२७ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
Sunrise — 7:14.
"You can bet on almost anything today. Elections. Literary prizes. If you have a feeling that, say, Lapuan Virkiä is going to beat Porin Pesakarhut in the women’s Superpesis..."
From "America’s Gambling Addiction Is Metastasizing/When life feels this precarious, it’s only natural to roll the dice on just about everything" (The Atlantic).
If you ever find yourself wondering, Am I the only one who..., the answer is no you are not. There is always someone else.
That's what Meade asserts — and I presume he's not the only one who asserts that. If he could say it, someone else has also said it. You're never the only one.
The specific occasion for the assertion of this immense generality was a discussion of yard signs on view in our neighborhood as we were driving home from the sunrise run this morning. We noted that the Black Lives Matter signs are nearly all gone, for whatever reason. The only persistent signs are anti-gerrymandering, perhaps because there's serious hope of affecting legislation, with help from Tony Evers. (Evers, the governor, is a Democrat, but both houses of the Wisconsin legislature are run by the GOP.)
I mention Evers, and I have to add, "Say it, say it!" which I do to escape the very mild fake annoyance I would experience if Meade said what he always says — or used to always say — which is: "Tony is the little man who lives inside my mouth and tells me what to do." I added, "Do you think you're the only one who whenever he hears the name Tony Evers says 'Tony is the little man who lives in my mouth and tells me what to do'?"
"Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a 'politically correct Disneyland'...."
From "Don’t turn Notre Dame into a 'politically correct Disneyland'" by Harry Mount (The Spectator).
Another U.S. expression the OED notes is "get a wiggle on" (which means to hurry). English has so many words. Do we need both "wriggle" and "wiggle"? And we also have "squirm" and "writhe," to name 2 more. "Squirm" has the advantage of rhyming with "worm," but worms really seem more to wriggle... or is it wiggle? "Wiggle" is the official Bob Dylan choice.
I'm not that worked up about the Disneyfication of the interior of Notre Dame. The contents of those alcoves along the perimeter are transitory — they'll live out their little lives and pass away.
UPDATE: This post made me remember a song that I don't think I have thought of in over half a century:Skipping Xi and going straight to Omicron — I'd have made the same decision if it were up to me.
The World Health Organization appeared to skip two letters in the Greek alphabet when it announced Friday the name for the latest coronavirus variant.... Nu and Xi were apparently the next letters in the Greek alphabet that have yet to be used for a variant....
Internet pundits and politicians speculated that the group skipped Nu to avoid confusion with the word “new” and passed on Xi because of its written similarity to the name of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) retweeted a Telegraph editor who cited a WHO source saying Xi was skipped to “avoid stigmatizing a region.” “If the WHO is this scared of the Chinese Communist Party, how can they be trusted to call them out next time they’re trying to cover up a catastrophic global pandemic?”....
Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer had a different take. “Kudos to the WHO for skipping over the potentially confusing Nu and Xi names and going straight to Omicron”....
If you think not using "Xi" was about undue deference to Xi Jinping, I challenge you to pronounce "Xi," not the Chinese leader's name, but the Greek letter. After you get that right, imagine audio reports about the virus that use that bizarre sound and millions of people trying to understand what they are hearing.
If you get that far and still think WHO should have proceeded through the Greek alphabet in order, imagine all the reports of the "Nu virus" and assert with a straight face that that would have worked out well.
Now, good for you, you've achieved peak Cruzosity!
२६ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
The most beautiful sunrise of this fall continues.
"I feel strongly that the essence of Charlie Brown is premature existential despair and world weariness..."
Thanksgiving with Weird Al.
Just catching up on some emails this morning. pic.twitter.com/RPwp3EMmt6
— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) November 25, 2021
"There was a time I loved riding the Hudson River Bikeway, but the metal bollards dotting the path made me phobic."
From "I Was Afraid of the Bike Path. So I Hired a Bike Coach. A nasty crash instilled a phobia of bollards. I called the Bike Whisperer" by Joyce Wadler (NYT).
Then a "food delivery guy" yells the piece of advice that I think most cyclists know:
"I just hope and pray that maybe Ms. Sebold will come forward and say, 'Hey, I made a grave mistake,' and give me an apology. I sympathize with her. But she was wrong."
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed. He hired a private investigator, Dan Myers... to look into the evidence against Mr. Broadwater, and became convinced of Mr. Broadwater’s innocence. Mr. Myers suggested they bring the evidence they gathered to a lawyer and recommended [David] Hammond, who reviewed the investigation and agreed there was a strong case. Around the same time, Mr. Broadwater decided to hire Mr. Hammond based on the recommendation of another local lawyer. Mr. Broadwater, who was released in 1998, had been scrimping and saving to hire lawyer after lawyer to try and prove his innocence.
Mucciante sounds like something of a hero in this story, but you can see how practical considerations would have been adequate motivation. Imagine if this movie, based on Sebold's telling of her story, had come out and the whole world suddenly took a hard look and considered things from Broadwater's point of view. Broadwater would have come forward, and the movie would have been destroyed. I question how the movie idea even got as far as it did. And how did the book sit out there for so long without a serious challenge? Broadwater has been "scrimping" for 20 years trying to get some attention to his ordeal, which goes back 40 years?!
"When is a racial hate crime not a racial hate crime? When it doesn’t advance the left’s, and the Democrats’, narrative."
The spectacular Thanksgiving.
Our dinner was spectacular pic.twitter.com/lyxTWKbzhV
— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) November 26, 2021
२५ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
"All holidays are sins, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ strict doctrine. Each one is a different tactic of the devil attempting to distract and tempt..."
"During a Q&A session, one student stepped to the mic and called Chappelle a 'bigot,' adding, 'I’m 16 and I think you’re childish, you handled it like a child'...."
From "POLITICO Playbook: A Dave Chappelle Thanksgiving special." Chappelle made a surprise appearance at his alma mater the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
"A growing movement questions the practice of requiring defendants to post monetary bail to ensure that they appear at their court hearings...."
From "The Wisconsin parade suspect was accused of a car attack weeks ago. Here’s why he was out on bail" (WaPo).
He was also convicted of a sex crime in Nevada after impregnating a minor, officials say.
That’s called rape, WaPo. Thanks for demonstrating this whole problem. Crimes against women don’t count. Rape them, hit them with cars, neglect support payments, strangle them, abuse them, rob them, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It almost never matters.
AND: Here's the NYT approach to the same material: "Waukesha Suspect’s Previous Release Agitates Efforts to Overhaul Bail/Darrell Brooks, accused of plowing his S.U.V. through a Wisconsin parade, had been freed on $1,000 bail for a different charge in Milwaukee County, where there is a backlog of cases":
"I’m not sure that having more police officers or more materials on the French shore will help to stop these crossings because we have 200 or 300 kilometers [120 or 180 miles] of shore to monitor 24/7."
Said Pierre-Henri Dumont, a French legislator, quoted in "France and Britain spar over illegal migration, after at least 27 drown in English Channel" (WaPo).
He also rejected the offer of help from Britain, because it's a "question of sovereignty — I’m not sure the British people would accept it the other way round, with the French army patrolling the British shore."
"Sweden on Wednesday confirmed Magdalena Andersson as its first female leader.... Hours after assuming office, Andersson resigned from the post..."
"I’ve done 43 Thanksgivings, and the best one was probably in 1997, when I was 19 and getting sober at Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota."
Writes Molly Jong-Fast in "Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving/Maybe you’ll change a heart or a mind. Or not! Either way, it’s something to do besides just eat" (The Atlantic).
"If the enemy can separate Kimye, there’s going to be millions of families that feel like that separation is ok… but when God brings Kimye together..."
"The English expression 'the social fabric' was coined in the 1790s, the age of the machine loom, when observers worried..."
"Is society coming apart? Despite Thatcher and Reagan’s best efforts, there is and has always been such a thing as society. The question is not whether it exists, but what shape it must take in a post-pandemic world" by Jill Lepore (The Guardian).
२४ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
"The jury has found Travis McMichael, the man who shot Ahmaud Arbery, guilty on all nine counts, including malice murder and felony murder."
The jury has found Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael's father, not guilty of malice murder, but guilty of all other counts he faces, including felony murder.
On the first count of the indictment, malice murder, the jury has found William Bryan, who filmed the fatal encounter with Ahmaud Arbery, not guilty. Here are the other counts he faces and the jury's verdict on each: Felony murder, count one -- not guilty/Felony murder, count two -- guilty/Felony murder, count three -- guilty/Felony murder, count four -- guilty/Aggravated assault, count one -- not guilty/Aggravated assault, count two -- guilty/False imprisonment -- guilty/Criminal attempt to commit a felony -- guilty
"Last year’s protests often devolved into naked criminality, to which many progressives, including those in the news media, closed their eyes..."
"It was very scary. People with no morals, no sense for other people’s safety. I feel helpless. It’s disturbing."
Said one person who works at the mall described in "Smash-and-Grab Thieves Target Hayward Mall; Lululemon Store Robbed in San Jose’s Santana Row" (CBS SF)("Witnesses described some 40 to 50 looters wielding hammers and other tools looted Sam’s Jewelers, breaking glass cases and quickly fleeing").
ADDED: "Why some US cities are facing a spree of 'smash-and-grab' crimes" (CNN): "'There's no political will to prosecute the people in this climate. Why should a police officer waste time getting into an altercation when the person is not going to jail because it's overcrowded and a prosecutor is not going to prosecute that case because it's not high on the priority list?'... The decriminalization of low-level offenses in some states has created opportunities for criminals to manipulate the system.... 'It is incredibly easy to sell stolen merchandise online through e-commerce platforms....'"
The NYT reveals its shortlist of 25 books, one of which will be named "the best book of the past 125 years," and "Gone With The Wind" is on the list.
Isn't that weird?
I read that book when I was about 16, and I thought: This is the best book I have ever read, and I don't think I will ever read a better book, because how can any book be better than this?
There's a lot in the book that's not in the movie, as I was disappointed to see when I finally got a chance to see the famous flick. I was 16 in 1965, and back then, you could only see an old movie if it showed on TV or played in a theater. "Gone with the Wind" never played on TV, not until 1976, but it did have a theatrical rerelease in 1967, which I missed, and another in 1971, which is when I did finally see it.
What I remember loving in the book and missing in the movie was all the detail in Scarlett O'Hara's experience of other women — her mother, Melanie, (the prostitute) Belle Watling, etc. Scarlett was always on the lookout to see what made a woman great, wanted to see herself as a great woman, and she kept needing to recognize that other women were great.
Anyway, that made a big impression on me, more than half a century ago, but I'm surprised to see something so out of step with the times making the NYT shortlist. I haven't delved into what the NYT is saying it means to be "the best book of the past 125 years," but I wonder if what is "best" is to be judged by the standards of our point in time or whether we are somehow counting what the book meant to people at the time it was published and what it has meant to people over the course of time.
Here's the whole shortlist:
The Grammys nominated Louis CK!
The nominations were unveiled on Tuesday, and C.K. earned a nod in the category of Best Comedy Album for Sincerely Louis CK. This was the comedian's first stand-up special since his career was derailed in 2017 after multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. He admitted at the time that stories of him masturbating in front of women or asking to do so "are true."
२३ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
"New York City lawmakers are poised to allow more than 800,000 New Yorkers who are green card holders or have the legal right to work in the United States to vote in municipal elections..."
The NYT reports.
"Trump’s shadow campaign... recently polled Trump-Biden matchups in the five states, all of which were decided in 2020 by fewer than 3 percentage points."
"Jurors on Tuesday found the main organizers of the deadly right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 liable under state law for injuries to counterprotesters..."
The NYT reports.
"Ian Fishback, an Army whistle-blower whose allegations that fellow members of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners prompted the Senate..."
The NYT reports.
"I'm very dismayed about what's happening to the United States... I mean, dude, we cannot let this go. You cannot let democracy slide off the table."
Said the filmmaker Ridley Scott, in Episode 1281 of Marc Maron's "WTF" podcast (at 50:27).
"You get to post bail after driving your SUV over your child's mother??? What about the deterrent of keeping a crazy man in jail pending trial? It couldn't have made the woman he ran over feel safer knowing this crazy man was out o[n] bail. A thousand dollars? Life is cheap in Wisconsin."
Michele LaVigne, a former director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Post that setting Brooks’s cash bail at $1,000 is not necessarily unusual and that bail amounts can vary between jurisdictions and courtrooms.
When Brooks was arrested earlier this month, she said, officials weighing what bail to request probably considered the seriousness of the charges and the fact that he was already out on bail in the earlier case and had continued showing up for court appearances.
ADDED: I'm just noticing that bail is a subject Kamala Harris went out of her way to bring up during the Vice Presidential debate last fall: "We need reform of our policing in America and our criminal justice system... We will require a national registry for police officers who break the law, we will – on the issue of criminal justice reform – get rid of private prisons and cash bail and we will decriminalize marijuana...."Deterring further crime is “not the purpose of cash bail,” LaVigne said. “Cash bail is really, ‘Are you going to show up [to court], or are you not?’ ”
"Diversity is what Texas has over many cities in the Midwest or the West — places like Madison or Colorado Springs or Portland."
"Money is seen as dirty and secret. Money is awkward to talk about. Money is wrapped up in guilt, shame, and fear."
Writes Clay Cockrell, in "I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out" (The Guardian).
"I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating. I believe there needs to be change."
"Art handlers packed up an 884-pound statue of Jefferson in a wooden crate Monday after a mayoral commission voted to banish the likeness of the nation’s third president from City Hall where its resided for nearly two centuries..."
२२ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
On a 0% cloud cover morning, the most interesting thing about the sunrise was how it shone through the state capitol building.
"Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us."
“Over the last few years I’ve watched, appalled, as women like Allison Bailey, Raquel Sanchez, Marion Miller, Rosie Duffield, Joanna Cherry, Julie Bindel, Rosa Freedman, Kathleen Stock and many, many others, including women who have no public profile but who’ve contacted me to relate their experiences, have been subject to campaigns of intimidation which range from being hounded on social media, the targeting of theiremployers, all the way up to doxing and direct threats of violence, including rape. None of these women are protected in the way I am. They and their families have been put into a state of fear and distress for no other reason than that they refuse to uncritically accept that the socio-political concept of gender identity should replace that of sex."
The government — in failing to maintain order in Kenosha — deserves blame for the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.
On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23 — three months after the murder of George Floyd and the riots it sparked — a Kenosha police officer shot African American Jacob Blake. The shooting was far more complicated than initial reports indicated: Blake had a knife, resisted arrest after being tasered, and was reaching into his car when he was shot.... But the video of the incident almost guaranteed that riots would occur without decisive action....
That evening, instead of deploying the National Guard to Kenosha, Evers sent out an inflammatory tweet suggesting that police may have behaved “mercilessly” in their encounter with Blake. “Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin... While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”
A few hours later, 100 cars were torched in Kenosha.
It wasn’t until the next morning, August 24, that Evers called out the National Guard — and even then he sent only 125 guardsmen to Kenosha, which has a population of just under 100,000. That night, arsonists set fire to dozens of buildings in the city. On Tuesday, August 25, Evers sent another 125 members of the National Guard. But that evening, the Washington Post reported, law-enforcement agents were “overwhelmed” by rioters and “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier.”
Evers had turned down an offer of federal support earlier that day. “I have no regrets because the only thing I said no to was Homeland Security and I knew that would not work out because of what I saw in Portland,” Evers said after the fact. Evers has defended his minimal deployment of guardsmen by saying, “We have fulfilled every request that the leadership in Kenosha have asked for.”....
Evers is at fault and so is the leadership of Kenosha.
ALSO: More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).
"Robert Bly, Poet Who Gave Rise to a Men’s Movement, Dies at 94/His most famous, and most controversial, work was 'Iron John: A Book About Men'..."
[The 1990 book "Iron John: A Book About Men"] drew on myths, legends, poetry and science of a sort to make the case that American men had grown soft and feminized and needed to rediscover their primitive virtues of ferocity and audacity and thus regain the self-confidence to be nurturing fathers and mentors.... He held men-only seminars and weekend retreats, gatherings often in the woods with men around campfires thumping drums, making masks, hugging, dancing and reading poetry aloud.
He said his “mythopoetic men’s movement” was not intended to turn men against women. But many women called it a put-down, an atavistic reaction to the feminist movement. Cartoonists and talk-show hosts ridiculed it, dismissing it as tree-hugging self-indulgence by middle-class baby boomers. Mr. Bly, a shambling white-haired guru who strummed a bouzouki and wore colorful vests, was easily mocked as Iron John himself, a hairy wild man who, in the German myth, helped aimless princes in their quests....
Click my "Robert Bly" tag. I've written about him quite a few times, most recently 3 weeks ago, with "This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging."
And I wrote about him in my second year of blogging, 2005: "Remember the men's movement?"
There's this from a post in 2010: "And what are the burdens of manliness? Ironically — ironjohnically — men are made to feel unmanly for developing their set of grievances and whining and moaning about the unfairness of it."
"When a 38-year-old man fell from his bed during a violent seizure, his wife found him shaking and 'speaking gibberish' on their bedroom floor at 4 a.m."
From "His sudden seizures were a mystery. Then doctors saw a tapeworm in his brain from 20 years ago" (WaPo).
I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years. But then I start thinking about this: "Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature" (Huffpo).
Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?!
"I don’t think many on the left are actually super enthusiastic about these diversity trainings, but the general sense is also that only a bitter crank would actually complain about them."
From "How to be an anti-racist/Diversity training doesn't work — here's some stuff that does" by Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring).
"Every month or so, while conversing with sources at Fox News, I express surprise that Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes are still employed by the network. After all, the two men are reality-based conservative thinkers..."
".... who refuse to capitulate to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, Fox viewers rarely get to hear from them. They are booked by the network's producers so rarely that their contracts could be likened to golden handcuffs. Now they are ditching the cuffs."
I'm trying to read "Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes resign from Fox News, protesting 'irresponsible' voices like Tucker Carlson" by Brian Stelter (CNN Business).
If you're not on any shows, you can make a show out of the spectacle of leaving. And Brian Stelter tries to boost the visibility of this Jonah-and-Stephen-never-capitulate show.
As for "reality-based" — it made me think of Alvy Singer reacting to Duane Hall:
"Well, I have to go now... because I'm due back on the Planet Earth."
As for "golden handcuffs" — this expression implies that they were paid a lot of money to go on Fox News exclusively, essentially paid to remain silent. But was that the deal? And how much money were they paid? Stelter doesn't say.
It's noble, I suppose, to walk away from money — depending on how much money it was and how ignoble it was to take it in the first place. But we're not told!
Here's the Goldberg + Hayes statement. It doesn't say how much money they got from Fox. Maybe they only walked away from the erstwhile honor of being affiliated with Fox. Now, they judge that association to be detrimental to their stature, and they break it off. If that's the case, there never were any "golden handcuffs," and there's nothing grand about the gesture of walking away.
"Eighty looters ransacked a Nordstrom store in California's Bay Area on Saturday night, injuring at least three employees in a raid that lasted less than a minute."
"The large group,wearing ski masks and carrying crowbars, rushed the Walnut Creek store, stole an undetermined amount of merchandise and fled in their vehicles. During the theft, two Nordstrom workers were punched and kicked, while another was sprayed with pepper spray. All three individuals were treated for their injuries on scene.... The brazen robbery comes as Bay Area businesses reduce their hours due to a spate of brazen shoplifting incidents. Locals are also slamming woke San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin over his failure to prosecute thefts. San Francisco has also seen an uptick in property theft since a local law downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor in 2014. Store staff and security now tend not to pursue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.... Although most of the raiders managed to flee, police managed to arrest at least two of the suspected looters...."
ADDED: Jeff Bezos looks on warily....
"Protesters upset over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse marched in Kenosha on Sunday — in the presence of a Second Amendment-supporting father-daughter duo armed with AR-15s they said were to protect the demonstrators."
The NY Post reports, with lots of photos of Erick Jordan, 50, and his 16-year-old daughter Jade.
Jordan said he’d been training Jade to use firearms since she was 4 but only let her touch a weapon once she was 14. He said they were protecting a restaurant and two parking lots in the area on the night Rittenhouse shot three people, including two fatally, amid protests over police conduct.
As for the Rittenhouse verdict, Mr. Jordan said: "It is what it is. The jury did their job, and this is America."
ADDED: Did Erick and Jade Jordan smoke out any hypocrites?
"Redistricting in this way — drawing districts so contrived as to be ludicrous, to shore up power that is clearly fading — reads like a balding man trying to fool the world with an embarrassing combover."
Says state senator Michelle Au, quoted in "As Georgia grows more Democratic, its members of Congress will not" (NPR).
ADDED: To extend the analogy, I'd like to ask Au if she'd agree to solve the "embarrassing combover" problem by adopting the equivalent of a buzzcut. And then Democrats and Republicans have to go on with the buzzcut. No going back to a combover.
But the question is: What would a gerrymander buzzcut look like? Can we leave it to a computer that is programmed with information that does not include anything about race, ethnicity, past voting patterns, or political affiliation?
Would Au agree to that?
"After the parade carried on for a few minutes, emergency vehicles sped by, sirens and lights blaring, as a group of children dancing with snowflake props tried to carry on with their performance."
Kaylee Staral, an intern at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, attended the parade with her family, who took their spots next to parents and children with candy bags and blankets. “It was supposed to be an exciting event.... A bunch of little kids were there. People were there to get in the holiday season.” Minutes later, the SUV shot past Staral and her family, and they watched as it rammed into participants....
"If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be" — Part 2.
Yesterday, I blogged:
I was surprised to run across this aphorism on Facebook the other day: "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth Should Be." There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction. I considered delivering truth that would destroy their bullshit celebration of a principle I doubt they believe.
Today, I must destroy my own statements with truth. I'm going to give this post my rarely used "I was wrong" tag!
I wasn't wrong about running across the aphorism on Facebook the other day, but I was wrong to remember "lots of comments celebrating" it. I merely imagined that other people would read it and celebrate it. My son John had reposted something he'd originally posted 8 years ago that passed along a post from Humans of New York. The Humans of New York post had a photograph of a young man with a purple notebook and this conversation between the photographer and the man:
"If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?"
"If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be."
"I like that. Where'd it come from?"
"I'm not sure exactly. But it's really just another way of stating the scientific method. We shouldn't be clinging to hypotheses that are contradicted by observation.
John quoted "If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be" and he added it to a Facebook "album" of his that he calls "Intellectual Honesty." I'd say John is expressing some admiration for the adage. I have some admiration for it myself, but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out in the abstract, I get suspicious.
There were 2 comments on John's repost. The first one, "Topical quote," is slightly celebratory, possibly satirical, possibly partisan. The second one "R'amen" is a joke that I get: It's "amen" for believers in The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So, clearly, truth has destroyed "There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction."
२१ नोव्हेंबर, २०२१
"Asked"?! That's putting it mildly.
I'm reading "Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions" by John McWhorter (in the NYT).
"[W]e think of it as ordinary to not give voice to our questions about things that clearly merit them, terrified by the response that objectors often receive. History teaches us that this is never a good thing."
McWhorter is underplaying the problem. We don't just think it's ordinary to refrain from saying certain things (such as, to name the example he stresses, the existence of race-preferences in higher education admissions). We think it's abnormal to the point of toxicity not to refrain.
We (as a culture) are deeply engaged in teaching young people that they must lie. The "white lie" is no longer merely permissible. It's required. I wonder if young people have retained any of the old-fashioned commitment to truth. It's obviously not the highest value anymore.
I was surprised to run across this aphorism on Facebook the other day: "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth Should Be." There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction. I considered delivering truth that would destroy their bullshit celebration of a principle I doubt they believe.
But I refrained. I consider my reputation as a nice (enough) person on Facebook to be worth preserving. But I didn't believe the aphorism. I just had a mischievous urge to show them their admiration of it was itself a lie. But such urges are better confined to this blog, where no one runs into me by accident.
Anyway, whose aphorism is that? Quote Investigator has done the research, here. The answer is not Carl Sagan.
"Baby kissing is a practice in which politicians and candidates campaigning for office kiss babies in order to garner public support."
So begins the Wikipedia article "Baby kissing," which I'm reading this morning after getting this viral tweet:
Is Biden a "creepy ghoul" there? I see a responsive tweet that says "I blame the mother for putting her child in this situation. Why do these people always b[r]ing their children around this creep?"Little girl slaps Biden’s creepy ghoul hand away. pic.twitter.com/oBfceo5iOM
— Suburban Black Man 🇺🇸 (@goodblackdude) November 21, 2021
Of course, some babies don't like it, and they don't know or care that the stranger handling them is the President. Some Presidents manage to make the baby's rejection work as a charming photo op:
From the Wikipedia article: