April 6, 2021
"A conscious neck restraint by policy mentions light to moderate pressure. When I look at exhibit 17..."
"... and when I look at the facial expression of Mr. Floyd, that does not appear in any way, shape, or form that that is light to moderate pressure."
From "Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo Testimony on Use of Force in Derek Chauvin Trial Transcript" (REV).
Perhaps you've noticed that I've eliminated comments on this blog.
If you want to understand why I've made this change, go to this momentous post from Sunday and search the comments for contributions from me. I did not believe when I put that post up that I was about to end comments, but the comments — ironically, the comments insisting that I keep the comments — convinced me that I needed to let go of the blogging-with-comments game.
You can still comment on posts. You just have to send me email. Use this address. I'll presume you want to be quoted in an update to the post, but I'll be very selective about that. To see the first example of a post update with a quote from the email, go back to this post from yesterday.
"To me, this is something you do, ideally, zero times. You never experience the impulse to do it, and you lead a pleasant life."
"You travel. You eat lunchmeat sandwiches. Maybe you do a marathon, or climb something. You lead a blithe existence for many decades, you die in your bed in your mid-nineties surrounded by your cherished relatives, and in all that time, you never walk up to a colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives and out of nowhere present him with a nude photograph of someone you claim to have had sex with. But if you can’t do it zero times, then ideally it happens only once. It happens only once, because the moment you do it, the person you show it to responds the way a person should respond. You produce your photograph to your colleague, and your colleague looks at you and says, 'Never show that to anyone, ever again. Go home and rethink your life. I do not feel closer to you. If anything, I want to have you removed forcibly from my presence by strong gentlemen whose biceps are tattooed with "MOM." The fact that you thought this would make us closer makes me question every decision in my life that has led me to this point. Leave now and never come back.' But we can probably suppose that this is not what happened, because life is regrettably unstingy with moments like this, when a small awkward 'no' seems too costly. Perhaps the person to whom this was shown emitted a sort of uncomfortable, nervous laugh, and this was viewed as acceptance enough. Or worse, he leered at it, encouraged it. Or, still worse (a scenario alleged to have existed during Gaetz’s time in the Florida state House), he joined a fun little club with Gaetz and others to assign themselves conquest points."
Writes Alexadra Petri in "Opinion: This should not happen more than once" (WaPo).
She's talking about the way Matt Gaetz "used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with." Strange use of the word "people." These were all pictures of women, I think. I don't know why Petri would want to downplay that this is something a man was doing to women.
Perhaps a new political correctness urges her to refrain from assuming that the human beings you're talking about are the sex they appear to be. But that diffidence drains power from feminism: We're all just people. In a culture that rejects colorblindness as the answer to racism, it's inconsistent to structure sex-blindness (gender-blindness?) into the discussion of issues of sexism.
Petri is calling for good men — and men who'd like to think of themselves as decent enough to deserve the company of women — to say "no" to the male camaraderie that comes in the form of nudging to casually enjoy the graphic depiction of the naked female body. In that view, it's up to all men to create the environment where somebody doing what she's saying Gaetz did would get the message that he's a creep.
Petri, perhaps unintentionally, points to a way out of cancel culture. The colleagues don't have the credibility to encapsulate and excise just the one person. They're all responsible. They must change.
But I don't know what Matt Gaetz did. Consider this, by former Congresswoman Katie Hill: "Matt Gaetz Defended Me When My Nudes Were Shared Without My Consent/Now He's Accused of Doing Just That/Matt and I forged an unlikely friendship in Congress, and he was one of the few colleagues who spoke out after a malicious nude-photo leak upended my life. But if recent reports are true, he engaged in the very practice he defended me from—and should resign immediately" (Vanity Fair).
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
April 5, 2021
"See that smile? Ron had slipped up. He knew it and I knew it."
This is the big reveal in the finale of #QIntotheStorm where Ron Watkins says too much to Cullen Hoback and lets his guard slip.
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) April 5, 2021
It was so good it made the whole six hours worth it. pic.twitter.com/QzwTGNcl5q
The evidence is circumstantial, and no proof affirms Watkins’ role. Watkins, for his part, messaged his 150,000 subscribers on the chat service Telegram late Sunday, “Friendly reminder: I am not Q. Have a good weekend.”
"The thing that’s complicated about the body positive movement is it can be for the privileged few who have a body that looks the way people want to feel positive."
"We want curvy bodies that look like Kim Kardashian has been up-sized slightly. We want big beautiful butts and big beautiful breasts and no cellulite and faces that look like you could smack them on to thin women. I have a big stomach, I always have. That’s where I gain my weight — especially after early menopause, I have a straight-up gut, like an old man —and that’s not where anybody wants to see flesh. It’s not like if I posted a sensual nude of myself on Instagram, people would be marveling at my beautiful derrière.... There’s so much judgment around bigger bodies, and I think one of the judgments is that bigger women are stupider. They eat too much and don’t know how to stop. Thin women must be discerning and able to use their willpower. Bigger women must be limited in their understanding of the world, and they keep doing things that are bad for them. The amount of people who have written to me on my page: 'You’re promoting obesity. Don’t you understand you’re killing yourself. Are you stupid? Why are you doing that?'"
Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham and the Spanx Liberation Movement/The actor-writer-director-controversy creator is back with a new project: a plus-size clothing line. The whole body positivity thing? She has thoughts" (NYT).
I was interested in this concept of negativity within positivity — that the much-vaunted "body positivity" isn't really generally accepting the full range of fatnesses, but only okays manifestations of fat that fit a feminine ideal of voluptuousness, curvaceousness. If the fat has overtaken you in the way it would beset a man — "a straight-up gut, like an old man" — the radiations of positivity do not reach you.
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
FROM THE EMAIL: A reader, Mary, writes:
Your blog post today "The thing that’s complicated about the body positive movement…” got me thinking about an Instagram post I saw a few days ago by Paulina Porizkova, because it’s not just shaming women for their body shape and size, there’s also the issue of shaming women for how they age.
Here she says “As a woman, you are shamed if you look your age and you’re shamed if you do interventions to not look your age. Jane Fonda , who has been absolutely honest about her ways of coping, will go on a talk show to promote a new movie and all she’s asked is about her facelift. Is it any wonder that many celebrities would prefer not to have to defend their choices every single day? What if you went to your office and was always introduced as “Jenny, who has Botox in her forehead and had a lower facelift” when you’re there to pitch a great new idea, or sell off on a deal, or just sign contracts? Would you be so keen on letting everyone know if it is then becomes what defines you as a person, rather that your abilities and talent and personality?”
This is mostly celebrity looks issues, but I think we all feel it to some degree. I’m 55 years old and when I look in the mirror and see my neck, oh man, what the fuck happened! I’m seeing my age and it all seems to be happening so fast now. It’s like I’m pruning overnight! Should I wake up in the middle of the night and drink a gallon of water? I don’t know.
But I do understand most women are going through some sort of…"do I look good?” shit. And really it’s more important that we feel good about ourselves. Regardless of age, belly fat, boobs, because none of that matters if you’re not happy with who you are on the inside. I guess that sounds corny and sort of Sesame Street, but it’s not. It actually matters.
How long throughout history has there been such an emphasis on women’s looks? I don’t think this is ending any time soon.
I read that immediately after looking at pictures of myself... with a completely judgmental eye. And I'm 70!
MORE EMAIL:
I will be 60 this year. The thing that is most disturbing to me is the "old man pot belly" which I definitely have now. You can kind of hide it with loose tops (and of course something that shows more cleavage might distract from the belly). It is good to make sure your hair looks nice when you go out, do your nails, put on some makeup and jewelry, etc. But I am not competing with 20 year old's, that would be ridiculous. I just want to feel pretty even though that is kind of bending to the patriarchy. Also it's kind of funny, with the advent of mid-rise jeans, my pants size has not changed at all. I just have to wear a belt to keep my pants from falling down. By the way your hair looks great.
Thanks!
"The syndicate has set the level of expectation..."
Notice posted in the window of a tavern on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin (click to enlarge and read):
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
"I have COVID-love shame. I don’t tell anybody about this … A lot of my dread is purely, for lack of a better word, selfish."
Said a man ("William") who got Covid — nearly symptomless Covid — and loved the solitude and inactivity it imposed on him.
Quoted in "A Great Excuse to Do Nothing’: The People Who Don’t Want to Return to Normalcy" (Intelligencer).
More from William: "I’ve had explicit permission to just stay home and I have got my own self-sustaining ecosystem here … work, food, exercise, recreation. I just feel so much more control of my experiences. I’m just dreading traffic, ‘meet me at the coffee shop at three,’ ‘I’m ten minutes late,’ baby showers, [gender] reveals. Like, I don’t want to do any of that fucking shit."
Do you think they just made up that quote or are men these days actually beset by baby showers and — why are these things not yet politically incorrect? — "gender reveals"? But it's sad if people have so lost the capacity to protect themselves from the hurly-burly of the shallowest manifestations of social life that they find relief in catching Covid.
More stories at the link about individuals who didn't understand how much they wanted to be left alone and couldn't figure out how to get what they needed... until Covid.
Is it really solitude that they want, or is it a more satisfying social life? It seems to me that William had a lot of frivolous, annoying, time-consuming interactions with people. The real lesson to be learned might be that you shouldn't do things with other people merely to have something that can be called a social life, but that you should reserve your social self for genuinely worthy occasions. And don't throw occasions that are not worthwhile for your targeted attendees. You don't certainly don't need a "gender reveal." And reconsider your showers — the party kind of showers — and even — it's hard, but let go! — your weddings.
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous.
It certainly wasn't an Easter idea. Who am I to step on Easter?
I had a post — put up before sunrise — about a column by a bishop who spoke of "recovering the strangeness of Easter," but he wasn't saying make your Easter Sunday strange — do something strange in your life. He wanted you to engage with the strangeness of the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus. That was no call to perform strangeness in the drama of my own little life.
I went out for my usual sunrise run. It wasn't a big showy sunrise, but there was a gentle softness on the lake that translated into luscious strips of color in the photographs. I ended up posting 8 of the photographs, lined up chronologically. I don't think I've ever presented the sunrise photographs like that.
And those 2 posts together, with nothing more, could have made a solid Easter Sunday on the blog, a change from the usual day on the blog, with more seriousness and beauty than the usual style. There's much more to the day than what shows up on the blog, and it's good to have some days when the blog side of life is minimal.
But the blog side of life turned maximal, because I put up one more post. I'd come back from my sunrise run, and running gets me thinking and putting my thoughts in new order. As soon as I got back home, I put up the post, "I'm considering changing the approach to comments on this blog." I spelled out a few options and started a conversation. The results of the poll were very clear:
"Keep it the way it is" — that is, let comments flow into new posts unmoderated and deal with problems as they come up by deleting the trolls and the spam and so forth. I like the free flow too, but unlike the rest of you, I have to continually tend to the problems, and whenever I step away from the blog to go about my life in the material world, I have background static: I wonder what's happening in the comments. Do I need to get in there and deal with a troll infestation? There was an open door to anyone in the world to make a mess of a place that I had bound myself to protect and that I had protected for 17 years.
I didn't try to skew the poll by telling you about the burden it has become for me. I just wanted to see what you thought, and it's nice to know that the majority of poll-takers were happy with the experience I had worked so hard to create. The behind-the-scenes work for me isn't something that should concern you. Quite the opposite. The backstage labor isn't part of the show.
I was interested to see what people would say in the comments. That's the up side of comments for me. I like to read what people have to say. I'm used to the sense of seeing the readers and feeling the camaraderie. But somewhere along the way in that thread that is now up over 600 comments — many of which are from me, responding to people — I could see that there is only one answer that gives me what I'm afraid I must take for myself. And that is the end of comments.
I've chosen the least popular option — if you don't count the "Something else," which wasn't any specific option at all. You can email me by clicking here. If you email me, you need to say if you don't want to be quoted on the blog, because I may select quotes from the email to use in updates to the blog. But the freewheeling chattiness of the comments section is gone. I'm sad to lose it.
In that long thread yesterday, a lot of people told me that they come to my blog not for me but for the comments. They seemed to think that argued in favor of my continuing to carry the burden of moderating the comments. It cut the other way. I didn't plan for yesterday to be so momentous, but it was that argument — augmented with the threat that I would lose traffic, the all-important, precious traffic — that pushed me toward decisive action.
So now, here I am, blogging on alone, without the hefty support of a comments section under this post. I'm writing this paragraph, and that's it. It's not a kick-off to a conversation. It stands on its own. You've read it — now, you're free. There's nothing more to do. No remarks to make. You'll see — if you continue on as a reader — what difference it makes in me as a writer. That's something I want to see too.
April 4, 2021
I'm considering changing the approach to comments on this blog.
I'd appreciate it if all readers would participate in this poll, whether you comment regularly, occasionally, or not at all.
"There were a number of prominent theologians during the years that I was going through the seminary who watered down the Resurrection, arguing that it was a symbol..."
"... for the conviction that the cause of Jesus goes on, or a metaphor for the fact that his followers, even after his horrific death, felt forgiven by their Lord. But this is utterly incommensurate with the sheer excitement on display in the Resurrection narratives and in the preaching of the first Christians. Can one really imagine St. Paul tearing into Corinth and breathlessly proclaiming that the righteous cause of a crucified criminal endures? Can one credibly hold that the apostles of Jesus went careering around the Mediterranean and to their deaths with the message that they felt forgiven? Another strategy of domestication, employed by thinkers from the 19th century to today, is to reduce the Resurrection of Jesus to a myth or an archetype. There are numberless stories of dying and rising gods in the mythologies of the world, and the narrative of Jesus' death and resurrection can look like just one more iteration of the pattern. Like those of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis and Persephone, the 'resurrection' of Jesus is, on this reading, a symbolic evocation of the cycle of nature. In a Jungian psychological framework, the story of Jesus dying and coming back to life is an instance of the classic hero's journey from order through chaos to greater order.... Declaring a man's sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided. But when his band of Apostles saw him alive again after his death, they came to believe that he is who he said he was...."
From "Recovering the Strangeness of Easter/For Christians, the holiday is about recapturing the surprise and excitement that the Resurrection brought to Jesus' first followers" by Bishop Robert Barron (Wall Street Journal).
April 3, 2021
"The liminal state of this song is punctuated by lulls of drones humming and possible ecstatic highs, but even as fractured and wild as it might all be..."
"... the power of getting through this speck of time is in your hands. While maybe you can’t directly relate to Chapman’s urgent promises about breaking the cycle of poverty and disappointment, you can loosely use O’Rourke’s scientific process for getting through any situation rife with angst, murk and the blah of it all. Listen hard enough, and the nearly sitcom-length middle can even feel short when the same big, bending sounds are crammed into little pockets of time that flitter away before you know it."
From "Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ is a beautiful ballad. This 33-minute cover version takes it to a whole new place" by Hau Chu (WaPo).
Are you waiting for the basketball game to start and enduring Miley Cyrus?
Miley Cyrus singing We Will Rock You at the #FinalFour #MarchMadness
— Miley Cyrus Edition (@MileyEdition) April 3, 2021
MILEY CYRUS FINAL FOUR pic.twitter.com/pA6PfMnydz
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
