"As Hurricane Irma prepares to strike, it’s worth remembering that Mother Nature never intended us to live here."

Writes Michael Grunwald (at Politico). Excerpt:

“Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for,” one Army surgeon wrote [in the 1830s]. “It was the most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited, nothing but barren wastes.” An officer summarized it as “swampy, low, excessively hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” The future president Zachary Taylor, who commanded U.S. troops there for two years, groused that he wouldn’t trade a square foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square mile of Florida. The consensus among the soldiers was that the U.S. should just leave the area to the Indians and the mosquitoes; as one general put it, “I could not wish them all a worse place.” Or as one lieutenant complained: “Millions of money has been expended to gain this most barren, swampy, and good-for-nothing peninsula.”

Please use this post to talk about Hurricane Irma. Are you/were you in the path of the hurricane? 

AND: "'There are no rules': Desperate stranded tourists tweet out of St Maarten as looters with 'guns and machetes' raid hotel rooms and stores" (Daily Mail).

"Eric Bolling's son Eric Chase died on Friday night, just hours after his father lost a high-profile job at the Fox News Channel."

CNN Media reports.

[Eric Bolling] parted ways with Fox News in August after an investigation into allegations... that Bolling had sent female colleagues an "unsolicited" lewd photo. Bolling moved to sue the HuffPost reporter and vowed to fight the claims, which he called "false smear attacks."...

Fox announced his departure around 4:30 p.m. on Friday. Fox said it happened "amicably."

I've seen a report elsewhere that bluntly says "suicide," but here I'm reading that no cause of death has been announced and the autopsy hasn't take place yet.  The son was a 19-year-old college student. It's hard to imagine a young man throwing his life away simply because of his father's disgrace and misfortune.

Does the timing make it look that way? Yes. But one might choose to make a suicide look as though it were caused by something other than the true cause. In this case — and we don't know that it was suicide — it might be that the son was already suicidal, and he chose yesterday because it allowed him to express great anger at the people who are hurting his father.

It's very sad to lose a young person to suicide, and terrible to think about how much pain it inflicts on the family. Condolences.

"Master Persuader rising. If he runs, he wins. And it won't be luck."

Says Scott Adams.

Talking about Kid Rock:



Rock's rant reminded me of the discussion we had 3 days about "the psychology behind people actually enjoying it when others curse."

More from Adams about Rock in this long "periscope." At one point, Adams goes beyond predicting that Rock will win the Senate seat to imagining him winning the presidency.

Something I've been thinking lately is that we are on a trajectory of weirdness, and it should not seem abnormal that Trump won the presidency, but a natural outgrowth of Obama's having won. The abnormal is normal and we want more of it. Kid Rock — with the swearing, the tough get-a-job right-wingery,  the stage show, the guitar chords and video background — enters at a point where it makes sense to predict we are going.

At the Black Dog Café...

... find your shelter from the storm.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan spoke at the University of Wisconsin–Madison yesterday.

I didn't attend. In fact, I was only reminded that the talk occurred yesterday when I was idly checking Facebook this morning and it told me "We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 1 year ago." The post, exactly a year ago, said:

Justice Sotomayor came to the law school to give the Kastenmeier Lecture yesterday. (It seems to have been a question-and-answer session rather than a lecture.) I didn't attend. There were limited tickets and I feel sure whoever got the ticket I would have taken got more out of it than I would. Nothing against Sotomayor specifically, but being in the presence of someone who will be saying things that I know or can read about doesn't do anything for me emotionally, and it's not as though I would be contributing something by my presence. Everyone's time is precious. I spent my time between 4 and 6 yesterday in prime experience, and it was not in that auditorium, and I hope the person sitting in the seat that was not taken up by me had a prime life experience too.

And that pretty much also explains why I didn't occupy a seat at the Kagan event. Here's a local newspaper story about it, "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan highlights importance of compromise at UW-Madison discussion":

With an even-numbered court prior to Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch filling the ninth seat on the bench, accepting 4-4 ties on cases would make the court seem divided and incapable of getting its work done, Kagan said.

“I think we all made a very serious effort to try to find common ground, even where we thought we couldn’t,” Kagan said. “It sort of forced us to keep talking with each other.... I’m actually hopeful that the effects of it will continue now that we have a nine-person court in the sense that all of us will remember not to stop the conversation too soon,” she said. “All of us will remember the value of trying to find a place where we can agree, where more of us can agree."

IN THE COMMENTS: Yancey Ward asks if Kagan would say the same thing if Hillary Clinton had won the power to pick the replacement for Scalia. I think maybe she would. What does it cost to speak of the value of continuing conversation and working seriously to find common ground? She might be even more inclined to say it if she intended to take full, confident advantage of a 5-person liberal majority.

"But one controversial scene from King’s novel has dogged the book and subsequent adaptations."

"After defeating It, the kids get lost in the sewer tunnels on the way out; this is attributed in part to the fact that they’re losing their 'connection' to one another. The solution is to bind them together, which Beverly — the only girl in the story’s main group of protagonists, called 'the Losers' — says can only happen if each of the boys has sex with her. Where they’re timid and unsure, she’s confident and maternal.... The sex is a 'consensual' gang bang, with each of the boys losing his virginity, and thus entering manhood, through Beverly. The ’80s was a bonkers time, but the orgy scene in particular has aged poorly.... A Reddit reader from last year simply asked, “WTF?” and generated over 500 comments. For almost ten exhaustive pages, King describes each of the boys having sex with Beverly and their orgasms as a version of 'flying.'... Beverly’s desires are positioned as a way for her to overcome her own fears around sex, but mostly the narrative centers on how the boys literally enter adulthood through Beverly’s vagina."

From "How Does the New It Movie Deal With Stephen King’s Orgy Scene?" (New York Magazine).

The top-rated comment at the Reddit "WTF?" link quotes King's explanation of what the fuck was:

"I wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don't remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don't remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues."

The new movie — spoiler alert — replaces the gang bang with:

BEVERLY
Guys, stop it. Focus.

Everyone turns to Bev. Their muse. Their light.

SHE TAKES EDDIE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES STAN’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES RICHIE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES MIKE’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES BEN’S FACE IN HER HANDS
SHE TAKES WILL’S FACE IN HER HANDS

"From Sex Object to Gritty Woman: The Evolution of Women in Stock Photos."

By Claire Cain Miller (in the NYT).

In 2007, the top-selling image for the search term “woman” in Getty Image’s library of stock photography was a naked woman lying on a bed, gazing at the camera with a towel draped over her bottom half.

In 2017, it’s a woman hiking a rocky trail in Banff National Park, alone on the edge of a cliff high above a turquoise lake. She’s wearing a down jacket and wool hat, and her face isn’t visible.

“It really feels like an image about power, about freedom, about trusting oneself,” said Pam Grossman, director of visual trends at Getty Images. “Who cares what you even look like? Let’s focus on what you’re doing.”...

I was just railing against stock photos — in "Althouse annoyed by stock photograph" — and I've started a new tag for the subject.

I'm glad to see that better stock photos are coming into vogue. The stock photo that annoyed me was one of sleazy sexualized women.

"'Think all millennials are woke?' Woke? Who wrote this headline? A millennial?"

The second-highest-rated comment on a Washington Post piece with the headline "Think millennials are woke? A new poll suggests some are still sleeping on racism."

The highest-rated comment is:

As a copy editor for much of the last half century, "are woke" made me scream out loud. Turns out it is a new piece of millenial jargon and us old fogies (over, say 35) don't know it. See ["Earning the ‘Woke’ Badge" NYT].

Still, it's pretty awful, and yes, an abomination.

The third-highest-rated comment addresses the substance of the article:

I see, whites aren't "woke" because 86% of them don't see racism as one of the top three problems in the countries. But neither does a large majority of blacks, 65%. So blacks aren't "woke" neither. Or maybe the problem is with the (typical "if you don't agree with me you are racist" Liberal) reporter?

"I really, really wish, that at the moment of her passing, the Washington Post had found a picture of Kate Millett without Gloria Steinem sharing the frame."

A comment on the Washington Post obituary "Kate Millett, ‘high priestess’ of second-wave feminism, dies at 82."

By the way, Gloria Steinem isn't merely "sharing the frame." She's in focus, speaking, looking engaged and emphatic, and Kate Millett is out of focus, leaning back, and has her eyes cast on Gloria Steinem. The caption says "Dr. Millett, left, listens as feminist activist Gloria Steinem speaks at a news conference in New York City in 1970." Millet listens....

The third paragraph reads:

Dr. Millett was a contemporary of Gloria Steinem’s — the Ms. Magazine co-founder was six months her senior — and along with Steinem became a driving force behind feminism’s “second wave” that transformed the movement in the 1960s and 1970s....

Way too much Steinem. Inappropriate. It's an obituary. Lavish attention on the person who died. And it's not even accurate to portray Millett as a sidekick to Gloria Steinem. So they were contemporaries in the same general field — arguably. Obituaries don't normally work like that, and there shouldn't be a different rule for feminists.

I wrote "arguably" in that last paragraph because Steinem worked on a magazine and Millett wrote a theoretical book. Millett's important book was a big sensation in 1970, and Ms. Magazine did not begin until 1971. There is zero reason to put Millett in the shadow of Steinem.

Deploying flood-rescue photographs as masculinity propaganda.

At WaPo, Janell Ross has a long piece titled "How viral images of hurricane heroes are rebranding the ‘redneck’ identity." You can guess what photograph appears first: that handsome white SWAT officer carrying a delicate Asian woman who is holding a little baby. Maybe you can also guess the second photograph: a white man standing up in a boat and holding the hand of an elderly woman.

These pictures and others are widely shared, but Ross focuses on the sharing by "far right, alt-right and just avowedly right-leaning sites." These photo-sharers add captions like:

When disaster strikes, it’s what men do. Real men. Heroic men. American men. And then they’ll knock back a few shots, or a few beers with like-minded men they’ve never met before, and talk about fish, or ten-point bucks, or the benefits of hollow-point ammo, or their F-150.

That is, the disaster activated some men to get out there and rescue people and the photographs activated other men (and perhaps women) to get on the internet and tout masculinity. And the masculinity-touting photo captions activate and Janell Ross and me to analyze the masculinity propaganda (and perhaps you to comment on our propaganda analysis instead of getting out there in the real world and helping somebody in your town or region who needs to be carried or boated somewhere).

There's much more to Ross's column, and it's specifically about whiteness. Ross, we're told, "covers race along with the social and political implications of the nation's rapidly changing demographics." She says:

What appears to be taking shape in the national conversation about disaster recovery is praise not only of the individuals doing the work, but of a particular brand of white male masculinity. And with that has come an open attempt to dismiss legitimate concerns about the stereotyping and racism some self-identified “rednecks,” “country boys” and those who admire them engaged in before the storm.

"The storm surge is what really scares me. Potential 12 feet of storm surge. Think about that. You cannot survive this."

"Look, it’s getting late. If you’re not on the road on the west coast by noon, you need to get to a shelter, get to a friend’s house if you’re in an evacuation zone. Get off the road."

Said Florida Governor Rick Scott.

"With robots, is a life without work one we'd want to live?"

"Even if automation provides people with the opportunity to find purpose elsewhere, it’s not clear whether we’ll be ready or able to conceive of a life of meaning which is totally disconnected from work," writes Matthew Beard (in The Guardian).

[T]he benefits of automation are only going to be enjoyed if they are recognised – that is, if workers are able to see themselves as having meaning outside of their job. The father who defined himself primarily as a lawyer might not be able to find the same sense of purpose or meaning from a life of domesticity. Even though he could theoretically find meaning in his family, he would need to change his perspective first. For some, this change won’t come easily. For others, it might be impossible....

The question is whether automation will shoot itself in the foot by freeing up our time to do things that matter but at the same time deprive us of the skills we need to use our time meaningfully.... 

The robot isn't shooting itself in the foot.* It's just following instructions and our instructions may have unintended consequences. It's our foot.

Soon enough, the majority of an entire generation won’t know what it means to have a job but they will need to know how to work. Work isn’t exclusive to the labour market – relationships, parenting, creativity, sport and exercise are all kinds of work. But if robots are taking care of household chores in a decade, I’ll need some other way to teach my son that there’s more to life than pleasure, that sometimes you need to stick at something to get results and that in a community, everyone has a role to play so everyone can flourish. For my parents, chores and household jobs were a way of teaching me that message....

Personally, I think there will be plenty to do. I don't know why these things will need to be portrayed as work rather than pleasure. I suspect people say that because they do still need to work and must maintain a positive attitude about that. In the future, if it comes to pass that people don't need to work anymore, I think they'll look back on our time with wonder at the way human beings, within a particular span of historical time, saw their lives in terms of training for, finding, and doing those things they called "jobs." Imagine having a job! It will seem absurd.
________________________

* Though I can see that the idea of a robot that kills itself is a topic of some interest:

"The study from Stanford University – which found that a computer algorithm could correctly distinguish between gay and straight men 81% of the time, and 74% for women..."

"... has raised questions about the biological origins of sexual orientation, the ethics of facial-detection technology, and the potential for this kind of software to violate people’s privacy or be abused for anti-LGBT purposes."

“It’s certainly unsettling. Like any new tool, if it gets into the wrong hands, it can be used for ill purposes,” said Nick Rule, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, who has published research on the science of gaydar. “If you can start profiling people based on their appearance, then identifying them and doing horrible things to them, that’s really bad.”...

Rule speculated about AI being used to actively discriminate against people based on a machine’s interpretation of their faces: “We should all be collectively concerned.”

"We should all be collectively concerned" — what a phrase! Mind if I be individually concerned or if I let other individuals or collectives engage in concern without my participation, at least for the nonce?

I'm not reading the details here, but since the great majority of people are straight, wouldn't a machine that just guessed everyone is straight be right more than 90% of the time? Seems to me the machine it terrible at its work. 

And here's a simple solution: Let's not actively discriminate against people based on sexual orientation — except in the formation of sexual relationships — and then the machine won't have any relevant function. Who cares if sexual orientation arises "biologically" or through some other process that nevertheless becomes ingrained in the biological entity that each of us is?

Oh, but maybe in our formation of sexual relationships, we'd like a machine to double check whether our partners are actually sexually oriented to us. Maybe you'd like it built into Tinder or Match.com or whatever, some kind of notice that there's a 19 or 26% chance that this person is advertising the wrong sexual orientation. Again, the best solution is to stop making life difficult for gay people: They'll pursue their own desires and not people they don't really want. It's a win-win.

"I agree with everything Jill Filipovic says about the barriers that society has created that keep women from responding appropriately to men who seek to harass or intimidate them."

Says a letter to the NYT editor about “Donald Trump Was a Creep. Too Bad Hillary Clinton Couldn’t Say That,” by Jill Filipovic (Sunday Review, Aug. 27). The letter-writer, George C. Thomas (of Warren, NJ) continues:

Missing from Ms. Filipovic’s account, however, is the inconvenient fact that for decades Hillary Clinton responded to allegations of sexual assault against her husband by denying those charges on his behalf and by vilifying the alleged victims.

I don’t know whether it’s ironic or pathetic (maybe it’s both) that Mrs. Clinton helped strengthen the barrier she confronted in the debate with Donald Trump.

Yes, that's true. I was just wondering aloud about whether Mrs. Clinton's book addresses this difficulty, not that I have the slightest hope that it does, but I'd love to hear what she'd say about this if she ever really did "let [her] guard down" (as she claims she is doing in the new book).

Another letter to the editor about the Filopovic piece, from Pamela Rothstein in Falmouth, Massachusetts, says:

My response now, as it was back then, focuses on the one action that could prevent such behavior in political debates: a clear, definitive directive that candidates remain at their chair or lectern when it is not their turn to speak. Period. No moving around. No stalking. No intimidating.

Ms. Filipovic says that the moderators did not instruct Mr. Trump to physically back off, arguing, “It would have been uncomfortable, and they would have faced accusations of bias.” It is time for debate organizers to step up and accept responsibility for preventing a repeat of such behavior.

Rothstein doesn't seem to realize that viewers look forward to seeing how the candidate moves around. We have an animal-level instinctive judgment that we like to get a chance to exercise. We got a lot out of the difference between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in this segment of a debate in 1992. We feel as though we're learning something about the candidate's humanity (or lack thereof). Do we have a real person or an uncanny-valley simulacrum?

If a candidate moves around the wrong way, he's hurting himself. In my all-time favorite debate clip, the candidate who moves into the other person's space — and apparently thinks his behavior is winning — makes a terrible impression (and the other guy scores brilliantly with a slight nod):

"Tractor giant John Deere just spent $305 million to acquire a startup that makes robots capable of identifying unwanted plants..."

"... and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide... Pesticides and other chemicals are traditionally applied blindly across a whole field or crop. Blue River’s systems are agricultural sharp shooters that direct chemicals only where they are needed. The startup’s robots are towed behind a regular tractor like conventional spraying equipment. But they have cameras on board that use machine-learning software to distinguish between crops and weeds, and automated sprayers to target unwanted plants." (Wired).

I think technology like this is great, but I don't know why the word "robot" is used... other than to try to make us like it more. It's just a machine. When is a machine a robot?

Here's an answer to that question at Quora:

• Machine can be defined as an apparatus used to perform a particular task.
• Most machines are not autonomous. Meaning they can't take decisions or they can't be left without inspecting or assisting them.
• A Machine can be termed as a Robot, if it is autonomous and if it agrees with the three laws stated by Isaac Asimov - Father of Robotics
• Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
• Some machines are Robots.

For example an electric screw driver is a machine, it is not autonomous. If collaborated with a robotic arm, it may be autonomous and hence can be termed as a Robot.

Is the Blue River autonomous? It's an attachment that must dragged behind a tractor. But it does seem to be making decisions on its own.

I'd like to think that "robot" was limited to a machine that resembles a human being. Wikipedia briefly acknowledges my romanticism:

A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to take on human form but most robots are machines designed to perform a task with no regard to how they look.

The Oxford English Dictionary separates the meanings, with one being "An intelligent artificial being typically made of metal and resembling in some way a human or other animal" (and restricted with "Chiefly Science Fiction") and the other "A machine capable of automatically carrying out a complex series of movements, esp. one which is programmable." Both meanings go back to the 1920s. There's also the figurative meaning, "A person who acts mechanically or without emotion," and that too goes back to the 20s, e.g., "Mr. G. Bernard Shaw defined Robots as persons all of whose activities were imposed on them" (1923).

It's interesting that today I think of the word "robot" as working to give us a friendly attitude toward a machine, but back then, the word was used to express negativity toward human beings.

Here's a line from a poem by D.H. Lawrence: "The mechanical impulse for money and motor-cars which rules the robot-classes and the robot-masses, now."

"No regrets: Trump exuberant in Oval Office after deal with Dems."

According to Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan at Axios:

Among Republicans on Capitol Hill, "I've never heard members and senators so angry at the president of their own party," one durable Washington hand told me after yesterday's round of check-in calls.

But hate-watching "Morning Joe" down in the White House residence, President Trump was feeling cocky. His surprise deal with Democratic leaders may create midterm headaches for his party, but it's winning rave reviews from the academy....

"The academy" seems to refer to the NYT, specifically "Energized Trump Sees Bipartisan Path, at Least for Now" by Peter Baker and Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Second paragraph at the NYT:

[Thursday morning, Trump] picked up the phone and called the two Democratic congressional leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California. “The press has been incredible,” he gushed to Ms. Pelosi, according to someone briefed on their call. He was equally effusive with Mr. Schumer, boasting that even Fox News was positive.

Speaking of the NYT, I enjoyed the morning podcast today. It's titled "Trump’s New Prom Date: Democrats." Among other things, it suggests that Trump and Schumer are a lot alike, both "outer borough" New Yorkers, and that Trump misses New York and interacting with New York people, and Schumer knows how to be the guy to meet his needs. I assume both men think they know how to use and have fun with each other. Just look a the now-iconic photograph.