May 29, 2021
"The Great Outdoors Was Made for White People."
A great headline at The Nation... but is it deadly serious? Actually, yes:
Through military and legislative intervention, such as the Mariposa Battalion’s violent raid of the village of Ahwahneechee in 1851, which expelled the remaining Indigenous people from Yosemite, these places were cultivated primarily for white people. Early conservationists like Bowles, or the venerated John Muir or Madison Grant (who wrote one of the foundational texts of the American eugenics movement, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History), were not shy in advocating racial exclusivity: When they spoke of the importance of nature for our nation, they meant the white nation....
"[T]he pandemic turned the kaleidoscope of U.S. migration, and many families—especially many high-income families with work-from-wherever jobs—are shopping around for sunny, spacious real estate..."
"... and bidding up prices wherever they land.... When people leave multimillion-dollar houses in, say, Los Angeles to plunk down $1 million on a house [in Texas or Idaho] that was worth $500,000 a year ago, they turn a merely frenzied housing market into a once-in-history, hair-on-fire, what-the-hell-is-happening bonanza. Supply issues are just as important. Years of insufficient building and a construction pause during the pandemic have led to low inventory. Seniors, who in previous decades sold their homes to downsize, are now more likely to 'age in place,' which is keeping millions of homes off the market. Plus, some builders are putting their projects on hold because of the sudden tripling of lumber prices, which could delay the construction boom this country so badly needs...."
From "Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market/Rising inventory is one of several signs that we may have reached peak ludicrousness" (The Atlantic).
"What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means."
"That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom. My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.... The West’s idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.... Our world is just a set of interlocking forms of oppressive structures, and has been since the West’s emergence.... When it began, critical theory was one school of thought among many. But the logic of it — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them. Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal 'reasonable person' standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.... This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal."
From "Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism/What the 'Critical Race Theory' debate is really about" by Andrew Sullivan (Substack).
Sunrise.
ADDED: A reader asked me if the wildflower in the closeup is wild parsnip, a troublesome invasive weed. No, I've done some checking (using Plant Snap and other things), and I'm pretty sure this is Golden Alexander (Zizia aptera). Now, one of the common names for this plant is meadow parsnip, but wild parsnip is something different, with the scientific name Pastinaca sativa. The useful cultivated vegetable is the same species, so respect the parsnip.
By the way, "sativa" means cultivated.
At the family level, both wild parsnip and Golden Alexander are Apiaceae:
Apiaceae or Umbelliferae is a family of mostly aromatic flowering plants named after the type genus Apium and commonly known as the celery, carrot or parsley family, or simply as umbellifers. It is the 16th-largest family of flowering plants, with more than 3,700 species in 434 genera[1] including such well-known and economically important plants such as ajwain, angelica, anise, asafoetida, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, cow parsley, parsley, parsnip and sea holly, as well as silphium, a plant whose identity is unclear and which may be extinct.
Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald punch down at Just Jess.
Just Jess is a woman on Twitter with less than 10,000 followers, but she said something that got a reaction:
So... turns out the new friend I went on vacation with doesn't believe there was an insurrection. So... vacation over 4 days early. Friendship way over. Mind blown.
I can't tell what this "new friend" did. Did she think there was no breach of the Capitol at all or was she getting semantic about the word "insurrection"?
Anyway... I thought it was interesting that both Scott Adams and Glenn Greenwald reacted.
Adams's reaction is pithy and funny, but he's using a tight definition of "insurrection" that exaggerates the extremism of Just Jess. He tweets:
Never go on vacation with someone who believes you can conquer a superpower by occupying a room in the Capitol.
I admire the humor technique of switching the perspective to that of the new friend. She shouldn't want to be stuck in close quarters with Jess.
By the way, isn't it always a bad idea to go on a vacation with a new friend — at least if you're going to be stuck in a car or a hotel room with this person for many long hours? You don't know whether you'll bug each other or be any good at navigating around arguments.
Greenwald is not so funny. He barrels straight into the official humor format of the internet, sarcasm — heavy, obvious sarcasm:
Immediately terminate all friendships with anyone who sees the world differently than you see it -- especially politics. Much healthier that way never to have your views questioned or challenged by anyone near you.
What if you had to go on a cross-country road trip with one of these 3 — Glenn, Scott, or Jess? Well, I think the first choice is quite clear, but I'll hold back my response for now and give you a chance to vote:
"When Trudi Juggernauth-Sharma became wifelet No 68 to the seventh Marquess of Bath the polyamorous aristocrat drove her up to a ramshackle cottage on the edge of his Longleat estate..."
"... and asked her to live there so he could see her whenever his wife wasn’t at home.... That was in 1998, but after his death from Covid-19 in April last year the 74 wifelets he accumulated during his life discovered this week they had been left with nothing in his will, after he gave £14 million to his wife, children and the Longleat estate. The Times understands that at least one of the three wifelets still living in cottages on the estate are being kicked out by Ceawlin Thynn, his son, the eighth Marquess of Bath. Juggernauth-Sharma, 61, who still lives in her cottage at present and said she was the most favoured wifelet, told The Times that the son had made her an outcast. 'There were some very badly behaved wifelets,' she said. 'Ceawlin doesn’t have to take on his father’s wifelets, I do understand but I thought he would be a bit more lenient towards me because I was different and he knew I really cared for his father. In his will he didn’t say take the cottages back from my girlfriends. I thought at least I would be able to use the cottage for as long as I want.'... Dressed in glamorous clothes, she explained that her home didn’t have central heating until about 2008 and the estate installed a shower only about five years ago. 'It was perishingly cold, there was just a little coal fire,' she said. 'I used to wash with a jug in the bath.'... She proudly explained that she was from the Brahmin caste, the highest position in Indian society... 'I was in love, it was something different... I was just exploring life as it came.'"
From "Marquess of Bath’s son is kicking me out of Longleat, says wifelet No 68" (London Times).
"Structural and cultural shifts have convinced many on the left that their causes are broadly and increasingly popular, and that strong rights protections have become a political obstacle. "
"But it is rash, especially in a big and insubordinate country like this one, to imagine that appeals to reasonableness and popularity will always serve as a more reliable guide to justice than the language of the Constitution. Yes, the N.R.A. used the language of rights to defeat laws that many people say they support.... But this is how rights often work: they protect things that most people think don’t deserve protection at all."
From "From Guns to Gay Marriage, How Did Rights Take Over Politics? The N.R.A., the Supreme Court, and the forces driving the country’s most intractable legal debates" by Kelefa Sanneh (in The New Yorker).
Of course rights are experienced as "a political obstacle." That's exactly the idea. When shouldn't the majority win.
Sanneh is mostly bouncing off of a book:
"Look, to his credit, Donald Trump brought many new voters into our party, and we want them to stay. He’s a former president now..."
"... but the issues and values that held so many Republican voters and turned so many Democrats into Republicans, those issues and values still matter.... In a lot of manufacturing towns, and in other once-forgotten places, people know who’s speaking for them, and more than that, who’s listening to them. Like the Reagan Democrats of another time, these voters feel respected in our party, respected for the work they do, for their way of life, and for their love of country. I can’t think of any better evidence that the Republican Party has been doing at least a few things right. Having joined our ranks in the last five years, there is no reason these voters cannot go on adding their conviction and support to the conservative cause. All good-meaning people from every background should feel welcome in the forward-looking, inclusive, aspirational movement that we must be...."
From "Paul Ryan Reagan Library Speech Transcript May 27: Future of GOP" (Rev).
May 28, 2021
"A bill signed into law by Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt bans lessons that include the concept that 'one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,' that a person's 'moral character is inherently determined by his or her race or sex,' or..."
"... that someone should feel discomfort, guilt or distress on account of their race or sex.
Nonetheless, educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.... Paula Lewis, chair of the Oklahoma City School Board, said though the state's new law bans teachers from discussing concepts they weren't discussing anyway, and though its penalties are not yet clear, the danger is the fear it instills. 'What if they say the wrong thing?' Lewis said. 'What if somebody in their class during the critical thinking brings up the word oppression or systemic racism? Are they in danger? Is their job in danger?'"
From "Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting A Chill On Their Lessons" (NPR).
This is another example of the notion of outlawing something that nobody's doing anyway. I'm not saying that it's true that no one was doing it or threatening to do it. I'm just observing that it's a form of argument against a law.
Instead of arguing that X should be legal, the argument is don't outlaw X because no one is doing X. You might want the opponents of the law against X to say whether they think X should be illegal, but they don't want to answer that question. They want to accuse the proponents of the law against X of wanting to send a hostile message or scare people who are doing something in the vicinity of X.
Here's where I discussed this concept before: "What is the objection to a law against something that we're told no one is doing anyway?"(discussing the Tennessee ban on transgender hormone treatments for prepubescent children, which "some experts" said was not within current medical practice).
"In the last few months, six promising connections with men under 30 — all of them well-educated and seemingly polite — degenerated quickly..."
"... (before meetings that never took place), first into references to sex, then to requests for information on what I 'like,' and then to an unstoppable slew of messages about what they’d like to do to me, what they’d like me to do to them, the current status of their body parts, and then incessant voicenotes, body-part pictures and requests for pictures of me. It is inane, tiring and completely pointless. Sexting has taken the place of sex. This may be because sex itself has become such a vexed operation, even for 24-year-olds...."
From "Why are young men so scared of sex?/Sexting has taken the place of sex" (Spectator).
I don't get "unstoppable slew." Why not block anyone who is boring you? All I can think of is: hope.
"Meltdown May refers to an unofficial annual observance that celebrities and popular Twitter accounts seem to attract controversy as a result of their tweets and comments in the month of May and draw further attention to themselves as they argue with their critics."
"... In May of 2021, multiple commenters agreed that Eve Barlow was the main character of Meltdown May for her consistent Zionist posting, culminating in her writing a piece in which she bemoaned mass replies of 'Eve Fartlow' to her posts as a 'social media pogrom.'"
ADDED: Click on those internal links for more. As for "main character":
A "Reddit moment" occurs in r/whatisthisthing.
I follow the subreddit "What Is This Thing?" — where people post photographs of objects they don't understand. Today, somebody posted this photograph of "soft metal objects [found] while metal detecting under a pier at low tide":
Almost immediately, these were identified as inexpensive Hindu charms that are deliberately thrown in the water in pursuit of good fortune.
One user asks: "Should he return these to where he found them in your opinion?"
A second one says: "No, as soon as the offering is made it is spent so its okay [t]o remove them"
A third: "Not like they’ll find out their magic squares got moved anyways ¯_(ツ)_/¯
A fourth: "Its good to pick up the religious littering."
The third person sees that his "magic squares" comment is getting downvoted says: "I wonder if the people downvoting would feel the same way about Christian trinkets. All religions suck pretty equally"
At that, a fifth person declares: "Reddit moment"
"The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps."
"Walls are covered in paintings and prints, whether reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces or folk art portraits, alongside family photos. 'I just like art, I’ve got all kinds of art, I don’t care what it is,' Kelly said. Knickknacks on the shelves include creamy ceramic vessels that her sons made as children and souvenirs of vacations nationwide — the very kind of 'odds and ends of family living' that Woman’s Home Companion had envisioned.
A coating of sparkly green stucco on MoMA’s wooden exterior 'makes it maintenance-free,' Shaun Kelly, the eldest son, said.... The property’s 2.7 acres are lush with unusual trees, such as Japanese snowbell and weeping huckleberry. 'If it doesn’t give me a flower, it can’t come here,' Mary Kelly said. Neoclassical stone statues, vintage subway signs and metal filigree benches are scattered around the grounds."
I strongly encourage you — if you have any interest in design — to click through and see the photographs of the house as it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 and how it looks now, 71 years later, after getting lived in by real people, with their own ideas of what a house should look like. The text I've quoted gives some idea, but the photographs drive home the truly amazing distinction between what professional designers conceive of to meet the needs of ordinary people and what actual people choose for themselves.
Of course, the NYT refrains from laughing or sneering at the Kelly family, but the exposure in the photographs is a bit threatening to their dignity, I think. I notice the NYT does not provide a comments section for this article. I discern that the politically correct response to this article is to mock the original modernist designers and to celebrate the humanity of the Kellys.
The article quotes a professor who's written about the architect:
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