Althouse |
- "White women love dinner parties more than anything. It’s their safe space to talk about how much they hate their husbands, how their kids are super annoying..."
- "See-through socks?" — Joe Rogan tries to keep up with David Lee Roth and David Lee Roth just barrels along.
- "But anyone who has spent a small amount of time with Mr. Zuckerberg knows that he’s uncomfortable with his immense power..."
- "In the late 1950s, not long after his daughter, Jennifer, was born, Arthur W. Staats turned what had been a more or less random parental punishment into a staple of behavioral psychology and a household phrase."
- Unique sunrise.
- "This is one of those where I read the title and went 'I can't imagine how you could not be the asshole' and then read the post and went '....oh.' "
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 11:25 AM PDT "... how crazy busy they are, the latest school auction they're raising money for. You turn the place where they typically unleash their entire sea of whiteness into somewhere where you can actually have safe, not shameful, conversations around racism.... They start recognising how they've been cocooned in whiteness... White people have perfected their performance. We're watching 'White Women, the Musical' playing to a shut-down Broadway every night... They have the language. They have lots of yard signs. My God, they have so many yard signs and T-shirts and books. It's checking boxes but what has changed? Nothing." Said Saira Rao, quoted in "Ladies, your $5,000 'racism supper' is ready — don't choke on the guilt new/Dinner parties designed to teach white women about their privilege are serving up lessons on injustice in America" (London Times).
You'll be given a time out.
Racism — it's what's for dinner.  |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 06:49 AM PDT
You can scroll back to the beginning to watch that whole 12-minute clip. I actually listened to the entire 3+ hours of the podcast on Spotify. Roth is such a motor mouth, but it's all pretty interesting. He did leave Rogan in the dust, though. The main thing Roth got across — if you take the 3 hours as a whole — is that he's internalized the lesson his father taught by asking — every night at the dinner table — what did you contribute? In case you're wondering, Roth will be getting a new tooth. I forget how he said he got that one knocked out. Speaking of Spotify, I like that — at the age of 70 — I've been able to hear something new now and then and genuinely adopt it as a personal favorite. When I was a teenager, it was so easy to accept new musical artists and really love them — internalize them. Now, it's an amazing delight when something leaps into the place in my head that was so open when I was young. Yesterday, I clicked on this and immediately took it to heart:  |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 06:46 AM PDT "... he agonizes deeply about his every step. In my innumerable conversations with him over many years — often late at night over a phone, giving them the feel of a college-dorm jaw session — he maintained that he trusted Facebook's larger community to clean out the vile, often-toxic dreck that flowed over his ever-larger platform. Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man. I have studied the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany and during China's Cultural Revolution. I told him that there is no low that some people will not sink to if it is in their interests to do so. Once, when Mr. Zuckerberg was still talking to me, we argued about some much-less-serious violation of rules on Facebook, issues that now seem quaint in comparison. Trying to lighten the mood, I invoked the old journalism bromide: He should trust, yes, but always verify. 'If your mother says she loves you, check it,' I said to him, trying to convince him that he could not rely on the community or algorithms or anything else but his own decision making when push from bad actors inevitably came to shove. He did not get the joke at all. He also missed my larger point that the world was an ugly place and that he had handed some very bad people in it a potent weapon of destruction. They would take advantage of his belief that the truth will always out. Even now, I have a hard time describing the blank stare on his typically blank face. It was as if I was talking in another language to another species on another planet." From "The Terrible Cost of Mark Zuckerberg's Naïveté" by Kara Swisher (NYT). Notice what she's saying — that the traditional liberal principles of freedom of speech are stupidly naive. I think! She isn't fairly representing Z's side of the conversations (the "jaw session," as she calls it), but I think his position was the classic belief in the marketplace of ideas, where all the ideas come out and are heard and responded to and people make their choices about what to believe, rejecting what is bad and selecting what is good. That's what I'm guessing is behind Swisher's assertion "Mr. Zuckerberg believes in the perfectibility of man" and "his belief that the truth will always out." The most obvious response to the marketplace of ideas concept is that people are not necessarily shopping for truth and even if they are, they might be distracted into making an impulse purchase of something more exciting or soothing, like the way you go into the grocery store thinking of buying fresh fruits and vegetables and end up buying Coke and Tostitos. But that doesn't meant that everyone who's sticking with free speech and citing the marketplace of ideas theory is naive. The nonnaiveté lies in the understanding that the alternative approaches are worse. Swisher seems to be saying that because the world is "an ugly place" with "some very bad people," censorship is better than free speech. She's just as open to an accusation of naiveté as he is. What depth of understanding is she showing about the harms of the suppression of speech? The question isn't what's perfect, but what's better. And instead of facing that, which I would call the real world, Swisher reverts to the standard bashing of Zuckerberg: he seems like "another species on another planet." He doesn't seem normal. Here, there's room on the couch with these guys:  |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 05:34 AM PDT "He called it a 'time out.' Exhaustive experiments conducted by Dr. Staats (rhymes with 'spots') and his collaborators found that removing a child from the scene of improper behavior, and whatever had provoked it, ingrained an emotional connection with self-control and was preferable to punishment. As a bonus, it gave frustrated parents a short break. Dr. Staats emphasized that children needed to be warned of the consequences of their behavior in advance, and that the 'time out' tactic had to be applied consistently and within the context of a positive relationship between parent and child....."  |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 10:39 AM PDT I've been doing my daily — almost daily — sunrise runs since September 2019, and this is the first time I've seen this:
ADDED: My first thought, on seeing this scene at my usual sunrise vantage point, was that — because everyone was paying attention to one woman and there were at least 2 other women off to the side — this was an example of men behaving in a shallow and unkind way. Then I noticed that one man was doing a lot of talking, toward the woman and to one of the other men, and it was hilariously obvious that I was witnessing a wedding.  |
| Posted: 05 Jun 2021 05:25 AM PDT "NTA. I am not normally a scene-making person, but this is the kind of thing that making a scene is for. I am not normally one for publicly shaming someone but this is what public shame is for. Sometimes someone's behavior is so far beyond the pale that the kindest and most righteous act for everyone else involved is to make a goddamn scene." Top-voted comment at "AITA for telling my SIL no [one] cares that she's pregnant" at the subreddit "Am I the Asshole?"  |
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