Althouse

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• A name has been named, but I am not saying it.
• Elon Musk said he will reverse Twitter's permanent ban on Donald Trump and that he opposes permanent bans generally....
• "The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died..."
• "Remember when sports were political?... It seemed we were entering a new age of sports activism...."
• "Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator whose family plundered billions of dollars, was elected president of the Philippines by a landslide..."
• "My breasts were even bigger than I imagined them.... As the surgeon moved his computer mouse, they changed shape. With a twitch of his finger, they rose on the disembodied torso..."
• "Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people."
• "Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...."
• "That we largely associate love scenes or depictions of the less fortunate in films — or any scene evoking tears or strong emotions — with the sound of the violin is largely due to Seidel."
• "His gender dysphoria was manageable. He felt fine about his sex life. Though he had read about 'bottom surgery' online..."

A name has been named, but I am not saying it. Posted: 10 May 2022 01:56 PM PDT The Madison Police Department is aware of a group claiming responsibility for the arson at Wisconsin Family Action. We are working with our federal partners to determine the veracity of that claim. — Madison Police (@madisonpolice) May 10, 2022

Elon Musk said he will reverse Twitter's permanent ban on Donald Trump and that he opposes permanent bans generally.... Posted: 10 May 2022 01:34 PM PDT ... because they "just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter." He said: "If there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension — a temporary suspension — is appropriate, but not a permanent ban.'" Intelligencer reports.  Musk was speaking at a conference in London. Trump, it should be remembered, has said he won't return to Twitter, but I suspect he'll change his mind Here's the video. Note that Musk says the decision to ban Trump was "morally bad and foolish in the extreme":

"The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died..." Posted: 10 May 2022 05:00 PM PDT "... and a few days before Trump nominated conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace her. Back then, 70% of registered voters said they had either 'some' (50%) or 'a lot' (20%) of confidence in the court, and 30% said they had either 'a little' (23%) or 'none' (7%). But the new survey of 1,577 U.S. adults, which was conducted immediately after the leak, found that... just half of voters still express some (37%) or a lot (14%) of confidence in the court, while the other half now expresses either a little (24%) or none (26%).... ...Americans are divided over whether the leak is a 'good thing' (30%), a 'bad thing' (37%) or something they're not sure about (33%).... [F]ar more Republicans consider the leak bad (59%) than good (19%), and far more Democrats consider it good (50%) than bad (20%)." Yahoo News reports. Surprising that there isn't more disapproval of the leak, isn't it? Well, actually, I'm not surprised, because I, myself, felt rather impassive about it. I'm sure I'd have said the leak was "bad" if they'd polled me, but I'm unmoved by the histrionics about it, and I'm not that roused by the sanctimony about the Court's entitlement to dead secrecy.

"Remember when sports were political?... It seemed we were entering a new age of sports activism...." Posted: 10 May 2022 01:17 PM PDT "But I think it's fair to say the activism surge has at least slowed a little bit. Just look at the sports world's reaction to the leak that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade.... Leagues are like any other corporation: They will support a cause if they think it will benefit them, and they won't if they think it won't.... They're run, and played, mostly by men.... And it's fair to say the unity, such as it was, that we saw in sports after the murder of Floyd will be difficult to replicate when it comes to abortion. People are exhausted. All over sports, there is an undeniable sense of gratitude that the pandemic is over (at least in the eyes of the people who run and play sports) and that 'normal' seasons are back. Increasingly, 2020 is seen as an anomaly in all senses. For all the activism of that year, decades of powerful inertia is still pushing sports to focus solely on the games themselves.... It might be a shame — for all of us — that they're returning to those comfort zones. But it's not difficult to understand why." From "Why Athletes Are Ignoring Roe v. Wade" by Will Leitch (Intelligencer).  It's not really that complicated, is it? People are truly divided on abortion. Some have very deep beliefs and many are permanently torn and don't know what position to take. Compare the George Floyd protests: Virtually everyone opposes racist police and police brutality. The differences are about how pervasive the problem is and what form activism should take.

"Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator whose family plundered billions of dollars, was elected president of the Philippines by a landslide..." Posted: 10 May 2022 08:39 AM PDT "... according to preliminary results, only 36 years after his father was ousted in a historic revolution. For critics, it marks a further backward slide for a nation — once admired as one of the few democracies in Southeast Asia — that continues to trudge down the path of populism....The excesses of the Marcos family were in full view during their rule decades ago, with frequent jet-setting, spending sprees and, famously, Imelda's thousands of pairs of shoes — boxes of which have since fallen victim to mold and termite infestations. Under martial law at the time, reports of human rights abuses were rampant, including arbitrary arrests, forcible disappearances, torture and killings." WaPo reports. The article quotes University of Chicago sociologist Marco Garrido: "The faith they had in liberal democracy has dried up … and they've developed this taste for illiberal rule over the course of the Duterte administration. This nostalgia for the Marcos period wouldn't make sense unless you put it in the context of 36 years of disappointment."

"My breasts were even bigger than I imagined them.... As the surgeon moved his computer mouse, they changed shape. With a twitch of his finger, they rose on the disembodied torso..." Posted: 10 May 2022 08:23 AM PDT "... and shrank into the breasts I had fantasized about for more than 25 years. Until age 11, I was a confident, athletic child.... Then, my breasts arrived.... I stopped playing sports, stopped playing outside altogether. Worse, I was dogged by boys and loathed by girls.... ... Kathy Davis, the foremost contemporary feminist theorist on the subject, wrote in a 1991 article in the journal 'Hypatia,' that cosmetic surgery was 'regarded as an extreme form of medical misogyny, producing and reproducing the pernicious and pervasive cultural themes of deficient femininity.' The woman who yielded to the desire to commit such violence to her body was a 'cultural dope,' afflicted by false consciousness, believing she made a personal choice while actually yielding to a system that controls and oppresses women.... My conception of feminism... permitted me to cover myself in tattoos, pierce just about every flap of skin on my body and stretch inch-wide holes in my earlobes.... [But t]o change my body through cosmetic surgery... was unnatural and irreversible, perverting my God-given form in too extreme a fashion.... It seems clear to me now that any feminist position on cosmetic surgery that doesn't take women's relationships to their own bodies into account actually objectifies them. I'd hated my body for years, felt both obscured and exposed by it, and subjected it to many acts that others wanted irrespective of my desires... The assumption about cosmetic surgery is that it will give the patient something she didn't have before, but I've found the greater gift to be what it removes. My body's meaning has consolidated and is less contingent on the perceptions of others." From "The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction/My body had been objectified for as long as I could remember. So I decided to change it" by Melissa Febos(NYT). This is a very long article, and I understand the motivations to write long articles about feminism and one's personal choices. But I don't think the question of breast reduction is difficult. If you have uncomfortably large breasts weighing you down and restricting your activity, go ahead and have the surgery. The author obsesses over the difference between "cosmetic" surgery and surgery to correct a "deformity," but I don't see why feminism should adopt that line. Improving your comfort and functionality is easily justifiable, and I don't see anyone out there objecting to this kind of surgery.

"Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people." Posted: 10 May 2022 08:40 AM PDT Wrote Steve Schmidt, quoted in "Former Top McCain Aide Says He Lied to Discredit a Times Article/'John McCain's lie became mine,' Steve Schmidt wrote about Senator John McCain's relationship with a female lobbyist" (NYT). Defending his long silence on the matter, Mr. Schmidt said in his post that he "didn't want to do anything to compromise John McCain's honor." His post then questioned Mr. McCain's judgment in choosing the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate and accused Mr. McCain of cowering before her — "terrified of the creature that he created," he wrote.  In an interview on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he was motivated to speak up now in part because he felt he had been unfairly associated for nearly 15 years with Mr. McCain's choice of Ms. Palin, which he called "a burden." Speaking of honor, you should have unburdened yourself while the man you accuse of lying was still alive. Now, it looks like you just can't get enough of kicking Sarah Palin around. Go away.

"Liberalism, she said [in the late 1960s], rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into 'a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live...." Posted: 10 May 2022 07:29 AM PDT "She argued that the real revolution that allowed women to have careers was not the women's movement but the availability of modern forms of birth control. To Ms. Decter, women had a biological destiny to be wives and mothers, and those who tried to escape it evinced self-hatred. In her 1972 book, 'The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation,' she wrote that women's 'true grievance' is not that they are 'mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are — women.' She offered a solution: Single women should remain chaste, because women are naturally monogamous. And withholding sex, she said, was a form of power over men...." From "Midge Decter, an Architect of Neoconservatism, Dies at 94/As a writer and intellectual, she abandoned liberal politics, challenged the women's movement and championed the Reagan Republican agenda" (NYT).  I remember reading about Midge Decter for the first time back in 1972 when "The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation" came out. I wish I could find that article now, not just to be able to revisit the reaction to the book, but to see the illustration, which I remember as a sequence of drawings of a woman reading the book calmly, then reading the book with an expression of developing anger, then kicking the book in the air. It neatly conveyed the message: Don't read this book. Midge Decter is toxic. I did find the contemporaneous review in the NYT, "The argument of Women's Liberation, Midge Decter says, is with liberation" (October 15, 1972). The reviewer, George Stade, an English professor, writes: Women's Liberation, she says, expresses not a demand for equal rights or a yearning for freedom, but an inability to manage the rights and freedoms women already have. Women are now free to marry or not, to do housework or not, to get a job or not, and to make of their marriages, housework or job what they will....  Housework, Midge Decter argues, has become not a task imposed, but a profession chosen. With choice comes the possibility of making the wrong one, the anxious knowledge of that possibility beforehand, and a personal responsibility for how it turns out.  Similarly, middle — class women, unlike their husbands, take jobs by choice, not necessity. For men a career is the only medium of self‐definition. For women a career is a possibility embraced among others that beckon.  Liberationists, then, are those women who cannot bear the risk of failure or the responsibilities of success, who cannot come to terms with their own ambition, who see themselves as too delicate for the hurly‐burly of competition or for exposure to judgment—those who want never to grow up.  These are hard words, but of a kind with Midge Decter's stern replies to the arguments of Women's Liberation on the subject of sex, marriage and motherhood. The movement's response to the sexual revolution has been counterrevolutionary, she argues, a retreat to a nunnery of the mind, a longing for the old chastity and the bargaining power it gave women over men, a flinching avoidance of the dangers and difficulties of sexual equality.  What the Women's Liberationist cannot abide is the terms of the contract [of marriage]—terms which include the requirement that she respond to her husband's maleness with a reciprocal femininity, that she enter into the conflicts and concessions of a dialogue with the sexual and social other.  Midge Decter also has a reply to the movement's claim that motherhood is a swindle, an ideological fortress erected by men to confine women to a life of drudgery, a stockade built on the narrow ground of a biological property that science will soon remove to the lab. Her reply is that birth control and the easier availability of abortion have "transposed motherhood from a descriptive category to a normative one." ... [T]his new opportunity for decision and choice, like the others, has been felt by Women's Liberation as only a new burden, a dreadful freedom, a sickness unto death from the moment of her first child's birth. The movement, then, is not an expression of women's surge toward new possibilities and new freedoms, but "an expression of their terror in the face of the harshness and burdens of a new and as yet not fully claimed freedom." That terror is the force behind the movement's "true underlying intention. And that is to create a world, or a culture, in which either literally or to all intents and purposes there would be no men and no women."  The world they want to re‐create is that of prepubescent androgeny, a world shrunk to "a household culture in which maleness and femaleness would be indistinguishable."...  No doubt Midge Decter goes too far, but in doing so she clarifies the issue... Women's Liberation says women are victims; Midge Decter says they are free to choose among alternatives...

"That we largely associate love scenes or depictions of the less fortunate in films — or any scene evoking tears or strong emotions — with the sound of the violin is largely due to Seidel." Posted: 10 May 2022 08:34 AM PDT Wrote Adam Baer, quoted in "A Violin From Hollywood's Golden Age Aims at an Auction Record Played in 'The Wizard of Oz' and other classic films, Toscha Seidel's Stradivarius could sell for almost $20 million" (NYT). Baer dismissed the notion that the Hollywood pedigree of the "da Vinci" might curb its value at auction. While he conceded Seidel did not record the most intellectually rigorous music, he added that "the fact he was a Hollywood performer shouldn't diminish the value at all."  "He was a great classical musician before he came to Hollywood," Baer added. "And 'The Wizard of Oz' is a pretty big deal." Here's Baer's article "The Sound of Tinseltown/Toscha Seidel made a nation fall in love with the violin" (American Scholar).

"His gender dysphoria was manageable. He felt fine about his sex life. Though he had read about 'bottom surgery' online..." Posted: 10 May 2022 06:04 AM PDT "... the final outcomes did not seem good enough for him to justify the risks. People were comparing the results to soda cans, he recalls. 'They were saying they weren't functional. You couldn't pee out of them. You couldn't feel anything.'... Though phalloplasty cannot yet produce a penis identical to the one most men are born with, it can provide for many of the classic penile pastimes: standing urination, penetrative sex, orgasm (without ejaculation), changing in a locker room.... In the United States, there are two common types of phalloplasty: radial forearm flap (or R.F.F., which uses the forearm as a skin-flap donor site) and anterolateral thigh (or ALT, which uses the thigh). These flaps form the shaft and can be combined with various other procedures in pursuit of four major post-op priorities: standing urination, aesthetics, erectile function and sensation. Most surgeons begin by asking patients to rank these priorities.... Ben's primary goal was standing urination. He decided his next goals were penetrative sex and aesthetics.... At 4-foot-10 and 97 pounds, he felt he had certain disadvantages. 'Women don't like short men,' he said. 'I kind of had to give myself all the edge up on the competition I could get.'... I wondered aloud if the point of surgery was to grant him the freedom to stop thinking about his penis. 'No,' Ben said, correcting me. 'I think about it all the time. Touch it all the time. Look at it all the time. It's my favorite thing to do.'"  From "How Ben Got His Penis/Phalloplasty — the surgery to make a penis — has grown more popular among trans men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure" (NYT). "Women don't like short men"... but do women like men who think about their penis all the time and touch it and look at it all the time?

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