"Genuine users are rightly outraged at the idea of being blackmailed into paying Musk to prove who they are."
"Last year, federal prosecutors in the [Washington D.C.] U.S. attorney’s office chose not to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested..."
"Not every time, but most times, you select Twitter and put the name 'The Kinks' in there, and it warns that it could be quirky stuff, like a porn star or kink porn."
Said Dave Davies, quoted in "We Are the Viral Tweet Restoration Society/The Kinks’ Dave Davies says Twitter is suppressing his band’s content—and he knows why" (Slate).
"If it’s happening to us, I’m sure it would happen to a lot of people with slightly devious names. The whole idea of being creative, it’s to come up with new things, or different and unusual things. So, it’s going to put a damper on creative ideas.... I can choose what words I want to say—'hello,' 'good day,” and 'how are you'—and it shouldn’t be limited by certain rules or regulations, which might rule that you can only say 'hello' and 'goodbye.'..."
"Appropriately titled 'Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,' the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state..."
Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters). But cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
The researcher is choosing which things to inspect for tightness or looseness. What if you had to argue that California and Oregon were "tight"? You'd just identify some areas of ideology about which leftish folk are harshly disciplinarian.
The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued, is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France, among others. The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive.
I'd say we need to watch out for autocrats, but if you think they're all coming from the right, you're going to get blindsided.
My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
"Tight" is a confusing word. It could describe orderliness and cool practicality. I think of a "tight ship." But it could imply rigidity and fear of change. Why was "tight" ever used for "drunk"? "Loose" is confusing too. Is it relaxed and creative or lazy and disorganized? I wrote that before reading this:
In her book, Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side. Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
So, Gelfand embraces the confusingness. We need a balance of loose and tight, apparently — like yin and yang.
Edsall poses the question:
If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
Psychprof Laura Niemi answered:
Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior, as morally relevant and wrong... [Liberals stress] caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values” — while conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
The left supports individualism? The left goes for fairness and rights? I think that's only because you are choosing where to look and your choice is based on what you want to see.
I'm going to read "Fear pervades Tennessee's trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter's gender identity."
Within 10 minutes of police saying that the suspect was transgender, the hashtag #TransTerrorism trended on Twitter.
I added the link and scanned some of what is on Twitter. I can see that there are some people trying to put together a pattern that would show that trans people have a propensity toward violence or a plan, as a group, to seek vengeance for perceived wrongs.
Around the same time, Republican lawmakers — including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — insinuated in social media posts that the shooter’s gender identity played a role in the shooting. And by Tuesday morning, the cover of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post read: “Transgender killer targets Christian school.”
“We are terrified for the LGBTQ community here,” Kim Spoon, a trans activist based in Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “More blood’s going to be shed, and it’s not going to be shed in a school.”....
Denise Sadler, a drag performer who is transgender, said... “You don’t know if [the shooter’s gender identity] is going to trigger a community of people who already hated us to come and try to shoot us to prove a point,” Sadler said. “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of hurt going on, there’s a lot of anger going on, there’s a lot of confusion going on.”...
It sounds as though everyone is afraid of violence. Some people are afraid that random transgender people are going to become murderers, and some transgender people are afraid some of those fearful people are going to go on the offensive and randomly murder transgender people. This is an amorphous but specific fear of violence. Both groups are afraid of each other.
So far this year, Tennessee lawmakers passed two bills targeting LGBTQ people: A first-of-its-kind law that will criminalize some drag performances takes effect Saturday, and another that will ban gender-affirming care for the state’s minors becomes effective July 1. Nathan Higdon, the chief financial officer of Knoxville Pride Center, is helping organize protests against the new drag law in Nashville and Knoxville this upcoming weekend.
Higdon said that while he and other organizers are “scared sh–less” that the conservative backlash over the shooter’s suspected gender identity will prompt violence, they’re going forward with the events as planned. “The people who hate us are always going to hate us,” Higdon said. “We can’t not do these things. We just can’t not show up.”
Are the protesters of the new laws in danger because of the school shooting? I'd like to think that human beings can think straight and would not hold the acts of an individual murderer against the group that murderer belongs to (or may belong to), but passion and irrationality are high, and protests are not exemplars of rationality and impassivity.
Not usually.
They can be.
I reveal the name of the puzzle cited in yesterday's post, "She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles...."
Last night, I happened to watch a Mae West movie, her first, "Night After Night." It was another one of the Criterion Channel's series of pre-code Paramount movies. She has a secondary role and doesn't even show up until the movie is halfway over, and it looks like this, at the door of George Raft's speakeasy:
The character West plays — Maudie Triplett — was based on the real life personage, Texas Guinan. Here's some documentary footage of Guinan in a speakeasy in 1928:The annoying use of "you" in headlines these days is especially annoying when they assign mistakes to you that you haven't made.
Sunrise — 7:14.
"I once felt that I would rather die than go blind. Now I feel the opposite. Daily life has a renewed delight and vigor."
Writes Edward Hirsch, who has been going blind for 20 years, in "I Am Going Blind, and I Now Find It Strangely Exhilarating" (NYT).