Are we having a conversation yet?

"I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place."

Conversation?

Man, "conversation" has become one of those Orwellian words. There it is in Obama's NYT interview, where he's saying something that invites the relabeling that Sarah Palin so effectively slapped on it — "death panels."

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Conversations! Damn! As if the government does not have power! Oh, but it's "not determinative," you say. It's just "some guidance." He said that, see? Ugh! Spare me! We're right to be afraid now, while the man is burbling about conversation. You know damned well he's about to say and now the time for conversation is over, and we must pass legislation. Before, he was all quick, shut up, it's an emergency, pass the legislation. People freaked, so then he deemed the period of freakage part of the conversation, and there, it has occurred, and now: shut up, pass the legislation. Oh, yeah, here it is, in today's NYT, an op-ed by Barack Obama:

Our nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them....

It's "debate" now, not "conversation," because the wrong people are doing the talking. The real conversation is what those people who aren't talking would say.

The long and vigorous debate about health care that’s been taking place over the past few months is a good thing. It’s what America’s all about.

But let’s make sure that we talk with one another, and not over one another. We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real, and not wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that anyone has actually proposed. This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.

Okay! Let's pick it all apart and examine everything. Have you read the great WSJ op-ed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey? He had some serious ideas on some real issues, but wait, how dare he speak! How dare he get in the way of the Democrats' ramming legislation through Congress. The Democrats know what the millions upon millions of silent Americans really think, so he and those other loud voices need to quiet down, right? That's what I call conversation — when everyone shuts up and lets me give them what they'd say they want if only they weren't so silent.

Obama predictably insists that we do something now:

In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing....

Why isn't doing the wrong thing a lot scarier than doing nothing? Don't we need to be careful and get it right? If I say that, am I a "cynic" or a "naysayer"? And don't cynics and naysayers belong in the conversation too? Obama's answer is, apparently, no, they are not the real Americans. The real Americans are silent, and I represent what they think.

Obama's final fillip:

In the end, this isn’t about politics.

Oh, come on! But this post is already too long, and it's about the rhetorical use of "conversation." "This isn’t about politics" is at least as common and at least as disingenuous, but we'll have to have our conversation about this isn’t about politics some other day.

***

And yet, I must keep this postscript, while we're talking about "conversation":

Remember Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign announcement?

I'm not just starting a campaign, though, I'm beginning a conversation -- with you, with America. Because we all need to be part of the discussion... And let's definitely talk about how every American can have quality affordable health care.... So let's talk. Let's chat. Let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.... So let the conversation begin. I have a feeling it's going to be very interesting....

Ha ha. Yeah, it was interesting. We sure enjoyed chatting with you. Now, what does your husband think? Oh, yes, he was all about conversation too:

Over the coming year I want to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation about race... We have talked at each other and about each other for a long time. It's high time we all began talking with each other....

I'm sure you enjoyed that chat... which is still going on....

Why did Eric Alterman stop doing Bloggingheads?

Was it something I wrote? Here's what he says:

[Ken] Silverstein's dander is up because he thinks I called him "America's worst pundit." But the rest of the world understood pretty well that I was referring directly to William Kristol, whom I discussed in the previous paragraph.... He then goes to the trouble to find a bunch of things I said in a conversation which, ripped out of context, sound wrong today. But I'm guessing that if I went to the trouble of going back and looking directly at the quotes in question, I could find sufficient qualifiers purposely ignored by Silverstein to demonstrate that I was not saying what he pretends I am. (And don't forget, Silverstein is quoting something I said in conversation, not something I wrote in a monthly magazine. Ann Althouse did the same thing to me in both her blog and in a New York Times op-ed. This is one reason, aside from a lack of time, I stopped doing bloggingheads.tv. It's ridiculous to say something in conversation and to have people treat it as if, well, as if you wrote it in a fact-checked monthly magazine.)

"In conversation"? He said something in a public dialogue on Bloggingheads. It's not like I publicized something he said to me in a private conversation. I have no interest in this current hissyfit about Ken Silverstein, but why drag me into it and insinuate that I did something underhanded? You can read my blog post (and NYT column) for yourself. I took something he said seriously and argued against it. What on earth is his problem? My guess is he has some shame about having uttered the words "I think it would be good if we had some sort of, you know, blogging — you know — council, where we could condemn people." He should also have some shame about attacking me baselessly and totally out of context like this. And he's the one who wanted to enforce standards! Ha!

AND: Speaking of criticism from out of nowhere, can anyone explain why Amanda Marcotte is trashing me here? The closest I can come to understanding her point is that she interprets the phrase "shameless sybarite" as unalloyed praise.

UPDATE: Eric Alterman calls me "insane" in this new post, which — since I'm sitting on the floor at O'Hare with nothing to do — I'm going to fisk:

Ann Althouse is insane, continued: Read her here. The story is this: I made a point, yesterday, about the fact that one tends to be more considered in print, particularly print in a monthly fact-checked magazine, than in casual conversation. She saw her name there and has become hysterical over something I clearly didn't say -- and you can check the tape below -- notably, that bloggingheads.tv somehow constitutes a "private" conversation.

Well, Eric saw my post here and has become hysterical over something I clearly didn't say — and you can read the post above. I didn't say that Eric thought that Bloggingheads is a private conversation. I said he was reacting as if I'd done something underhanded, which might have made sense if I'd repeated something from a private conversation. But since it wasn't at all private, and in fact was especially public, my taking his quote seriously was perfectly justified and not at all underhanded. I didn't like seeing my name dragged down for no reason and I wrote this post to complain. He could have apologized, but instead, he wrote another post and called me insane. That's insane.

She then takes her own, imaginary reading of what I wrote and goes on to speculate that I feel a secret "shame" about what I said.

Actually, Eric, I'm sure you're shameless. That was a joke and a dagger to punish you for attacking me.

This is exactly the kind of thing, I suppose, one would expect from a woman who attacks other women for having boobs.

And Eric, since I never did that, you are lying about me — in an especially sexist way.

Perhaps Althouse should get together with the similarly challenged Ken Silverstein and the two of them can do this kind of thing all the time, but in private.

That's what passes for a masturbatory fantasy in the mind of Alterman.

In the meantime, allow me to recommend a book I just finished teaching to my students, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, in a new 20th anniversary edition from Viking, which contains some extremely useful musings on the advantages of thinking in print compared to musing in conversation -- particularly televised conversation. Think before you blog, people; a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and so is my time.

Alterman is incoherent. Blogging is writing. In any case, both speech and writing are valuable. Obviously, when Alterman was teaching that book to his students, he was speaking. We human beings do both, and conversation has a long and honorable tradition, longer than writing. We get a good sense of what people are by hearing them speak. It has a special trustworthiness that writing lacks.

Look at how we insist on hearing our political candidates speak, and we don't get that much out of their policy papers (which others have crafted and polished). We judge people by how they seem when they speak, and I judged Alterman harshly for the revelation of the mind I glimpsed when he said "I think it would be good if we had some sort of, you know, blogging — you know — council, where we could condemn people." Imagine if he were a political candidate and said something like that. It would be the end.

(And I'm not trashing bloggingheads, which is among the best of these conversations. It's just that the medium is by definition limited, and so is my time, which was the main reason I stopped doing them. I told Rob I would be glad to do a few once Why We're Liberals is published because, well, one has to promote one's real work.)

Yeah, he'll go on video to flog his book.

And he did trash Bloggingheads... which he can't go on, because something shockingly repellent oozes out. It's gruesome!

AND: Who's Rob? Does he mean Bob Wright?

"Why are black boys expendable?" is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

But when I click through the link, I just find a column (by Eugene Robinson) that portrays the verdict in the George Zimmerman case to mean: "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent."

Legally, that makes no sense. If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure Robinson knows that, which is why he said "Our society considers" instead of sticking to the confines of court procedure, even as he appropriated the legal lingo of burden of proof.

If the legal doctrine that governed the jury's decision-making precludes the interpretation that the jury found Trayvon Martin to be dangerous, interchangeable, and expendable, what is the basis for the assertion that our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable? Robinson's next sentence is "This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid."

Okay, let me attempt that conversation, Mr. Robinson.

Here's the recording of the Trump/Musk conversation?... And was it a true conversation?

pic.twitter.com/cPUMFx9Qu5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024

I was hoping for real conversation, and I think Musk was too. I wanted "something innovative and possibly disruptive." And Musk said he wanted people to hear how Trump "talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview," and "Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like."

But there wasn't enough back and forth between Trump and Musk for it to feel like conversation. It was more like Trump's rally speeches, where he goes long and riffs this way and that, but the audience doesn't get to participate other than to cheer him on. These speeches are relatively conversational, but they don't give us a feeling of what Trump is like when he's interacting with someone personally. And it's the rally speech feeling that I got from the Trump/Musk conversation.

The 2 men were not in the same room. Trump was at Mar a Lago leaning over his speaker phone:  

🧵🇺🇸 MAINSTREAM MEDIA SKEWS TRUMP-ELON X SPACE COVERAGE, IGNORES RECORD-BREAKING SUCCESS

Major news outlets show clear bias in reporting the Trump-Elon X Space.

The numbers speak for themselves:

- 1.32+ million live listeners during the Space

- 77+ million impressions in… pic.twitter.com/I5yy96srRa

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 13, 2024

Musk was somewhere else. Musk deferred to Trump and let him go on at length and also to interrupt and take control of the conversation at will. Trump was so hot to deliver his message that he bypassed the opportunity to draw Musk out, to get to know Musk, or to show that he was interested in Musk — Musk, one of the most interesting human beings in the world. Musk did not seem to mind. Musk clearly wants Trump to be elected and found an opportunity near the end to give a fairly long pro-Trump pitch. But that means the long encounter was pretty much all campaigning. 

I hope Trump accepts Joe Rogan's invitation and goes on that podcast. Rogan is so good at making conversation happen. But Trump might nevertheless take over and use all the time to batter his message in his usual way. The stakes are so high, perhaps no one running for President would ever risk having a real conversation. Not a major party candidate.

Did Princeton's president cave to the demands of the Woodrow-Wilson-reviling protesters or did the protesters get played?

John Fund at National Review writes: "It took only 20 protesting students from the Black Justice League just 32 hours to hold a sit-in in his office for Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber to cave to their demands,"

He quotes the article in The Daily Princetonian: 

University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 agreed to the modified demands of student protestors on Thursday evening.... The final list addressed all three initial demands of the protestors, which included cultural competency training for faculty and staff and a diversity distribution requirement, a special space for black students, and the removal of the name of Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, from the Wilson School and Wilson College. According to the agreement, Eisgruber will write to chair of the University Board of Trustees Katie Hall ’80 to initiate conversations on removing Wilson’s name from campus buildings. He will also write to Head of Wilson College Eduardo Cadava to request that he consider removing Wilson’s mural from Wilcox dining hall.

Whoa! The protesters (I'm spelling the word right) got played. Just 2 days ago, The Daily Princetonian had this:

Asanni York ’17, one of the organizers of the protest, explained the group would not leave until Eisgruber signed the document listing the demands.

“We are tired of talking to people. It’s conversation, conversation, conversation. We try and protest; we meet with the administration every other week,” York said. “We’re done talking. We’re going to be here until he signs this paper. We’re going to be here until things are met.”

You didn't want more conversation. He had to sign the paper, but the paper he signed was about how there would be more conversation. It’s conversation, conversation, conversation. Conversation all the way down at Princeton. Well played, Eisgruber!

"The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie."

"Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans," writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in "The Case for Reparations."

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

And here's Isaac Chotiner in "Get Ready for a National Debate About Slavery Reparations."

The best argument against Coates's proposals is simply that they will prove to be more trouble than they are worth, i.e. that their practical effect will be a negative one... But... [i]f we can't even have the conversation he wants because people are so defensive or unwilling (or plain racist), it's just more evidence for what his essay rightfully bemoans.

ADDED: Look at the fluid interchangeability of "reparations" and "the conversation." Are we talking about "the conversation about race" that we've been talking about (not) having for the last 2 decades? This almost feels like a negotiation about the conversation, where the demand for "reparations" is designed to get your attention and to prepare you to feel relieved that all you really need to submit to is the conversation.

But, as has often been observed, the supposedly desirable conversation isn't a real conversation. On one level, there's nothing to debate. No one who is to be taken seriously opposes the high level abstraction that is racial equality. On a less abstract level, debate isn't really wanted. The conversation-seekers want to teach lessons and have those lessons acknowledged and taken to heart. There is resistance to that kind of conversation, and I don't think it will be overcome by presenting it in terms of "reparations."

Coates speaks of "spiritual renewal." He professes concern about our national spirit, our our national "consciousness," and our national "self-image," our national "psyche." This is the stuff of religion and its substitutes. I don't believe in or really want awakenings on a grand scale. The human mind belongs to the individual. I would resist the charms of relocating psychic and spiritual matters to the nation.

AND: Coates's analogy to the recovering alcoholic makes my point. The recovering alcoholic is an individual, with an individual problem, going through a personal psychological (and physiological) process. It's imaginative but ultimately specious — and dangerous — to think of the nation as a person.

The morning chocolate conversation.

The coffee was not enough. I had to top it off with chocolate. And now more than an hour has passed since the first post of the day. I feel I should have served up some meaty political posts, delving into... oh, who knows?... some right-winger demanding that his crowd get heated up over the income tax in New York, which is causing him to abscond to Florida... or some left-winger assuring his flock that the John Doe investigation is really, really, probably going to get Scott Walker, just you wait. But I did not do that. My words did not go down on this blog. They evanesced. There is no archive, only vague memories of a conversation. What on earth did we talk about?

Ah! I remember. The conversation started with the observation that in blogging, there is always one post on top of the other, the new surmounting and obliterating the old. I'd been blogging about betamax3000's elaborate "Desolation Row" parody, about which he'd said, at last night's Bookshelf Café:

I Would Like to Think 'Internet meme Row' Will Inspire in Althouse a Sunday Morning Proustian Memory Flow, but - Alas - It Will probably Just be Swept Along With All of Yesterday's Other Pixels.

The Internet Paints Over Itself Each and Every Day.

And I was saying — to Meade, here in nonvirtual reality — that's a subject that bedeviled me in the early days of this blog. Like here, I'm chiding myself in 2005 for taking the trouble to update something written in 2004: "Don't I realize the old posts sink into oblivion? These old posts don't really exist at all." I visualized each new post physically weighing upon the posts underneath, pressing them endlessly into the murk.

Now, I tend to think — and this was the beginning of the hour-long conversation — that blogging is like life itself, with everything happening now, here in person, but better, because we can all talk at once, have the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity, and still be able to hear each other, almost in the present, and because of the archive, at any time, if we happen to care to listen to what has gone before.

I imagined a theater full of 2,000 people, with everyone talking out loud, expressing their thoughts at once. No one would hear what anyone was saying and it would just be an annoying variation of everyone sitting there silently and thinking. Blogging is the equivalent of having the superpower to go to everyone in that theater and close enough to hear that person and to repeat time, the same few seconds, over and over, until you'd gotten around to everyone and heard what each one had to say. No, it's even better than that, because you have a way to find the words you'd most like to hear, and to jump from one part of the theater to another at will.

You might think it would be better to write a book, that could exist and last and be read for 100 years, but perhaps in that 100 years, there would be no more readers than will read this blog post in the next 2 hours. And what of this conversation — this conversation from an hour ago, which I wasn't planning to blog about — this conversation that evanesced? There's no archive at all, unless I can pull it out of my memory and blog it now. There was all that and many more observations, including much talk of this panel discussion of 4 comedians where (at some point) they get to the topic of using what I will refer to as "the N-word"...



... and we talked about what it means to be "edgy," the subjectiveness of the edge with respect to comedy as opposed to the edge in slope snowboarding (and our own subjectiveness about what we were calling "the edge" as we nearly got into an argument), and how Michael Richards got into trouble by thinking he could be Lenny Bruce (and what was it Lenny Bruce did anyway? was it the same as the way Dustin Hoffman did it in "Lenny"? (NSFW)), and how comedians in a panel discussion are not the same as comedians doing standup, and panel discussions seem like they are supposed to be friendly conversation, but really involve a lot of competitive hostility, which maybe is what Chris Rock was doing to Louis CK in that part of the panel discussion that Meade described, but I still haven't watched, but I've been on plenty of academic panel discussions and I have a bit of a superpower to detect passive aggression, and that's why I like to do things in writing, from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, where the second post of the day, 2 hours after the first, is way overdue.

"The backlash that forced ABC to cancel Ms. Barr’s television series reflects a distaste for passé, plainly stated racism..."

"... in a society that likes to see itself as having put bigotry behind it. Nevertheless, centuries of institutional racism — and the dehumanization of black people upon which it relied — have left an indelible imprint on how Americans process blackness. The notion that the country might somehow move past this deeply complex, historically layered issue by assuming an attitude of 'color blindness' is naïve. The only real hope of doing that is to openly confront and talk about the powerful, but submerged, forms of discrimination that have long since supplanted the undisguised version."

The last lines "The Racist Trope That Won’t Die" by Brent Staples (NYT). The trope under discussion is the likening of black people to apes. The column went up yesterday, the day we were watching the new video "Apeshit," in which Jay-Z calls himself a gorilla. The line is "I'm a gorilla." Unfortunately, Staples didn't incorporate that complexity, and he's left saying things like "The toxically racist ape characterization has been pushed to the margins of the public square." Jay-Z isn't on the margins!

The other problem with Staples is that he ends up with the age-old prescription, the conversation about race. He calls that the "only real hope." Why is it the only real hope? Is there no hope at all in creating a powerful social etiquette of never saying anything that is regarded as racist and waiting until the population is replaced by people who don't think racist things (or who only think them in vague, innocuous ways)? Is there no hope in the forthright, vigorous reclaiming of race in the Jay-Z manner?  Who gets to say where the "only real hope" lies? Maybe the idea that what we really need is a conversation about race is itself a racial trope that won't die.

But, look, here I am, doing conversation about race. Probably not the right kind, and I expect that if Staples were to notice this, he'd tell me I'm doing it wrong.

And that's one problem with the conversation prescription. It's not a freewheeling, endlessly flowing, back-and-forth kind of conversation. It's a conversation that needs to go the right way, and that can get you into bad trouble if you do it wrong, and that often seems to be a demand that somebody sit still and take a harsh lecture.

So it may be might be naïve to think that "assuming an attitude of 'color blindness'" could easily work, but it's also naïve to think that "this deeply complex, historically layered issue" can be processed through that precious human interaction we call conversation.

"I guess I understand the compulsion to find somewhere to engage this national conversation... The white people who do this..."

"... don’t realize (or maybe just don’t give a damn) that we’re on different timelines. You learned yesterday what white privilege means? Great! Welcome to 1962. This, however, doesn’t mean I need to engage you about it today. Or tomorrow. Or ever. And most important, maybe I’m out walking, shopping or playing with my children, or out just, I don’t know, staring at a fire hydrant because I want to give myself a break from writing about, from speaking about, from thinking about and from raging about racism, and you’re asking me to work for you for free. And that’s what it is: work. Free labor. An absolution device for your conscience, provided by me, shipped for free. There’s nothing inherently valuable for me out of that exchange. I don’t have a bucket list. But if I did, a 17-minute conversation about lynching, while in line for ice cream, wouldn’t be on it."

From "You Want to Talk About Racism? Pay Me/And even then, maybe not" by Damon Young, author of "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays" (NYT).

Conversation is not like money. Handing someone a conversation is not like handing them money, because money is neutrally useful and if it's given to you, doesn't take any of your time. But a conversation isn't just a giving. It's a taking of someone's time, and it's always about something specific. That person has some power over how the conversation goes and can try to move it somewhere other than where you had in mind, but that requires time and effort, and who are you to demand that from them? Did you think about that? Or do you imagine yourself to be a wanted gift?

I looked up where Young lives, because I was trying to picture a place where people see a black man, recognize him as an author of a book about race, and think it's perfectly okay to make an effort to engage him on the topic of race, and have a conversation right there on the street at that moment, because that's where they encountered him. He lives in Pittsburgh.

I'm giving this post my tag "etiquette." Don't people understand etiquette?!

If only we could truly communicate.

A woman in Atlanta named Leslie Ruth Hunter writes to the NYT about its recent editorial "Measuring the Blogosphere":

I have a suggestion that would save us all a lot of time and aggravation as we grow increasingly more addicted to modern technology.

It's ridiculously simple really. How about if all those who spend much of their time chattering on their cellphones stow them somewhere, and actually talk to the living, breathing human beings right in front of them? Then maybe they wouldn't have to spend so much time blogging us all senseless.

We'd all be truly communicating, and we'd have more time to truly accomplish something. Or perhaps just enjoy life.

Radical idea? You decide.

I understand -- really, I do -- how someone who doesn't feel moved to blog and doesn't enjoy reading blogs might feel dispirited by all the blogging. And I agree that face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication. I'd even go so far as to say that -- in its highest manifestations -- it's the best thing.

But blogging is just writing, and like other writing, it has aspects that are better than conversation:

It can reach beyond the people you know.

It can reach people in the future, including the people you know.

It can reveal things that cannot come up in ordinary conversation.

It can allow one person to contribute a larger share of the ideas than would be seemly in conversation.

It lets you leap over your immediate physical environment.

If I stuck to face-to-face conversations, I'd be talking to people in Madison, Wisconsin all the time! One of the best things about blogging for me has been the ability to talk to (and with) people outside of this very specific locality. I'm not knocking it as a place to come and be a student for a while. (Come to our wonderful Law School!) But it's damned insular. The self-satisfied, easily offended lefties can really get to you after a while! [UPDATE: This does not refer to my friends!] One reason I blog (a lot) is that I have so much material I can't use in real life conversations. I'm conversation starved here and have been for twenty years!

And then, of course, there are the links. When bloggers talk, we sometimes say: "I wish I could link to" some article we've read. I'm used to talking about things and showing you the text at the same time. I can't do that very well in conversation, even if I carry the NYT around with me. In conversations chez Althouse, we do often start taking books off the shelves and pointing out paragraphs, but that's more of a family thing.

Finally, once we've become bloggers, our conversation changes. Many times I've said or heard things like:

I already blogged about that... [so I think it would be tedious to repeat this.]

Well, if you'd read my blog ... [you wouldn't be making me repeat this.]

That's the short version, you should read the whole thing on my blog...

And for us hardcore bloggers that last line seems like an amusing witticism, right?

Zoom is ruining conversation because it's much harder to interrupt.

I'm reading "How the Zoom era has ruined conversation." (WaPo) Maybe you think it's better to disempower the interrupters. If so, you need to hear from those who understand the importance of overlapping conversation — collaborative conversation:

Suppose someone is speaking and another person, eager to express agreement, chimes in at the end of their sentence. Over Zoom, this tends to derail the discussion or narrative.... Then there’s the turn-waiting....

[S]ociolinguist Deborah Tannen... describes cooperative overlap as “talking along to show enthusiasm, as a way of encouraging the other person to keep speaking rather than cutting them off.” Her initial research focused on the difference between Jewish New Yorkers with an Eastern European background (who were inclined toward talking over) and Californians of a Christian background (who tended to feel interrupted).

Well, there you have it. California is winning.

Meanwhile, for people who don’t particularly like the idea of fighting to be heard, the Zoom era — which creates more orderly queues for commenting during conversation — has been a boon.

The article doesn't mention Justice Thomas at this point, but should. He didn't speak at oral argument for a decade, and now, he's a full and equal participant. 

ADDED: Despite the usual eagerness to talk about race, this WaPo article avoids the subject. Because the idea is that overlapping, collaborative conversation is good, there's an avoidance of the possibility that it's part of white supremacy.  Thus we have Christian Californians on the anti-interruption side and Jewish New Yorkers as their opposite. Where are the black people?

What's the more masculine response to nasty epithets — having a conversation or calling a 15-yard penalty?

"If someone wants to call me a name I'll have a conversation, with that guy and hopefully it won't happen to someone else."

Said Michael Sam — the openly gay football player, who's participating in the National Football League Scouting Combine — when a reporter asked he what he'd do if a teammate directed an epithet at him.

Meanwhile, the NFL is close to adopting a new rule that would impose a 15-yard penalty for the use of the N-word during a football game.

"I will be totally shocked if the competition committee does not uphold us on what we’re trying to do," [said John Wooten, chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, the influential group that proposed the rule]. "We want this word to be policed from the parking lot to the equipment room to the locker room. Secretaries, PR people, whoever, we want it eliminated completely and want it policed everywhere. I think they’re going to do what needs to be done here... There is too much disrespect in the game."...

"I think there is going to be a higher emphasis placed on it," [said former player Harry Carson, who's now the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance]. "It needs to be put a halt to in the locker room, on the field, whether it’s staff, whether it’s a player, there is no room for it... I don’t think it’s any new rule that we are pushing for because we have been told by the league that the penalty is there. It just has to be assessed if it is used."

That last remark refers to the existing rule against "unsportsmanlike conduct." Carson's point is that there needs to be a new, focused effort, with automatic enforcement on first violation.

I would expect to hear the criticism that the rule unfairly burdens black players, who might claim a different self-expression interest in the use of the word. But you can see why only a clear rule, equally applicable to everyone, will work, and when that rule is adopted everyone in the game will have to stop.

What do you think of free-expression;chilling rules like this within this particular workplace? Do you think the "I'll have a conversation with that guy" approach is better? Is it ironic that the gay guy brings an old-school manly approach to dealing with the problem? Or do you think the flat, automatic harsh penalty — no exceptions, no nuance — is the harder core masculinity?

My law-professorly answer to those questions is...

Bedeviled.

 

This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.

I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")

That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."

I like the word bedevil. It's vivid, perhaps too vivid. Are we to picture devils? Does anyone think of Jeffrey Epstein as literally The Devil? I know JD Vance seems to think the UFOs are devils — "I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:

I hope she's starting a conversation with America.

"[Hillary Clinton] is scheduled to declare her second run for president on Twitter at noon eastern time on Sunday...  followed by a video and email announcement, then a series of conference calls mapping out a blitzkrieg tour beginning in Iowa and looking ahead to more early primary states."

My headline — which is what I said out loud on reading the news — is a reference to Hillary's last launch, in January 2007. As I wrote at the time, on first watching her video announcement:

It's all about the dialogue, the chat, the conversation:

I’m not just starting a campaign, though, I’m beginning a conversation — with you, with America. Because we all need to be part of the discussion if we’re all going to be part of the solution. And all of us have to be part of the solution.

Let’s talk about....

And let’s definitely talk about...

So let’s talk. Let’s chat. Let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.

Because the conversation in Washington has been just just a little one-sided lately, don’t you think? And we can all see how well that works.

And while I can’t visit everyone’s living room, I can try. And with a little help from modern technology, I’ll be holding live online video chats this week, starting Monday.

So let the conversation begin. I have a feeling it’s going to be very interesting.

We've been talking with Hillary now for such a long, long time....

"Some users suggest that Grok 'sounds way more intelligent' than other chatbots as a result of its edgy 'personality.'"

"As for this writer, I'm not so sure. Cutesy prose and crassness -- however entertaining or inflammatory -- don't equate with cleverness, necessarily."

From "X begins rolling out Grok, its 'rebellious' chatbot, to subscribers" (Yahoo Life).

I wanted to check out Grok, which required me to sign up for X Premium+ and locate "Grok" in the left sidebar at the X website. (I use X on my browser.) Here's the shocking conversation I had:

Listening to the Musk/Trump conversation....

So far, it's a matter of trying to get signed in. I think a lot of people are having trouble. But here's a place to talk about it — your trouble signing in or, with some luck, the actual conversation.

UPDATE: Here's the link to watch if you can, but...

There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.

Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024

UPDATE 2: I'm in a space where it says "joined" and plays electronic "music"-type sounds.

UPDATE 3: It's on! I'm hearing Musk introducing the conversation — to get a "feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation."

UPDATE 4: Trump's speech is odd, like he's got a swollen tongue, and Musk sounds more nervous than I have ever heard him.

"Legendary journalist Christiane Amanpour walks into the room trailed by the most impressive of clouds: a cumulonimbus of fortitude, pierced by solar flares of her signature erudition."

So begins Kevin Fallon in "Christiane Amanpour on Replacing Charlie Rose: ‘It Sends a Really Big Message’/The acclaimed journalist on her new show, defending the press against Trump’s attacks, and what it means to be the woman replacing the disgraced Charlie Rose" (Daily Beast).

We attempt a joke. “Nice to meet a fellow ‘enemy of the people,’” transforming President Trump’s controversial characterization of the free press from a scorching threat on democracy to an interview icebreaker.

“I refuse even to joke about it,” Amanpour says, grinning gamely but preparing to deliver the first in a series of manifestos that would score our conversation about the state of journalism-under-fire....

Fallon is a florid writer. What does "manifestos that would score our conversation" even mean? Doesn't a "manifesto" need to be something more than a one-liner? My dictionary, the OED, says it's "A public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy..." and "In extended use: a book or other work by a private individual supporting a cause, propounding a theory or argument, or promoting a certain lifestyle." As for "score," I guess he means "To cut superficially; to make scores or cuts in; to mark with incisions, notches, or abrasions of the skin." Example from the OED: "The elephant,..deeply scores with its tusks the trunk of the tree" (Charles Darwin).

The conversation is covered with cut marks made by declarations of policy. Okay. It's actually quite common to speak for words as capable of making cut marks. We often say "cutting remarks." And a conversation is something that can be cut. We speak of cutting into the conversation and even of silence that feels like you could cut it with a knife. Or a manifesto.

Anyway. Back to late-night talk shows. Why were people watching Charlie Rose in the first place? Did he make them feel smart and sophisticated? Can Christiane Amanpour access the same streak of TV audience emotion? If there was a sexual element to the response, can Christiane do what Charlie did? By the way, was Ted Koppel in a different psycho-sexual niche? Who watched Ted and who watched Charlie? What was that late night consumption of men chewing the news all about?

IN THE COMMENTS: campy said:

“I refuse even to joke about it,” Amanpour says,...

THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!

"[Paula Marantz Cohen] is a self-professed 'talker,' the sort of person who lives for chatty checkout lines, leisurely coffee dates, vigorous college seminars, and spirited dinner parties..."

"... as well as spirited daydreams about whom you would invite to your fantasy dinner party of historical figures. She writes of the special 'synthesis' that occurs in marriage or other long-term partnerships, in which one’s lexicon merges with that of another, producing shorthand terminology and a distinct rhythm and style. But she doesn’t prize these types of decades-long exchanges over others; she always remains open to new connection. 'Surely, my readers can identify with that welling of positive feeling—that almost-falling-in-love-with someone with whom we engage on an authentic level,' she writes. 'I have felt this not only for friends and even strangers with whom I’ve had a probing or even a fleeting conversation but also for whole classes of students where it can seem that the group has merged into one deeply lovable and loving body.'..."

Writes Hua Hsu in "What Conversation Can Do for Us/Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?" (The New Yorker).

"Some have wondered whether support for B.L.M., especially among white people, is genuine or merely virtue-signaling."

"As the volatility of the polling suggests, there is reason to be skeptical. This conversation, however, misrepresents racism as a social problem rooted in individual values rather than as a system forcefully sustained by our institutions. In our opinion, a more fruitful conversation would consider how to transform support for B.L.M., wherever and how tenuous it exists, into more enduring political change. Whether or not this effort will involve substantial numbers of white Americans remains to be seen."

From the last paragraph of a NYT article by a Wellesley professor of social sciences and political science (Jennifer Chudy) and a Stanford polisci prof (Hakeem Jefferson). The article is titled "Support for Black Lives Matter Surged Last Year. Did It Last?"

So... you never really know what white people mean when they say they support Black Lives Matter. Maybe they're only saying what they think they ought to say in order to be seen as the kind of people they want to be thought to be or maybe they adopt opinions in a perfectly shallow way that is mostly about their own vanity. 

The authors acknowledge that's a big problem with the polling. Their answer is to turn away from that line of thinking altogether. They don't care about your individual values. You may be answering the poll questions like a human being who is concerned about your virtue and your reputation for virtue, and they know that's distorting and undermining the poll results. What the authors care about is the "system forcefully sustained by our institutions," and they're hoping to change it.

But is there support for changing it? The authors essentially admit they don't know. They can't know, because the poll respondents are human beings — self-regarding, vain, confused, proud, fearful. The authors want a "conversation" about political change aimed at changing institutions, but somehow they don't want the conversation to deal with the minds of the people they need to influence as they hope to change the institutions. 

They need people to believe that racism is "a system forcefully sustained by our institutions." And you never know what people really believe or how shallow and selfish their beliefs are. The authors' frustration at having to talk about that is understandable — recognizably human. And, of course, a lot of people must want to change the topic of conversation away from the subject the authors insist is the really fruitful topic.

Amazon's Alexa recorded a conversation between a man and his wife and sent the recording to the man's employer.

The NYT reports:

Now, Amazon says it knows what happened: As the woman, identified only as Danielle, chatted away with her husband, the device’s virtual assistant, Alexa, mistakenly heard a series of requests and commands to send the recording as a voice message to one of the husband’s employees.

“Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like ‘Alexa,’” Amazon said in a statement. “Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request. At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, ‘[contact name], right?’ Alexa then interpreted background conversation as ‘right’. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”

That reminds me: The other day, I was using my iPad and not intending to engage with Siri and the Siri screen came up. And it just said — I kid you not — "Fuck you."