Trendlist: Althouse

Friday, May 28, 2021

Althouse

"A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that 'one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,' that a person's 'moral character is inherently determined by his or her race or sex,' or..."
"In the last few months, six promising connections with men under 30 — all of them well-educated and seemingly polite — degenerated quickly..."
"Meltdown May refers to an unofficial annual observance that celebrities and popular Twitter accounts seem to attract controversy as a result of their tweets and comments in the month of May and draw further attention to themselves as they argue with their critics."
A "Reddit moment" occurs in r/whatisthisthing.
"The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps."
"Thank you so much for being the person for all of us on 'Friends' that was — I don’t know if this is the right way to say it — but the different one, or the one that was really herself."
Sunrise — 5:30 a.m.

"A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that 'one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,' that a person's 'moral character is inherently determined by his or her race or sex,' or..."

Posted: 28 May 2021 08:28 AM PDT

"... that someone should feel discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race or sex. Nonetheless, educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.... Paula Lewis, chair of the Oklahoma City School Board, said though the state's new law bans teachers from discussing concepts they weren't discussing anyway, and though its penalties are not yet clear, the danger is the fear it instills. 'What if they say the wrong thing?' Lewis said. 'What if somebody in their class during the critical thinking brings up the word oppression or systemic racism? Are they in danger? Is their job in danger?'"

From "Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting A Chill On Their Lessons" (NPR).

This is another example of the notion of outlawing something that nobody's doing anyway. I'm not saying that it's true that no one was doing it or threatening to do it. I'm just observing that it's a form of argument against a law.

Instead of arguing that X should be legal, the argument is don't outlaw X because no one is doing X. You might want the opponents of the law against X to say whether they think X should be illegal, but they don't want to answer that question. They want to accuse the proponents of the law against X of wanting to send a hostile message or scare people who are doing something in the vicinity of X.

Here's where I discussed this concept before: "What is the objection to a law against something that we're told no one is doing anyway?"(discussing the Tennessee ban on transgender hormone treatments for prepubescent children, which "some experts" said was not within current medical practice).

"In the last few months, six promising connections with men under 30 — all of them well-educated and seemingly polite — degenerated quickly..."

Posted: 28 May 2021 06:41 AM PDT

"... (before meetings that never took place), first into references to sex, then to requests for information on what I 'like,' and then to an unstoppable slew of messages about what they'd like to do to me, what they'd like me to do to them, the current status of their body parts, and then incessant voicenotes, body-part pictures and requests for pictures of me. It is inane, tiring and completely pointless. Sexting has taken the place of sex. This may be because sex itself has become such a vexed operation, even for 24-year-olds...."

From "Why are young men so scared of sex?/Sexting has taken the place of sex" (Spectator).

I don't get "unstoppable slew." Why not block anyone who is boring you? All I can think of is: hope.

"Meltdown May refers to an unofficial annual observance that celebrities and popular Twitter accounts seem to attract controversy as a result of their tweets and comments in the month of May and draw further attention to themselves as they argue with their critics."

Posted: 28 May 2021 06:29 AM PDT

"... In May of 2021, multiple commenters agreed that Eve Barlow was the main character of Meltdown May for her consistent Zionist posting, culminating in her writing a piece in which she bemoaned mass replies of 'Eve Fartlow' to her posts as a 'social media pogrom.'"

Know Your Meme explains.

ADDED: Click on those internal links for more. As for "main character":

A "Reddit moment" occurs in r/whatisthisthing.

Posted: 28 May 2021 06:26 AM PDT

I follow the subreddit "What Is This Thing?" — where people post photographs of objects they don't understand. Today, somebody posted this photograph of "soft metal objects [found] while metal detecting under a pier at low tide":

Almost immediately, these were identified as inexpensive Hindu charms that are deliberately thrown in the water in pursuit of good fortune.

One user asks: "Should he return these to where he found them in your opinion?"

A second one says: "No, as soon as the offering is made it is spent so its okay [t]o remove them"

A third: "Not like they'll find out their magic squares got moved anyways ¯_(ツ)_/¯

A fourth: "Its good to pick up the religious littering."

The third person sees that his "magic squares" comment is getting downvoted says: "I wonder if the people downvoting would feel the same way about Christian trinkets. All religions suck pretty equally"

At that, a fifth person declares: "Reddit moment"

"The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps."

Posted: 28 May 2021 07:37 AM PDT

"Walls are covered in paintings and prints, whether reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces or folk art portraits, alongside family photos. 'I just like art, I've got all kinds of art, I don't care what it is,' Kelly said. Knickknacks on the shelves include creamy ceramic vessels that her sons made as children and souvenirs of vacations nationwide — the very kind of 'odds and ends of family living' that Woman's Home Companion had envisioned. A coating of sparkly green stucco on MoMA's wooden exterior 'makes it maintenance-free,' Shaun Kelly, the eldest son, said.... The property's 2.7 acres are lush with unusual trees, such as Japanese snowbell and weeping huckleberry. 'If it doesn't give me a flower, it can't come here,' Mary Kelly said. Neoclassical stone statues, vintage subway signs and metal filigree benches are scattered around the grounds."

From "MoMA Built a House. Then It Disappeared. Now It's Found. In 1950, the museum exhibited Gregory Ain's modernist creation. It's now nestled in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y." (NYT).

I strongly encourage you — if you have any interest in design — to click through and see the photographs of the house as it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 and how it looks now, 71 years later, after getting lived in by real people, with their own ideas of what a house should look like. The text I've quoted gives some idea, but the photographs drive home the truly amazing distinction between what professional designers conceive of to meet the needs of ordinary people and what actual people choose for themselves.

Of course, the NYT refrains from laughing or sneering at the Kelly family, but the exposure in the photographs is a bit threatening to their dignity, I think. I notice the NYT does not provide a comments section for this article. I discern that the politically correct response to this article is to mock the original modernist designers and to celebrate the humanity of the Kellys.

The article quotes a professor who's written about the architect:

"He wanted to solve problems for ordinary working people," said Anthony Denzer, a professor at the University of Wyoming. Progressive activism, including support for desegregation, and an interest in Soviet architecture helped land Ain on the F.B.I.'s Communist Security Index of "'dangerous,' subversive individuals," Denzer writes in an essay in the forthcoming book "Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape."

Well, I hope that book has something about how the real working people received the designs their social superiors believed were good for them. If not, there's always Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House."

And I love the original house and wish I could find houses like that as I look all over the country for a new place to move into. I would never want a place in the condition the Kellys have created around themselves, but I know from my searching that real estate is designed to house people who share their sensibilities far more than for those who'd love to own the house as it appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.

ADDED: Looking over at the NYT now, 9 minutes after I posted, I see there is a comments section. Did I miss the comments section before? I don't think so, because the article went up yesterday, and there's only one comment, posted one minute ago. I have to think the NYT noticed my blog post and put up a comments section.

AND: Now there's a second comment, posted 2 minutes after the first, so I'm sure there was no comments section at the point when I said there was no comments section. Let's see how long before anyone says anything disrespectful about the Kellys. You need to look at the photograph of them to make a valid estimate of the potential for the expression of snobbery from NYT readers.

ALSO: I was looking back at "From Bauhaus to Our House" and hoping to find something about middle class people who do things like what the Kellys did. I found this passage about what rich people do to modern architecture:

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors—and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.

"Thank you so much for being the person for all of us on 'Friends' that was — I don’t know if this is the right way to say it — but the different one, or the one that was really herself."

Posted: 28 May 2021 04:19 AM PDT

Said Lady Gaga to Lisa Kudrow on the "Friends" reunion, quoted in "'Friends: The Reunion': 5 Things We Learned/You might think there's nothing more to know about the show and its cast, but the reunion special, which premiered Thursday on HBO Max, reveals a few things" (NYT).

I watched it, and in fact, I have watched every episode of "Friends" — all, save one, in the last few years. I came to the show familiar with only one of the performers, and that was Lisa Kudrow. I considered "The Comeback" the best TV comedy ever, and I'd always been a big fan of the movie "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."

But I didn't really like hearing Lady Gaga say that Kudrow's character was "the one that was really herself." The others were... what? Really somebody other than themselves? Maybe Gaga doesn't have facility with language, but I think she deliberately said something challenging, because she prefaced the remark with "I don't know if this is the right way to say it." Well, the rest of us don't know what "it" is. My interpretation was that she meant to characterize Phoebe (Kudrow's character) as the outsider. In that light, perhaps it's comforting and exciting for many viewers to see that character gets to be with the other 5. The idea seems to be that the popular kids include one oddball in their group, as if that must be every oddball's dream.

Gaga's theory — as I understand it — is a putdown of the rest of the characters — and of the entire show — who are all outsiders in their own way.

Another issue with the Gaga appearance: Was it at the expense of Chrissie Hynde? The Gaga bit used material from the episode — "The One with the Baby on the Bus" — that had Chrissie Hynde playing "Smelly Cat" with Phoebe. If I had to look at pop stars to find the different one, or the one that was really herself, I'd pick Hynde before Gaga. The disinclusion troubles me. The show is all about keeping the original group together (even though — spoiler alert — the series refrained from ending with each of the characters married to one of the others (4 ended up in Friend-on-Friend couples, but they brought in an outsider to marry Phoebe, and they left Joey without a love of his life)).

ADDED: Here's Chrissie Hynde on the show: