Althouse

I'll let you guess for a while and will reveal the answer soon. It's surprising!

Presented by David Lat at Substack.

I've listened to the first 22 minutes (and intend to finish later). That is, I've relistened to the Tirien Steinbach intervention, and I've heard, for the first time, everything that went before, that is, what students did that required the intervention.

As I heard it — and much of it was difficult to hear — there was one student who did most of the speaking, and she seemed to be trying to control the event by addressing the judge, inviting him into a dialogue instead of delivering his prepared remarks. The rest of the crowd seems to be supporting her effort, adding to the pressure on the judge, as if he might decide that the best path through the evening was to throw the written speech aside and take on all comers.

I can imagine a character in a movie doing something like that, really looking the questioning student in the eye and saying words that truly connected.

The movie in my head looks something like this:

The man says, “Get out of here

I’ll tear you limb from limb”

I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”

He said, “You’re not Him

Get out of here before I break your bones

I ain’t your pop”

I decided to have him arrested

And I went looking for a cop

The judge took a different route. That's the second half of the recording. I'll listen to it soon enough and get back to you. 

Remember? It was December 2017, and my first post on the subject was: "I was drawn in by the creepy close-up and started reading before 'Cat Person' became an internet phenomenon." Ha ha. I didn't want you to think I'd just follow a trend. I said:

I'm not going to read any more of the internet chatter, at least not right now. But I'll just say, based on my own reading of the story, that it makes a good jumping off point for discussing the problem of bad sex. Bad sex is something you need to distinguish from a criminal assault and take responsibility for avoiding. And reading the story is a good vicarious experience that might help women (and men) get better at ending an evening at an appropriately early point. The sex in that story is very graphic — graphic in a completely nontitillating way. In fact, the sex in that story is such that it would make excellent reading for an abstinence-only class.

 Wrote Steve Tesich in "A government of lies," published in The Nation in 1992.

The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves. The dismantling of our Republic goes on, and if the spiritual and intellectual vigor of our children is the true indication of our future, then our future is even more troubling than our present....

We keep asking why the level of our children's intelligence and competence, as measured by all our tests, keeps dropping. The reason is very simple: We don't want them to be well educated. The last thing we want now is for an intellectually and spiritually vigorous generation to confront us with the question of what we have done to this country....

We have lost both faith and contact with our national myth.... When lost, the most dangerous thing one can do is to blunder blindly ahead. The comparison may be too extreme, but when Europe was lost in the Dark Ages it went back to its heritage for enlightenment and proceeded into the Renaissance. We have that option as well, and with it the hope and promise of our own renewal....

Tesich — who won an Oscar for writing the 1979 movie "Breaking Away" — was credited with coining the term "post-truth." 

Here's a Nation article about the coinage — "Post-Truth and Its Consequences: What a 25-Year-Old Essay Tells Us About the Current Moment." That's from November 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries made "post-truth" the "Word of the Year."

You still have something of a grasp on truth if you can use the term "post-truth." You're probably observing that other people are living in the realm beyond truth, but you're still in touch with the truth, you must be thinking, perhaps dishonestly.

Obviously, November 2016 was the time for finally getting around to making "post-truth" the "Word of the Year." We know what happened in November 2016. 

Tesich had died by then. He had a heart attack in 1996. Wikipedia says: 

Steve Tesich was born as Stojan Tešić (pronounced TESH-ich) in Užice, in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on September 29, 1942. He immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister when he was 14 years old. His family settled in East Chicago, Indiana. His father died in 1962.

I was reading about Tesich not because I was researching "post-truth," but because I was reading about "Breaking Away." 

That happened because after watching 2 seasons of "The White Lotus," I started watching another HBO series created by Mike White, "Enlightened." And I loved the scene in Season 1, Episode 9 where the Diane Ladd character has a conversation with another old woman in the grocery store. Who was that other actress? She seemed so familiar. It was Barbara Barrie, who, 3 decades earlier, had played the mother in "Breaking Away."

So I merely stumbled into the Steve Tesich essay and "post-truth."

"... to share his thoughts on a movie he had just watched. Zhang used his Douban account as a chronicle of his personal development, recording the books he wanted to read ('What Would Google Do?' 'Catch-22' and 'The Road to Serfdom') and the movies he’d seen ('The Departed,' 'Good Will Hunting,' 'Inception'). The movie Zhang watched that Christmas was 'The Social Network.' The movie was of particular interest to Zhang.... Born in 1983 as the only son of a librarian and a nurse, Zhang came of age in a China flush with reform and newfound connections to the West.... Zhang loved the freedom that technology offered and displayed a fondness for the West, politically as well as culturally. In 2009, when Chinese authorities blocked access to several websites, he took to his personal blog to voice his disapproval, according to a Wall Street Journal profile. 'Go out and wear a T-shirt supporting Google,' he wrote. 'If you block the internet, I’ll write what I want to say on my clothes.'..."

Much more about Zhang and the app he created in "How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis/A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive?" (NYT). 

Spoiler alert for the movie and the musical. In the movie, when Jack Lemmon takes his wig off and announces he's a guy, the man who fell in love with him says "Well, nobody's perfect." Famous ending for a famous movie. In the new musical, in the same situation, the last line is "You're perfect."

But that's not all, as the Guardian critic, Alexis Soloski writes: 

In previews, complaints emerged, in the grimmer corners of the Broadway message boards, that the show was too woke for its own good. Wokeness merely refers to an awareness of systemic bias and injustice, past and present, which any revival or new adaptation should have. ...

[I]n wanting to treat the comedy of men in dresses with greater care and sensitivity – a terrific goal in and of itself – changes the meaning of Some Like It Hot itself. The original, in its sophistication and ambivalence, is a celebration of disguise, of the quick wits, silver tongues and wild cheek that let Joe and Jerry juggle their multiple fictions. Yet in this version... drag becomes a means to self-acceptance, a beribboned road to truth....

In putting on a dress, Jerry uncovers a nonbinary identity.... “I don’t have the word for what I feel I just feel more like my self than I have in all my life,” Jerry tells Joe.

Because it's the 1920s: He didn't have access to the word "nonbinary" (or "trans").

Tweets Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Twitter 1.0 placed me on the blacklist on the first day I joined in August 2021. I think it was my pinned tweet linking to the @gbdeclaration that triggered the blacklist based on unspecified complaints Twitter received.

Twitter 1.0 rejected requests for verification by me and @MartinKulldorff . Each time the reasoning (never conveyed to us) was that we were not notable enough. They should have asked Francis Collins -- he would have vouched for our standing as "fringe epidemiologists."

It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.

It's a little melodramatic but I'll admit that the first thing that flashed into my head was the scene in "The Lives of Others" — spoiler alert — when the main character enters the Stasi Records Agency and is able to read his file. How exciting to enter the domain of the entity that has persecuted you, to be treated with respect and deference, and to be handed the written record of what they had been doing to you in secret!

Here's a news report on the Stasi Files (not from the movie):