Saturday, February 26, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"In the end, Biden went with the safe choice. That might sound like an odd thing to say, considering that [Ketanji Brown] Jackson is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court..."

Posted: 26 Feb 2022 04:43 AM PST

"But she's also an insider — a former clerk for Stephen Breyer, the justice she would replace, and a product of [Harvard Law School]. Jackson has already been confirmed by the Senate three times, including for her current seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. That court is often a feeder institution for the Supreme Court, in part because it deals mainly with arcane matters of administrative law, rather than the political kindling that tends to dominate nomination fights — abortion, guns, gender, freedom of speech, religion. Senators and their aides have combed through reams of pages of Jackson's judicial record — including the nearly 600 opinions that she wrote as a district court judge... [T]he coming battle over her nomination will resemble what fans of professional wrestling call 'kayfabe.' As the sociologist Nick Rogers said of the term in a guest opinion essay back in 2017, 'We'll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.'"

From "Biden Made a Historic Supreme Court Pick. What Now? Nominating the first Black woman is both bold and politically savvy, Democrats told us. Republicans are divided over how much of a fight to put up" by Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam (NYT).

Here's the 2017 Nick Rogers essay, "How Wrestling Explains Alex Jones and Donald Trump." Rogers is a lawyer/sociologist. Excerpt:

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years "kayfabe" has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We'll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined....
The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer's emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn't about factual verifiability; it's about emotional fidelity. Although their athleticism is impressive, skilled wrestlers captivate because they do what sociologists call "emotional labor" — the professional management of other people's feelings.... 
Chants of "Build the Wall" aren't about erecting a structure; they're about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy. Voting to repeal Obamacare again and again only to face President Obama's veto was kayfabe. So is shouting "You lie!" during a health care speech. It is President Bush in a flight suit, it is Vladimir Putin shirtless on a horse, it is virtually everything Kim Jong-un does....

I think it's easier to say "political theater," but "kayfabe" has perhaps a little more suspension of disbelief... or is it a little less? More catharsis? Less catharsis? It certainly has more masculinity — more glistening muscular definition and slippery sweat.

"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."

Posted: 26 Feb 2022 03:38 AM PST

"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada's countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I'd finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn't owe them and they didn't owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei. 

As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.

ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn't owe them and they didn't owe me" and not "I didn't own them and they didn't own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.

"By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to 'denazify' Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism – that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians..."

Posted: 26 Feb 2022 03:15 AM PST

"... and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group. Russian Christians are targets of a conspiracy by a global elite, who, using the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights, attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation. Putin's propaganda is not aimed at an obviously skeptical west, but rather appeals domestically to this strain of Christian nationalism.... The attack on liberal democracy in the west comes from a global fascist movement, whose center is Christian nationalism. It will be hard to disentangle this movement from antisemitism (albeit a version of antisemitism that allies with forces pushing for a Jewish nationalist state in Israel). Unsurprisingly, proponents of the view that a Christian nation needs protection and defense against liberalism, 'globalism' and their supposed decadence, will be marshaled to their most violent actions when the faces of free, secular, tolerant liberal democracy prominently include Jewish ones."

From "The antisemitism animating Putin's claim to 'denazify' Ukraine/The Russian leader's pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine's Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust" by Jason Stanley (The Guardian). Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, is the author of "How Fascism Works."

ADDED: Also in The Guardian, there's "'It's not rational': Putin's bizarre speech wrecks his once pragmatic image/Analysis: President makes appeal to Ukraine's military to abandon its 'drug-addicted, neo-Nazi' leaders," in which Andrew Roth describes the speech Putin gave on Friday:

"Once again I speak to the Ukrainian soldiers," he said, addressing his enemy. "Do not allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, your wives and the elderly as a human shield. Take power into your own hands. It seems that it will be easier for us to come to an agreement than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis."

The speech seemed to be ripped from an alternate reality – or from the second world war, where Putin appears to be spending more of his time as he launches the kind of broad military offensive not seen in Europe for nearly 70 years.

Banderites? From Wikipedia: 

The term derives from the name of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that formed in 1929 as an amalgamation of movements including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. The union, known as OUN-B, had been engaged in various atrocities, including murder of civilians, most of whom were ethnic Poles. This was the result of the organization's extreme Polonophobia, but the victims also included other minorities such as the Jews and Romani people. The term "Banderites" was used by the Bandera followers themselves, by others during the Holocaust, and during the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by OUN-UPA from 1943–1944. These massacres resulted in the deaths of 80,000-100,000 Poles and 10,000-15,000 Ukrainians.

According to Timothy D. Snyder, the term continues to be used (often pejoratively) to describe Ukrainian nationalists who sympathize with fascist ideology and consider themselves followers of the OUN-UPA myth in modern Ukraine....

"Ukrainian forces are holding on to their capital even after hours of overnight street fighting that included explosions and bursts of gunfire...."

Posted: 26 Feb 2022 02:49 AM PST

"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fate of the nation was 'being decided right now,' and at daybreak, he posted a video of himself, unshaven, on the capital's streets — proof of his apparent commitment to remain in Kyiv, even as Western officials warn about the possibility of his being captured or killed.... While some Ukrainians have picked up arms and created improvised weaponry, more than 50,000 others have fled, and 100,000 have been internally displaced. Ukraine has accused Russia of targeting civilian infrastructure, which the Kremlin denies...."

WaPo reports.

"But nobody tops Joy Behar for... making the whole thing — the destruction of property, the loss of life and of hope — all about her."

Posted: 26 Feb 2022 02:38 AM PST

"'The View' co-host said on her show Thursday that she was 'scared' about how the strife in Ukraine might affect Western Europe, specifically Italy, where she planned to take a vacation this summer, long-delayed by things including the COVID-19 pandemic. 'You know, you plan a trip. You want to go there. I want to go to Italy for four years and I haven't been able to make it because of the pandemic,' she said."

From "Clueless, narcissistic celebs need to shut up about Ukraine" by Andrea Peyser (NY Post), where I also found out about this monstrosity:

 
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