"One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship.... Jewish genius operates differently."

"It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different. Where do these habits of mind come from? There is a religious tradition that, unlike some others, asks the believer not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree. There is the never-quite-comfortable status of Jews in places where they are the minority — intimately familiar with the customs of the country while maintaining a critical distance from them. There is a moral belief, 'incarnate in the Jewish people' according to Einstein, that 'the life of the individual only has value [insofar] as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.' And there is the understanding, born of repeated exile, that everything that seems solid and valuable is ultimately perishable, while everything that is intangible — knowledge most of all — is potentially everlasting."

From "The Secrets of Jewish Genius/It’s not about having higher I.Q.s." by Bret Stephens (NYT).

To answer the question is Stephens Jewish, here's Wikipedia: "Bret Stephens was born in New York City, the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico. Both his parents were secular Jews. His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in Kishenev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1901; he fled with his family to New York after a pogrom."

At Wikipedia, Stephens has 1 item under the heading "Controversy":

"The specter of Dickens’s ranting spinster — spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress, plotting her elaborate revenge — casts a long shadow over every woman who dares to get mad."

Writes Leslie Jamison — in "I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore. On female rage" (NYT) — invoking Hillary Clinton:

In “What Happened,” her account of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton describes the pressure not to come across as angry during the course of her entire political career — “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman,” she writes — as well as her own desire not to be consumed by anger after she lost the race, “so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.”

Miss Havisham was "rattling around" over a marriage that never happened, so it's irksome to see her used as Hillary Clinton's point of reference. Hillary Clinton is all about a marriage that did take place, and it would be interesting to know what she would have been without Bill.

But the topic here is female anger.

If an angry woman makes people uneasy, then her more palatable counterpart, the sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. It’s as if the prospect of a woman’s anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.

That's the discipline. If you're set on looking beautiful and commanding empathy, you've accepted the subordination and made yourself small. I think this is an important topic, and I like the photo illustrations at the link, but the essay is not to my taste. Quoting Hillary. Quoting this wretched nonsense from Audre Lorde: "I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter." Wolf's lip??

Here's the whole Lorde essay, in case you think more context will help.

Wait a minute! I googled "wolf's lip" and got some major help from Urban Dictionary ("Picture the side of a dog's mouth, the back part with wrinkly skin and folds of dark moist flesh"). Did the NYT understand what it was quoting?!

IN THE COMMENTS: Rob said:

"[T]he sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant." Now we know why Cory Booker publicly anguished about hurting and having tears in his eyes.

From last night's Cory Booker comments thread, Hoodlum Doodlum says "This one goes out to Corey and T-Bone" and points us here:



You might be asking, yes, but who's T-Bone. Answer: "Cory Booker’s Imaginary Friend" (National Review).

"Maybe it was his haircut, long and floppy up top; or his rumpled T-shirt showing the Nickelodeon cartoon character CatDog..."

"... or his tentative, confused movements in a widely circulated video — gestures familiar to anyone who has loved a child. Or the instant and inescapable question of whether a parent was left alive to give him a hug."



ADDED: I'm giving this post the "using children in politics" tag, even though it's not quite what I have meant by it in the past. But the commenter HoodlumDoodlum said "This blog usually opposes the use of children to make political points or advance some cause." I responded:

This isn't a case of people putting children in political ads or having children carry signs in protests.

The photographer got in there to take the picture and the usefulness of the picture was perceived after the fact and largely occurred through viral sharing as it affected people.

That is propaganda but the child is real and no one chose to put that child in that condition. I think it's important not to look away from reality.

Did Justice Ginsburg express so much contempt for Donald Trump that she'll have to recuse herself, if he becomes President, in all the cases involving the President?

This Washington Post column entertains that proposition.

Imagine a Bush v. Gore type election this year, with the outcome subject to a Supreme Court vote. There will only be 8 Justices on the Court. If Ginsburg has to recuse, it produces a 4-to-3/conservative-liberal balance on the Court.

The irony! Ginsburg's horror at the idea Donald Trump winning the presidency could cause Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Here's the NYT interview where Ginsburg displayed her political feelings. What she said was: "I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president... For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.” And then, quoting her husband, she added, "Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand." We're told she was "smiling ruefully."

IN THE COMMENTS: HoodlumDoodlum said:

Professor: how do you feel about Ginsburg's statement and/or her decision to make it? 

I don't think she really said that much. She just said "I can't imagine...." You have to flesh it out with ideas of your own for it to mean anything. I would have ignored it. I ignored the interview when it appeared in the NYT, even though I always read the Times and the story was pushed heavily on the front page. I was annoyed at the NYT playing to its readers in the usual way — fawning over Ginsburg, eager to serve up more Trump hate in what must have seemed to be a delicious new form. But when The Washington Post took it so seriously and interviewed lawprofs about recusal, it got interesting. I would have left her alone to have a little freedom of speech about politics, and it's helpful to the people to get some information on how political the Justices might be. What Ginsburg most clearly expressed is that she wants Scalia's seat filled with someone who's on her side.

"... Clinton supporters are analogous to the wife in Battered Wife Syndrome...."

"In a brilliant critique that I've stolen from a young family friend of ours who recently earned his degree in psychology, Clinton supporters are analogous to the wife in Battered Wife Syndrome. Go ahead and look up BWS -- you'll see it works. Now plug in Media for Wife and you'll see the same. Trumpians too, though to a lesser degree because the abusive relationship is still in its early stage of dating -- romantic steak dinners, careful grooming, fancy golden hotels, and tender sexy words whispered in their hopeful ears."

Wrote Meade, in a comment, after HoodlumDoodlum said "No matter how much the Dems shit on the Media, the Media still love the Dems. Embarrassing!"

"... the prof asked the one German kid if they had a German dream. He responded, 'We did but no one liked it.'"

I saved the screen at the top of Yik Yak here in Madison last night.

IN THE COMMENTS: HoodlumDoodlum said:

Reddit has a thread with that joke from April 2015... the thread appears to be jokes by teenagers. There are Google hits from May and June 2015, too. Step up ya joke takin' game, WI kids.

Thanks. I should have checked. Yik Yak around here is full of jokes. I guess I wanted to believe that scenario took place around here. By the way, I downloaded Yik Yak after I read that it was full of horrible racist and sexist things. I never see that here. I see, in addition to jokes, people who are trying to get up the nerve to talk to somebody they like, concern about doing well in school, and expressions of joy at having seen a dog.

"It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood."

"I call this the 'fallacy of mood affiliation,' and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning.  (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often 'optimism' or 'pessimism' per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)"

Tyler Cowen wrote back in 2011. I'm reading that today — strangely early in the morning — because yesterday, the commenter HoodlumDoodlum said: "Professor Althouse: It sounds like what you're describing is what Tyler Cowen calls the fallacy of mood affiliation."

Was I saying the same thing? Not exactly, but there is some resemblance. Cowen's idea is that people — for some reason (I don't see him exploring why) — have a preference for the way they want to feel, and then they pick the ideas that give them that feeling. I'm saying people have a preference for feeling comfortable in the social environment where they find themselves and so they affect or adopt the ideas that are shared by others around them. That is, I'm specifying one preferred feeling — social comfort — and ascribing it to nearly everyone. And I'm saying that the ideas that follow on are simply the group's shared ideas. I was talking about how ordinary people haven't thought through these ideas and don't want to. The ideas didn't arise within their minds at all. What came from them is the desire to be liked and loved and included. Cowen's fallacious thinker is generating the ideas from within, but the generation process is influenced by the feelings the thinker desires.