Friday, April 29, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 04:58 PM PDT

IMG_0106 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Jack Dorsey called Elon Musk the "singular solution" to Twitter's problems and said "I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 10:15 AM PDT

"Dorsey's exaltation of Musk evoked 'great man' thinking — a theory of history in which individual heroes direct world affairs through force of will and intellect. Antiquated among academic historians, 'great man' theory has enjoyed a renaissance in the technology industry.... What 'great man' thinking obscures is that technological breakthroughs invariably build on the work of others.... Of course Musk can't build cars or rockets or a social network without help. But the importance of the teams he assembled at Tesla and SpaceX has been overlooked by many, including Dorsey, in assessing his takeover of Twitter. In short, Musk can't transform Twitter, or even keep it moving forward, without a workforce of highly capable developers, designers, product and policy thinkers who truly believe in his plans for the company. And that is exactly what, by all accounts, he does not have at Twitter right now.... He could try to win over Twitter's existing employees.... On Tuesday and Wednesday, he issued a series of tweets critical of both Twitter as a company and individual Twitter employees, including its top policy executive, Vijaya Gadde. Those tweets have helped to fuel an ugly, and at times violently racist, harassment campaign against her...."

From "Elon Musk and tech's 'great man' fallacy/Jack Dorsey called him the 'singular solution' to Twitter's problems. But no leader can go it alone" by Will Oremus (WaPo).

There's no link on any part of "ugly, and at times violently racist, harassment campaign," and I do not know what it refers to. I went to Musk's Twitter feed, but am I supposed to sift through all manner of crazy stuff like this...

"That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising...."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 09:23 AM PDT

"The companies appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers. And they offer solid wages and benefits for their industries — even, for that matter, compared with some other industries that employ the college-educated. More than three years after he earned a political science degree from Siena College in 2017, Brian Murray was making about $14 an hour as a youth counselor at a group home for middle-school-age children. He quit in late 2020 and was hired a few months later at a Starbucks in the Buffalo area, where his wage increased to $15.50 an hour. 'The starting wage was higher than anything I'd ever made,' said Mr. Murray, who has helped organize Starbucks workers in the city.... [T]he gap between the expectations of college graduates and their employability has led to years of political ferment. A study of participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which highlighted income inequality and grew out of the 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, found that more than three-quarters were college graduates, versus about 30 percent of adults at the time...."

From "The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class/Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they're helping to unionize them" (NYT).

"But I offered [my daughter] a bit of unsolicited advice, too: Next time you want to skip school, don’t tell your parents. Just go."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 09:17 AM PDT

"Browse vintage stores, eat your favorite snack (onigiri), lie on your back in Prospect Park and stare at the clouds. Isn't that the point of skipping school, after all? To sneak around, to steal time and space back from the arbitrary system that enfolds you? To hell with permission! That's being a teenager — carving out a private life for yourself under the noses of the authority figures who surround you. Sasha said no, she would not be doing that. Not because she's a Goody Two-shoes but because she's too lazy to plan the subterfuge...."

Writes Matt Gross, in "Your Kids Can Handle Dangerous Ideas" (NYT).

"A few hours after publishing an apology for the hateful language in this column, The D.O. also removed the name of the columnist to prevent them from receiving backlash because The D.O. gave a platform to them in the first place."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 09:23 AM PDT

From the second disclaimer on a Daily Orange column, titled "SU's campus is becoming saturated with inappropriate sexual events" (via Instapundit).

The first disclaimer called the column "hateful speech." Notice what's going on: Opposition to the sexualization of public spaces is being characterized as a focused attack on LGBTQ people. Using the same kind of reasoning and interpretation, that characterization itself could be called hateful speech. Why would you portray LGBTQ status as having to do with sexualization? Heterosexuals and nontransgender people are also involved and interested in sex. I remember when excessive sexualization of public spaces was considered a mechanism of male supremacy and an oppression of women!

"I'm watching this trial. It's a cautionary tale. It's a cautionary tale about believing in bullshit. Like: forming a narrative in your head, like: We're rebels together!"

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 07:22 AM PDT

 

ADDED: A similar, but different analysis:

"How Women’s Sports Teams Got Their Start/As the 50th anniversary of Title IX arrives in June, historians are reflecting on the legacy of women’s sports teams and whether it’s time to stop segregating some sports by sex."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 07:26 AM PDT

 This is a column by Maria Cramer in the NYT.

In the late 19th century, female educators in American high schools and colleges began forming teams for girls and women to play sports like softball and basketball... Rules were modified so that women would "adhere to stricter social norms... to make sure there wasn't too much contact and too much exertion.... There was a real concern that they would hurt their [reproductive] organs."... 

Critics "raised the question whether a woman would become masculine.... Would women defeat men and the male sense of superiority?"... "Women's sport exists as a category because the dominance of men athletes was threatened by women competing".... 

Since Title IX was passed, women have been competitive with men at the elite level in fields like rock climbing, surfing and endurance sports, like ultra running and biking. Their achievements have led some to ask, Should we start integrating more professional sports?... "If a greater opportunity to participate has led to greater performance, why won't we allow females to participate with males to further explore the ceilings of performance?"

I think the reason we don't want to "explore the ceilings" is that we expect the ceiling to be very low.

Should we explore this particular ceiling?
 
pollcode.com free polls

"Sometimes the game isn't necessarily fair, because me and her are playing a whole nother mental game that they don't even know — that when you are a person of color..."

Posted: 28 Apr 2022 06:59 AM PDT

"... and you're the only one — that you have to play. And that's something they don't even have to worry about. Everybody can just be themselves. We have to be ourselves, but then hold back a little bit."

From "Survivor 42 recap: Drea and Maryanne take a stand/The complicated history of race on reality TV leads two players to take an emotional stand" (Entertainment Weekly).

ADDED: Here's how the racial discourse looked on last night's episode:

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 05:36 PM PDT

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 ... you can talk about whatever you want. 

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"You think we imprison people on a whim? No, if you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing, that alone would justify your arrest."

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 03:41 PM PDT

Says a Stasi interrogator in the 2006 film "The Lives of Others." The "humanistic system" was East Germany.

I just watched for the first time, on the urging of my son John, who warned me that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel. John chose that movie as the best movie of 2006, noted on his blog about the best movies from 1920 to 2020.

William F. Buckley Jr. said it was "the best movie I ever saw."

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, got the idea for the movie from Maxim Gorky's description of a conversation he had with Lenin about music:

And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, he added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!

In the movie, a character quotes Lenin — about Beethoven's "Appassionata" —"If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."

Here is my new selection of TikTok videos — 8, this time — hand-selected by me, with my preferences, which are mostly, but not entirely, for delight.

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 03:19 PM PDT

1. Kiss the hand.

2. Bear on a wire.

3. Approximating the English expression "skyscraper." 

4. The cat plays rhythm.

5. Did he call her fat?

6. Impression of a decomposing fox.

7. A gentle Alzheimer's patient shows great interest in meeting her daughter's mother.

8. A memorial to the smoke the rose within Grand Central Station over the years.

"Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets."

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 10:21 AM PDT

"Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don't, then no matter — no one sees what we're saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be or we lose.... There is a reason that Donald Trump, with his preternatural gift for making people look at him, was Twitter's most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was, in effect, a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the whole world bore the consequences.... But I count myself, still, as a cautious believer in Musk's power to do the impossible — in this case, to expose what Twitter is and to right-size its influence. In fact, I think he's the only one with the power to do it.... He will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten."

Writes Ezra Klein, in "Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter" (NYT).

"What exactly does [Elon Musk] believe can’t be said on [Twitter] right now?"

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 10:10 AM PDT

"It certainly doesn't take long to find discredited race science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior, antisemitism, defenses of white supremacism and transphobic comments that remain on the platform even under current policy. It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr. Musk is standing up for is worse even than that. As the comedian Michael Che put it on 'Saturday Night Live,' the $44 billion deal shows 'how badly white guys want to use the N-word.' All of this is a moral and ethical case for keeping moderation policies in place...."

From "Let's Be Clear About What It's Like to Be Harassed on Twitter" by Elizabeth Spiers (NYT).

"It is easy to assume" a lot of things! It's also easy to splatter opinion columns with the idea that Musk is a racist, sexist pig and that to declare that you've made "a moral and ethical case" for censorship... and — paradoxically — that you're fighting misinformation.

It's interesting how much free speech the opponents of free of speech already have.

"Yesteryear’s 'ball-point pen' became the 'ballpoint,' 'wild-flowers' evolved into 'wildflowers,' and 'teen-age” found acceptance as 'teenage' in most outlets..."

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 09:13 AM PDT

"In modern times, the hyphen has sown controversy. [Pardis Mahdavi, author of 'Hyphen'] tells the story of how Teddy Roosevelt, in his outrage at losing the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, appealed to Americans' xenophobia. He was an 'anti-hyphenate.' Mahdavi writes, 'Referring to the hyphen between the name of an ethnicity and the word "American," hyphenism and hyphenated Americanism was seen as a potentially fracturing and divisive force in an America on the brink of war.' Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and Chinese-Americans were all suspect. In 1915, Teddy Roosevelt made some remarks that formed 'a turning point in how the hyphen became demonized both orthographically and politically.' He said, 'The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic.' (Victims of anti-hyphenism might be gratified to know that during the pandemic the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was removed from in front of the Museum of Natural History.)"

From "How to Use (or Not Use) a Hyphen/Plus: a brief digression into why The New Yorker hyphenates 'teen-ager'" by Mary Norris (The New Yorker).

Those are 2 very different issues with the hyphen. One has to do with the evolution of a compound word. It's about helping readers see what they're looking at. There must have been a time when people, looking at "wildflower" might have taken an extra moment to decide the second part is "flower" and not "lower" (what are "wildfs"?) The second issue is whether we're going to use this concept at all. To prefer "American" to "Irish-American" is to cast aside the Irish part. It's more like deciding we'll just call all these things "flowers" and not pay attention to whether they are "wild" or not... speaking of xenophobia!

What makes a flower "wild" anyway? All flowers are rooted somewhere and incapable of emigrating:

"Wildflower" is not an exact term. More precise terms include native species (naturally occurring in the area, see flora), exotic or, better, introduced species (not naturally occurring in the area), of which some are labelled invasive species (that out-compete other plants – whether native or not), imported (introduced to an area whether deliberately or accidentally) and naturalized (introduced to an area, but now considered by the public as native).

It's the human point of view or activity that creates an occasion for the concept of wildness. 

In the Dolly Parton song "Wildflowers," the "wildflower" is able to migrate: "So I uprooted myself from my homeground and left/Took my dreams and I took to the road...."

I thought I remembered a Disney cartoon that had flowers that pull themselves out of their place and dance around. I'm surprised I found it — "Flowers and Trees" — because the flowers are what these days we'd call racist:

"The vanishing of nature is also romanticized: the lonely polar bear on an ice shelf. Romanticism has trickled down through Walt Disney..."

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 09:00 AM PDT

"... and now we have the Disneyfication of landscapes, of human existence, of storytelling, of our relationship with wild nature. The bears are cuddly and you have to hug them and you have to sing to them. That's the tragedy of Timothy Treadwell, in 'Grizzly Man,' a tragedy of misguided philosophy. When somebody espouses New Age ideas, I always lower my head and charge."

Said Werner Herzog, quoted in "Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection/A conversation with the filmmaker about the place of literature, the toll of war, and the conviction that his writing will outlast his movies" (The New Yorker). I see he has a book coming out soon, called "The Twilight World" that is, in part, the true story Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who fought, from a position on an island in the Philippines, for 3 decades after WWII had ended.

Herzog met Onoda in real life. He was in Japan, and had actually turned down an invitation to meet the Emperor. He didn't want to see the Emperor, because he would have been required to "speak only in formulas and polite, prefabricated dialogue." So who did he want to meet? He said, "Onoda."

But I had the feeling that the tragedy of settling into a fictitious life may not have been such a tragedy after all. I have the suspicion that he lived a fulfilled life. And, of course, what fascinates me is not only how Onoda settles into a fictitious life but how basically all of us do, within our cultural norms. In his story, the deeper structure of what makes a human being becomes more visible....

I think he was reluctant, after thirty years of waging a solitary war, to acknowledge that there was no war. This is why he insisted that the young man who found him, in 1974, should return to Japan and mobilize a former major of his unit, who would then come back to the island and issue competent military orders for him to desist hostile activities. The end needed to be formalized and ritualized—only then would the war be over. But the astonishing thing is that he still hoped that the major would tell him, "This was all made up, we just wanted to test your perseverance." He hoped that the end was an illusion....

A dismaying headline in The New Yorker.

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 05:44 AM PDT

This is just sad — or maybe it's funny — "How Congress Can Prevent Elon Musk from Turning Twitter Back Into an Unfettered Disinformation Machine/A new European Union law is a road map for how to put the onus on social-media companies to monitor and remove harmful content, and hit them with big fines if they don't."

I remember when the big issue was about whether Twitter could censor the writers who used it. Twitter was a private company, it was urged, so it wasn't bound by the First Amendment, and that made it almost impossible for its users to claim a legal right to free speech. Back in the day, I got into arguments — notably, this one — about whether "free speech" has any meaning other than as a right against what the government might do. 

Now, Elon Musk is making Twitter even more private, the possession of one man, and he's doing it ostensibly to provide the people with more freedom of speech. Now, the argument shifts from saying there's nothing you can do about the speech-freedom choices of a private entity — too bad, government is helpless! — to saying that government ought to step up and constrain Musk and his free-speech agenda.

I said this back in 2011: 

Remember when lefties were all about free speech? When did that change? Why did that change? Perhaps the answer is: Free speech was only ever a means to an end. When they got their free speech, made their arguments, and failed to win over the American people, and when in fact the speech from their opponents seemed too successful, they switched to the repression of speech, because the end was never freedom.

By the way, the New Yorker article is by John Cassidy. His bio says he grew up in Leeds, West Yorkshire and graduated from Oxford, so the lack of appreciation for American free-speech values is less disturbing. But what is the European answer he's vaunting?

Under the E.U.'s Digital Services Act, European governments now have the power to ask Web platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to remove any content that promotes terrorism, hate speech, child sexual abuse, or commercial scams. The platforms will also be obliged to prevent the "manipulation of services having an impact on democratic processes and public security."...

If the European authorities see a surge of online disinformation during a crisis, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine, they will be able to order social-media companies to take "proportionate and effective measures" to counter the threat. Although the new E.U. agreement stops short of treating online platforms the same as traditional publishers (which may be legally liable for intentionally false content about specific individuals and companies), it will force them to provide users with "an easy and effective way" to flag harmful content, so that it can be removed.

The platforms will also be subject to annual audits by European regulators on their efforts to counter disinformation and other abuses.

Who will decide what is "hate speech," "disinformation," and "manipulation of services having an impact on democratic processes and public security"? Americans should embrace government audits assessing "efforts to counter disinformation and other abuses"? Save us from this European hellscape!

Cassidy enthuses about fines of "billions of dollars" and even excluding the platform from doing business at all. He concludes: 

Musk would surely object to the U.S. adopting a regulatory system like the one that the Europeans are drawing up, but that's too bad. The health of the Internet—and, most important, democracy—is too significant to leave to one man, no matter how rich he is.

Freedom of speech shouldn't depend on one man either, and it's tragic that we reached the point where it did. But the new stage of this tragedy is the effort to mobilize government against Musk's free-speech agenda. How can the American government have that power? It's for "the health of the Internet." Health beats freedom these days, don't you know? And "democracy." Democracy means shackling the side that's not supposed to win.
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