Saturday, July 10, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

I was walking down by the Limnology building when I saw a concentrated pile of bird doo....

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 01:07 PM PDT

Video:

 

Still:

IMG_5949

"This makes it postable!"

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 11:46 AM PDT

I got email this morning from Bob Boyd, aiming at commenting on last night's post about MSNBC angsting about J.D. Vance: 

Media attacks of this kind will only help Vance with voters and increase his name recognition. 

Here is a twitter thread by a guy who has a very good grasp on the evolution of the thinking of Trump's voters over the course of the last few years and he explains it concisely. For anyone interested in understanding their point of view, this is very much worth reading. 

I didn't click on that link because other emailers had already called it to my attention. I just said:

yes, i saw that it's so annoying to read in the form of a twitter thread though 

Actually, Boyd sent me a link to a "Twitter reader" version of the thread, so it actually wasn't as annoying as what I'd seen, which was a long series of tweets on Twitter. Instead of pointing that out, Boyd responded...

No matter how annoying something is, it can always be worse. 

... and sent me this:

I responded:
thanks... this makes it postable!

"[T]he sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites... has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation."

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 07:38 AM PDT

"It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of 'white supremacy,' which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.... The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a 'social justice reckoning' these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that 'the country's social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.' She's right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.... The reason 'critical race theory' is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism's seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity ('intersectionality'). A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable 'systems' and 'structures' and 'internal biases' arrived to hover over the world...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "What Happened To You?/The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism" (Substack).

Just take one more minute for rational reflection and you will be all set.

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 08:37 AM PDT

That's what I have to say to metalmom, who writes this comment to "Do We Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day for Our Health? The advice that we take 10,000 steps a day is more a marketing accident than based on science. Taking far fewer may have notable benefits" (NYT):

What really burns me up about the endless reports of how we need to do at least 30 minutes of vigorous exercise five days a week: who has time for that? Let me get this straight. You have young children. You get them off to school and then commute an hour to your job. Do your job all day and then rush home to your kids. Help them with their homework, make dinner, attend school-related or community-related events. And all the housework including laundry and grocery shopping, and yardwork. Fit in a few minutes of conversation with your partner. Handle phone calls about the family or friends. Then fall into bed too stressed out to sleep. Repeat every day. Don't forget to get your vigorous exercise in! And feel guilty if you don't!

Such unnecessary burning up! 

ADDED: It occurs to me that if one were really burning with anger, it would consume calories. I'm thinking I could get rich writing a new diet book. Has anyone ever used this idea before? You lose weight by getting angry, so angry you feel the burn. That heat could not exist if not for calories. So don't worry about going running or off on your long runs. Stay on the internet and keep reading those websites that fire you up.

FROM THE EMAIL: Washington Blogger writes:

I lost 7 pounds reading the Althouse comments section. Now all that weight is back under the new format. However, blood pressure is down. I think my doctor prefers it that way, so you get a thumbs up from her. :)

"In many ways, Lex Lederman, 28, is a classic American family man. He owns a farm in New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife and three children (plus a sizable company of chickens, pigs and geese)."

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 06:51 AM PDT

"He's teaching himself home renovation (plumbing, electrics, how to lay floors) and regularly helps out with homeless food charities, refugee relief, and the local high school football team. But this lifestyle has only become possible since he quit his construction job for a full-time career on OnlyFans – the content subscription service where he uploads erotic pictures and videos for his predominantly gay male fanbase.... Towering at 6ft 3in and shredded like a Marvel hero, Lederman has always had a social media presence with big Dilf energy. On Instagram (his biography reads 'husband, father, goofball'), he shares photos of his family, documents his bodybuilding gains, and uploads videos of himself chopping wood in overalls. Those aspects of his real life feed into his OnlyFans persona, fuelling an erotic fantasy of the 'unattainable family man' that keeps him sitting comfortably in the top 1% of creators.... Now, Lederman's material ranges from editorialised underwear shots to homemade masturbation videos. Once he realised that he was earning more doing three hours of OnlyFans than he was doing 60 hours of construction, he quit his day job.... ... OnlyFans is that the latter has the feel of social media ... Fans can talk to creators directly, which means OnlyFans also offers a more intimate alternative to watching porn....."

From "'Where else can I make a month's rent in two days?': the unlikely stars of OnlyFans" (The Guardian).

"What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialised in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger."

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 06:36 AM PDT

"Meanwhile, I'm alone with my memories of what really happened – just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding on to the parts of a person that only you knew."

Writes Alexis Nowicki, the real-life person upon whom the story "Cat Person" was based, quoted in "The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter/Kristen Roupenian's viral 2017 short story is again being debated, now over her alleged use of details drawn from life. The questions this raises do not have neat answers" (The Guardian). 

[Nowicki] alleges that biographical details in the story were taken from her life and relationship with an older man, whom she calls Charles. Nowicki had never met Roupenian, but came from the same small home town, lived in the same college dorms, and worked at the same theatre as Margot....

As it turns out, Roupenian did know Charles and told Nowicki that she had gleaned details of her previous relationship with Charles through social media. It's a sad story, especially as Charles died suddenly last year and Nowicki clearly desires to set the record straight about a man she felt was kind and decent, unlike [the character in the story] Robert....

Of course, writers always use people like this... or maybe not quite like this. Change some of the details at least! And yet, it's Nowicki drawing attention to herself and to Charles. She seems to have felt Charles was wronged. Roupenian turned him into a symbol of misogyny, and Nowicki wants to clear his name... which requires an additional sullying of his name.

The author of the Guardian piece — the delightfully named Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett — says the "the most interesting question" here is: "how do you go about reconciling the necessary use of real human experience as a way of exploring human psychology while doing right by people?"

It was Graham Greene who wrote that every writer has a splinter of ice in their heart. I think he was right: you have to have it, otherwise you would spend all your time worrying about the impact of your work on others and you would never write at all.

"On Thursday President Joe Biden spoke in defense of his ill-considered, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, in remarks peopled with straw men and littered with false assertions."

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 05:22 AM PDT

Writes Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst and author of "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden."  

First, Biden contended that he was bound by a 2020 Trump administration agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all US troops by May 2021. But that was an agreement conducted by a previous administration -- so it's not binding -- and it was predicated on [a number of conditions that haven't been met]....

[T]he Trump administration pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, while Biden is now honoring an agreement with an insurgent/terrorist group that is not abiding by the terms of the deal that was negotiated last year by the Trump team.

Second, Biden claimed in his speech that the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, would "work vigorously" for a negotiated solution between the Taliban and the Afghan government.... The Khalilzad-led peace process hasn't worked for the past three years. Why would it suddenly work now?...

Third, Biden said that the US can't be in Afghanistan "indefinitely," yet there are some 28,000 US troops in South Korea three quarters of a century after the end of the Korean War....

Fourth, Biden speciously implied that if the US has troops in Afghanistan then somehow it won't be strong enough to "meet the strategic competition with China and other nations." The US military consists of 1.3 million active-duty personnel and yet it can't leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan? To use a trademark Biden expression: C'mon man!

After his speech, Biden told reporters that it's "highly unlikely" that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan, which is not what his own intelligence community is warning....

What could be sweeter than watching Bob Weir earnestly endeavoring...

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 04:48 AM PDT

When there is a clearly visible need, people really do step up.

Posted: 10 Jul 2021 04:37 AM PDT

"Liberals know which politics threatens their hegemony...."

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 05:04 PM PDT

"Today I learned that people exist who take out $200k+ in loans for film studies degrees."

Posted: 09 Jul 2021 05:01 PM PDT
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