Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"Peoplehood is the spiritual practice of connected conversation. Our Gathers are 55 minute group conversation experiences led by trained Guides in our digital sanctuary."

Posted: 24 May 2022 07:06 AM PDT

Says the Instagram page of Peoplehood, quoted in "From the founders of SoulCycle, a new (flawed) kind of church." 

The link goes to a column by Christine Emba in WaPo. She writes:

Peoplehood's tone is studiously nondenominational and stringently open-ended, without a hint of judgment or expectation.... The occasional Martin Luther King Jr. quote shows up, signaling social justice bona fides without being too alienating. "The problem isn't you," Peoplehood's website coos, "it's just life." 

Here's the thing: The religious structures Peoplehood is attempting to emulate kindle purpose by asking things of their adherents — hard things. They cultivate meaning by providing ethical frameworks and moral visions to strive for that are not solely opt-in consumables.... 

For all its trendy branding, Peoplehood's commoditized church is merely religion in an impoverished, attenuated form. If it succeeds? It'll only confirm the depth of our collective desperation.

But a lot of people do traditional church in a lightweight fashion. I think I'd be more upset by a bullshit commoditized church that did ask hard things of its devotees.

I will say that I find the use of "gather" as a noun irritating. It's easy to see what it means, but I sense some weird pride in cutting the "-ing" of "gathering" and offering what you're doing as something deeper and cooler.

Here's a doggedly uncool alternative:

"[I]n 2019, the tensions between local landowners and [mountain] bikers came to a head.... [A] visiting biker yelled at a landowner for riding a horse on her own property...."

Posted: 24 May 2022 06:31 AM PDT

"[When] three landowners pulled their property out of the trail network... which was well within their rights, [it] bifurcated the trails on Darling Hill, and... Kingdom Trails immediately shifted all its marketing efforts into education. It adopted a maxim from a nearby trail network, 'Ride with Gratitude,' to encourage good behavior, and remind visitors that it's a rare privilege to ride on pristine private land — one they shouldn't screw up...."

From "In Northern Vermont, Trying to Smooth the Ride for Mountain Biking/The Kingdom Trails Association has built a popular network of biking paths using private land. Now it's trying to make sure the community is happy, too" (NYT).

It's an interesting process: Old logging roads were connected by making trails across privately owned land. There was a tradition of owners allowing hunters and hikers to use their land, so it was easy, initially, to get permission to make these trails. By 1994, they had "100 miles of carefully built biking routes across 104 landowners' properties," and it became a vacation destination. That led to tourist-oriented business — bars and cafés and AirBnbs and so on — which caused inflation and didn't really benefit the landowners that the whole system depended on.

How do you inspire all the outsiders who are dropping in for a cute vacation to "ride with gratitude" and value the participation of the landowners?

"Princeton University’s board of trustees voted Monday to fire Joshua Katz, a tenured professor in the classics department..."

Posted: 24 May 2022 05:55 AM PDT

"... for failing to fully cooperate with a sexual-misconduct investigation that his supporters say is retaliation for his viewpoints.... [Samantha] Harris, Katz's attorney, said the university's actions could have a chilling effect on free speech on college campuses. 'The message to other people who might want to speak out is the price is having your personal life turned inside-out looking for information to destroy you,' Harris said. This is 'someone who was previously an award-winning, highly-respected professor, but from the moment he published that article onward he became a relentless target until he was fired.' [Gene A.] Jarrett, the faculty dean, pushed back against the assertion that Katz's views were the catalyst for the investigation in a November report on the probe, saying 'the current political climate of the university, whether perceived or real, is not germane to the case.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's my earlier post on this case.

The top-rated comment at the new article is: "I work at a university and it is a pretty clear policy and clearly understood that engaging in a relationship with a student will get you fired no matter what your politics or rank."

Okay, but then it had better be the case that every single one of these having-sex-with-students professors has been fired. No mercy. Zero tolerance. Yet, Katz's case itself shows that's not the policy, because the University looked into this very relationship in 2018: "He was suspended without pay for a year for violating school policy banning sexual relationships between faculty and students, and placed on three years' probation."

"Friends enjoying music on speaker during rooftop party at terrace against sky."

Posted: 24 May 2022 05:38 AM PDT

Ludicrous caption for "The pleasure principle: How the left wins the abortion wars/The right wants to punish sex — so the only way to win the abortion wars is make sex fun again." 

That's a Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. It's a stock photograph, and they just used the stock photo description. I guess they needed a photo of people having fun sex. 

 How idiotic does this look?

 

I'm certain Salon is fine with offending those who morally oppose abortion. In fact, this article aims to insult them. It says so in text: They're not really about saving babies. They "want[] to punish sex." I'm saying the photo (and caption) are ludicrous because they represent Salon's idea of inviting its readers into the world of sex as fun.

Look at those models. They're so beautiful yet slightly drunk. They're sitting on the edge of the roof. They're ecstatic about a miniature speaker. They have a black friend, tucked away as far back as possible, with his head slightly bowed. The man in this foreground — Is he stretching in joy over whatever music emanated from the elongated rectangle wielded by the central figure? Is he the drunkest of the lot? Or is he lying there, arms outstretched, as our flight path into sex? Girl in Hat gazes back at us: Yes, we can join them. We can experience pleasure.

So... "the pleasure principle" — the argument premised on hedonism. I've seen this many times over the decades. If it feels good do it. Girls just wanna have fun. "The Difference in Women's Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory" by Robin West.

But let's read Amanda Marcotte and see how she calls the pro-abortion crowd to the activist tactic of "mak[ing] sex fun." It's not sex for the sake of sex. The headline says there are "abortion wars" to be won and asserts they can only be won through sex. And not just any sex. You've got to make sex fun. 

That doesn't sound like it means the activists themselves should have fun having sex. It seems as though she's advising them to make other people feel that sex is fun. Just like that photographer setting up that photo shoot to demonstrate that a miniature speaker equals fun, the pro-abortion activists need somehow to use their skills to persuade onlookers that SEX IS FUN.

I do plan to read this article eventually, but first I want to read your mind. Maybe not your mind, but I'm pretty sure at least one of my readers got to the end of the previous paragraph and felt inspired to write a comment like: SEX IS FUN? How fun is it to have your limbs torn off one by one?

Marcotte quotes an Erick Erickson tweet:

Dear people upset Roe is dying. I want you to remember the feeling of dread you have right now. Now understand this is nothing compared to the feeling you'll have on the day of judgment you think is a myth. Repent.

Marcotte paraphrases that: "That fornicators are scared right now because they are about to face the punishment of forced childbirth for their dirty sex-having ways."

She continues: 

It's easy to see why progressives want to focus on the most dire outcomes from abortion bans. Images of dead women and starving babies are believed to create moral urgency around the issue.... The problem is that it's too easy for Republicans to dismiss the dire outcomes as fringe cases that have no impact on most voters....

By reframing the issue around sexual freedom, however, progressives would have an opportunity to make the discussion salient to people's lives and identities, which has a much bigger impact on voting choices....

It's another category of identity politics! The happy sex-havers are a voting bloc!

As I've argued before, voters want to be on Team Fun People instead of Team Sanctimonious Scolds. Republicans get this. That's why they rarely defend their rancid bigotry on its own terms, but instead try to pretend the debate is over fun-loving free speech jokesters versus the cancel-culturing "woke mob."...

That's a good point. Get the left to back off from it's repressive sanctimony. But it seems you only want that as a means to an end. It's a way to win the abortion wars. Do we get our freedom of speech back too, or is the "fun" thing for one issue only? Watch what you say, but have lots of fun sex. Ironically, that sounds like an old anti-feminist prescription for women: Don't talk. Fuck. And believe that you just love it.

With sex-positive feminists leading the way, there was robust public discussion about everything from porn to kink to issues of consent. There were even Slutwalks, as feminists stood up for their right to get laid without getting raped. Sex got so normal that it kind of got a little less sexy.... 

You know whats really unsexy? — abortion. But I guess Marcotte's point is that if people were thoroughly immersed in their own sexual pleasure, it might vastly overshadow the unpleasant collateral things — abortion, babies, rape, disease. 

Unfortunately, in recent years, the left has largely abandoned the role of being the fun ones.

Remember when the lefties promised fun? Was that less than 50 years ago?

Instead, we all too often lean directly into the worst stereotypes of progressives as dour scolds who can't even take a joke.... Self-righteous preenings gets [sic] shares and retweets.... 
All the talk about coathangers and rape victims really brings people down....

So, as difficult as it may be to overcome the puritanical impulse baked into the American psyche, the left needs to talk about sex again. Not just the bad parts, but why sex is good and why people should be free to pursue their happiness.... Freedom and pleasure arguments may not score points on Twitter, but they win people over in the real world.

There's something of an idea here, but it's too much about partisan voting to truly express hedonism. And if hedonism is your credo, develop it with some depth of meaning. Otherwise, your sex-is-fun routine is as shallow as that stock photograph.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 23 May 2022 07:09 PM PDT

IMG_0690 

... you can talk all night.

IMG_0691 

These 2 photos — taken at 5:32 — complete the sequence begun in the previous post.

Sunrise — 5:26, 5:29, 5:30

Posted: 23 May 2022 11:52 AM PDT

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IMG_0683

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The end of the world as we knew it.

Posted: 23 May 2022 10:26 AM PDT

"The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the 'Field of Dreams' thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie."

Posted: 23 May 2022 12:13 PM PDT

"It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In 'Fields of Dreams' [sic] there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that." 

Said Roger Angell, quoted in this August 2000 Salon article, which I'm seeing today because it's partially quoted "Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101/In elegantly winding articles for The New Yorker loaded with inventive imagery, he wrote more like a fan than a sports journalist" (NYT). That obituary, by Dwight Garner, was published 3 days ago, but it's linked in a new "Conversation" between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. Stephens calls Garner a "magnificent writer" writing about another magnificent writer.

Among the Angell quotes that Garner cherry-picked for the obituary: 

The Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk came out of his crouch, Mr. Angell wrote, like "an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves." The Baltimore Oriole relief pitcher Dick Hall pitched "with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud." Mr. Angell... described Willie Mays chasing down a ball hit to deep center field as "running so hard and so far that the ball itself seems to stop in the air and wait for him."....

He once referred to Ron Darling as "the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets starters." He wrote that Carl Yastrzemski, "like so many great hitters, has oddly protuberant eyes." And he noted, about a skinny Houston Astros team, that "they sometimes suggest a troupe of gazelles depicted by a Balkan corps de ballet."

Beyond the topic of baseball, Garner points to Angell's 2002 essay "Dry Martini" (The New Yorker):

We appreciated our Martinis, and drank them before lunch and before dinner. I recall an inviting midtown restaurant called Cherio's, where the lunchtime Martini came in chalice-sized glasses. Then we went back to work. "Those noontime cocktails just astound me," a young woman colleague of mine said recently. "I don't know how you did it." Neither do I, anymore....

At dinners and parties, I knew all my guests' preferences: the sister-in-law who wanted an "upside-down Martini"—a cautious four parts vermouth to one of gin—and a delightful neighbor who liked her Martinis so much that when I came around to get whiskey or brandy orders after dinner she dared not speak their name. "Well, maybe just a little gin on some ice for me," she whispered. "With a dab of vermouth on top."

"The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime..."

Posted: 23 May 2022 09:41 AM PDT

"... against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing out all hopes and prospects for a prosperous free society in our country. Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this. I regret to admit that over all these twenty years the level of lies and unprofessionalism in the work of the Foreign Ministry has been increasing all the time. However, in most recent years, this has become simply catastrophic. Instead of unbiased information, impartial analysis and sober forecasting, there are propaganda clichés in the spirit of Soviet newspapers of the 1930s. A system has been built that deceives itself.... It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred.... I studied to be a diplomat and have been a diplomat for twenty years... But I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy."

Writes Boris Bondarev, Russia's Counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva, quoted in "Exclusive: Senior Russian Diplomat at U.N. Defects" (U.N. Watch).

"I am really curious about this pronoun business in business communication. Who decided that the new law of the land is that everybody gets to pick their pronouns..."

Posted: 23 May 2022 09:06 AM PDT

"... however misaligned they may be to their publicly visibly persona, and everybody else needs to learn this and memorize? Who has time for this?"

That's a comment in response to the second question in the business advice column in the NYT. It's the most-liked comment that deals with that letter, which is about a workplace where it's an option to list your pronoun preference alongside your email signature.

One person in the place added pronouns other than the traditional he/she, but no one picked up the cue and started using those pronouns when talking about this person. The letter-writer, a supervisor, wanted to know how to "fix this situation." Nobody was acting disrespectful. They were just all failing to proactively use "they/them" (or whatever the preference was).

I'll skip the columnist's answer. You can probably guess what a NYT columnist's answer would be. What I think is notable is that a NYT reader made such a flat-footedly sensible, out-of-it comment and that so many readers up-voted it.

"Understand the difference between 'ask' and 'guess' cultures."

Posted: 23 May 2022 08:10 AM PDT

I suggested, in the first of 9 TikTok links I posted last night. The link went to this short video by Mary Robinette Kowal. She's a Hugo, Nebula, Locus award-winning author of SF and fantasy, and her videos are presented as writing tips.

Several of my readers singled out that video as their favorite of the 9 I'd selected, and it may have been my favorite too. I put it first on the list, which doesn't mean I like it best, but does mean I think it may draw you in.

One commenter, tim maguire, said:

Guess culture is obnoxious. Just say what you want and don't make the other person try to figure it out. "The cereal box is too high" could mean you want help getting the cereal, but more logically it means "we need to reorganize the kitchen." 
I wonder, though if a variation of that is at work in my own marriage. I'm ask culture, for sure. Speak plainly. Be clear about your needs. But my wife is constantly trying to find the hidden subtext in order to address my real motivations, which is annoying because there is no hidden subtext. Getting a simple answer to a simple question is way harder than it needs to be. Her mother is the same way, so clearly she was raised to do it.
pdug said (and I added the links):

[T]he Atlantic had a article about this in 2010. FWIW, calling it a "culture" seems a bit much its probably more about your interfamily dynamic than a whole regional culture

I like this quote from the Atlantic "Actually, One of Them Is Wrong." The New Republic's Jonathan Chait takes a hard line. "This is actually pretty simple: Guessers are wrong, and Askers are right. Asking is how you actually determine what the Asker wants and the giver is willing to receive. Guessing culture is a recipe for frustration. What's more, Guessers, who are usually trying to be nice and are holding themselves to a higher level of politeness, ruin things for the rest of us ... Guessers are what forces people with poor social discernment, like me, to regard all kinds of interactions as a minefield of awkwardness."

i also wonder if ask vs guess is just two *gendered* approaches.

That Chait quote triggered me. I quoted "Guessers are what forces people with poor social discernment, like me, to regard all kinds of interactions as a minefield of awkwardness" and wrote:

But what the guesser is providing is an opportunity for you to achieve in the activity of discerning, and when you have discerned, you can do the thing the other person wants and please them in a special way... and please yourself too, because you understood them and you — with your special skill, unlike awkward Jonathan — have discerned what this person wants. That's a whole subtle relationship that Jonathan doesn't even perceive might be wanted.

I mean, put it in the sexual situation. You just ask for each thing that you want? How do you even know what exactly you want and why would you be satisfied with someone who just does the things you said you wanted and thinks that's all there is?

If you've got the gendered format gdug imagines is common, where the wife is expecting you to guess what she wants and she [is] able to intuit what you want but you — let's say "you" means the husband — like to ask for [what] you want and want her to just ask for whatever she wants (and I presume you've already just asked her to do that) — then I think you ought to go "Gift of the Magi" on the relationship.

Each should give the other what they want. The ask-oriented husband should make a point of trying to understand what the wife is showing she wants, which includes wanted to be understood as a person who doesn't directly say but indicate[s]. He should love that about her. The wife should get the message that he wants her to directly ask for things and to accept when he asks directly. She should love him for that too.

But it is not always gendered in that direction. I won't name the men in my life who were/are "guess" culture types. They are not perversely withholding. They are giving, and one of the things they want to give is their perception of what the other person wants and their voluntary doing of a favor (as opposed to responding to a command).

And John Holland wrote:

It feels like our hostess is an Ask-type person. I intuit this from the fact that she asks us directly to tell her our favorite Tik-tok from her carefully-curated list ... and half the commenters bitch instead about their least-favorite.

Kinda like my household. 

I responded: 

Ha ha. I'm mainly saying pick your best to deflect the generic don't-like-anything comments. Why don't people skip posts that don't appeal to them? Why drop in to say "that's bad" or "i'm not interested"? Obviously, I've picked these things out because I liked them and they felt shareable to me. 

It's analogous to the dinner party the Southern etiquette man talks about. You've been invited. If you know you're [going to dislike] everything, don't go. If you want to go, but there are things you don't like, don't say anything about that.

That refers to the 6th of the 9 TikToks: "A Southern etiquette lesson." 

I continued:

I don't know whether I'm an ask or guess person myself, but I've learned over time to try to figure out what the other person is. If you've got a strong "guess" person, do guess culture with them. If you've got a strong "ask" person, be straightforward and ask. I can do either and I prefer to be conscious of what makes the other person feel better.

But that speaks of in-person life. On the blog, sometimes I ask things directly and sometimes I present things where you need to think of what needs a response. I do whichever feels right for the material or suits my mood at the time.

And what felt right to me this morning was to drag all that up out of the comments and splay it out where you can see it plainly. 

ADDED: Let me just name one of the "the men in my life who were/are 'guess' culture types" — my father. I remember struggling to live through the summer with the small bedroom of the new house my parents had moved into after I'd gone away for my first year of college. One day, I said something about having nowhere to put my books. I didn't say "Build me shelves" or "Will you build me shelves?" or even "It would be nice if you would build me some shelves." He built me shelves. That happened half a century ago, and it still brings tears to my eyes to think about it. If we'd just done "ask" culture all along, what would I remember?
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