"At least Hanlon's razor... has something witty and memorable and real-life-applicable about it..."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, where the 18-across clue is "'Never attribute to ___ that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."

The answer to on that clue is... spoiler alert...

"I was gonna get back to acronyms and I’m gonna withstand not doing that."

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden fumbles acronym during Pacific Islands forum speech: 'Doesn’t matter what we call it'" (NY Post).

If you think about it — and I had to think 3 or 4 times — "I’m gonna withstand not doing that" makes sense. He "was gonna get back to acronyms," but he couldn't think of the acronym or couldn't or wouldn't say it, so he was "not doing that" — not "get[ting] back to acronyms. You just have to figure out the function of "withstand." It makes sense — and I'm a believer in "charitable interpretation" — if you see "withstand" as a determination to stand against — to successfully resist — getting back to acronyms... but, no... he said he was going to resist NOT getting back to acronyms. Well, I think you get it. He meant he's going to survive not getting back to acronyms. Because of course he will. He survives everything. He seems feeble and befuddled, but he goes on and on.

"This practice of reading someone's words in an attempt to look for 'dogwhistles' is the opposite of 'charitable interpretation'..."

"... which means 'interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.' In contrast, dogwhistle hunting is the practice of interpreting someone's words in the most unreasonable or offensive way imaginable."

Writes my son John, discussing a recent effort to cancel Steven Pinker.

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. (Sorry to introduce a rival canine into this little post.)

"So when I say time has a race, I'm saying that the way that we position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought."

"And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution. So prior to that, we would talk about time as merely passing the time. After the Industrial Revolution, suddenly, we begin to talk about time as spending time. It becomes something that is tethered to monetary value. So when we think about hourly wage, we now talk about time in terms of wasting time or spending time. And that's a really different understanding of time than, you know, like seasonal time or time that is sort of merely passing. And so I wanted to think about, what does it mean if people are considered folks who, largely, are not impacting the flow of things, right? - which is often a racialized idea. So when we think about black and brown peoples around the world in Western frameworks, there is a way that black and brown people are seen as a lag on social progress. So they are seen as holding back the, you know, power of the West to modernize the world. And that becomes the pretext often to do all manner of violence...."

From "Brittney Cooper: How Has Time Been Stolen From People Of Color?" (NPR), which I'm reading — reading and following the the principle of charity — after seeing it mocked at "Rutgers professor: Even the concept of time is racist" (College Fix).

ADDED: Some cultures really are spoken of as "timeless" or "beyond time." And the statement "Time is money" is something you can agree with or reject. I sometimes say, "All I have is time." But what does that mean? I hear other people say, "I have no time." An apt riposte might be, "What? Are you dead?"

ALSO: I looked up the phrase "Time is money," and I see — in the Wikipedia article "Opportunity Cost":

[Benjamin] Franklin coined the phrase "Time is Money", and spelt out the associated opportunity cost reasoning in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748): “Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.” 

AND: Speaking of white men:

What a terribly bad week it's been for Gov. Northam.

Today, there's this:

BREAKING: Gov. Ralph Northam yearbook page shows blackface and Klan photohttps://t.co/6A89ejp5Ho

— The Virginian-Pilot (@virginianpilot) February 1, 2019

And earlier this week, a lot of people heard him saying he'd accept infanticide, though I myself gave him a charitable reading and never took it that way.

As for the blackface and Klansman photo, what's the charitable reading? He's not responsible for his yearbook page? Remember last September how seriously Democrats took Bret Kavanaugh's yearbook page?

"As soon as the new view of Sandmann emerged, I said (ask Meade), people need to resist trashing Phillips."

"Both Phillips and Sandmann were ordinary people living private lives in obscurity. They each did something that got them into the spotlight, but neither really asked or was at all prepared to be inspected and judged by millions. We should be charitable toward both of them. Ideally, they would never have been a news story at all. It is the media — mainstream and social — that deserve criticism."

I'm just front-paging something I wrote in "The Green Rat Café."

This made me want to read "The Principle of Charity" (Wikipedia):

In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation....

[Donald] Davidson sometimes referred to it as the principle of rational accommodation. He summarized it: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimises agreement. The principle may be invoked to make sense of a speaker's utterances when one is unsure of their meaning...

[There are] at least four versions of the principle of charity...

1. The other uses words in the ordinary way;
2. The other makes true statements;
3. The other makes valid arguments;
4. The other says something interesting.

A related principle is the principle of humanity, which states that we must assume that another speaker's beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some way, and attribute to him or her "the propositional attitudes one supposes one would have oneself in those circumstances"...

I'm making a tag "the principle of charity/humanity," because I think it might help me (and you!) remember to do something I very much believe in doing. You might say it's too similar to calling for civility (which I'm known for calling "civility bullshit"), but it's not the same thing. It's not about tone. It's about interpretation and understanding.