Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"Figures on political TV shows say stupid and historically illiterate things every day — including about the Nazis — and nothing much happens to them as a result."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 08:59 AM PST

"What, exactly, was different about this one? Is warmed-over critical theory prohibited now? And why does anyone care?... The View is a talk show, and a particularly stupid one to boot.... I simply do not understand the mechanism by which viewers are supposed to be damaged in some way by watching an actress make mistakes on live TV.... In its statement, ABC insisted that 'the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful, and transparent.' Okay... [but] Goldberg's only crime was 'being wrong in public' — an eventuality that is all-but guaranteed to arise when we televise spontaneous political debate. Why have such productions if we intend to police them like this? Bit by bit, and mob by mob, we are destroying our open culture and the organizations that we have constructed to serve it."

Writes Charles C.W. Cooke, in "Whoopi Goldberg's Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational" (National Review).

The link on "critical theory" goes to an Andrew Sullivan tweet: "Goldberg's basic point is classic CRT: if it's 'white people' vs 'white people,' i.e. Jews, it cannot be racism." 

The link on "particularly stupid one" goes to Cooke's own article, "Whoopi Goldberg's Nonsensical Abortion Rant." In response to Justice Alito's statement that "the fetus has an interest in having a life and that doesn't change... from the point before viability to the point after viability," Goldberg had said: "How dare you talk about what a fetus wants? You have no idea." Sample comment from Cooke: "Is she arguing that, as a rule, unborn children might be suicidal, and that abortion is doing them a favor?"

"President Biden has approved the deployment of about 3,000 additional American troops to Eastern Europe, administration officials said on Wednesday."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 07:22 AM PST

"The troops, including 1,000 who are already in Europe, will head to NATO allies on the alliance's eastern flank, the officials said. Their purpose will be to reassure NATO allies that while the United States has no intention of sending troops into Ukraine, where Russia has been threatening an invasion, Mr. Biden would protect America's NATO allies from any Russian aggression. ... The number of Russian troops assembled at Ukraine's borders has reached well north of 100,000...."

The NYT reports.

"News of Sen. Ben Ray Luján’s (D-N.M.) stroke sent shockwaves through the Senate on Tuesday, underscoring the fragility of Democrats’ 50-50 majority."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 07:05 AM PST

Democrats are in the majority because they have 50 seats and the ability for Vice President Harris to break a tie. Luján's absence leaves them at 49 seats until he returns, with his office saying he's expected to make a full recovery. 'It's just a reminder that in a 50-50 Senate any unexpected development could be a challenge to our moving forward on an agenda that the Democratic caucus shares,' said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who said he was very optimistic that the 49-year-old Luján would make a full recovery."

The Hill reports. 

I suppose the Democrats are working hard at understanding how to be properly discreet as they endeavor to will a Luján resignation into being. Of course, I hope the poor man does well, but I can't believe the Democrats intend wait for his return.

ADDED: In New Mexico, the governor would name a new senator if there is a vacancy. The governor is Michelle Lujan Grisham, and, in case you're wondering, "Michelle Lujan Grisham and Ben Ray Luján aren't cousins."

"James Joyce’s 'Ulysses'... was published in Paris on Feb. 2, 1922 — 100 years ago [today]...."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 06:45 AM PST

"Readers who journey with Joyce's Leopold Bloom as he navigates the shoals of everyday life on an unremarkable summer's day in Dublin become deeply familiar with his inner world and the quirky crevices of his mind.... In Bloom, [Joyce] created a settled, contented individual, 'a good man,' as he once described him, a counterpoint to the noisiness of the world around him. In 1919, W.B. Yeats wrote apocalyptically that 'things fall apart; the center cannot hold,' but Joyce, in the same period, pitched his antihero's tent firmly on the center ground.... In a passage at the heart of Joyce's message to the troubled world around him, Bloom sets out his credo: 'Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred.' It is 'love,' the opposite of hatred, he insists, 'that is really life.'... In the 'Circe' episode... Bloom appears as a political reformer with a charmingly idealistic manifesto: 'The reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature.'... At a time like ours, when narrow partisan opinions thrive in places and prejudice continues to flourish in plain sight, I [like] Bloom's centrist appeal to transcend force, hatred and history...."

Writes Daniel Mulhall, Ireland's ambassador to the United States and author of "Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey" in The Washington Post.

Named after Biden’s dog.

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 05:34 AM PST

"I kept being told by people in the [White House] the thing they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation. They treated us like we were Chicken Little. They didn’t believe the sky was falling."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 02:46 AM PST

Said Matt Zeller, a former CIA officer, quoted in "Scoop: Leaked document reveals Biden's Afghan failures" (Axios).

"What was there to stop you from just looking up an answer? You were on your own, there was no one watching. It’s kind of obvious."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 02:35 AM PST

Said an unnamed 2021 graduate, quoted in "Remote learning led to rampant cheating at NYC's Stuyvesant High School" (NY Post). Stuyvesant is a phenomenally elite public high school, with admission based on the Specialized High School Admissions Test.

Also quoted, an unnamed sophomore: "A lot of people didn't actually learn as much last year because of how easy it was to cheat on things, which is sort of sad. Remote learning changed the playing field. It was closer to [an] honor system, so I felt that most people were more likely to push the rules a bit."

It's another cost of the lockdown. If you cheat, you don't learn the material, you learn the techniques of cheating. And you degrade your morality. If the community sets things up to maximize cheating, it's a systematic degradation of morality in the young people — in this case, the most academically promising young people.

Here they are, America, your new elite.

"At the non-elite level... an athlete can elect to change their competition category in order for them to experience the sport of swimming in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity and expression."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 02:21 AM PST

"At the elite level, a policy has been created for transgender athlete participation in the U.S. that relies on science and medical evidence-based methods to provide a level-playing field for elite cisgender women, and to mitigate the advantages associated with male puberty and physiology.... Evidence that the prior physical development of the athlete as a male, as mitigated by any medical intervention, does not give the athlete a competitive advantage over the athlete's cisgender female competitors...."

From the new USA Swimming policy, quoted in "Lia Thomas' future murkier as USA Swimming releases new policy, Penn teammates express support" (NY Post).

Also quoted, Independent Women's Law Center (IWLC) and Independent Women's Forum (IWF) condemned USA Swimming's policies: "USA Swimming's insistence that there is some way to eliminate the athletic advantage that post-pubescent males have over females denies science. But it also ignores the fact that... [a]llowing male-bodied athletes to compete on limited roster teams inevitably means that there are fewer opportunities for female athletes (to be recruited, to receive a scholarship, or to participate in competitions). Make no mistake, taking athletic opportunities away from female athletes violates Title IX."

"The very term anti-Semitism, which casts Jews in racial terms, was popularized by a German anti-Jewish activist who wanted to give his hatred a scientific sheen."

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 01:59 AM PST

"Race is a social construct, and this is how it was constructed in Nazi Germany and much of Europe.... [W]ell-meaning people... don't know how to define Jews [because]... Judaism predates Western categories. It's not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it's also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It's not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it's not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not."

Writes Yair Rosenberg in "Are Jews a Race?/Whoopi Goldberg's Holocaust comments reflect how Jews don't fit into Western boxes" (The Atlantic).

Another reason why it's "not quite a race" is that race was never good science. From "The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism" (Smithsonian):

Fossils, as well as cave art, DNA samples and other evidence later uncovered around the world pointed to a more complex picture of human origins... Rather than distinct races, groupings or borders, the continually mixing populations produced only gradients, with some traits slightly more common in some regions than others.

Lighter skin color in northern climates emerged late; some Britons were shocked to learn that Cheddar Man, the remains of a man who lived in southwest England almost 10,000 years ago, would today have been considered black.

In the 1950s, geneticists began to confirm what some archaeologists had already surmised: "Individual variation within population groups, overlapping with other population groups, turned out to be so large that the boundaries of race made less and less sense," [writes Angela Saini in "Superior: The Return of Race Science"].

The conclusion was that no "pure" races exist that are distinct from others. Despite this evidence, those eugenicists still practicing sought to prevent their supposedly superior race from being overrun by immigration, miscegenation and higher birth rates among other ethnicities....

Stelter's plaint would mean more if he'd face up to how badly CNN's Sanjay Gupta fared when he sat down with Joe Rogan.

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 03:22 AM PST

 

Background: "CNN praises Dr. Sanjay Gupta for interview with Joe Rogan, buries viral moments/Gupta admitted his CNN colleagues should not have referred to Rogan's COVID treatment as 'horse dewormer'" (NY Post, October 15, 2021). That's something I blogged at the time, here: "In trying to present Sanjay Gupta as a science-is-real hero for talking to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, CNN laid the groundwork for fact-checkers to draw attention to all the most damaging omissions." 

ADDED: Writing this post and searching my own archive for Sanjay Gupta, I turned up a post from January 7, 2009, when President-Elect Obama was considering Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. There was debate at the time about the way Gupta had treated the filmmaker Michael Moore about his movie "Sicko."

The NYT columnist Paul Krugman had written that "Gupta specifically claimed that Moore 'fudged his facts,' when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong." 

Krugman observed: "Moore is an outsider, he's uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right."

And isn't that a bit like Joe Rogan? He's an  an outsider, uncouth, and he'll get smeared as unreliable even when he actually gets it right. Meanwhile, his mainstream media antagonists are counting on their appearing glossily professional. As I said back in 2009: "Gupta is couth, an expert at projecting competence, expertise, and level-headedness."

But I defended Gupta at the time:

Gupta was immediately called to account, and he stepped up to it. And what of Moore? Is he accountable? Moore may have not been wrong on this occasion, but he's been wrong in the past about plenty of things, and his entire filmmaking style is based on a strong point of view — that is, bias — that involves distortion and emotive exaggeration. Does Moore make corrections and apologize? His method involves going doggedly forward toward his predetermined goals — like government-managed health care or opposition to the war or gun control. So it's quite sensible... to be skeptical when Moore speaks.

At the same time, we listen to Moore — some of us — because he's got an artistic style that is often lively and funny and thought-provoking. He's chosen his uncouth, rebel style, and he uses his style every bit as successfully as Gupta uses his. Moore has scarcely been ostracized for his outsider manner. He's very popular. Some people hate him, but he's choosing to antagonize those people — it's part of his the polemical style that has made him rich and famous. So don't cry for Michael Moore, give Sanjay Gupta the credit he deserves, and don't swallow anything whole, whether it's served up by rebel filmmakers or sophisticated doctors.

That's what I said 12 years ago, and I'm reprinting it now because we're still talking about Gupta and, more importantly, I think the comparison of Joe Rogan to Michael Moore could be helpful.

By the way, Michael Moore has a podcast: 

The embattled speaker of the week is...

Posted: 02 Feb 2022 01:10 AM PST

"The embattled speaker of the week is Joe Rogan, the host of the world's most popular podcast," wrote NYT staff editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell, in "What the Joe Rogan Backlash Reveals About How We Handle Misinformation," published yesterday, which was Tuesday, the second day of the work week.

Oh, no! Embattled Speaker of the Week is a much faster game. Joe Rogan was the embattled speaker of last week. The embattled speaker of this week is Whoopi Goldberg: "In a statement on Tuesday night, Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said that Ms. Goldberg would be suspended for 'her wrong and hurtful comments.'" 

What did Joe even do? Hard to remember in light of Whoopi's blowing off the Holocaust: "This is white people doing it to white people, so y'all going to fight amongst yourselves."

But both Joe and Whoopi were one-person-show comedians who moved into hosting lengthy, semi-serious conversation shows. They offer lateral perceptions. God help us if we lose the ability to listen and think and continue the conversation.

 

Apparently, Whoopi has some free time. She ought to go on Joe Rogan's show. These 2 human individuals are sublimely valuable. The urge to oust them is all wrong. It is self-harm. 

And bring back Roseanne.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 04:15 PM PST

IMG_9104... you can talk about whatever you want. That photo was taken at 7:27 this morning, as I tried to complete my morning run out on the snow-covered ice.

"At one point, I had to clarify for a guy that I didn’t actually own the chair, that it was my friend’s, and he unmatched me. I was like, 'Okay, wow.'"

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 01:37 PM PST

Wrote Emily Kirkpatrick, 33, in "It's been 66 years, and young men are still obsessed with the Eames lounger" (WaPo). 

When Kirkpatrick, a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, later tweeted about her Tinder matches' obsession with the chair, women confirmed her assessment. "The hold this chair has on men," one user wrote. "The only chair they know," quipped another....

Sunrise — 7:05, 7:16, 7:21.

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 09:54 AM PST

IMG_9091

IMG_9095

IMG_9097

"At Georgetown Law, Black students are haunted by the shadow of impostor syndrome. Shapiro reinforced this phenomenon by reducing Black women’s accomplishments to 'small favors' from 'heaven.'"

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 07:33 AM PST

Wrote The Black Law Students Association at Georgetown, quoted in "Georgetown Suspends Lecturer Who Criticized Vow to Put Black Woman on Court/Ilya Shapiro has apologized after tweeting that President Biden was poised to nominate not 'the objectively best pick,' but a 'lesser Black woman' to the Supreme Court" (NYT).

Who is responsible for "the shadow of impostor syndrome" that "haunts" black students? Not Shapiro. He is only accused of having "reinforced" it.

"I met a lotta hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you? You’re 20 minutes."

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 08:02 AM PST

My favorite line in a movie we finished watching last night — "Ace in the Hole."

ADDED: I'd started watching that movie a while back and forced myself to finish it yesterday after my son John — who ranked it as the best movie of 1951 — reminded me it was about to end its run on the Criterion Channel. It's a rather strange movie about a ruthless, ambitious journalist. It's got the most absurd scene involving a fur garment. I don't want to spoil it, so that's all I'll say.

AND: There are a lot of movies about journalism — usually presenting the journalist as a hero. For example here's a ranking, with "Ace in the Hole" at #46, but if you limit that to movies where the journalist is an awful person — which I'm not equipped to do — I'm guessing it would make the top 10.

"When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink."

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 07:10 AM PST

AP reports.

I think Biden should also have had to abstain from water. For him and only him to get water... I must say my first association was Trump getting 2 scoops of ice cream. It's just so wrong.

"[A]s a black person I think of race as being something that I can see. People were very angry and they said 'no no we are a race' – and I understand."

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 04:46 AM PST

"People, you know, decided I was all these other things I'm actually not. I'm incredibly torn up by being told these things about myself. And I get it, folks are angry. I accept that and I did it to myself. This was my thought process and I'll work hard not to think that way again." 

Said Whoopi Goldberg, quoted in "'I stand corrected': Whoopi Goldberg apologizes for Holocaust comments" (NY Post). 

What she'd said was "The Holocaust isn't about race. No, it's not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man... It's how people treat each other.... It doesn't matter if you're black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other." 

That became an outrage, perhaps because she was wandering toward race-blindness territory and in danger of allying with those naifs who ask why we can't all love one another.

By the way, is Whoopi Goldberg — nee Caryn Elaine Johnson — Jewish?

About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, "My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—it's part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black", and "I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don't go to temple, but I do remember the holidays."

She has stated that "people would say 'Come on, are you Jewish?' And I always say 'Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.'" One account recalls that her mother, Emma Johnson, thought the family's original surname was "not Jewish enough" for her daughter to become a star.

Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were African Americans, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg. Results of a DNA test, revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives, traced part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her admixture test indicates that she is of 92 percent sub-Saharan African origin and of 8 percent European origin.

It's a bit like blackface, especially if you, like the Nazis, regard being Jewish as racial. Goldberg was taken to task for failing to regard Jews as a race. Attacked, she readjusted: "I'll work hard not to think that way again."

Vigilantism.

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 04:27 AM PST

"Fully 7 in 10 Americans (70%) agree with the sentiment that 'it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives'..."

Posted: 01 Feb 2022 03:43 AM PST

"... including 78% of those who report having gotten Covid and 65% of those who say they have not been infected. The main difference in the sense that it is time to move on is due to partisanship – ranging from 89% of Republicans and 71% of independents to 47% of Democrats.... [M]ore than 1 in 4 (28%) now believe a return to normalcy will never happen, which is up from 22% who felt this way in September and just 6% who were similarly pessimistic exactly a year ago.... [J]ust over half of Americans (52%) support instituting, or reinstituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines in their home state.... Less than half of the public (43%) supports requiring people to show proof of vaccination in order to work in an office or other setting where they are around other people. Support for this approach has declined steadily since September (53%), including 46% last month.... Ratings for how both the president and federal health agencies have handled the pandemic continue to slip. Just 43% say Biden has done a good job on this while 53% say he has done a bad job – the first time his rating on this metric has been underwater since he took office."

The Monmouth University poll reports.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 31 Jan 2022 04:51 PM PST

IMG_9085X 

... you can talk all night.

IMG_9086D 

Photos taken at 7:15 and 7:20.

"The sudden hit Wordle, in which once a day players get six chances to guess a five-letter word, has been acquired by The New York Times Company."

Posted: 31 Jan 2022 04:46 PM PST

"Generation X—as presented through albums like 'Nevermind' (1991), novels like 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' (1991), and films like 'Reality Bites' (1994), and then amplified ad nauseam..."

Posted: 31 Jan 2022 10:08 AM PST

"... by a vapid clutch of contemporary trendspotting articles.... Klosterman has come not to bury these stereotypes but to praise them.... 'Among the generations that have yet to go extinct,' Klosterman writes, 'Generation X remains the least annoying.' Its nihilistic blend of lassitude and disaffection, in his analysis, guarantees a minimum of whinging, quite unlike the 'self-righteous outrage,' 'policing morality,' and 'blaming strangers for the condition of one's own existence' typical of other generations. For the rusted youth of the nineties, 'solipsism was preferable to narcissism'; later, he contrasts their 'anti-commercialism' (discerning, optimistic) with the supposed 'anti-capitalism' (totalizing, pessimistic) of millennials.... If Gen X disengagement and ironic fence-sitting were brought up short by Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and the rise of social media, he wants to preserve the nineties as a safe space for his cohort.... He has no patience for partisan rashness, for passionate convictions that would break upon his ghostly solitude."

From "Chuck Klosterman Brings Back the Nineties/In a nostalgic tour through the decade, Klosterman defends Gen X as today's 'least annoying' generation" by Frank Guan (The New Yorker).

"Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, 'the insurrection,' and Russia to justify their censorship demands."

Posted: 31 Jan 2022 09:51 AM PST

"Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have 'urged' Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call 'disinformation' about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tactics against Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.... For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism...."

Writes Glenn Greenwald, at Substack.

"So 'Joni Mitchell music' is a genre of its own?"

Posted: 31 Jan 2022 08:51 AM PST

Said Lurker21, in the comments to this morning's post about Joe Rogan, which included appreciation of Joe's line, "I love Joni Mitchell, I love her music, 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is a great song"  ("Chuck E.'s in Love" being a Rickie Lee Jones song).

Since we're talking about Spotify, I'd just like to say that on Spotify, anybody's music is a genre of its own. You search the artist's name and, from among the results, choose the icon with the artist's name followed by radio. Thus, for Joni Mitchell, I find "Joni Mitchell Radio" — with varied artists along with Joni:

 

It works, as I say, with any artist. Just to pick someone I like who was obscure to me until recently: 
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