Saturday, April 10, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

The moment when she noticed.

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 01:41 PM PDT

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CORRECTION: Apparently, what she noticed was bees.

"Today’s ballet teachers and company directors know that they can no longer simply instruct their dancers to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean they’ve relinquished their rigid, narrow vision..."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 10:54 AM PDT

"... of what a 'good' ballet body looks like: They simply swathe that ideal in the gauzy, feel-good messaging of today's fitness culture.... In the 1990s, ballet's high-pressure and eating-disorder-friendly culture came in for some unwelcome attention.... The bad old days of American ballet teachers and company directors telling their dancers to eat nothing, or telling them exactly how many pounds they should lose, are largely over... [B]ecause of the new cultural injunction against explicitly telling dancers to lose weight, gatekeepers have developed a suite of euphemisms that all amount to the same message: slim down.... When [a] dancer used a dangerous and unsustainable crash diet to become skinnier than he had ever been [t]he company's decision-makers said he looked 'longer.'... In 2019, [the message was] phrased differently: to 'lengthen.'... In ballet, 'long' is the new skinny, but skinny still reigns supreme."

From "Ballet directors talk about 'fitness.' That's still code for rail-thin dancers" (WaPo).

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I don't think it's hard to understand at all... but it's also easy to understand that you're tired of it... and yet you claim to desire to understand.

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 10:22 AM PDT

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Liberals have ruined the movies with their depressing wokeism... according to Bill Maher.

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 10:23 AM PDT

 

This is a rock-solid comic rant.

It's not just "Nomadland." It's everything nominated for an Oscar this year.

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"[T]he way in which trans ideology doesn’t only seek to protect trans kids, but to abolish the idea of biological sex altogether and to teach kids they have a choice over whether to be a boy or girl..."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 10:55 AM PDT

"... should be kept out of the classroom. It takes the experience of less than one percent of humanity and tries to make it explain the 99 percent of their peers. It's nuts; and it will confuse children, particularly gay kids. If I had been told by my parents or teachers that my fear of contact sports or my love of theater as a child suggested I was actually a girl inside, I don't know how my 8-year-old self would have responded. But it is not unimaginable I would have believed them. My worry is that gay kids in particular could be swept up in this, and mistakenly make irreversible decisions they will later regret, as so many young lesbians have."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in "A Truce Proposal In The Trans Wars/There is a compromise available. Here's one version" (Substack). 

Read the whole thing. There are other elements to the proposed "truce," and Sullivan concedes that the radicals of the right and left are unlikely to accept his compromise position.

Also very interesting is this essay Sullivan links to: "Keira Bell: My Story/As a teen, she transitioned to male but came to regret it. Here's how it felt to enter history in the trans debate" Excerpt:

By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet.

Something else was happening: I became attracted to girls. I had never had a positive association with the term "lesbian" or the idea that two girls could be in a relationship. This made me wonder if there was something inherently wrong with me. Around this time, out of the blue, my mother asked if I wanted to be a boy, something that hadn't even crossed my mind. I then found some websites about females transitioning to male. Shortly after, I moved in with my father and his then-partner. She asked me the same question my mother had. I told her that I thought I was a boy and that I wanted to become one....

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"Hey, Dad, I was just wondering if you wanted to go outside and toss around... the..."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 07:11 AM PDT

Tragi-comic TikTok:
@devon_palmer

Play catch

♬ original sound - devon palmer

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I have a thing about headlines that begin with the word "how."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 07:30 AM PDT

You may remember my post from last December, "How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines": "I'm sure some 'how' headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of 'how' in headlines." 

Since it is my self-imposed task to be on the alert for "how" headlines, I must bring you this from today's Washington Post: "How the forces inside the GOP that pushed out John Boehner led to Matt Gaetz." 

I doubt that this piece (by Paul Kane) is really going to tell me how these "forces" led somewhere. I expect to find only an assertion that the moderates who used to have the GOP under control have lost their grip. But I'll give Kane a chance. Show me the forces and show me how they "led to Matt Gaetz" (whatever that means).

Reading, I see Kane is reviewing Boehner's memoir, which, Kane admits up front, hasn't got one word about Matt Gaetz. 

Boehner writes about his distaste for immoderate politicos within both parties: They are self-promoters who "claim to be true believers and purists, like the right-wing Freedom Caucus or the left-wing Squad, but really they are just political terrorists." There were always people like that in Congress, and Boehner supposedly wanted to tame them.

Kane writes: 

In his new memoir, [Boehner] finally admits that he couldn't control this new crowd, that they often handled him, not the other way around. "They didn't want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades. To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout," he writes.

The very people who had delivered him the speaker's gavel had now made his job a living hell.... After a couple years Boehner met with Roger Ailes, a longtime friend who was then head of Fox News. He pleaded with Ailes to keep flamethrowers like [Michelle] Bachmann off the air.

Instead the TV executive told the speaker that the Obama administration was spying on him — the conspiracy theories were within Fox headquarters. Fox was afraid that other conservative personalities would eat into their ratings, so they ignored Boehner's entreaties and steered deeper into that world, right through Trump's own 2016 campaign, according to Boehner.

"These shows went from real commentary pushing conservative ideas to just pissing people off and making money," he writes....

And Gaetz flourished in that environment — that environment that was always there, that Boehner (purportedly) didn't like but couldn't change.

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Justice Kagan makes a watermelon wisecrack: "[T]he law does not require that the State equally treat apples and watermelons."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 06:46 AM PDT

That's from the dissenting opinion in Tandon v. Newsom, which came out just last night. 

I'm amazed to see the gratuitous insertion of watermelon in a Supreme Court case. It's a play on the old "apples and oranges" expression generally used to assert that things are too different to compare to each other. To switch from oranges to watermelons is to say these 2 things are ludicrously different, because watermelons are even more different from apples than oranges are. They're so large. 

It's not hard to get the idea, just as it was not hard to get what Joe Biden meant when he said "This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle."Eagles are bigger than crows. Watermelons are bigger than oranges. But Biden was talking about something he wanted to portray as racial — the new Georgia voting law. The Tandon v. Newsom case is not about race but religion: Did California discriminate against religion when it banned religious gatherings in private homes? The question depends on how California treated other gatherings. Did it treat like gatherings alike?

From the majority opinion:

This is the fifth time the Court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit's analysis of California's COVID restrictions on religious exercise. It is unsurprising that such litigants are entitled to relief. California's Blueprint System contains myriad exceptions and accommodations for comparable activities, thus requiring the application of strict scrutiny. And historically, strict scrutiny requires the State to further 'interests of the highest order' by means 'narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests.' That standard 'is not watered down'; it 'really means what it says.'

Kagan's point is that all those exceptions were for activities that were not comparable — they were the apples in comparison to which the private-home religious meetings were watermelons. In that view, no strict scrutiny is needed, because there's no discrimination in seeing apples as apples and watermelons as watermelons. 

Is the fruit analogy helpful? Is the watermelon joke worthwhile? If race were anywhere in the picture, the mention of watermelon would provoke outrage. But the sensitive topic here is religion, not race. Nevertheless, I would have thought that racial sensitivity is so great that you'd never mention watermelon in a court case unless there were actual watermelons in the facts of the case.

Here's the NYT article by Adam Liptak, "By 5-4 Vote, Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on Prayer Meetings in Homes/The court shifted direction in cases on Covid-related limits on religious services after Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg." 

The Supreme Court late Friday night lifted California's restrictions on religious gatherings in private homes, saying they could not be enforced to bar prayer meetings, Bible study classes and the like.... The majority said California had violated the Constitution by disfavoring prayer meetings. 
"California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts and indoor restaurants," the opinion said....
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority had compared in-home prayer meetings with the wrong kinds of activities.

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Trout lilies.

Posted: 09 Apr 2021 06:50 PM PDT

IMG_3555

"At the risk of becoming Mr. and Mrs. Intense, we directed dinnertime chats with friends away from trivialities like vacation plans and house purchases, and..."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 07:18 AM PDT

"... toward issues of happiness, love, and spirituality. This deepened some of our friendships, and in other cases showed us that a more fulfilling relationship wasn't going to be possible—and, thus, where to put less energy.... The key to building perfect friendships is to see relationships not as stepping stones to something else, but as boons to pursue for their own sake. One way to do this is to make friends not just outside your workplace, but outside all of your professional and educational networks. Strike up a friendship with someone who truly can do nothing for you besides caring about you and giving you good company.... One of the great paradoxes of love is that our most transcendental need is for people who, in a worldly sense, we do not need at all."

From "The Best Friends Can Do Nothing for You/If your social life is leaving you unfulfilled, you might have too many deal friends, and not enough real friends" by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic). 

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Elizabeth writes:

I have few very close friendships. They are based on love, loyalty and the bonds of time. They are unconditional and not perfect. I faced a relationship conflict with someone recently, someone who struggles to want to retain relationships with those who think differently politically. (In plainer words, she struggles whether to keep friends who voted for Trump. She does, but it's a struggle.) I was speaking to a friend of mine about it... we are both Christians. And she pointed out a key, monumental truth of our faith. The only thing eternal is human relationships. Ponder the implications of that and see what impact it has.

"I understand and partially support your decision to remove comments from your website but if you persist in this effort you need to quit asking questions that beg a comment. State your opinion and let the chips fall where they may."

Posted: 10 Apr 2021 05:10 AM PDT

A reader named Carl emails.

I don't think he's trying to be funny, but that made me laugh. Questions are a literary device — often found in books, where there's never a comments section — unless you scrawl marginalia. I would never undertake to squelch the questions in my writing. They come up naturally as I'm thinking in real time. 

To form a question is to get somewhere into thinking about a topic. It's progress. It's a thought, not merely a failure to complete a thought. Not every question demands an answer. It might be a rhetorical question. But even when it's a question that would be good to answer, it doesn't need efforts to answer it right underneath. 

It can go into the reader's head and work the magic of giving rise to thoughts. It doesn't need other people immediately chattering. The reader might do better thinking independently. And surely you don't need me answering all my own questions. To say "State your opinion" is to assume I always have an opinion, but why would I? And I think a framed question is a kind of opinion. It's the opinion that this is a question. It's a statement of the issue.

And what is "let the chips fall where they may" supposed to mean? That I'm somehow withholding the answers to my questions out of fear of consequences?! 

I think questions are exciting, so I don't feel that I'm withholding answers. I like to open things up and create potential. That can go well with a comments section, but it's certainly not the case that it can't go without it.

FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Ron writes:

It's a guy thing. When a woman asks a question we think we have to come up with an answer. In fairness, we have learned this from a lot of "are you listening?" when we don't "answer."

Late afternoon sky.

Posted: 09 Apr 2021 05:18 PM PDT

Me, with my old iPhone, photographed by Meade with his new iPhone 12:

IMG_0016 

I love the ability to get the wide angle — though it makes me look bizarrely tall — and the color and detail in the clouds clearly surpasses what I got with my iPhone XS: 

IMG_3558

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