Friday, April 30, 2021

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Althouse

5:52 a.m.
"A senior judge has ruled it is lawful for carers in specific circumstances to help clients find and pay for sex."
"Seeing people who are so excited to welcome me into the community, it’s like, I want to go there."
"There was talk, at one point, of calling Aidy Bryant's show 'fat bitch'... the studio and network were like, 'Uh, no'...."
"There is little countries can do to lift their native-born birthrates; nor is it even clear why the U.S. fertility rate, which now stands substantially below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman, is so low."
"Banning menthol cigarettes is a racial justice issue."
"Many of us view the practice of pronoun declaration as asking us to sign on to an ideology we do not share: that we all have an internal gender identity..."
Sunrise — 5:53, 6:10.

5:52 a.m.

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 09:19 AM PDT

"A senior judge has ruled it is lawful for carers in specific circumstances to help clients find and pay for sex."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 07:21 AM PDT

"The ruling found it would be wrong to stop them helping a 27-year-old man with mental disabilities fulfilling a natural desire.... The Court of Protection, which made the ruling, is dedicated to taking decisions for people who lack the mental capacity to live independent and safe lives. The young man at the centre of the case, known only as C, is fit and healthy but lives with carers because he needs daily help with many parts of his life. He has autism and a genetic disorder - but Mr Justice Hayden said that after speaking to C, he found that he was happy and well-supported. The court heard that C knew he would probably never find a girlfriend but he nevertheless wanted to experience sex - and so he had asked his carers if they could find him a sex worker who would be paid for their services...."

From "Carers can help vulnerable clients visit sex workers" (BBC).

(To comment, you can email me here.)

"Seeing people who are so excited to welcome me into the community, it’s like, I want to go there."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 06:48 AM PDT

Said Jennifer Hill Booker, quoted in "Want to Move to Our Town? Here's $10,000 and a Free Bike/With offers of cash, housing and a budding talent pool, smaller cities and states hope to get in on the ground floor of a new era for remote workers" (NYT).

The Fayetteville region — including Bentonville, best known as the home of Walmart's global headquarters — is one of several smaller metro areas and states across the country, from Georgia to Hawaii, trying to lure high-net-worth workers who can increasingly do their jobs remotely. The idea is that they'll shop in local stores and pay real estate taxes, but they won't take jobs away from locals. For regional economic development organizations, it's an effort to build communities with high skill sets to attract start-ups and larger companies in the future. For the migrating workers, it's a chance to try out an up-and-coming place alongside other newcomers.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"There was talk, at one point, of calling Aidy Bryant's show 'fat bitch'... the studio and network were like, 'Uh, no'...."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 05:47 AM PDT

"But being fat is part of what the series is about. 'Shrill' is based on Lindy West's memoir, sparked by her viral 2011 column, 'Hello, I Am Fat'... West's story resonated with Bryant.... 'It is a descriptor and, like, I am fat,' says Bryant, 33. 'To me, it's like taking the power out of it. It doesn't have to be so loaded. It's just true, and sitting with that, it makes it easier for me. It just feels a little less frightening.'... Will 'Shrill' leave a lasting impact on how fat people are treated in comedy? [Producer Lorne] Michaels was reminded of several popular, old SNL bits, including John Belushi gnawing on a chicken breast while playing Elizabeth Taylor and Chris Farley's shirtless Chippendales dance. The late Farley's sad description of his style was often 'fatty falls down.' 'How things change is really who's doing the talking,' Michaels says. 'If it's someone they trust as much as they trust Aidy, I think they're much more willing to take what she says seriously. And that's a good use of a comedy platform.'"

From a WaPo article about Bryant's TV show "Shrill."

As I've said for many years, "fat" should not be treated as a bad word. We call people "skinny" — often as a compliment — and "fat" is the corresponding word on the other side of "normal." I know, you can attack "normal," but I'm thinking of those BMI charts that show a range called "normal," meaning that's what you ought to shoot for if you want your best health.

Anyway... there's a long history to the comedy of fatness. There's good reason to have characters who just happen to be fat and don't do much if anything comical with their bodies. But the body is an instrument that can be deployed comically, and there are special things that can be done with a fat body. Here's Fatty Arbuckle:

(To comment, you can email me here, and I might publish what you write in an update to this post. Pithy, interesting comments that add something new to the conversation are most likely to make it.)

"There is little countries can do to lift their native-born birthrates; nor is it even clear why the U.S. fertility rate, which now stands substantially below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman, is so low."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 07:18 AM PDT

Says the Editorial Board of The Washington Post in "The 2020 Census is a clarion call for immigration."

I was just saying that President Biden's plan to vastly increase support for families with children could be justified by the need to inspire Americans to keep having children. Here's what I wrote 3 days ago:

There was some concern expressed yesterday over the "remarkable slackening" in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don't maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don't worry about it, less population growth is good for the environment. But if you took the other side of that debate... you'd better worry about women declining the option to undertake childbearing and men and women passing on the potentially fulfilling endeavor of child-rearing. It's terribly expensive!... [Y]ou're going to have to incentivize reproduction a little bit. The old scheme of locking women into childbirth as a consequence of indulging in sex failed long ago, and you sound like a fool talking about it now, especially if you attempt to stand on the foundation of love for babies, when what you are doing is justifying freeing rich folk — people who make over $1 million a year — from paying a 40% capital gains tax. Can't dishearten them in their enthusiasm for investing? What about the young people who are disheartened about having children? Worry about them.

But the WaPo editors have nothing to say about these new children-friendly policies. They just say there's little that can be done to motivate Americans to choose life with children. They go right to immigration:

This nation's prosperity, pluck, ambition and effervescent character are the products of more than 100 million immigrants who have sought better lives in the United States since its founding.

It's probably true that these children of Americans who are not getting born would probably be dull slackers compared to the plucky, effervescent immigrants.

FROM THE EMAIL: Temujin writes:

"There is little countries can do...." This is utter bullshit. And not even passable. There have been a decade of studies, articles, and even books on how our culture has changed to the point of either having fewer children later, or having no children at all. There is plenty that countries can do to change it. After all, they broke it in the first place. That is, the culture broke it. And that culture was promoted, incentivized, and proclaimed as smart, freeing, and the future. Indeed, it is a limited future.

One can point to the 60s and the rise of the feminist movement as one of the cogs. Yes, I know, that movement did a great amount of good. I completely agree with that. But it also left carcasses along the road as it changed, mutated, and diverged into man-hate, tradition-hate, and the ideas that the career was more important than creating your own offspring, your own family. We've spent decades now praising women to eschew marriage, or to eschew having children, or most certainly choosing their work over either marriage or having children. We've broken the Black American family completely. In the 60s, Black children were part of a two parent family over 73% of the time. Today 73% of Black children are born into single parent families. How's that culture working out?

Our young women are getting more undergrad and graduate degrees than men. They are getting more jobs than men. And it's not even a close competition. While we've spent a couple of decades praising women for being, at the same time we were also denigrating boys- just for being. We've drugged boys, refused to call on them in class, changed curricula to things of no interest, and finally, let them know they are toxic. Drugged and toxic. That's a fine goal. The result is that fewer men graduate, fewer go to, or finish college. Fewer get grad degrees. Also- studies have shown that todays 'men' have fewer sperm and less motile sperm. We've created a generation of Beta Men — seriously. And we've done it by design. So now in the real world you've got hard charging women, focused on their careers, a new Beemer, a nice condo in the downtown area of some major city, who are not about to stop working to have children now, but might be looking for future adequate partners with which to raise children. However, the pool of applicants is less desirable than any time in recent history. It's not working.

Those women who are having children are starting later, so that they are having only one, sometimes two children. And sometimes doing it by themselves, having given up on finding a man's man in a world of Pajama Boys.

And finally — when you do graduate college, and you've got a $200,000 loan to pay off, you can barely afford to live on your own, let alone find a guy making a decent living, let alone being able to afford having children. There are so many ends to this, but we've done this to ourselves at every turn. Economically, socially, demographically. Again — we're so sophisticated, we're sophisticating ourselves out of existence.

"Banning menthol cigarettes is a racial justice issue."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 04:52 AM PDT

Says a headline to an editorial in the L.A. Times, and I haven't read the text yet, but I don't know which way it's a racial justice issue.

I know black people who smoke are more likely than white people to prefer menthol cigarettes, and that previous efforts to ban flavored tobacco products have made an exception for the flavor menthol. They won't just ban all tobacco products, but they could attack what was purportedly aimed at children — flavored-added things. But they made an exception for the traditional flavor menthol. I think now there's a move to ban menthol too, and that will have a disparate impact on black people.

But which way does "racial justice" cut? I thought that the exception for menthol favored black people, so maybe banning menthol cigarettes is a racial justice issue because it would deprive them — more than white people — of something they've been choosing for themselves. But it could also be a racial justice issue because it would deter them from using a harmful product, since they — more than white people — will be deprived of the form of the product that they prefer, so maybe they'll cut back or quit.

Now, I'll read the editorial. Excerpt:

The African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and other public health groups sued over the government's failure to regulate menthol, despite compelling evidence of its harm. In November, a judge rejected the government's bid to dismiss the case, and Thursday's announcement was the settlement. It's a victory for public health nonetheless, no matter what the American Civil Liberties Union says. The ACLU and other civil rights groups sent a letter Monday to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock arguing against a menthol ban, claiming that it would perpetuate overpolicing in Black communities. But the FDA ban would not criminalize possession of menthol cigarettes, just remove them from the market.... ...Black public health advocates contend, and we agree, that the bigger injustice is allowing tobacco companies to continue to push their deadly product on communities of color.

So it's a racial justice issue because there are racial justice issues on both sides, but the L.A. Times has decided that there's more racial justice in taking away what black people choose for themselves than in letting them decide. It's paternalism. And it's infantilism, because the editors won't credit black consumers with the power to make their own choices: the tobacco companies are pushing their product on "communities of color," so the choice is not real choice.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Many of us view the practice of pronoun declaration as asking us to sign on to an ideology we do not share: that we all have an internal gender identity..."

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 07:13 AM PDT

"... which may or may not 'match' our sex, and that the third-person pronoun someone uses to describe us should reflect this identity rather than our sex. People call me 'she' because that is the third-person pronoun we generally use to describe female humans (and other animals), and I take that to mean nothing more than that they have correctly recognized me as female. However, announcing that 'my pronouns are she/her' would mean something very different: an indication that 'woman' represents my identity rather than simply my bodily reality; in other words, that I identify in some way with the social role of 'woman' or with stereotypical femininity (which I do not). People who have transitioned should of course be addressed with courtesy, but imposing the idea of 'gender identity' with corresponding pronouns on all of us is regressive and coercive. Not to mention that women in particular have good reasons for not wanting to foreground 'gender' in our interactions with others, particularly in a work setting."

That's a comment on a NYT advice column titled: "Do I Really Need to State My Pronouns?/A reader asks whether a workplace policy actually makes trans and nonbinary people feel more included."

The reader was someone who worked in sales and had experienced losing a sale to a customer who said he was "turned off by the pronoun thing." The advice columnist only gave a vague answer. The commenter made a brilliant point and put it quite well. It fits my tag "gender privacy."

(This is a post about a comment over at the NYT, a comment that interested me more than what the NYT advice columnist wrote. But how, you might wonder, can a reader comment on this Althouse post? The answer is — because some trolls made open comments impossible — you have to email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Lyssa writes

I've often thought that the gender concept is functionally a religion - the idea that there's some deeper, non-biological concept of "man" or "woman" is non-falsifiable, a matter of faith which is, at least for some, deeply and sincerely held. Like a religion, it's not appropriate for me to disrespect, or to point out my disagreement with its dogma outside of an open discussion. I won't stop you from praying to say you're doing it wrong, or "correct" you if you make a benign statement about your faith with which I disagree. But when you expect me to pray with you, to personally declare the beliefs of your faith, that's a bridge too far.

I have 2 responses to that. First, being required to declare your faith at all — even your own true faith or lack of faith — is a fundamental violation of your privacy. This is the domain of your thoughts, and it belongs to you and deserves respect.

Second, the conjunction of religion and your experience of the meaning of your own body can be seen Supreme Court's understanding of the right of privacy, as articulated in the most important opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which declared: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

AND: Another emailer, who requests not to be named, writes:

I have an autistic child, so every time social norms change, we have to figure out how to distill them down to a teachable rule set for behavior.

We recently moved to a very progressive city. The public school here school teaches "the pronoun thing" as a basic minimum of decency, such that failure to use the right pronoun is "bullying" -- something the kids have already been taught to fear and abhor, and something for which they expect draconian consequences. All of the kids are taught to declare their pronouns as the default expectation for behavior. Some kids are experimenting with the pronouns. They are not necessarily experimenting the same way with their dress. There aren't always external signals or behaviors to reinforce or remind others those pronouns.

As a result, there's no way to tell with any teachable visual shorthand what anyone's pronouns are. Rather than get it wrong and be thought of a "bully," my child started referring to all other students as "it." After we discovered this, our discussion of why gender neutral "it" is ALSO wrong added another layer of confusion to an already confusing topic.

ALSO: Darth writes:

For a polite society to function, members of that society live by a set of unwritten rules. In my travels throughout the world (Europe, China, Mexico, Middle East), there seems to be a prime rule: "Do not impose your will on the rest of society." The reason for this rule is that trying to make the rest of society conform to your will is considered rude.

Therefore, people who insist on making people declare their pronouns, are rude by trying to force society to their will. Forget the rationale that the language has developed over hundreds/thousands of years, and that some languages will not tolerate such perversions. For example the French zealously guard their language; it is not possible for people to declare their pronouns. In China, the third person singular is pronounced "ta", 他 (he) , 她 (she), 她 (it). The only way you can tell gender is by writing, not pronunciation.

Personally, I feel that anyone who feels the need to announce their pronouns is childish and rude, and I treat them as such.

Sunrise — 5:53, 6:10.

Posted: 30 Apr 2021 03:02 AM PDT

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