Sacred cow.

Working on the previous post, I briefly contemplated using the phrase "sacred cow." It's a metaphor, possibly useful in the context of discussing the things we feel we shouldn't say. But then I thought, isn't "sacred cow" one of those things we shouldn't say? It's culturally insensitive — isn't it? — implicitly mocking Hinduism. 

People don't say "sacred cow" anymore, do they? I checked, using my usual test of the usage of words, the New York Times archive. I was surprised to see "sacred cow" in active use. Just to list things in the past year:

"Many people who take pride in their green lifestyles—perhaps they bike to work and always carry a travel mug—also happen to be frequent flyers."

"This incongruity grows in part out of cultural factors. A certain type (and I count myself in this category) aspires to be both worldly and socially conscious. We would never think of driving an SUV, say, but we’ve been known to drop the names of far-flung capitals we’ve visited. To be sure, our portable bamboo utensil sets and canvas grocery bags accord with our principles, but they also accord with our self-image, our aesthetics, our personal brands. In other words, those choices are not sacrifices. Opting out of flying, by contrast, requires actual renunciation.... Changing our lifeways means reassessing not only conference design but also our personal customs. It might mean some amount of sacrifice.... Renunciation conveys to those around us that the situation is serious. Especially in the case of climate change—where the effects are dispersed, gradual, and tenuously linked to the causes—this kind of social cue is crucial.... Universities that boast about their LEED-certified buildings but encourage excessive flying among their faculties; governments that neither tax jet fuel nor invest in low-carbon ground travel infrastructure—the people behind these decisions are the ones who really ought to get acquainted with flygskam."

From "Flight Shame: The Climate Hazards of Air Travel" by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (NY Review of  Books).

"It’s true that much of Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal has to do with her frank and fluid way of expressing a politics whose particulars are increasingly popular across the country. But some of it feels substitutionary..."

"... having something to do with her status as an ambassador from everyday life—still so much like the rest of us who follow politics, caught between complicit spectatorship and horror at the seriousness at hand."

I'm consuming New Yorker prose...

"Substitutionary" is an odd word for me. But it is a word. The OED finds its earliest use in 1772, in "Clerical Subscription No Grievance": "The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his Life,..a substitutionary Ransom for many."

My Google search suggests that the word comes up most in the phrase "Substitutionary Atonement," and there's an article for that in Wikipedia:

Substitutionary atonement is the name given to a number of Christian models of the atonement that regard Jesus as dying as a substitute for others, 'instead of' them.... There is also a less technical use of the term "substitution" in discussion about atonement when it is used in "the sense that [Jesus, through his death,] did for us that which we can never do for ourselves"....

Atonement is a theological term for the act of paying for and thereby redeeming sin... A distinction is often made between substitutionary atonement (Christ suffers for us), and penal substitution (Christ punished instead of us)....

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suffers for us?



As the tag says: too much drama.

AND: What is the "politics whose particulars are increasingly popular across the country"? Socialism? I think that's what the New Yorker writer is festooning his prose around. So let's quote Trump's speech, because he talked about socialism:

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence - not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. 

ALSO: After Trump says, "We are born free, and we will stay free," the camera closes in on Bernie Sanders, visibly suffering:



He can't speak, but I imagine he's thinking something like: My socialism brings more freedom.

"This Is How Trump Convinces His Supporters They’re Not Racist/Trump garners support from both those who would be seduced by flagrantly racist appeals and those who would be offended."

An article in The Nation by Berkeley lawprof (former UW lawprof) Ian Haney-Lopez.

Haney-Lopez may not have written that headline, but I must begin by saying that the word "garner" is perfectly silly. It may be hard for some people to believe, but "get" is a legitimate word and not merely slang. So get smart! (You don't garner smart.) I believe that Jeb Bush might have won the GOP nomination if it were not for his strange need to say "garner" for "get."

See? I'm for clear speech. And the topic under discussion in Haney-Lopez's article is unclear speech — words that racists hear as meaning what cannot be said outright but that can be explained away as not racist at all. Haney-Lopez wrote a book called "Dog Whistle Politics" and thinks Trump's rhetoric is different from the "coded" racism we've seen from other politicians.

The nuanced language of dog whistling traditionally sought to hide the underlying racial manipulation from two audiences: potential critics of such an appeal, including political opponents as well as the media; and the target voters themselves...

Trump seemingly couldn’t care less whether his critics perceive and decry his racial fearmongering. 

Seemingly. We don't know how much, if at all, Trump cares. I appreciate Haney Lopez's professorial precision about what we know and don't know. The old "couldn’t care less" formulation asks us to imagine the least possible caring, in other words, zero care. I'd assume Trump cares at least a little — an apt occasion for the questionable "could care less" — but that he cares more about some other things. Or as we say using The Word of the Week, "sacrifice": Trump sacrifices his interest in protecting himself from being accused of racism in order to serve the higher goal of... of what?!

The 2 answers I can extract from Haney Lopez's column are: 1. To provoke the media into giving him free coverage, and 2. There are a lot of racist voters out there to stimulate.

What I want to say is that Trump doesn't completely sacrifice his interest in being seen as a nonracist. He's just setting the balance in a different place. At one extreme, you have people so afraid of saying something that could be interpreted as racist that they won't speak publicly at all. Among candidates, who must speak, many lean heavily in favor of platitudes of inclusion and steer clear of anything that could be portrayed as racist. Others go ahead with issues — like voter fraud or dependence on welfare — that will set off the racism detectors of people like Haney-Lopez. It's hard for people like Haney-Lopez to believe a candidate would go any further than that, but Trump has, and strong, outraged cries of racism have not turned him back. He just adds his condemnation of "political correctness," takes the hits, and runs with it, to the great puzzlement of onlookers.

It's like the movie monster who can't be stopped by bullets. What are you going to do now?

The word "sacrifice" is in issue this week, so let's look at 14 examples of the use of the word "sacrifice," mined from 186 posts with the tag "sacrifice" in the 12-year archive of this blog.

1. Back in November 2013, President Obama said this (in the context of staying in Washington until Sasha finishes high school):

"Cause she's, you know, obviously they-and Michelle-have made a lot of sacrifices on behalf of my cockamamie ideas, the running for office and things."

2. From a 2006 NYT article  about couples who choose not to live together:

Carolyne Roehm, the New York socialite and author, is similarly unwilling to sacrifice control of her space. Ms. Roehm, 54, said she is perfectly happy with her extreme version of the L.A.T. relationship, with Simon Pinniger, 53, a businessman who lives 1,700 miles away in Aspen, Colo. 

3. "Sacrifices have to be made," said a father who sold his motorcycle and got a minivan.

4. But another father put out a book in 2012 about the selfish reasons to have children:

Children cost far less than most parents pay, because parents overcharge themselves. You can have an independent life and still be an admirable parent. Before you decide against another child, then, you owe it to yourself to reconsider. If your sacrifice is only a fraction of what you originally thought, the kid might be a good deal after all.

5. The NYT reported something Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in the U.N. in September 2009:

“The engine of unbridled capitalism, with its unfair system of thought, has reached the end of the road and is unable to move... Selfishiness [sic] and insatiable greed have taken the place of such human concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity and justice. The belief in the one god has been replaced with self-belief.”

6. Here's Obama in April 2011:

"To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I’m president, we won’t.” 

7. An Orwellian banner hanging at the Wisconsin protests of 2011:

"All shared sacrifice is equal, but some must share the sacrifice more than others."

8. From a 2006 USA Today column:

"For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, [Al] Gore requires little from himself."

9. In 2012, Frank Bruni had a whole column in the NYT about the failure of the presidential candidates to use the word "sacrifice."

It’s odd. We revere the Americans who lived through World War II and call them the “greatest generation” precisely because of the sacrifices they made.... [T]he last president to make a truly robust call for sacrifice was ridiculed for it. That president, Jimmy Carter, suggested only that we turn down our thermostats a tad and guzzle a bit less gas, and in July 1979 observed, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Then came Ronald Reagan, whose many great contributions to America were coupled with less great ones, including the idea, which has dominated our political discourse ever since, that we should speak only of morning in America and that optimism, like virtue, is its own reward....

Conditions, all in all, are ripe for a serious conversation about sacrifice. But this presidential campaign has been noteworthy for its nonsensical insinuations or assurances that although we’re in a jam, we can emerge from it with discrete, minimal inconvenience.... We live in a sacrifice-free bubble of volitional delusion.

Obama has lately taken to speaking of “economic patriotism,” which is in some sense his euphemism for sacrifice....

10. From a speech President G.W. Bush made in December 2005:

It is also important for every American to understand the consequences of pulling out of Iraq before our work is done. We would abandon our Iraqi friends and signal to the world that America cannot be trusted to keep its word. We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed. We would cause the tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve, and tighten their repressive grip. We would hand Iraq over to enemies who have pledged to attack us and the global terrorist movement would be emboldened and more dangerous than ever before. To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor, and I will not allow it.

11. From the Democratic candidates debate, April 27, 2007:

SEN. CLINTON: This is not America's war to win or lose. We have given the Iraqi people the chance to have freedom, to have their own country. It is up to them to decide whether or not they're going to take that chance. And it is past time for them to demonstrate that they are willing to make the sacrifice, the compromise that is necessary to put together a unified government and provide security and stability without our young men and women in the middle of their sectarian war....

12. In 2006, the NYT "public editor" said this when Supreme Court journalist Linda Greenhouse revealed some of her political opinions:

[J]ournalism [is] a calling ... that requires sacrifices and special obligations. Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage.

Which made me say:

Greenhouse's speech didn't seem that out of line to me, because I am so used to hearing law professors express all kinds of personal and political opinions about the Supreme Court, and, obviously, I do it all the time myself. I'm trying to imagine a law school where the professors felt they needed to make sacrifices and suppress and submerge their opinions. Actually, it's a scary place! Do you really want us to become more devious?

13. From a 2006 review of a book about how religion works:

[Daniel C.] Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea "that has lodged in their brains." That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Islam, he points out, means "submission," and submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett's view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.

14. When we first encountered Edward Snowden in 2013, he spoke of himself in terms of "sacrifice":

He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

"Monica had to be sacrificed for the greater good of the Clintons and feminist ambitions."

"Hillary was furious at Bill — stories were leaked that he was sleeping on the couch — but she also had to protect her political investment. If he collapsed, she was done. And she was going up — to the Senate and eventually the Oval Office."

Wrote Maureen Dowd in 2014, quoted by me in this blog post, which I'm reading today because I created the tag "sacrifice" yesterday and added it to 200+ old posts so I could see how the word — so important in American presidential politics right now — has been used over the past dozen years.

Here's a more recent example of the use of the word "sacrifice," from June 8th of this yea:

"The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nominee."

Said Hillary Clinton, last night, proclaiming her individual historicity and immediately including everyone else:

Tonight's victory is not about one person.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible....

"Sacrifice," as I was saying yesterday, simply means giving up something of value to obtain something of higher value. You sacrifice because you think you'll be better off in the long run. In ancient times, a lamb might be burnt up instead of eaten out of a hope of winning blessings from God. In common modern parlance, parents sacrifice so that their offspring will have a good start in life, conceptualized as a benefit for the family the parents would like to see prosper.

It's one thing for a person to decide to sacrifice, to give up X for Y, but quite another for someone in the political arena to call what somebody else did a sacrifice. That's rhetoric, propaganda, and we need to analyze not what the person doing the sacrificing hoped to gain, but what the person using the word is trying to do to the minds of those who are listening. If a political orator says that the war dead sacrificed their lives, we should contemplate what the speaker hopes to gain. It's no sacrifice to say "sacrifice"! It's a way to elevate the loss and ease the pain, perhaps, or, ignobly, to distract us from the line of responsibility that traces back to our political and military leaders.

And we may very well be distracted, because there is social pressure to stop all other thinking and honor the war dead and empathize with their families. That's built into the power of the propaganda. We're getting some stern discipline this week — as Trump is pilloried for failing to perform the usual honor ritual. Never, ever, do anything but stop, honor, and empathize. Submit to the pressure or become a social outcast like Trump.

Now, back to my 2 examples above. The word "sacrifice" is used as other people take losses so that Hillary Clinton may gain. The Dowd quote is sarcastic, and the person who loses — Monica — is not choosing to take a loss. She's more in the position of the lamb in the old burnt-offerings scenario. In the June quote, Hillary is pointing at hordes of people and declaring them to have sacrificed for "for the greater good of the Clintons and feminist ambitions." Funny how the sarcastic Dowd language slots right into Hillary's own rhetoric.

Did you notice what Trump refrained from saying when he was asked what he has "sacrificed"?

You've noticed, I'm guessing, that at the Democratic convention, a man named Khizr Khan asserted that Donald Trump has "sacrificed nothing and no one." Khan's son had, as he put it, "sacrificed his life."

"Sacrifice" means to give up something of value to obtain some higher value, and it's interesting to think about when we use that word — in religion, in baseball — but Khan used it in a way that's conventional in wartime: to elevate death.

There are reasons — good and bad — for using a word that makes it seem as though the dead person chose to die in exchange for a higher good rather than to say that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. A good reason is that it eases the pain of those who loved the person who died. A bad reason is that it cuts off the line of responsibility that runs to those in power who made the decision that put the person in the place where he died.

But Khan went further than to say that his son sacrificed. He went on the attack — attacking a presidential candidate (and not the one who had anything to do with putting the son in the place where he died) — and antagonized Trump, telling him, in a statement that purports to have knowledge that Khan could not possibly possess: "You have sacrificed nothing and no one."

It was memorable rhetoric, and it was not surprising that George Stephanopoulos used it to question Trump:

STEPHANOPOULOS: He said you have sacrificed nothing and no one.

Trump did not say, yes, I have. He examined the question:

TRUMP: Well, that sounds -- who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writer write it? Because everybody that went out there....

And then he didn't complete his thought, but I think he meant everybody who went out there on the convention stage. I guess he was considering saying that Khan's speech didn't sound like a private individual's personal thoughts, but like part of the convention rhetoric, that is, the Party's propaganda.

Trump switched to talking about General Allen, who "went out... ranting and raving." It's much better to attack the general than the private citizen. The DNC wanted you to empathize with the father, not to question the warmakers, so Trump re-aimed the question well. When Stephanopoulos brought up Hillary's line "you don't know more than the generals," Trump lit into the generals:

TRUMP: Well, I tell you, the generals aren't doing so well right now. Now, I have a feeling it may be Obama's fault. But if you look at ISIS, General MacArthur, and General Patton, they're spinning in their graves. The generals certainly aren't doing very well right now.

See my Patton quote above, in italics. Stephanopoulos refocused on sacrificing: "How would you answer that father? What sacrifice have you made for your country?" And this time, Trump offered an answer:

TRUMP: I think I have made a lot of sacrifices. I've work[ed] very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've done -- I've had tremendous success.

Stephanopoulos needled him: "Those are sacrifices?" Is hard work a sacrifice? Trump seems to have swapped in the idea of doing good in this world. He makes no mention of giving anything up to pursue his line of work, though he could have. When people work long hours, they sacrifice leisure time. That's what the word means — giving up something of value for a higher value — but it's not politically wise to say that in response to a man who seems to be saying my son sacrificed his life for the greater good.

But there's something else Trump might have said, and it's something he says frequently, something that was expressed at the GOP convention — by Ivanka Trump:

In his own way, and through his own sheer force of will, he sacrificed greatly to enter the political arena as an outsider.

And Here's Trump himself (last May): "I’ve given up a tremendous amount to run for president. I gave up two more seasons of Celebrity Apprentice." And how many times has he said — at rallies — I didn't have to do this. I had a great life?

I'm not surprised Trump didn't deploy this theory when Stephanopoulos asked him the "sacrifice" question, but I'm rather sure he thought of it and chose not to say it. A lot of people seem to think he just blurts out everything that pops into his head, but it's hard to notice unsaid things like this one, and I want to give him some credit for restraint.

Titanic fight between Rex Parker and Will Shortz over the Sunday crossword.

What seemed like a terrible puzzle became damned good once we found out what the clues were supposed to be.

The NYT puzzle editor, Will Shortz, showed up in the comments section of Rex Parker's blog to say: "I don't usually read this blog, because I can't take the constant personal bashing" — but he just had to defend himself. He did so cagily — "The version [of the clues that the constructor] Jeff gave was not what I got" — and Rex called him on it — "That could mean anything" — and Shortz came back and essentially admitted that he'd changed the clues in a way that ruined the whole point of the puzzle.

If you didn't do the puzzle, the theme answers (the main long answers) were the titles of 2 different movies: FROZEN WATERWORLD, TITANIC SKYFALL, SAW THE DEPARTED, etc. These had clues beginning with "Double feature" and ending boringly: "Double feature about the Arctic Ocean?," "Double feature about baseball-sized hail?," "Double feature about attending a funeral?" But in the original version of the puzzle by Jerry Miccolis, the idea was that the clue referred to another movie: "Ice Age," "Armageddon," "The Sixth Sense."

Why did Shortz eliminate what made the theme interesting? As Shortz explains it:

"When asked 'Where are you from?' almost no one would answer 'Europe,' because after 50 years of assiduous labor by the eurocrats, Europe remains a continent, not an identity."

Writes Megan McArdle:

As Matthew Yglesias points out, an EU-wide soccer team would be invincible — but who would root for it? These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them. Trying to build the state without the nation has led to the mess that is the current EU. And to Thursday's election results. Elites missed this because they're the exception — the one group that has a transnational identity. And in fact the arguments for the EU look a lot like the old arguments for national states: a project that will empower people like us against the scary people who aren’t.

And it makes the argument against xenophobia seem like xenophobia.

Ken Burns uses his commencement address to tell Stanford students they must oppose and fight against Donald Trump.

Here's some very heavy-handed rhetoric — ironically against another man's heavy-handed rhetoric — that shouldn't be imposed on the captive audience of a graduating class and the guests who want to celebrate them, but I can see that he thinks it's such an emergency that the normal rules do not apply — which, again ironically, is why Donald Trump must think he's got to talk the way he does.

So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house, to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter; who has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment; who insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims; a man who took more than a day to remember to disavow a supporter who advocates white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan; an infantile, bullying man who, depending on his mood, is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships. I feel genuine sorrow for the understandably scared and—they feel—powerless people who have flocked to his campaign in the mistaken belief that--as often happens on TV--a wand can be waved and every complicated problem can be solved with the simplest of solutions. They can’t. It is a political Ponzi scheme. And asking this man to assume the highest office in the land would be like asking a newly minted car driver to fly a 747.

As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient Proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again--all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral Internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.

We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.

"The first time in our nation's history that a woman will be a major party's nominee."

Said Hillary Clinton, last night, proclaiming her individual historicity and immediately including everyone else:

Tonight's victory is not about one person.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls in 1848 where a small but determined group of women and men...

She put a little special, comical stress on "and men"...

... came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments* and it was first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred. 

I hear an echo of Barack Obama's It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation....

So we all owe so much to those who came before and tonight belongs to all of you....

So yes. Yes...

... Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

... there are still ceilings to break for women and men for all of us.

The metaphor that won't go away. Broken ceilings don't sound inherently good, and I wonder how many people remember (if they ever knew) why, in that metaphor, breaking part of a building is supposed to be good.

But don't let anyone tell you that great things can't happen in America. Barriers can come down. Justice and equality can win. Our history has moved in that direction. Thanks to generations of Americans who refuse to give up or back down.

Now you are writing a new chapter of that story.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure....

This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings...

No ceilings?!

... no limits on any of us and this is our moment to come together. Join our campaign. Contribute what you can... Now I'm going to take a moment later tonight...

So this is the moment... but there's another that's going to happen later. Mixing up the moments. Where's the poetry? I'm hearing an echo of Obama again. "Moment" is an Obama word... This was the moment...

... and the days ahead to fully absorb the history we've made here. 

That's just an unnecessary lie. She's been working so long to get this nomination she's wanted so badly. It's not believable that she's going to spend time in an effort to fully absorb the history. But, obviously, somebody decided the theme of the speech should be history, and it was flabbily fleshed out.
______________________

* I cut and pasted the text from Vox, but I've corrected the transcript. Vox, with sublime ignorance, wrote "the declaration of sent." At least they didn't write "the declaration of scent." From the video, Hillary's enunciation of "sentiments" is clear, and you'd think basic pride would force a transcriber to google the name of the Seneca Falls document. Oh, Vox.

"Here are 5 situations that, for now at least, often confound self-driving cars...."

"In the midst of busy traffic, a ball bounces into the road, pursued by two running children. If a self-driving car’s only options are to hit the children or veer right and strike a telephone pole, potentially injuring or killing the car’s occupants, what does it do? Should its computer give priority to the pedestrians or the passengers?"

Don't you want to decide for yourself just how much, if at all, you're going to sacrifice for the kids? Or is the answer it depends on whether the engineers give priority to my self-interest? Won't your guilty conscience feel better if the car made the call?

"In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus."

"He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and untold millions of dollars for his antiwar principles after being banished from the ring; he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness, and he was beloved for his accommodating sweetness in public. In 1996, he was trembling and nearly mute as he lit the Olympic caldron in Atlanta. That passive image was far removed from the exuberant, talkative, vainglorious 22-year-old who bounded out of Louisville, Ky., and onto the world stage in 1964 with an upset victory over Sonny Liston to become the world champion. The press called him the Louisville Lip. He called himself the Greatest."

From "Muhammad Ali, Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century, Dies at 74."

ALSO: "But Ali had his hypocrisies, or at least inconsistencies. How could he consider himself a 'race man' yet mock the skin color, hair and features of other African-Americans, most notably Joe Frazier, his rival and opponent in three classic matches? Ali called him 'the gorilla,' and long afterward Frazier continued to express hurt and bitterness."

AND: From my perspective, as someone who was 13 years old in 1964 when Cassius Clay emerged in the popular culture, he seemed to have invented self-promoting bragging. My parents' generation held values of modesty and sportsmanship. You shouldn't verbalize your self-esteem, especially in a way that vaunted yourself over others. You should achieve and be admirable and then, perhaps, other people will praise you.

As my parents and their coevals saw it, Clay was teaching the young people the wrong values, including the idea that you can push beyond your area of actual achievement — in Clay's case, boxing — and insult your opponents about something unrelated — such as the way they look. You could not only call yourself beautiful, but the other person ugly. To young people, like me, that seemed very funny and fun and liberating.

(I don't really want to mention Donald Trump in this post, but the connection is too obvious. Who are we? How did we get here?)

"I'm enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means!"

"Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd."

Wrote Garry Kasparov on Facebook, in a post that has been widely shared. He expands on it here, at The Daily Beast.

America transformed the 20th century in its image with its unparalleled success. American technology created the modern world while American culture infused it and American values inspired it. In recent decades that storyline has flipped. The tireless work ethic and spirit of risk-taking and sacrifice have slowly eroded.....

I respect and even like Bernie Sanders. He’s a charismatic speaker and a passionate believer in his cause...  The “revolution” rhetoric of Senator Sanders has struck a chord with many Americans, especially the young voters who are realizing that their own lives are unlikely to match the opportunities and wealth of their parents and grandparents. They are being left behind in a rapidly changing world. It is a helpless, hopeless feeling.

The problem is with the proposed solutions. A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them....

Why I quit watching the debate halfway through and woke up the next morning identifying strongly with Cruel Neutrality.

Do you remember Cruel Neutrality? It's an attitude I noticed in myself and embraced and branded in March 2008:

Who am I supporting in the presidential contest? You shouldn't know, because I don't know. In fact, I'm positioning myself in a delicate state of unknowing, a state I hope to maintain until October if not November. In the meantime, I will spread the attacks around and give credit where credit is due. I think if you look back, you'll see I've done this in the past week. Nothing is more boring than a blogger's endorsement, and I'm not interested in reading any blogger's day to day spin in favor one candidate or another. I would rather take a vow not to vote in November and to keep track of my pro and con posts and go out of my way to keep the tallies even than to turn into a blogger like that.

So I'm taking a vow of neutrality, but it won't be dull beige neutrality. I think partisanship is too tedious to read. This is going to be cruel neutrality.

In 2008, my cruel neutrality was monitored and verified and:

I'd say I've displayed impressive neutrality, being far more likely to stay neutral than to go either positive or negative. But when I did go negative, it was much more likely to be against Obama, and when I did go positive, it was more likely to be about McCain.

Does it surprise you then to realize that I'm almost surely going to vote for Obama -- the chances are about 89% -- and that through the entire period of the vow it has been more likely than not that I would vote for Obama? It shouldn't!

I did go on to vote for Obama. I voted for him before I voted against him (in 2012). Or... it's more accurate to say: I voted against McCain before I voted against Obama. I'm just not that enthusiastic about political candidates. We're in the middle of the 4th election I've blogged, and as ever, I'm drawn to the distanced observer position. I'm one of those voters who get categorized as "undecided" right up until the final weeks, annoying the hell out of some people who can't imagine what more needs to happen to make you decide.

But unless you're a donor — and I never am (not since young Russ Feingold personally pestered me by telephone and I was too polite to use another method to make him stop) — you don't have to nail it down until it's time to vote. Normally, what happens to me is that at some point, in spite of myself, I perceive that the selection has taken place, and it's because one of the candidates has lost me. I go back into my archive and study my own mind to see "How Kerry lost me," "How McCain lost me," and "Why haven't I done a 'lost me' post [in 2012]?" It's nice to have an archive of indecision to mine for the decision.

Last night, I walked out of the debate at about exactly halfway. Part of it was that 9 Central Time felt very late. I'd been up since 3:30 a.m. I am able to pinpoint my bailout time because this morning I'm reading my son's live blog of the debate, and I see the time-stamp on what I know propelled me out of the TV room:

9:30 [Eastern Time] — After Bush criticizes Cruz, Wallace finally lets Cruz respond. But Cruz doesn't have a substantive response — instead, he whines about how many of the questions have asked the candidates to attack him. Wallace retorts: "It is a debate, sir!" Cruz coyly threatens to walk off the stage if there are too many negative questions about him — an allusion to Trump's absence. [Added later: After I point out that Cruz was being facetious, Alex Knepper says, "I thought he was being serious! I guess not. Didn't deliver the line very well." My response: "It's safe to say that if as savvy a political observer as you thought he was being serious, his sarcasm wasn't effective enough to work on prime-time TV a few days before Iowa."] [VIDEO.]

I hated the argumentative overtalking. The moderators try to control, and they really have to. That's the idea of a debate, imposing some format. But it's a thing these days to bust through the rules and pose as the tough guy who's just got to get the truth out. It's irritating as hell. Either submit to the rules or don't. In that context, a joke about rejecting the debate (like Trump) doesn't work. Cruz wouldn't actually walk away, so the rules applied to him. Trump showed how to say I'm not going to submit to the control of these media moderators. Out or in.

But I stayed in. In my chair, watching the debate, for a few more questions, until the immigration part of the show began:

9:59 — Megyn Kelly plays a long clip show of Rubio in about 2009 talking about how phrases like a "path to citizenship" are "code" for "amnesty." Then Kelly suggests he then supported amnesty once he later became a Senator....

Yeah, I know this problem, and I know Rubio will need to twist and contort to answer, but I don't need to see exactly how. Not after I've been up for 18+ hours. It will all be there on the DVR in the morning. I was out. 9 Central. I called it a day.

I woke up clear headed. I really don't like any of the candidates too much, and I also don't hate any of them. I don't like the expressions of hate toward anyone. I have a certain longstanding aversion to Hillary, but I'm also able to accept that she's the most likely next President, and I'm a solid citizen of the Real World. In my youth, I suffered through LBJ and Nixon. It felt like a horror show. I'm old now, and nobody on the current scene is reprehensible in the LBJ/Nixon fashion. Maybe that's the perspective of long experience, but I just don't feel the emotion.

I'm balanced and distanced. I'm interested in observing the day-to-day details and writing about it with whatever edge and humor and insight happens. I'm not lying. I cannot tell you who I'll vote for. We'll see how things look next fall. I don't even know who'll I'll vote for in the primary... or which party's primary I'll vote in. There isn't one candidate I've x'ed out. Not Cruz? Not Trump? Not Bernie? No!

Going back to old "cruel neutrality" posts, I was struck by one commenter's "armchair analysis... of the character AA plays on her blog" — back in September 2008. Blake said:

I think MM is close to right [that Althouse is a Democrat and wants the Democratic Party to succeed], but I don't think that, even as a Democrat, AA identifies all that strongly with her party.

We can see that with her frequent mention of the sacrifice of feminism at the, uh, hands of Bill Clinton.

I think we see there that her identification as a feminist (as she defines it) is far stronger than party affiliation. Minimally, we see a level of integrity and respect for logic that prevents her from lauding Democrats when they do the things they've attacked Republicans for.

Still, she believes in things she associates with the Democrats like social justice (witness the fracas with the Libertarians [link]). She believes, perhaps hesitantly, that race has a non-zero weight in making her decision.

And we might guess that there's a certain, almost sarcastic identification with the person of her youth, that hippie art student who wouldn't bother with A Man For All Seasons or listen to square music, man. This character is obviously a Democrat, even if her future incarnation is surely too sophisticated to boil down politics into "Democrat Good. Republican Evil."

In that context, "cruel neutrality" wasn't ever about being 50-50, something the more strident here have missed. It simply meant that this character was going to go about her business as she always has, and not close her mind to the possibility of voting one way or the other.

Democrat has always been her starting point; but just as Kerry proved unworthy of her 2004 vote, Obama could prove unworthy of her 2008 vote.

The cruelty part comes in playing Devil's Advocate with her own comfort zone. As MM says, she's inclined to vote for Obama, but she won't give him a free pass. She's not the hippie true-believer any more.

This drives the hyper-partisans nuts, of course, since they need every observation to be balanced by a tu quoque.

As for the performance art/traffic angle, my take is slightly different:

If any of you are familiar with Loudon Wainwright III, you know that he writes all these songs about, essentially, himself. Ultimately, however, and by his own confession, the self that sings about isn't really him, but a more dramatic and interesting version of him.

That's sort-of how I see Althouse. There's certainly a motivation to drive traffic, but only within the parameters of what amuses the real Althouse.

5 cents please.

Ha ha. I'll leave it to you to think about how much of that really feels true to me now... other than to say the phrase that jumped out was "there's a certain, almost sarcastic identification with the person of her youth, that hippie art student...." And I haven't followed Loudon Wainwright III since those days, when — some of you will know what I'm talking about — I went to see him at The Ark.

"Given what we know in 2015, the question is whether anybody is really 'playing' football."

"Are high schoolers risking their lives for a chance out of poverty or a sense of elevated status really 'playing'? Are those who take the field in the NCAA, exploited for billions of dollars in television revenue while working in a state of indentured servitude, 'playing'? Are the NFL athletes who have to treat every single play as a potential threat to their brains, and get an average of three and a half years on the field, 'playing'? The only people 'playing' in this scenario are egomaniacal coaches and parents, craven NCAA thought leaders, and NFL executives, all preaching intensity and sacrifice, but really just playing with the lives of others. They are the sports equivalent of the Bush-era chickenhawks. Note how many big-time basketball coaches have kids who play hoops and note how few football coaches can say the same."

That's Dave Zirin in The Nation: "Why Does Anybody Play Football Anymore?/Football has never been more popular. And it has never felt less like a game."

Yes, that's a bit extreme and over-politicized, but I'm interested in the precedence given to "play," the different meanings of "play," and the work/play distinction.

There seems to be an assumption that if something is a game, it should be play and not work. You should be having fun, not striving and struggling, not using it as a way to get money. But what's bad about having a serious, hard-working mindset in sports? There's no corresponding assumption that those of us who are doing jobs that are not games shouldn't feel that we are at play, having fun, feeling joy that's disconnected from the money we're making.

Jack Lew explains why the Treasury Department is putting a woman on the $10 bill.

I'll save you the trouble of watching that clip. The reason is that women are "important" and it's "important" for "women and men" to know that women are "important." Now, just picture a smarmy smile on a bureaucrat and you've got it.

Yeah, but why the $10 bill? I thought there was a movement to get a woman on the $20 bill... and part of it was about the nefariousness of Andrew Jackson? Why have we turned our sights on Alexander Hamilton?

No answer to that, just some weird assurance that Hamilton will remain on the $10, sharing the space with the lucky woman, who may or may not be Harriet Tubman. A woman can't get a bill of her own?!

Why pick on Hamilton? He was a black man, wasn't he? From Ron Chernow's biography "Alexander Hamilton":

Hamilton was portrayed [by George Clinton, writing as "Cato"] as the uppity “Tom S** t” (Tom Shit) and introduced as a “mustee”— the offspring of a white person and a quadroon. This was the first time that Hamilton’s opponents tried to denigrate him with charges of mixed racial ancestry. Tom Shit is mocked for his “Creolian” writing. In a soliloquy, Tom, a conceited upstart and British lackey, says, “My dear masters, I am indeed leading a very hard life in your service…. Consider the great sacrifices I have made for you. By birth a subject of his Danish Majesty, I quitted my native soil in the torrid zone and called myself a North American for your sakes.” Tom is accused of having sent his “Phocion” essays, defending persecuted Tories, straight from the king’s printer in England. After castigating Hamilton as a treacherous foreigner, the author refers to Washington as Hamilton’s “immaculate daddy,” a snide reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy.... (Page 245.)

"On the face of it, 35-year-old Ben Cnaan has painted a friend, stepdaughter and their dog all looking equally pensive in the blistering sunlight of Israel’s Jezreel Valley."

"Another way of seeing it is defiance in the face of impending tragedy. Ben Cnaan’s portrait is based on the story of Jephthah, a judge who led the Israelites into war with the Ammonites and vowed to God that, if he won, he would sacrifice the first thing he saw on his homecoming. He expected it to be the dog. To his horror, it was his only daughter who rushed out to greet him."

From "Israeli artist Matan Ben Cnaan wins BP portrait award/Top prize of £30,000 awarded for painting that struck judges with its ‘engaging filmic narrative’ inspired by biblical story of Jephthah" in The Guardian.

You can discuss the art and politics angle on this — the Brits giving the Israeli the award perhaps because it could be read as anti-Israel — and the quality of the art — realism achieve through precise copying of a photograph that itself would not have seemed especially great. But I'm going to go right to the Bible story. There are 2 problematic elements to this story:

1.  If Jephthah thought he'd only have to kill his dog and he was thus not offering God that much, he was trying to con God. If he really believed in God and thought God hears and responds to prayers, he should have thought that God knew he was only offering a dog. That should have rendered the prayer ineffective or even put him in a worse position than if he hadn't prayed at all.

2. If Jephthah didn't want to have to kill his only daughter, he should have been a hell of a lot more sure that the dog always comes out first. Don't little children come running impetuously toward the father who is returning from war?

I was going to say that these are 2 defects in the story which render it inherently unbelievable. But I changed my mind as I wrote this. Here's my theory for how the 2 seeming weaknesses in the story can be seen actually to strengthen it. Jephthah was sure the dog would come out first and God knew it and caused the daughter to run out first so Jephthah would get what he deserved for trying to get God's support on the cheap.

Intense anticipation this morning at the Supreme Court. UPDATE: Reading Kerry v. Din.

"We have sixteen minutes until 10 am, when the Court will start to release opinions," says SCOTUSblog, live blogging from the Court.

UPDATE: There are 3 cases, but it's Kerry v. Din (PDF) that most interests me because it has a right-to-marry angle:

Respondent Fauzia Din petitioned to have her husband, Kanishka Berashk, a resident citizen of Afghanistan and former civil servant in the Taliban regime, classified as an “immediate relative” entitled to priority immigration status. Din’s petition was approved, but Berashk’s visa application was ultimately denied. A consular officer informed Berashk that he was inadmissible under §1182(a)(3)(B), which excludes aliens who have engaged in “[t]errorist activities,” but the officer provided no further information. Unable to obtain a more detailed explanation for Berashk’s visa denial, Din filed suit in Federal District Court, which dismissed her complaint. The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that Din had a protected liberty interest in her marriage that entitled her to review of the denial of Berashk’s visa. It further held that the Government deprived her of that liberty interest without due process when it denied Berashk’s visa application without providing a more detailed explanation of its reasons.

The Supreme Court vacates the 9th Circuit's judgement:

SCALIA, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, J., joined. KENNEDY, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which ALITO, J., joined. BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.

ADDED:  Justice Scalia, writing for himself and the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas, rejects the notion that there is a fundamental liberty interest within the meaning of the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment in living together with one's spouse:

"I get so tired of the sad articles that desperately try to reassure working mothers that their children are 'better off' than the children of mothers who stay home."

"Work if you want to, but don't imply that my children were at any disadvantage because I stayed home until the youngest started school. That's laughable. As for 'mommy wars,' maybe the constant need to downplay or subtly denigrate the value of SAHM in order to make working moms feel better about leaving their children with others for 8-10 hours a day is a big part of the problem. How about this: there are pros and cons to both scenarios and what matters most is that children are loved. Children who are loved are the ones who are 'better off' so let's leave it at that."

A comment at a NYT piece titled "Mounting Evidence of Advantages for Children of Working Mothers." The term "mommy wars"is in the article, the third sentence of which is:

The mommy wars might seem like a relic of the 1990s, but 41 percent of adults say the increase in working mothers is bad for society, while just 22 percent say it is good, according to the Pew Research Center.

That Pew poll is from 2007, which seems a little relic-y, but the term "mommy wars" comes from a 1990 Newsweek article called "Mommy Vs. Mommy" that begins:

Tension between mothers is building as they increasingly choose divergent paths: going to work, or staying home to care for their kids

These are the Mommy Wars...

Man, that is desperate journalism. And yet it is remembered a quarter century later.

Picture the working mother. Like most mothers of her generation, she probably grew up in a family with an at-home mom, so she's vulnerable to criticism that she's not spending enough time with her children.... She is anxious that her children are growing up without her, that she's missing the important landmarks in their lives...

Now cross the battle lines for a look at the working-at-home mother. She's usually there because she believes that's best for her children. Either she's lucky and her husband can support them easily, or they've agreed to sacrifice and economize so that they can live on one salary. Once ensconced, however, she is often isolated....

Making peace... Many feel that feminism's first wave didn't give them the alternatives they need. Because of that, some gave up on feminism... But perhaps the mothers can't "get it right" all on their own. It seems likely that a truce won't be possible until Congress passes legislation to give families more choices, without sacrificing either the children's welfare or the mother's individual needs. After all, isn't choice what feminism was supposed to be all about?

A truce won't be possible until Congress passes legislation...