The lake at 6:53 this morning.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

Sorry we lost the game, but great to see the stadium packed and everyone jumping around.

AWESOME!!!!🇺🇸🦅 pic.twitter.com/PfLEWL7bOY

— Dan Scavino🇺🇸🦅 (@DanScavino) September 4, 2021

(I know: no masks.)

For the annals of litigious babies.

The “Nirvana Baby” lawsuit has inspired me to seek millions from my parents for this picture: pic.twitter.com/aYtbkeAV8x

— Conan O'Brien (@ConanOBrien) September 4, 2021

"Facebook users who recently watched a video from a British tabloid featuring Black men saw an automated prompt from the social network that asked if they would like to 'keep seeing videos about Primates'..."

"... causing the company to investigate and disable the artificial intelligence-powered feature that pushed the message.... The video... featured clips of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. It had no connection to monkeys or primates."

The NYT reports. 

News flash: Human beings are primates. Black, white, whatever — we're primates. Notice how the love of science drops out of the picture altogether when there's an accusation of racism to be made. 

Of course, it's wretched of the AI to refer to black people as "primates" when that's not the standard way to refer to all human beings. It's touchy creating AI that can make embarrassing mistakes, and I think the companies have long been on notice that AI does a worse job at facial recognition when the subject is a black person.

"After being cited for a rip in her jeans on the first day of school, Sophia Trevino has led a protest seeking changes to the district’s dress code, which she says unfairly targets girls."

 The NYT reports.

Lined up with other students as they came into the school, Sophia was asked to put her hands down by her thighs to measure if the rip in her jeans was lower than her fingertips. It was not. She and 15 other girls were written up before first period. Every Friday since then, Sophia and other students at Simpson Middle School, about 25 miles north of Atlanta, have worn T-shirts that denounce dress codes as “sexist,” “racist” and “classist.” ... 

“Dress codes are definitely sexist,” [said Sabrina Bernadel, a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center]. “They put the onus on girls to not be distracting or not call attention to themselves instead of putting the onus on all students to respect everyone’s body.”... 

Sophia said her main issue with the dress code was that it singled out girls and made them responsible for boys’ actions. “In school, they think that the boys are just drooling over our shoulders and our thighs,” Sophia said. “They aren’t. They don’t care. And even if they do, that’s not our fault. That’s theirs.”

ADDED: This is the same idea I heard from the school principal circa 1965 when I kept getting in trouble for wearing miniskirts. To me, they were the fashion and they looked cute. We girls weren't allowed to wear pants. We had to wear skirts, and wearing a skirt that came down to your knee looked ridiculous, so I rehemmed everything I had, often re-rehemming as the Mod Era raged on, from 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 inches above the knee, as I deemed appropriate. 

I'd been sent to the vice principal many times, but I got passed up to the principal, perhaps because I defended my choice. The vice principal took the rules-are-rules position, even though the rule wasn't being enforced to the letter. I was just going too far. The principal shocked and offended me my making a plea on behalf of the boys. Did I understand what they were going through?! Well, no. It wasn't about the boys, and the boys seemed to be doing all right without any need for his creepy empathy. It was about fashion!

"With the return of really big hair, a new generation is discovering rollers. Here’s how to master the look."

The NYT tells us, in an article illustrated only with an old image of a woman with her hair set in hot rollers. 

In the comments section, just about everyone says, What the hell? It's an article about hairstyles, but you don't have any pictures of the hairstyles? The readers want to know what's being talked about — "the return of really big hair." Really? What does it look like? You need rollers for that?

What seems clear to me, though is that the editors think it's charming that something old is new again. Rollers! You'd think they'd be dead and buried forever, but here these kids on TikTok are doing their hair with rollers. Look: rollers!

From the article: 

"I am monitoring this trend of MSM comments that make anything into an occasion to bring up Trump."

I said, in the comments to a post yesterday, because I felt that I needed to explain why I saw fit to quote a comment that appeared in the NYT: "I find that imagining I am going to wake in the morning and read in the NY Times that Trump is dead puts me to sleep immediately." 

It was an article promising tips on how to get back to sleep when you wake up in the middle of the night. Trump doesn't belong there! Maybe someone who loves Trump could get back to sleep contemplating Trump, but here's a reader who loathes Trump and feels compelled to shoehorn her hate into a discussion about how to relax. So she envisions him dead! Now, death is also not a good subject for lulling yourself back to sleep, but the commenter brought in death because it was a way to make the subject of hating Trump cozy and comfortable. 

As for my comment — "I am monitoring this trend of MSM comments that make anything into an occasion to bring up Trump" — it prompted retail lawyer to say:

Ann, you're going to need a bigger blog, as Insty says. Scott Adams today was talking about "Long haul TDS." It seems to be a real thing, but I know of no well-done studies on the syndrome.

A blog will accommodate whatever you want to put in and will forgive you for any and all lapses in comprehensiveness. That is to say, I'll just do posts on the topic when I run into things, and I run into things sometimes by opening up a comments section on an article — usually in the NYT or the Washington Post — and doing a search for "Trump." 

I'm going on intuition, but what inspires me to do a search is an article that I'm already reading — because I'm interested in the topic — that has nothing to do with Trump. A place where Trump does not belong. I bet Trump's in there, I think. Or: I wonder how long it will take the commenters to connect this to Trump. 

I mean, there was an article on getting back to sleep. Can you get from that to Trump? Yes!

"This is the voice of someone — in this case, and often, a man — who is as comfortable speaking about virtually any subject as he is uncomfortable speaking at all."

"(This is not the careful, measured voice of Sheryl Sandberg, the cheerily blustering awkwardness of Elon Musk.) It is, by default, one of the defining communication styles of its time. Right? So. ZuckTalk is a style of unpolished speech exhibited in contexts where polish is customary. It’s a linguistic hooded sweatshirt in a metaphorical boardroom. It is more than a collection of tics, but its tics are crucial to understanding it. One: So. Another: Right? In their Zuckerbergian ultimate form, combined as a programmatic if-then connective move: Right? So."

 
From "The Rise and Fall of ‘ZuckTalk’ So, there’s this oratory style that asks for validation while bulldozing through almost any topic, right?" (NYT).

Here's the example given of Zuckerberg's "right, so" tic:

 

I think what's going on here is a person who knows he's very smart trying to include his interlocutor, but not trying that hard. He's essentially saying I care that you're keeping up and I do want you to follow along, but I'm still going to get all this out without stopping to let you speak and, perhaps, to show that you're not really on the same page with me. I'll just credit you with understanding and agreement and proceed with what I've got to say. Trust me, we'll all be better off if you go along with all this. Why, it's almost a human relationship.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

 

And please think of supporting this blog by doing your shopping through the Althouse portal to Amazon, which is always right there in the sidebar. Thanks!

"I find that imagining I am going to wake in the morning and read in the NY Times that Trump is dead puts me to sleep immediately."

That's the second-most-liked comment at "Wide Awake at 3 A.M.? Our Readers Offer Advice. Well readers share a range of strategies they use to get back to sleep in the middle of the night" (NYT).

The internet of yesteryear.

Can't wait to connect with thousands of other MP3 fans pic.twitter.com/mRxR2FQIpQ

— Philip Sherburne (@PhilipSherburne) September 3, 2021

"It’s galling that the word 'climate' appears nowhere in Manchin’s piece, even as he piously suggests he has a divinely inspired reading of what America truly 'needs to spend.'"

"This is doubly absurd, given that he sternly lectures us about how this spending will imperil our ability to meet 'future crises.'... Manchin justifies his demand for a 'pause' on spending by citing fears of inflation. But that’s a terrible theoretical pitfall. As economist J.W. Mason told Eric Levitz, a big threat posed by inflated inflation fears is that they could become a justification for efforts to 'scale back our plans for decarbonization.' The irony, as Mason noted, is that volatile fossil fuel prices are themselves introducing 'instability into the economic system,' so inflation actually tells us that 'we need to transition faster away from fossil fuels.' Manchin is learning exactly the wrong message, threatening awful consequences."

From "Joe Manchin’s new threat to destroy Biden’s agenda is worse than it seems" by Greg Sargent (WaPo). Not quoted with approval. 

"If Biden and Trump are the eventual nominees in 2024, Trump is slightly favored with 47%, while Biden is at 46%."

According to a new Emerson poll.

Among Republican voters, a majority (67%) said that they would vote for former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical Republican primary with 7 other candidates. When Trump was listed as a potential candidate, Governor Ron DeSantis was the only other candidate who got double digit support at 10%....

And look at how people assign responsibility for the war in Afghanistan:

I wish they'd asked, "Not counting President George W. Bush, which President holds the most responsibility for the war in Afghanistan?" I think if that were the question, Trump might have gotten as much as Obama or Biden or even as much as Obama and Biden added together, because the Democrats would go for Trump. What surprises me most is that Obama got so many votes. I'd been thinking that he bears so much responsibility for continuing the war after the death of Osama bin Laden, but that he'd been flying under the radar, by not making a big move to end the war, and because Americans — many but not all Americans — seem inclined to protect him from criticism and remember him in a golden glow of patronizing nostalgia.

The sandhill crane patriarch sings from the grassy knoll.

"Books to stop a young man from getting deeper into the alt right."

A post on the subreddit s/suggestmeabook:

My friend's brother loves to read, mostly nonfiction. He also listens to a lot of podcasts. The past few years he's been getting further into right-wing media and punditry. He reads so much, but it's all shit about Fascism and conservative viewpoints. What sort of books can help show him a different perspective without immediately turning him off?

Usually on this subreddit, people are looking for something else for themselves to read. They liked a certain book, and they want to hear about other, similar books. Or they have a certain feeling, and they want books about characters who feel like that too. But here's somebody who wants to massage or manipulate another person — a person they don't even like. They want to derail a young person who seems to be finding his way along a conservative path. 

But the most interesting thing about this thread, to me, isn't the desire to affect another person's political orientation, it's that the other commenters have a hard time coming up with good ideas about books that might reroute this young reader. Don't lefties have some antidote-to-conservatism books? 

And then there's the way they get twisted up in confusion over whether individualism is fascism. 

Somebody asks:

... you'll be a man, my son... a man... in shorts.