Althouse |
- "'Political correctness' is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits..."
- "If you ask me what kind of a person and interlocutor President Biden is, I can say that he is a constructive person, well-balanced and experienced seasoned politician..."
- "Slutty outfits for men."
- What's this bird?
- "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."
- "On my first flight in 15 months, of course we were rerouted back to the gate because two passengers got into a physical altercation over elbow placement upon arm rests."
- Remember when making Juneteenth a national holiday was a Donald Trump campaign promise?
- "'L' has to be like the consonant of the decade. Lily is one of the original 'L' names, or double 'L' names, like Lola, Lila and Lilian."
- "For about 20 minutes in a Tampa courtroom on Wednesday, a jury listened to an 11-year-old boy describe what he survived three years ago: hearing his mother hit with a shotgun blast..."
- Sunrise — eastern view, western view.
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 01:33 PM PDT "... they're seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It's much more invasive than mere 'correctness,' which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what's happening. The other frames are wrong, too: 'cancel culture' is a vacuous term and doesn't translate into a political program; 'woke' is a good epithet, but it's too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. 'Critical race theory' is the perfect villain... Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as 'creative' rather than 'critical,' 'individual' rather than 'racial,' 'practical' rather than 'theoretical.' Strung together, the phrase 'critical race theory' connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. [And critical race theory is not] an externally applied pejorative... it's the label the critical race theorists chose themselves." Wrote Christopher Rufo to Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who produced this New Yorker article: "How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory/To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like 'the perfect weapon.'" Is that headline correct? You know, I've got a thing about headlines that begin with "how." Are we really going to be told "how" or only "that"? But is it even true that Christopher Rufo invented the conflict over Critical Race Theory? The article shows the Rufo has been collecting information about anti-racism training sessions and, since late July 2020, communicating about what he's found and what he thinks of it. Rufo didn't invent the term. He took a term that already had a life and he exposed it and critiqued it. What did he "invent"? He's accused of — credited with? — inventing the conflict about it. If something is already out there — having an effect — and someone comes along and raises questions about it, has he invented a conflict? This is what activists do. It's the same thing the Critical Race Theorists themselves did. They looked at how systems were operating, and they "invented a conflict" about it. They said the systems contained racism, furthered white supremacy, even covertly and unintentionally. Their technique was to "invent conflict" — wasn't it? — just as much as Rufo's technique was to invent conflict. If we're going to use the phrase "invent conflict," he invented conflict about the conflict they invented.  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:17 AM PDT "... and I expected that. He recalled his family and conversations he had with his mother. Well, these things don't have directly something to do with our business, but nonetheless, it shows his qualities and his moral values. It is all appealing, and I believe that we spoke the same language. It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to look into the eyes and see the soul, and to pledge eternal love. We defend the national interests of our countries. And these relationships are always based on pragmatism." Said Vladimir Putin, from the transcript of his press conference after his meeting with President Biden on June 16th. Putin was responding to the Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Simmons, who'd prompted him with a reminder that Biden once claimed not to see "a soul" in Putin's eyes. What, she asked, did Putin see when he looked into Biden's eyes? By the way, when Putin called on Simmons, he said "A lady. Please give the floor to the lady. She will rock my world here." Back in April, I discussed soullessness at some length, here — "... I was having a real-life conversation about the notion that some people don't have a soul, and whether, if that could be true, the soulless person could acquire a soul, and whether a person who regards another person as soulless has a moral or intellectual obligation to look inside himself and seriously examine whether he himself has got a soul." I don't know if Simmons rocked Putin's world, but I do see that he didn't take the opportunity to opine about whether Biden or Trump or anybody else has a "soul." And he also didn't dismiss or mock this "soul" talk.  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 07:31 AM PDT It's TikTok, so... below the fold:
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| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 09:58 AM PDT  Photographed yesterday by Lake Mendota (in Madison, Wisconsin). I tried various "What is this bird?" websites, but I couldn't figure it out. I asked Meade, and he said "A penguin." IN THE COMMENTS: The most frequent suggestion is Eastern Kingbird, which was one of the options I saw, using bird identification websites, but I saw some differences. One reader, Bart, sent a picture of an Eastern Kingbird, the head of which I will juxtapose to my bird. I think the head shape is different (or maybe Bart's bird is ruffling its feathers and mine is a cooler character):  ADDED: With my photo cut off at the chest, Meade's "penguin" ID becomes entrancingly apt!  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 05:27 AM PDT So begins the great New Yorker essay, "The Journalist and the Murderer," quoted in "Janet Malcolm, Provocative Journalist With a Piercing Eye, Dies at 86/Her subjects ranged widely, but she took special aim at journalism itself, writing that every journalist 'knows that what he does is morally indefensible'" (NYT). Goodbye to Janet Malcolm! The essay is available in book form, and you really must read it. If you've read it, reread it! In fact, "The Journalist and the Murderer" has become something of a classic and was ranked No. 97 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. "It is now taught to nearly every undergraduate studying journalism," Katie Roiphe wrote in a 2011 profile of Ms. Malcolm for The Paris Review. "Today, my critique seems obvious," Ms. Malcolm told Ms. Roiphe, "even banal." The book version has an important afterward, about Malcolm's own fight to defend herself against a defamation lawsuit. She'd written an article — a fantastic article — where she put quotation marks around things that were not verbatim transcriptions of speech. "This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of uhs and ahs... I needed to present it in logical, rational order so he would sound like a logical, rational person" — she said at trial. The Paris Review interview is great. Roiphe has the wit to start off by asking Malcolm, "So how would you describe your apartment if you were the journalist walking into your living room?" Malcolm answers: "My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. If I were a journalist walking into the room, I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait of the New York writer's apartment with its standard tasteful objects (cat included) and general air of unrelenting Culture." Ha ha. Perfect. Exactly!  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:48 AM PDT Said one passenger, quoted in "Passengers kicked off United Airlines flight after brawl over armrest" (NY Post). Ugh! Just stay off planes, maybe. But I approve of this precise rule for ending the eternal armrest struggle:
That's the solution! The middle seat is the worst seat, everyone knows. The person in the middle seat is the only one without an armrest all to his own and without a person-free space to lean over into. So, yeah, this person gets the last word over how the 2 "internal" armrests will be used.  |
| Remember when making Juneteenth a national holiday was a Donald Trump campaign promise? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 06:21 AM PDT From September 25, 2020: "President Donald Trump made a series of promises at a campaign event in Atlanta on Friday in a bid to woo Black voters, including establishing Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of U.S. slavery, as a federal holiday" (Reuters). Of course, it was just "a bid to woo Black voters" when Trump promised to do it, but now that the members of Congress and the new President have actually made Juneteenth a national holiday, is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters? And then there was a time — just before Juneteenth last year — when Trump asserted: "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous." If only Trump were still on Twitter — don't you think he'd be claiming credit for the new holiday? But the truth is, Juneteenth was already a holiday in 47 states (and the District of Columbia) when Trump made his campaign promise last September. ADDED: I'll answer my own question — "is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters?" — with a qualified yes. Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post is minimizing the achievement but only of the Republicans who voted for it:
Stock response: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. Better response: "Supporting the Juneteenth holiday is a gesture..." for everyone. New topic prompt: Robinson says "'critical race theory,' a set of academic concepts they stripped of its original meaning and context"... but unless you can state the original meaning clearly, persuasively, and with an ongoing willingness to defend it to ordinary Americans, the issue that lefties brought into existence has a life of its own. This issue has real substance. Unlike a new national holiday, it's not a gesture. But if you won't talk about the substance, if you restrict yourself to incanting a phrase, then you are straining to make it a mere gesture. Your antagonists are going substantive, so you'd better fight on the substantive level. If you don't, your antagonists can and should make inferences about why you don't. My inference is that your substance is only appealing to left-wingers.  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:55 AM PDT "Luna has gone from almost nonexistent 20 years ago to number 14 on the Social Security Administration list of popular names. Chrissy Teigen and John Legend used that for their daughter. You saw the same thing with the 'J' names of the '70s and '80s — Jennifer, Jason, Jessica, Joshua. Then there were the 'K' names, which the Kardashians helped popularize in the 2000s. The sound of the letter is what becomes fashionable. But why 'L'? There are a lot of words that start with L that have very positive, warm connotations, like 'love,' 'lovely,' 'lilting,' 'lively.' What about for boys? There are definitely boy equivalents — Lucas, Luca, Leo, Levi. I know it sounds crazy, but there were more than 50 boys in the United States named Lucifer last year." Is the letter "L" the best letter? I have seen rankings of the letters, such as "Ranking the Letters of the Alphabet, From Lamest to Coolest" (Paste). But that ranking is so obviously wrong, putting "M" and "Q" near the bottom! But reasons are given. Here's what it says about "L" (which comes in at 21st): Hard to pronounce, limited in use, and ultimately pretty apathetic. Words like lollygag and idle and lazy and aimless and desultory and casual and frivolous and sluggish and lethargic and lackadaisical and dull and dally and indolent and laggard and languid and lummox and loafer and lifeless and slack and sloth and slow and lag and somnolent and…you get it. They all feature an L, the slug of letters. Wait! "Lummox" is a great word. It's so close to my all-time favorite word, "flummox." Yeah, I know, negative meaning, but it looks and sounds great, and this whole topic is gloriously superficial. And that reminds me. That NYT article tells us: "Parents are now looking at animal names like Ox — seriously." If Ox is okay, then why not Lummox. We'll name the twins Lummox and Flummox!  |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:43 AM PDT "... seeing his sister stabbed in the head with an ax, and then feeling himself get soaked in gasoline and lit on fire. His father, Ronnie Oneal III, is charged with committing these crimes. After the 11-year-old's harrowing testimony to prosecutors, Oneal himself got up to directly question him about it. 'Did I hurt you the night of this incident?' Oneal asked the boy, Ronnie Oneal IV. 'Yes,' the child replied. 'You stabbed me.'" The father attacked the child's credibility: The boy had said he saw his father shoot his mother, but he didn't see it, he heard it. Of course, the father is exercising his constitutional rights, representing himself and confronting the witness against him. This was a choice. He also chose to yell at the jury during his opening statement: "The evidence is going to show that we are under the most vicious, lying, fabricating, fictitious, government you ever seen! By the time it's all said and done, you will see who is the mass murderers in Tampa Bay!" The prosecutors called the boy as a witness. I'll start the video at the point when Oneal picks up his notepad and begins his cross-examination:  |
| Sunrise — eastern view, western view. Posted: 17 Jun 2021 06:02 PM PDT |
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