Althouse

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• "And nearly 13 percent — 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples — participated in some version of 'undoing gender.'"
• "In her most recent post, she argued that 'vaccinated people’s urine/feces' (sic) needed to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people via drinking water was established."
• Let's take a closer look at that snapping turtle.
• Why do supporters of Kamala Harris portray her as faceless?!
• "Missing Dog Launched from Vehicle During Car Accident, Found on a Farm Herding Sheep."
• "The IG's conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish... "
• "When they looked at students by race, they found that Black and Hispanic students lost the most learning because of hot school days."
• "Open your eyes/Look up at the skies/And see..."
• I begin this video before I know what animal that is up ahead.
• "I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor."
• "For the 30-ish fashion stylist Mickey Freeman, who has eschewed trousers for some six years, a kilt is a tool for flouting societal constrictions on what constitutes Black male identity."
• "Why is this administration telling asylum seekers to stay home when we have a moral and legal duty to give those in danger an opportunity to seek refuge."

"And nearly 13 percent — 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples — participated in some version of 'undoing gender.'" Posted: 10 Jun 2021 11:08 AM PDT "Many do this by taking parental names from their native cultures or religions that strip away the binary in this cultural context, collapsing the dichotomy between terms by merging them, such as 'Mather,' a fusion of mother and father, or creating nicknames ('Muzzie,' in one instance).... Ellen Kahn, the director of the Children, Youth & Families Program at the Human Rights Campaign, said the gender binary that underlies 'mother' and 'father' doesn't jibe with some parents' self-understanding and self-presentation: 'For queer parents who don't think of themselves as gender conforming, "mommy" and "daddy" may be a little discordant with the way they think about themselves.'" From "Some L.G.B.T. Parents Reject the Names 'Mommy' and 'Daddy'" (NYT). 1. Hello? NYT? "Muzzie" is a slur against Muslims! How can you just print that? Was someone pulling a prank on you — were you swingin' on the flippity-flop again?    2. "Mather," that's an interesting idea. I wonder how it would be pronounced. Just about exactly like "mother," but slightly weird and affected. Good luck, little child of "mather" and "fother."  3. You're going to give a child the task of expressing its parents' nonconformity? Be careful! You might create a longing for conformity. 4. It's an old idea, but worth considering — "parental units": 5. The NYT article has a correction noted: "An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of parents in a study who were 'undoing gender' by creating new names. It is nearly 13 percent, not a quarter." I read the comments over there and saw how the mistake was made. As you see in the quote in my post title, they had "20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples." They added 20% and 5% to get 25% ("a quarter"). That's some embarrassing innumeracy.  6. I remember the days of "Heather Has 2 Mommies." Apparently, we're regressing to the notion that there can't be 2 mommies. Even more regressive is the idea that to be a mother or a father is to follow stereotypical gender roles. How can this man be a father if he stays home with young children while this other person — how can we call her a mother?? — goes out to work for pay?!

"In her most recent post, she argued that 'vaccinated people’s urine/feces' (sic) needed to be separated from general sewage supplies/waterways until its impact on unvaccinated people via drinking water was established." Posted: 10 Jun 2021 10:25 AM PDT From "Naomi Wolf banned from Twitter for spreading vaccine myths/Many social media users applaud termination of author's account, but some have said move is a blow to freedom of speech" (The Guardian).

Let's take a closer look at that snapping turtle. Posted: 10 Jun 2021 07:52 AM PDT Following up on yesterday's video, here are the stills:   I like the curved line left by little monster's tail. Closer: I don't know for sure, but I am thinking this newly dug hole is turtle-related:

Why do supporters of Kamala Harris portray her as faceless?! Posted: 10 Jun 2021 02:50 PM PDT There's some discussion this week of a ridiculous cookie Harris's people handed out: Some people are referring to that as a cookie "with her face on" it, but it's quite distinctly a cookie depicting her with no face. Last October, I showed you this really bad sign, which we'd seen in our neighborhood: Why would you show a politician you support as having no face? One horrible answer would be: Oh, but it does show her face. It shows the facial trait that matters: The color of the skin of her face. In action, Kamala Harris uses her face. She's not a blank face. She's a smiling face. Like Obama, she deploys a big smile and laughs as much as possible. Like Hillary Clinton, she seems to laugh too much and not because she's genuinely delighted.  Perhaps her supporters default to a blank face because efforts to replicate the smile in a drawing or in cookie icing don't work. And how could they? To look like her, the smile would need to look off. So you just can't do it right. Another idea is that people are uneasy about any sort of a caricature of a black person. Anything you do might be criticized as racist. Facelessness is the graphic design equivalent of if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all... in a world where the standards of what counts as "nice" are so high and so confusing that you feel anything you say may be used against you. So let me revise: The choice of facelessness is the graphic design equivalent of taking the 5th. IN THE EMAIL: Omaha 1 writes: "I know it's awful but someone on FB said it looks like she has a turkey on her face. I can't un-see it now! You can see the drumsticks sticking out on both sides." That's got to be a reference to "Friends": AND: Tubal writes: "The shadow of the metal stakes makes Biden and, more so Harris, resemble Mr. and Mrs. Thompson from South Park":

"Missing Dog Launched from Vehicle During Car Accident, Found on a Farm Herding Sheep." Posted: 10 Jun 2021 05:53 AM PDT  People reports.  [Tilly, t]he 2-year-old border collie was ejected from the rear of his owner's GMC Yukon during a car accident on Sunday in Rathdrum, Idaho. Tilly fled the scene of the collision after being launched from the vehicle.... On Tuesday, siblings Tyler and Travis Potter noticed something weird about their Australian shepherd Hooey while watching the dog on their family farm... [U]pon closer inspection, Tyler and Travis figured out why. The dog out there wasn't Hooey at all, but Tilly, who managed to find his way to the Potter Farm, 1.5 miles from the crash site... "I think that dog was trying to herd," Travis Potter told The Spokesman-Review. Tilly's owner, Linda Oswald, told the outlet that tracks based on her dog's usual behavior. "He'll herd anything," Oswald said. "When I go to the dog park, he tries to herd the people into one group." Thus, we learn that a border collie, kicked out of his familiar home base, will look for work on his own and find it.

"The IG's conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish... " Posted: 10 Jun 2021 05:12 AM PDT "'[T]he evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.' Instead... 'the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.' Crucially, 'the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day.'.... The clearing of the Park, said the IG Report, had nothing to do with Trump or his intended visit to the Church; in fact, those responsible for doing this did not have any knowledge of Trump's intentions... [T]he media claims that were repeated over and over and over as proven fact — and even confirmed by 'fact-checkers' — were completely false.... Over and over we see the central truth: the corporate outlets that most loudly and shrilly denounce 'disinformation' — to the point of demanding online censorship and de-platforming in the name of combating it — are, in fact, the ones who spread disinformation most frequently and destructively." Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Yet Another Media Tale -- Trump Tear-Gassed Protesters For a Church Photo Op -- Collapses That the White House violently cleared Lafayette Park at Trump's behest was treated as unquestioned truth by most corporate media. Today it was revealed as a falsehood" (Substack).

"When they looked at students by race, they found that Black and Hispanic students lost the most learning because of hot school days." Posted: 10 Jun 2021 05:05 AM PDT "In fact, white students were able to mitigate nearly all of the effects of hot schools days.... Starting in the 1930s, the US government started to back home loans for Americans to help them build up wealth – but the US refused to back loans for Black people, or even white people who wanted to live near Black people.... In many historically redlined neighborhoods, cities built elements that trap and radiate heat, like highways and parking lots. Meanwhile in more affluent white neighborhoods, they installed heat-soaking elements, like parks and trees.... This ultimately means Black and Hispanic children are living and going to school in hotter neighborhoods, which could largely explain why hot days hurt them more.... 'If they're never really able to cool down to a normal body temperature, then that's an issue,' said Wolf, the heat researcher. 'We know that constant heat stress, where you don't really get a break from this, is a really large stressor. That compounds itself from day to day.'... Park and his colleagues found that this racial disparity in air conditioning is true across the country, after controlling for how hot a region is."  From "America's Dirty Divide/How the US lets hot school days sabotage learning/New research shows American students are losing huge chunks of learning to heat (The Guardian).

"Open your eyes/Look up at the skies/And see..." Posted: 10 Jun 2021 06:54 AM PDT That's the first line I heard when I got back to my car — radio set to the "Classic Vinyl" channel — after my sunrise run this morning. It was far from the most beautiful sunrise I've seen in my morning ritual...   ... but there was a partial solar eclipse...    There were about 8 other humans gathered to witness the phenomenon they'd heard about, and this is the point where one young guy exclaimed, ironically, "The solar eclipse is legit!"  ADDED: If you think you need those special glasses to look at a sunrise solar eclipse: 1. You need to ask yourself how you can look at ANY sunrise, and 2. Just interpose your iPhone between your eyes and the sun and watch the event on your iPhone screen (and take your photos, too).

I begin this video before I know what animal that is up ahead. Posted: 09 Jun 2021 05:26 PM PDT  On my sunrise run today, I encounter wildlife:

"I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor." Posted: 09 Jun 2021 06:31 PM PDT "I teach students who see inequities in texts that have nothing to do with power. Students have internalized the message that this is the way we read and think about the world, and as a result, they fixate on power and group identity. This fixation has stunted their ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature. In my professional opinion, the school is failing to encourage healthy habits of mind, essential for growth, such as intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, reason, and the capacity to question ideas and consider multiple perspectives.... Understandably, these students have found comfort in their moral certainty, and so they have become rigid and closed-minded, unable or unwilling to consider alternative perspectives. These young students have no idea that the school has placed ideological blinders on them." Writes Dana Stangel-Plowe, resigning from her job as an English teacher at an expensive New Jersey private school. The full text of her letter is here. I first read about this in The Daily Mail: "Black Columbia professor calls for 'truly antiracist parents' to pull their kids out of $52k New Jersey school after teacher quit over critical race theory lessons and says only this will stop the 'misguided quest'/John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, tweeted his support for Dana Stangel-Plowe." The Mail quotes McWhorter's tweet: "All hail Dana Stangel-Plowe, who has resigned from the Dwight-Englewood School, which teaches students 'antiracism' that sees life as nothing but abuse of power, and teaches that cringing, hostile group identity against oppression is the essence of a self."

"For the 30-ish fashion stylist Mickey Freeman, who has eschewed trousers for some six years, a kilt is a tool for flouting societal constrictions on what constitutes Black male identity." Posted: 09 Jun 2021 03:57 PM PDT "'Most people have an internal directive of how clothes play into a man's masculinity,' Mr. Freeman wrote in an email. Guys looking to loosen 'the internal shackles' of gender presentation may benefit from giving a test run to wearing a garment created without two legs and a zipper." From "The Boys in Their Summer Dresses Gender fluidity enters its next phase as men increasingly step out in skirts and frocks" by Guy Trebay (in the NYT) The headline is a play on a famous short story title, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses." The article does talk about men wearing summer dresses, but I just want to say that a kilt is not a dress, and a kilt is not "a tool for flouting societal constrictions." A kilt is a very traditional item of men's clothing. Now, it's possible that "a kilt is a tool for flouting societal constrictions on what constitutes Black male identity," but that has to do with a black man challenging convention by wearing something from the traditional clothing of white men, not about playing with gender. It's like saying a dashiki is a tool for flouting societal constrictions on what constitutes white male identity. By the way, Freeman seems to be black, so he may be able to talk about "the internal shackles of gender presentation." But I recommend eschewing slavery metaphors like that, especially when you're just talking about your feelings of being restricted. Your shyness, insecurity, and inhibitions are not like slavery, and as hyperbole, they're in bad taste.

"Why is this administration telling asylum seekers to stay home when we have a moral and legal duty to give those in danger an opportunity to seek refuge." Posted: 09 Jun 2021 06:34 PM PDT "Hopefully domestic politics is not a driving force because asylum must operate outside of politics." Said Lee Gelernt, "a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the administration over its practice of turning migrants away," quoted in "Kamala Harris, With Blunt Language on Border, Forges Immigration Image/The vice president concluded her first trip abroad, a high-stakes trip to Mexico and Guatemala during which she took on the politically volatile issue" (NYT). Gelernt (and others) object to Harris's advice — to Guatemalans who may be contemplating attempting to migrate to the United States — "do not come." That's the "blunt language" the headline refers to. Ms. Harris's team has tried to distance her from the U.S.-Mexico border issue, an acknowledgment of the political baggage it brings to any Democrat with aspirations for higher office. While she has shown a willingness to speak about the causes of migration, Ms. Harris has stumbled when discussing the border. When pressed by Lester Holt of NBC on Monday about why she wasn't visiting the border itself, Ms. Harris responded, "And I haven't been to Europe. And I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not discounting the importance of the border."

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