Althouse |
- Sunrise, 5:24.
- I think this is an honest revelation: American flags really do disturb Mara Gay.
- 5:07 a.m.
- "Thanks, I hate future ad-tech..."
- "And we all know that this is about payback for supporting Brett Kavanaugh, no more. If it brings the law school bad press..."
- "Joe Manchin’s Incoherent Case for Letting Republicans Destroy Democracy/The most powerful senator’s illogical reasoning"/"Joe Manchin’s Incoherent Case for Letting Republicans Destroy Democracy/The most powerful senator ties himself in knots."
- "At one of their debates, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of treating the Justice Department like his 'own law firm' in the suit, filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll."
- Sunrise at 5:28.
- "A person with very severe prosopagnosia may be unable to recognize his spouse, or to pick out his own child in a group of people."
| Posted: 08 Jun 2021 06:31 PM PDT
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| I think this is an honest revelation: American flags really do disturb Mara Gay. Posted: 08 Jun 2021 01:47 PM PDT This is a pretty standard aversion to the flag. It made me think of Katha Pollit's famous reaction to flag displays after the 9/11 attacks. Here: "Put Out No Flags" (The Nation, September 20, 2001): My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong–the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism.... It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins's Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits.  |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2021 08:48 AM PDT
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| "Thanks, I hate future ad-tech..." Posted: 08 Jun 2021 07:24 AM PDT |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2021 04:59 PM PDT "... and ruins the already disappointing deanship of Heather Gerken — spoiler, it has — then that's justice. Just read this, and imagine putting any of these people in charge of your life, your liberty, or your business's future." Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Yale Law School controversy. This is the complicated Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld matter that I'm not taking any position on, because I don't trust the witnesses. Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos is reviling Chua and Rubenfeld. Three other professors [said] that Chua is the victim of overzealous zoomers who have confused the natural hierarchy of achievement — and Chua's right to favor whomever she wants — with a social-justice outrage. "There are a lot of mediocre students at Yale who were superstars in their little county fairs, and now they're in the Kentucky Derby and they're not winning their races and they feel like it's unfair because other students are doing better," says one faculty member who thinks the dean, Heather Gerken, was too deferential to students in how she handled the small-group affair.... and goes nuclear: This person should be fired directly into the Sun. It's basically impossible to get into YLS without perfect everything, and the analogy between running the Belmont in 2:24 and impressing a bunch of wankers on the YLS faculty with your talent for subtle ingratiation disguised as "brilliance" is, shall we say, not a super tight one. It's easy for me to picture how the most elite admissions process could lead to a student body that, in action, feels like "a lot of mediocre students." But that's a dreadful dysfunction of the institution that the faculty is responsible for. It's truly contemptible to stand aloof and blame your students. And the use of the rural setting for the analogy — little county fairs — is out-and-proud snobbery of the most embarrassing kind. Little county fairs and the Kentucky Derby — that's rich. Is there horse racing at a county fair? I'd really like to know who came up with that dimwitted analogy, and I can see why it pissed Campos off. He's right that in that analogy, winning the Kentucky Derby is analogized to ingratiating yourself to law professors. But what we don't really know is what kind of ingratiating was going on with the great power couple that was Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld? Was it something different — creepier and more sexual — than the ingratiating that goes on with other Yale lawprofs?  |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2021 05:38 AM PDT Headlines — on the front page and atop the article — for Jonathan Chait's NY Magazine piece, which I haven't read yet. I don't believe Manchin is either "incoherent," "illogical," or "tied up in knots," but let's see what Chait is talking about:
Which would make his point coherent, logical, and unknotted.  |
| Posted: 08 Jun 2021 05:02 AM PDT "'What's that all about?' he sarcastically asked. But on Monday night, nearly eight months after Mr. Biden's attack, his own Justice Department essentially adopted Mr. Trump's position, arguing that he could not be sued for defamation because he had made the supposedly offending statements as part of his official duties as president. In a brief filed with a federal appeals court in New York... the Biden administration's Justice Department, now led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland... said that when Mr. Trump had denied raping Ms. Carroll, through the White House press office or in statements to reporters in the Oval Office and on the White House lawn, he was acting within the scope of his office. 'Elected public officials can — and often must — address allegations regarding personal wrongdoing that inspire doubt about their suitability for office,' the department lawyers argued, adding, 'Officials do not step outside the bounds of their office simply because they are addressing questions regarding allegations about their personal lives.' Ms. Carroll's lead lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, reacting to the new filing, said that as 'horrific' as the alleged rape was, it was 'truly shocking that the current Department of Justice would allow Donald Trump to get away with lying about it.'" It's not about Donald Trump anymore. It's about presidential power, and the new President needs and wants to defend that power. Presidents are attacked, often about personal matters, and they defend themselves. That turns into a defamation suit. That's going to happen again and again if it's allowed. As President, Joe Biden can easily see "What's that all about?"  |
| Posted: 07 Jun 2021 06:21 PM PDT
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| Posted: 07 Jun 2021 06:07 PM PDT "Jane Goodall also has a certain degree of prosopagnosia. Her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people—thus, she says, she is often unable to distinguish individual chimps by their faces. Once she knows a particular chimp well, she ceases to have difficulties; similarly, she has no problem with family and friends. But, she says, 'I have huge problems with people with "average" faces. . . . I have to search for a mole or something. I find it very embarrassing! I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day.'... Face recognition is crucially important for humans, and the vast majority of us are able to identify thousands of faces individually, or to easily pick out familiar faces in a crowd.... People with prosopagnosia... need to be resourceful and inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, for example, or by their spectacles or a certain type of clothing. Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and, of course, context and expectation are paramount—one expects to see one's students at school, one's colleagues at the office, and so on. Such strategies, both conscious and unconscious, become so automatic that people with moderate prosopagnosia can remain unaware of how poor their facial recognition actually is, and are startled if it is revealed to them by testing (for example, with photographs that omit ancillary clues like hair or eyeglasses)." From "Face-Blind/Why are some of us terrible at recognizing faces?" by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker, August 23, 2010). I'm rereading this today because the NYT ran an article today – "The Cost of Being an 'Interchangeable Asian'" — about "the phenomenon of casual Asian-face blindness" that may be holding back Asian-Americans in the workplace. I blogged that here. The suggestion that there's racism in the inability to recognize faces needs to be handled carefully, because there are 2 forms of discrimination in conflict. It may be discrimination to be bad at recognizing Asian-American coworkers, but vigilance about this human frailty may amount to a failure to accommodate the disabled — those with prosopagnosia. Quite aside from the specific disability, we're all on a spectrum when it comes to facial recognition. Many of us are bad at it, and some people are fantastic at it. Be careful about throwing accusations of racism around in this area of radically diverse ability.  |
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