Text: "Ghislaine Maxwell was snapped going for a casual stroll while carrying an umbrella on a sunny day at the cushy Federal Prison Camp Bryan.... Maxwell accessorized with a large bottle and a black umbrella — a la Mary Poppins — which she carried overhead despite the seasonally balmy weather in an effort to shield the Sun or perhaps lower her profile...."
Yes, you eventually got there, so you knew before publishing exactly why she carried an umbrella. As you inanely put it: "in an effort to shield the Sun." Inane, because it's not to shield the sun. It's to shield oneself from the sun. An umbrella carried for sun protection can be called a "parasol."
Does the reporter not know this? He's Shane Galvin: "Shane is an experienced writer with a proven track record. He has a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from The New School." How is English literature taught these days? Does one never encounter fictional characters who use parasols? There's nothing bizarre or nutty about protecting oneself from sunlight. I guarantee you that in Jane Austen novels nobody ever slathers on sunscreen.
Yeesh. I'll move on. Just one more thing. I see Galvin capitalized "sun." That's wrong, but why is it wrong? We capitalize the names of the planets — Venus, Mars, etc. Is it because "sun" is like "planet," and not a name at all? What then is the proper noun for the sun? Other stars have names — Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Betelgeuse. If you're talking about our sun along with other stars, what name do you use?
"... to an outdoor rally Sunday in Las Vegas, where temperatures are expected to exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.... Campaign organizers say they will have ample water bottles to hand out to attendees and that cooling tents will be place throughout the venue. Misting fans will be given out. The campaign has paid for additional EMS services to be on site in the case of emergency. The U.S. Secret Service will be making an exception to allow people to bring in personal water bottles and and umbrellas. During a Trump rally in Arizona on Thursday, the Phoenix Police Department said 11 people were transported to hospitals, treated and released for heat exhaustion. Many Trump’s supporters waited in line for hours and some were unable to get inside before the venue reached capacity. The temperature reached a record 113 degrees Fahrenheit... that day...."
"... in a memo released hours after the president underwent a routine annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Thursday morning."
The physician — or the Washington Post — needs instruction in how to avoid triggering jokes about transgenderism. "President Biden remains 'a... male...."
Anyway. Great photo at the link of Biden jogging across the South Lawn as his aide, holding an open umbrella, lags behind. The healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male does not need an umbrella.
That's your candidate, Democrats. There's no getting around it. And it seems that America will spend the next 6 years in the arms of the gerontocracy. Snuggle up!
"... seeking to incite racial tension in a demonstration that until then had been peaceful, police said. A Minneapolis police arson investigator said the man’s actions at the AutoZone on East Lake Street set off a chain reaction that led to days of looting and rioting. The building was later burned to the ground.... Police have also connected the 32-year-old man to a widely-publicized incident in Stillwater late last month, in which a Muslim woman was confronted by a group of men wearing white supremacist garb.... Investigators finally caught a break when a tipster e-mailed the Minneapolis Police Department identifying the man as a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang who 'wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing ['free (expletive) for everyone zone'] on the double red doors,' the [search warrant] affidavit said. A subsequent investigation revealed that the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a small white supremacist prison and street gang based primarily in Minnesota and Kentucky."
And don't forget about the Althouse Portal to Amazon. Here's something good I just had delivered: a Versa-brella. I thought I needed to buy a big patio umbrella with a heavy stand to arrange for the shade I needed to enjoy the deck, but for $20, I got a very nice, highly adjustable umbrella that clamps to my Adirondack chair.
The Sandman is a mythical character in Western and Northern European folklore who puts people to sleep and brings good dreams by sprinkling magical sand onto the eyes of people while they sleep at night, i.e. rheum....
Hans Christian Andersen's 1841 folk tale Ole Lukøje introduced the Sandman, named Ole Lukøje....
There is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely. In the evening, while the children are seated at the table or in their little chairs, he comes up the stairs very softly, for he walks in his socks, then he opens the doors without the slightest noise, and throws a small quantity of very fine dust in their eyes, just enough to prevent them from keeping them open, and so they do not see him. Then he creeps behind them, and blows softly upon their necks, till their heads begin to droop. But Ole-Luk-Oie does not wish to hurt them, for he is very fond of children, and only wants them to be quiet that he may relate to them pretty stories, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep. As soon as they are asleep, Ole-Luk-Oie seats himself upon the bed. He is nicely dressed; his coat is made of silken fabric; it is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreams at all.
ADDED: Yes, yes, I know, and I knew when I wrote the post.... A hundred people are nudging me to include the candy-colored clown (which by the way sounds like another sobriquet for Trump):
I'm thinking of that quote because I'm reading the comments on a WaPo article, "Woman impaled by beach umbrella in Ocean City" ("an umbrella was apparently uprooted and swept away by a gust of wind... the sharper end the umbrella shaft, which is used to plant it into the ground, impaled the woman in the chest"). This is what people have seen fit to write:
Obviously, time for common sense beach umbrella control.
I call for strict umbrella licensing and a 3 day waiting period.
Yes, we should of course do this, to the same extent every other advanced democracy does.
The umbrella injured the left ventricle of the woman’s heart, and despite an emergency surgery, she died. “If this incident had gone unwitnessed, and the nature of the object was not recognized, the manner of this woman’s death may have been in question... This case provides confirmation that beach umbrellas may cause fatal penetrating blunt force trauma to the chest.”
There have also been cases of deliberate weaponizing of umbrellas, notably the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Ivanov Markov in 1978:
On 7 September 1978, Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames, and waited at a bus stop to take a bus to his job at the BBC. He felt a slight sharp pain, as a bug bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He looked behind him and saw a man picking up an umbrella off the ground. The man hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street and got in a taxi which then drove away. The event is recalled as the "Umbrella Murder" with the assassin claimed to be Francesco Gullino, codenamed "Piccadilly".
When he arrived at work at the BBC World Service offices, Markov noticed a small red pimple had formed at the site of the sting he had felt earlier and the pain had not lessened or stopped. He told at least one of his colleagues at the BBC about this incident. That evening he developed a fever and was admitted to St James' Hospital in Balham, where he died four days later, on 11 September 1978, at the age of 49. The cause of death was poisoning from a ricin-filled pellet.
Here is Markov's description of life in Bulgaria in his time:
Today, we Bulgarians present a fine example of what it is to exist under a lid which we cannot lift and which we no longer believe someone else can lift... And the unending slogan which millions of loudspeakers blare out is that everyone is fighting for the happiness of the others. Every word spoken under the lid constantly changes its meaning. Lies and truths swap their values with the frequency of an alternating current... We have seen how personality vanishes, how individuality is destroyed, how the spiritual life of a whole people is corrupted in order to turn them into a listless flock of sheep. We have seen so many of those demonstrations which humiliate human dignity, where normal people are expected to applaud some paltry mediocrity who has proclaimed himself a demi-god and condescendingly waves to them from the heights of his police inviolability...
Speaking of paltry mediocrity, I am seeing — in a cheesy book called "Death by Umbrella! the 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons" — that there were 2 movies in which an umbrella was a murder weapon: "Silent Night, Deadly Night 2" ("Ricky skewers Rocco... and even unfurls it") and "Stitches" (woman killed with an umbrella to through the back of her head, popping out her eyeball, and unfurling in a way that rains blood all over the place).
I give you that clip, but I myself could not watch it. I clicked off at 6 seconds. Let's look at this:
Monument to Georgi Markov in Sofia cc TodorBelomorski
A translation of the inscription: "The living close the eyes of the dead, the dead open the eyes of the living."
A typical chapter skims the metaphysical and the dialectical, with the umbrella described variously as creating a “portable room,” as a “private sky” and “a hat with a handle.” Its combination of replaceability and contingency even “reads like a textbook symptom of late capitalism.” An early-19th-century article by J.S. Duncan classified umbrella wielders into familiar types such as the Sky-Striker and the Shield-Bearer, both of which species remain alas all too common to this day. And Rankine does not neglect such memorably sinister instances as the mysterious Umbrella Man present at Kennedy’s assassination and the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov by way of a poisoned ferrule.
Here, you can buy it at Amazon. It would make a nice Christmas present especially alongside a stylish umbrella.
I'm making an "umbrella" tag now (and adding it retrospectively). It's a tag I've considered making before, so I'm reaching a tipping point. Absurdly, every time I've checked to see if I have an "umbrella" tag, I see that I have a tag "Obama's umbrella." (Weirdly, that tag has 5 posts. 6 now.)
Now, I'm tempted to by "Brolliology" just to see if the author discussed Obama's umbrella. No, I don't need to. There's a search-inside-the-book function at Amazon, and Obama does not make an appearance in "Brolliology," but that doesn't mean it's not a good book. Quite the contrary! I'm browsing around in it and like it a lot. Plenty of amusing illustrations. And it has what I love: miscellaneousness.
In the transcript (NYT) of yesterday's press conference, we see Trump talking about the "alt-right" and the "alt-left" and challenging a reporter to give a definition:
REPORTER: Senator McCain said that the alt-right is behind these and he linked that same group to those that perpetrated the attack in Charlottesville.
TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I’m sure Senator McCain must know what he is talking about. When you say the alt-right. Define alt-right to me. You define it. Go ahead. No, define it for me. Come on. Let’s go.
REPORTER: Senator McCain defined them as the same group —
[cross talk]
TRUMP: What about the alt-left that came charging at — Excuse me — What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? [cross talk] Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. So, you know, as far as I’m concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
Define your terms — it's a way of slowing down an interlocutor who's letting labels do too much of the work. Trump combines the demand for a definition of one thing that is said with calling attention to what is unsaid: You've got a label for one side but not for the other side.
First up is the definition of "Alt-Right," and I think this definition pushes the word into a much uglier zone than some of the people who have popularized the term deserve:
It's not a completely over-the-top get-Trump effort. Notice that last headline: "Trump Jr. could be in legal jeopardy, but analysts say more would be required for a criminal case."
Further down on the page, there's "This is the mother of all tipping points" and "This is no ‘rookie mistake.’ The Trump team shouldn’t even be on the field," but also "President says Donald Trump Jr. is ‘open, transparent and innocent’" and "Is Donald Trump Jr.’s ‘I love it’ email a smoking gun or a distraction?"
Anyway, I wonder what scheming is going on behind the scenes at The Washington Post. I'm imagining that they are thinking This is it, we have him now. But how to play the hand? Over-eagerness could backfire, but if this thing is going to work, this is the moment, we must go all-in. And yet if we show that's what we are doing, it may put off some people whose support we need. We may look bloodthirsty and weird to them. How far, exactly, do we go? And what, exactly, do we want?
AND: On that last question — what, exactly, do we want? — I don't think it should be clear to a Trump-hater that the goal should be impeachment/resignation. Look at Mike Pence. He's ready to go, clean and untouched by these Trump troubles. Why give the Republicans a fresh start? I suspect that the goal is to immobilize Trump. Keep him, but freeze him. But how can we get by with an incapacitated President?
The title is a little ambiguous. "Their wives agree" means women don't want their husbands to be nurses, not the wives also don't want to be nurses, but if the closing quote is the point, then the wives also probably don't want to be nurses. (And by "nurses," the NYT means to refer to mostly to home health care workers and hospital assistants, and not the higher level nurses who are more like doctors and who I'm guessing don't appreciate seeing "nurse" as an umbrella term.)
If the closing quote is not the point — and the bulk of the article says it's not — then the problem is that men (and their wives) perceive the job as unmanly, but if they could get over that mental obstacle, men would like the job and be good at it.
There's a third theme, barely touched upon. The work actually is manly, in that it requires the lifting and moving of heavy patients, and men really are needed.
And a fourth theme: Many patients discriminate against men. Nature discriminates against men by killing them off at an earlier age. There are so many elderly women, and many of them don't mind saying that they won't accept a male health care worker. They're afraid of sexual predation. Whether men avoid the job because they're afraid of being thought of as a potential predator (or afraid of false accusation) is not mentioned in the article.
From the comments:
I am a female doctor and I find this whole issue surprising and disturbingly outdated. Gender does not register to my consciousness when working with a nurse, only their skill set. I have never heard the term pink collar but I find that as irritating as the rest of the article. Not all girls do pink. Not all nurses are women. Let's stop the a stereotypes! Nothing beats a good nurse period.
Ha, the female lawprof gets knocked by the female doctor. "Pink" is only used in that lawprof quote. But I think I see where the lawprof's thinking is. It's not that she sees women as "pink." She's implying that other people see women's jobs as insignificant and the old-fashioned term "pink collar" seems to embody that disrespect. And — I'm reading the etymology of the term now — that's always how the term worked:
The term "pink-collar" was popularized in the late 1970s by writer and social critic Louise Kapp Howe to denote women working as nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers. Its origins, however, go back to the early 1970s, to when the equal rights amendment, ERA, was placed before the states for ratification (March 1972). At that time, the term was used to denote secretarial and steno-pool staff as well as non-professional office staff, all of which were largely held by women. De rigueur, these positions were not white-collar jobs, but neither were they blue-collar manual labor. Hence, the creation of the term "pink collar," which indicated it was not white-collar but was nonetheless an office job, one that was overwhelmingly filled by women.
But if you don't know the origin of the term, it sounds as though it's insulting women, and it may also repel men from jobs we'd like them to take.
After last night's concert, wet from the rain and up past my bedtime, I wrote this list in my iPad to prompt me to remember things I might blog about. I didn't number the list, but now I see there are 9 items. Would have stretched for a 10th if I'd noticed. Since I'm getting a late start blogging, I'll give you the list for its enigmatic value and update item by item as I explain (or attempt to remember) the meaning:
Head high, glow sticks, no
Mansplainer lists jimi etc
Curly headed guy reeks, anosmia
Iphones
Diaries
Rain
Fifty years, first album
Whitest crowd
Standing os
Head high, glow sticks, no — Before the concert a woman came around to foist glow sticks on us. I said "no" approximately 10 times, with added protestations about not wanting the responsibility and concern about the potential for toxic leakage. But she would not take "no" for an answer. I ended up with a glow stick and instructions to break it to light it up and wave it around during "Hold Your Head Up." After she left, I said to Meade: "Whatever happened to no means no? If this were a rape trial, she'd be guilty."
The woman was not an employee of the theater, just a big fan, she said. A big fan of Argent, I guess. "Hold Your Head Up" is not a Zombies song, but the biggest hit of the band the Zombies' keyboard player Rod Argent formed after The Zombies. I did not follow Argent — it's prog rock — but I have heard the song on the radio enough to find it catchily familiar. It lends itself to glow-stick foolery in the chorus, which has a triumphant "Hold your head up WOMAN/Hold your head up WOMAN." You can stab the stick up and forward in a Heil, Argent salute on the "WOMAN." And trust me, the word is "woman," not "WHOA!" Rod Argent explained that to us.
Mansplainer lists jimi etc — Since it was general admission, you get there early and once you get that seat you want, you're going to have to sit in it for a good 40 minutes before the music starts. What to do with your time? You could talk, or you could try to read while the man in back of you talks. Who he talked to, I don't know, because he did all the talking. He was suffering from the delusion that his seatmate would admire him if he told her, one by one, about every concert he attended approximately half a century ago, complete with quotes from his father — "I don't care who the hell is playing" — can you imagine? Jimi was playing. One story like that, fine. But the man had an endless list, the next story always cued up and ready to stop the other person from offering the slightest contribution. At one point, I nudged Meade and started to lean over to whisper something like "That guy's concertsplaining" but Meade's slight smile and nod was enough to communicate to me that he and I were thinking exactly the same thing. You can't eavesdrop on Althouse and Meade doing mental telepathy in Row H.
Curly headed guy reeks, anosmia. That seat I was hoping would stay empty, the one right in front of me, between 2 couples, got filled at the last minute by a late-sixies-ish — in more ways than one — man with a big head of curly gray hair. Oh, no, he's sitting in front of me and he has big hair. Why'd I have to get the big hair guy? My problem was merely visual. (And, really, he only blocked my view of a large black box, which looked like the same box that temporarily deafened me in the right ear when I saw The Ramones play The Barrymore on May 27, 1995, just 3 weeks after we'd seen Mike Watt and The Foo Fighters.) But I'm differently abled. I have anosmia. Meade is more olfactorily aware. After the concert, Meade said: "That guy reeked of weed."
Iphones. Speaking of visuals. So distracting. Put them away, people. I considered getting my phone out to get one picture, but I thought it was too selfish, this idea that I should get one too. But it wasn't that everyone in the theater felt entitled and inclined to take one picture. It was that about 2% of the people thought it was okay to hold up their phone and video an entire segment. The screen looks very bright in the dark audience and it points back at everyone behind you. And maybe it's just me — the screen addict — but when I see the lit screen, I have to look at it. It's just riveting, even though it's nothing but an annoyance.
Diaries. There was no opening act, just 2 parts to The Zombies' performance. (The first set was a variety of things, including the aforementioned "Hold Your Head Up" and The Zombies' big hits "Tell Her No" and "She's Not There," and the second half was a second-by-second, live reproduction of the highly admired, influential studio album "Odessey and Oracle." (The spelling error on "Odyssey" is in the original.))
Between sets, I was reading on my iPhone. Arts & Letters Daily sent me to a review of a couple of books about graphomaniacs, including a woman who had written a diary that consisted of 148 volumes. The diarist, we're told, "never improves, never grows into art," because "She is deafened by solipsism." And: "Hers is probably the longest diary in history."
David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years, during which he has filled a hundred and fifty-three handmade notebooks. The following entries, which document Sedaris’s years in Chicago, have been taken from the forthcoming book “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002),” which is out on May 30th from Little, Brown.
153?! That's more than 148, the number of volumes in "probably the longest diary in history." Kind of surreal to find that statement refuted numerically in the very next thing I read. And then there's the whole idea that the graphomania of the diarist is inherently limiting. People who write obsessively like that are solipsists, going nowhere. The career of David Sedaris tells a different story.
Rain. When the concert let out, it was raining and the car was 5 blocks away. No umbrellas or rain gear. It's funny how you can go years and years without getting soaked in rain. We're pretty good at avoiding getting caught in the rain, and I could have avoided it last night too by accepting Meade's offer to wait under the marquee...
... while he got the car, but I wanted to be with him. Enjoyed driving home with the rain on the street lengthening the lights...
... into glow sticks.
Fifty years, first album.The Zombies first album — which made up much of the first set — was an important part of the record collection that mattered so much to me in the mid-60s, when I was a teenager. The album came out in 1965, when I was 14. It was strange to think of being that teenager half a century ago, listening to that album on a record player something like this...
... and now to be so much older and to be hearing the band live, and they're older too but they sound just the same. One of the original Zombies has died, but the rest, along with me, are still living in the world, still enjoying the same songs, played the same way.
What would the person of the past — the me in the bedroom with the record player — have thought if she were to know that she'll get to see The Zombies live, but it will be 50 years from now, and it will be these songs — "Tell Her No," "She's Not There" — sounding just about exactly like this record she's playing over and over?
I think she would have found it very weird. In 1965, 50 years ago was 1915. No one was excited about songs from 1915 in 1965. My parents were still clinging to songs from 20 years ago, from 1945, and I thought they were hopelessly stuck in the past. In 1965, everything seemed to be changing every year. Just 2 or 3 years ago seemed very different and already replaced by much more advanced material. Ah, but no, in 50 years, you'll still be in love with the mid-60s music, and you won't be home alone — like you are now — with records. You'll be out in a theater jam-packed with people who feel the same way.
Whitest crowd. I said it to Meade as we were standing in line and I said it again as we were in our seats waiting for the show to start: "This is the whitest crowd I have ever been in."
Standing os. Standing ovations. I have never experienced so many standing ovations. The Zombies got a huge standing ovation just for walking out on the stage. For both sets. And they got a standing ovation after every song. And they got at least a partial standing ovation in the middle of some songs. At first, I could appreciate all the love, but after a while, I was getting cynical. All right. Settle down. Or even despairing: Now, mere clapping will seem like an expression of hatred.
I did some research. Are there too many standing ovations? Here's Ben Brantley in the NYT:
I would like to make the case, officially and urgently, for the return of the sitting ovation. Because we really have reached the point at which a standing ovation doesn’t mean a thing....
The S.O. (if I may so refer to a phenomenon that no longer warrants the respect of its full name) has become a reflexive social gesture, like shaking hands with the host at the end of a party.
Or, to put it in cruder and more extreme terms, it’s like having sex with someone on the first date, whether you like the person or not, because you think it’s expected.
And here's the English point of view, from Michael Henderson in The Telegraph:
Although the standing ovation purports to honour the performer, it is usually about the person who stands. It is, more often than not, a gesture of self-reward, or self-congratulation. It is a way of saying: “I have paid a few bob for this ticket, and I have got my money’s worth.”...
But this canker in our theatre-going is also rooted in a narcissism that has spread through all parts of life. ... It is about letting it all hang out, without embarrassment – or, as some pop psychologist put it after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it’s “emotional literacy.” Ah yes, of course.
At cricket matches, the cameras love to linger on those odd folk who dress up as Saracens and cavemen. Even at the rugby, a game played and watched by manly chaps, every try offers an excuse to let off rockets, metaphorically and sometimes literally. And to think they used to shake hands and say: “Jolly well done, sir!”
Ah, I wonder what The Zombies thought of us Americans, us Madisonians. We, most of us, must have thought, flattering ourselves, that we were showering them with love, rousing them to higher an higher heights. So eternally youthful, so bursting with energy. That's what the standing o-ers seem to think of ourselves. But perhaps The Zombies, being English, are more like Henderson in The Telegraph, and they'd prefer a more modest response. As John Lennon once said:
Let's frontpage a debate that broke out in the comments. I had said, in the previous post:
Trump the billionaire has successfully bonded with millions of working-class Americans. He's convincingly worn a trucker hat and spoken like a tough guy. Trump's wealth is built on branding, and he made his grand political success out of branding: He's a man of the people.
jacksonjay said...
The Professor can be so dumb. The headwear is OBVIOUSLY a cap not a hat.
I responded (links added):
The standard term for that item of clothing is "trucker hat." I agree that the term for the baseball item is "baseball cap," but I believe the thing Trump wears is not a baseball cap but a trucker hat.
On the standard distinction between the words "hat" and "cap" in English, I'll start the debate with the statement: Not all hats are caps, but all caps are hats... except perhaps a skullcap.
I found a discussion of the hat/cap distinction at the blog of Mary Robinette Kowal, who, I see, is a Hugo-award winning author and professional puppeteer. Kowal writes:
You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:
After I finish the letter, I put it down on the coffee table, stare into space, open a bottle of wine and drink the whole thing. The next morning, the letter still splayed on the table, I realize it’s not just the image of a happy, still-together family that had unmoored me. It’s also the power of the record-keeping and the memories that such records evoke. I was never good at keeping records....
Here's an article from last August about the "myth" of sex addiction.
[David Ley, author of "The Myth of Sex Addiction," says] that that “sex addiction” isn’t well-defined, is quite scientifically controversial, and in recent decades has been increasingly used to explain a broad range of bad behavior on the part of (mostly) men. But in a sense, this robs men of their agency, of the possibility that they can control their compulsions and put them in a broader, more meaningful psychological context. “Sex addiction,” in this view, is a lazy and easy way out.
To Ley, all this same logic applies to Weiner’s escapades. To him, pushing behavior like Weiner’s under the umbrella of something called “sex addiction” obscures more than it reveals. It strips away a huge amount of the psychological complexity that drives self-destructive human behavior. “Calling Anthony Weiner a sex addict is a distraction from the important issues of personal responsibility and mindful choice,” he said in an email. “It’s also a sad form of slut-shaming.”
Quite apart from the laziness of calling it "sex addiction," there's the cheap convenience of packing someone up into an institution — the theater of saying we're doing something about this combined with the practical solution of bundling him away where he's incommunicado.
The man is separated from his wife. Why can't he just get some actual real-world sex instead of the ridiculous trapped-at-home internet foolery that we're shaming him to death over? It seems absurd to institutionalize him. Why not liberate him? What's the more likely route out of his masturbatory hell?
Do you want to talk about race or do you want to talk about words?
Because we could talk about what "bigot" means. It could mean only those who consciously embrace the idea that some group is despicable, or it could also cover those with unwanted feelings of hate that they are struggling with, or it could include everyone who has even unacknowledged feelings of only slight disgust toward some other group, or it could extend even to people who don't care enough about groups other than their own and have failed to go very far out of their way to do something to help the when they experience misfortune and suffer economic hardship. It's that last thing that Donald Trump is saying about Hillary, so he's making a good point, wrapped within a complicated linguistic issue that might — if people get caught up in it — ultimately work out in his favor. It's the same point as: "What have you got to lose?" Who cares about the tenderness of the hearts of the white people who want black people to vote for them? Shouldn't you vote for the candidate who will help you and your community? Isn't the real bigotry — the bigotry that matters — the bigotry that comes in the form of relegating your community to disorder and depression? We could talk about that.
And we could talk about the political value of saying "alt-right," all right? I mean, who even knew that word until Hillary said it yesterday? Even when you know the word and hear the definition — which she had to provide in the speech since people don't know the term — do you know that this is a real social phenomenon that we need to worry about? Or should we wonder if Hillary is trying to scare us with a bogeyman?
Obama stepped from Air Force One carrying an umbrella as a persistent rain fell on the tarmac. Before he emerged, he sent a message to Cuba on Twitter: "¿Que bolá Cuba?" he wrote, using an informal Cuban greeting. "Just touched down here, looking forward to meeting and hearing directly from the Cuban people."
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