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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 13, 2022 11:33:55 GMT -5
Frank Zappa on uniforms is always relevant to these conversations. And of course "costume" is a polysemous term: The neutral-descriptive sense is "what people wear," which elides into the social-presentational sense (how-we-present-ourselves), which is narrower than the general and utilitarian "clothing."
"Normal" is another of those polysemous words. A normal curve is not the same thing as normal behavior--unless the context for the latter is descriptive or statistical rather than, um, normative (which is to say, prescriptive). Early on in my philosophy education I was taught to look for the concealed or assumed "ought" in any discourse, and conversations about sex and gender and associated behaviors are full of oughts.
BTW, John, who is the "your" in the next-to-last paragraph of your post?
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 21:05:43 GMT -5
Codswallop? What is that? A less-vulgar way of saying "bullshit." Though actually it's closer to "nonsense," according to various on-line dictionaries.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 20:00:14 GMT -5
What I hear him pointing out is more like "Our society was cohesive when we pretended that everybody was getting along fine when they actually weren't." With a side order of "And when people complained about it, they got ignored or maybe slapped down hard." Since Mamet grew up in multi-ethnic Chicago, he must be aware of the role that redlining played in maintaining neighborhood color lines. And he must also have been aware of the real tensions that existed across even white sub-groups. And growing up Jewish, he couldn't have missed the garden-variety antisemitism that even I (growing up at the same time in a small town with, I think, one Jewish family) could see around me. So I call bullshit on his rosy memories the 1950s.
Interviewer Swaim: "What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally evolved cultural solidarity—something nearly everybody, on the left and the right, longs for now."
Codswallop. Any given period can be characterized in any number of ways, depending on what set of traits or events or movements get selected for attention. (Of course, the 1930s in Germany might be easier to characterize as dreadful.) The Dickensian "best of times, worst of times" description can easily fit the whole post-WW2-to-Vietnam stretch: very good times for many ordinary working folk, right next to various flavors of bigotry, political repression, and economic hemming-in for various other social groups. Every place and period has its own set of pieties, orthodoxies, sentimentalities, and unexamined assumptions, and to pretend that the 1950s didn't is either myopic or dishonest.
More Swaim: "Large majorities in wealthy cities dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the same reason." Yeah, sure, those damn bullying epidemiologists and virologists throwing their weight around because--um, because that's what they do? The interviewer's consistent conflation of Covid-coping measures with mere conformity and "woke signaling" is a telling tell. How, I wonder, would he characterize, say, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in a world of "virtue signalling"? But that would be an application of semiotics, which is apparently one of those time-wasting pursuits of the sheeple. Swaim may be a bigger jerk than Mamet.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 17:27:16 GMT -5
The fact that we still call it "coming out" signals the nature of the social issue. Coming out of what or from where? The felt need to hide one's affectional orientation persists even in this post-Will and Grace period.
I first encountered openly, unashamedly gay folk in grad school, starting in 1966. And even in the relatively relaxed environment of the big university, there remained closeted gay people. (As I discovered later.)
And then there's the whole relatively unexplored territory of degrees of affectional preference--for example the not-uncommon situation of family men who also pursue gay sex. There would seem to be many click-stops on that dial.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 16:37:30 GMT -5
Gene's generous and loving response to his relative is not universal, which might be why the relative thought (perhaps without careful reflection) that the pamphlet was necessary or helpful. There are certainly plenty of reports from gay people of familial rejection on their coming out.
(And the more I think about it, the clunkier the pamphlet approach feels, at least at a family gathering.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 15:53:15 GMT -5
Public Opinion Strategies is not exactly a neutral fact-finding outfit--in fact, they're in the campaign-support business: Public Opinion Strategies provides the strategic information that gives our clients a WINNING edge. In the last eight election cycles, Public Opinion Strategies (POS) has helped elect over 90 new members of the U.S. House, more than any other polling firm, Democrat or Republican. A look at the brag list at the bottom of their website's home page, pos.org, includes a long list of Republican clients. Their business is rooted in market research (their own characterization), and what they provide their clients is ammunition for political campaigns and PR efforts. Here's their snapshot of the polling results on the Florida law: pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/POS-National-Poll-Release-Memo.pdfI note the thumbnail description of the polling: Voters across partisan lines strongly support the new Florida law after being provided with the actual language of the bill: "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in Kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." The text of the entire bill runs for nearly seven pages (https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/PDF), and here is the official summary from the Florida legislature: www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2022/html/2825How much detail and nuance and discussion of implications could have accompanied the polling? On the other hand, if what POS is in the business of generating is ammunition, then the less detail and nuance the better.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2022 13:33:37 GMT -5
Both Mamet and the interviewer hold incoherent views. On the one hand, we are currently more conformist than the 1950s. On the other, many people don't really believe in the current batch of pieties: "Mr. Mamet is convinced that the 'woke agenda' (his term) is basically an act, so in some ways it works well in Hollywood. 'Nobody really believes it,' he says." And the interviewer spends the next paragraph offering examples of how "the young" are not "buying it." As for the reason for the conformity that is the interviewer's narrative hook: Mr. Mamet felt that modern conceptions of human nature had become hopelessly naive. A rosy view of human proclivities leads easily to groupthink and its invariable accompaniment, scapegoating. I wonder about Mamet's comment that "The idea that everybody has to behave the same way is part of the breakdown of what was a cohesive society." Does he notice the internal conflict between the two halves of that statement? Then there's the very strange stuff about being attracted to "the Christian tradition" but prohibited from converting because it's against his own Judaism. I suspect some deliberate, mischievous irony operating there. But there's also something interesting going on with Mamet's remaining "an observant Jew" while questioning the adherence of others to their systems of belief and codes of conduct. As for "what's trendy": Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along. Of course, I'm just practicing semiotics here, but while "trendy" isn't evoked, other kinds of collective herd-following (or bully-pleasing) behavior are. The central figure of the whole piece is Mamet-the-contrarian, Mamet-the-unfashionable. I confess that what I see is Mamet-the-jerk.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 9, 2022 11:47:51 GMT -5
I couldn't finish my large, upscale BLT, so (with the assurance from our server that with the fried egg consumed, it was safe) brought half home. C. sampled it and declared it very good indeed, and I had a nice late-night demi-meal while we watched an old episode of Endeavour. If Brunson's weren't a 90 minute drive away, we'd eat there a lot.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 30, 2022 13:19:25 GMT -5
It's always a good idea to give your rhetorical opponent the very ammunition they need to be able to ignore the actual subject at hand. As I wrote above, I'm trying to figure out who's giving "ammunition" to whom and for what purpose. There is agency in there somewhere in that sentence. On the other hand, the "ammunition" might be the kind of urban-myth/Facebook-post/chain-email stuff that precipitates out of a discourse space supersaturated with idle speculation, bad jokes, and actual-malice propaganda-seeding. And instead of it being "given," it might just be accepted by the credulous, the lazy, the unreflective, or the already-so-inclined. At least Bostelman didn't unlimber his firearms and go hunting for non-existent child molesters in non-existent pizza parlor basements.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 30, 2022 11:48:54 GMT -5
I'm trying to parse John's post--who is doing what to whom? Is Bostelman doing the deflecting, or is he the one being deflected? And if he is the deflectee, who gave him the "very ammunition to ignore the actual subject at hand"? (Which is what, exactly?)
Is there a left-wing boiler room somewhere, full of operatives busy ginning up crazy shit to inject into the right-wing infosphere as part of a campaign to make the right look bad? Do they target credulous local politicians and school-board activists?
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 29, 2022 19:02:02 GMT -5
“It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly,” Bostelman said.
In other news, he has been checking on reports that cats have knocked everything off the edges of the flat Earth, which accounts for sudden shortages in the knicknack supply chain.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 27, 2022 22:42:02 GMT -5
And get the time-lapse feature so you can watch old food grow blue-green.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 25, 2022 22:18:34 GMT -5
If you think their basketball guys are good, you should see what their Apologetics & Casuistics squad can do to a bunch of Benedictines in the Thomism Trials.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 25, 2022 13:41:02 GMT -5
I was under the impression that Trump never spent his own money on anything. Not that there's anything wrong with that--it's SOP for oligarchs and corporations everywhere. Only suckers spend their own cash.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 23, 2022 13:02:20 GMT -5
Hope you didn't cross over.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 21, 2022 13:40:57 GMT -5
I feel cheated. My usual uninvited earworm is either "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" or "Witch Doctor."
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 17, 2022 16:33:01 GMT -5
I didn't look at the video, so my argument really is with your post, starting with the phrase "the elite," with that definite article, which is pretty hard not to notice, and continuing through its characterization of "the" elite's psychology and its "self-loathing that drives their desire to move on, always looking back at what we/they were with a regret, an embarrassment, a loathing for what we were - fueled by the academic and political narrative that taught us that we in our history were nothing but an ignorant but willful evil."
Nor do I take myself as a sole counter-example. While I realize that there are cultural clumps of snobby, self-satisfied jerks, there are plenty of other clumps, and those are the ones where I hang out. A good friend is the daughter of a world-class art historian who grew up knowing a bunch of prominent modernist painters, some of whose work hangs on her walls. She also keeps stuffed animals in her apartment and loves Miazaki animated movies and is a passionate supporter of labor unions. Another is a retired judge who's also a Deadhead. My wife the Shakespeare scholar loves the Three Stooges. Go figure. Our friends are more like IJammers than any notional cultural-economic hegemonic elite. One of them's a potter-turned-mailman. Some of them are Republicans. There's not a lifted pinky in the bunch.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 17, 2022 15:16:35 GMT -5
John, your tendency to overgeneralize is, um, overdone. Part of it is rooted in a strange notion of what constitutes "the" elite, as though that category were as uniform as processed cheese rather than as lumpy and variegated as, say, a fruitcake. The other part is the armchair-psychiatric analysis of this notional elite's self-loathing, followed by the equally baseless assumptions about an "atheism" that rejects only Christian supernatuaralism and by extension Christian morality (and, perhap sneaking in there, any morality).
I've spent my entire adult life in one of the "elite" cultural segments (the academy) and am arguably a card-carrying member of that branch of the "elite," the card being my literature Ph.D. (Big fucking deal.) I'm also not poor, of no religion whatsoever, a secularist and a civil libertarian politically. I'm fond of classical music and Shakespeare. I used to read a lot of poetry. But I do not loathe myself or American culture (warts notwithstanding). I do, however, find the work of Kinkade--and Keane--sentimental, manipulative claptrap. My mother, bless her, would probably have enjoyed both of them, for which taste I didn't loathe her either.
There are snobs everywhere, and there are sentimentalists, and we like what we like for all kinds of reasons. And, as I'm told one of my great-grand-aunts once remarked, love goes where it's sent, even if it's up a dog's ass.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 16, 2022 15:38:19 GMT -5
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 16, 2022 14:18:30 GMT -5
This is veering off the original topic, but I found a story about Egypt opening an official reproduction-antiquities factory in competition with crappy Chinese-made souvenir fake antiquities and mediocre domestically-produced souvenirs. Which reminded me that the fake-antiquities business is itself of ancient ancestry--Roman tourists were bringing home phoney Pharaonic pieces 2000 years ago. And now those fakes are themselves antiquities of a kind. . . .
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