"I was wrong – Althouse obviously had her finger on the pulse of America when she started posting about Wankgate 24/7."

"I was wrong – Althouse obviously had her finger on the pulse of America when she started posting about Wankgate 24/7. It really has become the defining sociocultural (and political) event of 2017," writes Paco Wové in last night's Worn-Out Laugh Café.

Let me be the first to say, Time Magazine's 2017 Man of the Year should be the little man — the penis.

ADDED: I see that Time is currently running a poll on the subject. Current results here. Vying for the top position — each with only 7% — are Carmen Yulín Cruz, Taylor Swift, and (the nonperson who I think will actually win) #MeToo.

What about Trump? He gets 6%. Wasn't he Man of the Year last year? You can't just give it to the President every year. You might think a Trump antagonist would win, but the main 2 they've put on the list — James Comey and Robert Mueller — are lagging at 2% and 4%.

I'm okay with #MeToo getting the honor, even though I'd like to see something more precisely focused on all the women (and men) who spoke out about sexual abuse. The fact that there's a hashtag mixes up the bigger story with the existence of social media. (If you want to give the honor to social media, give it to Twitter.) And #MeToo has some problems with it, chiefly #MeToo what? Not everyone who uses the tag really belongs in the category that ought to be defined as the problem. There's a real danger that the category will be diluted to the point where people will stop caring about victims of abuse and start worrying about the moral panic and the urge to delete flawed human beings from the midst of the supposedly good people.

Headline — "School racism row: Parents don’t want a black principal" — doesn't mean what I thought.

It's news from Johnannesburg, South Africa:

School Governing Body member Henry Charles said... “During the process we were asked what criteria are we going to use with race. I stood up and said I would score five for coloureds and I’ll score four for black people... They said coloureds and blacks are the same and I said but this is a coloured area and they said I am being racist. We want a coloured principal because this is a coloured area”....

The department spokesman Oupa Bodibe said: “The department has learnt the disturbing news that the community in Klipspruit West has rejected the principal because of skin colour. This action is strongly condemned, as it runs against the non-racial principles of our society. Educators are appointed on the basis of qualification and experience.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Paco Wové asks:

So, why are you getting news from South African school districts? Do you have some kind of Racial Grievance Aggregator news feed software running?

I answer:

I have a Google alert set up for Robin Givhan, whose writing I enjoy. Her name appeared in an article in IOL (which I'd never heard of) called "Why Serena was victorious in her nakedness," which I clicked on but wasn't interested in blogging. There was a 5-item "most read" list on the page:

1. News of son's death kills dad
2. Man breaks car's window, tries to snatch girl from dad
3. School racism row: Parents don’t want a black principal
4. Fears of ‘Ramaphosa camp’ purge
5. Kushe ucansi emcimbini kamaskandi eMabhida

Tempting as #5 is, I chose #3.

On a more serious note, surfed said...

The predominately black inner city high schools schools in my city get black principals EVERYTIME and have for decades upon decades upon decades. The thought of a white principal at these schools is laughable - call it what you will. I know, because I spent 37 years as a teacher there for immigrant and refugees there. There's much more I could elaborate on but won't. It is what it is.

The news for cats.

1. "They even had a cat together named Max," writes the Daily Mail in "EXCLUSIVE: 'They went back and forth having sex, screaming, yelling, having sex.' Meet the college professor who Barack Obama loved and lost because he 'wasn't black enough to have a white wife,'" where the top-rated comment is: "They 'had a cat together'? Is that even biologically possible?"

2. "Judge Posner Is Beyond Catty" is a column by Ed Whelan at National Review who is incredibly irked at 7th Circuit judge Richard A. Posner for doubting that Neil Gorsuch cried while skiing when he heard that Justice Scalia died. Posner doubts both that the news intercepted Gorsuch on a ski slope and also that the crying could ensue, given that Scalia was 80, a heavy smoker and — in Posner's un-PC words — "known to be obese." Whelan struggled to come up with mean enough words to lob at Posner. After trying "What a jerk," he ended up with Posner's own words: "I have exactly the same personality as my cat…. Cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty." Poor hapless Whelan, trying to make us hate Posner and serving up one of Posner's best witty remarks. Whelan, thinking he's getting the better of Posner, follows that cool joke with a humorless "Yes, indeed. Decent human beings aim higher."

3. Howard Stern has 17 kittens.

4. "In a bizarre case that so far has police and residents stumped, at least seven cats in Waynesboro’s Tree Streets neighborhood have been shaved since December without their owners’ permission, according to Waynesboro Police," reports The News Virginian. The cats were "shaved in the underbelly, groin and leg areas" and "not otherwise harmed."

5. Evidence that cats are nowhere nearly as popular as mainstream media think. Here's a Washington Post article, titled "An artist’s best friend? Cats, a new Smithsonian exhibit claims," full of cute pictures of cats, including one holding an artist's brush and palette and — to make sure you get that the cat is an artist — wearing a beret. The article has been up for over a week, and it has zero comments.

6. That's it for the cat news. There are hundreds of recent cat stories, but they don't make the cut. They don't make the shave. I think, as I said in Item #5, people are not that interested in cats. Remember when cats ruled the internet? Bloggers did Friday Cat Blogging. Hey, wait a minute. Kevin Drum still does Friday Cat Blogging. Here's the most recent one, deploying a cat for the cause of anti-Trumpism. But even cat-anti-Trumpiana is old. Here's "These Cats Look Like Donald Trump/The Internet makes #TrumpYourCat a thing." It's from July 2015.

7. From the comments to this post, after a certain amount of discussion of crying — "What happened to Posner?" (MayBee), "I don't know, but he's 78, and if he dies, there should be no crying" (me), "There's no crying in jurisprudence – or skiing!" (Paco Wové) — campy said: "I cried because I had no cats, until I met a man who had 17."

"You may have told Glenn you were a 'sly trickster' but you were only being a sly trickster when you did."

"I think you could more accurately be described as a perceptively independent observer who enjoys pointing out where a generally accepted opinion is, if not wrong necessarily, at least questionable. Contrarians are more indiscriminate. Maybe the word you were looking for was impish."

Wrote Luke Lea in the comments to "I resist Glenn Loury's label for — me — 'contrarian,' explain why, and offer an alternative label, which he then readily slaps on himself."

That felt very accurate to me... except for the suggestion that the right word is "impish."

I wonder if the word "contrarian" felt wrong to me because it seems indiscriminate — like someone who disagrees for the sake of disagreeing. I'm discriminate, but you might not see the way I'm being discriminate. I'd have a little trouble myself explaining exactly what gets me going disagreeing with people, but it has a lot to do with whether those people are pleased with themselves and think they're better than other people because of what they think.* Smugness, self-righteousness, identification as one of the good people, looking down on people who don't agree — that brings out the contrarian in me.

Anyway, "impish"... it means "Having the characteristics of an imp; pertaining to or characteristic of a little devil or mischievous urchin." Sounds "a trifle too satanic" (to quote The Rolling Stones).



_________________________

* Yesterday was a good example, when everyone was scolding Chuck Schumer for demanding that a rich old lady tell him why she voted for a liar. I said "I think it's nice that Chuck Schumer displays his opinions and personality in full public view." In the comments, I even said "I cop to trolling on this one. Used the word on my own talking to Meade before I read this." ("This" = Paco Wové saying the post needed an "Althouse trolls her commentariat" tag.)

St. Patrick's Cathedral washed clean for the first time in decades.

"The venerable house of worship unveiled a brighter new pressure-washed Fifth Avenue facade on Friday — tearing down the scaffolding that masked it for more than two years."

The exterior was last cleaned in 1978 with a water solution — but the results were “not as dramatic” because it wasn’t pressure-washed, [Kate Monaghan, a spokeswoman for St. Pat’s].

After my first year of law school, I had a job in a law office in Rockefeller Center with windows at the level of the cathedral towers. Throughout the summer of 1979, I looked up from my work and gazed at the men on scaffolding washing the cathedral. How strange to see the before-and-after photographs in the news today! The "after" picture is just like the cathedral I saw back then.

And that new "before" picture? What a profound depiction of the passage of time in my life! It says: That's you, now. (And the "after" picture — years of grime removed — represents me at 28.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Paco Wové said: "Amazing how much cleaner the surrounding buildings got."

I said: "Good eye, Paco." And: "now I feel pretty!"

Married and unmarried.

The real class distinction in America.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University....

After all of the criticism of Sarah Palin for using target imagery in some campaign literature...

... it's it interesting to see the National Journal writing like this:

As they form a circular firing squad, Romney stepped back. Rather than engage his GOP opponents, as he's done most of his campaign, he's focused almost entirely on his No. 1 target, President Obama.

Romney has received cover from the primary's unprecedented volatility (at least since 1964), which has sent a bushel of candidates to momentary stardom atop the Republican field only to be torn down weeks later. Attacks from rivals and media scrutiny have followed each of these momentary front-runners...

And it's not as though Romney, his past rooted in blue-state Massachusetts, didn't supply his opponents plenty of ammunition. They have the bullets; they're just not firing them.

IN THE COMMENTS: First, the amusing. Mocks the writing in the National Journal — "This almost veers into Bullwer-Lytton territory" — Henry says "Why not go all the way?" and pens a rewrite:

While one candidate after another disintegrated like a clay pigeon at an English hunting weekend, former Governor Romney, encircled with the barrage balloons of his plastic bonhomie, so easily avoided the strafing attacks of candidates Bachmann and Cain, not to mention the kamikaze crash of Governor Perry, that the artillery spotters of the media could only wonder if their radios were broken: the guns of Sevastopol fire into the sea; the assassins' bullet bounces off the ghost shirt of the Mormon underwear; even the bloody dagger of professional ridicule fails to find the heart and the smiling to-be-tyrant only exclaims, "Gosh Brute, lovely day, wot?"

Second, the serious. Scott M wrote:

I don't know anyone that was taken in by the calls for a new civility after the AZ shootings. It struck me as just so much more "I want to feel good about something so this is what I'm going to say and assume it fixes the world" bullshit.

SGT Ted — noting that my "civility bullshit" tag "speaks for itself" — responded:

It struck me that after the AZ shooting that leftists and Democrat Party leadership were just trying to hang it around Republicans necks, when the shooter was a "leftwing pothead" according to his friends.

SGT Ted, Paco Wové said:

You should check out the Althouse comment threads from that day, for example. It took less than 30 minutes for the blame-orgy to start.

I just went back and read that long — 292 comments long — thread, and it's just appalling. 12 minutes after I put up a simple post — "U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot, along with at least 11 others, at a political event in Tuscon" — the get-Sarah business started: "Sarah Palin had AZ's 8th district in her gun sights." That came from someone who was taking a distanced attitude about what other people will be saying —"It would be interesting to follow the conversation on teh Internets today...." But soon it was "Remember, the DHS warned us of the rising threat of violent extremism from the political right" and so on, including much push back from commenters who didn't think we should be talking like that.