Sunday, May 29, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"Modern American culture has a way of transforming nearly every philosophical and spiritual tradition... into an anodyne pop-culture analogue."

Posted: 29 May 2022 09:16 AM PDT

"But contemporary iterations of Stoicism... may win the prize for reducing complex ideas to shallow, if marketable, sound bites.... At its best, Stoicism challenges us to tame our selfish passions and trains us to accept injustice, failure and death. Contemporary pop-Stoicism, however, treats this idea of self-control as... a useful 'life hack': individualistic, capitalist-friendly self-help... For [writers such as Jordan Peterson], Stoicism can often be boiled down to therapeutic platitudes: work hard, push through pain, reframe toxic narratives. But pop-Stoicism doesn't ask one of philosophy's most important questions: What does it mean to live a good life?... [G]oodness, unlike productivity, is something we can't 'hack' our way toward achieving."

Writes Tara Isabella Burton under the heading "Stoicism" in a collection of short essays, "Spring Cleaning 2022," at WaPo. She's the writer of novels and also the nonfiction works "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" and "Self-Made: Curating Our Image From da Vinci to the Kardashians."

The "Spring Cleaning" title refers to the prompt given to the various writers — "what all of us should toss."

I don't think Burton has established a reason to throw out Stoicism. Ironically, she wants people not to use this philosophy in a shallow way, but her rejection of today's efforts at Stoicism seems shallow too. She's certainly capsulized Jordan Peterson in an aggressively pat way.

"Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment..."

Posted: 29 May 2022 06:25 AM PDT

"[T]he Indian Supreme Court... identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry. For consenting adults, the court said, the police must refrain from arrests and other forms of harassment.... 'It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,' the court [wrote]. 'The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.'... Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.... [D]ecriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry."

From "India's Supreme Court Orders Police to Respect Prostitutes' Rights/Though sex work is legal in the country, those who practice it often endure harassment and abuse. The justices urged the authorities to employ a more nuanced and humane approach" (NYT).

The Loch Mendota Monster.

Posted: 29 May 2022 05:54 AM PDT

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Photographed by me, this morning at 5:32 a.m.

"Here's your opportunity... you're all about to graduate... .. is there an unpopular opinion you'd like to share with us?"/"Jesus is Lord!"

Posted: 29 May 2022 05:30 AM PDT

"Its title is a glancing reference to a Bob Dylan song called 'Visions of Johanna,' which has variously been described as a song about how one man is being pushed to the brink and about to burst emotionally."

Posted: 29 May 2022 05:12 AM PDT

"I am no Bob Dylan aficionado, but this strikes me as being a potent metaphor for what this country is going through."

Writes Kenneth Dickerman in "'Infinity Goes Up on Trial': A personal exploration of U.S. turmoil" (WaPo). The book he's talking about, "Infinity Goes Up on Trial," by Alan Chin, is a collection of photographs that show the United States as a "powder keg" of "white supremacism, misogyny and the increasing gap between the have and have-nots."  

A glancing reference? The title is entirely composed of a quote from the song. It's nice of Dickerman to inform readers who might be puzzled by the otherwise weird title, and as someone who'd had the words of that song seared in my brain for more than half a century, I don't mind seeing it explained for other people, but it's irritating to see it declared "a potent metaphor" for what's in this book, which doesn't seem to have the slightest connection to the what's in "Visions of Johanna." 

What would it mean for infinity to go up on trial? Dylan fans have contemplated that mystery for many decades. The trial of infinity, in the song, is something that happens not on violent streets but inside the museums:

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo, "This is what salvation must be like after a while"

In museums, things are solidly and quietly preserved, so it's a place where you might naturally inquire into the value of permanence. It's the opposite of chaos breaking out on the street. But maybe the book does a better job of justifying the title. In the lyric, the disembodied thought is maybe you don't want the same thing frozen in place forever and ever. It's the question that occurs at some point to everyone: Isn't Heaven tedious?  

But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles

You're in the museum, you're looking at the painting, and you're thinking this is awful. Infinity is guilty! The permanence is freaking me out. Come on, Mona! Let's get out of here.

See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze...
Don't get me started on the wallflower freeze/frieze.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 28 May 2022 06:03 PM PDT

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... you can talk about anything you want.

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I have 9 TikTok selections for your amusement tonight. I think they're all just exactly right, but you can tell me what you like best.

Posted: 28 May 2022 07:29 PM PDT

1. A strange device for popping popcorn.

2. A father's amazing skill at earthquake detection.

3. Hospice Nurse Julie went on a terrible date.

4. The self-dramatizing horse.

5. Son House sings "Death Letter Blues."

6. The first guy who comes up with the idea of going to the beach as an activity.

7. The cat on the Fancy Feast catfood can isn't fancy enough. (Later: Purina expresses thanks for the new design.)

8. Getting your hair braided in Ghana.

9. The rosy maple moth.

"Two blazes that grew into New Mexico's largest ever wildfire were both started by the U.S. Forest Service..."

Posted: 28 May 2022 08:29 AM PDT

"... the agency said on Friday.... Forest Service investigators determined the Calf Canyon Fire was caused by a 'burn pile' of branches that the agency thought was out but reignited.... That blaze on April 22 merged with the Hermits Peak Fire, which the USFS started with a controlled burn that went out of control on April 6, the agency previously reported.... Blazing a more than 40-mile-long... path up the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the fire has destroyed watersheds and forests used for centuries by Indo-Hispano farming villages and Native American communities."

Reuters reports. 

A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as "controlled" goes wildly out of control.

"The Daily Beast issued an apology to the laptop repairman who first obtained Hunter Biden's computer after the liberal blog erroneously alleged the device was ‘stolen.'..."

Posted: 28 May 2022 05:42 PM PDT

"The apology came as Mac Isaac launched a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast as well as CNN, Politico and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., over how they portrayed him while pushing the narrative during the 2020 presidential election that the content from Hunter Biden's laptop was the product of Russian disinformation... It is unclear if the apology is tied to any resolution to Mac Isaac's suit against the Daily Beast."

From "Daily Beast issues apology to laptop repairman amid lawsuit after claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was 'stolen'/John Paul Mac Isaac filed a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, CNN, Politico, Adam Schiff" (Fox News).

Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe the Daily Beast just suddenly felt stricken by its conscience and wanted to atone, to square up with the truth, to commit anew to the grand tradition of journalistic professionalism.

"We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness, we’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT..."

Posted: 28 May 2022 08:01 AM PDT

"... telling some children they're not equal to others, and they're the cause of other people's problems. I think CRT has been going on under the radar for quite some time as well. Wokeness has been. Liberal indoctrination has been. This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law is gonna – it's not gonna solve it. It's not gonna solve it."

Said Ron Johnson, quoted by Chris Cillizza, in "This Republican senator thinks 'wokeness' is the cause of mass shootings" (CNN).

I don't like the headline, because Johnson didn't say "wokeness is the cause of mass shootings." He said there's a failure to teach "values." Values have been supplanted by these other things. The word "values" is vague, but I think it at least conveys the desire to accentuate the positive. A problem with teaching the lessons of CRT is that you're inculcating children with negativity: It's a bad old world, kids — hatred larded into everything. That might explain why some of them hit the chaos of adolescence and veer into nihilism.

But Cillizza might not have written the headline. He riffs a few lines. Let's read:

Look. It's absolutely worth discussing guns in a broader cultural context. But the idea that Johnson appears to be pushing that critical race theory and "wokeness" sit at the root of the problem badly misses the point. Rather than acknowledge – as the facts bear out – that this country has a gun violence problem, Johnson is instead falling back on a Trumpian hobbyhorse: That political correctness is somehow to blame. The Point: Debate the influence of "wokeness" on our culture. Fine. Just don't do it as a way to explain what happened in Uvalde.

Maybe this article needs more of the transcript. Where did Johnson purport to "explain what happened in Uvalde"? 

And it would be so easy to throw Cillizza's low-quality reasoning right back at him. Here's my rough rewrite in the style of Cillizza: The country is losing its foundational values, and Cillizza is falling back on a liberal hobbyhorse: That guns are to blame. You can debate the influence of guns on our culture, without presenting them as the entire explanation for what happened in Uvalde. 

I mean, if the point is that Johnson is too knee-jerk ideological and crudely simplistic, well, so is Cillizza.

"Despite the camp absurdity of her scenes, she is not a clown, and despite her nakedness, her work doesn’t straightforwardly concern..."

Posted: 28 May 2022 05:57 AM PDT

"... either masochism or self-love. Instead, fat stigma is toyed with, embodied, and satirized, sometimes through sexualized caricatures of gluttony. 'Good Morning' shows her—with her underpants pulled down and stuffed with a loaf (or more) of sliced white bread—holding a knife and a jar of Nutella.... A fat woman is by cultural default already an object of ridicule; inviting laughter by clenching a baguette between her legs, or ironing a pizza to her chest, could easily spin out of her control. Perhaps Susiraja's blank affect is the key to her peculiar power to retain the upper hand. Indifference is one of the purest forms of defiance, but her disciplined impassivity, her refusal to cue the viewers' reaction, is more than that. Her unwillingness to feed us meaning is more provocative, and disquieting, than an obvious dare, and it leaves a more lasting impression."

Writes Johanna Fateman, in "Iiu Susiraja's Self-Portraits Are More Than a Dare/The photographer uses her own body without straightforward interest in either masochism or self-love" (The New Yorker). Lots of stunning/hilarious photos there. Perhaps a paywall will stop you, but here's her webpage. You can see the same photos there — and even more.

Wait. How do we know "she is not a clown"? It can't be the "blank affect." One of the prime ways of clowning is to do ridiculous things while maintaining a flat facial expression. There's a special and well-known word for it: deadpan.

The OED tips me off that "pan" was once American slang for "face" or "mouth." To quote "Great Comics" (1924): "Open yer pan afterwards about this and you'll be in stir for the next thousand years."

And I see that Nathanael West used "dead pan" in "Miss Lonelyhearts":

"You're morbid, my friend, morbid. Forget the crucifixion, remember the renaissance. There were no brooders then." He raised his glass, and the whole Borgia family was in his gesture. "I give you the renaissance. What a period! What pageantry! Drunken popes... Beautiful courtesans... Illegitimate children..." 

Although his gestures were elaborate, his face was blank. He practiced a trick used much by moving-picture comedians — the dead pan. No matter how fantastic or excited his speech, he never changed his expression. Under the shining white globe of his brow, his features huddled together in a dead, gray triangle. 

"To the renaissance!" he kept shouting. "To the renaissance! To the brown Greek manuscripts and mistresses with the great smooth marbly limbs... But that reminds me, I'm expecting one of my admirers — a cow-eyed girl of great intelligence." He illustrated the word intelligence by carving two enormous breasts in the air with his hands. "She works in a book store, but wait until you see her behind."

"There is such a bias toward glorifying hot weather and vilifying cold, though a lot of people strongly prefer winter to summer."

Posted: 28 May 2022 12:36 PM PDT

"I don't really get depressed in the summer, but I dread it because of the extreme discomfort & nothing to do for it but stay indoors. Winter, on the other hand, is completely manageable by dressing properly."

Says a commenter on "Seasonal Affective Disorder Isn't Just for Winter/Feeling blue even though everyone seems to be basking in perfect summer weather? There might be a good reason for that" (NYT).  

That was originally published a year ago, but it's on the NYT home page today, presumably because it's great Memorial Day weekend topic: Some of us don't love summer. If you suffer in winter, you have lots of vocal company. And if you enjoy winter, other people are always interfering with the pleasure by openly complaining about it. But there's an excessive celebration of the greatness of summer. If you feel bad in the summer, you might feel harassed by the pressure to join in all this purported fun.

Here's another comment from over there:

For years I told everyone I suffer from summer affective disorder. They looked at me like I was crazy. I hate summer. The noise level is horrible especially buzz saws, mowers, weed hackers, motorcycles, insects, etc. The frenzied energy is intolerable. I am a shut in in the summer with all the blinds closed against the heat and humidity as I get sick when I am outside. Winter is quiet and soft and most of all I feel more secure under the many blankets and in my flannel PJs. I can be outside where so few people venture. I love to bake and make soup which is perfect on a frigid cold day and love to watch it snow. And the coup de grace is that I don't have to wear a bra! 

Coup de grace is not the right phrase, but I know what she's trying to say. Thick layers of clothing take the spectacle out of bralessness.

The article offers a few ideas about what might cause Summer SAD, but it misses the most obvious one, which this commenter nails:

I definitely have Summer SAD. Heat and humidity do play a role but, I think, the long days play the most blame. I don't sleep well when it's light out and it's rough on me when daylight starts at 4:30a and it doesn't get truly dark until almost 9p. Months of poor sleep along with heat and humidity really takes a toll.

Here's a way to test this theory. Is there more Summer SAD in the South or in the North. In the South, there's worse heat, but in the North, there are more extremes of light and dark. I've been living in Wisconsin since 1984, but I've only recently let go of the idea that an adult can't go to bed when it's still light out, which it often is until 10. When I first moved here, I actually thought your couldn't expect kids to go to bed until it's at least starting to get dark. In June, it starts getting light before 5 a.m., so that means there are barely 7 hours of darkness. Seven hours is a good night's sleep, but it's not easy to aim your sleeping in such a precise zone of time every night. 

So where is there more Summer SAD, the North or the South? I'll bet it's the North, and the problem is letting the light deprive you of sleep.

Anyway, I recommend observing your own feelings in relation to the light and the temperature and moisture. Some of the SADness might be just that your feelings don't match those of the majority — or the vocal minority that's so biased in favor of summer. Enjoy your difference, whatever it is. You can close the curtains and sit inside and read. And I strongly recommend getting out at dawn in the summer. It's as cool as it's going to be all day, and you don't have that glaring light in your eyes and on your skin.

Speaking of the "horrible" excessive noise of summer, if you can sleep with the windows open, the birds will wake you up in plenty of time to get dressed and out the door for what, to you, is the earliest light. They see some pre-light that sets them off and chattering. Accept their news of the arrival of morning and get up, and start going to bed before day has fully given way to night.

Today, I encountered my favorite place at 5:39 a.m. and again at 5:15 p.m.

Posted: 27 May 2022 05:41 PM PDT

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It's where we like to go. What can I say? 

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Write about anything you want in the comments.

I've handpicked 7 TikToks. Let me know what you like best.

Posted: 27 May 2022 05:29 PM PDT

1. A scary tower (in Sri Lanka).

2. Nipa palm fruit.

3. Preschool Trump calls "fake news" on the teacher's announcement of "last day of school."

4. Life inside the Arctic Circle — sunlight in the middle of the night.

5. The street artist encounters a drain.

6. "you're breaking up with me but there's a squirrel outside eating at the squirrel table."

7. Hey, everybody, hi... it's the toast rack.

"Canada’s supreme court has ruled that life sentences without the chance of parole are both 'cruel' and unconstitutional..."

Posted: 27 May 2022 02:17 PM PDT

"The court unanimously determined on Friday that sentencing killers to lengthy prison terms with little hope of freedom risked bringing the "administration of justice into disrepute.'... Acknowledging the heinous crimes of those serving multiple life sentences, Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote that the ruling 'must not be seen as devaluing the life' of innocent victims. 'This appeal is not about the value of each human life, but rather about the limits on the state's power to punish offenders, which, in a society founded on the rule of law, must be exercised in a manner consistent with the Constitution.'"

The Guardian reports.

"How can we amend the law for those who sell their personality for the sake of benefits? Be responsible for your own life, Salmons!"

Posted: 27 May 2022 05:42 PM PDT

Said somebody quoted in "Taiwanese people stuck with the name 'Salmon' after sushi promotion Parliament debates law that bans people from changing their names more than three times after stunt leads to unforeseen consequences" (The Guardian).

In March 2021 restaurant chain Sushiro ran a promotion offering free all-you-can-eat sushi for a whole table to anyone with the Chinese characters for salmon, "gui yu", in their name.... 

Once the two-day promotion ended, most returned to their normal names, but... the government only allows people to change their names three times....

“It’s a serialized, Dickensian way of looking at and distributing filmed media.”

Posted: 27 May 2022 10:41 AM PDT

"When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman..."

Posted: 27 May 2022 09:35 AM PDT

"... who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation."

The NYT reports.

Also: "[P]olice leaders struggled to answer questions about the horrific hour it took to halt a gunman who opened fire on students and teachers inside Robb Elementary School. No school police officer confronted the gunman before he went into the school, a state police spokesman said...."

ADDED: If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.

AND: I've always remembered this passage from Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller:

Insofar as the Framers focused at all on the tiny fraction of the population living in large cities, they would have been aware that these city dwellers were subject to firearm restrictions that their rural counterparts were not. They are unlikely then to have thought of a right to keep loaded handguns in homes to confront intruders in urban settings as central. And the subsequent development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, would have moved any such right even further away from the heart of the amendment's more basic protective ends.

"White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower..."

Posted: 27 May 2022 08:26 AM PDT

"The White House's latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly.... Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion.... The White House has been looking for economic measures it can enact without congressional approval since the collapse of Biden's Build Back Better economic agenda at the end of last year.... The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that roughly 70 percent of the benefit will go to those in the top half of the income spectrum. Critics of debt forgiveness also say it does nothing to address college costs or the troubled lending system. It's not clear whether people who need to borrow to start college this fall, for instance, would be eligible to have brand-new loans forgiven."

 WaPo reports.

"We’ve run plenty of stories about people who have been the target of mobs... What we’ve rarely heard—here or anywhere else—is what it’s like for the person who loves the mob’s target."

Posted: 27 May 2022 08:14 AM PDT

"What it's like to watch someone you love being torn to pieces. Solveig Gold is one of those people." 

Writes Bari Weiss, at Common Sense, introducing "What Princeton Did to My Husband/My alma mater is not the school I once loved. But Joshua Katz is exactly the man I knew I married."

ADDED: Gold is now 27, or so I read recently in the NYT, and her essay says she entered Princeton as a student in 2013. So, it seems she met Katz when she was 18 and he was 44. There was a huge age and power difference between them. They began living together in 2019, when she was perhaps 24 and he was 50. She is currently a PhD candidate in Classics, his discipline. 

When Gold met Katz: "He was a balding nerd with a belly, and I adored him, but not like that. I adored him because he saw and brought out the best in me as a student and scholar.... Everyone at Princeton adored Joshua, male and female alike."

She continues:

Early on in our courtship in 2018, he confided in me about the worst mistake of his life: a consensual relationship with a Princeton undergraduate in the mid-2000s. He told me about the angst and pain it had caused them both. And he told me that a third party had, after all these years, brought the relationship to the attention of the university and that he would likely be disciplined with a yearlong unpaid suspension. (He was.) He told me I should leave him then and there....

In November 2018, Joshua bought my father a martini and asked for permission to marry me. In March 2019, we found our dream home in Princeton. That December, Joshua proposed....

 Go to the link to see more details of the controversy. I'm skipping ahead:

I watched the man I love become a shell of his former self, as he realized that many of his closest friends were not friends at all....

The woman with whom Joshua had the relationship had declined of her own volition to participate in Princeton's 2018 investigation. Indeed, she had repeatedly by email expressed her dismay that the school would even consider punishing him. In 2021, however, in the wake of both the Daily Princetonian's McCarthyist reporting and her discovery that Joshua was engaged to marry me (we have this in writing), she demanded that the university investigate Joshua anew. Princeton was all too happy to comply....

I added the boldface.  More details of the story omitted.

In the midst of it all, though, we were married: July 17, 2021... Unsurprisingly, the ongoing attacks on my husband have been coupled with attacks on our marriage....

I've been told that I was "groomed" because, for instance, we sometimes exchanged emails at 4 a.m. when I was a student (never mind that Joshua answers all his emails at 4 a.m.). The reporter who made so much of this never bothered to ask me for a comment, but I assure you: I'm incapable of being groomed. ...

In 2022, it seems, all sex is to be celebrated—except between older men and younger women. Student-teacher relationships are unwise for all sorts of reasons, and Joshua will be the first to tell you why. But when the same people who think that children can consent to puberty blockers claim that a 21-year-old woman cannot possibly consent to a relationship with her professor, it's hard to take them seriously....

Oh, come on! It's not all the same "them"!  You can't point to one other thing that some people think is good and use it to disqualify everyone who rejects professors having sex with students! 

Has Bari Weiss written about teacher/student relationships? There's more going on here that just this "person" who "loves." Presumably, most students who get into relationships with their teachers love them. It's the obligation of the teacher to maintain professionalism.

Who's playing/not playing at the NRA convention?

Posted: 27 May 2022 07:19 AM PDT

"When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal..."

Posted: 27 May 2022 07:06 AM PDT

"... sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. As the lovely lady nibbles, the male locks onto her with one penis while another penis delivers a sperm package. If everything goes smoothly, a roach's romp can last around 90 minutes. But increasingly, cockroach coitus is going really, weirdly wrong.... [T]hese new cockroaches seemed to have no affection for a form of sugar called glucose.... So when one of these glucose-averse females takes a bite of the male's nuptial gift, it literally turns bitter in her mouth, and she bolts before he can complete the double barrel lock-and-pop maneuver."

From "Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn/In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects" (NYT)(with very explicit video of cockroaches mating). 

Those... things on the end of a cockroach are 2 penises?!

You might think that if the females have lost their taste for this sugar, there will be less mating and therefore fewer cockroaches, but the article says no. It's a problem because we humans have been relying on sweetness to deliver poison. The cockroaches themselves will find a way.
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