This is all I have to say about it:
I felt it. And as much talk as there’s been around here lately about earthquakes, that’s the first time I felt one, I think, since I lived in Ecuador in the early ’60s…
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) June 29, 2022
What do y’all have to say?
By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist
Actually, it will be all “don’ts.”
It seems that 99.9% of Americans understand what Christmas best wishes, be they traditional hold-in-your hand cards or digital missives, should involve. Unfortunately, two of our nation’s highest elected officials, who represent us to the nation and the world, have not a clue.
It started with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky) posting a virtual Yuletide greeting on Twitter. The photo showed him, his wife, and their four children posing in front of a Christmas tree all armed with assault rifles. The caption read “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” An analysis published in Forbes estimated the arsenal on display to be worth at least $20,000. It should surprise no one that his fellow representative, Lauren Boebert (R-Co), responded with an image of her and her four children, the youngest of whom appears to be 9 or 10 years old, bearing similar weapons captioned “The Boeberts have your six, @RepThomasMassie! (No spare ammo for you, though).”
It will be difficult with the words I have left to count all the ways these images violate sanity, logic, dignity, propriety and Christian ethics.
First, as a gun owner, I am embarrassed for Massie and Boebert. I came relatively late to gun ownership, being introduced to hunting in my early thirties, soon after moving to Marion. What I quickly learned about hunters is that they are very careful with and respectful of their weapons. The only time I have my shotgun in my living room is when I am transporting it from my gun safe to my vehicle to hunt or shoot clays. Only a reckless pretender would pose with a firearm indoors. Massie and Boebert’s photos should anger all responsible gun owners.
Second, the use of children in this way is abominable. When I gave my son a shotgun at age twelve, I taught him the cardinal safety rules: Always assume a gun is loaded and never point it at anything you don’t want to kill. As I handed him the gun, I praised him for maturing into a young man who could be trusted with it. Then I reminded him that he could kill me if he were careless. He started to cry, which reassured me even further. It was clear that he understood the seriousness that owning guns should invoke. Think of what lessons Boebert’s youngest child is learning from her stunt: that guns can be treated like toys; that they are props, to be brought out for show; that they are political swag, to be used to drum up support.
Third, their desecration of Christmas is disgraceful. Massie is a United Methodist, as am I. Wikipedia describes Boebert as a born-again Christian. While on earth, Jesus said a few things about violence including “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9) and “Do not resist the evildoer… if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn the other also.” (Matthew 5:39). When Jesus was betrayed by Judas and arrested, Peter defended him by cutting off a servant’s ear. Jesus says, “No more of this!” and touched the ear to heal him. Because of Jesus’ teachings some Christians, such as Quakers and Seventh-day Adventists, feel that violence in any form is incompatible with the faith. The vast majority of others recognize Jesus as a gentle healer who accepted crucifixion without resistance. It would be hard to find a Christian who could make a connection between the Jesus of the Bible and Massie’s and Boebert’s version of him.
Fourth, Christmas is traditionally a time when we call a truce on our disagreements and focus on what unites us. According to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 44,000 people died in 2021 from gun violence, more than 23,000 of those by suicide. No one, no matter his or her view of the Second Amendment, can be satisfied with those figures. Both sides recognize the need for change, and could be induced to work together on measures to save lives.
America needs rational gun owners to come together with reasonable gun-control advocates. But this can only happen if we have political leaders on each side of the debate who exemplify a fair-minded approach. I have a foot in each camp and know people on both sides of the divide. The extreme positions – that gun owners will not accept any kind of new restrictions, and that gun control advocates want to repeal the Second Amendment – are too often used by politicians to stoke fear and anger. But most Americans are open to commonsense approaches such as universal background checks. Massie’s and Boebert’s Christmas display of guns is counterproductive, widening the divide between the opposing sides.
Similarly, at a time when Christianity is losing its appeal, especially among young adults, these images will only accelerate that trend. One of the major reasons nonChristians cite for rejecting Christianity is hypocrisy. When congressmen and women who identify as Christian post guns in their Christmas cards, it gives more young people an excuse the turn away from the faith. It’s impossible to reconcile Isaiah’s foretelling of the coming Messiah – “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them” – and Massie’s and Boebert’s Christmas photos.
For Christmas 2019, Rep. Massie posted a more traditional picture of his family (outdoors and unarmed) with the caption “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” (Luke 2:14), proving that it’s easier to promote good will toward your fellow American when you’re not brandishing a rifle.
Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, SC. Reach him at pvdemarco@bellsouth.net. This post first ran as a column in the Florence Morning News.
Again, I’m just going to share a tweet, and perhaps enlarge upon it a bit:
No. No one is “entitled to stay unvaccinated…” Perhaps legally, but not morally… https://t.co/L12WUTitVi
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) November 4, 2021
I’m just reacting to a headline, of course. The writer of the column is very much taking this guy, whoever he is (and yes, I can see he’s in a football uniform, but that’s all I know), to task. But she is wrong to throw the guy a bone by saying he is entitled to do the first thing.
No, he isn’t. He lives in a society. A society doesn’t work unless we accept, at the minimum, the obligation not to harm the people around us. That’s pretty much minimal. All the other things involved in making a complex modern civilization work — the laws, the system of government, the roads, a monetary system, and so forth — come after that.
I was feeling a bit disoriented by the news I was being fed this morning, so I posted this:
My phone keeps giving me headlines about how last night was the night that the Republicans won big and the Democrats were devastated. Where have these people been? Last night was the night the Braves won the World Series!
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) November 3, 2021
I mean, what’s wrong with people? Where were they last night?
Say what? Where WERE you people last night?
Here’s another fun pop-culture thing, one that I found way more engaging than I would have thought if someone merely described it to me.
My friend Steve Millies in Chicago retweeted this the other day:
If you don’t zoom in on this and look at it for at least a full minute I don’t even know you anymore. pic.twitter.com/ZKPKLku9qS
— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) September 27, 2021
I assure you I looked at it more than a minute.
It didn’t look like anything particularly engaging at first. OK, so we have some people who were big in TV in the ’70s all dressed up and having their picture taken together.
Yeah, there’s Mary Tyler Moore right at the front, looking as she did when she was probably the hottest star on CBS with her show that ran from 1970-77. OK.
But wait. Alfred Hitchcock is standing next to her. And on the other side of him, Walter Cronkite. Whoa…
So you start looking around. And you have to hunt, but eventually you find:
There are so many others I could name — big stars. But I’m going to let you find them yourselves.
I guess this was like the Emmys or something, and CBS must have really gone to a lot of trouble to make this happen.
Of course, maybe it was Photoshopped. But I don’t think so. As remarkable as it is, I think it’s real.
The only reason I have to doubt it (aside from the logistical difficulty of getting them together at the same moment) is the fact that these people weren’t all on the network at the same time. Overall, it seems like a shot from the ’70s. Steve speculates it was at a certain point in that period: “Good Times/Barnaby Jones overlap suggests 1973-74.”
But when someone was on a show isn’t a limiting factor. Hitchcock hadn’t been on CBS since 1964. And Dennis Weaver, although a former star of “Gunsmoke,” was at this time on a competing network. But they’re in it, too. And this has to be a CBS effort, based on who’s in the picture.
It doesn’t sound like it would be fun, but I thought it sort of was…
Her Twitter profile image.
By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist
One of the benefits of growing older is that you remember when things were different. We now have adults who were born after 9/11. There is no “before” time for them, no frozen moment when they realized we were being attacked.
Similarly, the fact that Nicky Minaj’s tweet about – and if you haven’t heard about this, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you – her cousin’s friend’s testicles will not strike people younger than a certain age as unusual. They don’t remember a time when it would have been impossible to know about said testicles.
But in the before time, say the mid-seventies when I was a teenager and began to be interested in the wider world, we received our news in aliquots. Like many of my contemporaries, I started reading the morning paper and watching the evening news. There was often a lag time between big news stories and when they were reported. This cuts both ways. In a hurricane, up-to-date news can be life-saving. But sometimes having hours to get a story straight before the presses started rolling provided readers a much clearer picture the morning after than could have been given the day of the event.
I have also experienced the sweet anticipation that is no more. If there was a ball game I had missed, I had three choices. Call a friend, stay up for the 11 o’clock news and hope it was mentioned, or wait for tomorrow morning’s paper (which is what I usually did). Then there was the reading of the box score trying to piece together the ebb and flow of the game.
I’m not suggesting we go back. I like my immediate highlights as much as the next man. But I know it wasn’t always so, and have a sense of the wonder of instant results – as well as a twinge of sadness for what we have lost.
I recently was given a new laptop for my medical record at work. The toolbar was set so that when I hovered over a certain icon in the bottom right corner, a news feed would appear. I found this infinitely distracting and disabled it. I can’t ponder the issues of the day while I’m caring for patients – my brain’s not big enough.
For me, the time for current events is while I’m getting ready for and commuting to work – and when I’m commuting back home.
For those that missed it, let’s review Nicky’s tweet from 9/13. In response to questions about why she did not attend the Met Gala, she reported that she had not been vaccinated. Then she tweeted the reason: “My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied.”
My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied
— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 13, 2021
What I know, because I remember the before time, is that this third-hand, difficult-to-believe anecdote of questionable provenance should have only been shared by Minaj to her inner circle, i.e., people she actually knows and talks to. In the before time, the only way for her to publically disseminate such a dubious claim would have been during a live radio or television interview. My sense is that any editor or producer of a taped interview would have cut this story since it is so flimsy – and also possibly harmful. It may encourage some of her “stans” to eschew the vaccine.
In the seventies, the only print publication that might have carried this tidbit would have been the National Enquirer – along with rumors of celebrity breakups and the latest alien abduction.
Minaj did get plenty of pushback on Twitter (would that be “Tweetback”?), including “’My cousin’s friend’ is the start to a story that totally happened” and my personal favorite “when u get an STI and don’t want ur girl to know.”
But, to my young friends: None of us should know anything about this. Imagine you are a cub reporter, presenting this story idea to your news editor, Brad Warthen. Think of the many questions he might have for you: Have you talked to an infectious disease doctor to see if this has been a reported side effect? (Answer: If this ever happens, it’s exceedingly rare); Have you talked with the person in question? (Answer: No one, including the health ministry of Trinidad and Tobago, has been able to find him); How about a story on Beyonce? I’m more Beyhive than Barbz.
Paul DeMarco is a physician who resides in Marion, SC. Reach him at pvdemarco@bellsouth.net.
The above is an email I got today. My reaction was, “LinkedIn deserves to be ‘moentized,’ far as I’m concerned. I may moentize it myself, next time I see it…”
We’ll talk another day about people who send out such emails, and are so careless with their headlines. Today let’s stick to LinkedIn, shall we? I hate it.
Which inspired me to write this quick-and-dirty list of social media I hate. And when I say “quick and dirty,” I mean even quicker and dirtier than the sloppy one about the Top Songs earlier.
I think I spent way less than one minute coming up with the five. Which is fitting, when writing about social media, don’t you think?
Anyway, here’s the list. Note that this is a personal list. I have to deal with some of these professionally, and in truth for many in business something like LinkedIn actually is useful, and I often help people make it more useful to them. But for me, I don’t get much out of it. This is partly because I’m not at a point in life when I’m trying to a) get a job or b) build a career. In other words, this is not business; it’s strictly personal:
Of course, there are other social media I love, even as I see their profound flaws and worry about the Rabbit Hole phenomenon. Those include Twitter — use it responsibly — and YouTube.
Then there are in-between social media — such as Pinterest. I go surf through it occasionally, and it intrigues me, but I can’t shake the feeling that it could be so much better…
Oh, look — Henry’s “urging” vaccines! But read the actual story. The news is that he’s NOT mandating masks, and he’s only URGING vaccines….
For a couple of months, I’ve had in mind a certain blog post, but haven’t written it because of the time it would take — time I don’t have. The basic idea was this: As you know, I’m sick and tired of the usual stupid news stories with ideologues yelling about whether people should, for instance, wear masks in public.
My idea was to contrast that with the real world. When I go out in public — to the grocery, to Lowe’s, to Walmart, and especially to medical facilities (which I visit a lot, usually to take my parents to appointments), people, generally speaking, wear masks. Everyone does at the medical facilities, because otherwise they don’t get in. Elsewhere, sure, fewer people were wearing them, but it was never perfect. Even at the worst moments of 2020, there were always some twits who didn’t wear them — in places where folks in charge lacked the nerve to enforce the rules. This summer, the numbers of maskless were greater — even serious people were starting to think they didn’t have to — but it wasn’t some ideological war. Reality was complicated, and most people were trying to be sensible.
But I missed my time for writing that. In recent days, things have changed. For instance, on a personal level, last night my wife told her high school classmates she would not be attending the 50th reunion in Memphis. Everyone else in the class was sending in similar messages. She attending a Catholic girls’ school that had only 37 seniors graduating in 1971. Of those, 22 had planned to attend. Now none are going, so once again the event is postponed.
This morning, she followed that up with a note of regret that she would not be attending a wedding she had planned to go to while in Memphis.
As she did these things, I nodded, because it seemed consistent with what I’ve seen around us in recent days — hospital beds filling back up, people re-evaluating gatherings and resuming precautions when they go out, all because of such factors as the Delta variant and the insanely large number of people who have refused to get vaccinated. Here and there, you even see a report of someone who had refused but has wised up.
Normal, rational human behavior — people adjusting to shifting circumstances. All that is in the real world in which we live.
But then I look at the world being described most prominently in media we consume — from mainstream to social. And I see the idiotic ideological arguments, the same taking of absurd positions that would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful to public health.
You know what I’m talking about. Locally, our alleged “governor” continuing to refuse to take any responsibility for public health. (At least he’s consistent, right? This is what the majority out there voted for, to its great shame, in 2018.) Our attorney general reaching out to try to prevent other elected officials from taking any such responsibility as well. Other such behavior across the country, from local to federal levels.
Occasionally, I comment, usually on social media, when things get really far from reality:
Rights? Rights to do WHAT? To use their children as instruments for spreading a deadly disease throughout the community? From where do such “rights” spring? Where does one find them enumerated? Where are they written? https://t.co/kJ6MeBZZiI
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) August 4, 2021
But mostly, I just look around and wish I could see more reporting on what’s really going on, and less about what stupid things “leaders” who refuse to lead are prattling about.
Sometimes I do see it. For instance, there was this, put out by The State in the past 24 hours:
Lexington Medical Center is experiencing a critical shortage of intensive care unit beds as it approaches a record-high number of COVID-19 patients, hospital officials said.
More than 90% of the West Columbia hospital’s 557 beds were occupied Tuesday morning, including 146, or about 26%, of which were filled with coronavirus patients, Lexington Medical Center spokeswoman Jennifer Wilson said.
“We are approaching our highest number of COVID patients hospitalized at one time ever,” said Wilson, who added that the situation at Lexington Medical Center was “very serious” and encouraged South Carolinians to get vaccinated.
The vast majority of the hospital’s COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated, she said.
Only 16% of coronavirus inpatients at Lexington Medical are vaccinated, and just three of the 43 COVID-19 patients in the hospital’s ICU are fully dosed….
That’s about the hospital that you can see from the street I live on, if you walk down that street a bit to get a better angle on it. What’s going on there, and in the hospitals across South Carolina — and the nation, and the world — is infinitely more important to me than the pronouncements of people who have made it startlingly clear, over and over, that they will in no way do or say anything that reflects what’s happening in the world.
Oh, and by the way, Jennifer Wilson — quoted in that news item I cited above — is married to that same attorney general mentioned above. The difference between them is that she lives and works in the real world, while her husband lives in one in which continued employment depends on showing people you are devoted to Trumpism.
Yes, reporters should continue to cover what the governor and AG say and do. Who knows, they might even run across a “man bites dog” story like this one from Arkansas: Arkansas’ governor says it ‘was an error’ to ban mask mandates. You know, a point at which reality and Republican political speech actually coincide.
Maybe someday our governor will stop trying to outstupid Texas, and instead endeavor to outsmart Arkansas.
But while you wait for that actual astounding news to develop, cover the reality more, please…
The rest of my week is pretty packed, but since I posted this on Twitter earlier, I’ll post it here, in case anyone is interested in discussing. It occurs to me this is a quick-and-dirty way to set up a discussion about something in the news today. If it works, I’ll do this more often. If not, you’ll have to wait until I actually have time to comment on something:
Fine. The law is the law, and the justices understand it better than I do. But everyone involved should still remember that the child did wrong, and should have accepted the punishment and learned from it. Now, that won’t happen. https://t.co/i5LES0PIop
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) June 23, 2021
As I went walking today, I checked my phone but didn’t see any really good NYT podcasts — as you know, there are several of those I generally enjoy — and just wasn’t in the mood to catch up on the latest news via NPR One. Then I had an idea.
Having not gone physically to Mass in more than a year, we’ve experimented around with different approaches via the web. We’ve joined our own church’s Masses via Facebook, and lately we’ve been checking out the ones from the National Shrine in Washington. Since the ones we’ve watched — from the “Crypt Church” at the basilica — are shorter than what we’re used to (under 30 minutes), we’ve added on the practice of listening to that week’s sermon from Bishop Robert Barron. And I’ve really been impressed by them. Here’s a recent one.
So today I thought, “Doesn’t HE have a podcast?” Yes, he does, I found it. And I listened to this recent one, headlined “Catholics, Media Mobs, and the Culture of Contempt.” It’s also available in video form.
It was good. Basically, it tied together my two most persistent recent obsessions: The political/cultural divide between Catholics, and the Rabbit Hole.
As for the Catholic part… the bishop talked about how back in the double-naughts, when the New Atheism was so active online, he got some pretty fierce comments from the followers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, et al. He found some of it pretty rough going.
But that was nothing compared to the flak he’s received lately from both sides of the Catholic culture war. He said he’d take the atheists any time over these fellow Catholics. The atheists were way nicer.
Then he got into what was causing this, the Rabbit Hole problem, although he didn’t call it that. He mentioned The Social Dilemma, which I’ve mentioned recently in that context. And he explained how the algorithms — in the interest of keeping you on the sites and in reach of their advertising — are written to pull you into the hole, deeper and deeper.
Anyway, whether you’re Catholic or not, I recommend the podcast. (Actually, it’s really a recent recorded virtual speech he gave.) That’s because he goes beyond wringing his hands over the Rabbit Hole the way I do. He offers advice on what to do about it, how to free yourself from it, and stop being such an a__hole (my bleeped word, not his). Of course, his solutions are grounded in the faith. If you don’t like that because you’re an unbeliever, go yell at the bishop about it. He likes that better than hearing from us crazy Catholics.
OK, I was going to mention some of my favorite parts of the speech, but I’m too tired right now. I’ll just give you this quote that comes right at five minutes in: “I’m talking about this toxic, poisonous, fetid quality, to much of the social media dialogue — and I’m sorry to say it, but to a lot of Catholic social media in particular.”
He had me at “fetid.” Other really good bits are at 28 minutes, 35 minutes, 37 minutes and 40 minutes.
How did I get on this topic? The usual, roundabout way. I was skimming through Twitter this morning and ran across this:
California GOP Will Need Unity to Recall Gavin Newsom https://t.co/cq7jcodhMm via @politicalwire
— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) May 4, 2021
… which got me thinking, what are they doing in California now? I had heard about the recall thing, but I paused to think, So what’s their beef with Newsom? I had no idea. I tried to remember whether I knew anything unsavory about him, and I thought of one thing: There was that bizarre woman with whom he was once connected, bizarre enough that it would certainly cause you to question his judgment.
But of course, I couldn’t remember her name. So I asked Google, using the only other thing I knew about her.
Into the search field, I typed: crazy woman who spoke at gop convention.
And I didn’t mean “crazy” in a pleasing, tuneful Patsy Cline sort of way. But Google understood me perfectly.
And you see what I got. Out of all the women it could have picked — such as, say, this one — Google knew exactly what I was looking for.
Having her name, I then looked her up on Wikipedia to confirm that she had been affiliated with Newsom, and found that they had actually been married. I had been thinking maybe they dated once or twice, but he married her?
Well, that would give any voter pause…
Anyway, there’s a life lesson here. Think about posterity. Try to live in a way that you are not remembered this way by Google — and therefore by the rest of the world. Just stop and think before you act. If invited to have a screaming fit during prime time at a national nominating convention of either major party, think very hard before you accept…
William III, by grace of God king of South Carolina?
Hey, y’all, I’m super-busy today, but just to give you something to chew on, Jeffrey Collins over at the AP posted this yesterday, sort of riffing on the new census figures:
If South Carolina and North Carolina decided to restore what the Lords Proprietors tore apart in 1691, the combined Carolina would have 15,557,813 people, according to the census data released today. That would be 5th largest state in the U.S.
— Jeffrey Collins (@JSCollinsAP) April 26, 2021
That started a little bit of conversation on Twitter (our own Lynn Teague joined in). For my part, I responded, “What on Earth would be the motivation for combining two such strikingly unlike states?”
Coming back at me, Jeffrey quickly explained, “Just an observation — certainly not an endorsement. I will say the separation 300+ years ago probably accelerated the differences between the Carolinas.”
Quite likely, I agreed. And of course, I understood it was merely an observation, which others took up and enjoyed discussing. But I couldn’t resist adding: “A technical point: If we went to the status quo ante of 1691, would Elizabeth II be our sovereign? Or would we say it was William III?”
Anyway, I saw Bud mentioned something about the new census figures on a previous post, and I thought y’all might enjoy kicking this around.
So, should SC and NC merge and become one? Talk amongst yourselves…
Jeremiah, as Rembrandt saw him…
It was late in the evening when I got around to today’s readings, which I’ve tried to make a point of studying each day during Lent.
From the book of Jeremiah:
I hear the whisperings of many:
“Terror on every side!
Denounce! let us denounce him!”
All those who were my friends
are on the watch for any misstep of mine.
“Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail,
and take our vengeance on him.”
Apparently, Jeremiah had trouble with Cancel Culture even without Twitter. Ah, but beware, all ye trolls:
But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion:
my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph.
In their failure they will be put to utter shame,
to lasting, unforgettable confusion.
Just thought I’d share that with you, before the day ended…
This came up over the weekend, and I meant to post something about it at the time, but just had too much going on. Before it gets too far in the past, I’m just going to put it up for discussion, and if y’all take it up, I’ll join in and say more.
Howard Weaver, a retired VP from McClatchy newspapers with whom I frequently trade tweets, brought this to my attention on Sunday:
President Biden has been selling his $1.9T Covid-19 package as bipartisan. But that message crashed into a hard reality Saturday when the House passed the bill — without a single Republican vote. https://t.co/krqCO9i3Cm – @sahilkapur
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 27, 2021
Howard’s reaction to it was, “A pointless, reflexive inside-the-beltway example of savvy swagger. Stop it, @nbcnews“
It certainly hit a nerve with me. I jumped in with:
It’s idiotic. The basic fairness and unity that @JoeBiden believes in, his fundamental belief that we are all Americans, regardless of party, is one thing. Whether any Republicans choose to back his proposals is another matter entirely.
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) February 28, 2021
I may have overreacted a bit. A bit. But there’s a reason.
Look, folks, Joe’s going to do some things wrong, and when he does, people should call him on it. I don’t think all the evidence is in on his administration’s failure to go after MBS over Jamal Khashoggi’s killing, but there’s plenty there to challenge, so have at it.
But this nonsense I keep hearing saying Joe Biden is somehow failing in his “unity” pledge when Republicans decide not to vote for something he advocates is ridiculous.
Mind you, in NBC’s defense, they didn’t quite say that — they suggested this bill isn’t bipartisan because it didn’t get bipartisan support. You can certainly assert that, and support it. And if this was the only thing I’d seen about it, I wouldn’t even take notice of it. And if you called it to my attention, I might even agree. But I see it within a context of multiple assertions about that poor, deluded (or dishonest) Joe Biden and his stupid, or alleged, belief in bipartisanship — a bunch of yammering we’ve been getting from all sides ever since (and even before) Inauguration Day. That makes it come across differently.
It gets asserted repeatedly by people on the left who don’t want any bipartisanship and see Biden as a doddering old fool for believing in it (something deeply rooted in the campaigns of all that huge crowd of people Joe had to overcome to get the nomination), and people on the right who claim, every time Biden expresses what he believes instead of what they believe, that he’s a big, fat liar. And media types who prefer that the two sides fight, because in their book that makes a better story — or certainly a story that’s easier to cover in their usual, simple-minded manner.
And it’s stupid, and I’m tired of it. Tired to the point that I react negatively to something that even suggests it.
So that’s the way my knee’s jerking these days. How about yours?
Russell Ott’s statement about his vote on S.1.
As we spoke on the phone today, I kept hearing bubbling, crackling sounds in the background, like something wildly boiling over. I asked Rep. Russell Ott what was going on.
Oh, he said, that was people applauding during the signing ceremony for S.1, the abortion bill that The State describes thusly:
S. 1 requires doctors to perform an ultrasound to detect a heartbeat before performing any abortion. If a heartbeat is detected, the doctor would be prohibited from performing an abortion unless the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or could cause severe harm to her health, if the fetus has a detectable anomaly that is not compatible with life or in cases where the woman reports being the victim of rape or incest. If a woman reports to a doctor that she was the victim of rape or incest, the doctor would then be required to report the crime to the local sheriff with or without the woman’s consent.,,,
Apparently, Henry just couldn’t wait to sign that one.
As it happened, this was what I had called to talk to Russell about. He thought he had found a quiet place where we could speak. But for him, there is no quiet place on this issue.
Russell Ott
Back in December when he was re-elected as assistant leader of the Democrats in the South Carolina House, he had looked forward to working on sentencing reform, hate crime legislation, rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine, and trying to get relief and support to small business owners.
“At the end of the day, that is what it means to be a Democrat,” he told the Times and Democrat. “To look out for the working families, to make sure they have everything they need, and our support as much as possible.”
Some days, it’s easier to be a Democrat than at other times.
It turns out that once the legislative session began, the party that actually runs the State House had another priority in mind, one that led Rep. Ott to put this on Twitter yesterday:
My statement on S.1 – the fetal heartbeat abortion bill pic.twitter.com/bStu2h3ecc
— Russell Ott (@reprussellott) February 17, 2021
That led to a lot of warm responses from his fellow Democrats, such as “Disappointed is a gross understatement,” and “Yeah you should definitely be primaried. Shame on you.” Someone called him “American Taliban.” So far, there are 25 replies. Of course, that’s not so bad when you consider that at the same time, there are 131 “likes.”
So I reached out to him in a text, noting that the reasons he cites as to why he’s a Democrat are the reasons I support Dems such as James Smith and Joe Biden. But abortion is one of the main things that keeps me from being a Democrat myself, so I could sympathize. So I wanted to chat with him before putting his statement on the blog.
He called and we spoke. I noted that it seemed he was having a rough day. He said he’d “probably had some easier ones, but it’s OK.”
He’s not bothered too much by the Twitter stuff. “Twitter’s not even real, Brad. You know that.”
“Come into my district,” he said. “People are not upset.”
Not that he dismisses the concerns of those commenting on Twitter. He respects their views. He respects everyone’s views, as he indicated in his statement. Having gotten into the habit in recent days, he asked me what mine were. I told him that might take years to relate (as y’all know), but I got to talking a bit about some of my problems talking with people who agree with me on so many things, but not on this. And while I’m not a party member, I touched on the problems I’ve had as a Catholic, in light of the fact that about half of my coreligionists voted for Trump over this very issue — setting aside everything else it meant to be pro-life.
He’s a Methodist, but he seemed to understand. Similarly, he wishes some of his more critical fellow Democrats would look at the big picture of what it means, and has long meant, to be a Democrat.
“I put up the amendment that led to the flag coming down” at the critical moment of the House debate in 2015. He’s fought for public education. He’s pushed for expanding Medicaid. “And I certainly have been applauded for that.” But for the moment, at least on Twitter, “That was all gone.”
“But that’s OK,” he says. “There’s a lot of people out there that acknowledge like I do that this is not an easy issue.”
A lot of Democrats maintain their position is not only the right one, but not to be questioned. Ditto among the Republicans, as we know. “Let’s not ignore the hypocrisy on the other side,” he emphasized. As he said in his statement, he’s a Democrat because he cares about babies after they’re born, as well.
“I’m the representative of people who sent me here to … address each issue, as they come,” he said. “I know that the opinion that I hold is not unique. A lot of people that vote Democrat a majority of the time agree with this.”
But that’s because they’re not the professional Democrats, the ones on Twitter. While many of those are fine people, ones Russell gets along with most of the time, sometimes they can be kind of like the Republicans: “Both parties weaponize this issue, and I just reject that position… If that’s the way that person feels, then fine… But if you believe that’s a human being, it’s a baby…” You have to do what you think is right.
“We shouldn’t have a litmus test in this party.”
Russell isn’t alone, of course. I just reached out to him because of the statement he had posted. Democratic Rep. Lucas Atkinson voted with him. I should probably reach out to him, too. I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, but I found out the other day that we’re related. He’s… hang on; let me go look at the tree… my 3rd cousin, once removed.
But they’re a small group.
There’s nothing new about pro-life Democrats in South Carolina, though. Remember Vincent Sheehen, Democratic nominee for governor in 2010 and 2014? Pro-life Catholic, and one of the smartest and best people in the Senate? Yeah, he got dumped by the voters for the sin of being a Democrat — fer bein’ one a them libruls, you know.
When I brought up Sheheen, Russell pointed out how close Vincent came to being governor in 2010. He said it seems like more Democrats in the state would look and notice how well a pro-life Democrat did. And also note the fact that Jaime Harrison ran as a conventional, pro-choice Democrat, and was easily defeated in spite of having raised more money than any Senate candidate in American history.
But never mind political calculation. Russell voted the way he thought was right. And he expects others to do the same, whether they agree with him or not…
Remember when I urged you all to vote for Joe, and promised that things would return to a nice, boring normality if he won?
Well, Happy days are here again. These are my favorite things on Twitter so far today:
Happy loves you all! Thanks for everything! pic.twitter.com/p1aY9JcFWh
— Adam Sandler (@AdamSandler) February 16, 2021
Oh, and don’t miss the blistering response:
My response @AdamSandler pic.twitter.com/Wa4Y8lh6rJ
— Shooter McGavin (@ShooterMcGavin_) February 16, 2021
These are the kinds of burning issues I enjoy….
Pinterest seems quite sure that momentary flickers of interest define me.
I never have time for this, but sometimes when I think I do — standing in line at the store or whatever — I’ll open the Pinterest app on my phone and see what it’s offering me now.
Pinterest is a contender for most useless social medium ever. It’s neck-and-neck with LinkedIn, only more fun.
I remember, years and years ago, when I first signed up for it, spending an hour or so scanning through the images being offered, telling myself I needed to do that in order to make the app “work.” I was letting it build a portrait of me and my interests, based on which images I “pinned,” or simply called up to look at better.
I found it an interesting, idle spectacle. Like watching spots of sunlight filter through the leaves of trees in a light breeze. Or watching whitecaps dance on the sea. Or maybe flames in a fireplace.
Actually, the flames make the best comparison, because you can change the patterns somewhat by poking at the logs. And that’s how Pinterest works.
If there’s a practical use for Pinterest, it escapes me. But I suppose it’s mostly harmless, although the mechanism I see in operation is the same as what has made other social media, and sites such as YouTube, such a threat to our reason and our society. As I’ve written here and here and here.
The algorithm is doing that same thing: Asking me to tell it — by “pinning,” or simply by spending time looking — what interests me. And then it says, “If you like that, you’ll love this.” And shows me more and more of the same thing.
Which can be sort of comical, because it leaps to such odd conclusions. Remember that post I wrote about posters I had on my bedroom walls as a kid? Probably not, since it only got two comments, one of them written by me. But I enjoyed writing it — actually, what I enjoyed more was searching the web for the actual images. And the one I played the biggest was the one of Steve McQueen riding a motorcycle on the set of “The Great Escape.” Which may have been my favorite poster. I know that that was my favorite movie when I was a kid.
Anyway, in searching for it, I must have looked on Pinterest. Anyway, it caused the algorithm to assume that I am obsessed with Steve McQueen, especially when he’s riding a motorcycle. I inadvertently reinforced the McQueen thing by pinning a pic or two from “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” which was a favorite show of mine when it was on, 1958-61.
Ever since then, any time I call up the Pinterest homepage, I’ll see five or 10 or more pics of McQueen in a minute of scrolling, often on a bike. They may go away if the app is momentarily distracted by some other assumed “obsession,” but they always come back eventually.
Hey, I like Steve McQueen. Just not that much.
Actually, though, I’m not seeing him much today. Today, the app thinks I’m crazy about flamenco dancers. That’s because lately I’ve been putting random black-and-white pictures on a wide variety of subjects into my “Images” folder. And taking a quick look at the app this morning, I saw this shot with a little girl in the background framing by a wide skirt being flourished by a dancer. I didn’t even notice what kind of dancer it was; I just liked the composition and sense of motion, and thought my daughter the dance teacher might like it.
So now it just knows I’m nuts about flamenco, and I’m getting flamenco dancers left, right and center — especially if they happen to have on polka-dot dresses. It even thinks I want to see a flamenco guitarist, and close-ups of castanets.
Steve McQueen is gone, for the moment.
I’m also getting a lot of pictures of Ernest Hemingway from his late, white-beard phase. This happened because one of my kids really liked cats, so I had pinned a shot of Hemingway with one of his famous Key West cats. Now he’s all over the place, with or without cats, because of that one picture. A little while ago it showed me one of him with a dog (see image below).
It’s fun to mess with the algorithms head like this, if you assume for a moment that it has a head. It takes practically nothing, the smallest gesture on my part, for it to make huge assumptions about what motivates and animates me. And it’s all so wonderfully superficial, because it’s just pictures — the content is so shallow! There’s virtually no text, and what little there is seems to play little role in the process.
The machine isn’t completely stupid. It’s right, for instance, to believe I like Calvin and Hobbes, and Norman Rockwell. And it has an inkling that it can always grab my attention with the kinds of pinup pictures that adorned the noses of warplanes in WWII. But that’s hardly a personality profile.
I’ve been fretting recently about what artificial intelligence is doing to our politics. But I find a few minutes with Pinterest reassuring. Look where it’s going now!, I tell myself. And for that moment, I’m less concerned about AI’s ability to take over the world. Yet, anyway…
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yeah, I know I wrote about this before, years ago. But thinking recently about what these algorithms were doing to our minds, I started playing with this medium again — just to watch the way it works — so I wrote about it again.
This may be my favorite — Bernie’s mittens discussing Chicken McNuggets with the guys from “The Wire.”/@turd_fergusson
You’ve seen the original, which is Bernie sitting at the inauguration using that unmistakable Bernie body language that has charmed so many, seeming to say:
“This could’ve been an email” pic.twitter.com/kn68z6eDhY
— Ashley K. (@AshleyKSmalls) January 20, 2021
Of course, everybody talks about the mittens — which were apparently made by a Vermont schoolteacher who has now run out of all those she had to sell.
But it’s not the mittens that grab us. It’s the attitude. There was another picture of Bernie apparently arriving at the inauguration, burdened with other stuff he had to do: a manila folder, and what looked like a check he had to take to the bank when this dumb thing was done. One wag tweeted that with the caption, “Bernie has places to be after this.”
You know, that inimitable Bernie charm.
On some of these posts, you’ll see debates as to whether folks are making fun of, or criticizing, Bernie for his lack of social grace, or praising his unaffected naturalness. But the memes seem to have appeal across the spectrum, from people who voted for him to those of us who are amazed that anyone thinks this guy, whatever his virtues, could persuade a majority of voters to make him president.
Anyway, the most popular image is of him sitting crabbily in the chair. Here are some of the alternative images this inspired. I’ve included under each image my best info as to where they came from.
Here you have the first solo album Bernie’s Mittens put out when the band broke up./@neutral_milk_airbnb
Remember the mittens from that weird movie Sandra Bullock was in? @Notorious_ARC_
@newyorknico
@Puptheband
@djjkim
Found this on the feed of @madeline__carl
Well, you get the idea. There are loads of them out there. I’d like to credit each and every Photoshop artist whose work I cited, but the best I could do on most was show you where I found it.
Now, go out and find your own…
Here’s a follow-up to my previous post, “Millions of separate realities, destroying our common world.”
I’m reading more and more of this stuff about how the way TOO many people consume the internet, and get consumed by it. Specifically, how they get their minds hopelessly warped by a couple of the standard features of social media and other web sites and services — the way these media keep showing you more stuff like what you seem to like, and — in this piece — the way the reinforcement of others (likes, retweets, shares, etc.) seduces people into insane new “realities.”
Here’s another item: A piece from the NYT headlined, “They Used to Post Selfies. Now They’re Trying to Reverse the Election.” The subhed says, “Right-wing influencers embraced extremist views, and Facebook rewarded them.”
This piece doesn’t make many broad observations about these phenomena; it mostly simply tells the story of how several individuals got sucked in. You’ll note the commonalities. The one place where the item touches upon the consistent themes is here:
He’s not alone. Facebook’s algorithms have coaxed many people into sharing more extreme views on the platform — rewarding them with likes and shares for posts on subjects like election fraud conspiracies, Covid-19 denialism and anti-vaccination rhetoric. We reviewed the public post histories for dozens of active Facebook users in these spaces. Many, like Mr. McGee, transformed seemingly overnight. A decade ago, their online personas looked nothing like their presences today.
A journey through their feeds offers a glimpse of how Facebook rewards exaggerations and lies.
But the rewards are trivial compared with the costs: The influencers amass followers, enhance their reputations, solicit occasional donations and maybe sell a few T-shirts. The rest of us are left with democracy buckling under the weight of citizens living an alternate reality….
Yeah, as I said the other day, I know this stuff isn’t new. We knew how the Web worked. You knew it; I knew it. But as I also said before, something just finally clicked recently when I was listening to “Rabbit Hole,” and for the first time in these last few years, I got Trumpism. I finally really saw how these people had become so warped, and so immune to facts and reason. What we’re seeing couldn’t have happened this way in any other time.
And frankly, I don’t know how we’re going to reverse this problem — a problem affecting people’s perception across the political spectrum (as I say, I know I’m vulnerable to it, too), but manifesting itself most threateningly among Trump followers. They’re the big problem now. (As I type this, I keep getting indications that there are people walking about downtown Columbia with semiautomatic weapons. There have been arrests. I might be writing more about it later, but I hope not. I hope the problem fades away…)
I don’t see how the toothpaste gets back in the tube, and people get sane again.
But I’m going to keep pointing out these glimpses of the problem as I encounter them. As I think I mentioned, I watched part of “The Social Dilemma” the other night. When I finish it, I’ll probably post about that, too. It starts from a perspective different from mine (such as worrying about addiction to social media, particularly among kids), but also gets into the problems I’m talking about…
Just thought I’d share a couple of things I had to say about the vaccine today:
Everybody: Stop getting excited about the vaccine shipping. You’re not going to get it for a long time. If you’re one of the few who DO, the desired effect won’t occur until everyone else does. Which will be a long time. And your life cannot, MUST not, change until then. Got it?
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 13, 2020
Basically, I was just sick of all the headlines that read to me (maybe not to you, but to me) like “Yay, it’s over! Here come the vaccines!” So I added to the above thread:
For my friends in the press: The small headline should simply say, “Vaccine ships. Don’t get excited.” The full body of the story should read: “Now go think about something else. And stay away from people, and wear your damn’ mask — properly. -30-“
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 13, 2020
Of course, part of the thing is that after I switched from news to editorial 26 years ago, I started thinking less it terms of “here’s a fact,” and more in terms of “so what should we do?” I mean, yeah, it’s a fact — vaccine doses are shipping. It’s the beginning of the beginning of a very hopeful thing that we look forward to happening over the next several months.
But what do all of us need most to be hearing right now? It is that this is a very dangerous moment, and we all need to hunker down with masks and social distancing more strenuously than ever.
And instead, the message I keep seeing is, “Look — vaccines!” And I worry about people seeing only that, and not the stories about how bad things are, and how much worse they’ll be if we as a country ignore warnings during Christmas the way we did on Thanksgiving….
If everybody reads a lot, we’re OK. Carefully read the NYT or the WSJ or Washington Post and you’ll get the whole picture. But plenty of people don’t read news at all, and watch TV, where they might see stuff like the headline pictured above. And as we know, lots of other people don’t get information from any professional news source, print or broadcast, and just go by what their friends tell them on social media. Or what Trump tells them, God help us…
