"There is an easy familiarity between the two men that allows Bannon to call Epstein a 'schmuck' and 'criminal' and even ask if he is 'the devil' fallen from paradise."

"At one point, Bannon comments: 'There’s something deeply fucked up with you.' The interview also becomes an exercise in intellectual peacocking as they invoke Socrates, Isaac Newton and quantum physics but pay little attention to Epstein’s crimes. Epstein reveals himself to be a living museum of racial prejudice...."

From "'Do you think you’re the devil himself?': highlights from the bizarre, newly released Bannon-Epstein interview/The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary" (The Guardian).

Sample clip, with Epstein posing as thoughtful on the topic of gender difference:

Transcript:

Science doesn't describe romance. I don't know why I'm attracted to somebody. I don't know. People are attracted to each other, and everyone has felt the same thing at some point. They've seen someone walk into a room and thought, "Oh, that person gives me a creepy feeling."

He knows, I infer, that the females he is finding attractive are experiencing him as creepy.

ChatGPT has been watching me, collecting what it can of my thoughts, and today, it serves it up to me — as if it's cool fun and compliments — as "Your Year With ChatGPT."

Here's what I saw at the bottom of the screen when I went to ChatGPT:

Admittedly, I clicked "Try it," so I suspect that there was no profile of me until I asked for it. That black oval is like the "Eat me" cookie in "Alice in Wonderland." I didn't have to click on it.

First, I got a poem supposedly about me, but skip that. The next screen was my "3 big themes." These are just for my use of ChatGPT in a browser on my desktop, mostly while I was involved in blogging. I got a different report on my iPhone ChatGPT app, where I never blog. I work through various off-blog problems and fancies. And even on the desktop, I use Grok more that ChatGPT. So there are other "me"s. Anyway, here's this thing purporting to know me:

I was given an award that reflects the me that I am when immersed in blogging:

"I should not be treated like a terrorist for traveling within my own country by an agency that’s trash at its job anyway."

Tweeted Evita Duffy-Alfonso, the daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, about the "absurdly invasive pat-down" TSA subjected her to after she, on behalf of her unborn child, declined to submit to the body scanner.

The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s “safe.”... Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if I’d handed over my biometric data to a random private company (CLEAR). Then I could enjoy the special privilege of waiting in a shorter line to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. Is this freedom? Travel, brought to you by George Orwell....

"Oh, lord. There's no way I could enjoy a meal with that poor piglet staring at me from across the table."

"Give me a great burrito from a taco truck or the perfect deli sandwich with salad and let the wealthy keep their creepy food."

A comment at this NYT article:

"Creepy food" is so apt.

Lots of photos at the link, but I'm low on free links at this point in the month, and we've still got 11 days to go. So you'll just have to take my word for it. I don't think all the food is "creepy," but it is all striving to look expensive to everyone who's hot to enjoy the life by spending large wads of money. I think the subtle subtext is: Don't go to these places.

"[Adrienne] Salinger would approach an interesting-looking kid in a mall or on the street and ask: might she come to their home and take their picture?"

"Salinger stipulated that her subjects were not to tidy up their rooms before she arrived—as if. With sessions lasting several hours, her intention was to grant as much agency as possible to the teens involved, and to counter the inevitable power imbalance between herself and her subjects.... Another rule was that parents had to stay out of the way. Even so, their presence leaks into many of the images and interviews. Greg H., pictured at thirteen in Kirkland, Washington, in 1984, has a mural of clouds, a mobile of planet-like orbs, and a telescope, all bespeaking parental investment in cultivating a wholesome interest. Anne I., sixteen, shot in 1990, in upstate New York, sits on her bed, with a white fluffy Teddy bear by her side and wall art of Jim Morrison hanging behind her, the two aptly illustrating the tenuous cusp between childhood and adolescence.... What appealed to Salinger about portraying people of that age, she says now, was the way in which they were so uncompromising. 'When you are a teen-ager, I think, you are really clear about what your viewpoints are,' she says. 'I wanted that fierceness of having your point of view without also having to pay rent, or think about having a job, or anything....'"

From "Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies/Adrienne Salinger’s cult photography book from the nineties makes a comeback" (The New Yorker).

That's about a book of photographs published in 1995, which is being reissued — here's a commissioned-earned link.

How would you like a photographer approaching your "interesting-looking kid" and asking to photograph them in their bedroom for hours and enforcing a rule that you stay out of there? It's so creepy by present-day standards that I'm surprised to see the artist vaunted in the New Yorker without questioning the intrusion on the child.

"She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim."

"She was 16 when she met the 11-years-older, mid-divorce Salvatore Phillip 'Sonny' Bono, who lied to her about being a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, and she moved into his apartment in exchange for cooking and cleaning — not sex, at first."

From "Becoming Cher Didn’t Come Easy/The first volume of her frank autobiography is a testament to resilience, chronicling a grim childhood and the brazen path to stardom, with and without Sonny" (NYT).

What did Trump do wrong lately that's getting the most attention right now on X?

He said that Taylor Swift is beautiful — and he repeated it too many times and with a weird intensity:

Trump gets weird talking about Taylor Swift and how beautiful he thinks she is.

But this is way less weird and creepy than when he talks about his own daughter.

At least he doesn’t say he wants to fuck Taylor Swift.

pic.twitter.com/PRp1A9lgaL

— Peter Henlein (@SwissWatchGuy) June 27, 2024

Collection of commentary, here, at X.

The pause before the last "beautiful" is — essence of creepiness? — Woody-Allen-like.

"This guy basically had his own little, you know, sweatshop of children. It’s insane. I’m still in disbelief."

Said Joel DeBellefeuille, quoted in "Teacher sued over accusations he tried to sell junior high students’ art" (WaPo).

DeBellefeuille brought suit after his 13-year-old son Jax learned that his art teacher was selling merchandise — mugs, cushions, etc. — with his students' art work printed on it.

I don't know if it affects the legal issue, but the assignment had been to do works in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Teacher accused of selling students' art without permission https://t.co/OXQbrM6FaC #artgate #quebec #saintlazare #canada

— Joel DeBellefeuille (@DeBellefeuille_) February 13, 2024

Quite aside from the teacher's appropriation of the children's work, what do you think of the original assignment? Note that each image is titled with the student's name plus "Creepy Portrait." Would you like your children required to draw/paint creepy versions of themselves? Shouldn't children be uplifted and encouraged to see themselves in a positive way? Here, the idea is to look at yourself and see sickness, decay, ghoulishness, and despair.

"Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers."

"Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room. In a new study... researchers... found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay. The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said."

From "If You’ve Ever Heard a Voice That Wasn’t There, This Could Be Why/With a ghostly finger in a lab, researchers coaxed people to hear phantom voices" (NYT).

"People who publish novels can be generally sorted into furtive daydreamers and pragmatic careerists. Comey goes in the second camp."

"This is not an aspiration he’s held close, or for long. He dismissed it when his agents initially pitched him on co-writing a book with James Patterson, and when the editor of 'Saving Justice' (his second memoir, after 'A Higher Loyalty') suggested he might be good at writing fiction.... But writing fiction was 'something that I think was tickling the back of his brain,' said Comey’s wife, Patrice. 'It would come up every once in a while, and at some point I realized that maybe he’s taking this seriously.'... Comey’s novels — plural; he’s already finished the draft of a sequel — are a family affair: The heroine of 'Central Park West,' Nora Carleton, includes aspects of all his daughters but owes a particular debt to his eldest, Maurene, who like Nora is tall, in her early-to-mid-30s and a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Comey first thought of the protagonist as a younger version of himself but found it more fun to write using someone else as his inspiration — though the method has its hazards: 'The kids are a little creeped out,' he said. 'Well, "creeped out" is a strong word — it’s just that they know that they’ll be asked about it.' (Asked about it, the Comey children declined to be interviewed.)"

Writes Sophia Nguyen in "James Comey is trying to master the twist ending. This time, on purpose. The former director of the FBI hopes his debut mystery novel, ‘Central Park West,’ will be the first of many" (WaPo).

The wife goes on record about what she thinks tickles the back of Comey's brain, but the daughters don't want to talk about whatever it is that made their dad say he'd creeped them out.

"Gen Z-ers grew up with hypercautious parenting that exaggerates the dangers in life."

"They grew up in a media culture that generates ratings and clicks by generating division and anger. They grew up in a political culture that magnifies a sense of menace — that presumes that other people are toxic — in order to tell simplistic us/them stories and mobilize people’s fears.... People who grow up in this culture of distrust are bound to adopt self-protective codes of behavior.... People who grow up in a culture of distrust are bound to be pessimistic about life....People who grow up with this mentality are also less likely to believe they can control their own destinies.... As a certified middle-aged guy, I’m glad that the members of Gen Z behave... responsibly.... Politically, they lean left, but dispositionally they are cautious and conservative. But the sense of exaggerated menace has its downsides.... It’s always good to be on guard against a dangerous creep, but you may miss out on meeting the person who could be the love of your life."

 
Writes David Brooks in "What Our Toxic Culture Does to the Young" (NYT).

"You might read comments somewhere that I was, at some point, given 'permission' to deliver my remarks by the DEI Assistant Dean, Steinbach. Nonsense."

"For a good 20-30 minutes (I’m estimating), I was ruthlessly mocked and shouted down by a mob after every third word. And then Steinbach launched into her bizarre prepared speech where she simultaneously 'welcomed' me to campus and told me how horrible and hurtful I was to the community. Then she said I should be free to deliver my remarks. Try delivering a lecture under those circumstances. Basically, they wanted me to make a hostage video. No thanks. The whole thing was a staged public shaming, and after I realized that I refused to play along."

Said Judge Kyle Duncan, interviewed by Rod Dreher (at Substack).

So, the judge declined to deliver his speech after Steinbach quieted the crowd for him. He's also now calling for her to be fired. He says it was a "staged public shaming," but that's the same thing as saying that the protest was planned. He and his supporters are engaging in staged public shaming too, and they want a person not just disrupted on one evening but deprived of her job. That's tit for tat and a refusal to stand down.

I wasn't going to contribute to viral marketing, but now that there's a #boycottTampax trend, I need to call your attention to this.

#boycottTampax a women's period products company is getting off on the idea of their products being inserted in girls and women - getting there first - while men are chatting them up hoping for sex. Overtones of rape, paedophilia, misogyny - what a hat-trick https://t.co/bgkmOGpRvm

— A Twatter on Tw*tter (@A44955679) November 22, 2022

"If you are attempting to persuade this creep's defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what [Taylor] Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep's identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error...."

"You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project. This new right fundamentally doesn’t want 'newsgathering' to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda.... It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account [Libs of TikTok], everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.... All I would like my unbiased, objective, nonpartisan reporter friends to understand is that they are debating with people that consider them the enemy not just in a partisan sense but in an existential one. The only correct posture to take in response is to make yourself an existential threat to their movement."

Writes Alex Pareene, in "They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!/They want someone to knock on your door, too. Not to put you in the newspaper, though" (Substack).

That rant is getting a lot of attention. It's inherently contradictory — a rant against chaos. But I thought you should see that. I guess by Pareene's lights, I'm a creep, because I'm just holding something up, giving it visibility, where it will be seen by people who may feel moved to laugh or attack.

ADDED: The "creep" usage makes me long for simpler days, when Eggagog was endlessly alarmed about THE CREEPS.

"I thought a lot about the implications of photographing women, many of whom are still teenagers, figure skating in revealing costumes...."

"Nicole Schott, 25, of Germany, wore a costume with a massive cutout on one side of her waist. As she turned into a backbend while spinning on one skate, I snapped a few frames of how far she was bending. The shadows on her neck and along her stomach, to me, showed the amount of torque the athletes’ bodies endure and the strength it takes to accomplish these tricks."

From "Our Photographers’ Favorite Olympic Images/Times photographers sought to capture every aspect of the Olympic Games in Beijing. These pictures were special to them" (NYT).

Is there something creepy about fixating on the details of the bodies of very young women? The photograph frames the torso and excludes the face, the arms, and the legs — that is, most of what you usually look at when watching a figure skater.

Do you feel differently about that quote when you know that the photographer who wrote that is female? Does it matter that the skater herself chose — or her people chose for her — to wear "a massive cutout on one side of her waist"? Does a cutout say I want you to look right here, dictating fixating?

ADDED: Do you immunize yourself by thinking about it a lot — or by saying you thought about it a lot? Or does the thinking add to the creepiness? And what did you think? This particular photographer, a woman, says "I thought a lot about the implications of photographing women" within what I assume she expected us to imagine was a properly feminist framework.

"But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion..."

"... the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

From "Does 'Mein Kampf' Remain a Dangerous Book?" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).

In this short article, Gopnik uses variations on the word "creepy" 5 times: "not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy.... The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity.... Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now.... Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone.... it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

That suggests that, if we readi the book, we will feel an instinctive revulsion against the writer, even as the writer was endeavoring to inspire revulsion against designated others. Is it good to rely on this instinct to deliver us from evil?

Melania was cold. Jill is warm.

Ugh. I should have steeled myself against this offensive goo. It's so very predictable. But I wasn't ready — it's still November — and this caught me before I'd prepared myself to simply laugh cynically, which is what it deserves: 

"Jill Biden’s first White House Christmas brings back a warmer, simpler vibe/The first lady chose 'Gifts From the Heart' as this year’s theme, filling rooms with shooting stars and peace doves" (WaPo).

A taste of the holiday fare:

The light, sound and smell of wood fires burning in the Green and Red rooms were just the first sign of the intimacy Jill Biden sought.... Gone are Melania Trump’s imposing — and some said, scary — blood red trees in the East Colonnade, from 2018, which late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon likened to Christmas in hell. Gone are the dozens of life-size “snow people,” wearing scarves and hats, in the first lady’s garden, installed by Michelle Obama in 2015, and moved inside in 2016.... “There’s a whole kind of Chucky element to them,” [Barack Obama] said. “They’re a little creepy.” Instead, Jill Biden’s Colonnade is a lower-key presentation, with shooting stars and peace doves hanging from the ceiling.... Biden’s first foray into holiday decorating at the White House was not glitzy or opulent, but rather an enhanced version of how many American families decorate their own homes, with lots of candles and twinkling lights....

So "some said" Melania's Christmas decorations were "scary." Why not cherry-pick the meanest things "some" are saying about Jill's decorations? I'll just read between the lines and flip the descriptions of Jill's stuff into the negative: It's so thudding uncreative. No grandeur, no awe, just the rich and powerful serving up their idea of what ordinary Americans supposedly do with their own home. 

Now, I must admit that WaPo isn't completely partisan, because — did you notice? — it takes a shot at Michelle Obama too, though the insult is a quote from her husband, who thought her snowmen and -women were "creepy" and Chucky-like. 

Ugh. The competition assigned to first ladies. Who's warm? Who's genuine? Who's got the best taste in clothes and interior decoration? Why is this still going on?

"Baby kissing is a practice in which politicians and candidates campaigning for office kiss babies in order to garner public support."

So begins the Wikipedia article "Baby kissing," which I'm reading this morning after getting this viral tweet:

Little girl slaps Biden’s creepy ghoul hand away. pic.twitter.com/oBfceo5iOM

— Suburban Black Man 🇺🇸 (@goodblackdude) November 21, 2021

Is Biden a "creepy ghoul" there? I see a responsive tweet that says "I blame the mother for putting her child in this situation. Why do these people always b[r]ing their children around this creep?" 

But mothers have been holding their babies up to politicians, expecting not just light petting, but outright kissing for as long as I can remember. It's been a synonym for campaigning. That's why there's a Wikipedia article "Baby kissing." 

Look how lovely our most charismatic President looked doing it (and he's even crotch-grabbing!):

Of course, some babies don't like it, and they don't know or care that the stranger handling them is the President. Some Presidents manage to make the baby's rejection work as a charming photo op:

From the Wikipedia article:

"It’s just incredible, when they blow in the winds they look like wave. It does look creepy the way it covers all the signs and everything."

"You can’t really see it in the photos but there are spiders all over. It’s like thousands and thousands of spiders."

Said Jena Beatson, quoted in "'They look like waves': spider webs blanket Gippsland after Victorian floods Flooded roads and paddocks disrupt local spiders which seek higher ground on road signs, trees and any tall grass they can find" (The Guardian).

In case you missed it...

This was gorgeous, in case you missed it. pic.twitter.com/XABIUDa0oP

— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) August 18, 2020

I object to the use of children in politics but that was a lot better than this...



And this...



IN THE COMMENTS: Wince said:

Why weren't they shown taking a knee?

Simultaneously, Bob Boyd:

Were they all kneeling?

Which was exactly what Meade said here in real space.

The answer to Wince is: They were shown from the chest up, in the familiar coronavirus-y style of people Zooming from home. That's why it's so funny to ask "Were they all kneeling?"