"As she took the helm, [Bari] Weiss sent around a friendly-sounding note to the news staff that had one particularly notable line."

"Among her 'core journalistic values,' she wrote, is 'journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.' Sounds good, but the two parties are far from equal these days. 'CBS should brace for a heavy dose of bothsiderism,' wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, observing that the Free Press has, as its central thesis, 'that Trump and his supporters are largely right about the cultural rot of the woke-elite' and liberal overreach (wokeness) is a bigger problem than Trump’s existential threats to American democracy...."

Writes Margaret Sullivan, in "Bari Weiss is a weird and worrisome choice as top editor for CBS News/When Weiss was named editor-in-chief, it was the latest turn in the network’s confounding departure from its roots" (The Guardian).

Here's my post from yesterday reprinting Weiss's note with 10 principles of journalism. My only comment was "I particularly like #6."

#6 was "Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny."

So what if "the two parties are far from equal these days"? When you hold unequal entities to equal scrutiny what you see is their inequality!

I think Margaret Sullivan has lost track of the meaning of equality. It doesn't mean reaching equal outcomes. It means applying the same standard. 

"One of us didn't understand..."

Link.

Have you ever understood implications of the meaning of a book that perhaps the author did not intend? Is the author the supreme interpreter of her works? Do you adhere to originalism in the interpretation of novels? Do you think that anyone who doesn't is a laughable fool?

ADDED: There are 2 dimensions of understanding here.

"I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun. It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun."

Said Josh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, quoted in "Wordle Is a Love Story/The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner" (NYT).

I played for the first time and got the word on the fifth line, without being strategic in choosing the first word, just using the kind of logic you use in Mastermind. It's more interesting than Mastermind, because the answer will be a real word, not just any combination of letters/colors.

The popularity of the game — not the game itself — had something to do with the very popular NYT game Spelling Bee:

Mr. Wardle said he first created a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends were unimpressed and he scrapped the idea.... The breakthrough, he said, was limiting players to one game per day. That enforced a sense of scarcity, which he said was partially inspired by the Spelling Bee, which leaves people wanting more, he said.

"His first self-imposed date for naming a running mate, around Aug. 1, came and went. The first week of August, another timeline he publicly floated..."

"... is nearly over, and an aide confirmed that an announcement would not happen this week. Mr. Biden has reached the final stage of his deliberations and is expected to name his choice shortly before the Democratic National Convention, which begins on Aug. 17.... This kind of approach — being openly meditative about the issue at hand, with a penchant for missing his own deadlines as he mulls his options — is in line with how Mr. Biden has made other big political choices throughout his career. Those who have worked with him over the years describe nonlinear decision-making processes with input from allies and family members, a barrage of questions from Mr. Biden, and a habit of extending deadlines in a way that leaves some Democrats anxious and annoyed, while others say it brings him to a well-considered decision, eventually.... Yet as the process has stretched out, each day has also brought intensive lobbying, uncertainty for the contenders and, increasingly, visible factions...."

From "Why Joe Biden Keeps Missing His Own V.P. Deadlines/On issues big and small, Joseph R. Biden Jr. will not be rushed, including the critical choice of a running mate. He’s deliberative, and he doesn’t mind extending his timetable — again and again" (NYT).

Did that article answer the question why Biden keeps missing his own deadlines? Nonlinear decision-making processes?? Isn't the answer really more about how he limited his range of choices by promising to pick a woman and then got overtaken by events that made it seem as though he had to pick a black woman and now he has no good choice? I wouldn't call that nonlinear. I'd call that disastrously linear!

By the way, there's no difference between "decision-making" and "decision-making processes," so "nonlinear decision-making processes" really set off my bullshit detector.

"He grew up in Bethel, Connecticut, a poor rural village in which survival demanded cunning, wit, and ruthlessness—traits known collectively at the time as 'Yankee cuteness.'"

"Barnum was proud of his upbringing, which encouraged in him an insatiable appetite for wealth from the moment he learned to count.... At Barnum’s christening in 1810, [his maternal grandfather] 'gravely handed over' a gift deed to 'Ivy Island,' five remote acres that his grandson was to inherit upon reaching his majority. For the next decade, as Barnum tells it, he was 'continually hearing' about how he owned 'one of the most valuable farms in the State'—from his grandfather, parents, even his neighbors, all of whom warned him against the perils of immodest wealth. 'Now Taylor,' said his mother, 'don’t become so excited when you see your property as to let your joy make you sick.' When Barnum finally treks to his inheritance at the age of ten, he discovers that Ivy Island is a waste of muddy bogs plagued by hornets and snakes. He shrieks and runs home."

From "American Humbug" (NY Review of Books).

This is a review of a book called "Barnum: An American Life." The review ends:

The great danger to democracy today comes not from marks slow to spot a humbug but from a public made cynical to the point of believing that everything, and everyone, is a humbug, especially the humorless class of credentialed experts whom Barnum took such joy in ridiculing. In the end, though, it’s a distinction without a difference. Too credulous or too incredulous—you’re a sucker either way.

So... I guess... in a world of uncertainty, you've got to get your credulousness somewhere in the middle. That made me think — vaguely — of a famous quote that appeared in my head as He who will believe in anything believes in nothing. Google understood my groping and set me straight. It's the other way around! Those who believe in nothing believe in anything. I considered believing that it's one of those A = B so B = A situations, but that's the kind of mistake you can only make if you dabble in logic.

I kind of like my version. What's the bigger problem — believing in nothing or believing in anything? I say it's believing in anything. Nothing is a good start. (Better than nothing is a high standard.)

Anyway, the famous quote is about a specific belief in nothing: "When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything." The quote tends to be misattributed to G.K. Chesterton.

Yesterday, I was listening to the car radio and this came on — Chris Cornell singing the old Prince song "Nothing Compares to You":



The singer's love interest is comparable only to nothing. It's intended as the supreme compliment.

"But I guess being on an island with minimal food resources might cause someone... to get excited by a blue-hued adult beverage called the 'Shark Bowl' that features a floating gummy fish."

"... Or cause [someone else] to declare that Applebee’s is her favorite 'sit-down restaurant.' I mean, come on. Shrimp ‘n’ Parmesan Sirloin? Yuck. Spinach and artichoke dip with chips? No thanks. Chef Bulgarelli’s Stuffed Rigatoni and Tomato Meat Sauce? Not exactly the right food for a tropical paradise. I don’t know how host Jeff Probst managed to even spit out the words 'loaded, sizzling fajitas, smothered with hot queso' with a straight face. Oh, and don’t forget the blue-ribbon brownie, whatever that is. Is it worth slithering on the beach tied to another player and getting your face and body exfoliated by what amounts hot sandpaper? I would say no."

Writes Susan Wloszczyna (at Gold Derby), which I'm reading because I hated the embedded Applebee's ad in this week's episode of "Survivor."

And maybe this is a good time to remind you that I don't blog about things in the order that I think they're important or criticize things in order of their badness in the grand scheme of things. I went to great lengths to analyze Trump's use of the phrase "human scum" — here and here — but that doesn't mean I think "human scum" is the worst thing anybody is saying right now.

I blog things according to my personal standard of bloggability, which is something of a mystery, and I don't expect you to understand it completely, especially since it's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it standards, but I would like you to remember that when I'm talking about one thing, I'm not implying something about all the other things that I am not talking about.

I don't like making an example of a particular commenter, especially somebody who is one of the all-time greatest commenters on this blog, but Laslo Spatula wrote, in the comments to my second "human scum" post:

These pro-Trump "memes" are "meant to be trivial pieces of online ephemera that signal the president’s righteousness over the 'libs.'"

"CarpeDonktum, a stay-at-home dad from Kansas who popularized this style of pro-Trump meme and who has received multiple invitations to meet President Trump at the White House, described these memes to me as 'boomer humor,' aimed at aging, hyperaggressive political posters on Facebook. In other words, these memes are empty-headed hyperpartisan sharebait — grist for the algorithmic mills. And the rudimentary composition of these clips is a feature, not a bug. That the memes look childish provides a veneer of acceptability — so that they can be shared without getting pulled from social networks. The memes’ creators and sharers can giddily watch the president dispatching his enemies while claiming the video is just a funny gag. When confronted, they can throw hands up in the air and cry, 'Snowflake!' In their version of reality, the uproar over this video is more proof that overly sensitive liberals are 'triggered.'... Indeed, MAGAland began relentlessly mocking the Times report on the video within minutes of its publishing. '23 paragraphs, about a meme lol. Yikes this is psychotic,' someone wrote on Twitter. 'These types of articles is why the meme was made,' another replied.... Taking the meme video seriously does the unfortunate work of amplifying the clip.... Responding to the trollish world of MAGA memes is a lot like arguing with a child...."

From "The Violent Trump Video Is Dumb, and That’s the Point/The absurdity of memes like the one shared widely on Sunday evening gives cover to their creators" by NYT opinion writer Charlie Warzel, who ends with the assertion that these memes should be taken very seriously and analyzed prominently because they are part of one big phenomenon of "political tensions and polarization." If it's all one big thing, and the big thing is important, then any trivial component is also important.

There must be a Greek word for that kind of logic. It's not necessarily a fallacy.

Note: Though CarpeDonktum is quoted in that column, he's not the source of that very violent "Kingsmen" meme that is in the news this week.

"It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides..."

"... but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the 'loss' of my own 'entitlement' as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women."

All toxic forms hurt. This is from a NYT op-ed by philosophy professor, George Yancy. A philosophy professor should not write such a blatant tautology. If he's not willing to say all forms of masculinity hurt and violate women, he shouldn't say "all forms." All he's saying is toxin is toxic.

Does Yancy define the part of masculinity that is toxic? He gives an example: He wanted the woman he married to take on his last name:

While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity. 

Also toxic: The feeling that he "should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time."

These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.

He sounds a little zombie-ized, doesn't he? Why can't everybody who lives in a house thank anybody who puts work into cleaning it? And doesn't everyone who cooks a meal expect those who eat it to say thanks? What's "deep and troubling"?

If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you. 

Well, get your ass over here, Yancy, and cook me dinner. I didn't know this was going to be so personal.

Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologize.

Now, I think you're making fun of me. Oh, but wait... there's more! I see it ahead....

I speak as an insider. I know about what so many of us men think about women — the language we use, the sense of power that we garner through our sexual exploits, our catcalling and threatening, our sexually objectifying gazes, our dehumanizing and despicable sexual gestures and our pornographic imaginations.

Garner!

There's much more to this essay, but I stop at "garner." It's just a special privilege of mine. Althouse privilege.

I'll just say, overall, Yancy has the tone of bowing down and confessing to God and pleading for absolution. But women are not God. We're human beings too. Wake me up when you get there. And make me some coffee.

Obamalove collides with Trump derangement syndrome.

I love this interchange in the comments to "Kanye West rebuked by Ta-Nehisi Coates in biting essay called ‘I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye’" (WaPo)(click to enlarge):

Careful with your thinking!

(We've already started talking about the Coates essay, here, so don't feel you need to start at square one with that.)

"Logic is dull."

A quote from Alfred Hitchcock, which I heard last night, as I watched the documentary "Hitchcock/Truffaut." I said the quote out loud as soon as I heard it (at home, though if I'd been in a theater, I might have whispered it to Meade).

I remembered the quote as I sat down this morning with my coffee and toast and woke up my computer to see: "One Star: ‘The Shape of Water’ Is a Loopy, Lunkheaded Load of Drivel." That's one of the tabs I'd opened as I read that excellent NYT article — blogged in the early evening — "Rex Reed Bangs a Gong on the Mediocrity of Modern Life."

I'd expected to enjoy Reed's "bang[ing] a gong" on "The Shape of Water." You need to understand that the NYT "Bangs a Gong" evokes "The Gong Show," the 1970s parody of a talent show, where the celebrity judges would bang a gong when a performer was so bad they wanted it to stop. Rex Reed — we learn in the article — was sometimes one of the celebrijudges. The NYT is not referring to the phenomenal, timeless 1970s recording "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" by T. Rex. Whatever "bang a gong" means to T. Rex — the other Rex — it is emphatically not negative. It's great sex, whether the "gong" is specifically the cervix or not.

YouTube seems to know the Urban Dictionary definition, since the next song it plays is "How Deep Is Your Love."

Speaking of deep love, the creature in "The Shape of Water" is dragged up from the deep and somehow enclosed in a water chamber where he can be encountered and fallen in love with by a woman who cleans urinals. We're invited to plunge into that nonsense. I'd expected to feel comical contempt along with Rex Reed. I'd got this far...

Knowing the unfortunate fish man faces extinction at the hands of the Kremlin, Eliza stages a rescue to the sound track of Carmen Miranda singing “Chica Chica Boom Chic” and with the help of a sympathetic co-worker (Octavia Spencer), smuggles the human red snapper out of the underground garage while a male military marching band plays “Shenandoah.” Hiding him in her apartment above a movie theatre that shows double-feature revivals of nothing but 20th Century-Fox movies, Eliza teaches the monster to eat with a knife and fork while she herself learns to dance around the dining room table singing “You’ll Never Know” from Hello, Frisco, Hello.

I thought, "Logic is dull."

From the Hitchcock interview:

To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. What’s the ultimate in representative painting? Color photography. Don’t you agree? There’s quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it’s not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.

We're not dull enough to ask whether the "Bang a Gong" girlfriend was really "built like a car" and had "a hubcap diamond star halo." Thus, Hitchcock has convinced me to see "The Shape of Water."

Carl Bernstein unwittingly reveals that he believes Trump is innocent of whatever it is that Mueller is investigating.

I was stunned by this amazing slip this morning on CNN's "State of the Union." The moderator Dana Bash had this question:WOODWARD: You have to look at the crimes.

[T]he investigation has been going on for over a year, at least in the Justice Department, the FBI. We still don't know about any evidence that the president knowingly colluded with Russia. Does that give the president's claim that this is a witch-hunt some credence?

Bernstein's answer:

He believes it's a witch-hunt. There's no question he believes it's a witch-hunt.

What?! The only way that Bernstein can make those assertions about what Trump believes is if Bernstein is sure Trump is not lying. Trump knows what he did with respect to Russia, but he's saying it's a witch-hunt. Trump's saying that it's a witch-hunt could happen if: 1. He knows there's nothing there (i.e., Mueller is searching for for something, like a witch, that doesn't exist), or 2. He's worried about something that he did and he wants to hide it. Bernstein's remark excludes #2. But Bernstein doesn't have access to the inside of Trump's head, so why did Bernstein say that? I'd say Bernstein, on his own, knows that there's nothing there, and he blurted out an answer without thinking about what he was saying about what's in his own head.

I know: It's also possible that Bernstein is a careless bullshitter.

ADDED: Here's how the CNN website covers the same appearance I am writing about: "Bernstein: Trump's lawyers tell him what he wants to hear on Russia." CNN's writers tell audience what they want to hear about Trump.

"You need violence in order to protect nonviolence. That’s what’s very obviously necessary right now. It’s full-on war, basically."

Said Emily Rose Nauert, "a 20-year-old antifa member who became a symbol of the movement in April when a white nationalist leader punched her in the face during a melee near the University of California, Berkeley," quoted in the NYT in "‘Antifa’ Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right."

Antifa adherents — some armed with sticks and masked in bandannas — played a visible role in the running street battles in Charlottesville, but it is impossible to know how many people count themselves as members of the movement. Its followers acknowledge it is secretive, without official leaders and organized into autonomous local cells. It is also only one in a constellation of activist movements that have come together in the past several months to the fight the far right....

That makes me think about that NYT article 2 days ago —  "Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language" (blogged here) — that relied on the characterizations of Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, who deemed “alt-left" "just a made-up epithet" and "antifa" an "old left-wing extremist movement."

The new article today seems to acknowledge the inadequacy of the 2-day-old article. The older article seemed intent on pushing back Donald Trump for talking about the "alt-left" as well as the "alt-right." The term "false equivalence" — which was a big media talking point earlier in the week — appears in the older article. I thought "false equivalence" was being used to say, essentially: When one side is worse than the other side, you're not even allowed to compare them.

There was something false about saying "false equivalence." Strictly speaking, the label applies only when 2 things are said to be the same. It shouldn't work to exclude all comparisons when people are being clear about the similarities and differences.

In the case of Charlottesville, there was no logical fallacy in saying there were 2 opposing factions that arrived on scene ready to rumble as long as you're also clear that the 2 sides were different. One side wanted to exercise its free speech rights to express bad, ugly ideas. The other side wanted to interfere with the exercise of free speech rights and was motivated by hostility to ideas that deserved hostility.

In the new article, there's less concern about stepping on the "false equivalence" talking point. There's a recognition that people like Nauert are headed in a violent direction and are gaining adherents. Maybe acting like they're nothing (or nothing any good people dare speak about) is dangerous. Right after that quote from Nauert, there's this subtle discarding of the "false equivalence" talking point:

Others on the left disagree, saying antifa’s methods harm the fight against right-wing extremism and have allowed Mr. Trump to argue that the two sides are equivalent....

Now, Trump never said "the 2 sides are equivalent." He didn't say "equivalent" and he didn't even say "2 sides." He said "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides." But those who were pushing the "false equivalence" idea needed to rely on the idea that one side is bad and the other is good, and they needed to minimize antifa. Now, the NYT admits the left has a violence problem. Good!

"If transgenderism is appropriate, then transracialism is appropriate./Transgenderism is appropriate./Therefore, transracialism is appropriate."

That's the argument Rebecca Tuvel believed she was making, but the reason feminist philosophers freaked out, Jim S. argues, is that Tuvel's modus ponens argument flips all too easily into this modus tollens argument:

If transgenderism is appropriate, then transracialism is appropriate.
Transracialism is not appropriate.
Therefore, transgenderism is not appropriate.

Here's the post where I reject the term "false equivalence."

First, is it "equivalence" or "equivalency"? The Ngram says "equivalence":



The 2 words are equivalent, and neither is wrong. I'm just noticing that there are 2 words and interested in picking one and being consistent. It's not a word I've used much in the 12-year history of this blog. It appears almost only in quotes and almost always when someone is saying "false equivalenc[e/y]" (or "moral equivalenc[e/y]").

It occurs to me that "false equivalence" is a bad expression. What's "false" about thinking 2 things are alike? You might falsely claim that 2 things are identical, but if you are just putting 2 things side by side and saying they are similar when there are also differences, you don't deserve to be accused of falsehood. Maybe "equivalence" is the wrong word. If you haven't said the 2 things are exactly equal, you don't deserve to be said to have asserted that there is "equivalence." To concentrate on the word "false" in the phrase "false equivalence" is to get distracted, perhaps by taking offense at the pejorative.

I'm drawn into this language issue by an off-line discussion of the alleged sexual misdeeds of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. In case you are wondering.

Anyway, looking at my own archive, I don't think I've ever accused anyone of relying on "false equivalence," but I have discussed the usage. For example, in June 2014, David Brock was trying to convince rich liberals to spend big money on politics even as he was lambasting the Koch Brothers (nonliberals) for spending big money on politics:

“You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game so you can be free to make money poisoning little kids, and neither am I... Subscribing to a false moral equivalence is giving the Kochs exactly what they want: keeping us quiet about what they’re doing to destroy the very fabric of our nation."

And I said: 

His idea is: Since the Democrats are in politics to do what is good and the Kochs want what is bad, there's a "false equivalence." Seeing the false equivalence — I observe — requires that you look at the end and not the means.

The phrase "false equivalence" is very common rhetoric these days. Watch out for it. I think it's being used to inhibit comparisons. But there is nothing wrong — nothing false — about comparisons. You just need to be perceptive and honest about how much alike things are. Those who say "false equivalence" are really saying they'd prefer to call attention to the differences or for you to just not bother them with a comparison that makes them uncomfortable.

One last thing. There are different reasons to resist someone's saying 2 things are alike. There's the familiar political argument. X criticizes Y's candidate, Y says X's candidate did the same kind of thing, X wants to get back to the problem with Y's candidate, and the phrase "false equivalence" seems like the tool for the job.

But quite apart from politics, there are different psychological orientations. I'm thinking of lumpers and splitters:

A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.

Some people see similarities much more than differences, and for other people differences predominate. I tend to see the ways we're all alike, but there are other people who look for ways to segment us off into little groups. I think I'm more of a lumper but to say that is to be something of a splitter, no? Those other people are splitters. It makes no sense. Or, yes, I see how it does, I need to see how it does. I don't think there are lumpers and splitters. That's too splitter-y for me. I think we're much more alike than different, but if you think we are more different, that's okay too, as long as you don't accuse me of falsehood for saying that we are more alike.

This election is pathological. Path-o-logical.

"Clinton’s advisers tell her to prep for a landslide Displaying unchecked confidence, the Democrat’s paid consultants see plenty of paths to the White House." So they say, according to Politico.

“Hillary Clinton has many paths to 270 electoral votes, more than any candidate in a generation,” said Jeff Berman, a paid consultant to her campaign....

Meanwhile, also according to Politico, "Inside Trump Tower: Facing grim reality/Three weeks until early voting, the campaign scrambles to pick a path and stay on it."

So, let me get this straight: Hillary has "plenty of paths," but Trump is struggling to "pick a path and stay on it."

Is it good to have different paths or is it bad? Good for Hillary, bad for Trump? Would it be pathological to want some logic in all this talk of paths?



I'm thinking the Hillary side figures it serves their cause to make people feel that it's all over, that there's no way to fight them off, because they've got another way and another way. It's like how you can't build a wall, because if you build a wall, they'll dig a tunnel and then another tunnel, and you'll never find all the tunnels. Ha ha! Give up! 

From the Trump article:

Late last week... Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met with Republican National Committee brass... Those present for the meeting... said Kushner’s questions reflected a growing realization within Trump’s team that for all the party’s talk about implementing a major swing-state deployment plan, it hasn’t yet materialized.... The absence of a clear plan has spread to something even more fundamental — the campaign’s path to 270 electoral votes....

Making matters tough for Trump has been the ongoing reluctance of the party’s biggest contributors to open their wallets.... The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch also have refused to come around.

The antipathy has had far-reaching consequences....

That's it. Antipathy! The opposition to paths.

A dialogue about those terrible things Trump says.

Trump said: "I thought Chelsea did a nice job [at the convention]. You know, Chelsea likes Ivanka and Ivanka likes Chelsea. I wish they didn’t like each other, but they do."

Prompting this dialogue at Facebook (in which I am one of the participants):

X: Trump: bringing people together (except his daughter and her friend, who he'd rather keep apart).

Y: I wonder if I could get paid as a Trump translator. I know what he means!

X: What does it say about him if he needs a translator? It's important for the president to communicate!

Y: Seems he's done pretty well with his communicating, but people who oppose him are taking advantage of opportunities to act like they don't understand him. We'll see how these cross-purposes resolve themselves.

Z: This actually makes sense, even if on first hearing it, it doesn't sound right. A lot of what he says, though, just can't be translated into anything a decent person would ever say.

Y: You reverted to pointing at all those other things after you were prompted to observe what makes sense of this one. I challenge you to focus individually on the other things and put them, one by one, through an equivalent effort. There must be a name for the logical fallacy you are committing here. Think about it. You believe there is a pile of evidence that X is true, and when you examine one item, it doesn't show X is true, so you point to that pile. It's over there....

"I continue to hope that logic will prevail."

Says a man who built a big swing set in his yard — in violation of the village code — and wants a variance. Part of his argument involves portraying the structure as a "wisteria arbor."

I'm not sympathetic to people in this position, which of course has nothing to do with logic. He's relying on the old strategy: Better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Every time that works, it erodes the belief that the rules apply to everyone.

“The village is interested in compliance. . . . The rules apply to everybody. They apply them equally,” said Suellen Ferguson, an attorney who represents Chevy Chase Village in the case. Ferguson said the swing set initially was described as an “arbor” in documents his family submitted requesting a variance. Then, things got a little wild. Time went on, swings started being attached... It became a play structure.”

"Why Can't All Ashley Madison Hacking Victims Be Josh Duggar?" is the wrong title for this piece by Amanda Marcotte.

Because this is the core of it:

But cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people. If the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people, it’s not cheating. It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves, and like all such agreements, the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects. It’s not the business of the world at large.

That's the second-to-the-last paragraph, the serious point. The final paragraph serves up some cheap political amusement:

Unless you’re Josh Duggar, of course. Or anyone else who fights publicly to use government interference to mess with the private sexual choices of consenting adults. If you fight for the government to limit or ban gay people’s marriages or women’s reproductive choices, then your sex life is our business. If only there were a way to do a targeted search of Ashley Madison data for that, while leaving everyone else alone.

I sort of agree with that observation, even though I'm a big proponent of equal justice and think it's an important test of any rules we have that we want them to apply to people we like just as much as to those we despise. But the Ashley Madison data dump isn't a rule we've adopted as a group. It's something a small bunch of hackers inflicted on us, and, like a car accident or a falling meteoroid, we can, without hypocrisy, hope that it hits someone we didn't like anyway. And, speaking of hypocrisy, there is something special about exposing the hypocrites. Anyone who's made a public show of disparaging the sexual morality of others had better uphold high standards privately, because there will be little sympathy if we catch them sinning (which seems to happen so often that I always assume public perseveration about sexual morality is motivated by guilt about sexual sin).

I've almost talked myself out of my original premise that the second-to-the-last paragraph is more significant. It is what I started this post to talk about. I want to take issue with the idea that "cheating is about violating a deeply personal agreement between two people," that "It’s all about an agreement that you decide between yourselves," that "the only people who should care what you do are people who your behavior directly affects," and "It’s not the business of the world at large." Hello?! We're talking about marriage. Why was same-sex marriage recognized as a constitutional right? It wasn't — I've read the opinion — so that couples could get access to the economic benefits of marriage. It was because same-sex couples deserved equal respect from society as a group. If it were just a "deeply personal agreement between two people," then the legal status of marriage would not have mattered.

Obviously, married couples can and do work out their own relationship in private, and they may have understandings about sex with outsiders to the marriage. Sometimes it's because — in Marcotte's crude language — "the person you’re with doesn’t care if you sleep with other people," and sometimes it's because "the person you’re with" — that is, your husband or wife — has pressured or talked you into accepting nonexclusivity. Sometimes it's because you blind yourself to something that, confronted, would destroy what you want to keep.

But when you take on the legal status of marriage, you are including the rest of the world. You may have the idea — perhaps based on enlightened self-interest and choice — that marriage for you isn't exactly what marriage is for the general public. It may be a festival of polyamory for you and your spouse. But it is not a thoroughly private arrangement. You invited the world in. You interacted with the government and acquired a status of "recognition, stability, and predictability." And that made it the public's business. Flooding into your personal life came all these outsiders' ideas about what marriage means.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jane the Actuary said: "So Ann Althouse is publicly coming out as saying that marriage, by definition, requires sexual exclusivity? Good!" And I said:

How do you figure I said that?

I said that when you marry, you deliberately take on a status that is about public recognition of your relationship, and that closes off your argument that what you are doing is purely private. You've invited public judgment.

You could still say: 1. The public are jerks to express judgment especially where they don't know the details of our relationship. 2. I'll ignore what people say and do what I want and the govt still can't take away my marital status unless we seek divorce, and 3. Marriage ought to be understood to include the privately arrived at relationship between the spouses, including greater sexual freedom.

The Ashley Madison problem has to do with one's public reputation, which is based on the public's idea of what is good, and which tends to be that married couples should be sexually faithful. So, it's going to hurt your reputation to look like an adulterer. That doesn't say thing about what marriage is "by definition."

Analogy: It hurts your reputation (in present day America) to be known to be an atheist, but that doesn't establish that God exists. 

"Pat Robertson Tells Grieving Mother Her Dead Baby Could’ve Grown Up to Be Hitler."

A headline at Mediaite. What Robertson said — when I woman asked how a good God could have let her 3-year-old child die — was:

As far as God’s concerned, He knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease. God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.

He could have made his theological points more clearly and he could have been gentler to the poor mother, but Mediate goes overboard. For one thing, Robertson didn't say that God took her baby because it "could've grown up to be Hitler." He's circling around some pretty conventional ideas: We can't know why God does what he does — allowing bad people to live and good people to die. And: When little children die, they go to Heaven.

Mediaite goes on question "this logic":

If Robertson’s version of God truly can see what he says He can see, then why didn’t he kill Hitler, Stalin, or all those serial killers while they were children? Did he see them draw a pretty picture or save a puppy from a fire and then assume that they wouldn’t [would've?] go on to become evil, so He spared them? Because that’s seems a bit short of seeing “the end from the beginning.”

That's just atheist talk, essentially mocking (or failing to understand) the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

Tonight's game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox will be closed to the public.

"The unusual decision to play the game before an empty Oriole Park at Camden Yards follows two straight days of postponements."

Lawprof Roger Groves comments:

Some have already blamed the youth who rioted as the sole culprits, the only cause of the problem. That reminds me of those who can’t understand why their weeds continue to grow when their lawn mower only cuts off the leaves. They didn’t see that the root of the problem requires digging deeper than what was on the surface....

That does not excuse bad behavior.... But as for the baseball aspect of this, playing a game without fans is not the answer.... Yes, a fan-free game minimizes the risk of a lawsuit for having a game in which they could get hurt. But even if it was more expensive to the owners and MLB, sacrificing fans for the profits and logistics is not a good idea. Ticket refunds may ameliorate the problem a bit. But I suspect the fans that paid that hefty ticket price would much rather see the game than have the same money back they already decided to spend.

I'll just add 2 things:

1. Playing before the empty stands makes a powerful visual statement that is entirely different from a postponement. If there's a postponement, there's nothing to see, and seemingly nothing is lost. Some later game between those 2 teams is turned into a double header. But when a game is played to empty stands, the disturbing spectacle will be on TV and radio. Many people will watch/listen and experience the theater of sadness. Fans will live through hours of What Has Happened to Our Proud City. On TV, there will be none of the shots of kids and weird guys and pretty girls to amuse us during the inevitable longueurs of baseball. You might think it won't matter so much on the radio, but it will. The crowd sound in the gaps in the chatter are integral to the beauty of baseball on the radio.

2. Groves's statement "That does not excuse bad behavior" will, I am sure, sound lame to many of you, but I happen to have my copy of Michael LaBossiere's "76 Fallacies" open to the precisely relevant page: "Confusing Explanations and Excuses":