Althouse

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• "The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment..."
• "Miller still remembers her shock at receiving a phone call, five years ago, from a New Mexico antiques dealer who discovered that the estate-sale painting he had just placed in his shop was in fact 'Woman-Ochre.'"
• "As the water level drops, formerly sunken boats are emerging in the mud, and other vehicles are getting newly stuck...."
• "Protest is a kind of theater, as abortion rights activists who dressed as characters from 'The Handmaid’s Tale' outside the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett know."
• "So the Russians are taking these losses and they are taking a hit from the Ukrainian Army with the best weaponry in the world, supplied by the West. But we are not in position to inflict any damage back on NATO."
• "Nordic larpers... 'are emotional junkies.... Most of us larp because we can feel it and smell it with our bodies.' 'Nordic larps—they’re not for everybody'...."
• "While serving as then-President Barack Obama's vice president, Biden was tasked in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to lead the administration's effort to enact tougher gun control laws..."
• At the Tuesday Night Cafe…
• "Bankman-Fried is an adherent of Effective Altruism, a utilitarian philosophy which promotes ideas like earning lots of money in order to give it all away."

"The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment..." Posted: 25 May 2022 08:53 AM PDT "Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said he has known [Salvador Rolando] Ramos since early elementary school.... They used to play video games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty. But then Ramos changed. Once, Valdez said, Ramos pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face. 'Then he told me the truth, that he'd cut up his face with knives over and over and over,' Valdez said. 'I was like, "You're crazy, bro, why would you do that?"' Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled. In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said....  'He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people," [said Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos's best friend]... 'Over social media, over gaming, over everything..... One time, he posted a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner, Garcia said, which brought on a slew of comments using a derogatory term for a gay person.... When Garcia [moved away], Ramos dropped out of school. He started wearing all black, Garcia said, and large military boots. He grew his hair out long.... [Garcia said,] 'I think he needed mental help. And more closure with his family. And love.'" From "Gunman was bullied as a child, grew increasingly violent, friends say/Relatives, classmates describe fraught relationship with mother and a troubling pattern of acting out" (WaPo).

"Miller still remembers her shock at receiving a phone call, five years ago, from a New Mexico antiques dealer who discovered that the estate-sale painting he had just placed in his shop was in fact 'Woman-Ochre.'" Posted: 25 May 2022 09:07 AM PDT "The dealer, David Van Auker, had bought the canvas as part of the estate of Jerry and Rita Alter, retired schoolteachers who lived nearby with the painting for decades. They had hung it in their bedroom in an odd spot, obscured by the bedroom door whenever it was open. As shown in the colorful, caper-like new documentary 'The Thief Collector,' all signs point to the Alters having stolen the painting for their own private enjoyment, from photographs that place the couple in the area the day before the crime to police sketches that match their features. (According to an FBI agent in the film, the investigation is no longer active.)"  From "Sacred or Sexist? After a Brazen Theft, Seeing de Kooning in a New Light/When 'Woman-Ochre' goes on view at the Getty Museum after its conservation, the painting will have a new mystique. But competing interpretations remain" (NYT).  Miller = "Olivia Miller, the exhibitions curator at the Arizona Museum of Art, [who] acknowledged the artwork's aggressive content but also argues that it has acquired a new mystique because of the theft... [and] discussed it as a 'sacred object' when asked to speak in a religious studies class.'" The question whether this painting is sexist is so old that I'm not in the mood to talk about it. Form your own opinion:

"As the water level drops, formerly sunken boats are emerging in the mud, and other vehicles are getting newly stuck...." Posted: 25 May 2022 07:14 AM PDT "And on Monday the National Park Service shared several photos on Twitter that showed trucks stuck in the mud around the lake – a shoreline that looks deceivingly stable, but acts more like quicksand." CNN reports — with photos showing the kind of truck that makes you think you can go where those other vehicles can't. Interesting to see the old quicksand! threat making a comeback. From a 2010 Slate article: For now, quicksand has all but evaporated from American entertainment—rejected even by the genre directors who once found it indispensable.... Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we're sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out?... Time was, a director could sink a man in the desert and still win the Oscar for best picture. Today, that gimmick has been scorned in third-rate schlock. Here's the comedian John Mulaney joking about his childhood concept that quicksand was going to be a big threat.

"Protest is a kind of theater, as abortion rights activists who dressed as characters from 'The Handmaid’s Tale' outside the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett know." Posted: 25 May 2022 06:44 AM PDT "The performance is not just for the target of the protests but also for anyone who sees it via news images or video or social media. The fact is, a group of people targeting just one person, at home, particularly at night, appears menacing.... Florida's lawmakers went so far as to ban 'picketing and protesting' at any person's private residence.... I believe such bans to be unconstitutional. The right of all Americans to peacefully assemble must be protected. But that doesn't mean that protesting at the homes of public officials is effective.... I expect that those who gathered outside my home also felt shut out from power when they screamed at me [in December 2020]. But showing up at my home to shout falsehoods about an election because they didn't like the results did not help their cause.... These protesters attempted to bully me into abdicating my duty to protect the will of the people of Michigan. But the people who made me fear for my family that night also emboldened me to do my job with integrity.... [P]rotesting outside an official's home is rarely if ever effective at achieving the goals of those gathering — and oftentimes, it backfires." From "Protesting at Judges' Homes Must Remain Legal. That Doesn't Make It Effective" by Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson (NYT). If sensible people realize that a protest outside of a public official's home is likely to backfire, then we may infer that people who protest outside a public official's home are irrational. That's an idea you might want to use if you need to argue that the bans on these protests are constitutional. Benson makes a good argument, but if it works, it won't work on 100% of the protesters who would otherwise take to the street right outside someone's house. The ones that are left are those who are least likely to care about lawful, peaceful persuasion. But also: Protests are not really about rational persuasion. They're about stirring up emotion, and emotion is inextricably intertwined with even the most earnest efforts at rational decisionmaking. I assume that the elite, educated, accomplished Ms. Benson endeavors to "do [her] job with integrity," but I don't believe she can exclude all feeling. In the case of the pro-Trump protesters screaming at her house, she felt "emboldened" — that is emotional. The protesters stirred up her fighting spirit. Yes, it backfired for them, but — by her own report — she was not impassive and solidly grounded in neutrality.

"So the Russians are taking these losses and they are taking a hit from the Ukrainian Army with the best weaponry in the world, supplied by the West. But we are not in position to inflict any damage back on NATO." Posted: 25 May 2022 05:55 AM PDT Said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian intelligence bureaucracy, interviewed in "Putin's Pivot to a 'Really Big War' in Ukraine/As his invasion enters its fourth month, the Russian leader is preparing for the long haul. Meanwhile, the military is chattering about its losses, and putting out calls for supplies on Telegram" (The New Yorker). The Russian Army suffered some big, disastrous casualties, and, to be honest, I've been following how people reacted to that internally.... Pro-Russian military bloggers started talking about the losses and asking why nobody was held responsible for these losses....  Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we have some new factor here in that [the messaging app] Telegram is such a big thing in Russia, that it is probably the very first war where we have, if you can call it, some public opinion of the Russian military and some sort of discussion about the military....

"Nordic larpers... 'are emotional junkies.... Most of us larp because we can feel it and smell it with our bodies.' 'Nordic larps—they’re not for everybody'...." Posted: 25 May 2022 05:55 AM PDT "Some of them 'can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience.'" That's just an isolated snippet from "LARPing Goes to Disney World/On a 'Star Wars' spaceship, the company has taken live-action role-play to a lavish extreme. Guests spend days eating, scheming, and assembling lightsabres in character" by Neima Jahromi (The New Yorker). LARP = live-action role play.  We're told that in the "Nordic larp scene," they prefer "games with deep emotional involvement and few rules." Nordic designers of LARPs were inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, but they rejected the idea of using actuarial tables to determine who wins and loses a fight. That "didn't really fit the culture here.... Nordics are way more collaborative than adversarial."  I'm not at all familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, but it was funny to read that it's based on insurance underwriting.  Anyway, the article is mostly about a big Disney/"Star Wars" production. I had trouble understanding this. My point of reference was a Renaissance Faire, not that I'd ever attended one, but I've seen that phenomenon discussed and mocked for decades, most recently in episode 5 of "Love on the Spectrum U.S." Isn't this LARPing like going to a Renaissance Faire? I've been on immersive Disney World rides like "Pirates of the Caribbean," where they load you into a fake boat and pull you though various scenes, but you're still a passive member of an audience. I did that only in the context of amusing my children. I can't imagine wanting further immersion with the pressure of being part of the show. But I will put some effort into trying to understand what other people are finding rewarding.  And does this mean I'm a standoffish observer in life, missing out on the fun? I'm standoffish about manufactured things that you're supposed to get caught up in. If there's one thing that makes me feel like a separate individual, it's being in the midst of people who are having an emotional group transformation.

"While serving as then-President Barack Obama's vice president, Biden was tasked in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to lead the administration's effort to enact tougher gun control laws..." Posted: 25 May 2022 04:14 AM PDT "... but in the nearly decade since the nation mourned for Newtown, no action on gun control has passed at a federal level." From "Biden addresses nation on 'horrific' Texas school shooting: 'We have to act'/Just a week ago, he mourned victims of the mass shooting in Buffalo" (ABC News).

At the Tuesday Night Cafe… Posted: 24 May 2022 05:16 PM PDT  … you can talk about whatever you want.

"Bankman-Fried is an adherent of Effective Altruism, a utilitarian philosophy which promotes ideas like earning lots of money in order to give it all away." Posted: 24 May 2022 03:48 PM PDT "He went into finance and started donating large portions of his paychecks long before he made his first billion and still lives fairly modestly, with roommates and a Toyota Corolla, with a stated goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune as he makes it. Critics, however, question the motives behind Bankman-Fried's increasing involvement in politics, noting that the crypto industry has been stepping up its lobbying in Washington as lawmakers and regulators look to apply new rules to the largely unregulated industry that has likely destroyed more fortunes than it has made. He's one of several crypto donors who have started spending large amounts of money in politics seemingly out of nowhere, just as the industry comes under scrutiny." From "Crypto billionaire says he could spend a record-breaking $1 billion in 2024 election/Democratic cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried says he expects to spend 'north of $100 million' in 2024, with 'soft ceiling' of $1 billion" (NBC News). Roommates!

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