Althouse |
- "And when you got criticized for saying that Vladimir Putin is smart, we’ve had many conversations, and you’ve often quoted to me Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
- "Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film..."
- "The ruling marks the first time in the records of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department — and one of very few times across the country — that a suicide has been classified as a line-of-duty death."
- "Liz Pickard, an office worker from Denver, was raised Episcopalian, but discovered the story of Brigid on an earlier visit to Ireland."
- "If you can shoot someone for throwing popcorn at you under Florida’s flawed Stand Your Ground law..."
- "One of the striking things about 'Western civilization' is that as an idea it is not particularly old."
- "Jussie Smollett has been sentenced to 150 days of jail and 30 months of probation."
- At the Thursday Night Café...
- "We’re not at war with Ukraine and Ukrainians, but at war with the USA inside Ukraine."
- "Wisconsin liberals on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and two other GOP congressmen are insurrectionists in violation of the U.S. Constitution..."
- "The neoliberal vision of brother Biden, which, in his own individual case, is predicated on crimes against humanity..."
- I've shown it to you before. This is a Borsalino fur felt fedora that I bought in Austin many years ago...
- "Any newspaper editor in 2022 could tell you that it’s gender o’clock in America, and yet Faderman seems to muffle her ears, partly, to this loud ticking."
- I scroll through TikTok so you don't have to. Here are 4 things I found for you.
- "She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right up until Y shared the news just now" (by crying like the baby she is).
- They named the woman-focused sports bar Sports Bra.
- Unclear? It's about as clear as any prediction we can make about what the Supreme Court will do.
- "If you want to cancel something, cancel federal gridlock, cancel the incompetence, cancel the infighting, cancel crime, cancel homelessness, cancel education inequality, cancel poverty, cancel racism."
- "These f*cking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the f*ck up. They’re f*cking b*tches."
- "Most Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 have been banned from leaving the country.... There are exemptions — fathers with three or more children can leave, as can people with medical issues. There are also ways to sneak out...."
- At the Sunrise Café...
- "The Philosophy of Modern Song could only have been written by Bob Dylan...."
- "Chollet celebrates not only the witches of the past, but also the so-called 'witches' of today..."
- A question about running speed.
- "We wouldn’t just go drown someone or burn someone at the stake. But if midazolam is not capable of maintaining that insensate state, we may well be producing the same feeling in the person being executed."
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 06:49 AM PST "Is that how you viewed Vladimir? Did you view Vladimir Putin and people like President Xi and Kim Jong Un and the Iranian mullahs as enemies that you needed to keep close?" Sean Hannity asked Trump last night, quoted in "'I got along': Trump avoids criticizing Putin The former president had several opportunities during a Fox News interview to criticize the Russian leader's invasion of Ukraine, but didn't" (Politico). Trump answered: "I got along with these people. I got along with them well. That doesn't mean they are good people. It doesn't mean anything other than the fact that I understood them and perhaps they understood me — maybe they understood me even better. That's OK, because they knew there would be a big penalty.... Putin is for Russia, and you see what happened... And that is all because they didn't respect our leader. Look, there was nobody, and Putin will tell you this — if he was telling the truth, and I am sure he has told it to all of his inner sanctum — nobody was tougher on Russia than me." |
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 05:57 AM PST "... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fishermen that if they found out anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichthyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the questions of what needs to be done and what is superfluous." Said Ezra Pound in an interview with The Paris Review in 1962. I found that as a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond," pp. 30-31:
Consider a world in which this astonishes Ezra Pound: |
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 05:54 AM PST "The moment may be a tipping point in a crusade to lift long-held taboos against open discussion of depression, addiction and suicide in policing, with several groups pushing for officers to have greater access to confidential counseling and other emotional supports." |
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 05:16 AM PST "She came to Solas Bhride this year for a weeklong stay in its hermitage. 'I was searching for meaning and she gives so much meaning,' Ms. Pickard said. 'Right now, if you go down a certain road with religion, there's a lot of pain caused by these people, but with Brigid, I think there's a lot of kindness, and a lot of service and courage.' Two sisters, Georgina O Briain and Caragh Lawlor, sat in the calm of Solas Bhride's central prayer space on Saint Brigid's Day, quietly weaving rush crosses... 'Brigid was both Christian and pagan, a mix of the two, and while I'm not very religious, I am very spiritual, and she brings it together for me,' Ms. O Briain said.... Tellingly, Brigid's Christian nuns maintained a pagan-style fire shrine on the grounds of her abbey, even after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, in which the English monarchy imposed strict Roman Catholic doctrine on the independent-minded Celtic church of Brigid, Patrick and Columba — Irelands' trio of patron saints...." I didn't know the legend: "Around the year 480... a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land. When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains...." Here's the Wikipedia article "Curragh." An excerpt:
Nowadays, the pagan-curious ex-Episcopalians traveling to commune with St. Brigid might gaze longingly at an "offbeat" Airbnb "nest" — a half-hollowed-out bank covered in furze bushes. |
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 04:28 AM PST "...it would be hard to convince a jury that a person's not allowed to hit someone who instigated a confrontation by storming into their business and barking the most aggressive and inflammatory term in the English language in their face." Said Andrew Warren, the state attorney for Hillsborough County, quoted in "Customer's Racial Slur Drew a Fatal Punch. The Sentence Is House Arrest. A plea deal in a confrontation at a Dunkin' shop in Tampa, Fla., 'holds the defendant accountable while considering the totality of the circumstances,' the prosecutor said" (NYT). The sentence was 2 years of house arrest. |
Posted: 11 Mar 2022 01:05 PM PST "It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on 'Western Civilization' began to be taught at elite American universities. By the onset of the Cold War, the term 'Free World' supplanted 'the West' because American power demanded a more globally inclusive banner that could rally South Vietnamese, Indonesians and others in the war on Communist 'slave societies.' After the Cold War, however, conservative American thinkers, such as Samuel Huntington, revived the idea of 'Western civilization' as a way of dramatizing how a set of values was now under siege from new threats: migrants, terrorists and moral relativists."
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"Jussie Smollett has been sentenced to 150 days of jail and 30 months of probation." Posted: 11 Mar 2022 03:39 AM PST "He will have to pay back the City of Chicago just over $120,000 in restitution and was also fined $25,000. Following the sentencing, he had an emotional outburst and screamed 'I am not suicidal and I did not do it.' ADDED: If you watch the video clip, you'll understand what he meant by "I am not suicidal":
He's saying that if he turns up dead in prison, it will not be because he's killed himself. He seems to be underscoring his argument against prison time: There's a danger that he could be killed in prison. And he wants everyone to know that if they say he killed himself, it will be wrong. Nearly everyone believes he faked the attack on himself. He still denies it, but he's lost the capacity to convince anyone of his version of the story. Now, as he speaks about the future, he could be setting up another faked attack on himself. That is, he could indeed be suicidal, planning suicide, and trying to lay a foundation for theories that he did not kill himself. I hope he is guarded so that he cannot carry out this terrible plan, if that's what it is. He deserves punishment for what he did, but not the death penalty. He seems to be a self-dramatizing person with very poor judgment, and I think he needs to be protected from himself. |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 04:06 PM PST ... you can talk about whatever you want. *** No sunrise photograph today. I overslept! I didn't expect that to happen. I slept over 8 hours, woke up with light in the room, and wondered what's going on? It took me a second to realize it was the sun. I'm getting to the part of the year when I need to set the alarm as a backup. There are so many mornings when I wake up at 3 or 4, so I assume that 5:30 is no problem, but it can happen. And yes, I know that the great resetting of the clocks is about to hit us in a couple days, but that makes no difference to me. I've set myself to the sun and only use the clock to keep track of its position, which never leaps forward or falls back but moves slowly and continuously. |
"We’re not at war with Ukraine and Ukrainians, but at war with the USA inside Ukraine." Posted: 10 Mar 2022 03:36 PM PST Said a Russian soldier in Ukraine, quoted in "Russian troops insist to Ukrainian that real target of war is 'USA inside Ukraine'" (NY Post). |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 03:31 PM PST "... for their words and actions in support of Donald Trump leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The lawsuit, alleging a violation of the 'Disqualification Clause' of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, says Johnson, R-Oshkosh, and U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany, R-Minocqua, and Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, conspired to undermine President Joe Biden's victory and sow public distrust of the outcome." This loathsome lawsuit has no chance of success, other than as a stunt that will appeal to partisans. |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 03:17 PM PST "... in terms of mass incarceration, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the Wall Street bailout that led toward the collapse of so many poor and working people's life chances—to me those are crimes against humanity.... It's very clear he turns out to be milquetoast, and the only way he can deliver is the opposing posture, as if you put a Black sister on the Supreme Court and you satisfy the Black women who voted. You're going to tell me that Black women voted solely to have a representative on the Supreme Court, and not to deal with Black people, Black children, and other folk who are suffering economically and socially? All you need is just a Black woman on the Court, and you're satisfied now? Most Black sisters out there that I know did not go out for that. But, of course, we want a Black progressive on the court, and a Black woman, fine. But he can't fight for voting rights for a whole year, can't hardly engage in any courageous action for that for a whole year?" Said Cornel West, quoted in "Cornel West Sees a Spiritual Decay in the Culture/A conversation with the prominent philosopher about democracy, disagreement, and how to stay upright in a fallen world" (The New Yorker). |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 10:55 AM PST ... and have used extensively, mostly to shield my eyes while I'm blogging in front of the big bright windows — for example, in this old post. But now, it's in this condition, a bite taken out of it... I could buy a new one but it's so expensive I'm afraid I'd feel pressured to wear it because it was expensive. I'm therefore working on how I think about it. Something like distressed jeans or perhaps evocative of a character in a Western movie — someone who's been through a life-changing ordeal. |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 09:16 AM PST "She is hip to modern phrases like 'assigned female at birth,' to Generation Z's increasing acceptance of nonbinary identities and Facebook's 56 gender options and men's diminishing sperm counts. But the parameters of her book stay, mostly, safely in the past. 'What is clear is that today one can choose whether or not to call oneself a woman,' she writes. 'What is more complicated is the meaning that the term "woman" has to those who use it to describe themselves.' For Faderman, who writes about Betty Friedan having called proud lesbians the 'lavender menace,' to omit a discussion of 'trans-exclusionary radical feminists' — an insult lobbed at J.K. Rowling, among others — seems notable, if understandable. That conversation can get very, very heated. Perhaps Faderman is simply waiting, and watching, for time to cool things off." Writes Alexandra Jacobs in the NYT in "'Woman' Is an Ambitious Attempt to Capture Four Centuries of Being Female/Lillian Faderman's exhaustive survey of American history comes up to the present but stops short of engaging with today's charged gender debates" (reviewing "WOMAN/The American History of an Idea" a 571-page book by Lillian Faderman, who, we're told is "one of the pre-eminent L.G.B.T.Q. scholars of our time" and published by Yale University Press). I think "What is more complicated is the meaning that the term 'woman' has to those who use it to describe themselves" is a good question. But my question is, does Faderman answer it or just point to it as a "complicated" question? Jacobs, the reviewer, seems disappointed, but what is she doing other than noting what's not getting talked about? Is everyone "simply waiting, and watching, for time to cool things off"? Where's the courage? Where's the heft? Jacobs gets to write a review in The New York Times, and Faderman has a whole giant doorstop of a book with a hyper-elite publisher. Or should Jacobs be faulted for failing to engage with the idea that "woman" is an idea? |
I scroll through TikTok so you don't have to. Here are 4 things I found for you. Posted: 10 Mar 2022 09:43 AM PST |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 07:51 AM PST "That's what they call her, by the way: Y. She's got a full name, but this doesn't seem like the moment to ask for it..." I'm reading "'Infamy Is Kind Of Fun"' Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby With Elon Musk/The visionary pop star holds nothing back, talking with Vanity Fair about everything under the sun, including her thrilling upcoming album, Book 1" (Vanity Fair).
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
Sometimes even when your parents pay for your ticket, you don't want to make the trip to visit them where they are. It's not about paying for the ticket, Mom. I mean it's a really long trip, and in fact, it's cold as hell. |
They named the woman-focused sports bar Sports Bra. Posted: 10 Mar 2022 06:32 AM PST From the comments at WaPo:
3. "Okay, whateverdoodle, oh Dearth of Hope comment-maker." |
Unclear? It's about as clear as any prediction we can make about what the Supreme Court will do. Posted: 10 Mar 2022 06:11 AM PST I'm reading "Ketanji Brown Jackson's Harvard ties raise recusal questions in Supreme Court's affirmative action case" (WaPo):
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Posted: 10 Mar 2022 06:18 AM PST Andrew M. Cuomo is leveraging cancel culture. Quoted in "Andrew Cuomo has reemerged. But New Yorkers don't want him back" (WaPo). ADDED: I can see by the first few comments that I need to make my point more obvious. I'm saying "Andrew M. Cuomo is leveraging cancel culture" because Andrew Cuomo paints himself as the victim of the cancel culture. He's ready for the pushback that will in one way or another insist that he should have stayed canceled. The quote in the post title is the response he's crafted. He must think it's clever and powerful rhetoric... or, at least, the best he can do under his constrained circumstances. |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 05:37 AM PST Said NYT National Security Correspondent, Matthew Rosenberg, quoted in "Pulitzer Prize Winning New York Times Reporter: January 6 Media Coverage 'Overreaction,' FBI Involved, Event Was Not Organized Despite Ongoing Narrative" (Project Veritas). You have to watch the video to get the full effect. Poor Rosenberg seems to be having such a lovely time impressing the unseen woman who is tricking him into chattering about his work: Other men are "fucking little dweebs" — "fucking bitches." He's parading his own manhood and deeply self-smitten. To be fair, he is attractive and performing well in the manly style. But the unseen woman is also performing well — in the classic "feminine" style. For us, the audience, it's fascinating and hilarious. But it's not funny if there really was a coup going on! Since Rosenberg seems to be saying that there was not, he's giving us all the go-ahead to laugh at him. |
Posted: 10 Mar 2022 05:26 AM PST "Some men said they took exit routes that were illegal.... 'We just wanted to live... We ran from hell. Like Stalingrad in 1942.'... A 24-year-old [medical student] from Kyiv... ran through a field and then a forest, 'scared s---less,' he said, until he and the others ended up on a cold road in what happened to be Moldova.... The medical student received papers giving him the legal right to be in Moldova. There's just one thing missing: a Ukrainian exit stamp. 'So I don't know how I can go back,' he said. ... In Chisinau, at the army barracks, a 32-year-old IT employee from Kyiv said he and his father, 57, had managed to cross without any problems. They presented non-Ukrainian passports. The catch is that in Ukraine, dual citizenship is illegal. The 32-year-old said he had talked with his dad at length about whether they were doing the right thing, and they agreed that war had forced them into a terrible, cold decision: picking their own interests above those of their country. 'I don't feel like a traitor,' the son said. He said it was natural to choose self-preservation. 'Just like America,' the father said...." From "In a war of terrible choices, these are the fighting-age men who left Ukraine" (WaPo). |
Posted: 09 Mar 2022 04:10 PM PST |
"The Philosophy of Modern Song could only have been written by Bob Dylan...." Posted: 09 Mar 2022 09:29 AM PST "He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal." Pitchfork relays info from a press release about the new book from Bob Dylan that's coming out this fall. Until then, we might amuse ourselves by thinking of single syllables that have diminished songs, maybe Bob Dylan songs. We can wonder if there's a corollary that the best songs could not benefit from the addition of a single syllable? And can you take a Bob Dylan song and make it better by subtracting or adding a single syllable? I read between the lines that Bob is saying he's seen to every last syllable of his songs... and until heaven and earth pass, not one jot or tittle shall pass from these songs, until all is fulfilled. As for getting out of the trap of easy rhymes: form, storm, warm, storm, corn, storm, thorns, storm, morn, storm, horn, storm, forlorn, storm, scorn, storm, born, storm. |
"Chollet celebrates not only the witches of the past, but also the so-called 'witches' of today..." Posted: 09 Mar 2022 08:21 AM PST "... independent women who have chosen not to have children, aren't always coupled, often defy traditional beauty norms (letting their hair go gray), and thus operate outside the established social order." From "A French Feminist Tells Us to Embrace Our Inner Hag" (NYT)(reviewing "IN DEFENSE OF WITCHES/The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial").
We're told that the book refers to all of these feminists: Rebecca Traister, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Gilbert, Audre Lorde, and Rebecca Solnit. What about Mary Daly?! When I think of feminism and witches, I think of Mary Daly. As Wikipedia puts it: "Daly said it is the role of women to unveil the liberatory nature of labels such as 'Hag,' 'Witch,' and 'Lunatic.'" That links to a page in Ruether, "Women and Redemption: A Theological History" where we find this snappy paragraph: |
A question about running speed. Posted: 09 Mar 2022 07:32 AM PST As you may know from my ritual of photographing the sunrise and posting these relentlessly repetitious photographs on this blog... ... I go out for a short run — it's 1.5 miles — every morning (that is, unless it's very cold, rainy, or dangerously windy). I've been doing this since September 2019, when I got the idea for this ritual, and I'm pleased with having kept it up. It's healthy and wholesome (and artistic and spiritual). I didn't think I was even able to run. I'd never been a runner, and I didn't even know how to breathe. I watched videos on how to breathe while running. I had to research what to wear. But here's my question now. I'm not concerned with running a longer distance, but I would like to go faster. My iPhone records my speed. It shows a range of speed for any given run, and that varies, but it often goes as high as 4.9 mph. And yet it never hits 5. It's like the phone is toying with me. If I can do 4.9 on any given ordinary day, why do I never hit 5? |
Posted: 09 Mar 2022 07:36 AM PST Said lawprof Maria Kolar, quoted in "This Sedative Is Now a Go-To Drug for Executions. But Does It Work? A legal battle in Oklahoma over whether prisoners feel severe pain after being given the sedative, midazolam, will determine whether its use is constitutional" (NYT). A highly rated comment over there: "Please explain to me why there can be painless, peaceful assisted suicide and yet our prison system is totally inept at execution. Of course, this barbaric act of execution should never be a part of our society." I thought that was interesting because it seems to accept assisted suicide while putting the death penalty beyond the pale. Traditionally, it was the death penalty that was accepted and suicide that was beyond the pale. And if the question is the possibility that pain is experienced — there's no intent to inflict pain but it's possible that pain is felt — then one ought to face the comparison to abortion. Do those who care about the possibility of pain in the context of execution support the effort to cut off access to abortion at the point where it is possible that the unborn feels pain? |
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