19 फ़रवरी 2022
Matt Yglesias wants process rights to vary depending on the substance. At least he admits it.
We should strive to achieve some genuine views about process and legitimate tactics, but it’s hard to completely divorce them — you’d want to say extreme measures are legitimate to defend fundamental liberties, but then which causes are the fundamental liberties?
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 19, 2022
"Seattle Bike Helmet Rule Is Dropped Amid Racial Justice Concerns."
The board of health... began to scrutinize the helmet rule in 2020 after an analysis of court records from Crosscut, a local news site, showed that it was rarely enforced, and enforced disproportionately when it was. Since 2017, Seattle police had given just 117 helmet citations, over 40 percent of which went to people who were homeless. Since 2019, 60 percent of citations went to people who were homeless. A separate analysis from Central Seattle Greenways, a safe streets advocacy group, found that Black cyclists were almost four times as likely to receive a citation for violating the helmet requirement as white cyclists. Native American cyclists were just over twice as likely to receive one as white cyclists....
You know, I laughed at the headline, but I've got to say, good. And this is the argument against too many rules. Don't have rules you won't uniformly enforce — enforce against your friends and family. This is a rule like that. And let the presumption always be against requiring people to do something, because this danger of unequal enforcement is always lurking.
I know you're going to say but maybe black people are less likely to wear helmets, but I really don't care, because my point is the presumption should be against restrictions.
"Of all human failings, he found humorlessness the funniest. Back then, the political left was so earnest about saving the world..."
"... that there was no room for laughter, which denoted a lack of earnestness. Self-deprecating humor, P.J.’s trademark, wasn’t allowed because it could undermine the mission. Saving the world was no laughing matter. One titter and the whole edifice could come crashing down.
Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom. A sense of humor, much less self-awareness, are not traits found in cults of personality. If Tucker Carlson has said anything advertently funny, witty or self-knowing from his bully pulpit, I missed it. Maybe you had to be there."
Writes Christopher Buckley in "P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor" (NYT).
Did you chuckle at "myrmidons of MAGAdom"? It's got a nattering-nabobs-of-nepotism air about it.
Does Joe Rogan have a "no-holds-barred podcast"?
It took 4 New York Times writers to write "Spotify Bet Big on Joe Rogan. It Got More Than It Counted On. The deal that brought his podcast to Spotify is said to be worth over $200 million, more than was previously known. Accusations that he spreads misinformation have roiled the company."
This piece is about the business of streaming, and that's a great topic:
Spotify was already the king of music streaming. But to help propel the company into its next phase as an all-purpose audio juggernaut, and further challenge Apple and Google, it wanted a superstar podcaster, much as Howard Stern helped put satellite radio on the map in 2006. Spotify executives came to view Joe Rogan — a comedian and sports commentator whose no-holds-barred podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was already a monster hit on YouTube — as that transformative star.
I guess they didn't want to waste any time trying to explain what's so great about the Joe Rogan podcast, but as a regular listener, I was irked to see "no-holds-barred."
It invites non-listeners to imagine all sorts of ugly nastiness, and it piles on after people have made various inapt accusations. And you can't really understand Spotify's decisionmaking if you don't appreciate what's so good about the show, if you think it's sweaty, loutish guys letting loose with sexism and racism!
Obviously, some "holds" are "barred." Joe lets his guests speak and he listens, but he breaks in and challenges things that seem off or where he's aware of other evidence. And he's selective about guests, often bringing in scientists with excellent credentials.
But maybe "no-holds-barred" just means freewheeling and rambling, not tightly edited.
***
Are you looking for a little escape?
This is an unprecedented display of strength and determination.
"Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes..."
"... while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.... A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. ... Peter sent another note reading: 'No chocolate yet.... You’re a pilot... I gave you a map.... How did you guys win the war anyway?' Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail. 'Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,' recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. 'It wasn’t the candy,' she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. 'It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.' Ms. Yunger had met Mr. Halvorsen for the first time at a reunion of airlift veterans in Tucson in September 2003. 'I was just shaking,' she said. He hugged her and handed her a Hershey bar."
3 things on TikTok.
1. A woman's impressions of celebrites are done in a single word (or "word").
2. Testing whether a teenaged boy, disguised as a baby, will be served a free meal at IHOP, where kids eat free.
3. A real baby, prompted to say a word that begins with "r," comes up with "rindow," and makes a compelling argument that his answer will do.
Feminist book cover from 1975.
The Female Man... was originally written in 1970 and first published in 1975 by Bantam Books. [Joanna] Russ was an avid feminist.... The novel follows the lives of four women living in parallel worlds that differ in time and place. When they cross over to each other's worlds, their different views on gender roles startle each other's preexisting notions of womanhood. In the end...
Spoiler alert!
... their encounters influence them to evaluate their lives and shape their ideas of what it means to be a woman. The character Joanna calls herself the “female man” because she believes that she must forget her identity as a woman in order to be respected (p. 5). She states that “there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective … Become it” (p. 139). Her metaphorical transformation refers to her decision to seek equality by rejecting women's dependence on men.
Metaphorical transformation. But the book cover seems to depict the physical peeling away of the female form. The browser is enticed to imagine something surgical.
Now, why was I reading that? I became interested in the word "munch" because I encountered an author who kept using the word "munch" as a replacement for "eat." I wondered if I had ever even once — in the entire 18-year history of this blog — used the word "munch."
A search of my archive turned up 7 posts — 5 of which have "munch" in the sense of the artist Edvard "The Scream" Munch.
One is a stray reference to the Girl Scout cookie Thank U Berry Munch. (I'm imagining an Obama inner monologue, there's a reference to marijuana, and so there's a nudge to think about "the munchies.")
The 7th post was part of my "Gatsby" project: "I know many of you don't like or don't get the 'Gatsby' project, in which we isolate and munch on a single, possibly turgid, sentence from 'The Great Gatsby,' more or less every day around here on the Althouse blog."
Why "munch" there? There's no actual eating. It's an eating metaphor, really a chewing metaphor. Indeed, the dictionary definition of "munch" stresses the the chewing — the mouth action — and not anything further along in the digestive process: "To eat (food) with a continuous and noticeable chewing action; to eat eagerly and audibly, or with evident enjoyment; to make a snack of."
That's from the OED — where I go to get my definitions, mainly because I love the lists of historical examples and where I found one that ended with the title that got me to that book cover:
a1425 (▸c1385) G. Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (1987) i. 914 Some wold monche [v.rr. muchche, mucche, muche, meche] her brede alon, lying in bed and make hem for to grone....
1600 W. Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iv. i. 31 I could mounch your good dry Oates.
1905 Baroness Orczy Scarlet Pimpernel xviii. 172 She partook of this frugal breakfast with hearty appetite. Thoughts crowded thick and fast in her mind as she munched her grapes.
1975 J. Russ Female Man 175 Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not.
"Dr. Bromage suggests a cigarette analogy: If someone were smoking, would the smell and taste of cigarettes quickly fill the air?"
"If yes, so would the virus. You’d be smart to wear a mask. If not, it’s unlikely that you’ll get infected. 'When I walk into a space, I always do that,' Dr. Bromage said. 'How high are the ceilings? Is the air moving? Can I create my own little buffer of space?'... Take a big box store with high ceilings. 'Those tend to have good ventilation and because of the high ceilings, there’s a lot of dilution,' said Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the airborne transmission of viruses. 'The risks are pretty low, unless you’re in a crowded line waiting to check out. If it’s a smaller space and crowded space, Trader Joe’s, for example, or some New York market with tiny aisles and people are really packed in there, the risk is higher.... You might want to wear a mask.'... At a restaurant, one person’s cigarette smoke at the next table over wouldn’t fill the air above yours. But you would smell someone smoking at your own table, so your direct dining companions pose the highest risk, Dr. Bromage said."
From "Should You Still Wear a Mask? Experts weigh in on where, and when, you can safely take one off" (NYT). Here in Madison, we're 10 days away from the end of our mask mandate.
As a person with an almost nonexistent sense of smell, I appreciated the wording "would the smell and taste of cigarettes quickly fill the air?" Somehow that made me think of the question, if a tree falls in the forest, and only a deaf person is there, does it make a sound?
It's interesting to read that someone smoking at the next table in a restaurant might not matter. I don't remember reading that in the NYT back when the ancient practice of smoking in restaurants was getting snuffed out in the United States.
18 फ़रवरी 2022
Antic grotesquerie.
But it felt new. I even looked it up in the OED to see if it counted as an English word (because if it were only a foreign-language word, I'd have put it in italics). Yes, it's English. They were saying it back in 1655:
Of course, "grotesquerie" is just a noun version of "grotesque," and I got sidetracked into the original meaning of "grotesque": "A kind of decorative painting or sculpture, consisting of representations of portions of human and animal forms, fantastically combined and interwoven with foliage and flowers."
Dolls and Porsches.
1. "Dolls and Drinks for Likes and Clicks/The American Girl Cafe has become an unlikely party spot for influencers and their imitators" (NYT)("'Come with me to get absolutely obliterated at the American Girl Doll Cafe,' begins a TikTok video... The store comped their meal, as they sometimes do for influencers').
2. "Ship Carrying 1,100 Porsches and Other Luxury Cars Is Burning and Adrift" (NYT)("No rescuers or crew members were injured in the 'highly skilled and physically demanding' operation... that whisked the crew members to the nearby Portuguese island of Faial").
"The Giddy, Terrifying Siege of Ottawa" — a great headline with a great photograph...
I'm blogging this because not because I'm terrified or think what's happening in Ottawa is "giddy." I'm just interested and I love the photograph (by Dave Chan). The photo centers on an exulting, shirtless man who reminds me of the QAnon Shaman:
Go to the link for the full photograph. He's surrounded by all sorts of signs and flags. The word "freedom" is key. I kept the upside down maple leaf, though I have no sense of how intense Canadians feel about their flag. Do they venerate the leaf?
The sign on the left reads: "Freedom pour nos enfants tabarnak/tabarouette." I had to look up "tabarnak," and was interested to see that it originally means "tabernacle" — the place in a Christian church where they keep the communion materials — but has come to mean "fuck." "Tabarouette" is a toning down of "tabarnak." Those links go to Urban Dictionary, which I'll trust at least for now. So the sign seems to mean "Freedom for our fucking frigging children."
There are 6 more Dave Chan photographs at the link, and I've been studying all the details in them rather than scanning to figure out what's so terrifying and giddy to Michelle Goldberg. None of the other photos show anyone as "terrifying" as the shirtless man I've shown you. They seem pretty nice. One photo has the caption "A relatively small number of people have snarled the capital."
Goldberg reports from Ottawa. She's actually talking to the people, not opining from afar. I like the first 2 paragraphs, but I see nothing giddy or terrifying about them:
"Thousands of women applied for 30 train driving jobs advertised for women in Saudi Arabia, revealing the extent of untapped potential in the conservative desert kingdom..."
"... which only permitted women to drive in 2018.... Some 28,000 put themselves forward to operate bullet trains between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina... Feminists greeted the news with cautious optimism.... Until recently Saudi women were mainly employed in health or education. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has promised to open more opportunities to women after he came under criticism for his role in the war in Yemen, the arrest of women’s rights activists and the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi."
"The women’s free skate had promised to be one of the most-watched events of the Games. But few could have expected its stunning denouement...."
"[Kamila Valieva, 15].... had stepped on the ice wearing the same face she’s worn all week in Beijing: Nearly expressionless.... Now that her free skate was over, she buried her face in her hands.... 'Why did you let it go?' [asked her coach Eteri Tutberidze]. 'Why did you stop fighting? Explain it to me, why? You let it go after that axel.' Valieva did not reply.... On NBC, Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir called the scenes around the end of the competition 'heartbreaking' and 'devastating,' and made clear, over and over, that they believed it had been unfair — to Valieva, to the other skaters, to viewers around the world — for the 15-year-old to have competed.... 'It’s not fair,' Lipinski said as the sobs played out on the screen, for a 15-year-old to have dealt with all of this. Her colleague Johnny Weir posted a video to his Instagram story soon after the broadcast ended, calling the night the 'most bizarre and heartbreaking event I have seen in my entire life.'... And on Russian state television, the commentator Andrei Zhuranko thundered, 'Sports officials, you have broken the most talented figure skater in the world.'"
From "Tears and sobs, and not just from Kamila Valieva, follow her crushing Olympic end" (NYT).
I used to be part of the huge audience that watched what must always be the most-watched event of the Winter Olympics — women's figure skating. I can't watch anymore. There's something awful about it. We're watching abused children, aren't we? So tiny, so young, so insanely controlled. It used to seem beautiful. It was always emotional, but now the emotion is ugly. The fashion is still idiotically sparkly, pumping up the grotesquerie.
"The mess began last Friday, February 11th, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave an address warning American citizens to evacuate Ukraine...."
"... American reporters began telling audiences a curiously detailed story about upcoming Russian invasion plans. PBS NewsHour’s Nick Schifrin cited 'three Western and defense sources' in saying Vladimir Putin had already made up his mind to invade. He then cited six sources — 'US and Western officials' — who told him the U.S. expected an invasion of Ukraine the following week. These voices left little to the imagination, saying the invasion would be a 'horrific, bloody campaign,' with two days of aerial bombardment, followed by electronic warfare and possible regime change.... That afternoon of the 11th, Politico cited 'a person familiar'.... reporting that Joe Biden held an hourlong call with Western leaders pegging February 16th as a possible invasion date.... It should be clear to any reporter that a national security source who whispers not only the alleged date of a coming invasion, but the number of days of aerial bombardment and the war’s expected level of horror and bloodiness, is either yanking your chain with a fairy tale, or using you, or both."
Writes Matt Taibbi, in "Another All-Time Media Faceplant/After the Biden administration and the press wrongly predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 16th, they kept compounding the error in spectacular fashion" (Substack).
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