Saturday, May 15, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world."

Posted: 15 May 2021 08:45 AM PDT

"Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel's mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It's impossible to have just one or the other. That's who we are. And that's Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two."

From the story "Carnaval" by Haruki Murakami, in his new short story collection "First Person Singular."

If this post makes you want to listen to "Carnaval," you may be interested to know that there are 2 characters who decide that "Carnaval" is the greatest piece for solo piano. They meticulously study recordings of "Carnaval," and one, the man, decides the very best is Arthur Rubinstein's RCA recording, which you can listen to here. The other person, the woman, takes the position that the best is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, available here.

My reason for posting this isn't really to push the Schumann piece on you or to get you trying to figure out which is the best interpretation. Of course, I'm more interested in the subject of wearing masks. Masks come up in the story because masks are worn at the pre-Lent festival called Carnival (AKA Carnaval). Notice the "carn" — "Carnival is literally the festival of thankfulness for meat, and a farewell to it, as Lent begins." Is there some connection between masks and the loss of meat? The face is meat? 

I'm simply offering this as something to add to your reflection on the subject of mask wearing.

"The lack of women in tech is a complicated problem. Attacking or ignoring one book written by a misogynist won’t solve it."

Posted: 15 May 2021 06:05 PM PDT

"However, rejecting the book as a typical narrative of our industry might be a good start. The book tells the story of an uninspiring, morally questionable individual in tech, who stands out only for the way he disparages people of minorities. It's not 'a guide to the spirit of Silicon Valley' as the author and his publisher try to present. Men don't have to be like the author, and women don't have to work with, even tolerate, men like the author to fit into the tech world." 

Wrote Chip Huyen, a writer and computer scientist, in "A simple reason why there aren't more women in tech - we're okay with misogyny" (at her own blog). She wrote that 2 years ago, criticizing Antonio García Martínez for his memoir, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." It was March 2019, and García Martínez had just been hired to write at Wired. Huyen wanted people to know that he'd displayed himself as an out-and-proud sexist. 

Huyen quoted this passage from the book:

"Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."

I was reading that because I was sent there by Axios, in a new article, "Apple parts ways with employee amid backlash." García Martínez had moved on to a job at Apple, and some employees there put together a petition, stating "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."

That is, whoever hired him at Apple could have read the whole book. It was conspicuous, published by Harper Collins and well reviewed. Even just the cover might make you wonder whether he's the sort of person you want in the corporate community:

Apple had to have known about this book. Maybe the hirers only looked generally at the book — who reads books? — but the passage had been extracted and quoted on line, so didn't they even find that? 

The petition demands to know "how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored," so ousting the author is not an answer to the question it asks. Did they miss his openly sexist presentation of himself or did they see it and decide it was okay? Might they even have actively wanted it?

Firing García Martínez is like settling one lawsuit. It evades the larger problem. If García Martínez told the truth, then the book is evidence of the culture of the tech industry. Maybe that's why he seemed to belong there and was hired in the first place. I don't know. Maybe the book is bullshit — lies and puffery in pursuit of the goal of becoming a NYT bestseller, which it was (according to the cover).  

Getting rid of García Martínez, now that the petition has made a spectacle of his sexism — his real or fake sexism — is a way for Apple to do its PR. I don't know. Maybe that PR is bullshit — a phony message about Apple's wholesome inclusiveness. 

But good for García Martínez if he wrote a great memoir. I haven't read "Chaos Monkeys," but I've believed for a long time — ever since reading "Liar's Club" — that the key to writing a memoir is to be harder on yourself than on anyone else. You have to look into the darkness and tell the truth. Don't flatter yourself and make other people the antagonists. You are the one with the deep flaws. Maybe García Martínez is a great writer. If so, he's better off without his corporate job. It's ludicrous to think that Apple is a place for looking into the human heart. 

If García Martínez is a good pop culture writer — as the book cover suggests — then he's got the option to write more books like that. Lay it on thick. Be outrageous. Get your readers. I see the blurb on the cover says it makes "Gordon Gekko look like Gandhi." Gordon Gekko, Gandhi — this is grist for the movies. A movie could be made out of his book. He'll have to be the villain, of course, but is that any worse than being a corporate drone for Apple?

ADDED: From the 2016 NYT review of "Chaos Monkeys": 

The literature of Silicon Valley is exceedingly thin. The tech overlords keep clear of writers who are not on their payrolls or at least in their thrall.... There are other barriers to literature.... Nailing this slippery culture would take an unholy combination of David Mamet and Tom Wolfe in their primes...

But "Chaos Monkeys" will have to do:

It is autobiography as revenge, naming names and sparing few, certainly not the author.... He describes the way the big companies resemble life in Cuba or Communist China circa 1965, with "endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader," not to mention the posters on the wall proclaiming, "Proceed and Be Bold!"... 

For all his criticism of the valley's way of doing things, he never stops to wonder about ethics....

First prize in Silicon Valley is enough money so your family and descendants will never have to work again until the sun goes cold. Second prize is a whole heaping pile of money. Third prize is you're fired, which is often pretty sweet too. Three years after being escorted out of Facebook, García Martínez is living on a 40-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay.

That was in 2016 — fired and doing just fine. Now, some of us — e.g., me — are hearing about him for the first time as he's fired again.  

AND: Matt Taibbi writes about Apple's treatment of García Martínez in "On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez/Much easier to ruin a career than mess with a corporate cash cow." I've avoided reading this until now because the beginning is (intentionally) off-putting: "I'm biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me...." I'll read it now: 

At one point, as a means of comparing [his girlfriend favorably to other women he'd known, he wrote this:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern "entitlement feminism" would be unmasked as a chattering fraud in a Mad Max scenario.

In context, he's obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals: [His girlfriend], on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone's back—required doing.

Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It's a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself.

The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references....

James Damore... I'd forgotten that guy, but now I remember.

[T]he same people at Apple who hired Antonio, clearly having read his book, [immediately] fired him, [and issued] a statement that implied a problem with workplace "behavior," which was not remotely the case.... It's cowardly, defamatory, and probably renders him unhirable in the industry, but this is far from the most absurd aspect of the story.

Taibbi takes a sudden turn:

I'm a fan of Dr. Dre's music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It's not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I'd like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from, partnership with the author of such classics as "Bitches Ain't Shit" and "Lyrical Gangbang," who is also the subject of such articles as "Here's What's Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up."...

[G]oing after Dre would mean forcing the company to denounce one of its more profitable investments — Beats and Beats Music were big factors in helping Apple turn music streaming into a major profit center....

Taibbi proceeds to bring up Apple's use of Uighur labor in China. That's a much bigger deal that the passages in "Chaos Monkeys," an opinion Taibbi expresses with sarcastic humor that (of course) will be taken out of context and used against Taibbi: 

Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!

ALSO: García Martínez is tweeting about the conflict, here. He says: "Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one)."

"The larva of the cicada on attaining full size in the ground becomes a nymph; then it tastes best, before the husk is broken. At first the males are better to eat..."

Posted: 15 May 2021 06:07 AM PDT

"... but after copulation the females, which are then full of white eggs." Wrote Aristotle, quoted in "How to Cook Cicadas, According to 3 Richmond, Va., Chefs/Cicadas are swarming the East Coast, and three Southern chefs are cooking them up every which way. Kung pao bugs, anyone" (Bon Appétit). 3 recipes at the link, plus this revelatory tip:
After all, if cicadas [are] the shrimp of the dirt, they should stand in just fine for their pink cousins...

... in whatever shrimp recipes you've got.

Since the word "shrimp" has popped up, let me drop in this song I chanced into yesterday when I was researching the question what are the greatest melodies? 

 

How many shrimps do you have to eat/Before you make your skin turn pink?

In case the idea of Don Lemon leaving CNN is distressing you, Don Lemon says "Relax! I'm not leaving," smiles a charming smile, and says he'll explain everything on Monday.

Posted: 15 May 2021 05:02 AM PDT

Okay. That's what I got from clicking on the Twitter sidebar. Here's the NY Post article on the subject:

Lemon shocked viewers by ending his news show Friday with... "It's been really, really great. This is the last night that will be 'CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.'" he said. "So, I appreciate all the years of 'CNN Tonight with Don Lemon,' but changes are coming, and I will fill you in."

No NYT article yet, but I see something there from a month ago: "CNN Is in a Post-Trump Slump. What Does That Mean for Don Lemon?/The prime-time host on the future of cable news, the urgency of conversations about race and whether CNN is a boys' club." It's a podcast interview. Excerpt: 

kara swisherYeah. I want to talk about CNN and the future of the network and cable in general. Because I've had Jason Kilar on, the head of Warner, so your boss's boss. And he talked about making —

don lemonHe's my boss. Nice guy.

kara swisherI'm sorry? Yeah, he is.

don lemonAnd very handsome, by the way.

kara swisherHe's a very handsome man.

don lemonI know that's weird, that's going to be weird. [LAUGHTER]

kara swisherSaid a very handsome man about a very handsome man.

don lemon I said who is — This is our new boss, hm, interesting.

kara swisherO.K. All right, let's move along. I'm going to get you out of the jam here.

don lemonThat's gonna get me in trouble.

kara swisherIt is indeed. I'm going to move you out of a jam before you move along further. All right. There are a number of threats to the business. He and I talked about it a lot. Declining ratings, changing of the guard, diversity challenges. So now that Trump's out of the White House, cable news viewership all over has been down. Fox's particularly — prime-time viewership 32 percent from the last quarter. CNN has done better. Still lost 16 percent of prime-time viewers. So are you worried about — Trump always said, "I'm good for cable." And so cable, people who run cable. Are you worried about the viewership fizzle? So what does it mean you have to do now?

don lemon No. I'm not worried about it. I just keep doing what I do. I've always been nimble and malleable and whatever comes next I'll be ready for it. The reason I'm not worried about it is because it beats the alternative. The alternative of him being in there and us having to figure out how we deal with lies, and bigotry, and hate, and the toxicity that was the Trump administration. Which has nothing for me to do with my ideology or politics. Because people have accused me of being conservative. It has nothing to do with politics. Trump was a horrible person. And he was terrible for the country. And it is better for all — for the world that he is no longer the President of the United States. So if that means that cable news ratings go down? Aww. So I'm not really that concerned about it. I would prefer that my ratings go down and Trump not be in office than my ratings be sky-high and him be there. That's the honest truth.

I had to look up what was going on with Lemon's ratings. Ah, I see, it's his show that is getting challenged by Fox's new Greg Gutfeld show. In the ratings that came out yesterday, Greg leads in his hour with 409,000 and Lemon has 206,000 in the 25-54 demographic and 1,771,000 to 697,000 for total viewers.

ADDED: "I've always been nimble and malleable...." He means nimble and flexible or adaptable. That's the trouble with displaying a big vocabulary. You have to know the shades of meaning. At least he didn't say "manipulable." 

The root of "malleable" is the same as the root of "mallet." We're talking about susceptibility to hammering and to maintaining the hammered-into shape after the hammerer is finished. From Etymonline:

late 14c., "capable of being shaped or extended by hammering or rolling," from Old French malleable and directly from Medieval Latin malleabilis, from malleare "to beat with a hammer," from Latin malleus "hammer" (from PIE root *mele- "to crush, grind"). Figurative sense, of persons, "capable of being adapted by outside influence" is recorded from 1610s.

Clearly, it's not a good brag to call yourself "malleable"! You want to be the hammer wielder, not the hammered one. Here's the non-figurative concept:

"I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside even though I’m fully vaccinated because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative ��."

Posted: 15 May 2021 04:06 AM PDT

 Tweets activist David Hogg. (I got there via Instapundit.)

This tweet is so perfect that I thought it might be a fake David Hogg making fun of lefties, but it's the blue check mark David Hogg, so I'm trusting Twitter that it's really him. I'm saying it's "perfect" because it sounds exactly like someone without much comic talent doing some heavy-handed, obvious political humor. It seemed like what right-wing people imagine left-wing people are thinking. But it's the left-wing person himself, and I guess he thinks he's being funny.

"Some fun fact about these little creatures: In Vietnam we eat them"/"How dare you come here and say that. Oh nonooooooo."

Posted: 15 May 2021 04:36 AM PDT

"those were delicacies in someplace in VN,some are just plain street food,some are expensive high class dishes, I'm sadly have to announce to you that." 

 From "A Little Vietnamese Mossy Frog" (Reddit).

ADD: There's a truly adorable photo at the link, which is the reason I'm blogging this. Please don't think I'm blogging this to attack the animal-eating choices of people in a foreign country. Unless we're vegetarians, we eat the animals we're used to eating, and we don't give a reprieve for cuteness. We eat lambs if we like lamb. Here's video of a lamb dreaming, presumably not of becoming a chop.

Redbud petals in the lawn.

Posted: 14 May 2021 06:13 PM PDT

IMG_0809

Warnings.

Posted: 14 May 2021 06:11 PM PDT

Several readers have emailed me to say they're getting a warning when they try to come to my blog. I haven't done anything different, so I'm assuming it's some transitory glitch that will be gone soon.

ADDED: I don't see a warning when I try to go to my blog — either in Safari, Foxfire, or Chrome — so I have trouble taking this problem seriously. I know there's a rigmarole that I could go through.... checking for malware, requesting review.

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