The surreal sunrise.

"[W]omen and girls are being forced to meet athletic standards that are based on how men and boys develop. If you try to make a girl fit a boy’s development timeline..."

"... her body is at risk of breaking down. That is what happened to Cain. After months of dieting and frustration, Cain found herself choosing between training with the best team in the world, or potentially developing osteoporosis or even infertility. She lost her period for three years and broke five bones. She went from being a once-in-a-generation Olympic hopeful to having suicidal thoughts.... We fetishize the rising athletes, but we don’t protect them. And if they fail to pull off what we expect them to, we abandon them."

From "I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike/Mary Cain’s male coaches were convinced she had to get 'thinner, and thinner, and thinner.' Then her body started breaking down" (NYT).

Things I noticed on Tik Tok today. Tell us the order you like these and think about what that says about you.

Trump Jr. on "The View": "We've all done things that we regret. Joy, you have worn blackface. Whoopi, you said... Roman Polanski… it wasn’t 'rape-rape,' when he raped a child."

Yikes. He came ready to spring:

In the span of 10 seconds, @DonaldJTrumpJr called out Joy Behar for wearing blackface

& Whoopi for saying Roman Polanski wasn’t guilty of “rape-rape.”#TheView pic.twitter.com/9R6S8hTiBF

— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) November 7, 2019

Did Joy Behar ever wear blackface?!! Yes!

Here's @TheView's Joy Behar admitting on national TV that she in fact wore blackface. Why are they denying it now? https://t.co/B9ReOYrwXY

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 7, 2019

Whoa!

He had a lot of nerve going on that show, and they were all set to bully him. I almost feel like buying the book he was flogging — "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us" — even though I assume I already know everything in it. All these subtitles that begin with "How"... I already know how the left blah blah blah. But I did not know how to instantly fight off a pouncing double team of Whoopi and Joy. That was quite something. They totally deserved it. And I would have never have noticed that Joy Behar had a blackface incident lurking in her past. So rich!

"The mayor of a small town in Bolivia has been attacked by opposition protesters who dragged her through the streets barefoot, covered her in red paint and forcibly cut her hair...."

"The protesters accused Mayor [Patricia] Arce of having bussed in supporters of the president to try and break a blockade they had set up and blamed her for the reported deaths [of two opposition protesters]... Amid shouts of 'murderess, murderess' masked men dragged her through the streets barefoot to the bridge. There, they made her kneel down, cut her hair and doused her in red paint. They also forced her to sign a resignation letter."

BBC reports.

"I haven't and won't read it, but Scott Adams's new book seems to be a manual for how to argue with people who don't share your opinions, a skill his fans definitely need."

"I bet it also provides coping mechanisms for those who have been shunned for supporting the President."

Ha ha, I love reading 1-star reviews for books I'm reading, which in this case is "Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America."

I was just listening to the audiobook, wanted to do a post about one thing I heard, needed to get an Amazon link, and just could not resist clicking into the 1-star material.

Anyway... here's the quote from the book that I wanted to share:

I often observe people who desperately want to win political arguments but can’t escape from their own ego jails. People want to be 100 percent right while painting their debate opponent as 100 percent wrong. Sometimes that leads to absurd positions that defy both reason and facts. The need to be right (driven by ego) crowds out the opportunity to be persuasive, which is the whole point of debate. Choosing ego over effectiveness is classic loserthink.

Adams has an idiosyncratic way of talking about "ego":

The productive way to think of your ego is to consider it a tool, as opposed to a reflection of who you are on some core level. If you think your ego is a tool, you can choose to dial it up when needed and dial it down when it would be an obstacle.

Notice how the subject is not what ego actually is or anything deep or real at all. It's just: On the assumption that you want to be successful, here's how think about ego. Cogitating about who you are on some core level is for losers. The question is what works.

I'm looking at all this from a cool distance. I don't desperately want to win political arguments myself. I don't like argument, I don't like politics, and I never feel at all desperate when talking about politics, and I feel no temptation to characterize myself as 100% right and others as 100% wrong. If anything, I have work up from a natural inclination to say that everyone is sort of right and sort of wrong and that at heart we don't even disagree at all. That's not loserthink in Scott's book, but I'm pretty sure it's also not winnerthink.

The word "winnerthink" doesn't appear in the book. In fact, the word "winner" only appears twice. Scott's last book was about winning. From that book, "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter":

Brand yourself as a winner. If people expect you to win, they will be biased toward making it happen.

Oddly enough, these Scott Adams quotes are making me think of literature's biggest loser, Hamlet: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"I'm not going to be the idiot that I'm telling you not to be."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"Recently I heard a woman say her department is full of freaks, they don’t like her, and she doesn’t have a life, but that sounded more like a whine than an epiphany."

"I’m no sociologist so I don’t know if this era is less interesting. You’d think people would be as tormented by sex, self-fulfillment, and relationships (and babies) as ever, but I’m not hearing it on any movie lines I’ve been on lately. Maybe I should ask the NSA."

Said Stan Mack in a 2013 interview on the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Stan Mack drew the fantastic cartoon "Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies" that ran in The Village Voice from 1974 to 1995. The words in the cartoons were all things Mack claims to have heard people say around New York City. I, myself, had long loved the absurdity of the partial conversations you'd overhear as you walked around or half-minded your own business in a restaurant or shop. Here's an example showing part of one week's Stan Mack cartoon:



If you like that, you can order a collection of the funnies — remember when we called the comics "the funnies"? — here (at Amazon).

In the quote that begins in the post title, Mack is comparing the words he used to overhear with the words he overhears today, which, unlike then, include a lot of talking into cell phones. In fact, the reason I was looking up Stan Mack this morning is because I read (on Facebook) this post by Annie Gottlieb:

Really, the things you hear on the street. People on their cellphones seem to assume they’re in a soundproof phone booth, and people just conversing seem to have been made unselfconscious or oblivious by phone culture to being either intrusively loud, or private and overheard. You hear some funny things.

(a woman on her cellphone, crossing the street, indignantly: ) “I don’t want ANY bacteria.” (Apparently no one has yet broken the news about the microbiome.)

(Young man to his girlfriend, walking along holding hands, conversationally) “You know how some people jerk off just to jerk off?” (as opposed to?)

(today) “Hydroglyphics”

ADDED: Did people become less self-conscious because of cellphones? It's very hard to compare what you're hearing now with what you heard back then. Stan Mack is kind of an authority on the subject, and the difference he cites is in the interestingness. If what people are saying these days is less interesting, it could be that people are more private, less prone to revealing themselves when they can be overheard. But it could be that the eavesdropper has changed, and not just because we've all gotten older. We're different because we're listening to phone talkers, not to people who are with other people and talking in the flesh. People talking into a phone irritate us a lot more, so we're more judgmental. We think they're intruding on us. When we listen to people who are together in real life — as in "Real Life Funnies" — we feel that we are intruding on them. Our transgression makes things inherently more interesting.

What say we respond?

What say we respond to the #WhatTriggersLiberals hashtag with some lists of #WhatTriggersConservatives.

- Women
- Nonwhites
- LGBTQ+ people
- Non-Christian religions
- Pronouns in Twitter bios
- Questioning Dear Leader
- "Happy Holidays"
- The very existence of @AOC

Any others?

— There Is No Try, Only Zuul (@tonygoldmark) November 7, 2019

I saw that John Kennedy was trending on Twitter, and it's a little early in November for the annual meditation on the long-ago assassination.

But it's not that John Kennedy. Took me a few minutes to absorb that there's nothing about the John Kennedy whose death mindscaped our generation. I was wondering why I'm seeing a Trump rally. But it was this guy, this John Kennedy:

How about John Kennedy get some upper teeth before he starts slagging people smarter than him. https://t.co/skJbynnM56

— Stormdog 🇨🇦 (@gwstevens911) November 7, 2019

"I had to read this twice to make sure it wasn’t parody. Firstly, the stereotypical, monolithic take on black people as fried chicken loving...."

"... spice obsessed, fast food nuts is highly offensive. Fried foods, particularly chicken, became part of black culture due to food scarcity in slavery/Jim Crow times. To celebrate a multi-billion dollar corporations exploitation of poor and black people is absurd. Secondly, fried foods are unhealthy. Fried foods will damage your health. It’s a well known fact! Promoting this cultural ownership of fried chicken (especially factory farmed chicken) ignores a massive public health crisis that disproportionately affects black people. Thirdly, not all black people love fried chicken. Not all black people like spicy food. Part of the reason why 30% of fried chicken is consumed by black people is due to poverty and aggressive targeting of poor communities by fast food companies. It’s obscene that an author would produce such an uncritical analysis in favor of promoting a chicken sandwich from a corporate chain, let alone the underlying implication that black people all eat the same food, or that white people are clueless when it comes to food spiciness. Finally, it’s mediocre chicken in a cheap bun. How about an article for healthy, home made fried chicken sandwiches? How about an article about how good like chicken wings was once forced up slaves because whites refused to eat it? Or just not stereotyping people based on race? Please?"

That's the most-liked comment on a New York Times article with a title that made me go straight to the comments to find something like what that commeter said. Article title: "Popeyes Sandwich Strikes a Chord for African-Americans."

Really, what are the rules? I presume the NYT would hold back from publishing "Watermelon Strikes a Chord for African-Americans."

That NYT article about the Popeyes sandwich begins by linking to various social media things, and I get the feeling that the NYT these days is always on the alert for what people are clicking on in social media, but the third link goes to a Twitter post with a few responses and then: "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content." There's a "show" button. I click, but nothing come up. I don't know whether that means Twitter is censoring or people aren't that racist.

Here's the 4th paragraph of the NYT article:

One Twitter user, @RocBoy_Mel, wrote Sunday that he did not know whose “grandma” made the sandwiches, “but I finally got my hands on one today and I was very impressed.”

I clicked through to @RocBoy_Mel, and I see someone telling him he's quoted in the NYT, with a link to the article, and his response is "That’s pretty cool thank you." A few hours later, somebody says "The article was a fucking insult to the Black community." And @RocBoy_Mel responds:

Yea it was pretty racist

— Mel (@RocBoy_Mel) November 7, 2019

Now, I must admit that so far, I have only read the first 4 paragraph in the NYT article. So I have not checked the truth of the commenter's characterization of the article as "an uncritical analysis in favor of promoting a chicken sandwich from a corporate chain."

I glance ahead and get the feeling the NYT got comfortable because it criticizes a big corporation, and — of course! — the article is probably written by a black person. Checking... yes. John Eligon. That bio, at the Times, shows that he writes on race issues for the NYT.

Back to the article:

Popeyes has aggressively marketed itself to African-Americans, and many of its restaurants are in black communities....

In a Facebook post in August, Nadiyah Ali, a nurse from Katy, Texas, compared the sandwich to a rival’s: Chick-fil-A’s version, she wrote, tasted as if it were made “by a white woman named Sarah who grew up around black people.” The Popeyes sandwich, she added, tasted “like it was cooked by an older black lady named Lucille.”...

Again, social media. The NYT wants to ride on top of social media energy, and it's always liked quoting people in articles. I can see the temptation to use material like that, especially with the anti-Chick-fil-A angle.

[Omar Tate, the founder of "a pop-up dinner series... that uses food to explore black identity"] said... [w]hen he thinks of authenticity, he thinks of the techniques of someone like Edna Lewis, a pioneering black chef, who fried meats in lard and seasoned the fryer with smoked pork.

“That’s authentic. That’s what soul food is to me,” he said. “It’s one of those black magic things that can’t be reproduced.”...

Frying meat in lard isn't really magic, but there are some decidedly non-magic reasons why a commercial chain restaurant can't fry meat in lard.

Popeyes’ inroads with black Americans may be as much about marketing as anything else. The company has made appeals to African-Americans in its advertising, stoking criticism that it is pandering. When the chain introduced a fictitious black woman named Annie the Chicken Queen in its commercials about a decade ago, some people criticized it as racist....

Marketing is part of running a big business, and it can be done well. There are risks to marketing to black people. They can call you racist. And there are risks to writing about marketing to black people. They can call you racist.

Am I calling the NYT racist? I don't know! I could just say I enjoyed reading the article. But I'm a white person. Maybe if I enjoyed reading the article, it would be racist. I can see the NYT put a lot of effort into coddling and cosseting me as I enjoyed the racism, if it was racism, and if I enjoyed it.