Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"'There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:51 PM PDT

A quote I blogged here, in February 2016, which I'm reading now as I review my posts with the Madeleine Albright tag.

Albright died today at the age of 84. Here's the NYT obituary, "Madeleine Albright, First Woman to Serve as Secretary of State, Dies at 84/She rose to power and fame as a brilliant analyst of world affairs before serving as an aggressive advocate of President Bill Clinton's policies."

The obituary does include the women-in-hell quote:

In 2016, Ms. Albright again supported Mrs. Clinton for the presidency. At a campaign stop for the New Hampshire primary, Ms. Albright told a crowd, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." The line went viral. She had used it previously without objections. But some voters now found it offensive, taking it as a rebuke to younger women who supported a Clinton rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

An ardent feminist, Ms. Albright apologized in an opinion article in The Times. "I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based on gender," she wrote. "But I understand that I came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences. If heaven were open only to those who agreed on politics, I imagine it would be largely unoccupied."

"Several people told me that it is considered bad form to talk about politics in Margaritaville. 'Many people here strive for no politics'..."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:36 PM PDT

"... Murphy had said. 'All you have to do is look at the fucking Villages. Leave it at the front gate, you douchebag.' During the 2020 election, this standard was tested. The residents eventually passed an ordinance against lawn signage. Still, I encountered a range of opinions about the current President and his predecessor. There was at least one golf cart flying the blue-line American flag, in support of the police. Some rolled their eyes when it passed; others waved."

From "Retirement the Margaritaville Way/At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it's five o'clock everywhere" by Nick Paumgarten (The New Yorker).

"Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?" Buffett told me. "I thought for a while it was a myth."

ADDED: We were just talking about The Villages 11 days ago, here.

"Thousands of Afghan girls were left distraught at school gates today after the Taliban’s last-minute decision to ban girls aged over 12..."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 02:58 PM PDT

"... reversing their promises that education would be open to all. Afghanistan's new rulers have decided against opening schools to girls beyond grade six, a Taliban official said today, the first day of the new school year. Only days ago, a statement by the education ministry had urged 'all students' to come to school. 'We were refused entry,' said Sumaya Mohsini, 15, as she stood outside Zarghona high school in central Kabul with friends. 'I'm devastated. I was so happy as I got ready for school and packed my bag, but to come here and be told we cannot return to our lessons, it's just the worst feeling. I spent the first five months [following the Taliban takeover] barely leaving my home. Eventually I began attending a private course and then I heard we'd be allowed to go back to school — I was so excited, so was my father. My dream is to become a surgeon but that dream is slowly slipping away.'"

The London Times reports.

"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:37 PM PDT

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for "event scores" that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] "Disappearing Piece," which simply commands: "Boil water" (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and "Clock Piece," which instructs: "Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it."

You can easily imagine one that says: "Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream." Or one that says, simply: "Imagine Peace."...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

Some of the questions it prompts — When will this stop? Who will intervene to stop it? — were being asked as Vietnam turned into a quagmire, and they are being asked again now about Ukraine. But as the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued, there is "another, historically specific register of meaning" for "Cut Piece." The performance, she points out, is about reciprocity. Ono was making an offering, providing a souvenir, encouraging a kind of commemoration. Of what? Of the unspeakably high cost of war. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Army prohibited images that showed the effects of the blasts. Ten years later, when photographs, drawings and written accounts were finally permitted, one of the most common descriptions was how the blasts had shredded people's clothes....

Getting back to the present-day billboard, Smee concludes:

Instead of judging Ono's gesture by its "effectiveness" (what is a billboard ever going to achieve?), we might think of it instead as her latest "event score," an instruction we can try to carry out — or not.

"Supreme Court nominee Jackson says she would recuse herself from Harvard affirmative action case."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 02:14 PM PDT

WaPo reports.

This was predictable. She's on Harvard's Board of Overseers, and her vote wasn't going to change the outcome of the case, given the 6 conservatives already on the Court.

"In a per curiam (unsigned) opinion on the shadow docket, over the dissent of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has rejected a redistricting plan that a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted..."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 01:50 PM PDT

"... for drawing state assembly and senate districts.... The [Wisconsin] court adopted the [Democratic] Governor's maps, and those maps added another majority-minority district around Milwaukee. The governor added this district saying it was required by the Voting Rights Act... The Supreme Court's opinion today says either the Governor or the Supreme Court misapplied the Supreme Court's VRA and racial gerrymandering precedents... The state supreme court should have considered under strict scrutiny 'whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.'... [T]he Court used a case in an emergency procedural posture to reach out and decide an issue.... It decided these issues in ways hostile to minority voting rights without giving a full opportunity for airing out the issues and pointing out how this will further hurt voters of color."

Writes Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog.

Here's the opinion. 

Why do only Sotomayor and Kagan dissent? What about Breyer? From "The Supreme Court's Astonishing, Inexplicable Blow to the Voting Rights Act in Wisconsin" by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate

Only Sotomayor and Kagan noted their dissents; it's possible that Justice Stephen Breyer dissented as well, but chose not to note it. (This opacity is a perennial problem with the shadow docket.) He may have simply decided not to publicize his disagreement—choosing, perhaps, not to rock the boat months before his retirement. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Breyer agreed with the majority, since he has publicly opposed its approach to the VRA in innumerable cases.

"I’m not a fucking TERF. No reasonable person could think I’m a TERF. It’s actually quite easy to find out whether or not I’m a TERF."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:07 PM PDT

"All you have to do is ask me, or spend two minutes scrolling my twitter timeline. Sandra Newman isn't a TERF either, something that can be easily discovered by the same methods. I have to assume the jury for the Lambda Literary Prize did neither. Nobody talked to me and I wasn't asked. I was informed last week that my nomination was withdrawn. To be clear, Lambda Literary, an organization founded to champion queer writers, to preserve queer culture, to bring attention to queer writers who might otherwise never receive recognition by mainstream literary organizations, withdrew the nomination of my book, because when I saw my friend being piled-on by people making assumptions about a book they hadn't read, I responded. A literary award was withdrawn because I told people… to read a fucking book. I am a queer woman, and I was silenced most of my life. I found my voice, but if my nomination is being withdrawn for using it, what the fuck is the point of Lambda Literary?"

Writes the author Lauren Hough in "A question for Lambda Literary/Who gets to have a voice anyway?" (Substack). 

I got there through this NYT article: "Lauren Hough Loses Lambda Prize Nomination After a Twitter Feud/Her essay collection was removed from contention in the category of best lesbian memoir after she went on Twitter to defend a forthcoming Sandra Newman novel from charges that it was transphobic." 

Here's Hough's memoir, "Leaving Isn't The Hardest Thing." It's about being a lesbian serving in the Air Force during the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" period.

The NYT article doesn't contain the acronym "TERF." It does use the phrase for which TERF is an acronym: "trans-exclusionary radical feminist."

Here's Newman's novel, "The Men," which has a cover image of XX and a publisher's description that also refers to chromosomes: "a dazzling, mindbending novel in which all people with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth." I think the TERF accusation is all about equating "men" with "Y chromosome."

"The end of the Soviet Union disoriented Russia’s elites, stripping away their special status in a huge Communist empire.... One of the most alluring concepts was Eurasianism."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 04:22 AM PDT

"Emerging from the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, this idea posited Russia as a Eurasian polity formed by a deep history of cultural exchanges among people of Turkic, Slavic, Mongol and other Asian origins. In 1920, the linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy — one of several Russian émigré intellectuals who developed the concept — published 'Europe and Humanity,' a trenchant critique of Western colonialism and Eurocentrism. He called on Russian intellectuals to free themselves from their fixation on Europe.... Suppressed for decades in the Soviet Union, Eurasianism survived in the underground and burst into public awareness during the perestroika period of the late 1980s. Lev Gumilyov, an eccentric geographer who had spent 13 years in Soviet prisons and forced-labor camps, emerged as an acclaimed guru of the Eurasian revival in the 1980s. Mr. Gumilyov emphasized ethnic diversity as a driver of global history. According to his concept of 'ethnogenesis,' an ethnic group could, under the influence of a charismatic leader, develop into a 'super-ethnos' — a power spread over a huge geographical area that would clash with other expanding ethnic units.... But Eurasianism was injected directly into the bloodstream of Russian power in a variant developed by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin.... Russia had always been an empire, Russian people were 'imperial people,' and after the crippling 1990s sellout to the 'eternal enemy'.... In 2013, [Putin] declared that Eurasia was a major geopolitical zone where Russia's 'genetic code' and its many peoples would be defended against 'extreme Western-style liberalism.' In July last year he announced that 'Russians and Ukrainians are one people,' and in his furious rant on the eve of invasion, he described Ukraine as a 'colony with a puppet regime,' where the Orthodox Church is under assault and NATO prepares for an attack on Russia."

Writes Jane Burbank, a professor in Russian history, in "The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War" (NYT).

The resistance of the Ukrainians is a profound rebuttal to the theory. But theories can be revised and must be revised to incorporate undeniable events in the real world. Assuming Burbank's analysis is correct, how can Putin adapt his ideology and extract Russia from its predicament? Destroying everything in Ukraine and making Ukrainians hate Russia is completely inconsistent with the theory.

"Masculine Women! Feminine Man!"

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:44 AM PDT

I just stumbled into this song from 1926 with lyrics like "Masculine women, feminine men/Which is the rooster, which is the hen?/It's hard to tell 'em apart today" and "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!"

The audio here is the Irving Kaufman version, from 1926, and the visual is a lot of pictures from movies of the 1910s/1920s/1930s (and from "Some Like It Hot," which is set in the 1920s): 

 

I wasn't looking for transgender-adjacent popular songs. What happened was, I was reading about various 1960s pop stars and saw this about Tiny Tim:

In a 1968 interview on The Tonight Show, he described the discovery of his ability to sing in an upper register: "I was listening to the radio and singing along; as I was singing I said 'Gee, it's strange. I can go up high as well.'" In a 1969 interview he said he was listening to Rudy Vallée sing in a falsetto, and "had something of a revelation – I never knew that I had another top register," describing it as a religious experience.

Through Spotify, I found the key Rudy Vallée recording, "Deep Night." I have listened to that recording a hundred times in the last month. I'm trying to understand all the mysterious elements that make me love that song. It's because of "Deep Night" that I've been delving into 1920s playlists on Spotify. That's what put me in a position to notice "Masculine Women! Feminine Man!" And I thought you'd enjoy the diversion.

Here's an instrumental version with an excellent collection of photographs of less famous people — presumably centering on the 1920s and showing many women dressed as men and men as women (or, perhaps, transgender men and women):

Here are the full lyrics, written by Edgar Leslie/James V. Monaco:
Hey, hey
Women are going mad today
Hey, hey
Fellas are just as bad, I'll say!
Go anywhere
Just stand and stare
You'll say they're bugs
When you look at the clothes they wear
Masculine women, feminine men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It's hard to tell 'em apart today
And say
Sister is busy learning to shave
Brother just loves his permanent wave
It's hard to tell 'em apart today
Hey, hey!
Girls were girls and boys were boys
When I was a tot
Now we don't know who is who
Or even what's what!
Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide
Nobody knows who's walking inside!
Those masculine women and feminine men
Stop, look, listen and you'll agree with me
Things are not what they used to be, you'll see
You say hello to Uncle Joe
Then look again, and you'll find it's your Auntie Flo!
Masculine women, feminine men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It's hard to tell 'em apart today!
And say
Why, auntie is smoking, rolling her own
Uncle is always buying cologne
It's hard to tell 'em apart today
Hey, hey
You go into give your girl a kiss in the hall
But instead you find you're kissing her brother Paul!
Ma's got a sweater up to her chin;
Papa's got a girdle holding him in
Those masculine women and feminine men!
Now, wifey is playing billiards and pool
Hubby is dressing the kiddies for school
It's hard to tell 'em apart today
Hey, hey
Since the Prince of Wales in ladies' dresses was seen
What does he intend to be
The King or the Queen?
Why, grandmother buys those tailor-made clothes;
Grandfather tries to smell like a rose
Those masculine women and feminine men!

"'Literal grooming.' You can make your points without such anti-gay bigotry."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:01 AM PDT

At the Tuesday Night Cafe…

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 04:11 PM PDT

… you can talk about whatever you want. 

Let's watch Ted Cruz question Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 01:37 PM PDT

I doubt if much of any great interest can happen at the confirmation hearing. The President has made his choice, and the Senate's role is going to be predictable theater (unless it isn't). But the NYT play by play coverage made me think that things got somewhat lively when Ted Cruz got his go at her:

  

ADDED: It continues — with the discussion of the children's book "Anti-Racist Baby." Cruz was challenging her statement that "Critical Race Theory" is not taught in schools. The book isn't teaching theory. It's a product of theory. I think they all know that's the distinction, but watch if you want to see the exquisite struggle:

ALSO: Even though Biden selected her only because she fell within the pool of possible candidates by being a black woman, I am uncomfortable with subjecting her to special questions premised on her status as a black woman. She is the nominee, and the President's basis for singling her out says nothing about her worthiness of confirmation. Presumably, there are hundreds or thousands of individuals who could have been nominated. It was the President's role to select one. Criticize him if you like. But she deserves exactly the same treatment that would have been given to any of those others, not some special black woman questioning.

"Several large shareholders have urged BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down the entire news operation...."

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 12:27 PM PDT

"BuzzFeed News... has about 100 employees and loses roughly $10 million a year.... The digital media company went public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle in December. The shares immediately fell nearly 40% in their first week of trading and haven't recovered.... Rather than shut down BuzzFeed News, Peretti is attempting to make the division profitable. He has a ready-made template: He made the decision to lay off 70 HuffPost staffers last year after acquiring the company from Verizon Media...."

CNBC reports.

BuzzFeed — I haven't blogged about Buzzfeed since Ben Smith ran the place and Jake Tapper criticized him for being "'Irresponsible' For Publishing Trump Dossier." That was bloggable because Tapper wrote (in private email) "Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick."

"[T]he presumption of the policy... is that there is an existing problem... that requires further state government intervention."

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 11:08 AM PDT

Those are conservative words, spoken by Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, quoted in "Bucking Republican Trend, Indiana Governor Vetoes Transgender Sports Bill/Gov. Eric Holcomb nixed legislation that would have blocked transgender girls from playing school sports. Eleven states have enacted similar bills" (NYT). 

It's a basically conservative approach, and it's also politically wise. To pass this law would shift the attention to the new law — how it works awkwardly or has unintended consequences, the real individuals who feel the effects and deserve empathy, and what's wrong with the meanies who voted for it. 

To decline to legislate is to leave the problem in the hands of the authorities who run the sport, who will have to struggle to find solutions that will never be perfect and never free of criticism.

So, hooray for Holcomb.

"[I]n the last couple of chapters of The End of History and the Last Man... I said that there is this side of the human personality that the Greeks called thymos. It’s the pridefulness..."

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 07:45 AM PDT

"... and the desire for respect that sometimes conflicts with your rational pursuit of self-interest. One of the problems in a liberal society is that it doesn't give you a source of striving for higher ends if you simply have peace and prosperity. And I think that you can see this both on the left and the right today, where, in the United States we're having a lot of disputes over mask wearing and vaccination mandates. And protesters are wearing stars of David, saying that their requirement to get vaccinated and to wear masks is like Hitler's treatment of the Jews. And I think that's a perfect example of complacency. You're living in a liberal society. The government is not asking very much of you, but even the slightest imposition on your individual freedom, you compare it to the worst tyrannies of previous ages. You can only do that in a society that's really forgotten what real tyranny is like. And I think that one of the things that has happened with Putin's invasion of Ukraine is to remind people what real tyranny looks like...."

From "Francis Fukuyama on Ukraine, liberalism and identity politics/'Vladimir Putin is going to be remembered as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian nation'" (Spectator). Fukuyama is promoting his new book "Liberalism and Its Discontents."

Fukuyama also says this about Ukraine, declaring that "Vladimir Putin is going to be remembered as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian nation when this is all over with":

The big problem in Ukraine prior to the war was corruption. And the corruption came from the fact that much of the economy was owned by six or seven oligarchs that were a kind of byproduct of the way the Soviet Union collapsed. What's remarkable is that structure has really crumbled now. Ukraine has experienced a birth of a nation that really would not have been possible but for the invasion. So the oligarchs have all fled. Their properties are being confiscated or destroyed... by the Russians. ...

None of the Russian speakers, as far as I can see, have any sympathy now for Russia given what they've done in Kharkiv and other Russian-speaking territories. I think that the whole earlier division has really been replaced by an extraordinary sense of national unity around Zelensky and around the idea of a free Ukraine. So Vladimir Putin is going to be remembered as one of the fathers of the Ukrainian nation when this is all over with.

[Interviewer: And Zelensky, who most of us have come to consciousness of as a war hero president, how did you rate him before all this happened? Was he deeply implicated with these oligarchs? Was he ruling by permission of them?]

Francis Fukuyama: To a much less extent than other Ukrainian politicians. He had been linked at the time of his election to [Ihor] Kolomoisky. And there had been a lot of suspicion that he was acting on his behalf. I think that after he became elected, he proved that actually wasn't true. You know, they continue to act against Kolomoisky's interest. There was a big reversal of a privatisation that they were trying to contest, and he didn't manage to do that. And I think that the thing that was remarkable about Zelensky was that he was the outsider candidate that was elected over other candidates that were much more representative of oligarchic interests by an incredible margin, which indicated that the Ukrainian people as a whole really wanted an outsider that wasn't connected to any of the existing corrupt elite....

Here's a well-drawn cartoon. My question: Who's the most gullible?

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 07:35 AM PDT

The funniest answer to my question is: the woman. She thinks the Russians are gullible (though they're just stuck with the media they can get) and she's (apparently) married to that guy. She's gulled into joyless endurance while her partner is getting it on with Tucker. 

Hillary something!

"Porn star Stormy Daniels loses appeal in Trump case, owes former president almost $300,000."

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 03:15 PM PDT

 CNBC reports. 

In its decision Friday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said it had no jurisdiction over Daniels' appeal of the attorneys' fees issue because she failed to file a notice of appeal within a 30-day deadline of a federal judge granting the fees to Trump....

The amount Daniels owes Trump in the case is about the same amount she was swindled out of by Michael Avenatti, her former lawyer....

Trump commented: "The lawsuit was a purely political stunt that never should have started... Now all I have to do is wait for all of the money she owes me."

It's hard to remember what this lawsuit was about, isn't it? 

Daniels sued Trump when he was president in 2018, seeking to void the nondisclosure agreement with Cohen. While Trump later agreed not to enforce the agreement, a judge in 2020 ordered him to pay Daniels more than $44,000 for her legal fees in that case.

Later in 2018, Daniels sued Trump again, claiming he defamed her when, in a Twitter post, he scoffed at a police sketch artist drawing of a man who Daniels said had threatened her in 2011 over her allegation of having had sex with Trump.

Trump called the sketch a "con job" about a "nonexistent man."A federal judge dismissed that lawsuit later in 2018, saying Trump's statements were protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

I wanted to see that police artist drawing again. I'd forgotten. I'll just link to my Google search because I see the drawing, signed "Lois," presumably the police artist, is emblazoned with "© Michael Avenatti, Esq."... and he's litigious. But he's not an "esquire" anymore. And he's in prison.

Despite the clear image of the face — which is so generically good-looking it's funny — the height is given as 5'9" to 6'. Who doesn't know the difference between a 5'9" guy and a 6' guy? I guess if you think he's 5'10 or 5'11" the police say 5'9" to 6'.

"Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?"

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 06:03 AM PDT

That was the headline in The Forward, last fall, quoted in "After Criticism, Film Museum Will Highlight Hollywood's Jewish History/The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which tried to present an inclusive history of film, overlooked the role Jewish immigrants played in creating the industry" in the NYT. 

"We want to ensure that we are taking an honest, inclusive and diverse look at our history, that we create a safe space for complicated, hard conversations," the museum's director, Bill Kramer, said the day after the museum opened as he welcomed guests to a panel discussion titled "Creating a More Inclusive Museum."

But one group was conspicuously absent in this initial celebration of diversity and inclusivity: the Jewish immigrants — white men all — who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system. Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to list just a few of the best-known names from Hollywood's history....

Some historians said the omission appeared to be the latest example of Hollywood's strained relationship with its Jewish history. "You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders — and those who maintained the industry — would be identified as Jews," said Neal Gabler, the author of "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," a book about the Jewish studio heads. "It's almost fitting that a museum devoted to the history of Hollywood would incorporate in its very evolution this fear and sensitivity."

I think the omission was based on a real concern that calling attention to the participation of Jews in the industry would feed anti-Semitism and could very well be perceived as anti-Semitic. The achievement of this group is so strong and so long-standing that it is downplayed, not celebrated. The conventions of present-day inclusiveness were designed to hearten — and appease — groups that have not done well in the past. If you emphasize that Jews were the studio heads, won't you look as though you are blaming Jews for the exclusion you are dedicated to stressing? 

The NYT article doesn't address this obvious problem. I'd say it pushes the insight farther from the reader's view in the third sentence: "But one group was conspicuously absent in this initial celebration of diversity and inclusivity: the Jewish immigrants — white men all — who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system."

White men all! 

ADDED: It was only last month that Whoopi Goldberg got scathed for saying Jews are white.

ALSO: Will the museum's tribute to Jewish studio heads include Harvey Weinstein?

Sunrise — 7:29, 7:33.

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 05:37 PM PDT

IMG_9605 

IMG_9608 

You can talk about anything you like in the comments.

"The trigger-warning crowd does not make fun. I’m actually for going further: We should have fecal mobs go out and perform turd terrorism to prove that we’re serious about policing pronouns."

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 10:14 AM PDT

Said John Waters, adding that "The Jan. 6 people, they [expletive] in Nancy Pelosi's office. So maybe we should go even crazier politically correct the other way and have fecal flash mobs going out there." 

The quote is in the NYT — "John Waters Is Ready to Defend the Worst People in the World" —  so that's why "shit" is written "[expletive]."

The NYT adds a footnote: "One of the men charged in conjunction with the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was accused of defecating on Speaker Pelosi's office desk." 

I did not know that. Did I know and forget or was that just not fit to print until it was needed to explain what the hell John Waters is talking about.

He continues: "I'm just saying humor is how you fight. It's how you make people change their mind. Everything I've ever done is about using humor as a weapon. I don't think I'm mean, but everything's touchy now. When things are touchy, isn't that when comedy gets more exciting? Always, I was trying to satirize the rules of the world I lived in. At the same time I was trying to make you laugh and to see, What are the limits?"

"Don't blame men. It's not our fault that men make better women than women do."

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 10:44 AM PDT

Quips Instapundit, linking to "Women's opportunities are being taken away by 'womxn'/Biological men that identify as women are invading the area created specifically for women and are not only doing a disservice to the women but themselves as well" (Campus Reform). 

I'm not blogging this to engage on the issue whether transwomen belong in women's sports. But I will say, as I've said before, that I think women's sports has to do with the physical body, and not with the mind. Transgenderism radically prioritizes the mind over the body. Each of us holds dominion over our own mind, and that includes power to think of yourself in gendered terms and to give any meaning you want to the idea of what it means to be a woman. In your mind, you can believe it refers only to the body or only to the mind or to something in between or to nothing at all.

The reason I'm blogging this is to extract an unexamined question from "men make better women than women do." And that is: What makes a woman?

If you Google that question, the first thing you'll see is probably the Katy Perry song with that title:

 

Katy says you "could spend your whole life, but you couldn't describe what makes a woman/She's always been a perfect mystery... and that's what makes a woman to me." That is: It's a mystery! There's no answer — even if you spend your whole life looking for the answer. There's a problem with the question! There is nothing that "makes a woman." 

I quoted the chorus. The verse contemplates the possibility that it has to do with speaking in a sweet way, having soft skin, being a bitch, buttering up her man, changing her mind, fearing abandonment, having a particular sort of hairdo, not wearing makeup, having intuition, crying, or nursing a broken heart.

I see there was an op-ed in the NYT with the headline "What Makes a Woman?" back in 2015. The author, Elinor Burke, remembered the way Lawrence H. Summers — president of Harvard at the time — was denounced as a massive sexist because he simply wondered aloud about the possibility of difference between the male and the female mind. But more recently Caitlin Jenner had announced, "My brain is much more female than it is male." We're told:

"You can't pick up a brain and say 'that's a girl's brain' or 'that's a boy's brain,' " Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Britain's Aston University, told The Telegraph last year. The differences between male and female brains are caused by the "drip, drip, drip" of the gendered environment, she said. The drip, drip, drip of Ms. Jenner's experience included a hefty dose of male privilege few women could possibly imagine.... 
After [Ms.] Jenner talked about [her] brain, one friend called it an outrage and asked in exasperation, "Is he saying that he's bad at math, weeps during bad movies and is hard-wired for empathy?" After the release of the Vanity Fair photos of Ms. Jenner, Susan Ager, a Michigan journalist, wrote on her Facebook page, "I fully support Caitlyn Jenner, but I wish she hadn't chosen to come out as a sex babe."

From the comments: "I was disappointed that Caitlyn Jenner came out as a sexpot. A stereotypically male stereotypical vision of what a woman is."

Here's a 2016 article in The Atlantic: "What Makes a Man or a Woman?" We're told of the "internal tension on the left":

On one hand, we are told that gender is simply a social construct; that there is no such thing as a "male brain" or "female brain," as we all exist on a spectrum; and that we should break out of the rigid "binary" modes of thinking about male and female, allowing for a broader range of personal expression.... 
But the transgender movement... argues that a person who conforms outwardly to socially conditioned, feminine gender roles is actually and truly a woman, irrespective of sex, while a person who adopts stereotypical male behaviours and dress is actually and truly a man. How regressive! 
Moreover, in arguing that a biological man can have a female brain or vice versa, the transgender movement seems to be saying that gender is not a social construct, but is instead rooted in biology—but, apparently, not the biology dictated by chromosomes. The alternative theory is that trans people's bodies don't align with their souls.... 
Is gender a mere social construct, or is it biological? And if gender is a meaningless social construct, while sex is a set of immutable biological characteristics, then why is there a push in progressive circles to eliminate sex-based protections in favour of gender-based ones?

And here's an article in Elle from 2015, "What Makes A Woman?/Three women discuss how they defined femininity on their own unique terms." 

Is femininity just a performance, as gender theorist Judith Butler once argued? Or is our sense of womanhood beyond our control, shaped by early experiences in our childhood? Indeed, femininity is personal, complex and tied irrevocably to circumstances that we often have no control over. So the best way to understand is to listen to each other's stories. And so we've asked three women....

If it's really all about telling your own story, then if "men make better women than women do," it would be because they tell better stories about their womanhood! And why wouldn't a transwoman tell a better story about what it means to be a woman? In their circumstance, they have so much more incentive.

Indeed, the first of the 3 women who tell their story to Elle is a transwoman, a model named Hari Neff:

I do feel a certain amount of pride as someone who completely constructed herself from the ground up. None of this was given to me – this body was not given to me and my standing as a woman was not given to me. I had to earn all of this for myself; every trans person has to make that for themselves and I think that's why trans people are so strong....

I was just going out and changing up my look, experimenting with drag. I didn't dive into being a woman – I added elements piece by piece.... I was shaving my eyebrows, had bleached hair and wore make-up...

I think I internalised femininity through fashion and through pop culture, and started to create a woman in my head.... I began to attach desires and value judgements to things, and eventually understood that this woman was stronger and better equipped than I was to deal with the world. I came to the point where I had no doubt that I would be a better person, a happier person, if I inhabited her....

Radical feminists ask, 'Why would you ever want to be a woman? Why would you ever want to give up that male privilege?' And I don't really have an answer for that other than the burden of being a man, for me, was far more severe than anything I've experienced on the other side.

Once you've changed gender, the annoying aspects of daily life become secondary. I sweat the small stuff less. I'm very happy. I'm not saying that trans women are more evolved than other women, but I really do think they are the coolest, most beautiful people in the world because everything about them in relation to their gender, their appearance, the people they 'are', they built.

And there you have it, Neff seriously makes the point that Instapundit put in a quip.

"There are strong philosophical arguments for opposing Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. And she may in fact be too solicitous of criminals. But..."

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:02 AM PDT

"... the implication that she has a soft spot for 'sex offenders' who 'prey on children' because she argued against a severe mandatory-minimum prison sentence for the receipt and distribution of pornographic images is a smear."

Writes Andrew McCarthy in "Senator Hawley's Disingenuous Attack against Judge Jackson's Record on Child Pornography" (National Review).

"Jackson’s rulings have been detailed, methodical and left-leaning."

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 07:38 AM PDT

The NYT reports today, as the confirmation hearings are about to begin. 

A review of a substantial sample of Judge Jackson's roughly 500 judicial opinions suggests that she would be about as liberal as the member of the court she hopes to replace, Justice Stephen G. Breyer. That would make her a reliable member of what would continue to be a three-member liberal minority on a court that is dominated by six conservative justices....

Those opinions are diligent and exceptionally thorough, exhibiting a sure command of both the facts before her and the relevant legal materials. But they are often less illuminating than appeals court rulings that establish precedents and bind other judges.

In Judge Jackson's eight months on the appeals court, she has issued just two majority opinions, and they have been crisp and forceful....

So, we're told she's "left-leaning" but only "about as liberal" as Justice Breyer.

"By the way: Did you read The Times’s account of the government’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax and foreign-business affairs?"

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 04:44 AM PDT

Bret Stephens asks Gail Collins in their conversation in the New York Times, "It's Never a Good Time for the Hunter Biden Story." The transcript continues:

Bret: The news here has less to do with Hunter himself and more with the fact that those emails recovered from the discarded laptop were his, despite the best efforts by Twitter and other social media and news media companies to bury or not look closely enough at that fact on the eve of the 2020 election.

Gail: I'm so glad our colleagues are still doing strong reporting on this story — Hunter Biden's scummy business dealings shouldn't be swept under the rug any more than anyone else's.

Did Collins just admit that her colleagues were,  at one time, sweeping it under the rug? Or does "still doing strong reporting on this story" preclude that interpretation? Stephens had some careful locution himself: Was the NYT part of the "best efforts... to bury or not look closely enough"? He leaves a loophole. Maybe it was those other "news media companies."

Bret: Not to mention those paintings he tried to sell for up to $500,000 a canvas in nontransparent sales. Nothing at all fishy there.

Gail: That said, I have to admit I've never found Hunter's behavior criminal — just very, very depressing. Fragile son in a family buffeted by tragedy, grows up to have a drug problem and makes a lot of money by working for companies that presumably like to have a famous American politician's relative to trot around.

Bret: The D.O.J.'s investigation will tell.

Gail: Some of Hunter's behavior was obviously unseemly in the extreme. Any new evidence needs to be carefully examined to see if Hunter's behavior ever went past that into actual criminality — did he claim, for instance, that he could deliver favors from the government because he was Joe Biden's son? So far I haven't seen it, but whenever Hunter's name comes up, I do find myself holding my breath.

The obvious question that needs to be asked at that point is in fact asked by Stephens:

Bret: ... [W]hat really bothered me was the not-so-subtle media effort to bury the email story right before the election as some kind of "Russian disinformation" campaign. If someone had discovered that, say, Ivanka Trump had left a laptop at a repair shop stuffed with emails about 10 percent being held "for the big guy"— to use a reference that appears to be to Joe Biden, which comes from one of the emails found on Hunter's computer — would the story have been treated with kid gloves?

Does Collins try to wriggle out of this or does she face up to the problem of partisanship at the NYT?

Gail: Well, Ivanka is a much tidier person.

Tidier?! And yet Hunter Biden is the one we always see in the bathtub. I guess Collins means, jokingly, that Ivanka wouldn't lose track of her laptop.

Collins continues:

Your mentioning her does remind me that it's never been clear to me exactly how much, if any, of the campaign donations Trump's been piling up are going to his kids' activities.

Ha ha. Collins grasps at the hope of turning the inquiry onto the Trump kids.

Not trying to downplay the Hunter story...

But of course you are. You're just trying not to look as though you're trying to downplay the Hunter story. That is, you're downplaying your own downplaying.

... but in the grand scheme of things I still think his misdeeds are going to wind up as a sidebar on the Biden saga. Feel free to remind me I said that if half the family winds up indicted.

Bret: I honestly hope not. The world needs another White House corruption scandal like I need a hole in my head, to borrow a line from one of the better songs of the 1990s.

The link goes to a song by a rock band named Cracker, which is unusually interesting because not only has the phrase "I need you like I need a hole in my head" been around for a much longer time than that, it's the title of a 1947 recording by the great Pearl Bailey.

And that's the end of the discussion of Hunter Biden and the NYT journalism. Collins responds by bringing up the topic of... earmarks!

"Oh I hate myself for my first reaction to this...."

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 04:05 AM PDT

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