Writes E.J. Dickson — "your standard Brooklyn millennial lefty mom" — in Rolling Stone....
November 2, 2021
"I have always firmly believed that most of a parent’s energy should be invested in making sure your kid is healthy and happy and putting one foot in front of the other..."
"... the idea that they have to meet some bullshit level of achievement or hit the threshold for performative political awareness (i.e., the type of cutesy anecdotes of toddlers referring to RBG as a 'princess' that get thousands of likes on Resistance Twitter) has always been anathema to me. Trying to indoctrinate your child with a set of abstruse political values, at a time when parents should simply be encouraging kids to learn the basic building blocks of empathy and friendship, is pretty gross. And liberalism or conservatism aside, oftentimes aggressively copy-pasting your own politics onto your small child serves your own ego far more than it’s likely to benefit them...."
November 1, 2021
"An 'insurrection,' as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority."
"Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Hill Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that 'got out of hand.'"
Writes Roger Kimball in "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax" (Real Clear Politics).
When I see "uprising," I think of this:
Sometimes people want to be thought of as insurrectionists. Sometimes the political protesters that got out of hand want the bigger concept to apply to them. They use it to brag about the scope and significance of what they accomplished.
It goes both ways, this spin. But it's funny to me to see leftists using "insurrection" against the protesters they hate when they — some of them — used the same notion to vaunt their 2011 takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol.
And don't forget Occupy Wall Street.
Am I failing to distinguish "insurrection" and "uprising"? I've dabbled in researching the difference if any. I think the 2 words mean the same thing, though "insurrection" might have somewhat more of a connotation of armed rebellion. I don't think any of the things discussed above were armed rebellion. So I'd just use the word "uprising" and use it consistently to refer to the takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol and the takeover of the U.S. Capitol. If you don't want to use that word for both things, just don't use it for either. Or be exposed as a propagandist.
McAuliffe accuses Youngkin of racist dog whistling.
Transcript. Excerpt:
TERRY McAULIFFE: [P]eople were very happy that I vetoed the bill that literally parents could take books out of the curriculum. You know, I love Millie and Jack McAuliffe, my parents, but they should not have been picking my math or science book. We have experts who actually do that. And look what happened. [Glenn Youngkin] is closing his campaign on banning books. It's created a controversy all over the country. He wants to ban Toni Morrison's book Beloved. So he's going after one of the most preeminent African American female writers in American history, won the Nobel Prize, has a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he wants her books banned. Now, of all the hundreds of books you could look at, why did you pick the one Black female author? Why did you do it? He's ending his campaign on a racist dog whistle...
It's racializing to call it a racializing, of course.
... just like he started the campaign when he talks about election integrity. But Chuck, we have a great school system in Virginia. Dorothy and I have raised our five children.
But McAuliffe sent 4 of those 5 children to private school (Catholic school).
"TRAVEL HELL"? Reframe your perception: It's environmental HEAVEN.
Here's why that's heaven — if you are genuinely concerned about climate change. A radical decrease in airline travel would make a dramatic contribution in what has been portrayed as a desperate fight. I'm not writing this post to debate whether that portrayal is accurate. I'm speaking to those who believe (or purport to believe) that carbon emissions are a severe emergency. I'm saying see how this "hell" is heaven.
Let the airlines scale back the number of flights to deal with the labor shortage. Let supply and demand determine the prices. And that's just it, people. Enjoy the new heaven of airline travel drastically reduced by the economic process that is already in motion. For God's sake, don't try to reverse this process!
The rhetorical stylings of Nancy Pelosi.
Text and video here.
So again, the transformative agenda, the president was knowledgeable. I mean, he knows chapter [inaudible 00:04:20] because he wrote this, he campaigned on this. He spoke to this in his state of the union address. I told him last night, on phone last night, but today in front of our colleagues, that when he gave that state of the union address, we were sitting behind him, the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, and the speaker of the House, me. And people said, “How did it feel? How did it feel? The two women.” I said, “Well, that was exciting and historic.” What was really exciting is the speech the president made about women, not about two women, but America’s women, and what would happen with this progressive agenda that he was putting forth. At the same time, we’re moving forward with BIF, a once in a century chance to rebuild the infrastructure that past the Senate a while back. The BIF has good things and it has missing things. And of course, the fact that we have the reconciliation… Let me not call it that anymore, let’s call it the Build Back Better legislation is essential because that’s where we have the major investment in climate. Although there is some in the BIF. Roads, bridges, water systems, crumbling. Some water systems are over 100 years made of, and our colleagues talked about their own experiences in their own communities, some made of bricks and wood. That’s a nice water system, right?
I'll just say it myself so I don't get 100 comments in moderation all saying this: If Trump spoke with that level of coherence, he would have been derided as a blithering idiot.
I'll add that I pretty much always could understand Trump, and I can understand Pelosi there too. It's a kind of stream of consciousness that people are feeling okay doing in public these days. It's like wearing casual clothes. It feels more like direct thoughts, and I think people more or less like it when it comes from someone they like, and they enjoy the easy mockery they can do when it's someone they don't like.
3 takes on Zuckerberg's "metaverse."
1. "Facebook wants to be The Matrix" by Kevin T. Dugan (Fortune).
Zuckerberg still puts bringing people together as his guiding principal [sic], and this is how to do it, even if it just has them interact more with sensors and goggles than with other living, breathing people. It all seems kinda bleak, like when you first see how people are harvested to make up The Matrix. As Morpheus says, channeling the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “welcome to the desert of the real.” But as Facebook’s continued dominance in social media attests, you don’t really even need people to like your product very much in order for it to be extremely powerful and widely-used.
2. "What Zuckerberg's metaverse means to our humanity" by Douglas Rushkoff (CNN).
In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has planned for us, it's not that Zuckerberg's simulations will rise to the level of reality, it's that our behaviors and interactions will become so standardized and mechanical that it won't even matter.... We learn to downgrade our experience of being together with another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure... Now, just as we're waking up to ways Facebook has knowingly eroded our social, mental and civic well-being, Zuckerberg is back with a new offering: a way out.... But... to go in the direction that Zuckerberg is pushing us, we must leave our humanity behind.
3. "The metaverse may be coming. But don’t expect it from Mark Zuckerberg" by Megan McArdle (WaPo).
[M]any companies that see the approaching catastrophe and dutifully try to adapt fail to do so. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, and nonetheless went bankrupt in 2012 thanks to digital photography.... If you wanted to create a digital photography company, you probably wouldn’t staff it with 145,000 employees of a company that made cameras and film....
When Zuckerberg founded Facebook, he was one 19-year-old college student with a computer, among millions. A decade ago, when he was pushing the company to focus on mobile rather than desktop and buying Instagram for $1 billion, he was a 28-year-old entrepreneur. Now he’s a billionaire, one of only thousands, and he has aged out of the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic..... [I]t seems more likely that the future belongs to people we’ve never heard of — those without a legacy business to worry about or a thick layer of money and fame insulating them from the longings of ordinary users.
October 31, 2021
"Nerds are winning."
I said to a trick-or-treating kid just now, and he seemed amused. I am taking a survey, giving all kids a choice between Twix — which I consider the mature choice — and Nerds Ropes — the funny choice.
The near west side of Madison has voted and the choice is clear: Nerds are winning.
I don't know what this necessarily means for society at large, but it seems to me it's a vote for fun.
"Southwest Airlines is conducting an internal investigation after one of its pilots reportedly said a phrase used in right-wing circles as a stand-in for swearing at President Biden over the plane’s public address system..."
"The airline faced turbulence on social media over the weekend after an Associated Press journalist was on a flight from Houston to Albuquerque on Friday when she heard the pilot use the phrase 'let’s go Brandon,' writing that it brought on 'audible gasps from some passengers.' Audio of the pilot’s greeting, which The Washington Post could not independently verify, was separately circulating widely on social media. 'Southwest does not condone Employees sharing their personal political opinions while on the job serving our Customers, especially when comments are divisive and offensive,' the Texas-based airline said in a statement to The Washington Post on Sunday."
How can anyone qualified to be trusted with the lives of people who willingly strap themselves into seats inside an inescapable tube in the sky imagine that he can impose any sort of political statement on them, let alone a partisan taunt?
It's such a failure of judgment! It's one thing for ordinary citizens to think they're smart or cute or gutsy or whatever to say "Let's go Brandon," but do it on your own time, not to captive listeners who are dependent on you. What jackasses people have come to be!
This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging.
1. This morning, before going out for my sunrise run, where I planned to continue listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Crossroads," I opened up the NYT review, "Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." I wanted to read a review, and I selected that one, just because it's in the NYT (and written by Dwight Garner, a reviewer I like).
2. After the sunrise, with that tab sitting open on my browser, I sat down for my usual morning blogging session, and what caught my eye and set the tone for the morning was Donald Trump's participation in the tomahawk chop at the World Series game in Atlanta last night.
3. As I wrote in the previous post, that "jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?" That led me into a 1991 WaPo article about the men's movement 30 years ago, which entailed drumming and other "Native American" inspired rituals, much of which came from the musings of the poet Robert Bly.4. I click various windows out of my way and uncover that "Crossroads" review. It begins:
Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.
5. And don't even get me started on Joseph Campbell. That was so last week.
"American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."
"... of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. There's a lot of hurtin' cowboys out there."
Said Ed Honnold, "the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing and roaring, hugging and weeping," quoted in "MEN'S MOVEMENT STALKS THE WILD SIDE," a WaPo column by Phil McCombs, published on February 3, 1991 — 30 years ago.
I'm reading that this morning because the news about Trump at the Atlanta baseball game doing the tomahawk chop — blogged here — jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?
Here's the part about drum circles from that 1991 article:
2 movies I watched this past week.
I used to watch a lot of movies, but these days, it's unusual for me to watch even 1 movie in any given week, even just on television, and I have a lot of access to movies with Netflix and Criterion. But I watched 2 in the past week — both highly recommended:
This sounds like the message he ran on, but not much like what his Party has been up to lately.
It seems to me that Biden got elected by offering to be not much more than the absence of Trump, but his Party seems to behave as if the people elected Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (and won both houses of Congress with a comfortable margin).My plans are not about left versus right — or moderate versus progressive — or anything else that pits Americans against one another. They are about competitiveness, expanding opportunity, and leading the world.
— President Biden (@POTUS) October 30, 2021
As long as I'm in the President's Twitter feed, I wanted to show you the vivid bodycon dress Dr. Jill wore:
Jill and I are honored to join the Mattarellas and Draghis at the G20 Summit Leaders Dinner. pic.twitter.com/FrnZUmFFsc
— President Biden (@POTUS) October 30, 2021
The media genius strikes again — with a tomahawk.
I was in denial. He didn't go to the game, I thought. It was in the Daily Mail, Meade said, and that wasn't enough. I've got to check. There's the screen shot. Maybe that was some other occasion? But no, that's in The Guardian. It's real. The man went to the World Series. And Melania looks utterly pleased to be screwing with the haters alongside her eminent husband.
I think the tomahawk chop is awful and that the people of Atlanta ought to want to abandon it, but they're not succumbing to chop-shaming, and the irrepressible ex-President is with them:ADDED: The haters say she's faking it:Trump and Melania doing the racist tomahawk chop.
— Resist Programming 🛰 (@RzstProgramming) October 31, 2021
Trump loves endorsing racist sports issues. pic.twitter.com/brKgx7WMRf
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