As political as you want it to be.

I'm just answering the question posed in this New Yorker title: "How Political Is This Supreme Court?"

Read the article if you like. It contains material like "My argument is that the Court is neither entirely political nor that it is entirely apolitical. I think we have to be a little more nuanced in the way we go about this. First, how do we define political?..."

What is closest to your reaction?

I'm not the sort of person who needs to read that sort of thing.

Good. That sounds substantive and nuanced.

I'm distracted by the Althouse "nuance" tag.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"These people are kinda crazy" — JD Vance adds a "kinda" to Trump's "These people are crazy."

Trump:

 

JD:

 

Assess the difference "kinda" made:

How does JD's "kinda" — in calling people "crazy" — distinguish him from Trump? Check all that apply.

He's a gentler, sweeter man.

He's less decisive, less sure he's got it right.

He's not that tightly bound to Trump.

He prefers fuzzier speech.

He has reservations about using the concept of insanity.

He's maintaining a distinction from Trump for 2028 election purposes.

"Kinda" is just filler, like saying "um." It means absolutely nothing.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: The results:

"They’re trying to turn it into something scary, something sinister. But folks, it’s not really about anything that’s all that complicated."

"At its core, it’s about giving every American an opportunity to be treated with the basic decency, dignity and respect they all deserve."

Said ex-President Joe Biden, about transgender rights, quoted in "Biden Slams Republicans for Using L.G.B.T.Q. Identity as ‘Political Football’/The former president defended his support for transgender rights, a stance that has provoked second-guessing among some Democrats" (NYT).

So it's all very simple and anyone who says otherwise is sinister, and to boil it down to that isn't politicizing anything. It's the other side that's doing the politicizing, those bad people over there. 

I remember when Democrats liked to portray themselves as sophisticated, seeing all the complexity and nuance. Now, they're pushing the idea it's all quite simple. It's black and white. So... binary.

The top-rated comment over there is interesting. Jose writes:

"We have to be vicious just like they are. It's the only thing they understand."

Said President Trump, about the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the train in Charlotte. Trump presents the problem of violence as straightforward, easy to solve quickly if we simply have the will to go hardcore into law and order, with none of the liberal complexity.

Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, there's "Trump blames Democrats for Charlotte stabbing. Records complicate the story. The case has sharpened partisan divisions about an intractable root of crime: how to treat the seriously mentally ill who pose risks of violence."

Is it really so complicated and intractable? WaPo urges readers to see "nuances" — basically the failure to deal with mental illness.

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...

... in the podcast "The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate/It’s our politics": 

I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.

So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.  

And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.

That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."

When I talk to my students about it...

Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.

I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.

How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people? 

But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:

And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...

So a censor is posited at the outset. 

... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.

The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.

And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”

So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:

I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.

Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:

But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.

If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?

"The most basic part of gender identity is what I call our transcendent sense of gender. In a way that goes beyond language..."

"... people often just feel male or female, and some more strongly than others. This can manifest in different ways. Some of my young patients draw themselves as a certain gender and have a 'wow, this is me' feeling.... [I]t’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words. But it is the foundation of our gender identity, the scaffolding we’re born with...."

Writes Jack Turban, a psychiatrist, in "Not Everyone Thinks About Gender the Same Way. Here’s One Way to Talk About It" (NYT).

"Pride Month has always been about a political and progressive embrace of our rainbow of choices. But lately..."

"... I find myself feeling alienated by loud voices among activists in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community on all sides of the Israel-Gaza war. They’re intolerant of nuance, complexity and opposing views."

Writes Amichai Lau-Lavie, leader and a co-founder of Lab/Shul, in "The Pride March Doesn’t Have a Place for Me" (NYT). Amichai Lau-Lavie "is the spiritual leader and a co-founder of Lab/Shul, an everybody-friendly, God-optional congregation in New York City."

Why would a parade about pride partake of nuance, complexity and opposing views?

"Necheles notes that in [Stormy] Daniels’s book, she describes the early part of the encounter, writing that she made him her 'bitch.'"

"Necheles seeks to suggest there’s an inconsistency here, because Daniels wrote about being aggressive with Trump but then testified that she was intimidated when he approached her for sex. Necheles is in extremely dangerous territory here: She could convince jurors that Daniels was inconsistent. But these jurors may also understand how complex these types of situations — and memories of them — are. Necheles eventually cuts right to the point of her cross-examination about the sexual encounter: 'You made all this up, right?' she asks. Daniels responds forcefully: 'No.'"

From the NYT coverage of the the cross-examination in the Trump trial. Nechelles is Trump's lawyer, Susan Nechelles.

From an earlier point, there's more about this "complexity": "Stormy Daniels’s story of her sexual encounter with Trump is very nuanced and complex, and Daniels describes a lot of different types of motivations and a really conflicted approach to the whole episode.... Susan Necheles, I think, is going to attack her mixed motivations directly, making her seem as if she was lying about how much she wanted to have dinner with Trump in 2006, and how she understood the encounter."

"Law professors report with both awe and angst that A.I. apparently can earn B’s on law school assignments and even pass the bar exam."

"Legal research may soon be unimaginable without it. A.I. obviously has great potential to dramatically increase access to key information for lawyers and nonlawyers alike. But just as obviously it risks invading privacy interests and dehumanizing the law.... At least at present, studies show a persistent public perception of a 'human-A.I. fairness gap,' reflecting the view that human adjudications, for all of their flaws, are fairer than whatever the machine spits out.... Judges, for example, measure the sincerity of a defendant’s allocution at sentencing. Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact. And most people still trust humans more than machines to perceive and draw the right inferences from these clues.... Many appellate decisions turn on whether a lower court has abused its discretion, a standard that by its nature involves fact-specific gray areas. Others focus on open questions about how the law should develop in new areas. A.I. is based largely on existing information, which can inform but not make such decisions...."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, quoted in "Chief Justice Roberts Sees Promise and Danger of A.I. in the Courts/In his year-end report, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. focused on the new technology while steering clear of Supreme Court ethics and Donald J. Trump’s criminal cases" (NYT).

Speaking of humanity, remember when Senator Barack Obama voted against the confirmation of Justice John Roberts because Roberts said "he saw himself just as an umpire"?: "But the issues that come before the court are not sports; they’re life and death. We need somebody who’s got the empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.... In... 5 percent of cases, you’ve got to look at what is in the justice’s heart, what’s their broader vision of what America should be."

By the way, in literal, as opposed to figurative, baseball, A.I. does a better job of calling balls and strikes.

"Toxic masculinity. Fragile masculinity. Like most pop-sociological truisms that gain traction on social media, these are great buzzwords but they fail to grapple..."

"... with nuance.... 'The Male Gazed,' by the queer Colombian writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt, is a smart, refreshing essay collection.... Take one of the collection’s most compelling essays, 'Wrestling Heartthrobs,' which shows the author 'wrestling' with his attraction to the high school jock archetype, especially Mario Lopez’s singlet-clad character, A.C. Slater, in 'Saved by the Bell.' 'The image of the wrestler, even one as charming and unassuming as that of Slater, can’t help but conjure up both aggression and eroticism; the male body so revealed is both a come-on and a threat,' Betancourt writes. 'It is manhood distilled.'... Betancourt later dons a singlet himself, literally stepping into his high school fantasies so he can harness their carnal powers to appeal to other men and to become, if only on an aesthetic level, one of those jocks who excited him. His outfit is a celebration and a self-flagellation all in one."

Writes John Paul Brammer in "What’s the Deal With Men? In his new essay collection, 'The Male Gazed,' the writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt explores society’s portrayals of masculinity" (NYT).

Grappling with nuance.

ADDED: This made me think of the famous nude wrestling scene in the 1969 movie "Women in Love."

"[T]he gap between Covid-19 mortality and overall excess mortality has proved remarkably, and mystifyingly, persistent...."

Writes David Wallace-Wells, in "Why Are So Many Americans Dying Right Now?" (NYT).

[A]lmost every week for more than six months, the agency has calculated that total excess mortality was 50 percent larger than and often almost twice as large as the number of official Covid-19 deaths.... What are the hypotheses? 

He knows you are, but what is he?

"Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances?"

Writes Philip Bump in "The impressively weak effort to ‘whatabout’ Biden’s classified documents" (WaPo).

"Well, I wasn't expecting this: the Washington Post calls Trump 'nuanced.'"

Says my son John (at Facebook), reading this:

Democrats went all-in on Donald Trump in Virginia this year — but the far more nuanced game played by the former president and his Republican allies appeared to be on track to carry the day late Tuesday in the commonwealth’s race for governor.…

That's the first sentence of a WaPo article, "Youngkin’s balancing act with Trump pays off in Va. governor’s race."

I have a tag for "nuance" — going back many years — because I thought it was a funny buzzword, used by Democrats to express their sense of superiority. It's such absurdly vague praise: John Kerry was nuanced. And of course, George W. Bush was a simpleton. But the nuance on the left has faded. 

Looking back at my "nuance" tag, I see this from June 2020, reacting to "Defund the Police": "Liberals love to present themselves as the People of Nuance. But if you're going to do slogans and chants — and especially if you're going to do vandalism and looting — you're not doing nuance. And if your knee-jerk reaction for everything you do wrong is to flip it into ORANGE MAN BAD, you are not doing nuance."

It was un-nuanced to reflexively denounce Trump, but he was, it seemed, so crude that the crudeness of calling him crude was hard to see. If he comes to be seen as nuanced, the inadequacy of the un-nuanced denouncements might flummox his antagonists.

"Politics is the great generalizer... and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other..."

"... they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn’t to be. Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself—for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.... Generalizing suffering: there is Communism. Particularizing suffering: there is literature."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.

4 major museums have postponed a retrospective for a highly respected painter — Philip Guston — because some of the paintings have images of the KKK.

I'm reading "Delay of Philip Guston Retrospective Divides the Art World/;Philip Guston Now' has become Philip Guston in 2024, after four museums postponed an artist’s show that includes Klan imagery."

There's no reason to think Guston liked the Klan. It's for the viewer to gaze on these painterly cartoons...



... and wonder what the hell is this supposed to mean? or just to think hmmm, there's that or whatever you think in a museum... those bastions of white supremacy!

Maybe you think, yeah, this is all cute fun or mysterious ambiguity for elite white folks but it's all made possible by an unexamined sense that black people don't matter.

Okay, but maybe Guston meant to say that — to draw you in and then challenge you to confront your impulse to accept the KKK when it's painted and in a museum.

From the NYT article:

This week, the directors of those museums released a joint statement saying that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”...

Darby English, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a former adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called the decision “cowardly” and “an insult to art and the public alike.”

And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works.

Nuance! I saw people in my town tear down a statue of a young man who died in battle fighting against slavery, and Godfrey is criticizing the museums for failing to credit the public with high-level discernment! Of course, it's irksome for museums to over-explain the works of art, but the museums are rightfully afraid of destructive attacks on the paintings. I know the official statement is that the works need to be presented more "clearly" — what? with lots of wall cards saying the artist opposed the KKK? — but the real motivation must be a fear of violence and destruction.

"Their argument, then, is not necessarily that we don't need police officers. It's..."

"... how we can best ensure that police officers are serving the communities they are tasked with policing? But that subtlety is lost in chants of 'Defund the Police.' And Trump, desperate for an issue to latch onto as he watches his poll numbers both nationally and in swing states tumble, will destroy any nuance in the conversation over police funding in order to paint Biden (and Democrats more broadly) as wanting to get rid of the police entirely."

Ha. Yeah. Trump IS the destroyer of nuance.

I'm reading "Is 'Defund the Police' a massive political mistake?" by Chris Cillizza (CNN).

Liberals love to present themselves as the People of Nuance. But if you're going to do slogans and chants — and especially if you're going to do vandalism and looting — you're not doing nuance. And if your knee-jerk reaction for everything you do wrong is to flip it into ORANGE MAN BAD, you are not doing nuance.

I've been following this "nuance" theme since I started this blog in 2004. Remember how John Kerry was fawned over as the candidate of nuance, compared to that vicious dimwit George Bush?

"As an activist, it can be very easy to develop a black and white view of the world: things are clearly wrong or clearly right."

"Harvey Weinstein’s decades of rape were clearly wrong. Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong. Brett Kavanaugh’s actions, told consistently over decades by his victim (and supported by her polygraph results), were clearly wrong. So were Matt Lauer’s, Bill Cosby’s and so many others. As we started holding politicians and business leaders and celebrities around the world accountable for their actions, it was easy to sort things into their respective buckets: this is wrong, this is right. Holding people accountable for their actions was not only right, it was just. Except it’s not always so easy, and living in the gray areas is something we’re trying to figure out in the world of social media. But here’s something social media doesn’t afford us–nuance. The world is gray. And as uncomfortable as that makes people, gray is where the real change happens. Black and white is easy... Gray is where the conversations which continue to swirl around powerful men get started.... It’s not up to women to admonish or absolve perpetrators, or be regarded as complicit when we don’t denounce them. Nothing makes this clearer than the women who are still supporting Joe Biden even with these accusations. Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren have all endorsed Biden and like me, continue to support him.... This is the shitty position we are in as women....  Believing women was never about 'Believe all women no matter what they say,' it was about changing the culture of NOT believing women by default.... I hope you’ll meet me in the gray to talk and to help us both find the way out."

From "Alyssa Milano On Why She Still Supports Joe Biden & How She Would Advise Him About Tara Reade Allegations – Guest Column" (Deadline).

If "Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong" — alleged — then why can't you say "Joe Biden’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong"? It's black and white at the allegation level. But then, you didn't say "Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged actions." You said "Brett Kavanaugh’s actions." You can get out of the grayness whenever you want just by saying "alleged." I don't know what motivated you to give Trump the "alleged." Maybe some editor worried about a defamation lawsuit and inserted that after you wrote it.

Anyway, grayness. Yes, real life as grayness to it. Let's be mature and fair and realistic. But don't confuse the grayness that is the uncertainty about what happened with the grayness about whether something is right or wrong. Tara Reade alleges that Joe Biden did something that Alyssa Milano — and all those other Democratic women she names — should have absolutely no hesitation to say is clearly wrong. The grayness is at the level of evidence. Who should be believed?

What do you do when someone on your side, on whom you've staked your party's success, is accused? You want to believe your guy! That's one way out of the grayness, and that looks like the way you have chosen. Why not be black-and-white honest that's what you and Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren are all doing?

You say "Black and white is easy," but it's not, because you are still choosing what to call black and white and you are still smudging it into gray to suit your political preferences. That looks black and white to me.

The dawn run in the 35° rain.

1. A little colder — with snow — would be warmer — emotionally — but I celebrate diversity — not just in human beings but in the inanimate aspects of nature.



2. It's built into this sunrise running project that some days will have more brilliance and pleasing comfort. You've got to value the full range, perhaps think of a morning like this in terms of "subtle nuance." I put that in quotes not for sarcasm but because I thought of the phrase at the time — I'm quoting my brain — and "subtle nuance" really did help me enjoy the experience. I thought of the analogy to human personalities: Today is an introvert.

3. My AirPods were dead, so I had to run — not in silence — in the sound — the subtle nuance sound — of nature. The raindrops were tiny and soundless. A little rustling wind. Some duck quacking. I think of the music as giving energy, making the run easier, but oddly enough, it was easier without the podded-in music. There was a mindless, timeless feeling. The songs mark out time and they have words that release old memories and draw me into elaborate ideas.

4. There was the sound of conversation — some, not all of the time. I mentioned the idea you see there in point #3, and Meade said something that made me say, "Thoughts meander like a restless wind..."

5. And then there was the sound of singing, not me, but Meade, not "Across the Universe," but "And I'm proud to be an American/Where at least I know I'm free/And I won't forget the men who died/Who gave that right to me...." I said, "Oh, no, you're going to blow my cover," meaning: Remember where you are and be discreet. In fact there was one other runner coming down the path. But don't worry, he said, she's wearing "ear tampons" (i.e., AirPods).

6. If you're going to sing "Proud to be an American," then you ought to sing "You Can't Always Get What You Want." And Meade sang out his version:

I saw her today at the convention
A glass of Miller Lite in her hand
I knew she wanted to make a connection
At her feet was a socialist man
No, you can't always get Bernie Sanders
You can't always get sleepy Joe Biden
You can't always get Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren
But if you try sometime, you'll find
You get Donald Trump...

7. No one heard that, no one but me, and we made it back to the car without getting our fair share of abuse.

8. Driving home, we had to stop for turkeys — a dozen turkeys making their way across the road. What are they doing here? Why are they not eaten? I rolled down the car window and congratulated them: "Good work! You made it! Thumbs up!"

9. The turkeys survived Thanksgiving and their mindless crossing of the road, we survived the trip home from the sunrise run, and words are flowing out like endless rain, so I'll stop this list at 9.

The things that went wrong on TV last night were better than anything that went right.

There was a Starbucks cup of coffee on "Game of Thrones":



I don't give a damn about "Game of Thrones," and I don't even want to hear about why I should. But I do like the screwup of including a Starbucks cup.

Meanwhile, over on "American Idol" — which I do watch, and I don't need to hear about why I shouldn't — Katy Perry picked her butt:

When you forget your on live TV! 😂

You get that wedgie girl 😂💖 @katyperry @AmericanIdol
pic.twitter.com/Do3YaeACjt

— CAITLIN (@KCCAITLIN_) May 6, 2019

They eliminated my favorite contestant, Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon. The voters didn't want him, and the judges — faced with two losers and with only one "save" to give — chose the other loser. It was obvious her performances were worse, but to save the boy and send home the girl and leave a final 5 with 4 males and only one female was apparently intolerable. And I think the show's effort to portray Jeremiah as rejected by his conservative parents because he's gay kind of backfired. His parents weren't public figures who deserved public scorn even if they were awful, but they were a lot nicer to him than the show wanted to make it look, as Jeremiah himself pointed out back when he was soaring in the competition (in early April):