Saturday, June 4, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

Sunrise — 5:11, 5:13.

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 07:36 AM PDT

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"I tried to visit Eve’s tomb once in Saudi Arabia."

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 07:15 AM PDT

"For some Muslims, tradition holds that the grave site of the woman who is the biblical Eve is in the Red Sea city of Jeddah (the Arabic word for 'grandmother'). The cemetery's caretaker said no women were allowed in.... The [Depp/Heard] trial resonated because it was a primary story. We find depictions of vertiginous falls compelling. It is human nature to be fascinated by stories that echo how our nature became human, in darker respects, once Adam and Eve were demoted to mere mortals. According to the Book of Genesis and 'Paradise Lost,' the sort of behavior described in the sordid defamation trial — jealousy, violence, excess, overindulgence — came as a result of Eve giving in to Satan and Adam giving in to Eve.... And what could be more Edenic than Depp's $100-million property portfolio...?"

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Johnny and Amber: Trouble in Paradise" (NYT).

Dowd is distancing herself from the sordid detail of Depp's proving he'd been defamed. Let's back way the hell off and see only the vague outlines of the timeless myth of Man and Woman.

But who knew they had Eve's tomb somewhere?

After the Depp/Heard verdict, let's talk about the role played by the ACLU.

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 06:47 AM PDT

There's this column, from Erik Wemple — "Depp-Heard case hinged on the world's worst #MeToo op-ed." Wemple's column, like the "world's worst #MeToo op-ed," was published in the Washington Post:

The first draft came off the keyboards of the ACLU, via consultation with Heard. Four lawyers at the ACLU reviewed it to ensure that it aligned with the organization's policy positions. Heard's lawyers separately scrubbed it for compliance with a nondisclosure provision of her divorce settlement, according to an ACLU spokesperson. 

So Heard's celebrity conferred standing at the ACLU, which then leveraged her name into a Post op-ed. The byline was accurate only to the extent that the ACLU tried to craft a piece consistent with Heard's spoken views. Which is to say, not very accurate. 

Kris Coratti, a Post spokeswoman, says that the opinions section has a standard form seeking attestation from op-ed writers that they actually wrote the work under their bylines, though it's uncertain whether it was requested in this case.  

"We recognize that many writers receive help with their pieces at various stages along the way," notes Coratti in an email, "and the involvement of the ACLU in the piece was disclosed to us. We also disclosed to our readers Heard's relationship with the ACLU, as she did in the body of the piece."...

As for the Washington Post (which was not sued by Depp):

The Post on Thursday appended to Heard's op-ed an editor's note apprising readers of this week's developments. It was a neutral passage that avoided taking a position on the Virginia jury's verdict, and amplified the weakness of the piece itself — which was that The Post was taking a shortcut to this controversy, forgoing the journalistic effort required to piece together a bona fide #MeToo story. A jury has made its decision on the merits of the case. Does The Post stand by the op-ed? "We do not take stands on the opinions shared in our op-eds," replies Coratti.

Here's Heard's original column. It's still up at WaPo (with a note about the lawsuit). I was interested to see the most-liked comment, which was posted when the column first went up:

Amber Heard should not be given this platform when she herself was arrested for domestic violence at an airport against her old girlfriend, Tasya Van Ree. She also admitted in a deposition during her divorce that she punched and hit her ex-husband in the face during an argument. Another important thing to keep in mind, is that she originally sent a letter of financial demands to Johnny Depp that basically stated she would not ruin him publicly with allegations of abuse if he caved in to her demands. He did not, and that is why all their dirty laundry was aired. She is a fraud if you read about the case. I think their relationship was mutually dysfunctional, but nothing like she described. By the way, I could care less about [Johnny] Depp and am not a super fan defending him, but I was intrigued by the whole fiasco and paid close attention to the details and court filings. I think [there] is enough evidence to point to the fact that she greatly exaggerated what happened or blatantly lied....

The Washington Post and the ACLU really did behave awfully.

Borrowing edge and then retreating when criticized.

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 06:17 AM PDT

"There is, so far, only one proven fact in digital publishing: The more you publish the more successful you are...."

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 07:32 AM PDT

"The most effective of the influencers turned commentators, like @houseinhabit's Jessica Reed Kraus, know this. Kraus is a San Clemente, California, mother who got her start in the content mines as a lifestyle blogger (picture lots of wavy-haired sons, surfboards, pools, and exposed ceiling beams). Over the past year or so, she morphed into a trial-obsessed Instagrammer.

"Her gossipy roller-coaster ride through evidence and pop culture has earned her almost 1 million Instagram followers and apparently thousands of paid Substack subscribers.... Kraus folds together her own commentary, court evidence, trial video, and professional photos to which she surely cannot claim copyright. ('Photoshoot in The Bahamas day after claiming she was "beaten within an inch of her life,"' Kraus posted over a skin-baring image of Heard.) She also has a clever natural sense for cheering on a surprising side: Just as she was strongly, disturbingly sympathetic to Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a chief instigator of the anti-Heard story line.... Kraus is just one of hundreds who racked up huge numbers and built followers during the trial.... Now that the trial is over, these creators and many more are left with huge audiences.... If the innovators stay in the game, they'll find out just how lousy the media business can be."

From "The Mainstream Media Lost the Depp-Heard Trial/And the lifestyle influencers turned court correspondents won" by Choire Sicha (Intelligencer).

From the top-rated comment over there: "The 'mainstream media' coverage seemed to start with the assumption that Heard was 100% truthful, Depp was as good as a convicted abuser, and that all cases of women accusing men of abuse should be taken at face value without any effort of proof or consistency.... Tiktokkers covering it while potentially coming from their own subjective positions seemed to understand the trial better than the mainstream media which decided from the beginning that Heard was 100% the victim and continues to see anything other than that as somehow setting back the Me Too cause rather than strengthening it by sorting through false or seriously questionable accusations with care and focusing on clearer cut cases of pattern abuse."

I see that Senator Ben Sasse called out the "weirdos"... but who are the weirdos?

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 07:33 AM PDT

It sounds so childish, calling other people "weird." I'm writing this, still not knowing what the reference is. I decided to blog this based on the headline — "Sen. Ben Sasse calls out 'weirdos' dividing country in fiery Reagan Foundation speech" (Yahoo) — and beginning to read this quote: 

"This is a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos and for the weirdos," Sasse said Thursday night in California. "Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack — mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there."

Octogenarian! What kind of ageist bullshit is this? And isn't he exemplifying the problem he's attempting to state — which seems to be something like mindlessly emoting about politics. 

Sasse, a former university president who was often chided through the Trump administration for failing to pick a clear side in the many battles surrounding the former president, said that while "jackwagon" politicians and "isolationists" increase the intensity of their stunts, the U.S. is falling behind as a global superpower....

I had to look up "jackwagon." It's not in the OED. It's some American slang, as I'm reading about in "If You Don't Know Jack, You're a Jackwagon" (Daily Writing Tips):

So, how did we get to the insult jackwagon, popularized in a television commercial featuring actor and former drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey? As a less offensive alternative to jackass as a derogatory label, it may derive from a nickname for the chuck wagon (chuck comes from a slang word for food), a vehicle carrying cooking implements and supplies for a cattle drive or a wagon train, or for any of one of several other types of wagons that might bring up the rear of a procession of other vehicles. The seemingly lowly status of the trailing wagon, literally left in the dust of what came before it, presumably came to be associated with a person of low character or intelligence.

Let's find that commercial. I don't watch commercials, so I'm slow getting up to speed on this slang. Ah! Here:

 

It seems that Ben Sasse wants to call politicians to a place of intelligence and moderation, but he's throwing out insults — weirdo, jackwagon. Who will listen to him? 

It makes me think back to my own use of the word "weird" in relation to Trump. There's this from July 12, 2016:  

Trump is tempted to appease those who think he's too weird, but whatever he chooses will be portrayed as a new dimension of weirdness. There's no getting to the illusion of normal. The trick, I think, is to be weird in the right way, the way that doesn't make us think: Why would we want a weird President?

I think it's going to rain.

Posted: 04 Jun 2022 04:11 AM PDT

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This morning at 5:16. And 5:15:

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Paddleboarding on Lake Wingra.

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 06:52 PM PDT

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It was sublime!

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"[Sheryl] Sandberg has been telling people that she feels burned out and that she has become a punching bag for the [Facebook's] problems..."

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 10:47 AM PDT

"'She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she's sick of it,' said one person who worked alongside Ms. Sandberg for many years.... [P]olitical consulting firm Cambridge Analytica... improperly accessed the data of [87] million Facebook users. That data was then used to target voters...to get them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.... After the fallout of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg that he blamed her and her teams for the scandal.... Ms. Sandberg confided in friends that the exchange with Mr. Zuckerberg had rattled her and she wondered if she should be worried about her job... Ms. Sandberg also has been anxious about how coming film and television projects on Facebook will depict her tenure as one of the top women in tech. 'There's no scenario in which a successful businesswoman is not portrayed as a raging bitch,' she told one adviser...."

From "Why Sheryl Sandberg Quit Facebook's Meta/One of the world's most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business she was instrumental in building. That dovetailed with a company investigation into her activities" (Wall Street Journal).

"Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier..."

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 06:18 AM PDT

"... for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers' nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect.... The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable. There are some politicians of that middle generation... They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation's political imagination. A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn't the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?"

Writes Yuval Levin, in "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?" (NYT).

This gets my "gerontocracy" tag, which you can click to read what I've said about it. Hint: I don't like it. But Levin is making the additional point: It's not just that the old Boomers are clinging to power. It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty: "The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."

I was sad but also amused by the notion of a palpable vacuum. Can you palpate a vacuum? It reminds me of the old childhood revelation: Nothing... is... something.

"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves" (1931).

"[F]ew of the Hollywood figures who spoke up during the height of the #MeToo movement are showing any solidarity with Heard..."

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 05:52 AM PDT

"... a stance that would require a modicum of courage given the power of the #MeToo backlash and Depp's evident popularity. She may well be ruined for good. One of the statements in her Washington Post essay that was deemed defamatory was, 'I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.' The trial that she lost proved her point."

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "The Amber Heard Verdict Was a Travesty. Others Will Follow" (NYT). 

The top-rated comment (by far) is from Mari (in London): "I am really starting to get sick of these partial articles, of the cherry picked facts, of the caveats and concessions for Amber's side when presenting this trial in the media. I am a progressive, a feminist, work in human rights. I am not a conservative or a wild Johnny Depp 'tik tok' fan. I watched the whole trial. I was on Heard's side, for years. But it was clear as the trial went on, that it is very likely that Heard has fabricated the allegations - something absolutely heinous to do, to destroy someone else's life. Please Michelle, don't be dishonest here. Everyone watching the trial could see the facts as they were presented; most people are smart enough to infer their own conclusions that Heard acted with malice."

I haven't read all the comments, but I haven't found one that isn't critical of the position Goldberg takes.

"A lesson meant for first grade called 'Pink, Blue and Purple'... from a curriculum called 'Rights, Respect, Responsibility'... tells students that gender is not a fixed attribute."

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 05:38 AM PDT

"'You might feel like you're a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are "girl" parts,' the teachers are told to say. 'You might feel like a girl even if you have body parts that some people tell you are "boy" parts. And you might not feel like you're a boy or a girl, but you're a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you're perfectly normal!'... In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using 'Rights, Respect, Responsibility' introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn't fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly. He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. 'We don't say a penis belongs to a man,' he said. It belongs to a human, he explains."

From "Gender identity lessons, banned in some schools, are rising in others/Students are told that dolls aren't just for girls, and that there are no 'boy colors' or 'girl colors'" (WaPo).

I don't see why there should be any need to say anything at all about genitalia in kindergarten and first grade. To force the subject, with open discussion about how children think about their genitalia, strikes me as wrong — to the point where I'd say it's objectively wrong. It's at least objectively true that some of the parents will feel that it's wrong to have kindergarten and first grade lessons teaching children about genitalia and how to think about them. 

WaPo nudges its readers to regard objection to these lessons as something conservatives do. We're told that "a conservative activist" calls it "cult grooming and ideological grooming." That is, we're encouraged to see the objection to the lesson — rather than the lesson itself — as strange and extreme.

At the Sunrise Café...

Posted: 03 Jun 2022 04:50 AM PDT

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... you can write about whatever you want.
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