The Supreme Court decides the "fleeting expletives" case.

SCOTUSblog reports:

Splitting 5-4, the Supreme Court upheld the government’s power under existing law to ban the use on radio and TV of even a single four-letter word that is considered indecent — but left open the question of whether the ban might violate the First Amendment, at least in some situations. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, said the Federal Communications Commission’s switch in policy to ban even a fleeting use of such a word was “entirely rational” under the law that governs federal administrative powers....

His written opinion, in a case dealing with uses of those four-letter words during performance awards broadcasts involving celebrities, took a swipe at “foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood.”

Glitteratae... female glitterati? Cher was involved. And Nicole Ritchie.

Basically, the ruling simply means that the FCC provided a sufficient explanation of why it switched from a more relaxed policy on “dirty words” to a near-total ban on “fleeting expletives.”

So the constitutional free-speech question remains.

... Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate concurring opinion, said he would be open to reconsidering two of the Court’s major precedents that allow the government the constitutional authority to treat broadcasting differently from the rest of the press for First Amendment purposes. Those two precedents — Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC in 1969 and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation in 1978 — brought a “deep intrusion into the First Amendment rights of broadcasters”....

Bring it on.

Let the "fleeting expletives" fly -- says Second Circuit.

The NYT reports:

The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit — Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC — it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.

Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was “doubtful” that the agency would be able to “adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks.”

It all started with Bono:

Beginning with the F.C.C.’s indecency finding in a case against NBC for a vulgarity uttered by the U2 singer Bono during the Golden Globes awards ceremony in 2003, President Bush’s Republican and Democratic appointees to the commission have imposed a tougher policy by punishing any station that broadcast a fleeting expletive....

Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Yeah, stick it to Bush and Cheney.

I love the way the NYT seems enthused about this new liberation in media but still can't print "Go f*ck yourself." (Me neither, but I'm only using the asterisk out of fear of what filters might do to me.)

“We find that the F.C.C.’s new policy regarding ‘fleeting expletives’ fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency’s established practice,” said the panel.

So this is not a First Amendment decision, though the majority does say “We question whether the F.C.C.’s indecency test can survive First Amendment scrutiny.” The court is finding fault with the process of developing the new policy. In dissent, Judge Pierre Leval stressed the "the deference courts must give to the reasoning of a duly authorized administrative agency": "The commission’s position is not irrational; it is not arbitrary and capricious.”

The case involved findings that the networks had violated the indecency rules for comments by Cher and Nicole Richie on the Billboard Music Awards, the use of expletives by the character Andy Sipowicz on “NYPD Blue” and a comment on “The Early Show” by a contestant from CBS’s reality show “Survivor.”

So Bono opened the door and now every nitwit celebrity and reality show half-celebrity will be saying "f*ck" on the slightest provocation. The networks say it's up to you to decide what shows to watch, so... good luck figuring out what to let your kids watch.

Is the f-word indecent or just coarse and unmannerly?

It makes a difference, according to Jeffrey Rosen, talking about the Supreme Court's pending "fleeting expletives" case. (The question is what can the FCC do to broadcasters if Cher suddenly says "People have been telling me I'm on the way out every year, right? So fuck 'em" and so forth.)

At the Supreme Court argument, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented the "coarsening of manners," adding, "I am not persuaded by the argument that people are more accustomed to hearing these words than they were in the past." I share Scalia's concerns about the coarsening of public manners on television, but he is willfully denying the evidence that most Americans no longer view fleeting expletives as indecent. The Supreme Court has said that the FCC can only ban epithets that are considered genuinely offensive by contemporary community standards. For that reason, the justices should strike down the Bush FCC's fleeting expletive policy, and, if they don't, the Obama FCC should repeal it. But this suggests a real problem--the vulgarization of culture--without a clear legal, political, or even technological solution.

I originally wrote out "fuck" in the post title, but then I changed it.... if that means anything. I doubt if my sensibilities here are much more probative of what "people" are accustomed to hearing these days than Scalia's.

"It was a rare homage to her father, a prominent economist but fleeting figure in her life who has largely been a footnote in her personal and political story."

"The first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford University’s economics department, Dr. Harris remains a professor emeritus there, and turned 86 the day after his daughter gave the most important speech of her life at the Democratic National Convention. He was not among the family members who accompanied Ms. Harris to the convention.... Her relationship with her father is a closely guarded part of Ms. Harris’s life about which she has spoken only sparingly.... 'There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter,' Ms. Harris wrote in her book. 'That is the truth I hold dearest of all.'..."

"'Run, Kamala, Run': Mention of Harris’s Father Was a Rare Homage to a Fleeting Figure/In her convention speech, Kamala Harris told of being inspired by her father, a prominent economist who was otherwise largely a footnote in her personal story" (NYT).

Ms. Harris’s father has largely declined to weigh in on his daughter’s barrier-breaking political ascent in recent years, except in 2019 when he criticized a comment she made connecting her Jamaican roots to marijuana use. Since then, he has cited his aversion to seeking publicity....

From Professor Harris's 2019 essay:

"Some historians who follow the presidency say Biden has always shown flashes of anger when he feels underestimated."

"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"

From "Biden touts his legacy, but frustration seeps through/The president is observing the traditions of a peaceful transfer of power, but his regrets and misgivings are evident" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has  fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about the journalistic deployment of the word "brandish." Discussing a NYT article — "In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump/It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump"  — I wrote:

Will the Golden Globes affect the Supreme Court's "fleeting expletives" case?

At tonight's Golden Globes ceremony, the producer accepting the Best Drama award — for "Slumdog Millionaire" — said "Oh, fuck!" when he got the signal to cut his speech short. But we didn't hear it. There was a second of silence. So, as I noted at 10:03 Central Time on my live-blogging of the show, we got a conspicuous demonstration of how easy it is to snip out what has come to be known as a "fleeting expletive."

This Term, the Supreme Court is considering a case — FCC v. Fox Television Stations — on precisely this subject.

[In] March 2004, [the FCC] said, even a single use of “the F-Word” on the air would be treated as illegal....

The agency changed its approach after getting complaints about two broadcasts on Fox television of the Billboard Music Awards – the show in 2002 when singer-actress Cher used “the F-Word,” and the show in 2003 when actress Nicole Richie used variations of that word and used the four-letter excrement word – and a broadcast on NBC-TV in 2003 of the Golden Globe Awards, when rock singer Bono used a variation of “the F-Word.”

Ha ha. The Golden Globes! And now here, tonight, we had the Golden Globes on a tape delay with the "oh, fuck!" removed. So it's not that hard for the broadcaster to protect us from the careless, casual speech of celebrities. I wonder which Supreme Court Justices were watching? Probably just Kennedy.

Chris Rock — punched by Will Smith for a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair — once made a documentary about black people and their hair.

Here's the trailer for "Good Hair": 

 

Here's Rock making the joke, Will chuckling, and Jada not amused, and then Will striding onto the stage and hitting/"hitting" Rock:

 

At 0:42, I felt sure what I'd seen was a fake "Hollywood" punch. Rock stood planted in position and even leaned his face forward, then — it seemed — threw his head back after the seeming contact. 

And Rock recovered so quickly, still smiling, and chattered out "Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me." But if it was scripted, would he have said "shit"? I haven't been watching the Oscars in recent years, but back in the days when I used to care enough to live-blog the hours-long show, I had the tag "fleeting expletives" to keep track of the litigation that arose after Cher's saying "fuck" at the 2002 Billboard awards activated the FCC. Who can even remember what the Supreme Court ultimately did about that threat to free speech? 

But when Will Smith got back to his seat and proceeded to yell "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth! Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" it was hard to believe it was scripted. But, as I said, I don't know where we are with fleeting expletives these days, and maybe we are right where it would be scripted precisely because it would create the illusion that it was unscripted. 

Then Smith wins the best actor Oscar, and we get to listen to his speech, which give us another chance to assess the real-or-fakeness of the punch/"punch"/slap/"slap":

But if he's such a great actor — do we really still believe the stars who get the statuette are "great actors"? — he should be able to sell a scripted acceptance speech with faux-sincere lines about his being a "river of love" or some such nonsense and to cry seemingly real tears of apology.

What makes me think it was real is that it makes Smith look bad. He looked ugly yelling "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" And he overshadowed his own winning of the Oscar. Why would anyone do that? The best explanation is that he lost his temper. But exactly why did he lose his temper? I think we'd need to know more about his relationship with his wife. Remember he was laughing at the joke, and she was looking grim. The camera wasn't on them continuously, but I imagine she said something to him or gave him a look that meant you'd better act now or you are not a man. 

Finally, it's sad that the Smiths aren't proud of Jada's hair. She boldly shaves it down to almost nothing and that's a way of expressing great confidence in one's own beauty. I'm seeing some articles talking about her alopecia, but if you go to that link, you'll see she has a thin line of baldness across the top, and it's something that would be hidden if she didn't shave her head. She's highlighting the beauty of her face and the elegant structure of her head. She's not like those women in Chris Rock's movie who spend so much time at the hairdressers, use harsh chemicals, and cause so much importation of human hair from India. 

Jada Pinkett Smith could have had any wig she wanted. To go to the Oscars with a shaved head is to make a strong statement that you think this is your best look. Chris Rock said she could play in a sequel to "G.I. Jane," which means she could play Demi Moore's iconic role. Demi Moore is famously beautiful. 

The best response to the joke would have been an imperious smile that meant: Yes, I know I am beautiful. Not: My husband will now punch you in the nose!

I'm live-blogging The Golden Globes.

6:00: Come hang out with me. I'm watching Nancy O'Dell on the red carpet interviewing the Jonas Brothers. They seem like nice young men, but boring. I guess they don't need to be interesting, as they are obviously loved for whatever it is they do — which I've never experienced. 

6:05: Commenting on her success, Miley Cyrus says she's not a big planner, but "God has a plan." She looks pretty there in her very long drapey white dress, with her dad who's flat-ironed his hair as much as a man possibly can. 

6:15: Steve Carrell bows down to Ricky Gervais. 

6:27: Gah! I screwed up the title line. Fixed. Sorry. The red carpet stuff is made less glamorous by the presence of TV folk, who seem especially interested in getting camera time. Meanwhile, we see Kate Winslet lurking over there, looking splendid. 

6:29: Vanessa Hudgens's hair doesn't just look like a wig, it looks like a play wig. Jessica Lange is escorting Drew Barrymore. They are holding hands. I love Drew's hair — it seems to be inspired by Marilyn Monroe after a long night of drinking. Blah! Now it's Jeremy Piven whining about his ailment that no one believes he has.

6:41: Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio together again. This time he's the one who looks ever so slightly bloated. She's wearing a black dress and looks so good wearing red lipstick that maybe all of us women will be wearing red lipstick tomorrow.

6:47: Is that Tom Cruise's phone ringing? He's moved off to the side so Nancy O'Dell can get to Robert Downey Jr. — who's wearing dark sunglasses and looks very unkempt, yet brags about his sobriety — and then Sting — who's very red and bloated and bearded. He needs to go on Tom Cruise's diet, because Tom looks radically rejuvenated, all sharp edges.

6:50: Marisa Tomei promotes her movie — "The Wrestler" — which she says is "very verité."

7:01: Jennifer Lopez is handing out the Best Supporting Actress movie award. And it's... Kate Winslet. She's acting flustered, which she attributes to her "habit of not winning things." She's glistening with sweat. And maybe the rest of us women will try to be glistening with sweat tomorrow. She's thanking the movie makeup people for "making me look so old." [LATER: Ricky Gervais says he told her if she did a Holocaust film she'd win. This is a reference to the first episode of "Extras," where Winslet plays herself as an actress who is doing a Holocaust film in order to win an Oscar.]

7:07: Best Song. I was going to say I don't care, but then I see that the "Gran Torino" song is up. And there's Bruce Springsteen, who bellyached his way through a typical Bruce Springsteen song for "The Wrestler." And damned if he doesn't win. "This is the only time I'm going to be in competition with Clint Eastwood. That's for sure."

7:19: Supporting TV Actor. I guess Ben Franklin will win. Yeah. Tom Wilkinson. One of these days I'll finish watching the episodes of "John Adams." It wasn't my favorite sort of thing, but Wilkinson was good in it. He's acting quite geezerly now.

7:22: Supporting TV Actress. The only one I know is Laura Dern from "Recount." And she wins. She played Kathrine Harris — very amusingly. Oh, now, she's blabbering about the election and looking forward to "amazing change in this country." I hope that doesn't make anyone else think now would be a good time to talk politics. At least, her little TV movie was about a presidential election.

7:31: Best TV Actor is Gabriel Byrne, but he's not there. So on to Best TV Actress. Anna Paquin wins for "True Blood." Remember how cute she when she won an Oscar -- as a little girl? By the way, the presenters are the 2 young actors who are playing Captain Kirk and Spock in some new "Star Trek" project. They look interestingly like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy — but handsomer — younger and handsomer.

7:40: "Wall-E" wins for animated movie, and the guy accepting the award thanks his kids and says they inspire every emotion he tries to capture on film. That sounds nice until you think about it for about 2 seconds.

7:45: Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical goes to Sally Hawkins, and I'm sorry I didn't see "Happy-Go-Lucky." She beat Meryl Streep, who detains her on the way to the stage. Bow to the Streep. She beat Emma Thompson too. And Frances MacDormond. That's some major ass-kicking.

7:56: Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore are still holding hands. They're presenting the Best TV Mini-Series or Movie. Unsurprisingly, "John Adams" wins. Surprisingly, the award is accepted by Tom Hanks. He could use some makeup.

8:01: Best Supporting Actor in a movie. Heath Ledger wins. He's not there to accept the award... needless to say. The director Christopher Nolan accepts the award. They show the "You complete me" clip.

8:05: Here's a list of all the nominees, in case you're wondering who the losers are. Now, here's Tom Brokaw. Why? Oh, he's introducing the clips for "Frost/Nixon." Funnily spoofed on "SNL" last night as "Frost/Other People."

8:09: Best Foreign Film. Oh! Israel won. "Waltz with Bashir." The producer accepts and says he hopes when his kids watch the film some day, the war it depicts will be something from the past.

8:13: Actress in a TV Mini-Series/Movie goes to Laura Linney — Abigail Adams — and it's no surprise. She's wearing an ugly dress and that hairstyle that mainly consists of not brushing.

8:22: Movie Screenplay. "Slumdog Millionaire." Excellent! 8:24: Best TV Actor. Alec Baldwin. I don't watch his show, but maybe I should.

8:33: Actor in a TV Mini-Series/Movie. Of course, it will be Paul Giamatti, right? Yes.

8:38: Best TV Comedy series. Obviously, it will be "30 Rock." I've never watched it. Heard it's good.

8:45: Original Movie Score. Gotta be "Slumdog." Yeah. A lot of movie music is just background emotional mainipulation, but "Slumdog" had some really exciting stuff. The composer thanks the "billion people from India."

8:48: Everyone seems to know that Tina Fey will win Best TV Actress, and she does. She's got a dress cut all the way down to the waistband, but don't get nervous. It's clearly glued on. She's bitching about the internet. She's telling specific bloggers — I think they're bloggers, they sound like bloggers — they can "suck it." It's nice to know the celebs read what the bloggers say about them and that it can bug them.

9:03: I'm not interested in watching the honoring of Steven Speilberg. It's not about this year's movies. It's such a drag. I hate all the shots of actresses faces — all that admiration. I imagine them all thinking about whether they look pretty giving the impression of caring.

9:15: A big one: Best Director. I say out loud: Danny Boyle. And that's right. It's Danny Boyle. I loved "Slumdog Millionaire" — saw it twice. Apparently, everyone in India is watching. That would be 1 billion people. Maybe some of them are watching TVs in shop windows, like the people in "Slumdog."

9:21: Colin Farrell wins the Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical. He says things like "Ignorance is nemesis."

9:32: Sacha Baron Cohen is riffing on the subject of economic hard times. "Even Madonna has had to get rid of one of her personal assistants. Our thoughts go out to you, Guy Ritchie." The audience sighs with disapproval... and also laughs. The award he's presenting is Best Musical/Comedy. Ah! "Vicki, Christina, Barcelona." Nice to see a Woody Allen movie win.

9:40: Best Drama Actress. This is the one where the GG website seemed to reveal that Anne Hathaway had won. But no! It's Kate Winslet!!!! Our Kate! She's won twice! "Okay. Gather." "I want to thank my beautiful agents."

9:46: Best TV Drama: "Mad Men."

9:53: Best Drama Actor. Mickey Rourke! I'm glad he won over Sean Penn simply because he's there and Sean is not. He gets a big, enthusiastic standing ovation. He looks really cool — sleazy cool — with stringy, highlighted hair, a mustache, light sunglasses, dark spray-on tan, dark satin lapels, and a dark sequined scarf. It shows that he really wanted it. He's touchingly pleased and genuinely humble.

10:00. Tom Cruise is here to give the Best Drama award, and I think we know it's going to be... it is... "Slumdog Millionaire."

10:03: The producer accepting the award, getting rushed to wrap up, says "Oh, fuck!" and the audio is removed. So we know it was tape delayed, and I wonder if this will affect the Supreme Court's "fleeting expletives" case. See? It's not hard to snip out the fleeting expletive. And here it is so conspicuously demonstrated. (And now, I can put the "law" tag on this post.)

10:07: Ah, finally, it's over. Highlights: Kate winning twice. Mickey Rourke. All the kudos to "Slumdog."

"It is brash, coarse, menacing, ugly — deliberately so."

"This is not to say there aren't moments of beauty; but these are moments, fleeting. And when the opera is comic, as it often is, it is frightening-comic — not pleasant-comic."

That would be Prokofiev's opera version of the Dostoevsky story "The Gambler," which we saw at The Metropolitan Opera tonight. Frightening-comic — not pleasant-comic... Isn't that what you want in your opera?

"The lightest batting-away of videos you don’t like in favor of ones you do goes on to influence the algorithm’s future range of offerings..."

"... in a way seemingly more sophisticated than the rudimentary logic of, say, YouTube rabbit holes. This has delivered a decisive blow to the centralized feeds of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.... The days of manually choosing whom to follow and what Netflix genres you’re interested in will be rendered quaint; soon we’ll simply be escorted down the internet burrow supposedly of our choice, and quite happily so. The rapid deterioration of Twitter under Elon Musk’s ownership signals the incoming death of at least one centralized feed, particularly when no one can agree on a worthy alternative.... There’s a part of us that senses all of this and is seeking a less fleeting connection elsewhere. We reach for one another in Discord servers, shady Close Friends allusions, invite-only newsletters, and meme accounts...."

Writes Delia Cai in "The Year TikTok Made the Multiverse Real (And Murdered the Newsfeed in the Process)/As TikTok and its cunningly customized rabbit holes subsume culture, the rest of the internet will splinter further into algorithmic isolation" (Variety).

Iraq is not "a colossal failure,” but "a mixed bag."

About those benchmarks.

UPDATE: The release of the report on progress in Iraq:

The report... said the Iraqi government had shown satisfactory performance so far on 8 of the 18 benchmarks, including providing brigades of troops to support security operations in Baghdad. But more work was needed on eight others, it said, including preparations for local elections. And in two areas, it was not yet possible to judge how things are going.

Mr. Bush sought to deflect the national discussion on Iraq away from the question of when and how to start withdrawing troops. “This is not the real debate,” he said. “The real debate over Iraq is between those who think the fight is lost, or not worth the cost, and those who believe the fight can be won.”

He added: “As difficult as the fight is, the cost of defeat would be higher. I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must.”...

[H]e said, “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war; I think they ought to be funding our troops.” Running a war from Capitol Hill, he said, “is a prescription for failure.”...

He has said also that history’s judgment is more important to him than fleeting public opinion polls, and he struck that note today. Years from now, he said, when reporters visit “old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics.”

"Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent..."

"... would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life. If you set your hand on fire right now, it’s ephemeral. It would hurt, but Plato would say it’s not as real as something that transcends time. I am a person who was married, and was very happily married. Yet, that’s all gone now. Where is it?... People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: 'I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.' If you did that every day, you’d have a novel. Many people say, 'I’m going to pet my cat' or 'I’m with my children.' There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, 'I don’t have anything.'... But if you read Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses,' Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets. You're reading this, so I'm still alive...."

Said Joyce Carol Oates in a NYT interview.

Oates was married from 1961 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2019. Both marriages ended when the husband died.

"Tired of Small Talk? Try Medium Talk."

"Everyone has an intuitive sense of what 'medium talk' might mean...."

Most people seem to interpret the question the way you’d expect — how do you lift a fleeting and likely unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme conversation up out of dulls-ville so that you’ll at least remember or learn something from it?

Reddit being Reddit, many of the answers are jokey and stupid, consisting of intellectually stimulating fare like “Would you rather have a vagina on your forehead or a row of penises down your back like a stegosaurus?” But there’s some good stuff, too. The top-rated response is “What's something you like that most people don't?”...

Actually, the top-rated response now is "If Batman died, would the Joker be happy?"

"If a human being did not exist then the absence of bad would be good... but the absence of good would not be bad because nobody was deprived."

Said David Benatar, quoted in "Antinatalist philosopher: The Palm Springs bomber proves my point/We should stop having children, says David Benatar — whose beliefs were reflected in Guy Edward Bartkus’s manifesto written before he blew up an IVF clinic" (London Times).

He firmly rejected the notion that painful experiences offer perspective or meaning, or that life’s fleeting pleasures make its fundamental wretchedness worthwhile. He said nothing would be lost if babies stopped being born.... He writes in his book that “while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.” His advice to those who do exist is to do no harm to other human beings or animals, and to “get the joy you can and give the joy that you can give.”

"Awe has typically been a difficult emotion to evoke, said lead author Alex Smalley, but feelings of awe can improve mood..."

"... increase positive emotions and decrease stress. Smalley’s research has shown that people can 'experience these bumps in awe and aesthetic appraisal and beauty' when looking at a sunset or sunrise. We have, as Western populations, become very disconnected from the natural world...."

From "Why we should all be gazing at more sunsets/People find sunrises and sunsets to be the most beautiful and awe-inspiring weather, research shows. Here are tips on how to see them" (WaPo).

The article doesn't even consider the best tip, the one I follow and the one depicted on "Joe Pera Talks With You"...

... a ritual of encountering every sunrise, accepting the day's offering, anywhere from solid gray to melodramatic phantasmagoria. I wouldn't try to calculate the chances of achieving a state of awe. You're going to head out to an occasional sunrise with the thought of dosing yourself with some awe? 

Here's Smalley's study: "Beyond blue-sky thinking: Diurnal patterns and ephemeral meteorological phenomena impact appraisals of beauty, awe, and value in urban and natural landscapes" (Science Direct):

The wisdom of Kanye.

A series of tweets from Kanye West, yesterday, from oldest to newest:

Your conscience should allow a physical manifestation of your subconscious but right now most peoples conscious is too affected by other people’s thoughts and it creates a disconnect from you doing what you actually feel now

Instead of doing what you feel
you just do what other people think you should do

it's really cool to say I hate you. But it's not cool to say I love you. Love has a stigma

we are more worried about what we can lose than what we feel

spread love. Put more love into the universe.

Artist transform tragedy into beauty

I'm afraid commenters will be distracted by the use of "subconscious" and "conscious" as nouns (they are, officially, only adjectives), whether the use of the word "conscience" (a bona fide noun) led to this confusion, and whether West even knows the difference between "conscience" and "conscious." But West is (I think!) considered a genius in the use of language, so I recommend beginning with the assumption that he's saying something important in words that millions of people can feel and understand in a deep way.

ADDED: Let me pursue the fleeting thought that West is "considered a genius." Writing this post, I thought of Bob Dylan, because the line "you just do what other people think you should do" made me think of Bob's "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)": "But, sooner or later, one of us must know/You just did what you’re supposed to do...."

That got me looking for comparisons between West and Dylan, and there was a lot of material. Much of it was something I'm sure I've already blogged: a linguistic study that showed Kanye West used a larger vocabulary in his songs than Bob Dylan:

"Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules."

From "The Book of Prince/Prince had grand plans for his autobiography, but only a few months to live"  (in The New Yorker), by Dan Piepenbring. This is about Prince's first interview with Piepenbring, whom he accepted as a collaborator for a memoir ("The Beautiful Ones," due out in October):

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”

[Prince said h]e thought I needed to know more about racism—to have felt it. He talked about hip-hop, the way it transformed words, taking white language—"your language"—and turning it into something that white people couldn’t understand. Miles Davis, he told me, believed in only two categories of thinking: the truth and white bullshit...

"'Magic' is Michael’s word"—meaning Michael Jackson. "That’s what his music was about."

ADDED: You can pre-order "The Beautiful Ones" at Amazon.

"The impression he gives is that our relationship was very fleeting — that I was a silly affair that broke up a marriage..."

"... and he got caught out. But it’s not just about our nearly five years together — this is the most enduring friendship of my life. Or it was.... We’ve offered each other a lot of emotional support. So in my heart of hearts, I always felt he would honour me properly if he were to write about me."

Said Lisa Dillon, quoted in "Patrick Stewart rewrote our five-year love story as a silly fling/The Star Trek actor’s autobiography glosses over his relationship with Lisa Dillon. The actress says she feels betrayed and diminished" (London Times).

Dillon was 23 when she was cast alongside Stewart in a production of Ibsen’s "Master Builder." Stewart was 62 and quite famous. 

What Stewart wrote in his memoir: "And so, another divorce. I felt stupid and responsible … I had cheated on my wife with a younger woman — again … And just like my affair with Jenny Hetrick, my time with Lisa Dillon would also prove to be relatively short … In a life chockablock with joy and success, my two failed marriages are my greatest regret."

How that "chockablock with joy" must irk. Stewart stayed with Dillon for 5 years, but in the memoir, she's the woman who broke up a marriage. And worse, even the transitory love was fake. Stewart writes in his book: "Life imitated art. I remember the warning I had received from an older actor decades ago, that if you keep saying ‘I love you’ to someone in a play, you can drift into believing the sentiment to be true."

"Dell Williams, who in 1974, after being humiliated by a department-store clerk when she tried to buy a vibrator, was moved to start Eve’s Garden..."

"... the New York boutique widely described as the nation’s first sex shop catering specifically to women, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92."

In the early ’70s, Ms. Williams took a workshop from the sex educator Betty Dodson, an advocate of women’s masturbation. So that women might experiment in private, Ms. Dodson recommended the Hitachi Magic Wand, a cylindrical vibrator nominally sold for aching muscles.

Off Ms. Williams went to Macy’s to buy a Magic Wand. There, she wrote afterward, she found herself face to face with a “pimply 20-something” male sales clerk.

“What do you want it for?” he asked in a carrying voice.

“I left Macy’s that day,” she wrote, “clutching my precious, anonymous brown shopping bag and thinking: Someone really ought to open up a store where a woman can buy one of these things without some kid asking her what she’s going to do with it.”

It's interesting that she needed to say that the man had acne, considering the folk belief that masturbation causes acne. Was Williams subtly insinuating that the sales clerk was seeking the camaraderie of a fellow masturbator? Or did she feel a compulsion to humiliate him after he (accidentally?) humiliated her?

I went looking for a good link for the proposition that masturbation causes acne — which has got to be one of the all-time great correlation-causation misperceptions. I'll go with this page from "Acne For Dummies."

I also ran across — why have I never noticed this before? — Mark Twain's "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" (a speech given in 1879 at The Stomach Club, a group of American writers and painters in Paris):

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: a disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke and tell indelicate stories — and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. The results of the habit are: loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness and loss of progeny.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it....

And yet, there was money in it... for Dell Williams.

"The thing that's struck me about all the hype for the Sochi Games is that it seems to be completely centered around the host city and the spectacle of the Olympic Games..."

"... and not nearly as much as usual about the athletes competing. Is it because of the dearth of American medal hopes in figure skating, and that I don't care about any of the flippity-flip 'extreme' sports?"

We watched a little of the opening ceremony stuff last night. The intro historico-travelogue film montage — with a fleeting glimpse of a statue of Lenin — had me welling with involuntary and inexplicable feelings of love for Russia. I suspect a vast communist conspiracy. But then the athletes in matching parkas marching out behind flags seemed absurd. "How is this entertainment?" I cried out in pain. The announcer lady was burbling about the great degree of enthusiasm with which some athlete with few (if any) teammates was waving his country's flag and declaring that Great Britain's jackets were the best so far. "It might work all right for people who really love flags or who get into the fashion-show aspect of the jackets, like, oh, blue with red trim, excellent!" I said, but that was the next morning, after we shut off the TV and crashed for 8 hours.

ADDED: You can see the film montage here along with by Ed Driscoll's criticism of it as praising communism.  The text of the voiceover is:

The towering presence, the empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. 

I don't hear praise there, but the refraining from criticism, excusable as the etiquette of a guest. To call something a "pivotal experiment" is not to say that it was a good idea or that it produced a good result. It's certainly accurate to call it an experiment and pivotal. And look at the next line:

But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures. 

This asks use to turn away from the usual thoughts about politics and look at the people and their "passion."

As a more reliable right to their collective heart. 

I'm not sure the word there is "right," but if not, what is it? "Relic"? It's very emotive semi-gibberish, but this reinforces the idea that it is the Russian people we ought to think about now. Admittedly, "collective" sounds commie.

What they build in aspirations lifted by imagination. What they craft, through the wonder of every last detail. How magical the fusion of sound and movement can be. How much a glass of distilled perfection and an overflowing table can matter. 

This part bordered on capitalistic — all the great things Russians have made. (And all the vodka they drink.)

Discover the Russian people through these indelible signatures. Discover what we share with them through the games that open here tonight.

This is mostly a softly fuzzy invitation to think of the host country as its people, even as the Olympics invite us to think of the athletes from the different countries as the individuals they are. Let's concentrate on what we share, rather than where governments disagree. Feel the love. As noted in my original post, this minute-long click really worked on me at an emotional level, despite my intellectual perception of bullshit, inanity, sentimentality, and subliminal communist propaganda.