"Get out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off."

Earlier in that "Real Time" interview, not on that clip, Scott Galloway said, "We've unwittingly built an economy dependent on our ability to evolve a new species of asocial, asexual men. And what you have is Big Tech is trying to sequester people — especially young people, especially young men — from the most important thing in their life and that is relationships."

AND: Here's the "Overtime" part. Galloway brings out beers for the boys:

This topic reminds me of some thing I've quoted before — from Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" — about the playwright Henrik Ibsen:

"A presidential candidate admitting to marijuana use is nothing new. That happened in 2004, 2008, and 2016."

"But I've never seen any presidential candidate other than Kamala Harris follow up that admission with this kind of argument for legalizing marijuana: 'I think that it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.'"

Writes my son John, on his blog, linking to "Kamala Harris says she smoked marijuana in college, calls for legalization" (ABC News).

This reminds me of why I changed my mind about legalization in March 2015 as a result of reading something written by Paul Johnson about Henrik Ibsen:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

That's about alcohol, but it jogged my thinking. As I elaborated later:

I'm not a big marijuana legalization advocate, though I did change my position on the subject fairly recently, because I think substance-boosted disinhibition is important, though overdone.

When people didn't understand the connection to the passage about Ibsen, I said,

Here's a clue: freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority. 

Without the disinhibiting substance, Ibsen would have got away with his stupid pomposity.

I'm talking about something a bit different from "joy." I like joy too, but there's something with more edge that I'm interested in.

And speaking of edge, here's something else I found searching my blog archive for Ibsen and marijuana. From April 2016, "The perfect problem — when everything big and small and up-to-date and retrospective and cool and puritanical collides in one crowded intersection":

"Snapchat's new Bob Marley lens sparks 'blackface' outrage."

To acknowledge 4/20, known as "Weed Day," Snapchat created a special "lens" that morphed people's faces into Bob Marley, the late reggae icon. The lens added dreadlocks, a crochet slouch cap, changed the shape of eyes and noses, and darkened skin color.

People flooded Twitter with accusations that Snapchat had created a blackface filter....

And this is why we need marijuana.

But that was April 2016, and now it's the Era of That's Not Funny! And it's been the week of hammering it into everyone's head that blackface is always always offensive and never ever funny. Ibsen didn't think his medals were funny. Kamala Harris imagines marijuana bringing joy — just some nice elevated feelings. But what if we get started laughing and we can't stop? It's a slippery slope out of the Era of That's Not Funny.

"In the flickering light of the campfire, you can’t do much that requires keen eyesight like sewing or making tools, but you can chat away across the flickering flames."

"This is nicely illustrated by what South African San Bushmen talk about around their campfires. When anthropologist Polly Wiesner listened in on their conversations, she found that daytime conversations typically consisted of boring factual topics and discussions of trading agreements with neighbours, but evening conversations were invariably about social topics or involved storytelling and jokes.... So, if you want to know the secret of a long and happy life... the important thing is to take time out with people you know and talk to them over a beer or two, even that bottle of Prosecco if you really must. There’s nothing quite like a convivial evening wrapped around a pint to give you health, happiness and a sense of wellbeing."

From "Why drink is the secret to humanity’s success/Alcohol has been more valuable to our species’ survival than we might imagine" from last August in The Financial Times. I'm reading that this morning because my son John put it up on Facebook.

I like the article because it fits well with how I've been thinking about the use of disinhibiting substances ever since I read this passage in Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals":

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

And, later, repeating that quote, I said: "Freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority."



That's "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano" by Georg Pauli (the Swedish painter who encountered Ibsen wearing his medals as he walked around in Rome).

"Mens sana in corpore sano is a Latin phrase, usually translated as 'a healthy mind in a healthy body," Wikipedia tells us. The idea is that "physical exercise is an important or essential part of mental and psychological well-being."

Speaking of Rome... the phrase traces back to the Roman poet Juvenal:

You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
and deems length of days the least of Nature's gifts
that can endure any kind of toil,
that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.

Why ostracize Louis C.K.?

I'm reading "Now that Louis C.K. has admitted he’s a pig, can we keep him? The answer is still no," by Hank Stuever in the Washington Post.

Why can't we hate the sin but love the sinner? To ostracize a person is to say: He's very different from us. His sins are of a different order. By cutting him off from us, we are restored. We're the good people, and we've demonstrated our goodness by ridding ourselves of that devil.

Steuver explains why the remedy is exile:

The end of Louis C.K. — who, at 50, is alive, but in a sense dead to us now — is a difficult but necessary loss.... A certain piggishness was always part of his act, wasn’t it?.... Onstage, he... turned such subjects (pedophilia, necrophilia, chronic onanism; but also marital strife, loss of libido, body-image issues) into a kind of perverted, guy-centric gold....

In [his TV series] “Louie”... Louie makes progress in his understanding of women by sharing the duties of raising his two young daughters as a single dad,....

So, is this goodbye? C.K.’s statement Friday, filled with everything but “I’m sorry,” could almost read as a treatment for that long-overdue new season of “Louie”....

The arc is clearly there: Louie’s behavior costs him everything, including some of his dearest friends, and he must scrape his way up from rock bottom, by listening rather than talking. Part of me wants to say I’m eager to see that show. But the far better part of me would rather see shows made by people who don’t assault and humiliate the people around them.

The exile is not from all family and friends. Stuever isn't talking about whether people who know Louis C.K. personally should "keep him." He's talking about whether people who don't know him at all should keep watching his shows. That is: Should we consume the intellectual work product of a mind that causes a man to behave the way Louis C.K. has done?

Yesterday, in this post, I interpreted Louis C.K.'s statement to mean that "from an ethical standpoint, consent is never enough." I said:

To share your sexuality with another person, you have to mean them well. You can't be taking advantage of them, even when they like you so much they say yes to what you're offering them. This isn't a legal argument. It's philosophy.

Don't offer bad sex, even to those who will consent to it. Don't take whatever you can get. You should know when you're extracting perverse pleasure from humiliating or hurting someone else.

The commenter Jupiter wrote:

Is it permissible to buy a hamburger in a restaurant if I don't actually hope and believe the chef will get a kick out of frying it? People use each other all the time.

I said:

The chef, if he's not a slave, is working for money. You get an exchange by adjusting the money to the level the chef is willing to work for.

Sex is different. You should not be adding other benefits in a sexual exchange. Either the sex alone is good for both, or, under the morality I am advocating, you should not be having sex. If you have to throw in money to equalize the exchange, you shouldn't be doing sex. Go out and get a hamburger instead. Have a conversation. Maybe some day someone will actually want to have sex with you.

To get closer to a better hamburger analogy, consider the situation where the chef knows he's using meat tainted with e coli, and the customer either doesn't realize it or is too dumb to care or thinks it will somehow still be okay or he's just so hungry he's only thinking about now. The chef wants to make the money, but he should not serve the meat.

What I hear Stuever saying is: Don't consume the tainted product.

By the way, if you're thinking of reconsidering all the intellectual work product you consume — movies, TV shows, books, political arguments — here's a great place to start: "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. Johnson shows why you won't want to consume what's been cooked up by Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Noam Chomsky.

Maybe it's time bring back the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

What Trump has taught us.

Via Power Line, here's the venerable historian Paul Johnson talking up Donald Trump. Some of this is disturbingly extreme...

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless, pusillanimous and underdeserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination. The fact that he was elected President–not once, but twice–shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

... but Johnson has been putting strong opinions in stark language since long before Donald Trump gave us all a stunning lesson in clear, impudent speech. Maybe Johnson loves Trump because Johnson sees himself in Trump.

Johnson's key point — the part that I agree with — is that it is heartening, in view of the dangers of political correctness that someone has succeeded by being "vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous," and "saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again."

I especially like the idea that Trump is teaching us that it works to speak forthrightly about what we think. That might not be true. It might work only for Trump — maybe he has some weird communication genius — but I hope people can absorb and process the lesson and make it work for themselves.

I had a dream about Trump a while back. It may have been part of this dream I told you about on August 3, 2015. This part of the dream isn't in that description, but it's the part I've remembered and thought about over these past 8 months: I thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely.

This is a lesson that works for everyone, whether they share Trump's positions or not. And yet I can see that Trump is teaching the opposite lesson as well — that you can be hated for what you say and that if you say anything that can be called racist/sexist/xeonophobic and people decide to box you into that characterization, that's how they will think of you from then on, and they will spread the word that you are toxic and you require exclusion. But that is why political correctness is so dangerous and why punching through it would be such a benefit. 

I shouldn't have...

... left those "Weedsburg" photographs at the top of the blog for so long.

Creates the wrong impression.

Those were the recent photographs I had... after a drive and a long walk to look at fall foliage. You might think fall foliage is photogenic, but what looks pretty in person may come out of your camera looking rather dull. The shop — where they didn't mind my taking pictures — was, by contrast, really interesting.

Leaves versus leaves, and marijuana won, being more photographable.

But I'm sorry to create the wrong impression. I'm not a big marijuana legalization advocate, though I did change my position on the subject fairly recently, because I think substance-boosted disinhibition is important, though overdone.

ADDED: I changed my mind about legalization in March 2015 as a result of reading something written by Paul Johnson about Henrik Ibsen:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

In the comments, back in March, John Stodder said: "I like Paul Johnson. I like Ibsen. I like legalizing marijuana. I like Ann Althouse. However, I do not understand the connection. I feel like I've been outrebounded!"

I said — after laughing at "outrebounded" (an inside joke back then) — "Here's a clue: freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority."

"Average US Reading Level by Grade: Country 3.3, pop 2.9, rock ‘n’ roll 2.9, R&B/hip-hop 2.6."

Dubious song lyric science. It irks me when that "reading level" nonsense is equated with intelligence. And having country come out on top and "R&B/hip-hop" on the bottom just seems racist.

Well, Country is the only genre generally devoid of words like “oh” or “yeah” repeated 20 times in a row. Sorry everyone else, but if you say it in the song, it’s counted as a “lyric.”

But it’s also about the syllables. Country music is full of words like Hallelujah, cigarettes, hillbilly, and tacklebox. Add to that long place names like Cincinnati, Louisville, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and Country has a serious advantage over the competition....

In 2007, Rock and R&B/Hip-Hop both plunged with the help of songs like “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain (which just made it above a 1st grade reading level) and “I Don’t Wanna Stop” by Ozzy Osbourne (a more respectable 1.6 average grade level).

ADDED: Pride in long sentences is idiotic. From Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals":

But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.'...

On this journalistic basis, Hemingway built his own method, which was both theory and practice.... He once defined the art of fiction... as ‘find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too.’ All had to be done with brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs, short sentences, nothing superfluous or for effect. ‘Prose is architecture,’ he wrote, ‘not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

"I can understand why a depraved man may find salvation in marriage."

"But why a pure girl should want to get mixed up in such a business is beyond me. If I were a girl I would not marry for anything in the world. And so far as being in love is concerned, for either men and women — since I know what it means, that is, it is an ignoble and above all an unhealthy sentiment, not at all beautiful, lofty or poetical — I would not have opened my door to it. I would have taken as many precautions to avoid being contaminated by that disease as I would to protect myself against far less serious infections such as diphtheria, typhus or scarlet fever."

Leo Tolstoy, quoted in "Intellectuals," by Paul Johnson.

Oh, that book title makes me want to tack on this wonderful quote from that professor who got in trouble for smoking a cigarette and raving about lefty politics on an airplane: "I know that might sound somewhat esoteric to other people, but I’m an intellectual, so that’s what I intended."

The esoteric thing she said was that the cigarette smoking was done for symbolism and it signified "a smoking gun" and "revolutionaries" (notably, Fidel Castro). (And it's just by chance that the first post of the day is on the topic of esoteric writing.)

Purchase of the day.

Through the Althouse Amazon Associates portal: "A History of the Jews" by Paul Johnson.

Associate earnings to the Althouse blog: $0.98. Cool. Thanks.

Are you tiresome enough to say that listening to audiobooks is not reading?

Stephen King on audiobooks. (That link may require an Entertainment Weekly subscription.)

Some critics — the always tiresome Harold Bloom among them — claim that listening to audiobooks isn't reading. I couldn't disagree more. In some ways, audio perfects reading....

The book purists argue for the sanctity of the page and the perfect communion of reader and writer, with no intermediary. They say that if there's something you don't understand in a book, you can always go back and read it again (these seem to be people so technologically challenged they've never heard of rewind, or can't find the back button on their CD players). Bloom has said that ''Deep reading really demands the inner ear...that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.'' Here is a man who has clearly never listened to a campfire story....

There's this, too: Audio is merciless. It exposes every bad sentence, half-baked metaphor, and lousy word choice. (Listen to a Tom Clancy novel on CD, and you will never, ever read another. You'll never be able to look at another one without gibbering.) I can't remember ever reading a piece of work and wondering how it would look up on the silver screen, but I always wonder how it will sound. Because, all apologies to Mr. Bloom, the spoken word is the acid test. They don't call it storytelling for nothing.

King lists a Top Ten and lavishes praise on the number 1 choice: Philip Roth's "American Pastoral," read by Ron Silver. I don't need any more convincing. I'm going right over to Audible.com to buy it. And I'm going to check out Stephen King's new book, even though he doesn't mention it. It's gotten high critical praise, you know. I'm buying it. (It's read by Mare Winningham.)

I love audiobooks, and not just because sometimes I want to rest my eyes and sometimes I want or need to walk somewhere. I love the meaning and feeling the reader gives to the book. If you're wondering which audiobooks I've been listening to lately, here's my current set of books, my reading list, if I can say that:

"The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," Bill Bryson

"Don't Get Too Comfortable," David Rakoff

"Napoleon," Paul Johnson

"A Spot of Bother," Mark Haddon