Trendlist: Althouse

Monday, May 17, 2021

Althouse

Mid-May — a time for allium and hesperis.
"Two times in the space of a decade, then, I became the beneficiary of one of the greatest acts of human altruism: living organ donation."
"The Supreme Court on Monday set the stage for a major ruling next year on abortion – one that could upend the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in Roe v. Wade..."
"Philip Roth Biography Finds a New Publisher/Skyhorse said it would release the paperback and digital versions of the book...."
"I don't listen to podcasts. The format has never appealed to me. I am a visual learner. I love to read. Reading allows me to jump around..."
"Let me show you how liberal media functions to see why it's failing. Yesterday, we published at my Substack platform..."
"These are, I should stress again, a bunch of nice, thoughtful people.... I should stress again that these are smart people...."
An excellent sunrise this morning.
"Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates met at work. He was technically her boss. He ran Microsoft..."
New River Gorge — the newest national park.
"The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct..."
Allium.

Mid-May — a time for allium and hesperis.

Posted: 17 May 2021 01:45 PM PDT

"Two times in the space of a decade, then, I became the beneficiary of one of the greatest acts of human altruism: living organ donation."

Posted: 17 May 2021 01:36 PM PDT

"Now, I find myself dependent on others yet again. This time, my health relies on people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. As a transplant recipient, I am one of the immunologically unlucky: those who derive insufficient or no protective immunity from vaccinations. We organ recipients take medications — typically anti-metabolites — that suppress our immune systems, specifically, the function of the body's B cells, which are responsible for generating antibodies. These drugs are necessary to prevent the body from attacking implanted organs, thus blocking organ rejection. But this means that many of us produce no detectable defenses against covid-19."

From "Opinion: Vaccines probably don't work on me. So I must rely on others to beat covid-19" (WaPo).

"The Supreme Court on Monday set the stage for a major ruling next year on abortion – one that could upend the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in Roe v. Wade..."

Posted: 17 May 2021 12:55 PM PDT

"... and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the court ruled that the Constitution protects the right to have an abortion before a fetus becomes viable. The court granted review in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a challenge to the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that (with limited exceptions) bars abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy.... The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit... reject[ed] Mississippi's argument that the Supreme Court's cases required the district court to determine instead whether the law creates a 'substantial obstacle' for a person seeking an abortion before the fetus becomes viable. There is no substantial obstacle, the state suggested, because a patient could decide to have an abortion before reaching the 15th week. But the Mississippi law is not merely a restriction on the availability of pre-viability abortions, the court of appeals stressed; it is a ban on pre-viability abortions.... The justices repeatedly... put off considering it at their private conference – before finally considering the state's petition for review for the first time at their Jan. 8, 2021, conference. The justices then considered the petition 12 more times...."

Writes Amy Howe (at SCOTUSblog).

It's hard to imagine considering the petition 13 times. It seems to mean they don't want to have the take the case but also can't bring themselves to turn it away. It's so soon since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Court is choosing to bring this divisive issue to the fore. I predict the precedent will remain intact, to the political benefit of social conservatives.

"Philip Roth Biography Finds a New Publisher/Skyhorse said it would release the paperback and digital versions of the book...."

Posted: 17 May 2021 12:37 PM PDT

The NYT reports.

Norton's decision [to take the book out of print] raised questions about publishers' ethical obligations to respond to controversies that extend beyond the contents of the books they publish, and it prompted criticism from some free-speech and authors' advocacy groups, including PEN America, the Author's Guild and the National Coalition Against Censorship. "Books must be judged on their content. Many of literature's celebrated authors led troubled — and troubling — lives," the National Coalition Against Censorship said in a statement last month....

Last year, after Hachette dropped [Woody] Allen's autobiography, "Apropos of Nothing," in the wake of an employee walkout, Skyhorse acquired and published it, with a print run of 75,000 copies....

"I don't listen to podcasts. The format has never appealed to me. I am a visual learner. I love to read. Reading allows me to jump around..."

Posted: 17 May 2021 10:10 AM PDT

"... skim where I think it appropriate, moderate my pace, and return to passages that are important. With reading, I can easily highlight, or copy and paste a key phrase into a blog post. Moreover, much more care is put into the printed word. Authors (present company included) labor over every sentence, word, and syllable. Podcasts are different. Less care is put into the spoken word. Unless the narrator is reading from a transcript, we are left with the normal flow of conversational english.... Sure, I can play it at double-speed, but I am still stuck with his chronology...."

Writes Josh Blackman (at Volokh Conspiracy).

The thing I don't do — and for some (but not all) of those reasons — is watch the news and news commentary shows on television. You have to give yourself over to their control of your precious time. With text, you control your own time, according to your needs and abilities and predilections. And it's so passive. I can't easily blog it or send it to somebody. I'd have to either transcribe it or make a little video clip of it. So I would be either bored or agitated by the slowness, the repetition, and the loss of the opportunity to do something with it.

But I wouldn't designate myself a "visual learner." I'm just someone who likes to do things with text. So, mostly, I read.

I have my uses for audio, including audiobooks and podcasts. I like an audiobook for a long walk for 2 reasons: 1. It keeps me from dwelling on the walk as a slog, and 2. It forces me to continue linearly through an entire book. And I like the right podcast while doing various tasks — housecleaning, personal hygiene, and so forth — that require some but not that much engagement. I like the sound of good conversation, the feeling of human company, and some random material to mix with my stray thoughts.

"Let me show you how liberal media functions to see why it's failing. Yesterday, we published at my Substack platform..."

Posted: 17 May 2021 09:34 AM PDT

"... an article by a veteran freelance reporter that questioned whether 'reformist' prosecutors have caused a big increase in violent crime. The article was one of the few we put behind a paywall, for subscribers only. Nonetheless — based solely on the headline — liberal journalists rose up to condemn an article they hadn't read. Why? Because they think journalism should propagnadize [sic] for liberalism and hide dissent."

Writes Glenn Greenwald (at Twitter).

"These are, I should stress again, a bunch of nice, thoughtful people.... I should stress again that these are smart people...."

Posted: 17 May 2021 09:08 AM PDT

"And they followed the deep partisan grooves of contemporary politics, in which liberals believed the absolute worst of a Trump supporter. But they also contained a thread of real conspiracy thinking — not just that racism is a source of Trumpian politics, but that apparently ordinary people are communicating through secret signals."

From "I'll Take 'White Supremacist Hand Gestures' for $1,000/How hundreds of 'Jeopardy!' contestants talked themselves into a baseless conspiracy theory — and won't be talked out of it" by Ben Smith (NYT).

An excellent sunrise this morning.

Posted: 17 May 2021 06:05 AM PDT

"Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates met at work. He was technically her boss. He ran Microsoft..."

Posted: 17 May 2021 09:20 AM PDT

"... and she began working there in 1987 as a product manager the year after she graduated from college. Throughout their relationship, the two have played up the cute aspects of their office romance. He flirted with her when they sat together at a conference, then asked her out when they ran into each other in a company parking lot, according to Ms. French Gates, who described their relationship's beginnings during a public appearance in 2016. Long after they married in 1994, Mr. Gates would on occasion pursue women in the office.... Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm that manages the Gates's fortune said those incidents, and others more recently, at times created an uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr. Gates was known for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office.... Some of the employees said... he did not pressure the women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women the space to refuse his advances. Even so, Mr. Gates's actions ran counter to the agenda of female empowerment that Ms. French Gates was promoting on a global stage. On Oct. 2, 2019, for example, she said she would spend $1 billion promoting 'women's power and influence in the United States.'"

From "Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior/Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee" (NYT).

Imagine spending a billion dollars to promote a message — to bullshit the masses — while you are blithely violating that message within your personal business realm, where people are trying to make their own little living. What royal hypocrisy!

I don't know the facts first hand, and maybe none of these allegations against Bill Gates are true, but it seems that Melinda Gates — Ms. French Gates — is wisely choosing to disengage her reputation from his. She wants a feminist message? She's got to lop him off.

AND: It's so interesting, these marriages that begin in a workplace setting. Do they not originate in interactions like the interactions that become the evidentiary basis for claims that there is a discriminatory hostile workplace? But the success of the relationship makes all the difference. This one interaction grew into a marriage. I think of all the professors who are married to former students. That seems so nice for the lovely couple — we participate in the playing up of the cute aspects — but what's in the larger picture? Was it just that one magic student who was perceived as wifely material? We gamely presume so, we with our enjoyment of cute aspects.

New River Gorge — the newest national park.

Posted: 17 May 2021 04:45 AM PDT

"The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct..."

Posted: 16 May 2021 04:28 PM PDT

"... he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he's worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn't, it would be wrong. But he's finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life's very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.

The character in the novel became entranced with Tom Paine by reading "Citizen Tom Paine" by Howard Fast, which came out in 1943.

"He was the most hated—and perhaps by a few the most loved—man in all the world." "A mind that burned itself as few minds in all human history." "To feel on his own soul the whip laid on the back of millions." "His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's could ever be." That was Paine as Fast portrayed him, savagely single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent—unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar's clothes, bearing a musket in the unruly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless.

He did it all alone: "My only friend is the revolution." By the time I had finished the book, there seemed to me no way other than Paine's for a man to live and die if he was intent on demanding, in behalf of human freedom—demanding both from remote rulers and from the coarse mob—the transformation of society. He did it all alone. There was nothing about Paine that could have been more appealing, however unsentimentally Fast depicted an isolation born of defiant independence and personal misery.

Allium.

Posted: 16 May 2021 03:51 PM PDT