Althouse |
- "Hollywood doesn't appear progressive to me. What I see is unrestrained capitalism topped with a thin layer of virtue signaling."
- "Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat...."
- "She was only 13 years old, but she was 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, far larger than any of the teachers or school administrators...."
- "Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one...."
- "A New York appeals court on Thursday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes..."
- "The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence.. That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me..."
- "I want to scream. I want to vomit. I want tear down every courthouse brick by brick because there is no justice to be had in our system of laws."
- "For years, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to climb the corporate ladder by promoting themselves in the workplace..."
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 11:33 AM PDT Says the top-rated comment on "Are the Movies Liberal? Everyone knows Hollywood is progressive. But look at the films it churns out. They tell another story" by A.O. Scott in the NYT. I only skimmed the article. It's a ridiculous straw man. "Everyone knows"... but what "everyone knows" is actually not true, as the film critic explains citing examples of various recent films that I have no interest in seeing. I didn't "know" it, didn't think it, and would prefer to read an article about the things the film critics "know" that just are not true. |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 11:19 AM PDT "There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?" Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT). Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it. Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day? Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you... |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 11:03 AM PDT "For a moment, the only sound was Sabrina's loud moans. She threw a shoe at a teacher. She took off her shirt. She cursed at the school staff arranged around her in a protective circle. Summoned to the scene, her parents tried to soothe her. She kicked and swung until they backed off. On the Sabrina tantrum scale, so far this registered only a 4 out of 10, declared her father.... This was the third time this week he had rushed to school for one of Sabrina's meltdowns.... In interviews, parents across New York State described... being attacked by an adolescent child, now bigger and more aggressive than before.... In the years since [large state] institutions were closed, there has been a clear presumption [that] children with intellectual or developmental disabilities... should live at home through childhood.... But the presumption can fail a small number of families...." |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 10:50 AM PDT "In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right... Today's left-wing cultural program represents the tastes and worldview of an insular class of often white progressive elites, who now sit to the left of nonwhite Democrats on any number of social issues, including race.... "The right's new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called 'Middle American radicals,' or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump's electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles.... They 'unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.'"From "What Comes After the Religious Right?" by Nate Hochman, a fellow at National Review (NYT). The teaser on the front page is more compulsively clickable:  |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 10:24 AM PDT "The New York decision had been hotly anticipated by the state's legal community, particularly after oral arguments in December, when members of the five-judge panel that heard the case seemed skeptical of some decisions made by the trial judge. But the decision Thursday was unanimous — and clear.... Mr. Weinstein's lawyers... argu[ed] that three women who had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual assaults for which he was not charged should never have been allowed to testify and that prosecutors had 'tried Weinstein's character not his conduct.' But Judge Mazzarelli said... that their accounts had been key in showing Mr. Weinstein's pattern of behavior. They demonstrated, she said, that Mr. Weinstein did not see his victims as 'romantic partners or friends,' but that 'his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.'" This is the intermediate appellate court, and Weinstein's lawyer indicates there will be an appeal to New York's highest court. |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 09:54 AM PDT "... working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt." Wrote Elon Musk to SpaceX employees, quoted in "Elon Musk to Workers: Spend 40 Hours in the Office, or Else/In emails to workers at SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk said they were required to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office" (NYT).
From the comments at the NYT: "I'm always amused when people describe non-local work as 'phoning it in' and 'not real work.' It's about as amusing as Musk — who has no experience in manufacturing — claiming that his micromanagement on the factory floor is why his companies didn't go bust. Plenty of automakers support full time remote work now; they'll happily poach Tesla's most capable people." |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 08:52 AM PDT Said a woman — identified only as "Meghan" — who had experienced "physical and emotional abuse" during her marriage. Quoted in "'Men Always Win': Survivors 'Sickened' by the Amber Heard Verdict/It didn't matter what the verdict was — as one domestic violence survivor puts it, 'this case is my worst fear playing out on a public stage'" (Rolling Stone). This morning, I'm brushing off the many knee-jerk reactions to the Depp/Heard verdict — low-quality ravings about how women in general will suffer because this one woman wasn't believed. (It seems to me, the greater cause is the truth, and we can very coherently side with real victims and oppose phony victims. This was a case of catching a liar in action.) But this quote struck me as different and bloggable because it speaks of destroying the buildings that house the governmental entities that are functioning in a way that you believe falls below proper standards: I want tear down every courthouse brick by brick because there is no justice to be had in our system of laws. It made me think of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Put to the side whether you agree that the 2020 election was rigged or that Amber Heard didn't get justice. The question is, if you do think something like that, should your reaction be to attack the building?  |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2022 04:25 AM PDT "... and asking for more help from their spouses at home. Now, her departure from Facebook as one of the highest-ranking female executives in corporate America marks the end of an era in the brand of self-empowerment feminism she championed as a critical tool to fight sexism in the workplace.... Her advice to women who wanted to ascend higher in their careers was simply to 'lean in,' or be more assertive at their jobs, which became a cultural phenomenon.... 'There isn't another Sheryl.' Over the years, Sandberg has struggled to retain her voice as a champion of women as Facebook.... The movement to get more women into better roles in corporate America has stalled in recent years.... Sandberg's image as a corporate feminist was first burnished after the 2010 TED Talk, in which she chronicled what she saw as the reasons women were still struggling to compete with men in moving up the corporate latter...." Here's that TED Talk from 12 years ago. I blogged about the "Lean In" movement back in 2012 — "'Leaning in' evolves into coffee-sipping wishful supportiveness": If you can bear to keep reading you'll see that there's a Lean In Foundation where you can register your "Lean In" circle and there are actually 7,000 registered circles. This is all very nice for the Chief Leaner In Sheryl Sandberg, she of the book "Lean In." It's her branding. You want to get her branding on you? That furthers her leaning in, but what does it do for you — you, over there in that circle in a coffee shop getting lost in the evolving cross-currents of mutual support? |
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