Well, you can't skew the teams in the middle of the of the World Series... can you?

"Astros' Yuli Gurriel Suspended For Racist Gesture — But Not Until After World Series."

So racist gestures matter... but not too much.

Here's where we talked about this controversy yesterday, where I linked to an L.A. Times column by a man whose ancestry was half-Hispanic, half-Japanese and who tried to convince us that racial epithets were not as serious coming from a Spanish-speaking person as they'd be if they came from an English-speaking person and "Even racist-looking gestures, like the one [Yuli] Guerriel made, aren’t made with the same level of vitriol. Not close. Of course, just because something is done playfully doesn’t necessarily make it OK...."

It's bad but not that bad.  Suspension... but after the World Series is over.

Mulling Mueller.

I've got nothing to say, because it hasn't happened, but here...

... in case you feel the need to talk about it.

Did Dana Milbank not understand that he was working with a man who was sexually harassing women?

He says he didn't, in "A #MeToo for clueless men" (WaPo), but he wasn't "clueless," if there were clues, and he says it outright "there were clues." He says it, but then, weirdly, doesn't enumerate clues about anything that was done to put a disparate burden on women at The New Republic.

Milbank purports to have seen only a gender-neutral problem:

I knew that Wieseltier could be a bully. At editorial meetings, he would harshly cut down those he didn’t like. I was advised before I took the job that if I wanted to get ahead at the New Republic, I needed to be on his good side. He would protect those he held in favor and sink those he didn’t. I was one of those he protected. I think he liked me. I liked, and greatly admired, him.

Milbank denies that he was part of "a conspiracy of silence." Rather, it was "a cone of ignorance."

Come on, Mr. Milbank. Give me a break. How did you get into a "cone of ignorance"? You're supposed to be a journalist, and yet you lacked basic awareness of the environment in which you worked, and you claim to know nothing about the precise matter that would make you look bad now that you know you got the advantage of the favor of this man who was (allegedly) making the workplace unequal for women?

Why should we believe that? I can see that you want us to believe that because it is powerfully in your interest, but that's a reason not to believe you. You say you "knew that the magazine was a boys’ club." You took advantage of the boy's club and, at best, you pulled a cone of ignorance onto your head* so you wouldn't have to think you were wrongfully benefiting. Today, you have a lovely platform at The Washington Post. Why do you deserve that, you with the Cone of Ignorance?

My friend Franklin Foer, a former editor, recalls being uncomfortable with Wieseltier’s lewd comments when he first arrived at the magazine. But “they just seemed accepted. I said nothing — and certainly didn’t think hard enough about how those remarks would be suggestive of private behavior or created a hostile environment.”

Maybe this is because Foer and I were both members in good standing of the same boys’ club. “One of the byproducts of benefiting from male privilege is that it blinds you to the costs of the system,” Foer continues. “I abstractly understood this and even tried to combat it. But the toll wasn’t evident to me until now.”

Oh, bullshit. The "toll" is that you now are experiencing a burden — exposure as a man who knew or willfully blinded himself and not only did nothing to help, but accepted benefits for yourself at the expense of others.

So now, when it is in your interest, you're doing what you can, which seems to be to accept a carefully designed form of blame, which is no more blame than the story that has broken is forcing upon you.

_________________________

* I'm picturing something like a dunce cap or a KKK hood, but perhaps it's not headgear:


Cone of Ignorance from Clark on Vimeo.

At Daisy's Café...

... you can run all over the place.

(And if you need to shop, please use The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"Was this meant for a comment on the GOP? It sounds like talk to text gone wild"/"Love this--reminds me of Waiting for Godot! Truly, we live in absurd times!"

Comments on a comment that's rated #1 on a NYT article titled "As G.O.P. Bends Toward Trump, Critics Either Give In or Give Up."

Here's the comment that's delighting everyone:

Zero optimism that the Democrats can ever regain hello hi oh you’re there are you outside oh well let me come to the door I’m icing my knee and I’m hard boiling some eggs I’ll turn them off and then will do our meeting yet out that that will be fine I’m Normans out doing some errands and he knows you’re coming so he’ll just go down to the cave I was down in the Cape myself this morning by getting so let me get up because I’m right now sort of trapped in my chair and then I’ll put the ice pack back on when you get here OK thanks bye-bye

New York Magazine highlights the comment and the later comment explaining it:

“I was composing a message using the autospeak, and a friend arrived early to my house,” she wrote in a reply further down the thread. “I had no idea all that drivel was being recorded — there are even errors in the drivel! And then to be a pick, with about 15 emails announcing such, meant that my email went rogue. Yes, folks,” she added. “I guess I do sound like Sarah Palin here!”

Oh, a gratuitous swipe at Palin. She needs to go back on autospeak, where she was charming as hell. And maybe give a little thought to why (some) people like Sarah Palin so much. It's the freedom, the spriteliness. Maybe try it on purpose some time.

By the way, "I’m right now sort of trapped in my chair..." is more "Endgame" than "Godot"...

"The 'shitty media men' list wasn’t made to be a bludgeon. When the anonymous, crowdsourced Google spreadsheet was first created earlier this month..."

"... to collect anonymous reports of alleged sexual abusers, harassers, and general creeps in the New York City media and publishing sphere, it was presented, and understood by its creators, more as a shield than as a weapon — a tool to help women to protect themselves from men they should avoid. It was highly and admittedly unreliable — 'take everything with a grain of salt,' it said at the top, and 'if you see a man you’re friends with, don’t freak out' — but it was also private, meant to be shared quietly and directly between women the way whispered warnings always have been. This model, of course, didn’t work for very long. For about 24 hours, the list circulated as it was intended to, among a fairly small number of women...."

New York Magazine reports.

Words.

Recently published words in the Oxford English Dictionary:

auger, v.
mirch, n.
disacceptance, n.
aulicism, n.

1. Don't confuse "auger" with "augur." To "auger" (the verb) is what you do with an "auger" (the noun). To "auger" is to bore a hole. To "augur" is to "forecast from signs or omens."

2. "Mirch" is based on "mirc," the Hindi word for pepper. It's just the pepper in Indian cooking, and it's also figurative for intense feeling, as in "Adding mirch to the masala is a politician..who takes the..police to task" (from Times of India, 1990).

3. "Disacceptance" you can easily figure out, but why would you need this word instead of "refusal" or "rejection"? Maybe it works to get some aloofness or archness, or maybe sometimes you like the way it looks in phrases like "God's acceptance or disacceptance of things is... proportionable to his judgment" (a1652 J. Smith Select Disc. (1660) vii. v. 325).

4. "Aulicism." This is a rare word that means "A courtly expression or turn of phrase" or — and this is a historical usage — "A tendency or attitude amongst clergymen to become attached to the secular ways and values of court, or to seek political influence and power, at the expense of devotion to religious and spiritual matters."

"When a young woman started work at the New Republic, she would be swept into Leon’s glittering welcome wagon."

"Maybe it would be lunch at one of his favorite haunts (The Palm, back in his heyday) or a cozy chat (and maybe a sip of bourbon) in his office. The venue shifted, but the purpose was constant: to gauge the newest member of the family’s potential as a playmate. For Leon, women fell on a spectrum ranging from Humorless Prig to Game Girl, based on how much of his sexual banter, innuendo, and advances she would put up with. Once he figured out where to place you, all else flowed from there.... As woman after woman has stressed, Leon’s was not a Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes type of predation. No one I spoke with was ever physically afraid of him. Yes, some feared his ability to make their life miserable and ruin their future.... At the same time, many women longed to be in what one called 'the sunlight' of Good Leon. Complicating matters, the owner of the magazine during my tenure, Martin Peretz, had a reputation as a scorching sexist (a tale for another day), and the magazine was seen as something of a boys’ club. Leon always presented himself as a champion of women, which in many cases he was: He helped some women fine-tune pieces, he introduced them to famous and powerful people, he helped them find jobs a step up the career ladder.... As a senior political writer, I didn’t look to Leon for mentoring. Even so, I wanted to stay in his good graces—not merely because I feared Bad Leon, but because Good Leon could be, yes, incomparably charming, funny, and brilliant. I rationalized that I could handle the rest and that his low-level lechery was simply the cost."

From "Leon Wieseltier: A Reckoning/Women who once worked at The New Republic reflect on their experiences with the legendary literary editor, who is now facing allegations of workplace 'misconduct,'" by Michelle Cottle (in The Atlantic).

Let's watch Trump do his Halloween photo op with the children of White House reporters.

Of course, he'll get a few things a little off, and the game is, of course, to find them and use them as much as possible to prove, once again, what a bad person he is:



The New York Times puts it this way:

“I cannot believe the media produced such beautiful children,” President Trump marveled, surrounded in the Oval Office by the Halloween-costumed offspring of White House reporters. “How the media did this, I don’t know.”

The children stared vacantly. The candy had not yet arrived.

For some 180 seconds on Friday, these visitors inspired a quintessential Trump performance — part executive gripe session, part grandfatherly charm, part open-mic night for the under-12 set....

“These are beautiful, wonderful children,” he began, pausing for a beat behind his desk. “Ughhh. You going to grow up to be like your parents?”

When the candy arrives, he hands it out saying: “Who likes this?And you have no weight problems. That’s the good news, right?”

Yeah, but how did Obama handle Halloween? I looked it up. Oh, my...



That guy could be so beautiful (in a way Trump cannot begin to emulate). I blogged that a year ago under the post title "I'm going to miss this man." Seeing a tiny boy dressed as Prince, Obama sings "Purple rain, purple rain."

By contrast, Trump saw a little girl with purple hair and said: "I like that hair. Wow. What color is that? Is that purple?" The little girl just said "Yeah." She was the daughter of a journalist, and yet she politely refrained from retorting: "I like that hair. Wow. What color is that? Is that orange?"

ADDED: Let me pick on the NYT for this:

On the girl with purple hair: “What color is that? Purple?”

That makes Trump sound dumber than he is, because here's the girl in question:

It's a setup to call her "the girl with purple hair." Many girls, if asked "What color is that? Purple?" would give an elaborate answer like: "Well, it's sort of purple, but really, I would call it lilac or maybe lavender." Perhaps Trump has had conversations with his daughters about colors and thought it was giving the girl a good opportunity to say something cute or clever.

But she just said, "yeah," which is okay, but I don't think Trump should be made to look like he wasn't good at talking to kids because he just stated the obvious.

You could even say he was better than Obama, because Obama took the spotlight from the child by singing "Purple Rain," but Trump allowed himself to sound dumb when he was really giving the girl a chance to shine.

I've had many conversations with children over the years, and I think I'm kind of good at it. And I would use simple questions like "What color is that? Purple?" Or maybe I'd have said "What color is that? I've never seen that color before. Is that special color only for unicorns?" The idea is to give the child a chance to say anything and then to show interest in whatever it is and get some kind of riff going in any way that the child can do.

"[B]elieve me when I tell you racial terms aren’t said with the same level of maliciousness in Spanish as they are in English."

"Even racist-looking gestures, like the one [Yuli] Guerriel made, aren’t made with the same level of vitriol. Not close. Of course, just because something is done playfully doesn’t necessarily make it OK. Race- and ethnic-based humor typically demonstrates ignorance, as was the case here with Gurriel, and Latin cultures could use less of that. At the same time, it’s hard for me to be offended by words or actions that weren’t intended to be mean-spirited. Remember when Yasiel Puig and Hanley Ramirez used to feed Juan Uribe bananas in the Dodgers dugout?"

Writes Dylan Hernandez, in the L.A. Times, claiming special authority to discuss Guerriel's "slanty eyes" gesture and use of the term "el Chinito" as he was in the dugout celebrating the home run he'd just hit — in Game 3 of the World Series — off the Dodger's pitcher Yu Darvish.

Darvish is Japanese. Guerriel is Cuban-born. Dylan Hernandez is the offspring of a father who was born in El Salvador and a mother who was born in Japan.

"El Chinito" — according to Hernandez — means something like "little Chinese boy."

Hernandez says the Spanish-language epithet is different — merely stupid — because it is not "using language representing a system designed to oppress certain groups of people."

Spanish doesn't represent a system designed to oppress certain groups of people, but English does? It's almost as if Hernandez is saying that there's depth and serious meaning in what English-speaking people say, and those who speak Spanish should be understood as playful and childlike. But that would be racist.

After he heard the criticism, Gurriel said (in Spanish):

“What happened was that I was commenting how I hadn’t had much luck with Darvish... I said I thought maybe they saw me as they see themselves and I wanted to see if they would throw me a pitch like that.”

And why call a Japanese person Chinese? Gurriel said: “It’s because in Cuba and in various places, you don’t say Japanese, you call all Asians ‘chinitos.’” (And he admitted knowing that lumping all Asians together as Chinese is also offensive.)

As for Darvish:

“I saw it, but for me personally it doesn’t really bother me,” he said in Japanese.

Asked if he was upset, Darvish deadpanned, “I’m very, very angry.”

He laughed and added, “No.”

How are we to understand that? It was in Japanese. Hernandez, despite his Japanese background, does not reveal what he may think about whether those who speak Japanese reveal what they think.

Gurriel mocking Darvish?? pic.twitter.com/DsHz12HT3O

— You (@CoIIier) October 28, 2017

Annabella Sciorra "was still living in fear of [Harvey Weinstein], and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her..."

"... in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly," writes Ronan Farrow, in a new New Yorker article, "Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein/Annabella Sciorra, Daryl Hannah, and other women explain their struggles with going public."

Farrow had attempted to get Sciorra to speak to him for the first article, and here we see her description of how she reacted to Farrow's earlier encouragement to tell her story:

“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.... Even now, as I tell you, and have had all these women around saying it’s O.K.,” Sciorra told me, “I'm petrified again.”

Farrow says there are still "many others" too afraid to talk to him.

Daryl Hannah, also interviewed in this article, explains the reluctance to speak:

Hannah said that she had decided to speak publicly about her experiences for the first time, more than a decade after they occurred, because “I feel a moral obligation to support the women who have suffered much more egregious transgressions.” She, like many women who have come forward, still had doubts about the trade-offs she would have to make for speaking openly. “It’s one of those things your body has to adjust to. You get dragged into the gutter of nastiness and pettiness and shame and all of these things, and it sometimes seems healthier and wiser to just move on with your life and not allow yourself to be re-victimized.”

This is the #MeToo that inherently can't be talked about: I decided to do nothing because I didn't want to be dragged into the gutter of nastiness and pettiness, and it seemed healthier and wiser to just move on.

There's also the outright retaliation:

Sciorra said that she felt the impact on her livelihood almost immediately. “From 1992, I didn’t work again until 1995,” she said. “I just kept getting this pushback of ‘We heard you were difficult; we heard this or that.’ I think that that was the Harvey machine.” The actress Rosie Perez, a friend who was among the first to discuss Sciorra’s allegations with her, told me, “She was riding high, and then she started acting weird and getting reclusive. It made no sense. Why did this woman, who was so talented, and riding so high, doing hit after hit, then all of a sudden fall off the map? It hurts me as a fellow-actress to see her career not flourish the way it should have.”

You say you don't want a R-Evolution...

Earlier this month, we were talking about a proposal to put up a 45-foot sculpture of a nude woman on the National Mall. The sculpture, "R-Evolution," was supposed to stand there, facing the White House, for 4 months. According to the artist, Marco Cochrane, the thing would "start a conversation about violence against women." His collaborator expressed the hope that President Trump would see the sculpture and "change his perspective" toward women.

I was skeptical to the point of sarcasm:

Yes, looking at sculptures that are nothing more than the figure of a nude woman has great potential for people to change attitudes about women.

And to the point of feminism:

[The male artist] makes the sculpture and he talks about it, touting the meaning. [The female sculpture] expresses nothing, and that's what he likes, a woman present and saying nothing. What an immense challenge to the imagined mindset of President Trump.

Now, I'm seeing (in the NYT) that the National Park Service has denied the permit:

Placing the piece on the turf for 91 days was likely to “significantly damage” the grounds, [wrote the park service’s acting regional director, Rick Obernesser]. Putting such a tall sculpture near the base of the Washington Monument, he said, was “likely to have an adverse effect on the aesthetics, including the cultural identity, of the area.”...

“We received no indication of anything disqualifying in our permit application until the media began reporting on the story,” said Robert Haferd, a lawyer who sought the permit on behalf of the group.

There is a free-speech issue here. It shouldn't be viewpoint discrimination, but the aesthetics were awful.

Since you're not going to get the monumental female nude that is "R-Evolution," here's the new Taylor Swift video:

"The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by a major Republican donor, initially retained the firm that conducted opposition research on Donald J. Trump — including a salacious dossier..."

The NYT reports, based on testimony before the House Intelligence Committee today.

According to people briefed on the conversation, the website hired the firm, Fusion GPS, in October 2015 to unearth damaging information about several Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. Trump. But The Free Beacon told the firm to stop doing research on Mr. Trump in May 2016, as Mr. Trump was clinching the Republican nomination.

In April 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee also retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia. Working for them, Fusion GPS retained a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele.

He went on to produce a series of memos that alleged a broad conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump. The memos, which became known as the “Steele dossier,” also contained unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, as well as real estate deals that were intended as bribes.

That sounds clear (if cagey): The dossier is traced to the Democrats.

The "major donor" is Paul Singer, who is (presumably) the name Trump was talking about yesterday when he said "I think I would know... but let's find out who it was... If I were to guess, I would have one name in mind."

"[I]f you intensely think at the same time as you intensely exercise, your performance in both thinking and moving can worsen."

"But your muscles’ performance will decline much more than your brain’s will," according to a new study, the NYT reports.

The study was based on testing a group of young men — rowers at Cambridge University in England — on 3 occasions: 1. The sat and memorized words, 2. They worked a rowing machine, 3. They memorized words while working a rowing machine.

Almost uniformly, the men had been able to produce fewer watts [on the machine] and recall fewer words when they performed the muscular and mental tasks together.

But the falloff in physical functioning was much steeper than the mental slump. The rowers lost almost 13 percent of their power output, a decline that was about 30 percent greater than their loss in word recall after the combined session.

“Our proposed explanation for this finding is that they were both competing for the same resource,” which in this case was blood sugar for fuel, says Danny Longman, a postdoctoral research fellow at Cambridge who led the study.

And the brain won.

I'm not impressed that the brain generally "wins." It was a rowing machine, not a run to capture needed food or to escape injury. I suspect it's just more interesting to memorize words then to row a machine and maybe pride motivates Cambridge college guys to pay more attention to an intelligence test.

Now, I'm reading the comments over there. Here's the highest-rated one: "The rowing didn't last long enough to deplete the muscles' stored glycogen; they weren't competing with the brain for anything but 'attention.' This protocol was useless for addressing the stated hypothesis."

Second-highest: "Assuming the info about this study has been accurately described this is the silliest thing ever concluded. An equally appropriate conclusion as to what might be causing the decrease in 'power output' of the muscles is the brain's decrease in 'attention output' to muscle task versus mental one!"

I find that mental distraction improves my physical ability. When I'm walking or biking and get very absorbed in my thoughts — for example, thinking up an idea for a book and planning it —  I'm better at the physical activity because I'm not paying attention to it. If I think about the next hill or how far I am from the end, I feel the strain and get balky. But with active thought, the body is automatic and efficient.

"I suppose you could say that I became the world’s oldest, tallest, bearded stewardess."

Said Donald Bain, quoted in his NYT obituary, about his idiotic 1967 book "Coffee Tea or Me?" Bain, who died at age 82, wrote all sorts of things under various pseudonyms (including the "Murder, She Wrote" series, as "Jessica Fletcher").

I was 16 in 1967, and I remember "Coffee Tea or Me?" being a best-seller and all the leering jokes about "stewardesses." It was the humor of the segment of the older generation that considered itself sexy. Of course, I didn't read the book at the time. At the time, I would have read books like "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," by Alan Watts.

But I was curious enough about "Coffee Tea or Me?" to put it in my Kindle. It made me think of Harvey Weinstein and the way he initially reacted to the allegations against him by saying, "I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then."

Sample passage from "Coffee Tea or Me?":

You make up your own mind whether your captain really does have the right to all your services. Captains realize that the longer a girl flies the line, the harder she’ll be to conquer. Stewardesses who’ve been around will generally have latched onto one particular captain or have acquired other interests. So those on the make stalk the new girls....

It was on Rachel’s third flight that she was introduced to the “manual flush” routine so popular with cockpit crews where a new girl is concerned. It was a light flight and dinner had been served when the little light flashed in the galley indicating that service was needed in the cockpit. It’s an unwritten rule that the junior girl handles the cockpit chores, unless a senior girl has something going up front. This day, Rachel was the one. The other girls had evidently sworn off crew members for the week and simply pointed to Rachel. She nervously pranced up the aisle, fluffing her dark hair and straightening her skirt. The flight engineer patted her fanny as she slid by him, a gesture Rachel assumed was normal cockpit procedure. Besides, she wasn’t about to be labeled a square so early in the game. She stood silently, in back of the captain’s right ear, his head just reaching her chest....

“That little button in front of me, the one farthest away, activates the manual flushing operation. Every twenty minutes, I want you to come forward to the cockpit and flip that button. You’ll flip it and hold it for forty-five seconds. Got it?” “Yes, sir.” “Better give it a try now, Rachel.” The only way Rachel could reach the button was to lean over the top of the captain’s head. She strained to get her finger to the switch, her breasts melting comfortably around the captain’s ears....

Most new stewardesses are put through the manual flushing routine. Some come back to the galley cursing the captain. Some, embarrassed, say nothing. Some can’t wait for the twenty minutes to pass. Good thing all Rachel’s attitude was that it could have been worse. Another favorite trick is to hoist a new stewardess up into the overhead coatrack before passengers have begun to come aboard. The crew then sits and watches the girl try valiantly to get down, tight skirt and all.

She wasn’t about to be labeled a square so early in the game....

The book has illustrations. They're like this:

"The Umbrella Man," by Errol Morris.

The strangeness of historical details... in this case, a man with an umbrella who was standing right near where John F. Kennedy was shot: