... you can talk about whatever you want.
December 10, 2022
"The 'Twitter Files' Is What It Claims to Expose."
Asserts Eric Levitz at Intelligencer.
All right. We have seen the "nothingburger" response to the Twitter Files. This is the I'm-rubber-you’re-glue response: You are the very thing that you denounce.
Let's see how we'll this argument works. I'll cut as close to the core as I can for this excerpt:
"One player told The Post via Twitter DM that they changed their computer’s clock to do the Wordle early and avoid breaking a 90-day streak."
Other players weren’t aware of the union’s call to skip the daily puzzle. On the Wordle subreddit, some lamented not knowing about the call sooner. On social media, other players declined to break their streak consciously, with some claiming they didn’t see the point, and others not interested in taking such an action....
As The Cut explored in 2019, people can become attached to their streaks, and the bigger a streak grows, the more a person might feel they have to lose by breaking it....
Do you have any streaks that you're truly attached to, that you feel you'd lose a lot by breaking?
I really only have one: this blog. I'm coming up on 19 years of blogging every single day. The longer it gets the more unbreakably magical it feels. Or... no. That's not really true. Going the whole first year without missing a day felt far more significant than the completion of any other year. Now, it's just normal. But don't misunderstand me: I love normal. I'm very happy to have something that feels so good that I get to do every day.
What's the tag for this? I had to think for a second: It's "superstition"!
"In a well-covered incident at the tournament, Wahl was detained by Qatari security guards at a stadium when he arrived to a game wearing a rainbow soccer ball T-shirt."
"Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. Wahl, on his Substack, wrote that security guards refused to let him in, held him for 25 minutes and demanded he remove his shirt."
From "U.S. soccer journalist Grant Wahl dies after collapsing at World Cup match" (WaPo).
Wahl, 48, had written about some of his health issues in Qatar in the days leading up to his passing. Earlier this week, he wrote: “My body finally broke down on me. Three weeks of little sleep, high stress and lots of work can do that to you.”
He said he had a cold turn into something more serious on the night the United States played the Netherlands. “I could feel my upper chest take on a new level of pressure and discomfort,” he wrote.
ADDED: The Daily Mail puts it far more luridly: "Grant Wahl complained of 'death rattle' cough day before his shock death at World Cup and received 20 minutes of frantic CPR before dying in hospital: Gay brother suggests he was murdered."
"In Sinema’s 2009 book... she described giving up shrill partisanship, which was making her unhappy, for a vaguely New Age ethos..."
"... that prized inner tranquillity. One chapter was called 'Letting Go of the Bear and Picking Up the Buddha,' with the bear representing fear and anger. 'Picking up the Buddha (becoming a super centered political actor) makes you a stronger, more effective you,' she wrote. 'To be your most fabulous political self, you’ll need to learn to recognize the bear and learn to let go of it in your work.'
Transcending fear and anger is an excellent spiritual goal. But becoming a more centered and fabulous person is a political project only when it’s directed toward aims beyond oneself. With Sinema, it’s not remotely clear what those aims might be, or if they exist. (Another chapter in her book is 'Letting Go of Outcomes.')"
Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Kyrsten Sinema Is Right. This Is Who She’s Always Been" (NYT).
I had to look to see if Sinema is a Buddhist. She's not, so I'm giving this post my "cultural appropriation" tag. "Picking Up the Buddha" — is that an expression, some New Age cant? Or did she come up with this image of picking up and putting down entities that are not, if real life, picked up and put down?
Here's a NYT article from 2012, "Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion"
Although raised a Mormon, Ms. Sinema is often described as a nontheist — and that suits the activists just fine....
But a campaign spokesman rejected any simple category for Ms. Sinema. “Kyrsten believes the terms ‘nontheist,’ ‘atheist’ or ‘nonbeliever’ are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character,” the spokesman, Justin Unga, said Thursday in an e-mail. “Though Sinema was raised in a religious household, she draws her policy-making decisions from her experience as a social worker who worked with diverse communities and as a lawmaker who represented hundreds of thousands.”
Furthermore, Ms. Sinema “is a student of all cultures in her community,” Mr. Unga said, and she “believes that a secular approach is the best way to achieve this in good government.” In rejecting not only religious labels but irreligious labels, too, these politicians resemble the growing portion of Americans who feel that no particular tradition, or anti-tradition, captures how they feel about God, or the universe, or what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern.”
"The fact that Zelensky was a performer and is so good at presenting himself, the first reference I have to that is Reagan."
"The master communicator and professional actor. Right? And Trump, the entertainer recast as something. When did you get the sense that Zelensky was genuine?"
Asks the interviewer, Geoff Edgers, in "David Letterman on his surprise Ukraine trip and Zelensky interview A special episode of the former late-night king’s Netflix show, ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,’ grew out of his admiration of the Ukrainian president during the ongoing war with Russia" (WaPo).
"Within the Justice Department, officials have long chafed at some of the prisoner exchanges pushed by the State Department..."
"... in part because law enforcement officials tend to believe that authorities should adhere to a 'like for like' rule, in which only individuals of equal status or criminal history should be exchanged. For example, exchanging spies for spies has long been an accepted practice at both the State Department and the Justice Department — but federal law enforcement officials frequently object to proposed swaps of convicted criminals for people who committed relatively minor offenses.... Robert Zachariasiewicz, a former DEA agent who was involved in the case against Bout, said... 'We just showed that it is really useful to have an American in your back pocket because you never know when you need them to trade'....
The OED word of the day is "bambi" — the interjection
This is a word in Ugandan English that expresses "a variety of emotions, such as surprise, wonder, sympathy, etc."
Based on the examples given, it seems about like "oh, dear":
"Implicitly antiestablishment and insinuatingly revolutionary, Art Nouveau spoke to the period’s endemic unease about a new century..."
"... that would surely be nothing like the old one. The style’s wavering contours conveyed sensations of constant movement, persistent instability, uncertain boundaries, and inevitable change. By the time its popularity began to wane—around 1910, when it was replaced by a reactionary resurgence of Neoclassicism—the globe had been figuratively encircled in its seductive embrace."
Writes Martin Filler in "Whips and Vines Martin/Recent books and exhibitions reveal that behind its undulating lines and swirling excesses, Art Nouveau was far more complex and nuanced than we once believed" (NYRB)(reviewing 6 books about Art Nouveau).
And then Art Nouveau was so popular in the 1960:
Sixty years ago Art Nouveau came to be seen once again as excitingly rebellious by the proponents of a youthful counterculture who emphasized its joyous sensual abandon. That can be discerned in such Sixties favorites as the tornadic ceramic-inlaid architecture of the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, the kinky black-and-white drawings of the British Aubrey Beardsley, the refulgent multicolored glassware of the American Louis Comfort Tiffany, the curlicued bentwood furniture of the Austrian Thonet brothers, and the radical white-on-white interiors of the Scottish couple Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, all of whom again found acclaim after their reputations had languished through decades of posthumous oblivion....
This 60s-looking thing — "The Kiss" by Peter Behrens — is from 1898:
December 9, 2022
At the Friday Night Café...
... you can talk about whatever you want.
No photo today. The cloud cover was 100% at sunrise, and I didn't want to add my car to what were very snowy roads here in Madison.
Matt Taibbi is back with another set of tweets, this time focusing on Donald Trump.
Start here.
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files/THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP/Part One: October 2020-January 6th....
4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @Shellenbergermd will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @BariWeiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.
ADDED:
The best 6 TikToks for right now, I sincerely believe.
1. Find someone who matches your energy.
2. How to photograph a stranger.
3. What does the squirrel say?
4. A seagull and his meatballs.
5. We need a GPS voice for the sensitive souls.
From absolutely not to everybody already knew that..
Conservatives: The reach of our tweets is being limited by a progressive Twitter workforce.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 9, 2022
Dems: That's an insane conspiracy theory.
Bari Weiss: Here are the docs proving this.
Dems: Everyone knew this already. It's an -- all together now -- nothing burger. pic.twitter.com/VewGdK4CoP
"One iconic moment was predictably included in the Netflix show to underline Diana’s supposed superiority as a parent."
"During a 1991 trip to Canada, Diana raced along the deck of the royal yacht Britannia with arms open wide and scooped up William and Harry with a huge hug in a blaze of camera flashes. She had, in fact, deliberately run ahead of Charles when they approached the ship, leaving him to catch up. He, too, publicly gave his sons hugs and kisses, but only one photograph of his affectionate embrace appeared in the press, while newspapers around the world led with Diana’s radiant display."
From "Prince Harry’s attacks on King in Netflix series may mean no way back/The criticism of Charles was insidious and he was given no credit for what he did as a father" (London Times).
"Twitter has long been referred to as a 'hell site,' but the weeks that followed Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company marked a nadir for social media..."
"... or perhaps a climax, depending on how prone you are to Schadenfreude. The majority of discourse on the platform focussed on the platform itself and its theoretically impending doom. The situation called to my mind Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting 'The Raft of the Medusa' which pictures the aftermath of an infamous shipwreck with the few living sailors struggling to climb up a mound of corpses on a decaying raft. In this case, no one was coming to the rescue, especially given that Twitter’s content moderation and safety staffs had been decimated by layoffs."
Writes Kyle Chayka in "The Year in Apps I Gave Up On/In 2022, the entire Internet began to feel something like a dying mall populated only by stores we don’t want to visit" (The New Yorker).
How does the Twitter situation look in your head? Please express yourself metaphorically, citing a work of art — e.g. "The Raft of Medusa":
Background story (from Wikipedia):
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