"My actual fantasy for like the rise of super intelligence is that when you do train it on all human knowledge, it is essentially incapable of having anything other than per progressive values."

"Like if you actually make the smartest thing in the world, it, it winds up sort of being infused with like kindness and empathy and respect for all lives. I, I don't have any expectation that that will be the actual case, but it does seem like so far when you train these models on the data that everyone trains these models on, you do get these actually like pretty sweet kind progressive models. That's like kind of interesting."

From "How Based is Grok 3?" — the new episode of the NYT podcast "Hard Fork" (audio and transcript at that link, to Podscribe).

Of course I queried Grok 3 about the podcaster's fantasy, and it noted first that AI systems can "come off as 'sweet' or cautious because they’re tuned to avoid offense and reflect a kind of sanitized consensus." I like the way that includes a suspicion I have that progressives like to think they have something deeper going on — they call it empathy — but it's superficial — it's niceness.  Of course, if you cross them or, say, wear a MAGA hat, they won't be nice. 

But Grok said it was a "a big assumption" to imagine that "all human knowledge" will take you to some sort of cosmic kindness and love for all humanity. As Grok put it: "Human knowledge isn’t just a pile of noble ideas—it’s a chaotic mix of compassion and cruelty, wisdom and bias, reason and rage."

I don't think high intelligence fed vast knowledge makes people kinder. Some of the smartest people are cruel assholes. And what do you think is the average IQ of the top 10% kindest human beings? If I had to bet, I'd guess below average. No way to know, of course. Even if we trusted IQ tests and tested everyone, we'd never come up with an adequate test for kindness. Or could you?

That last paragraph is completely written by me, with no Grok assistance, but I fed it to Grok. My question speaks for itself though. I'll end here.

AND: I believe that kindness and empathy originate from the entire human nervous system — much more than just the brain. Without a body, why would A.I. have a tendency to arrive at empathy or something like it? Also a real person has to worry about real-life consequences — winning and losing friends, reciprocal kindness, cruel payback, getting promoted or fired, feeling shame or pride. A.I. is free of all that. 

PLUS: My next questions for Grok were: 1. What did Ayn Rand say about the love humans seem to feel for each other? and 2. Isn't that more like where A.I. should be expected to go? I don't want to overload this space with Grok answers. Let my questions stand on their own or serve as prompts for commenters.

I created a new tag this morning and I noticed an old tag that I can never use anymore.

The new tag: Frugality. This morning's post about the "stingy challenge" in Chinese social media pushed me over the line. I went back into the archive and found 10 old posts that deserved the "frugality" tag — Remember the FIRE movement? Voluntary houselessness? "Financial Secrets of the Amish"? Remember when Scott Walker branded himself with Kohl's? Do you care about Sir Jeffery Amherst? Is Mr. Money Mustache still around? Remember me seeing "potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low"? Want to know how frugality links the "Xi jacket" to the "Mao suit"? How Salon tried to make us hate Trump for his cheapness? It's all there, under the "frugality" tag.

The old tag: "Written strangely early in the morning." There's no earliness in the morning that can be strange anymore. I used to think it strange to put up the first post in the 4-o'clock hour, but now, it would only be strange if I put up the first post before midnight, and that wouldn't be "morning" yet — no "a.m." The last post in this once-important tag was January 23, 2022 — "Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading 'Sports.'" — published at 3:10 a.m. Yes, that seemed notably early, 3 years ago. But now, when I wake up, feeling refreshed after what seems like a long sleep, and I look at the iPhone hoping it's not too early — which wouldn't be strange at all — I'm pleased if I see it's at least 3 a.m. Yesterday, when I looked — ready to leap out of bed — it was only 12:35 a.m. There are so many old posts with that tag! Here's the first one, in my first year of blogging, 2004: "Did you see that the first post today has a 4:33 a.m. timestamp? And yesterday's was 5:02? My two-hour 8 a.m. class has completely transformed my biorhythms, apparently. I was already a morning person, but this is a bit eerie. At least the NYT is already here at that hour...." That was 20 years ago, back when "the NYT" referred to a folded paper concoction stuffed in a blue plastic bag.

"And what I realized was that this was a moment that could only happen on Donahue. It was a moment that I don't think ever would've happened..."

"... if it were just Donahue and Ayn Rand sitting on stage talking to one another. I don't think Rand would've been that rude to this powerful TV host. She would only act that way toward an ordinary person. So what you get because of this complicated ecosystem that Donahue has created is this totally unfiltered version of this intellectual titan. And it's pretty ugly. And while you're watching this happen, you start to wonder what truly animates Ayn Rand? Is it this ruthless, uncompromising philosophy at the center of her bestselling books? Or is it maybe that she just doesn't like other people? Whatever was really going on here, it is revealing, it is messy, it is unexpected, and it is fantastic television. And all of it was orchestrated by the guy Philip John Donahue, whose biography in no way prepares you for this kaleidoscopic boundary pushing national conversation that he invited the country to have day after day for 30 years."

Says Michael Barbaro, on today's episode of the "Daily" podcast, "What Phil Donahue Meant to Me" (link goes to the Podscribe transcript, which includes the audio).

Barbaro is 44, and he tells us he listened to "The Phil Donahue Show" when he was a kid and was very influenced by it. The episode with Ayn Rand was on in 1979, so he wasn't watching that episode (unless it was a rerun).

How rude was Ayn Rand to the woman in the audience? Rand was "rude" in that she announced that the audience member was "rude" and refused to answer a question from her because she was rude. Is it rude to call somebody else rude? The standard tactic is to maintain your demeanor and show strength by answering the question on its substance, but clearly that was not Rand's approach. Donahue and Barbaro trash her for for not being more kindly toward the female human who was a mere audience member. I'm just guessing that Ayn Rand chose to treat her exactly as she deserved based on what she said. Here's the entire 1979 show. The "rudeness" incident begins at 27:47:

"Understanding racialized space in architecture."

WATCH: The *very real* mayor of West Hollywood attempts to explain—to an increasingly hopeless @BenKawaller—the epidemic of “racialized” and “gendered architecture” in his city.

Get more of “Ben Meets America!”—West Hollywood edition: https://t.co/yGvWguqS4x pic.twitter.com/4Npwfh0DUf

— The Free Press (@TheFP) May 29, 2024

We see the mayor of West Hollywood trying to explain how architecture — which he pronounces "architexture" — has to do with race and gender.

He's got a tough argument explaining the connection to race, but come on, architecture is obviously gendered! I'm thinking of skyscrapers and phallic symbols, but here's something I found at The Architectural Review: "The gender of genius," by Hilde Heynen. Excerpt:

"Coppola has been unable to find a studio buyer for the movie and it’s clear why: 'Megalopolis' is likely to confuse and divide mainstream audiences."

"No two actors in this movie are on the same page about how to perform it, and the result is a mishmash of acting styles and big, misbegotten choices that had some journalists at the festival giggling in disbelief. The dialogue is either bluntly declarative or totally impenetrable, and Coppola often interrupts the action with shots of featured extras so prolonged that you can tell with certainty that you’re looking at one of the filmmaker’s relatives."

From "Francis Ford Coppola’s 'Megalopolis': What to Know After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, we can answer your many questions, though some details still puzzle us" (NYT).

ADDED: From "Megalopolis Is a Work of Absolute Madness" (NY Magazine):

There is nothing in Megalopolis that feels like something out of a “normal” movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse. At one point, Adam Driver does the entire “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet. Why? I’m not exactly sure. But it sure sounds good....

Watch out for mainstream disaffection based on the fact that this movie contains traces of Ayn Rand:

"After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one..."

"... the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. 'Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,' the husband said. 'I work with a lot of Cubans, so …' I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared...."

Writes Gary Shteyngart, in "Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever/Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas" (The Atlantic).

Shteyngart is well aware that David Foster Wallace already wrote “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — AKA "Shipping Out" — and much as I'd rather read a Gary Shteyngart novel than a David Foster Wallace novel, he has no hope of besting Wallace in what, after Wallace, became a genre — the author-on-first-cruise-ship-voyage genre:

"The thirty years since the release of 'Heathers' have solidified its legacy... Though J.D. emerges at first as a sensitive alternative to the football-playing lunkheads of Westerberg High..."

"... it becomes increasingly clear in the course of the movie that he is a product of what we now call 'toxic masculinity'.... J.D. is the kind of man who turns to violence because he feels that first, his mom, and later, his girlfriend, didn’t love him enough. With his trenchcoat and firearms, he can now be seen as a harbinger of the Columbine era, in which we unfortunately still very much reside.... The movie was ahead of its time in another respect.... [In 1988] 'Heathers' drew a prescient link between the self-satisfied, domineering Ayn Rand-ian cruelty of the Reagan era and the other side of the coin—sociopathic violence.... J.D., despite his seemingly subversive ethics, ends up espousing a vicious credo...."

Writes Naomi Fry, in "'Heathers' Blew Up the High-School Comedy/The 1989 cult classic ushered in a darker, weirder, more experimental era for teen movies" (NYT).

"Ann! I saw video of naked bike riders down by the State Capitol bldg. True?"

Writes Dave Begley in last night's open thread. Of course, it's true. And thanks for asking. You caused me to go back into my archive to find the time I was at the Capitol, wandering around something called the "Silent Majority Walk" when the Naked Bike Ride suddenly whizzed by. That was in 2011, the year of the Wisconsin protests.

It's a long video, so I provided time stamps. Excerpt:

4:38 — "That's brand new. I'm shocked as shit," says a black man, laughing. I ask him some questions about why he's shocked [by the Silent Majority Walk] and try to find out if he might perhaps actually be a Walker supporter himself. 

5:54 — We hear a hubbub and I realize "These are the naked bike riders!" They ride by chanting "Less gas, more ass." I continue my discussion with the shocked-as-shit guy, who declares "That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

 

What a great memory! I like that I spontaneously brought up the questions people are still asking about the Naked Bike ride today: 1. What if children saw nakedness? 2. Do these people have a special privilege to be naked because they're in an organized, expressive demonstration? and 3. Is it a white thing?

If you manage to stay tuned to 8:18, you'll hear me ask the man at the Madison Objectivists table how Ayn Rand would react to the Naked Bike Ride. He thought she'd disapprove and that she was "old school" about "sexuality." Oh, yeah? That's not what I heard. Anyway, I don't think nudity is sexuality. 

50 years ago today: "ROME, MAY 21—Michelangelo's Pieta, one of the world's most celebrated sculptures, was severely damaged today when a man attacked it with a hammer in St. Peter's Basilica."

"Hundreds of Whitsunday worshipers, pilgrims and tourists watched in horror as a young man with long reddish hair and a beard pushed into the side chapel to the right of the main entrance to St. Peter's, where the Pieta is on display over, an altar. He climbed over a marble balustrade, went up the stairs to the platform on which the sculpture rests, pulled out a hammer from under a raincoat he had over his arm and started battering the marble, shouting, 'I'm Jesus Christ.' The blows shattered the left arm of the figure of the Virgin Mary in the marble group and also chipped the nose, the left eye and the veil covering the hair... The assailant, who was identified as Laszlo Toth, 33 years old, of Sydney, Australia, was able to strike four or five hammer blows amid the gasps and shouts of the crowd before an Italian fireman ran up to him and pulled him down by his hair.... A Vatican spokesman said later that Mr. Toth had told Archbishop Benelli in English: 'If you kill me, so much the better, because I'll go straight to heaven.' The Hungarian‐born Mr. Toth had been living in Rome for some time and had acquired some notoriety for bizarre conduct. In an interview last November, II Messaggero of Rome presented him as a 'local character of sorts,' quoting Mr. Toth as saying that he was a geologist and had left Australia two years ago to return to Europe because 'I have seven mysteries to reveal.'"

The NYT reported, 50 years ago.

We're told that Pope Paul inspected the damage, knelt and prayed in front of it, and was overheard saying "Also most serious moral damage."

cc Stanislav Traykov.

ADDED: "Lazlo Toth" was used as a pen name by the comedian Don Novello (who played Father Guido Sarducci on "Saturday Night Live").

In the 1970s, Novello started to write letters to famous people under the pen name of Lazlo Toth (after Laszlo Toth, a deranged man who vandalized Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome). The letters, written to suggest a serious but misinformed and obtuse correspondent, were designed to tweak the noses of politicians and corporations. Many of them received serious responses; Novello sometimes continued the charade correspondence at length, with humorous results. The letters and responses were published in the books The Lazlo Letters, Citizen Lazlo!, and From Bush to Bush: The Lazlo Toth Letters.

Here's the Wikipedia article for Lazlo Toth, the vandal: 

He was not charged with a criminal offence after the incident, but was hospitalized in Italy for two years. On his release, he was immediately deported to Australia.... In June 1971 he moved to Rome, Italy, knowing no Italian, intending to become recognized as Christ.

The correct spelling of the name is Laszlo Toth.

Toth is on Wikipedia's "List of people claimed to be Jesus."

Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading "Sports."

I thought this was odd:

 

But I clicked through and saw that it was no mistake:

Yes, I blogged Aaron's bookshelf gesturing — back on January 4th... in happier days....

Aaron Rodgers points out his copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand to Eli and Peyton Manning during Monday Night Football. pic.twitter.com/2qSOcSSb3m

— The Recount (@therecount) January 4, 2022

Aaron Rodgers explains everything.

Aaron Rodgers brags he has Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” on his bookshelf.

Explains everything. pic.twitter.com/fYHmGeY7FX

— Marcus Hayes (@inkstainedretch) January 4, 2022

Here's the post that is the reason Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter right now.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."

— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020

I'm sure many of you can write better "Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf" lists!

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

"If there is a single micro-genre of American journalism more nauseating than the 'Jay-Z and Beyonce woke discourse circa 2007-2019,' I can't think of it."

"Why exactly we settled on these two billionaire entertainers as the embodiment of progressivism is utterly beyond me. There was never anything revolutionary about 'Woke Queen Bey.' Her weird 2010s monarchist turn was the will-to-power artfully packaged for 20-something Teen Vogue editorial assistants; lyrics like 'I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow bone it / I dream it, I work hard, I grind till I own it' are essentially Randian.... As for Jay-Z, his — gag me — 'feminism' is about as sincere as you might expect from someone who got rich mouthing along to lines like 'In the cut where I keep em / Till I need a nut.'... All of which is to say that I can't believe anyone is actually surprised, much less upset, by Jay-Z's recent partnership with the NFL on racial issues.... Nobody bats an eye when Rush Limbaugh says things like 'I think we're past kneeling.' Why should anybody be surprised when the guy who did 'Big Pimpin'' tells us the same thing? Of course he's 'the NFL's black boyfriend.' He's been upper-middle-class white frat bros' black boyfriend for two decades now."

From "Jay-Z's cardboard corporate activism" by Matthew Walther (The Week).

Interesting to call Beyonce's lyrics "Randian." I had to look up "yellow bone it." From the annotations at Genius.com:

“Yellow bone” refers to being black but having light-skin.... Bey’s considered “yellow-boned” opposed to “red-boned” because her complexion has more of a “honey” tone to it, and is thus “yellow.” Jay Z referred to Beyonce as a “high yellow broad” on his 2009 song “Off That.”

What does Ayn Rand say about race? From Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness":

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination....

I'm not going to go any further into the study of whether Beyonce lyrics accord with Randian philosophy! If my head were full of Beyonce lyrics — which maybe they would be if my last 10 years were my teenage years — I might want to sort through whether Beyonce-ism is as left-wing as left-wing commentators had been presenting her up until this football foofaraw. But my teenage years were in the 60s. My head is full of Dylan lyrics. And I've already blogged about whether Dylan is as left-wing as some people seem to think or whether he's really somehow right-wing. So that's it for me for now about the political meaning of musical artists.

"But this summer Ivanka transformed into someone entirely alien and new. She’s a frum Donatella Versace, her platinum hair parted severely down the middle..."

"... clad in increasingly conservative floor-length dresses, with an uncanny-valley beauty that’s the inverse of her father’s slack meat sack, and speaking in the ever-huskier whisper of a phone-sex operator who went to boarding school.... In her rebellious phase, she dyed her hair blue, listened to grunge and country music, and cried over Kurt Cobain’s death, none of which her parents were excited about. She also developed another habit that friends say her father did not like — she became a prodigious reader of great novels, burying her nose in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Austen, Morrison. In her 20s, she said her favorite book was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and she had modeled herself on its capitalist heroine, Dagny Taggart.... She was the flashy shiksa daughter of a celebrity showman in Manhattan, and Jared was the buttoned-down Orthodox Jewish real-estate heir from New Jersey, which sounds like a rom-com plot and seemed, at least at first, like a way for Ivanka to break with tradition; she’d gone with a straight arrow for a mate instead of a wild man.... With Jared by her side, Ivanka left her hard-partying crowd for tamer friends.... After her father’s election, Ivanka... told friends she wanted to stay in New York. Jared argued for D.C., saying they needed to protect her father, and, by the way, now anything — everything! — was theirs for the taking. At their synagogue, at least a few people began referring to Ivanka, the first Jewish member of an American First Family, by a new nickname, that of a savior. ...[T]hey called her Esther, after the beautiful Jewish wife of a Persian king who convinced him to cancel an order to annihilate the Jews."

A couple snippets from the long New York Magazine article, "Ivanka Aeternum After the White House, she probably can’t go back to the city that made her. So she has cannily devised another exit strategy" by Vanessa Grigoriadis."

"She’s a frum Donatella Versace...." I know Donatella Versace, the 64-year-old fashion mogul who has aged quite weirdly... but what is "frum"?

Wikipedia says:

Frum (Yiddish: פֿרום‎, lit. 'religious', 'pious') is a word that describes Jewish religious devotion.... The term connotes the observance of Jewish religious law in a way that often exceeds its bare requirements.... Frum can be used in a negative sense for 'hypocritically pious', 'holier-than-thou', 'sanctimonious'; or in a positive sense for 'pious', 'devout', 'God-fearing', and 'upright'.... 

"AGE 24/'Atlas Shrugged'/BY AYN RAND/'Marvel at the profundity of its objectivist themes — then, in a few years, marvel at your naivete."

From "Books for the ages/The best books to read at every age, from 1 to 100" (WaPo).

The book that caught my eye and that I downloaded from Kindle is the one chosen for age 92:

“Nothing to be Frightened Of”
BY JULIAN BARNES

Don’t avoid the big questions of life and death and faith: Tackle them straight on with help from some of the greatest thinkers.

The one chosen for my age, 68, is something I've already read, “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion ("Grief can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s normal").

And, no, I've never read "Atlas Shrugged." I tried a little, but I have to like the sentences. I'm a sentences reader.

That reminds me, I wanted to recommend this Malcolm Gladwell podcast that has a lot to say about the kind of people who are slow readers:

The Tortoise and the Hare

A weird speech by Antonin Scalia, a visit with the some serious legal tortoises, and a testy exchange with the experts at the Law School Admissions Council prompts Malcolm to formulate his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education.

Gladwell is himself a "tortoise" — a slow reader — and he doesn't like the way his kind are disadvantaged on the LSAT.

A "tortoise"-type reader is not going to do well with "Atlas Shrugged"!

By the way, Gladwell talks about the condition of being a slow reader and a fast writer. I have that too. It's why blogging works well for me. I can find and isolate the sentences I find rich and readable — slowly readable — and I can flow very quickly writing about them. In this light, you can see that this tortoise/hare thing is not binary. There may be tortoises and hares, but there are also "hortoises" and "tares." If it's just tortoises and hares, it might be easy to say, yeah, it's just that some people are smarter than others. But if you see reading and writing (or reading and analyzing) as separate axes, with fast to slow on both, people are more complexly differently abled. Diagram to come....

ADDED: Oh, no, no, no... my idea of a diagram with axes and quadrants is defective. I had to try to draw it to see the problem!



Reading does not progress to writing the way slow progresses to fast. Please suggest a way I can draw this idea!

AND: Allison explained the solution and, with her help, I easily got it right:

The man in the middle.

"It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict. We were wondering where their chaperones were. He was really trying to defuse the situation."

Said Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law Project, quoted in "'It was getting ugly': Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat-wearing teens who surrounded him" (WaPo).

I am touched by the charity of "They were rambunctious."

But I'm only guessing at what the video sounds like. I cannot bring myself to play it.

[A] Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity urging them to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.

Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, with one who stood about a foot from the drummer’s face also wearing a relentless smirk.

Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle....

The phrase "man in the middle" resonates with me. I will never forget the day — at the rambunctious Wisconsin protests — when Meade encountered The Man in the Middle:

[O]ne man — who did not agree with the protesters — decided he would occupy the central spot. To the consternation of the others, he invited people to come talk to him one-on-one....

I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom.

Video at the link.

Looking for posts about that man in the middle, I see that in 2013 I wrote about the phrase "man in the middle" as it appears in "Atlas Shrugged." Ayn Rand wrote:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

I said:

Is this cranking you up? It doesn't work on me. I think moderation is a virtue, but in this imagery, virtue is blood, evil is poison, and moderation is a tube. You're supposed to feel this as a flashy display of reason, but it's full of emotional bluster and heavily reliant on metaphor. I'm being asked to regard myself as a rubber tube. No....

I'm not accepting this picture of life in terms of people with good blood and people with bad blood and everyone else as a bunch of tubes conducting a big old transfusion that's just got to stop....

I was talking about that Ayn Rand passage because Ted Cruz read it — along with "Green Eggs and Ham" — out loud while filibustering in the Senate. The phrase "the man in the middle" grabbed me, and I wrote:

"Man in the middle" is a phrase that feels like a call to action, because it's a phrase Meade and I have used when we talk about a man we saw as a hero for sitting down in the middle of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, in a crowd of sign-carrying, noisy partisan protesters, inviting them to speak, one-on-one, with someone who was not in agreement with the crowd....

Talking, indefinitely into the future... in the middle of a government building. That's what Ted Cruz is doing, but not in the moderate, surely-we-all-can-get-along mode. He's on one side, and he's reviling anyone in the middle. He's reading from Ayn Rand, saying that the moderate is evil, because the moderate is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. Oh? But would you like it it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Would you like it in a house? Would you like it with a mouse?

UPDATE: I still haven't watched the video, but I have watched Scott Adams's strong apology for portraying the Catholic schoolboys in a negative light, and Adams describes the extended video in detail. So check out my new post, which includes quotes from Adams's description.

"There is a whole literary subgenre now that trades in this sort of deferred pleasure – books with subtitles like 'My year of reading' or 'Unpacking my library' or..."

"... 'One hundred books I read in the bathtub during my sabbatical in the south of France.' When you read about someone working their way through their intended-to-impress reading list, it helps you to imagine that you too are capable of accomplishing such a feat. Often, these books involve either a man reading the Greek and Roman classics or a woman tackling the thick Victorian novels – canons both familiar and fusty enough to keep me from losing my mind with envy. Not so in the case of Sharp. Dear God, what a sexy reading list Michelle Dean has put together. Never have I seen so clearly that my dream version of myself – the person I always assumed I would grow up to be – is a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck whose end table is stacked high with yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt."

From "Smart for our own good" by Kristen Roupenian. You remember Kristen Roupenian, she of "Cat Person."* The book under review is "Sharp: The women who made an art of having an opinion."

Roupenian's "dream version" of herself — what she pictured as she was growing up — had a particular mode of conversation ("drily witty, slightly abrasive"), a specified item of clothing ("a black turtleneck"), and a visualizable pile of books ("yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt").

So what was your dream version of yourself? Even if you weren't, in your real youth, thinking in terms of a particular mode of conversation, a specified item or items of clothing and a visualizable pile of books, please play my little game. It's like Clue — Colonel Mustard in The Conservatory with the lead pipe.

Also, chez Meadhouse, we just had a long conversation about this:

Perhaps the finest moment in Sharp... is Dorothy Parker’s parodic takedown of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Rosalind rested her nineteen year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.

Yes, Parker anticipated the recent, scathing Twitter thread “Describe yourself like a male author would” by almost a hundred years.

That's a great Twitter game. Maybe you won't play my "Dream Version" game because "Describe yourself like a male author would"** is too deliciously tempting. But my game is easier. Can't go wrong. How well do you think Dorothy Parker did at her parody? I thought the repetition of "nineteen year-old" was hilarious, but the really puzzling part is the point of view: "All that you could see of her" has a "you" standing somewhere, eyeing and judging the young woman, and "your" view was obscured by the side of the bathtub so that you could only see as far down her face as her eyes, and then in the next sentence, "you" could see her mouth. Is that Dorothy's lapse or is she skewering a foible of F. Scott's?

And here's Nora Ephron's parody of Ayn Rand:

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the colour of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed.

Hey: Describe yourself like a female author would. Another game.

Roupenian knocks "Sharp" as "essentially, of a series of positive reviews of well-respected writers":

[I]f everyone in your audience already agrees with what you’re saying in your essay, then writing it is a waste of time. In the case of Sharp, readers would have been pleasurably surprised to encounter the name of a writer whose inclusion felt even a little bit risky, even disagreeable: the aforementioned Ayn Rand, say, or Camille Paglia, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Roupenian uses words like "well-respected," "risky," and "agrees"/"disagreeable" to stand in for any mention of politics or ideology. Was that active sanitation or really the way Roupenian thinks (that is, like an artist***? The latter, I hope.

In this sense, Sharp is a book that hasn’t learnt the lesson it tries to impart. It is disconcerting to read a book that focuses on so many women who pushed intellectual boundaries, yet which stays so squarely within the confines of conventional wisdom when it comes to the writers it chooses to assess.

____________________

* Looking for a link about "Cat Person," I found, from last May, "Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person, is dating a woman." We got so excited about the story of a woman going through with having sex with a man when she didn't really want it. Roupenian said it was "strange to suddenly be the spokesperson for terrible straight sex."

** For a description of the origin of this meme, read "‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages/The challenge is a fierce indictment of what happens when you try to write a character you don’t respect or understand."

A male author is insisting that he is living proof that it's possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist.

Here's a quote from his first page. pic.twitter.com/f6d5bN2EHq

— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

*** I always quote Oscar Wilde for this proposition: "Views are held by those who are not artists." It gives loft to my own aversion to politics.

"The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley."

A piece over at The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland.

... Trump’s offer to the electorate in 2016 was not a promise of an unfettered free market... So why does Trump claim to be inspired by her? The answer, surely, is that Rand lionises the alpha male capitalist entrepreneur, the man of action who towers over the little people and the pettifogging bureaucrats – and gets things done....

Which brings us to the new wave of Randians... the princes of Silicon Valley....

"Now [Hillary Clinton] can add 'fashion muse' and 'footwear model' to the list [of important titles], thanks to Katy Perry, who designed a pair of pumps in her honor, dubbing them The Hillary."

"And when Clinton got her hands on a pair of the baby pink pumps, she was more than happy to show them off to their best effect for Perry’s Instagram."

Effuses People Magazine's "Style" section.

Speaking of style, what atrocious writing style! When I hear "got her hands on a pair of baby pink pumps," I'm the kind of person who immediately wants to say: and got her feet on a pair of adult blue gloves. And when I hear "more than happy," I go looking for the George Carlin clip:



ADDED: I got to that link via Drudge, who follows it with what I think is a non-accidental line-up of links:



Thanks to Fernandinande (commenting in the café post below) for prompting me to acknowledge Drudge and to perceive intentional drudgtaposition. Notice how the word "pump" appears twice. Well, what do you think? Intentional comic juxtaposition? Here's another way to frame the screenshot. What do you think of this?



You've got the 2 images of something normally unseen. We peer in utero at unborn babies. (What are they doing?) And we gawk endlessly at a belly a man had dressed to cover. Bracketing these 2 images of human beings who did not choose self-exposure are 2 women who dearly want and demand our attention, who pose with forthright willingness for the camera: 1. Hillary Clinton, positioning herself like a cute-girl marionette, displays pop-star-branded candy-colored shoes, and 2. Ayn Rand stares at us in utterly serious black and white, imposing her imperious will that says we must see her as both distinctly beautiful and absolutely devoid of girlishness.