21 AM PDT

"Light scurries to corners and crevices, rises from below, casting your features as defamiliarized, haunting forms. Everyone looms. By the time you get down here, are you as raw as the concrete? As callous as a villain? As low as your basest instincts? Cackles ricochet off concrete. Sinister plots surface from the shadows.... Washington's most notorious Brutalist building, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building, has become a living lair, a symbol of surveillance and policing.... When seen from the corner of Ninth and E streets NW, the upper structure seems to hover atop the main building. This illusion makes the long narrow windows seem as far away as a lair atop a cliff. You couldn't imagine how to get up to them — let alone who or what looks through them. The structure on top threatens to either take off for space or to crush the structure below. Viewed from Pennsylvania Avenue, the entire building crescendos to an angle, as if plowing toward the National Mall. The FBI building is defined by geometry so rigid that the winding wires of surveillance cameras look playful by comparison. But like the most interesting villains, it's untamed. You don't know what it will do next."

From "Brutalist buildings aren't unlovable. You're looking at them wrong" by Kelsey Ables (WaPo).

ADDED: Government isn't unlovable. You're just looking at it wrong: 

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

"After class, Doe approached Meriwether and 'demanded' that Meriwether 'refer to [Doe] as a woman' and use 'feminine titles and pronouns.'"

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 04:29 AM PDT

"This was the first time that Meriwether learned that Doe identified as a woman. So Meriwether paused before responding because his sincerely held religious beliefs prevented him from communicating messages about gender identity that he believes are false. He explained that he wasn't sure if he could comply with Doe's demands. Doe became hostile—circling around Meriwether at first, and then approaching him in a threatening manner: 'I guess this means I can call you a cu--.' Doe promised that Meriwether would be fired if he did not give in to Doe's demands."

From Meriwether v. Hartop (6th Circuit, March 26, 2021), via "Professor who refused school order on transgender student's pronouns wins in court" (NY Post). 

It was a motion to dismiss, so the facts stated above are the plaintiff's allegations, presumed true and with the inferences all going toward the plaintiff. The professor will be able to go forward with claims based on freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

"Opponents of trans girls’ participation in sports frame their fight in terms of the rights and opportunities of cis girls..."

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 03:42 AM PDT

"... they claim that trans girls, with their unfair advantage, will snag the medals and the college scholarships that rightfully belong to athletes who were assigned female at birth. But, as I listened to the Judiciary Committee hearing, it struck me that the opposition set up in the arguments was between cis-girl athletes on the one hand and a vast liberal conspiracy on the other. (The term 'gender ideology,' a favorite bugaboo of the global far-right movement, made an appearance, too—gender ideology is also apparently out to destroy girls' sports.) Trans girls were not a part of this imaginary equation, and this was perhaps the most telling part of the hearing. Nor are trans boys ever mentioned in this conversation, perhaps because forcing trans boys to compete against girls, as has happened in Texas, where a trans-boy wrestler who had begun testosterone therapy handily beat female competitors, would expose the inconsistency of the argument from defenders of sex purity in sports. The goal of this campaign is not to protect cis-girl athletes as much as it is to make trans athletes disappear. This is a movement to exclude trans girls from community and opportunity. It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like those over the presence of lesbians on women's sports teams. And, just like earlier panics, this one is based on what passes for common sense but is in fact ignorance and hate."

From "The Movement to Exclude Trans Girls from Sports/The opposition is cast as one between cis-girl athletes on the one hand and a vast liberal conspiracy on the other" by Masha Gessen (The New Yorker).

1. The rhetorical move here is to characterize one's antagonists as bundles of emotion — hate and panic. Then, the idea is that we don't need to take their stated arguments seriously, because we know what they are really about and we certainly don't want to associate with such awful people. 

2. We're expected not to care about the field of women's sports, which has been specially cultivated over the years in the interest of equality in education. We're expected to feel bad about ourselves if we think that the medals and scholarships of women's sports "rightfully belong" to those who were "assigned female at birth."

3. "It is a movement driven by panic over the safety of women and children that reproduces earlier panics, like...." Like the Me Too movement? The safety of women and children is overwhelmingly important... except when they tell you that it is not.

4. I looked up the committee hearing because I wanted to see how the term "gender ideology" was used. Gessen tells us it's "a favorite bugaboo of the global far-right movement." There's this, from Abigail Shrier (author of "Irreversible Damage"): 

I have probably interviewed more transgender Americans than any person in this room. And I can honestly say that — excepting political activists — most do not want to obliterate women's rights and safe spaces. Most would never think of stealing women's scholarships by forcing young women into demoralizing contests with male bodies. But gender ideology, which is at the heart of this bill, is misogyny in progressive clothing. Gender ideology tells women and girls that they are not entitled to their fear or their sense of unfairness, as their protective spaces are eliminated. They must never object that sports is and has always been, a matter of biology, not identity. They mustn't assert that we keep women's protective spaces for biological women to ensure their physical safety, regardless of how they identify, because it isn't our identities that are at risk, it's our bodily integrity. Being a woman is a lifetime commitment. It entails profound blessings, but also physical vulnerabilities. For generations, women like the late Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fought to create sex- based protections to make life safe and fair for women. If you vote to take away those rights, don't pretend you've achieved a civil rights victory. In the name of inclusivity, you'll have made life far less safe, far less fair, and far less inclusive for America's women and girls.

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