Althouse |
- "I’d Rather Die Than Delete Truthful Tweet For Cancel Creeps."
- "Whereas elopements began as a way to surreptitiously tie the knot, today, they’re all about creating something special, specific, and small — but by no means secret."
- "Salad is a first-world luxury..... Lettuce is a vehicle to bring refrigerated water from farm to table."
- "In Middle English, male children were 'knave' girls while female children were 'gay' girls."
- At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, [Richard] Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces."
- "Everything — hair, makeup, jewelry, wardrobe and nail care — seemed to communicate calm, control and, especially, neutrality...."
- "[Trump] recently surprised some advisers by saying he might declare his candidacy on social media without warning even his own team..."
- What sort of law protecting access to abortion do you think Congress should pass?
| "I’d Rather Die Than Delete Truthful Tweet For Cancel Creeps." Posted: 02 Jul 2022 10:31 AM PDT Writes Jordan Peterson at The Daily Wire.
What he did was "deadname" Elliot Page (in the process of calling the breast-removal surgeon a criminal).
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2022 09:06 AM PDT "These events are not meant for large crowds in the moment, but they are meant to be shown off, and so incredible photography becomes a nonnegotiable.... [E]lopements allow couples to 'treat themselves to their flavor of extravagance' — one that is suddenly attainable. So if a traditional wedding is vanilla or chocolate, think of this new brand of elopements as an Instagram-only hot-fudge sundae with a gold-leaf brownie balanced on top: It is lavish and luxurious, aspirational and impressive, meant to be admired by friends and strangers via social media. Delicious enough onscreen, but even better in real life." From "Expensive Elopements Are the New Dream Wedding" (NY Magazine). |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2022 07:41 AM PDT "If you have an intuitive sense that a food that's 96 percent water is a waste of resources and a nutritional zero, you're right.... Salad... uses too many resources for too little food to be a smart choice for either human or planetary health. It graces my table because I like it and because it can help me say no to seconds of lasagna. But that's a solution to a first-world problem: too much food.... Lettuce lends its health halo to anything that gets put in a bowl with it.... If you buy a salad, and then remove the lettuce, you see what you're really eating for lunch: sad little brown piles of croutons, dressing, shredded cheese, and chicken strips. Of course there are grain- or bean-rich salads, populated with bona fide nutritious vegetables like kale and broccoli.... But they're the outliers. Most salads are nutritional and environmental losers." |
| "In Middle English, male children were 'knave' girls while female children were 'gay' girls." Posted: 02 Jul 2022 07:20 AM PDT "Only in Modern English did 'girl' come to refer only to female children. Why this happened isn't certain, but it's not uncommon for words to specialize over time in that way: 'meat' originally referred to all food or sustenance, kind of like the phrase 'daily bread'; 'apple' to fruits generally; and 'queen' began as a word for 'woman' in general, and only later specialized royally. However, which words go in which directions can be quite fortuitous, and some words acquire wider, rather than narrower meanings. 'Dog' first referred to certain larger, more powerful dogs, then came to mean all dogs. 'Child' came to mean all pre-adults rather than just the littlest ones. As we moved from Middle English to Modern English, even 'child' could take on a female meaning in a certain context. A line in Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale' asks, 'A boy or a child, I wonder?' And one might suppose that this suggests that a girl is somehow less distinctive than a boy, a mere generic 'child.' But it's possible this actually traces back to when 'child' referred specifically to female children." Writes John McWhorter in "'Woman' and 'Female' Didn't Start as Words About Men" (NYT). |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2022 07:13 AM PDT "His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of 'music itself,' which, he wrote, represented 'a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.'... Mr. Taruskin's most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for 'historically authentic' performances of early music.... 'Being the true voice of one's time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,' he wrote in The Times in 1990. 'To be the expressive medium of one's own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.'... The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin's undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces...." |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2022 06:44 AM PDT "[Cassidy Hutchinson] wore minimally visible makeup — what appeared to be light bronzer, but no discernible colors of lipstick or eye shadow.... Social media teems with thousands of tutorials on 'reshaping one's face' with contouring makeup, how to make eyes look bigger, noses smaller, skin smoother. The overall messages are clear but contradictory: 'become an artist of the self,' 'make yourself beautiful' and 'do it imperceptibly.' It's a tall order — time-consuming, hard to ignore and subject to wide interpretation. And it's especially hard for women in politics.... Many of the (often young and attractive) women of the Trump administration favored an overt, high-glam style, and we saw a lot of very long hair, dramatic false eyelashes, sheath dresses and stiletto pumps — a 'beauty pageant' vibe said to be favored by the former president.... At the hearing, Ms. Hutchinson's image was distinctly different from that aesthetic. She dressed as if ready to blend into the corridors of power, to do her job, to convey depth over surface (although she was noticeably telegenic)..... And the nation is unlikely to forget the day Cassidy Hutchinson, with her precise, low-key style, told her disturbing story." From "Muted Tones Spoke Loud and Clear/At a surprise session of the Jan. 6 hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson calibrated her appearance to keep us listening" by Rhonda Garelick (NYT). I'm laughing at the happenstance of seeing "surprise" again so soon after going on about the tedium of surprise. But I'm blogging this piece because I'd blogged, just yesterday, about Cassidy Hutchinson's makeup: She seems to be wearing dark foundation on her face that doesn't match her skin tone. I'm saying that based on the light pink color of her hand, which we keep seeing held up next to her face, because that's the appropriately evocative taking-the-oath position. But the Times writer, Garelick, is eager to extol the neutrality of Cassidy's look. It bolsters her credibility, and that's why it's the longstanding and obvious advice given to witnesses. But come on. I have a problem with Garelick's credibility. She describes the foundation as "what appeared to be light bronzer." But the photograph accompanying that text makes my point quite clearly:  I don't know what women hope to achieve by slathering on nonmatching foundation. Are they influenced by the bad makeup they see in social media? Well, Trump does the same thing!  Part of the problem is just not bothering to put makeup on one's hands and only caring about the face (and maybe the neck). So the hands are there to tell the tale. The real question is why do people think their face needs to be a different color? Is it a fear of looking "washed out" or sickly or weak (indoorsy)? It's not just tone (dark/light). It's also hue — that is, the place on the color wheel. In those little pictures, you can see that both Trump and Hutchinson have a natural pink hue and they seem to be using makeup (or tanner) to move away from it. Trump famously lunges toward orange. Hutchinson going for something more neutral that most of us would call brown, but we might say olive. What is this rejection of pink? Too feminine? Weak? What is the problem to be solved with the expungement of pink? There's a word for the fear of pink: Rhodophobia. |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2022 06:34 AM PDT "... and aides are scrambling to build out basic campaign infrastructure in time for an announcement as early as this month. That timing would be extraordinary — presidential candidates typically announce their candidacies in the year before the election — and could have immediate implications for Republicans seeking to take control of Congress in November. Mr. Trump's presence as an active candidate would make it easier for Democrats to turn midterm races into a referendum on the former president, who since losing in 2020 has relentlessly spread lies about the legitimacy of the election. Some Republicans fear that would distract from pocketbook issues that have given their party a strong advantage in congressional races.... One of the most compelling arguments against an early announcement had been federal campaign finance laws. If and when Mr. Trump announces, he would be ineligible to use any of the $100 million that he has parked in his political action committee to directly support his presidential run. His campaign would also be constrained by a strict $2,900-per-person donation cap for the primaries...." He "surprised some advisers by saying he might" surprise them. So much surprising. And it's all so predictable. Do you ever get tired of the tedium of surprise? Am I the first person to write "the tedium of surprise"? Google says yes, but... ... taking the quotes off, the second hit has trump in it: "The Tedium of Trump." And that was back in 2020, just before the election.  From that article:
Ah! If only he'd been reelected, we'd be almost done with him now. We'd be about to pay attention to a new slate of contenders. But as it is, he's looming as our only choice, and he may start his run even before the midterm. And those who did manage to oust him in 2020 have preoccupied themselves with him, frittering away their turn in power. |
| What sort of law protecting access to abortion do you think Congress should pass? Posted: 02 Jul 2022 04:51 AM PDT That's a question I asked yesterday, because I was dissatisfied with the question Emerson polling had asked — "Should Congress pass a law legalizing the right to abortion?" There such a wide range of things Congress could do, notably protect a short period of entitlement to abortion. I don't expect Congress to take advantage of the opportunity to come together and do something practical and helpful, and obviously my little unscientific poll shows an overwhelming preference for Congress to do nothing at all, but I just wanted to suggest that it would be sensible for Congress to create a statutory right to abortion in the first 10 weeks, leaving the rest of the legislative choice to the states. I'd like to see some proper polling of this question. I understand why Democrats in Congress are concentrating on the "viability" line that the Court had identified. But I wish they would consider an earlier point, in order to get a modest time-limited right in place to meet the real needs of women in states, like mine, who now have no right to abortion. |
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