Monday, January 24, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina..."

Posted: 24 Jan 2022 08:00 AM PST

"... presenting the most serious threat in decades to the use of affirmative action by the nation's public and private colleges and universities.... In the latest case, groups backed by a longtime opponent of affirmative action, Edward Blum of Maine, sued Harvard and UNC in federal court, claiming that Harvard's undergraduate admissions system discriminated against Asian American students and that UNC's discriminated against both Asian American and white students.... The challengers in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, urged the justices to overrule the court's 2003 decision on affirmative action, which upheld the University of Michigan's use of race as a plus factor and served as a model for similar admissions programs nationwide...."

NBC News reports.

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Posted: 24 Jan 2022 07:31 AM PST

Said Gustave Flaubert.

I'm reading that this morning because it popped up in the end of a New Yorker article about — of all things — Led Zeppelin:

If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don't have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony.... [S]urely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn't live demonically. What about Flaubert's mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin's case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band's career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became.

Yes but who is the "famous fictional atheist" and how can I reverse the paraphrase "atrocious human deeds are... the manure for our future harmony"? Oh, I managed to do that.

It's from "The Brothers Karamazov," spoken by Ivan, who's famously atheist:

"Oh, with my pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind, I know only that there is suffering, that none are to blame, that all things follow simply and directly from one another, that everything flows and finds its level — but that is all just Euclidean gibberish, of course I know that, and of course I cannot consent to live by it! What do I care that none are to blame and that I know it — I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. I have believed, and I want to see for myself, and if I am dead by that time, let them resurrect me, because it will be too unfair if it all takes place without me. Is it possible that I've suffered so that I, together with my evil deeds and sufferings, should be manure for someone's future harmony? I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for."

The NYT tries hard to get Temple Grandin to talk about vaccines and the fear of autism, but she won't go there.

Posted: 24 Jan 2022 05:40 AM PST

They get an interesting interview out of her anyway — "Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently" — but it starts off incredibly awkwardly: 

During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about who's vaccinated and who's not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers — I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. That's all I'm going to say.

Well, if it's OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if you'll answer or not. That's a subject where that's pretty much all I'm going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I don't have to worry about going to the hospital. I'll leave it at that.

In the past, you've expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines because of — No comment.

Is it your understanding that the concern that certain parents have with vaccines is — No comment.

OK, I'll move on for now...

There's a footnote at "In the past, you've expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines":

In a 2013 interview with The Times, when Grandin was asked about mothers of autistic children who suspect links between vaccines and autism, she replied, "I have talked to maybe five or six of those mothers, and that's the reason I don't pooh-pooh it."

The interviewer David Marchese moves on to some other things, but comes back to what I assume is the whole reason for choosing to interview this well-known public figure now:

There are specific studies debunking the idea that vaccines have a causal relation to autism, A 2011 analysis of more than 1,000 research articles concluded that there are no links between immunization and autism, right? No comment. No comment. No comment. 
You don't think it could be useful for people to hear your opinion? No comment. No comment. 
I got it. You better get it. Because I'm not discussing it. 
Have you gotten in trouble for talking about this subject before? No comment. I've had my two Pfizer shots and my booster. If they require a fourth shot, I'll be first in line, thank you. 

Again Marchese retreats into other material, and after a while — showing amazing doggedness — he tries again:

I realize that maybe earlier I should have just asked this question bluntly: Do you believe vaccines can cause autism? I'm not discussing that. I will give you one thing about vaccinations: I listened to the news, and a doctor was complaining about having heart-attack patients die because they could not get into the emergency room because the hospital was so full of unvaccinated Covid people. And then I talked to this person that was not vaccinated about, you know, maybe all these people filling up this hospital killed some heart-attack patients. He said, I never thought about that. That I will talk about. 
But why not vaccines and autism? I don't want to talk about that. 
I'm curious about your reluctance. I'm not discussing it. OK. There are certain things I don't talk about because it interferes with stuff I care about. It's that simple.

He really wanted her to get into that. I am going to guess that he had an idea for an article that it might be possible to write: Maybe Grandin would give people reason not to dread autism and perhaps to advise us that it ought to be understood in a positive light, as part of the rainbow of human diversity.

But, good lord, how many times should a reporter pressure the interviewee to talk about a subject she's put off limits? It's interesting to print the entire sequence, so that we, the readers, live through the experience of a reporter not taking no for an answer. 

I've been interviewed a few times by a reporter who kept coming back to something he seemed to already believe and wanted me to say, so I like the transparency! And Marchese never comes out and states what — if anything — he's trying to get her to say, so this interview is much better than what I've gone through.

"When the snow melts in the spring, fields can get so muddy in the plains of Eastern Europe that Russians have a word for it: Rasputitsa, or 'the season of bad roads.'..."

Posted: 24 Jan 2022 07:30 AM PST

"If Russian President Vladimir Putin orders his forces to invade, analysts believe it would come before the spring thaw. 'The best time to do it is winter because it's going to be a mechanized advance and the mechanized divisions need hard frozen ground'... At a news conference Wednesday marking his first year in office, President Joe Biden warned Putin against an invasion, threatening a strong response by the US and NATO, but waffled over what would happen if Russia made a 'minor incursion,' in an awkward statement he sought to clarify afterward. 'The Russian dictator has not been subtle or secretive about what he wants. He might as well make the national anthem the Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R.,"' wrote Max Boot, in the Washington Post. 'He definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire, thereby undoing what he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. And that requires bringing back into the fold the second-largest former Soviet republic (by population) — the independent state of Ukraine.'"

From "Putin confronts the mud of Ukraine" (CNN).

*** 

From a 2011 post of mine, collecting mud quotes: 

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev 

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle 

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau 

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

Russian, French, American, British.

ADDED: Thank God we have a mentally competent President. He understands the seasons — "First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.... Yes, there will be growth in the spring!"
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Generate a catchy title for a collection of newfangled music by making it your own

Write a newfangled code fragment at an earlier stage to use it. Then call another method and make sure their input is the correct one. The s...