"Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not?"

"Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent.... The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men.... What is natural... about being hurtled through the troposphere in a pressurized metal tube burning petroleum distillates refined from dinosaur debris?... But to pursue a state of purity—even a fictional one; even a made-up, obviously impure one—still feels righteous. To act on an attempt to become closer to nature, or some imagined state of unadulteratedness, also makes one feel as if one is getting the best of it...."

Writes Ian Bogost, in "Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves/Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved" (The Atlantic)(free-access link, in case you need "rawdogging" defined, etc.).

I'm giving this my "scrupulosity" tag.

"From elementary school through college, girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades."

"Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies. What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class — their hyper-conscientiousness about schoolwork — also hold them back in the work force?... So how do we get hyper-conscientious girls (and boys, as there certainly are some with the same style) to build both confidence and competence at school?... Th[e] experience — of succeeding in school while exerting minimal or moderate effort — is a potentially crucial one. It may help our sons develop confidence, as they see how much they can accomplish simply by counting on their wits. For them, school serves as a test track, where they build their belief in their abilities and grow increasingly at ease relying on them. Our daughters, on the other hand, may miss the chance to gain confidence in their abilities if they always count on intellectual elbow grease alone."

From "Why Girls Beat Boys at School and Lose to Them at the Office/Hard work and discipline help girls outperform boys in class, but that advantage disappears in the work force. Is school the problem?" by the clinical psychologist Lisa Lamour. That's at the NYT, where the highly rated comments are very resistant and want to talk about sex discrimination in the workplace and the demands of childcare.

I'm interested in this subject of the downside of conscientiousness. My tag for it is "scrupulosity."

"... I fear that Comey is damaging himself — and the credible case he makes against the president — by putting his obvious distaste for Trump into the service of selling his book."

"It allows Trump and his defenders to paint Comey as disgruntled and self-serving. If Trump is a pig, Comey’s a prig. I wonder who comes out looking better to most Americans in that particular contest."

Says Bret Stephens, quoted at the NYT in a conversation between him and Gail Collins that has the headline "When a Politician and a Lawman Try to Play the Hero, the Lawman Usually Wins." That's the headline because it's what Collins then says:

Gail: When there’s a choice about whether a politician or a lawman is going to get to play the hero, lawman usually wins. I suspect Comey will go down in history as the hero who stood up to a crazy president. Although in a fairer world he’d also be remembered as the guy whose overdramatic press conference got us said president in the first place.

1. I think "If Trump is a pig, Comey’s a prig" was a much spiffier and more obviously true line than "When there’s a choice about whether a politician or a lawman is going to get to play the hero, lawman usually wins," but I can see why the Collins quote was chosen to appeal to NYT readers.

2. As to "I suspect Comey will go down in history as the hero who stood up to a crazy president" — Comey himself explicitly rejected the notion that Trump is crazy. From the transcript of the ABC interview: "I don't buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia."

3. Where did Collins get the notion that in a showdown between a politician and a "lawman," "the lawman usually wins"? I'm getting a Western movies vibe from this image, what with "lawman." I've been in the law field myself for 40 years and "lawman" doesn't feel idiomatic to me as a way to refer to present-day law-enforcement personnel. In Western movies, though, I agree that the lawman usually wins. But in modern American life, politics and law interact in complex ways, and the law often leaves the answer to political choice.

4. I'm searching the NYT archive for "lawman," and I found the next most recent use and think it's something that may have influenced Collins. From "Best of Late Night":

In an interview with ABC News over the weekend, [James Comey] went into detail with a critique of Trump’s tan. Trevor Noah wondered aloud whether Comey could be undermining his own credibility.

“You see, now that’s funny, but that doesn’t sound like an impartial lawman. That sounds like a guy who got fired from White Castle talking trash about his old boss — that’s what it sounds like. It’s like, ‘Man, that dude smelled like onions before he got to work!’” 

And just before that, in "James Comey’s Attacks on Trump May Hurt a Carefully Cultivated Image":

For decades, James B. Comey cultivated an image of purity as a lawman who stood above politics and politicians. Then came the book tour.

With the release of his memoir this week and a set of high-profile media interviews to publicize it, Mr. Comey... has veered onto risky terrain, shedding the trappings of a high-minded referee and looking instead like a combatant in the country’s partisan battles.

Mr. Comey’s description of the president as an unethical liar “morally unfit” for office; his call for voters to decide Mr. Trump’s fate at the ballot box in 2020; and even his observations about Mr. Trump’s appearance — his “orange” skin, his too-long ties, his hands — are stark departures from the law-enforcement mission of his old agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

If I go any further back in the NYT archive, I get the word in the Western sheriff context, so I'll just note that there seems to be a new tic, calling Comey the "lawman." Perhaps there's some ideation that the sheriff is in town or that Trump feels like the Wild West and needs taming.

5. There actually was a TV show "The Lawman" (1958-1962). I'm old enough to have an impression of that in my head. When I hear "lawman," I picture something like this:



And maybe that's what some people (including Comey?) would like to picture Comey doing to Trump.

"The color of a lobster is no more important than the color of a person. This lobster is like all the others in the ways that matter."

"And all that matters is that lobsters want to be free to live their natural lives just like us, not cooked alive and eaten. Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praise worthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally."

But people do care intensely about the color of their various pets and often choose one or the other based on color. Should we stop that because of the actual real-world human problem of racial prejudice?

Even with respect to human beings, we have lots of color preferences that aren't part of the race-prejudice problem. You might love seeing a woman in a red dress. You might want to dye your hair blue. You might want to see multicolored tattoos on other people's arms. You might adore Elizabeth Taylor because her eyes were a color that it seemed nobody else had.

Are all these pleasures something about which we should become self-critical?

If you want to be be self-critical, how about being self-critical about your precious attention to your own morality — that wonderfully named sin called scrupulosity — and consider whether likening the everyday joys of color perception to the age-old suffering of racism is itself a racist error.

"I started living in a bubble of restriction. Entirely vegan, entirely plant-based, entirely gluten-free..."

"... oil-free, refined sugar-free, flour-free, dressing/sauce-free, etc. and lived my life based off of when I could and could not eat and what I could and could not combine."

At some point, the interest in "healthy" eating becomes an unhealthy obsession, orthorexia nervosa.

This reminds me of the most interesting sin called scrupulosity — the sinful obsession with not sinning.