"In one scene, a military police officer asks Jesus to produce his identification. 'I don’t have one!' Jesus says. 'I don’t have anything!' In another scene, Jesus walks on water by becoming a duck."

From "Frank Stack, Painter Who Secretly Drew 'The Adventures of Jesus,' Dies at 88 For 20 years, he hid his identity behind the nom de plume Foolbert Sturgeon as he chronicled Christ’s encounters with modern-day hypocrites in comic-book form" (NYT)(gift link, so you can read more, including some of the comics).

“I’ve always loved to see my stuff in print, but I was on the horns of a dilemma,” he wrote. “Did I dare to publish the cartoons under my own name when my job was at risk if the university ever noticed that I worked in the most disgraceful of all media — the awful COMIC BOOK?” 

"Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago..."

"... during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. 'Megan McArdle,' said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Will AI end anonymity? I tested it. Artificial intelligence can echolocate authors through their prose. Your digital fingerprint is at risk" (WaPo).

"No one should have to listen to a few people – standing bravely behind fake names – lob racist or misogynistic taunts at them, or others."

"And a forum for ideas should not involve running debates on whose mother does what to whom. Allowing that only elevates bad behavior and only empowers bullies. Now, I know, there are many who use the comment function in a genuine, thoughtful way and will truly miss the opportunity to engage with others about the latest vote in Madison or latest Bucks move.... I am sorry that others have ruined it for you. In some ways, this is the inevitable end of a progression. We have long blocked comments on stories we know are magnets for vile, demeaning and often racist comments.... Several years ago, we blocked comments on all news stories, as the comments often devolved into bickering, name-calling and libel-slinging accusations.... [I]f you are upset about the decision on comments... please take it elsewhere."

Writes Greg Borowski, the executive editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, announcing the end of the comments function in "Journal Sentinel to end commenting on stories, seek new ways to connect with and serve readers" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

Rand Paul: "I'm ready to make a decision on someone I cannot support. I'm announcing this morning that I'm Never Nikki."

As I look over the field, I don’t think I yet have a first choice, but I do know one thing: count me in as #NeverNikki! pic.twitter.com/0RjbBhnwdc

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 12, 2024

"I don't think any informed or knowledgable libertarian or conservative should support Nikki Haley. I've seen her attitude toward our interventions overseas. I've seen her involvement in the military-industrial complex: $8 million being paid to be part of a team. But I've also seen her indicate that she thinks you should be registered to use the internet.... I think she fails to understand our Republic was founded on people like Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Madison, John Jay, and others who posted routinely, for fear of the government... anonymously. And I think her failure to really understand that or to think that you should register through the government somehow for the internet is something that should disqualify her in the minds of all libertarian-leaning conservatives. So I'm announcing today: I'm Never Nikki."

"Is Nikki Haley aware that the Federalist Papers were written by founding fathers using pseudonyms?"

Is Nikki Haley aware that the Federalist Papers were written by founding fathers using pseudonyms?

Nikki Haley may be one of the most war-mongering and authoritarian candidates for president in some time. She's completely unhinged. This is blatantly unconstitutional. https://t.co/irQwxsSTrI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 14, 2023

"Ememem is a self-described 'pavement surgeon' and 'pothole knight.' He calls his art, flackings..."

"... which refers to the French word, flaque, which means puddle. Not much is known about this man who focuses on the 'art of healing the street' except that his father was a tiler.... [H]e has created over 400 'plasters' over Europe—in Scotland, Norway, Germany, Italy and Spain. His artwork is not strictly legal in the sense that he never asks for permission and he works at night so he won't be disturbed, sometimes in disguise.... [He] once erected a working space by wrapping red tape around cones to fill in a hole in Guadaloupe, to give the impression that he was working officially...."

From "Ememem, The Mozaic [sic] Street Artist Filling Europe’s Potholes" (Forbes).

Lots of images at his Instagram account.

I'm interested in street art and pseudonymity, but notice also this other topic: Acting like you're doing something official and thereby getting away with doing something wrong in the plain view of others. That's more specific than my big tag "seen and unseen" — which is one of my 3 favorite tags (the others being "big and small" and "light and shade")—  but I can't immediately think of a phrase to express what's so delightful about it. And what are some other examples of that?

I thought of the Gogol play "The Inspector General," but that's really exactly the opposite phenomenon, where someone who is not the official is believed to be the incognito official they are expecting. Maybe I need a tag to cover confusion over whether something is official. And isn't it interesting how readily obeisant we are to things understood to be official? And then what is it that makes us delight in some misappropriations/misattributions of officialdom? Some. Of course, not all!

WaPo goes after the Twitter feed "Libs of TikTok" — tracing and revealing the name of someone who had been anonymous.

"Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine A popular Twitter account has morphed into a social media phenomenon, spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and shaping public discourse" by Taylor Lorenz. 

Last Thursday, the woman behind the account appeared anonymously on Tucker Carlson’s show to complain about being temporarily suspended for violating Twitter’s community guidelines. Fox News often creates news packages around the content that Libs of TikTok has surfaced.... 

[T]he identity of the operator of Libs of TikTok is traceable through a complex online history and reveals someone who has been plugged into right-wing discourse for two years and is now helping to drive it.... 

A woman at the address listed to [this] name in Los Angeles declined to identify herself. On Monday night, a tweet from Glenn Greenwald confirmed the house that was visited belonged to [her] family....

I guess Lorenz (and WaPo) think this doxxing is acceptable — and good journalism — because the person is opposed to the left and giving visibility to its TikTok videos that might otherwise escape notice. There's this implicit justification for doxxing:

Maybe just do the same thing but with a pseudonym.

Ok it’s a long story but I need a pseudonym. Which one of these is your fave?

— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) October 11, 2020

Comedy story. @adrianbliss asked me to do a cover of ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe for a video in 2015. My cover went viral on TikTok last week. Many asked me to release it on Spotify but don’t want covers on my Spotify so say hello to @EdithWhiskers my pseudonym. Song out tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/fLl8iwTyTG

— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) October 15, 2020

Seems a fairly appropriate 2020 thing that a woman who doesn’t exist is currently 🥈 on the global viral charts on Spotify. pic.twitter.com/FofrE7oQIZ

— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) November 14, 2020

What a strange life this is. https://t.co/0YHJ1hgNEo

— Tom Rosenthal (@tomrosenthal) November 26, 2020

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....

"The Fox News star Tucker Carlson said on Monday evening that he would leave on a vacation, starting immediately, days after a writer on his program, Blake Neff, resigned over racist, sexist and misogynist messages..."

"... that Mr. Neff published pseudonymously on an online message board. Mr. Carlson told viewers that he would return to his show next week and described the vacation as 'long planned,' suggesting that his time off had been set before Mr. Neff was revealed on Friday as the author of the offensive posts.... Mr. Neff... resigned last week after Fox News learned of his activity on AutoAdmit, an online forum popular with law students. There, Mr. Neff had written messages that denigrated African-Americans, Asian-Americans and women.... 'What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong,' [Carlson] told viewers. 'We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to the show. It is wrong to attack people for qualities they cannot control.'... Mr. Carlson, who has used his platform to denounce a so-called cancel culture that he says stymies free speech, appended a somewhat defiant note. He said that Mr. Neff 'has paid a very heavy price' for his behavior, 'but we should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs... We are all human.... When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question."

From "Tucker Carlson to Take ‘Long-Planned’ Vacation After Writer’s Resignation/On his Monday evening show, the Fox News host said racist and sexist posts by one of his writers, Blake Neff, were 'wrong,' while castigating his detractors as 'ghouls'" (NYT).

I hope this "ghouls" terminology catches on. It was only 3 days ago that I myself said: "I've been seeing this Steven Pinker story out of the corner of my eye for a while. I don't even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they're crying wolf."

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince links to the fascination with the word "ghoul" in "Gangs of New York":

I'm reading "Are There Benefits to Intermittent Fasting?" in The New York Times.

Subtitle: "The best diet is the one where you are healthy, hydrated and living your best life. If you want to fast, it offers similar weight-loss benefits to just cutting calories." And I'm not at all impressed by the science — quotes from a couple nutrition professors who say that fasting is nothing more than another way to restrict total calories. But I do love this comment, from someone who adopts the old Marcel Duchamp pseudonym "R. Mutt"* and says he's in Timbuktu (aren't we all?):

Interesting article but as others have stated it focuses more on the weight loss benefits and not on the many other aspects of fasting. Our bodies and metabolisms have evolved to deal with a continuous cycle of feast or famine ... if it is all one or the other we will have problems. Living in an age where near unlimited access to an abundant supplies of food (both good and bad) encourages overeating and unfortunately if you live in a neighbourhood with limited access to a good grocery store you will be forced to eat mostly processed foods. The quality of what you are eating while doing an intermittent fast is a crucial component. I am lucky to have access to healthy food and have for most of my life incorporated different approaches to fasting into my day and have come to realize that as we age our metabolism slows and we must adjust our diet accordingly. I am only eating one nice healthy meal a day and feel great; have lost weight, more energy and clarity of mind, skin is feeling and looking better, senses mental clarity have been heightened, less aches and pains ... that's good medicine. I am also physically active which is another important component in the overall feeling of well-being. A fasting couch potato in my opinion would probably not reap the same benefits. It's not rocket science ... whether intermittent fasting or not, listen to your body and adjust your eating habits accordingly. And please remember to "stop eating all the time" guys ;-)

Hey! I'm writing about fasting on Thanksgiving! Why not fast for Thanksgiving? I see — also in The New York Times — "The Horrible History of Thanksgiving/Before you fill your plate, please remember why we mark this day," by Charles Blow, who says:

I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.

Well, hell, how can you feel that bad and have it just be step 1, before step 2, "fill your plate"? No plate for you! How can you be all "I can no longer abide" and proceed to the piles of turkey and high-carb side dishes? It reminds me of Lewis Carroll's walrus:

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

Whether we can expiate all of America's sins by fasting on the feasting day, I don't know. I doubt it.

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear...

The Walrus was weeping over the great quantities of sand on the beach. He cared! He mused, and he went about his way, doing everything he wanted. But he still cried all the while. Wasn't that good of him?

How about fasting for Thanksgiving? Will you join me? If R. Mutt is right, we may get some "clarity of mind" and an "overall feeling of well-being." Ah, that sounds to good for us! Better to cry and simultaneously stuff your face. That's the new American tradition.
_____________________

* It's the famous signature that made a urinal art:



Duchamp explained:

Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip "Mutt and Jeff" which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man... I wanted any old name. And I added Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.

You remember "Mutt and Jeff":

Question for Mike Huckabee: Were the authors of The Federalist Papers kids, cowards, couch potatoes, or perverts?

How sad. A US Senator created a fake name for Twitter and became "Pierre Delcto." Hiding behind a pseudonym is what kids, cowards, couch potatoes, or perverts like "Carlos Danger" do. https://t.co/E9ti4dUSZ1

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 21, 2019

Pseudonyms are an American tradition. They're all over the place in debate over ratifying the Constitution.

And how about Rocky Clark? Was he a kid, a coward, a couch potato, or a pervert? (Rocky Clark was the pseudonym Steve Wozniak used "when attending the University of California, Berkeley after co-founding Apple Computer, because 'I knew I wouldn't have time enough to be an A+ student'" — see "Pseudonym" (Wikipedia)).

And then there's Donald Trump:

Donald Trump, an American businessman, politician, and 45th president of the United States, has used several pseudonyms, including "John Barron" (or "John Baron"), "John Miller" and "David Dennison". His practice of sometimes speaking to the media under the guise of a spokesperson has been described as "an open secret" at the Trump Organization and in New York media circles. Some New York editors recalled that "calls from Barron were at points so common that they became a recurring joke on the city desk." A writer for Fortune reported that Trump's father Fred Trump had used the pseudonym Mr. Green in business dealings....

Was Huckabee couch-potatoing when he came up with that pathetic tweet? He didn't even spell Pierre Delecto right.

The NYT's Charlie Warzel takes CarpeDonktum's silly Biden-massaging-Biden video and turns it into something aggressive, chaotic, toxic, and dark.

I'm reading "Meet the Man Behind Trump’s Biden Tweet/A stay-at-home dad in Kansas reveals how the lines have blurred between viral trolling and the business of politics," a NYT article by "Opinion writer at large" Charlie Warzel. That is, the NYT acknowledges and tries to deal with this:

WELCOME BACK JOE! pic.twitter.com/b2NbBSX3sx

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2019

Warzel got an interview with the "memesmith"* who calls himself Carpe Donktum, who seems like a perfectly nice man, so I felt queasy about the way Warzel undercut him:

Yep, a grainy, edited parody clip of the former vice president... [is] a perfectly unbelievable and dispiriting artifact of our fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem, where politicking is conducted through viral memes and retweets.

Chaotic? Dispiriting? It was brilliantly funny, lightweight, sweet and doesn't seem to take any position on how we ought to feel about Joe Biden. It was absurd — and hardly political at all. I think it's positively healing. Why is Warzel getting so heated up about it?

The entire event is at once silly, trivial, offensive and, thanks to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, something we’re now begrudgingly made to pay attention to.

Oh, spare me. You're already paying complete attention to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.  Warzel seems to hate the idea that CarpeDonktum may have "an indirect line to the Oval Office." Yes, isn't it terrible that an ordinary person, somewhere in flyover country, can just say something or show something, and the President might see it and take 10 seconds of his time to acknowledge that it exists and is funny? It's easy to imagine how wonderfully cool the same behavior would be if Obama, while President, had done the same thing with a video that made cute fun of Dick Cheney.

And his elevation — from a Kansas City keyboard warrior to right-wing internet fame as the president’s unofficial meme maker — is a telling example of how the internet has fully blurred the lines between meme posting and business of politics.

MSM wants a strong border between the professional media and social media. They're overwrought about the cacophony of illegitimate voices in the discourse. Their entire way of life is threatened. If only there could be some kind of wall to protect them from the chaos of the invasion of the horde.

“It’s definitely an organic process,” CarpeDonktum told me over the phone shortly after Mr. Trump tweeted his video. “[White House director of social media] Dan Scavino follows me on Twitter, but there’s no formal relationship there between me and the president. If there’s something I want to make sure [Scavino] sees, I’ll wait for him to post a tweet and try to be the first to reply, linking to what I want to show.” He said that he doesn’t get paid for any of his videos (other than his Patreon crowdfunding account and occasional YouTube ad revenue) and has no relationships to outside politicians....

It's a simple process, and CarpeDonktum nicely shared a tip.

[CarpeDonktum] tailors [videos] to an older generation of internet users. The elaborate memes feature footage from old Looney Tunes cartoons or depict Mr. Trump as a cowboy from an old John Wayne-style Western, slapping a man with a CNN or MSNBC logo across its head. “It’s boomer humor,” he said of his style of videos. “I’m not a boomer. But that brand of humor is most easily shareable by lots of people. So, I stay away from real violence, or overly sexualized stuff so it appeals to the largest amount of people.”

"Boomer humor" — by a younger guy who sees its value. Gee, thanks. I hear him saying that he wants something more sweet and silly, but Warzel wants to use him to show that everything's spinning out of control.

The videos share extremely well among an aging Trump supporter contingent who are prolific and aggressive posters of misinformation and hyperpartisan content on platforms like Facebook.

There's no misinformation or hyperpartisan content in that Biden video. I wonder how old Warzel is. Based on his photograph, he's Gen X or millennial. But he doesn't share CarpeDonktum's affection for the aging Boomers, at least those of us who don't accept instruction from mainstream media. Our laughter at a silly meme feels "aggressive" to him — "chaotic" and "dispiriting."

“Sean Hannity is going to play the video tonight,” [CarpeDonktum] told me... “Some kids that are 18 can retweet it and so can some grandma in Wisconsin. It’s slightly edgy but universal.”

See? CarpeDonktum thinks he's having fun and reaching everybody.

Though his videos are dressed up using cartoons or slapstick humor, all of them center on the incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan themes of Mr. Trump’s politics (the wall, anti-media sentiment, making fun of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats). 

The Biden one doesn't. Warzel seems to be injecting his own political emotion without regard to the substance. Ironically, this is what professional journalism shouldn't do. And it just seems really mean to get an interview with what seems to be a perfectly civil good guy who's being nice and funny and sharing his tips and to call what he does merely dress-up. Dressed-up what? Suddenly a video has a surface —which might be cute and funny — and a core — which in CarpeDonktum's case is "incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan." But the Biden video isn't incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan. It's retweetable by some grandma in Wisconsin!

And CarpeDonktum, who described himself as “an entertainer” who “wants to make people laugh,” is not above engaging in all-caps Trumpian politics (which includes angrily tweeting at liberal politicians).

What's the evidence of his "angrily tweeting"? The NYT puts a link on those words and it goes to a search of his Twitter feed for the word "fuck"! Turns out CarpeDonktum sometimes says things like "Respectfully, you don't know what the Fuck you are talking about." To someone who did something that risked violence to another person he said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" And he'll even say "Fuck you." Who would he say that to? Look:

John,
When faced with the reality that the people of the United States might elect a president that would not be under your thumb, you threw a temper tantrum that resulted in acts of treason.

You betrayed your country and its people.

Fuck You John https://t.co/etbuNM6TjE

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 20, 2019

Back to Warzel's hit piece:

[CarpeDonktum's] desire not to reveal his name suggests that he’s aware that those outside Trumpland find his content toxic.

Pseudonymity is a complex topic, but Warzel chooses the interpretation that says what he wants: CarpeDonktum knows his memes are regarded as "toxic." Another way to put this is: CarpeDonktum is afraid Trump haters might try to destroy his family's life.

“I’m not shy about this stuff but I don’t advertise it,” he said. “If I were to go to a party I wouldn’t introduce myself as the ‘Trump meme guy from Twitter.’”

And that's in Kansas.

That CarpeDonktum’s online musings or personal life should be picked apart is controversial in its own right. 

What? Who's picking apart his personal life? Is Warzel engaging in NYT musing about whether he should pick apart CarpeDonktum’s personal life?

At first glance, it feels silly, maybe even wrong, to elevate him. 

Elevate him? You sound like you want to destroy him.

He’s not a politician. He’s a Reddit user wielding far-right “Dad humor.” He’s not a public figure, save a few Infowars appearances and Persicope live stream videos where he films himself talking while he makes lunch for his children.

Ugh! Don't even mention the children! And look at the next thing he says:

But at a time when our politics is programmed by what’s viral on Twitter, CarpeDonktum appears — stupefyingly as it might seem — to have something approaching power in MAGAland. It appears he senses it, too.

Did Warzel contemplate the ideation that a crazy Trump hater might get from that?

“All of the memes and stuff like that.” he said. “That’s the future of political advertising. The 30 second spots on TV aren’t the way to market anymore. The stuff online that people dismiss as memes — that’s the way to motivate people,” he added. “It’s the viral political marketing of the future.”

In theory, his story is a perfect realization of the utopian understanding of the utopian promise of the internet: a truly democratic system of communication where anyone, anywhere can create things and get them seen by important people — even the president!

Yes, that's the story I see here, but that's not how the article ends. There are 2 more sentences:

But in keeping with our current political moment, that utopian vision is used for vapid, divisive ends. The reality, as we should all know by now, is darker and a whole lot dumber.

Gone are the days when the NYT could tell us there's something "we should all know by now" and we would scurry to get up to speed with what all the right people think. Warzel decries what is "divisive," but he jumped off from a completely non-divisive video and — after speaking to a nice man in Kansas — went as "dark" as he could. Ridiculous!
___________________________________

* I think "memesmith" is the NYT's word. I'm still trying to adjust to the use of the word "meme" to refer to individual items — videos or graphics — that are merely intended to be shared frequently. I accept that the word grew out of the original Richard Dawkins idea (from "The Selfish Gene" (1976)):

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

It became something that didn't require imitation and copying with variations, if they acquired virality — if people really did share it compulsively. Now, the word applies to any damn thing someone makes with the hope that it will inspire massive sharing and even if it fails. So the Russians threw together thousands of dumb graphics and we're told they made 3,000 memes. Where was the virality?

Well, ultimately there was a kind virality, as Trump resisters used them in their misguided, ridiculous effort to oust the President America elected, but mostly we've heard only references to the "memes," and we're not looking at these stupid things. The only one I remember seeing is Jesus arm-wrestling with Satan. I don't think the actual graphics were compulsively shared, so they were not viral, and I don't like calling them "memes."

But if these items are to be called "memes" at the point of their creation and before any virality is achieved, I accept the word "memesmith." The ending "-smith" refers to someone, like a blacksmith, who manufactures something.

Remember that Donald Trump destroyed sculptures.

"In 1979, when he was a relatively unknown New York real estate developer (the mind boggles), a 33-year-old Trump acquired the historic Art Deco Bonwit Teller building, only to demolish it a year later to build what would become Trump Tower. He promised, however, to save two 15-foot-high bas-relief panels that adorned the Teller building and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art should he be able to remove them. Despite his word, the 'pieces that had been sought with enthusiasm by the Metropolitan Museum of Art…were smashed by jackhammers yesterday on the orders of a real estate developer,' as the New York Times report from the time tells it."

From "How Real Estate, Violence, and Public Protest Destroyed These Iconic New York Artworks" (which includes the story of "Tilted Arc," a sculpture people hated because it was massively in the way.)



Trump said at the time that the sculptures were "without artistic merit":

In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ‘Donald’ were Trump. ‘What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?’ he asked Vanity Fair a decade later.

Who cares? Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York. Do you think, if I failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.

On not being Facebook's "you."

Facebook assumes you use Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends by displaying yourself a nice person, a person with friends and family who loves smiling faces and romping doggies. We have this very modern, pushing-the-envelope form of communication, but it wants customers in the billions, so it has to picture The Customer as a pretty conventional person. It talks to this person as "you," and being on the receiving end of that "you," I often feel insulted. Like this morning:



IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande said:

Strongly worded letter follows.

I don't like the way the tip of the dog's ear extends into the white border of his picture. I also don't like the fact that a different dog is in front of that picture.

LOL. But I like the implication that the dog is on Facebook sharing dog pictures. It's a fantastic representation of how Facebook undermines the beauty of the internet as expressed in the classic cartoon:



By the way, that cartoon has its own Wikipedia page. Excerpt:

Peter Steiner, a cartoonist and contributor to The New Yorker since 1979, said the cartoon initially did not get a lot of attention. Later it took on a life of its own, and that he felt similar to the person who created the "smiley face". In fact, Steiner was not that interested in the Internet when he drew the cartoon, and although he did have an online account, he recalled attaching no "profound" meaning to the cartoon; it was just something he drew in the manner of a "make-up-a-caption" cartoon....

The cartoon symbolizes an understanding of Internet privacy that stresses the ability of users to send and receive messages in general anonymity. Lawrence Lessig suggests "no one knows" because Internet protocols do not force users to identify themselves; although local access points such as a user's university may, this information is privately held by the local access point and is not an intrinsic part of the Internet transaction.....

What's the life span of a social media app?

I don't know. Maybe some are immortal. But Yik Yak ended.

The app, by its design, was problematic from its inception. A platform where people can say whatever they’d like without disclosing their identity? What could possibly go wrong?...

Mean things were said. Bullying. Hate speech. Threats. The company tried to deal with it:

The company tried introducing handles to make the app safer and more enjoyable for users, but this backfired and translated to more targeted harassment. Last August, the company required all users to disclose their identities in order to use the app, but it ultimately wasn’t enough to keep its user base from ditching the app. RIP, Yik Yak. You were a real beast.

I've blogged about Yik Yak before. A year or so ago, I read it pretty often trying to see what terrible things might be going on around here in this forum that had been — until they tried to fix it — optimized for uninhibited speech. I never participated, but only eavesdropped, and I found the opposite of meanness and bullying. From my old posts:

1. December 28, 2015: "So I downloaded Yik Yak, because I wanted to see what the students around here are talking about. The #1 thing seems to be that the professors haven't put their grades in yet."

2. March 6, 2016: "By the way, I downloaded Yik Yak after I read that it was full of horrible racist and sexist things. I never see that here. I see, in addition to jokes, people who are trying to get up the nerve to talk to somebody they like, concern about doing well in school, and expressions of joy at having seen a dog."

For anybody around here, I believe, Yik Yak would have worked as a cure for the feeling that other people are mean. It would have made you feel that other people are busy, often shy, and pretty damned nice. But it's gone now, because some tiny percentage of the speech amounted to something that people could point to and call hate. 

"They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective," said the "liberal studies" professor.

Michael Rectenwald, 57, is on paid leave, he says, for what he wrote pseudonymously on Twitter. Beginning in mid-September, calling himself Deplorable NYU Prof, Rectenwald tweeted about campus things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, and Halloween costumes. For example, about the costumes, he tweeted: "The scariest thing about Halloween today is . . . the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance. NYU RAs gone mad." (RAs had put out a flyer about avoiding offensive Halloween costumes.)

Speaking of costumes, a pseudonym on Twitter works as a kind of costume, a disguise, allowing someone to inhabit a character. Twitter, with a pseudonym, can be a safe space for the writer, who has a real-world reputation and relationships to protect as he works out his transgressive ideas in public.

But Rectenwald was not outed. He chose to unmask himself, to connect the tweets with his name. He gave an interview to the student newspaper, Washington Square News. Two days later:

A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor in the same paper.

“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote of the untenured assistant professor. 

I don't see any "illogic." Maybe "liberal studies" is a field where "logic" is used loosely. I can see that "liberal" is used loosely. As for civility... well, you know I have a tag for that: civility bullshit. It represents my belief that demands for civility are always bullshit — not really about a neutral value but an effort to get your opponents to tone it down.

Anyway, Rectenwald says the dean and an HR representative met with him and "expressed concern about [his] mental health" and wanted him to "leave and get help." An NYU spokesman asserts that the leave does not have anything to do with the tweeting and his opinions. Perhaps the university means that it's not reacting to the substance of the ideas in the words, but the words as evidence of insanity. That would deserve comparison to the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

Slate/Inside Higher Ed has an article by Colleen Flaherty on Rectenwald's predicament. I see there that Rectenwald says he is a communist and that he diagnoses the university community as insane:

Identity politics, over all, Rectenwald told the [student] newspaper, “have made an infirmary of the whole damn campus. Let’s face it: every room is like a hospital ward. What are we supposed to do? I can’t deal with it—it’s insane.” 

So what does this have to do with Donald Trump? The student newspaper interview asked that question because "deplorable" in the pseudonym made him seem like a Trump supporter (something he admits he intended to do). Rectenwald answered:

I don’t support Trump at all. I hate him — I think he’s horrible. I’m hiding amongst the alt-right, alright? And the point is, this character is meant to exhibit and illustrate the notion that it’s this crazy social-justice-warrior-knee-jerk-reaction-triggered-happy-safe-space-seeking-blah, blah, blah, blah culture that it’s producing this alt-right. Now, I’m not dumb enough to go there. And my own politics are very strong — I’m a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed. Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point....

Rectenwald chose to create an alternate identity on Twitter, to "hid[e] this character in the alt-right" — "because otherwise, the social justice warriors are going to come onto me like flies, and they can be so extreme... It’s a nightmare." That is, he's a lefty, criticizing lefties, but he wanted to disguise himself as a righty. Talk about costumes! When do we get to inhabit someone else's identity?

Quite aside from what's permissible and what deserves punishment — I'd say it's all permissible and unpunishable — when is it effective for a speaker to appear to stand on the opposite side from his true ideology? Does the speaker really know himself? Rectenwald seems pretty certain he's a communist and that the alt-right was his mask. That puts him in the tradition of mobys and false flag operations. But there are far more subtle situations, like this blog you are reading now.

Aaaaah! Moss might be Maass, the apparent Republican in a possible plot against Russ Feingold.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story:

An apparent Republican activist tried to join Democrat Russ Feingold’s team this week in what Feingold’s campaign suspects was a plot to dig up dirt on him.

In an interview with Feingold staff on Wednesday, she initially said she wanted to work on issues affecting women’s health care and unions, but clammed up when confronted about whether she had worked for conservatives and tried to infiltrate Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Iowa last year....

The woman signed up to be a volunteer as Allison Moss on Tuesday, but was let go Wednesday after the Feingold campaign asked her if she was actually Allison Maass. Maass is a writer with Campus Reform, a project of the conservative Leadership Institute aimed at exposing liberal bias at universities....

Why change your name only just that much — Maass to Moss? Perhaps it is inherent in the nature of moss, not to change much, which is why very reactionary conservatives are called mossbacks. 

Mossback..seems to have originated in the swamps of North Carolina, where a particular class of the poor whites were said to have lived among the cypress until the moss had grown on their backs.

ADDED: A bit more information at Yahoo News, with references to Project Veritas, (the James O’Keefe operation) and the spokesman's statement: “Regarding the person you named below, Project Veritas will neither provide nor confirm the identity of any of our undercover journalists, real or imagined."

We were just talking about the ethics of undercover journalism the other day — after a Daily Beast writer did a story on gay male athletes at the Olympics. So check out that post if you are wondering how bad it is for journalists to misrepresent themselves to get a story. I don't know if the Feingold incident — if it was indeed a trick of some kind — was an effort at journalism or some kind of political spying or sabotage.

AND: The Feingold campaign ought to be careful about what it is doing to the real Allison Maass. Here's her page at Campus Reform, where you can see her picture and links to articles she's done. She's a real person: "She is a senior at the University of Minnesota studying professional journalism and graphic design and is Editor-in-Chief of the student publication The Minnesota Republic." Her page links to her Twitter feed, which was only set up this month and has no tweets yet.

Sherman Alexie explains why he didn't oust a poem from The Best American Poetry 2015 after he found the author, a white man, had used a Chinese pseudonym.

As the guest editor of the annual volume, Alexie (a Native American) had some rules for himself in choosing the poems, including:

Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color....

Most of the rules — please read the whole thing — were about neutrality and not showing favoritism.  60% of the poems he chose were written by women, 40% by "people of color." One poem Alexie chose turned out to have been written by a white male, Michael Derrick Hudson, who'd adopted the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou — in Alexie's words — "as a means of subverting what he believes to be a politically correct poetry business." Alexie only learned of the ruse after he picked the poem, and he was "angry at the subterfuge," but he decided to keep the poem in the anthology and to share his soul-searching over what to do about "this colonial theft." (The boldface below is mine.)

Just call me Elaine Glad.

I'm using the "Chelsea Clinton Fake E-Mail Name Generator: your mother’s middle name and the first thing you see when you open the kitchen drawer."