Newt Gingrich, predicting a post-election uprising: "If Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker."

On "Meet the Press" this morning:

I think tragically, we have drifted into an environment where if Hillary is elected, the criminal investigations will be endless, and if Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker. The opposition of the government employee unions will be so hostile and so direct and so immediate, there will be a continuing fight over who controls the country. I think that we are in for a long, difficult couple of years, maybe a decade or more, because the gap between those of us who are deeply offended by the dishonesty and the corruption and the total lack of honesty in the Clinton Team. And on their side, their defense of unions, which they have to defend, I understand that. But that will lead to a Madison, Wisconsin kind of struggle if Trump wins.

I always love hearing the name of my city called out as the symbol of resisting the outcome of the election.

And maybe Newt Gingrich read my blog post from a couple weeks ago:

This is what Democrats actually did in Wisconsin when Scott Walker took office as governor in 2011.

I'm reading a NYT article that's teased on the front page with the headline "Some Trump Voters Warn of Revolution if Clinton Wins" and the quote "People are going to march on the capitols. They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there." From the text of the article:

"They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective," said the "liberal studies" professor.

Michael Rectenwald, 57, is on paid leave, he says, for what he wrote pseudonymously on Twitter. Beginning in mid-September, calling himself Deplorable NYU Prof, Rectenwald tweeted about campus things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, and Halloween costumes. For example, about the costumes, he tweeted: "The scariest thing about Halloween today is . . . the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance. NYU RAs gone mad." (RAs had put out a flyer about avoiding offensive Halloween costumes.)

Speaking of costumes, a pseudonym on Twitter works as a kind of costume, a disguise, allowing someone to inhabit a character. Twitter, with a pseudonym, can be a safe space for the writer, who has a real-world reputation and relationships to protect as he works out his transgressive ideas in public.

But Rectenwald was not outed. He chose to unmask himself, to connect the tweets with his name. He gave an interview to the student newspaper, Washington Square News. Two days later:

A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor in the same paper.

“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote of the untenured assistant professor. 

I don't see any "illogic." Maybe "liberal studies" is a field where "logic" is used loosely. I can see that "liberal" is used loosely. As for civility... well, you know I have a tag for that: civility bullshit. It represents my belief that demands for civility are always bullshit — not really about a neutral value but an effort to get your opponents to tone it down.

Anyway, Rectenwald says the dean and an HR representative met with him and "expressed concern about [his] mental health" and wanted him to "leave and get help." An NYU spokesman asserts that the leave does not have anything to do with the tweeting and his opinions. Perhaps the university means that it's not reacting to the substance of the ideas in the words, but the words as evidence of insanity. That would deserve comparison to the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

Slate/Inside Higher Ed has an article by Colleen Flaherty on Rectenwald's predicament. I see there that Rectenwald says he is a communist and that he diagnoses the university community as insane:

Identity politics, over all, Rectenwald told the [student] newspaper, “have made an infirmary of the whole damn campus. Let’s face it: every room is like a hospital ward. What are we supposed to do? I can’t deal with it—it’s insane.” 

So what does this have to do with Donald Trump? The student newspaper interview asked that question because "deplorable" in the pseudonym made him seem like a Trump supporter (something he admits he intended to do). Rectenwald answered:

I don’t support Trump at all. I hate him — I think he’s horrible. I’m hiding amongst the alt-right, alright? And the point is, this character is meant to exhibit and illustrate the notion that it’s this crazy social-justice-warrior-knee-jerk-reaction-triggered-happy-safe-space-seeking-blah, blah, blah, blah culture that it’s producing this alt-right. Now, I’m not dumb enough to go there. And my own politics are very strong — I’m a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed. Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point....

Rectenwald chose to create an alternate identity on Twitter, to "hid[e] this character in the alt-right" — "because otherwise, the social justice warriors are going to come onto me like flies, and they can be so extreme... It’s a nightmare." That is, he's a lefty, criticizing lefties, but he wanted to disguise himself as a righty. Talk about costumes! When do we get to inhabit someone else's identity?

Quite aside from what's permissible and what deserves punishment — I'd say it's all permissible and unpunishable — when is it effective for a speaker to appear to stand on the opposite side from his true ideology? Does the speaker really know himself? Rectenwald seems pretty certain he's a communist and that the alt-right was his mask. That puts him in the tradition of mobys and false flag operations. But there are far more subtle situations, like this blog you are reading now.

Did Cher threaten suicide?

"Cher hosted a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser at the Park on Thursday, starting things off by saying if Donald Trump wins the White House, 'I’m gonna have to leave the planet.'"

That's unwholesome. Some people take the idea of unwillingness to go on living seriously, and I consider Cher one of the great survivors.

But quite apart from the terrible example of threatening suicide — especially when you're a popular, attractive celebrity with a nice, comfortable life — making the election about you personally is politically wrong. If you really believe a particular President would be devastatingly harmful to the country, your leaving the country doesn't change that reality. Presumably, you are trying to say you care about your fellow citizens, not yourself. The country will be in the same predicament, whether you're here to experience it or not.

Much as I hate the implication of suicide, I've got to give Cher credit for seeing that leaving the planet is the necessary relocation if she wants to avoid witnessing the horror of a disastrous U.S. presidency.

Barbra Streisand said she'd move to Australia if Donald Trump is elected. What sense does that make? The news of what's going on in America will reach you in Australia just as it reaches you in your posh enclave in Malibu. If you don't want to have to know what's happening to the people of America, you'll have to shut off the news flow — turn off the TV, don't go on the internet. That's as true in Australia as it is in Malibu.

To my mind, those who talk about moving somewhere else are revealing that they're thinking of themselves, not the American people. And maybe that is exactly what they mean to say: If Donald Trump wins, then I don't respect the American people, and I don't want to live anywhere near them.

But you're already up on a cliff in Malibu. What difference does it make if you go farther away? The difference seems to be: I want to engage in conspicuously snubbing these awful people, the Americans. Yes, I've already isolated myself from them, and I'm perched on the edge of the left coast. But I need to do something more to make news of my snub for you people I've never wanted anywhere near me.

Ginkgo glory.

In our neighborhood today, the ginkgos won the award for best tree.

Long shadow on the Lake Wingra boardwalk.

Today. I can't even understand my shadow in that picture. I was wearing a short skirt.

"Donald Trump cancels Wisconsin rally just as Paul Ryan says he would campaign with him."

Ooh. Ouch.

"The best way to keep leaves out of the streets and our lakes is to mulch or compost them in your yard."

"Yet most residents want their leaves picked up from the curb. That’s fine — so long as the leaves are piled a few feet from the street so they stay put during a storm."

Leaves in the street are a huge pollution problem here, because of runoff into the lakes. But the trucks that pick up leaves are also polluting (and cost us taxpayers money). I don't see why everyone doesn't keep their leaves and compost them.

"Comparing Trump to The Terminator, Chappelle said, 'That would have devastated anybody else.' "

"Chappelle added that Trump’s handling of the debate immediately following the [Access Hollywood tape] controversy had won him over."

Referring to Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz’s hostile questioning, he said, “Something about this was backward. A gay white man and a white woman asking a multi-billionaire how he knows the system is rigged and insisting it’s not. Does that sound right to you? It didn’t seem right to me. And here’s how you know Trump is the most gangsta candidate ever. They asked him how he knows the system is rigged and he said, ‘Because I take advantage of it.’ He may as well have flashed his membership card for the Illuminati right then.”

About that Oregon law professor who wore blackface as part of a Halloween costume and provoked demands that she resign.

It turns out it was a female lawprof and she was dressed as the male author of a book she likes, "Black Man in a White Coat." She says she "intended to provoke a thoughtful discussion on racism in our society, in our educational institutions and in our professions," and: "It provoked a discussion of racism, but not as I intended."

I intended to create a conversation about inequity, racism and our white blindness to them. Regrettably, I became an example of it. This has been a remarkable learning experience for me. I hope that all who are hurt or angered by my costume will accept my apology. I meant no harm to them or others.

The professor — who is 68 years old and has taught at the University of Oregon since 1982 — was put on leave while she is being investigated. There's a petition demanding that she resign. (I guess that would mean retire.) And there's a petition on the other side (premised on academic freedom, not the idea that it's okay for a professor to wear blackface or okay as long as she had positive racial values).

I find it hard to believe that people are willing to be so vengeful over a single instance of bad judgment. Whatever happened to mercy and forgiveness? And what about our shared interest in living in a culture where people aren't fearful that their lives could be ruined if they said one thing wrong — even when they were trying to say something quite bland (like why can't we all get along)?

By the way, the professor, Nancy Shurtz, was not just a white person dressing up as a black person, she was also a woman dressing as a man, and a law professor dressing as a doctor. Why is the one crossover an outrage when the other 2 are not? How about some actual intellectual exploration of the subject of inhabiting alternate identities?

There must be some significance to the adult involvement in Halloween in present-day American culture. I don't think I've dressed up as a character for Halloween or any other occasion since I was a child, but I see my fellow adult Americans going in big for Halloween year after year. Why are we doing that?

"Lying's the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off..."

That's Natalie Portman in a 2004 movie (directed by Mike Nichols) called "Closer." The Portman character is responding to the prompt "Tell me something true." The entire response is: "Lying's the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off — but it's better if you do." But it's better if you leave off the last phrase. It's already implied and therefore verbose, but the entire movie was probably unnecessary.

I'm seeing that as a consequence of looking up the word "Closer" after reading this NYT headline, "The Closer: Michelle Obama." Obviously, the NYT means to flatter if not fawn over Michelle Obama, but calling her "The Closer" had a negative edge that I wanted to try to figure out. From the article:

Mr. Obama’s political advisers have long regarded his wife as a potent weapon. Their nickname for her in his 2008 campaign was “the closer.” Back then, with Mr. Obama engaged in a bitter Democratic primary against Mrs. Clinton, his aides noticed that Mrs. Obama’s so-called conversion rate — the ratio of voters who registered or signed up to volunteer or otherwise help the campaign after she made an appeal — was exceptionally high.

So she was the closer against Clinton, and maybe now she can be the closer for Clinton.

I wanted to get a feeling for "the closer" as slang, so I went to Urban Dictionary. A favorite definition is someone who can advance a relationship to sexual intercourse, but it's also recognized as a sales term: "someone that can close the sale. Sell anything to anybody at anytime."

See? That's not flattering to Hillary Clinton. Send in "the closer" because we've got a bad product and we need to sell it.

But one of the definitions is "An amazing movie" — the movie in the clip, above. And that line about lying — it's how girls have fun — seemed so apt for those of us immersed in the presidential campaign. We must be having so much fun.

The top Urban Dictionary definition for "closer" isn't apt at all. It's not even using "closer" as a noun. It's the adjective "closer" in the title of the Nine Inch Nails song. Great song, great video. If there's any possible association to Hillary Clinton, I don't want to know about it.

So let's just back away and watch Alec Baldwin deliver his "always be closing" speech:



You sons of bitches! Get mad!! You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls to sell real estate.

Jay Z, performing at a concert for Hillary, said the words that everyone knows are in his songs.

Business Insider writes it out enough so you can see what people heard and what Hillary had to know would be heard:

The rapper repeatedly used the n-word and dropped the f-bomb as he performed “F—WithMeYouKnowIGotIt” and his hit “Dirt off Your Shoulder” song at a Cleveland rally.

"You're tuned into the motherf----- greatest," a voice said as Jay Z appeared onstage.

“If you feelin’ like a pimp n----, go and brush your shoulders off,” Jay Z rapped. “Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off. N----- is crazy baby, don’t forget that boy told you. Get that dirt off your shoulders."

Jay Z also performed the song "Jigga My N----," in which he boasted that he was "Jay-Z, motherf-------!"

I'd say this is why artists should maintain their separation from politics, but Jay Z chooses to be involved and Hillary's campaign chooses to use him as a tool to access a segment of the population that seems to be hard for her to reach.

At the link, there's video of Jay Z's performance, with the words uncensored. I'd like to see that video spliced into this much-played Hillary Clinton ad:



Use the same children, the same innocent, sweet faces, watching Jay Z and ending with Hillary's solemn intonation: "Our children and grandchildren will look back at this time -- at the choices we are about to make, the goals we will strive for, the principles we will live by -- and we need to make sure that they can be proud of us."

IN THE COMMENTS: AReasonableMan said "Artists get a lot of leeway in how they express themselves that is not open to most other professions." And I say:

Yes, but the criticism is of Clinton. Should she be attaching these words to herself? I think an edgy artist ought to stay separate, but I don't know that Jay Z cares about being a rebellious social critic. The words he uses have been the norm in his genre for decades, so his using them says nothing. I'd have to read more about him to know if he's talking about anything that I'd have to disapprove of.

So that made me go over to Rap Genius and read the lyrics to "Dirt off Your Shoulder." An annotator explains: "Brushing dirt off your shoulder is just a 'pimp' gesture, it shows that yeah, you got knocked down, but you don’t care." So, I get it. It's the same message as the corny old song "Pick Yourself Up" — "Nothing's impossible, I have found/For when my chin is on the ground/I pick myself up/Dust myself off/And start all over again." Same idea. Here, listen to Nat King Cole. You want to say, no, it's not the same as "Pick Yourself Up" because Jay Z is talking about being a drug dealer? Well, then check this out:



UPDATE: Trump talked about it today:

"[Jay-Z] used every word in the book last night... He used language last night that was so bad and then Hillary said, 'I did not like Donald Trump's lewd language.' My lewd language. I tell you what, I've never said what he said in my life. But that shows you the phoniness of politics and the phoniness of the whole system."

"So his reasoning is that there's no evidence of the destruction of evidence, and surely nothing unethical happened because lawyers were involved?"

"Is this a joke? Donald Trump is also well-lawyered — should we hold back from ever accusing him of illegality in his business affairs or lawsuits because surely his lawyers would have prevented it?"

Writes my son John Althouse Cohen, responding to Matthew Yglesias's "The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign."

Yglesias wrote a sentence that makes me laugh, cry, and cringe all at once: "Generally speaking, in life we assume it would be moderately difficult to hire a well-known law firm to destroy evidence for you without someone deciding to do the right thing and squeal."

Would Cass Sunstein support law school admissions based solely on LSAT scores?

That's a question that occurred to me as I was reading his column "Job Interviews Are Useless":

Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should....

A lot of evidence suggests that... employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions -- and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

What’s true for sales positions is also true more generally. Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. For medical school interviews, for example, they appear to have no predictive power at all: in terms of academic or clinical performance, those accepted on the basis of interviews do no better than those who are rejected. In law schools, my own experience is that faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews -- which usually provide no information at all about how they will do as teachers or researchers....

In fact, some evidence suggests that interviews are far worse than wasteful: By drawing employers' attention to irrelevant information, they can produce inferior decisions. For example, people make better predictions about student performance if they are given access to objective background information, such as grades and test scores -- and prevented from conducting interviews entirely....

The headline way overstates the point in the text, which compares "unstructured interviews" with "specific aptitude tests." But Sunstein enthusiastically presents research that is skeptical of human intuition and sanguine about the objectivity of tests. And he doesn't give any sign of noticing any complexity in the idea of what it means to "succeed."



Where do we stand these days on the subject of "objective" tests? I've seen them disparaged over the years. Is liberal opinion turning in favor of these these tests? I remember, circa 1990, hearing a very famous law professor denounce the LSAT as evidence of absolutely nothing. I suggested that the LSAT was at least useful in giving those who'd squandered or botched their college education* a chance to show what they're capable of doing now, and she fiercely stood her ground. The LSAT has no value other than its negative value as a vector of discrimination.

But perhaps objective-test meritocracy is on the upswing. I wonder why. What's in the air these days? And can the air be objectively tested?


__________________________

* I was thinking of myself. I arrived at college in 1969 with a headful of ideas from Bob Dylan, the hippie movement, "The Way of Zen," and the Sermon on the Mount. I exited college with a BFA and a major in painting. But after 5 more years of youthful foolery, I had nailed a 99th percentile on the LSAT. Didn't that mean something? Or was I an inappropriate interloper? A third of a century later, I believe I was.

Is Donald Trump's "huge ad buy — 2 minutes long" terrifying CNN?

I noticed this at Memeorandum:



"Donald Trump has huge ad buy - 2 minutes long — Donald Trump is trying something unconventional in the final stretch: a two-minute-long TV ad. — The campaign says it is spending $4 million to buy time for the ad in nine battleground states and on nationally televised shows."

That caught my eye, because it's CNN straightforwardly crediting the Trump campaign with a big and unusual move that could turn out to be quite clever.

Here's the ad (or what I think is the ad (maybe I'm just being tricked into propagating an ad and there's some other ad)):



But look at the CNN headline now: "Trump and Clinton prep long final ads."

Trump's not doing anything special. Both campaigns are just boringly doing the same thing — long ads.

Let's read the text and see whether Trump is doing something special — "huge" and "unconventional" — or just proceeding alongside his opponent in a boring nothing-to-see-here fashion.

Wait. Before reading the text, I realize that the first characterization is the one that makes you think I'd better check out that ad and the second version makes you think blah, more ads, leave me alone. So my hypothesis is that CNN changed the headline to keep readers from wanting to see that ad — either right away, on the web, or when it comes up as they're watching TV over the weekend. Oh, there's that Trump ad everyone's talking about.

Reading the text, I see it supports the older headline:

Donald Trump is trying something unconventional in the final stretch: a two-minute-long TV ad.

The campaign says it is spending $4 million to buy time for the ad in nine battleground states and on nationally televised shows. TV ads are usually 30 seconds long, so Trump is trying to stand out by buying longer blocks of time and placing the ads during Saturday college football games, Sunday NFL games, and tentpole shows like "The Voice."

The idea is that the uncommonly long ads will stand out from the noise.

The article is almost entirely about Trump's ad and its placement. And the accompanying TV clip, from Wolf Blitzer's CNN show, is only about the Trump ad. But there's also this about a Clinton ad:

A Clinton campaign spokesman said Clinton also has a two-minute ad in the works. It is scheduled to also air on Monday night on "The Voice." It will also be seen on CBS, which has the new sitcom "Kevin Can Wait." The election eve ad time was reserved by Clinton's campaign on Thursday.

That's not an equivalent big ad buy, just 2 airings of an ad yet to come. It's enough to make the new headline not entirely ridiculous, but I think the headline was rewritten to dampen interest in the story and the ad.

What did I think of the ad? It successfully portrays Hillary Clinton as the embodiment of the establishment, the establishment as the evil oppressor that must be overthrown, and Donald Trump as the embodiment of change, change that is needed. Within that ad, both candidates are symbols, not human beings. Don't think too much about Trump, the person, or Hillary, the person: Think about the big ideas.

The Hillary campaign has been stressing Trump, the person. He's a terrible man. Trump has called Hillary "a nasty woman," but his closing argument is not personal. I haven't seen Hillary's closing argument, but ad that I've seen in the last week on TV here in Wisconsin is this old one (from last July) that harps piano-chords on Trump's personal ugliness:

"Big Names Campaigning for Hillary Clinton Underscore Donald Trump’s Isolation."

A NYT headline that could so easily be rewritten pro-Trump.

"Religiosity is rising, especially among the middle class."

"A sense of identification is increasing."