"Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 is authentic.... A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023..."

"... driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.... Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary."

Announces Merriam-Webster.

They call attention to a headline I hadn't noticed and don't feel I even need to understand: "Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift’s Authenticity And Build An Eras-Like Workplace."

That article came out a month ago in Forbes, which tells us: "Swift’s events brim with energy, carried by the thunderous voices – some melodious, others less in tune – of thousands: the opposite of how work feels today. According to recent data, 60% of employees are emotionally detached, and one in five is miserable."

Why would anyone want the workplace to feel like a pop concert? Why would the answer involve the concept of "authenticity"?

Take Hannah Shirley, a 23-year-old tech worker who recently went viral for pointing out that her job was “like a full-time acting gig.” She tik-toked one consequence of this: feeling “drained — especially mentally, sometimes even physically — from the character that …we play at work.”...

A Taylor Swift lyric is quoted: “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism? Like some kind of congressman?”

Forbes goes on:

What happens during an Eras event that makes it so engaging? There is realness, empathy, kindness, listening, a narrative (or journey-like) space big enough for all to partake and feel whole with oneself and others. The whole experience is devoid of pretension. Take this recipe and break it into three precepts – avoid alienation, increase authentic living and balance external pressure – and you have a roadmap for creating an Eras-like workplace culture....

I don't see how merger with a huge crowd is a feeling that you could — or would want — to take into the workplace. Even if I did, I wouldn't think of it as "authenticity." 

***

I've written about the word "authentic" many times on this blog. A few examples.... (and the first thing I see, strangely enough, has Taylor Swift in it):

On March 20, 2010, I quoted John Hinderaker saying "Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers." I say: "that's a trick assertion, since Bob Dylan was never about authenticity." I quoted Sean Wilentz:

During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.

On June 17, 2015, I talked about a Slate writer's advice to Hillary Clinton that she should "offer voters her authentic, geeky self. I said "We've been seeing the word 'authentic' a lot lately — what with Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. There's this idea we seem to like that everyone has a real identity inside and that if we've got an inconsistent outward presentation of ourselves it would be wonderful for the inner being to cast off that phony shell. But 'authenticity' can be another phony shell...."

On December 19, 2017, I wrote about Facebook's purported goal of "authentic engagement." I said:

Facebook wants you to engage... with Facebook. They want the direct interface with the authentic person, not for some other operation to leverage itself through Facebook. And it makes sense to say that the exclusion of these interposers makes the experience better for the authentic people who use Facebook.... 

On a more metaphysical level: What is authentic anymore? What is the authentic/artificial distinction that Facebook claims — authentically/artificially — to be the police of? Is there an authentic authentic/artificial distinction or is the authentic/artificial distinction artificial?

AND: I'm reading a book that I think has a lot to say about the authentic/artificial distinction. You can tell by the title: "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (Subtitle: "A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"). But the word "authentic" never appears in the book, and the word "artificial" only appears in the context of "artificial spit" ("it’s called Zero-Lube. It’s an actual pharmaceutical product").

On March 9, 2018, I blogged about something Nancy Pelosi said about "RuPaul's Drag Race." According to The Hollywood Reporter, she "suggested that politicians could learn a thing or two from Ru's girls: 'Authenticity. Taking pride in who you are. Knowing your power....'" Reading the comments on my post, I added:

Everyone jumps on that word "authenticity." "I mean, I'm all for people doing what they want -- except for misusing words like 'authenticity'" (fivewheels); "Authenticity? A man dressed as an over-the-top woman is authentic?" (Annie C); and the inevitable "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" (Ignorance is Bliss). Yeah? Well, when a person putting on a show is in costume and makeup, you could say he's an authentic showperson. And, anyway, what makes you think you're so authentic? 

My mind drifted back to this 1967 song by Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": 

chameleons changing colors while a crocodile cries
people rubbing elbows but never touching eyes
taking off their masks revealing still another guise
genuine imitation life
people buying happiness and manufactured fun
everybody doing everybody done
people count on people who can only count to one
genuine imitation life

Not laughable at all.

I'm reading "Cancel Culture Claims Another Scalp" by John Hinderaker (at Power Line), which is about the Bret Stephens column on the "genius" of Jews. I blogged about the column, here, before the Twitter outrage cranked up.  I said:

So, according to Stephens, there are the people who can build things and do things in the real world. They can perform feats of engineering or devise military strategy. But those things are "prosaic," and — in Stephens blunt view — not what Jews do with their "prodigious intellect." Jews — in Stephens view — stand apart from these practical things and "question the premise and rethink the concept," they "ask why (or why not?)," they see absurdities and "maintain[] a critical distance." It may be good to value different kinds of intelligence and to roughly opine that there are the people who do things in the real world and people who stand back and observe and critique everything, but it's a big problem to put a group — even your own group — in the second category.

I was focusing on the danger to Jews that was inherent in the praise Stephens was attempting to offer. The outrage on Twitter (and elsewhere) was more about the use of IQ data from a paper co-authored by the anthropologist Henry Harpending. Hinderaker is critical of that outrage:

[L]iberals promptly swung into action, in many cases weirdly accusing Stephens of perpetuating an anti-Semitic stereotype.

Hinderaker quotes "Bret Stephens under fire for NY Times column on Jewish intelligence" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):

But the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Harpending was an anthropologist who possessed a white nationalist ideology and promoted eugenics, which was studied and practiced by the Nazis.

Hinderaker comments:

I would’t take the SPLC’s word for anything, and there is something laughable about a supposed pro-Nazi who publishes an article finding that Jews have high IQ scores. 

Wow! I do not find that laughable at all. Whatever may or may not be true about Harpending, it is not inconsistent with anti-Semitism to believe that Jews are especially intelligent! Bigotry takes many forms, and the stereotypes about some groups include the notion that they have lower intelligence, but other stereotypes — for other groups — have the idea that they are more intelligent. That can be a basis for admiration, but it can be — and has been — a source of fear and the desire to disempower the people who you might imagine are deviously arranging the world to hurt you.

"As Trump told Stephanopoulos, there is nothing wrong with listening to information that anyone, foreign or domestic, might have that is relevant to a presidential candidate."

"But what is blindingly obvious, yet absent from every Democratic Party news account feigning horror at the ABC interview, is that the Hillary Clinton campaign didn’t just receive 'foreign dirt' on the Trump campaign. It paid for foreign sources to fabricate lies about Trump, which it then disseminated to the press. Listen to 'foreign dirt'? The Clinton [campaign] paid for it!"

Writes John Hinderaker (at Power Line).

"Reporters and editors pretend to believe that the First Amendment is somehow in danger from the Trump administration, but..."

"Their real complaint is that the president has used his own right of free speech to expose their mendacity. 'I don’t want to dwell on the president,' [Oliver Knox, President of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said in his speech at the group's 'gloomy' gala.] 'This is not his dinner. It’s ours, and it should stay ours. But I do want to say this. In nearly 23 years as a reporter, I’ve been physically assaulted by Republicans and Democrats, spat on, shoved, had crap thrown at me. I’ve been told I will never work in Washington again by both major parties.' Apparently being physically assaulted, spat on, shoved, threatened, etc. didn’t scare Knox. But Trump does? 'And yet I still separate my career to before February 2017 and what came after,' he continued. 'And February 2017 is when the president called us the enemy of the people. A few days later my son asked me, "Is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?" At the end of a family trip to Mexico he mused if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.' So we are to understand that journalists’ 'fears' are based on the musings of small children?"

From "THE PRESS HAS LEARNED NOTHING" by John Hinderaker at Power Line.

"Following former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan on Twitter, we see his animus nakedly on display."

"He is demented by hatred. Is this really the public role a former Director of the CIA is to be playing?... It is easy to forget the critical role played by Brennan in the still mysterious origin of the counterintelligence investigation that culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel," writes Scott Johnson at Power Line. He includes a long excerpt from Kim Strassel, including:

Mr. Brennan has taken credit for launching the Trump investigation... [B]y his own testimony, he as an Obama-Clinton partisan was pushing information to the FBI and pressuring it to act.

More notable, Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack...

The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid.... [who then] wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use “every resource available to investigate this matter.”

The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open....

"Ironically, the demonstrations in favor of school safety featured, in some instances, attacks on non-conforming students."

"At one Minneapolis high school, two students stood apart from the throng calling for more gun control. One of them carried a sign that said “Blame the Culture, Not Guns.” The other carried a Donald Trump banner. He was cursed, pursued, knocked down and beaten up by “pro-school safety” demonstrators. School officials, who purport to be so concerned with the safety of their students, did nothing to intervene. It is fair to say that school administrators and teachers organized children’s demonstrations on behalf of the Democratic Party. Today, the Democratic National Committee sent out an email fundraising on the students’ gun control protests...."

Writes John Hinderaker at Powerline in "ON TODAY’S DESPICABLE MISUSE OF CHILDREN."

When I heard that the children in my school district were cutting school in my city to attend a demonstration, my reaction was as one of the school district taxpayers, who pay for this expensive benefit to children that they were just throwing out one day's worth of. I imagined their answer. Actually, I performed it out loud (we were in the car): This demonstration is a real-world education that is more valuable than one another routine day in the classroom, and if you don't believe that, you ought to ban all field trips. To which Taxpayer Me said: I do want to ban all field trips. Go places on your own time!

But now that I'm reading John Hinderaker, I'm thinking: This is a campaign finance violation! 

I loathe the use of children in politics (and if you click that link, you'll see all the past posts with this theme). I really love and feel a strong urge to protect children, so I'm not going to display the image of 3 sweet teenage girls holding up a sign that reads, "@Donald Trump/If your place of work is a gun-free zone, then why isn't mine?" I wonder whether it ever occurred to them how wrong those words are. But if I were in real-world space with them, circulating the way I did during the Wisconsin protests, I would have approached them and nicely engaged them: Excuse me, can I ask you, what does your sign mean?

And if benevolent pedantic adults would engage protesting children in conversations like that, then the public square would be a better free-speech forum, and I'd think better of the value of vamoosing the classroom.

"I think Joy Reid has inadvertently made an important point. The crazed hatred of Donald Trump that we see on the left is based on a fantasy..."

"... a fantasy that liberals attribute to Trump and his supporters, but that in fact exists only on the left. In the minds of liberals."

Concludes John Hinderaker, reading that article Laurence Tribe declared a “brilliant take on the politics of the space-time continuum" (and that we were talking about yesterday, here).

"The indictment is odd, to say the least."

"Its very first paragraph recites that it is against the law for foreign nationals to spend money to influence US elections, or for agents of foreign countries to engage in political activities without registering. But no one is charged with these crimes. Instead, the indictment is devoted mostly to charging a 'conspiracy to defraud the United States.' Normally, that would refer to defrauding the U.S. out of, say, $10,000 in Medicare benefits. Its application to the 2016 election seems dubious. Beyond that, the indictment charges relatively minor offenses: bank fraud (opening accounts in false names) and identity theft.... The indictment says nothing about how effective the Russians’ efforts were, but their magnitude was rather small. At the height of the campaign in September 2016, the campaign’s budget was only $1,250,000 per month. Compare that with the $100 million that Jeb Bush spent, or the $1.2 billion that Hillary Clinton reportedly ran through."

Writes John Hinderaker.

I note that the indictment speaks of the "ORGANIZATION" with its different departments including a graphics department and that "Defendants and their co-conspirators issued or received guidance on: ratios of text, graphics, and video to use in posts...." Could someone point to examples of these graphics? I'm interested in graphics and how graphics might leap over our defenses and hit us in some mysterious emotional place, but what graphics did the Russians come up with? Wasn't it just crap like this:

"But [Susan] Rice did not write her email to cover Barack Obama’s rear end."

"If she or anyone else had wanted to document the claim that Obama said to proceed 'by the book,' the appropriate course would have been an official memo that copied others who were present and would have gone into the file... [S]he was C’ing her own A. Rice was nervous about the fact that, at the president’s direction, she had failed to 'share information fully as it relates to Russia' with President Trump’s incoming national security team. This violated longstanding American tradition. Outgoing administrations have always cooperated in the transition to a new administration, whether of the same or the opposing party, especially on matters relating to national security....  CYA memos are rarely a good idea. Most often, they reveal what the author was trying to conceal...."

From "Why Susan Rice Wrote and Email to Herself" by John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Power Line: "For now, all we can say is that the emails confirm Donald Trump, Jr.’s account..."

"... and support the conclusion that once again, the New York Times and the Washington Post have made fools of themselves by trying to fashion an anti-Trump news story out of entirely innocent materials."

Which judge made the sua sponte request for an en banc review of the 9th Circuit panel's decision in the Trump immigration case?

Power Line wants to know:

The Ninth Circuit per curiam opinion authorizing the continued injunction prohibiting enforcement of President Trump’s executive order is a farrago of nonsense. The court should be embarrassed by its decision. Indeed, it appears that at least one of the Ninth Circuit judges may actually be embarrassed by it.

The court filed an order this afternoon stating: “A judge on this Court has made a sua sponte request that a vote be taken as to whether the order issued by the three judge motions panel on February 9, 2017, should be reconsidered en banc.” In other words, no party moved for the rehearing; one of the court’s many judges did so on his own (i.e., sua sponte). I’m guessing it might be Judge Kozinski or Judge Bybee. I would love to hear from a knowledgeable court watcher on this point....

The Ninth Circuit is insanely liberal. Evidence of its insanity is all over the oral argument of the case and the opinion on which the vote for rehearing has been called. The Ninth Circuit gets a lot wrong in its 29-page opinion, but can it be rectified by this court? Not bloody likely....

Yes, but it keeps the subject in play and forces us to keep looking and taking different perspectives on it.

Even the New Yorker is conceding "The Vulnerabilities of the Ninth Circuit's Executive-Order Opinion." It's a modest little piece by Jeffrey Toobin, but the important thing is that it exists at all. For the "farrago of nonsense" take, we'll have to look elsewhere.

("Farrago" is a great word. It just means a medley, mixture, hotchpotch.)

Should we talk about the incident or how the press covered it?

"Vicious Hate Crime in Chicago Whitewashed by Press."

ADDED: I looked to see how the NYT handled the story. On a front page sidebar right now, there's:



Race is clearly stated. What's not mentioned is that the "white teenager" is mentally disabled. And the word "beaten" doesn't describe the attack accurately at all.

On the "U.S." page within the NYT there's:



That's a big reference to race, but with no specificity about which races are involved and who's attacking whom. Again, the verb is "beat" (not "torture").

The newest article — which went up in the last hour — is not linked from the front page or the U.S. page. I found it by searching the archive: "The Latest: Police: Race Not Motive Behind Video Attack." This is an AP article, with no photograph or video.

Chicago police say they don't believe a man beaten in an assault broadcast live on Facebook was targeted because he was white. 

But the attackers are saying "Fuck white people" as they torture the white man! How did the police arrive at this strange belief?

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Thursday morning that charges are expected soon against four black suspects. Guglielmi says the suspects made "terrible racist statements" during the attack, but that investigators believe the victim was targeted because he has special needs, not because of his race.

I didn't watch the video. I don't intend to. Do the attackers make statements about the young man's disability? Does the fact that attackers choose a weak victim mean that no other factors were involved? Would they have selected a mentally disabled black victim if they'd found one first?

Guglielmi says it's possible the suspects were trying to extort something from the victim's family. Video from Chicago media outlets appears to show someone off-camera using profanities about "white people" and President-elect Donald Trump. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Wednesday that the victim has mental health challenges, and he called the video "sickening."

Guglielmi said police are working with prosecutors "to build the strongest case."

I guess one way to build "the strongest case" is to forget about the hate crime element. It's just one more thing the government has to prove. But why then ever prosecute hate crimes? If you already have a physical attack, why make proving the case more difficult? Answering that question, the government must avoid viewpoint discrimination. It must not be that you go the extra distance and charge a hate crime when the hate goes in the way that you want to highlight for public consumption and you forget about it when it doesn't serve your agenda.

AND: As you consider whether the attack was motivated by racism against white people, consider whether the press coverage exemplifies racism against black people. Ironically and unwittingly, the journalists' speech betrays a negative stereotype about black people — that their words are not to be taken as seriously as the words of white people. That is an old and shameful stereotype.

MORE: The hate crime question focuses on whether the victim was selected because of his race, and the police seem to think that the man's disability is what made him a target. We can understand how cowardly people looking for a victim might choose someone weak. That's also a reason for choosing a female or an old or a small victim. It seems easier. But victims have multiple characteristics. If you were looking for an easy victim, you might select a small, old, disabled female. Now, add race. If you were an evil coward looking for the easiest victim, would you take race into account? Remember the Wisconsin State Fairground attacks in August 2011:

Police in West Allis, Wis., say some attacks by black teenagers on white people outside the gates of the Wisconsin State Fair on Aug. 4 were racially motivated and should be prosecuted as hate crimes.

One African-American teenager arrested Wednesday confirmed witness statements suggesting that the large group of black teens, who had originally fought among themselves, specifically targeted white people as they spilled out of the large fairgrounds on the outskirts of Milwaukee at closing time. According to the West Allis Police, he said he personally picked out white people because they were "easy targets."

"As I recall, the law school students at the University of Minnesota conducted an annual election — the Plonsker-Baine Poll — to determine the women at the law school whom the men would most like to sleep with."

"The voting was conducted on the law school premises and the results were posted in the law school’s administrative offices. The posted results noted the top 10 women as democratically determined."

So writes Scott Johnson, in a post at Power Line called "The Persistence of 'Locker Room Talk.'" I've quoted the paragraph that jarred me — because it's not about locker room talk at all. It's one thing to say men are going to talk about sex when they are alone with other men — because what fires up male sexuality more than being with other men? — and that it's too repressive and too at war with nature to outlaw it. But it's something else altogether when that male-on-male talk breaks out into the common spaces of an educational institution. Then it's not the male bonding of the locker room, and it can be motivated by an intent to communicate that this is a male-dominated institution where women are subordinate creatures.

Gender equality: Naked statue division.

In August, we saw the naked Trump statue set up in Union Square in NYC, and today we get the naked Hillary statue at the Bowling Green subway entrance in downtown Manhattan.

Video... shows [Nancy, an employee at the nearby National Museum of the American Indian] struggling with the artist who erected the statue, who identified himself as 27-year-old Anthony Scioli, as he tried to prop the structure back up. At one point during the tussle, the woman sits down on the statue to prevent Scioli from picking it back up.

Free speech. It's got to work both ways. Either impromptu sidewalk statues are okay or they are not.

Here's what I said back in August:

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is. But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")

And here's the inevitable Dylan quote, which I'm not quoting for the first time and not quoting just because Dylan won that prize. I'm quoting it for its enduring truth and pithy memorability:

But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

ADDED: Speaking of ugly statues at Bowling Green, here's an excerpt from Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton:

At Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, they mobbed a gilded equestrian statue of George III, portrayed in Roman garb, that had been erected to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act. John Adams had once admired this “beautiful ellipsis of land, railed in with solid iron, in the center of which is a statue of his majesty on horseback, very large, of solid lead, gilded with gold, on a pedestal of marble, very high.” Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. One wit predicted that the king’s soldiers “will probably have melted majesty fired at them.”

The power of women to read the minds of men.

1. Power Line's John Hinderaker has a lot of problems with Hillary Clinton's story of what it was like for her to take the LSAT in 1968. Last May, Hillary said: "We were in this huge, cavernous room... And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.' Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply." Were the young men actually saying those things to her and her friend? We see the usage "were like" followed by statements a magazine (New York) put in quotes, but it's not quite an assertion that these words were said. It's more of a dramatization of what Hillary felt at the time, perhaps because of something they said — "harangue" implies some speaking on the part of the men — but perhaps Hillary is relaying only her sense of what they must have been thinking.

2. Recently, Lena Dunham described her experience at the very swanky Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Gala sitting at a table next to the talented, attractive football player Odell Beckham Jr. She said: "And it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like: 'That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.' It wasn’t mean. He just seemed confused." Again, we see something in quote marks with a to-be-like intro: "He was like." He didn't actually say those words. Dunham was simply performing her subjective ideation around what he might have been thinking about her. It's comical and she's a comedian. It has the advantage of being self-deprecating. But it attributes mean thoughts to him. He never said those things, and it's not that hard to tell that the quotes are not real quotes. But it takes a liberty with another person's mind.

3. I'll be looking for things to add to this list. I just noticed #1 today, and it made me think of #2. Send me suggestions. I'm especially interested in the "He was like" usage to grab the female privilege to present mind-readings of men. I'm not totally condemning the belief in and use of this power of women to read the minds of men. Figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds is one of the highest levels of human thought. It is what great novelist do. The key is doing it well and doing it ethically. Like a great novelist. Or a great comedian. Or great feminist scholar. But you have to work on that power, and it's not easy to be great, and even when you are great, you're going to annoy and outrage a lot of people, and they're not all going to bow down and acknowledge your greatness.

IN THE COMMENTS: I went first with:

An award will be given to the first person to make what I believe is THE most predictable comment.

After a number of incorrect efforts, I wrote:

Prize not yet won.

Thanks.

When I posted that, I read a couple more comments including the winner, by campy:

Predictable comment: there are no great feminist scholars.

The prize is front-paging. Congratulations, campy. And I appreciate that you put your award-winning comment in the voice of someone else making the wisecrack that pre-annoyed me and not as your own disparagement of feminist scholarship. Huzzah!

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is..."

"But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")

The massive error in the much publicized "Correlation not causation: the relationship between personality traits and political ideologies."

That article in American Journal of Political Science that everyone was talking about — because it made conservatives seem mentally disturbed — had to run a correction admitting they'd botched the data and what they'd presented as correlating with conservatism actually correlated to liberalism. Power Line has the details and ends with this paragraph:

In other words, if this study hadn’t come out conforming to the liberal narrative and sliming conservatives, it wouldn’t have attracted much notice. By the way, your tax dollars paid for this essential social science research. A note at the end says, “The data for this article were collected with the financial support of the National Institute of Health.” And people wonder why Republicans in Congress want to cut off federal funding for social science research. As an alternative, I suggest redirecting federal social science funds to Retraction Watch.

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. 

The argument that Harriet Tubman wouldn't want to be on the $20 and that it disrespects her and appropriates her to use her that way.

I had not thought of this argument until I read Steven Hayward at Power Line making fun of it:

After years of complaining that America’s paper money featured only dead white guys, a lot of folks on the Left are in a snit that Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the twenty-dollar bill.... If these people were any whinier they would be kicked out of pre-school....

Hayward links to Feminista Jones (a mental health social worker). I'll excerpt a different quote:

[I]t’s clear that putting [Tubman's] face on America’s currency would undermine her legacy. By escaping slavery and helping many others do the same, Tubman became historic for essentially stealing “property.” Her legacy is rooted in resisting the foundation of American capitalism. Tubman didn’t respect America’s economic system, so making her a symbol of it would be insulting....

Harriet Tubman did not fight for capitalism, free trade, or competitive markets. She repeatedly put herself in the line of fire to free people who were treated as currency themselves. She risked her life to ensure that enslaved black people would know they were worth more than the blood money that exchanged hands to buy and sell them. I do not believe Tubman, who died impoverished in 1913, would accept the “honor,” were it actually bestowed upon her, of having her face on America’s money.

It's such a huge honor to get your face put on money that we may lose sight of the fact that the government is taking a private individual's identity and using it for the government's interest in branding its currency. With a U.S. President, we can infer that the honor would be appreciated and the use of his face granted freely. But with someone who didn't voluntarily assume a position within government, it's harder to make that inference. Why does the government high-handedly assume the woman would give herself to the government's enterprise of merging its cash with lofty values and moral weight?

Power Line's Hayward also links to Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian, who makes a somewhat different argument:

[T]here’s something frank and honest about [Andrew Jackson] occupying the 20 dollar bill. I mean, who better to represent what the US treasury has bought, and for whom it has amassed its tremendous wealth, than Andrew “trail of tears” Jackson?...

As historian Greg Grandin recently wrote: “Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it.”... This is the shit Tubman was escaping: the enslaved exploitation of black bodies for white profit. And it still happens today....

I am getting tired of the whitewashing of racial exploitation with brown faces. Enough with bullshit like McDonald’s slapping MLK’s face on their predatory and poverty creating labor practices.... Putting Tubman’s face on the $20 would only obfuscate how much exploitation there is still left to fight in America....

Thrasher's idea there is not so much Tubman's self-ownership and the importance of figuring out whether she, personally, would agree to play a role in the U.S. government's currency-branding project. Thrasher isn't talking about how Tubman herself would feel, but how he — and the people like him — feel. He's here now, concretely — on the pavement, thinking about the government — and he doesn't like it. He himself appropriates Tubman: her image and identity should be preserved for use on the things he supports. She belongs to him and the people he thinks he speaks for, and he wants to decide where she goes.

"The Times is peddling ignorance here. Actually, the congregation of walruses on land is an age-old phenomenon known as 'hauling out.'"

"It has nothing to do with the volume of sea ice at any given time. In fact, the Times is not just peddling ignorance, it is recycling it."