(Nicolek, from a few days ago, it's good that you're giving your kids high quality nut butters.)

From Carolyn Hax. I like the long paragraph near the end. There are 3,000-plus comments.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/advice/carolyn-hax-a-parent-pooh-poohs-a-non-parents-sleep-deprivation/2021/01/11/cf9e3f34-4aeb-11eb-839a-cf4ba7b7c48c_story.html

Jan. 11, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. EST
Adapted from an online discussion.

Dear Carolyn: I have kids who are 8 months old and 2 years old, so when a childless friend told me she had been sleep-deprived, I just laughed and told her she doesn't know what sleep-deprived is. She didn't say anything about it in the moment, but then later sent me an email detailing health problems she's had related to insomnia and telling me she thought I was insensitive.

I replied, "You're acting like this is personal about you. I'm just telling you, no parent wants to hear a non-parent whine about not sleeping." She didn't reply to that and I had basically forgotten about it, but I saw her yesterday and she was very cold to me.

Do you think I should address this with her again? It's not that I'm unsympathetic if she's really having problems sleeping, it's just that it's fairly ridiculous for her to compare what she's going through to what parents of young children go through.

— "Sleep Deprived"

“Sleep Deprived”: Yes, so so ridiculous, because parents of young children are the only ones whose experiences are actually valid! Yes!

Are your kids named Holier and Thou?

Holy headsmack.

Not only were you awful to this friend, but you also took her patient explanation as an opportunity to be awful to her all over again! And you still don’t see it. You’re doubling down.

There is no suffering Olympics, no gold medal to be won, there is only suffering.

And I’m just telling you (ugh!) that no suffering person wants to hear another person dismiss their suffering as a ludicrous yeah-whatever WHINE. You called a sick friend a whiner. And you did this even though you presumably have firsthand knowledge that sleep deprivation is a form of torture!

But instead of tapping into that to feel some empathy for your friend, you used it against her. Hard.

Please lose the certainty of your place at the top of the experience mountain and work on your empathy skills, stat.

And “address this” with your friend “again” only if you’re prepared to deliver an abject and heartfelt apology for treating her pain as nothing more than the “ridiculous” pretender to your own.

You can tell her you responded so badly because you, too, are sleep-deprived and are clearly not at your best at putting 2 and 2 together.

This part is not necessary to my argument, but I will spell it out anyway: You are not sleeping well because you are caring for little people who do not yet sleep all night without needing your care. This is not only a choice you made, but also — in the vast majority of cases — a temporary state of things, after which you will be better able to rest. In other words, it is not your body betraying you to the point that it’s denying you your ability to do what you desperately need, and not responding to efforts to fix the problem, and with no end in sight. That’s your friend’s current status.

So scoffing at that? Gets a “wow.”

It's under 14 minutes long. A woman tells of the differences between the American and Czech healthcare systems. (She admits it's not a comprehensive comparison. Also, it's pretty bizarre the way, on the one hand, in Czechia, you're supposed to stay home from work even if you only have a cold, but, if you're in a Czech hospital giving birth, and you want...well, you'll see what I mean.)

https://www.televizeseznam.cz/video/americanka-v-praze/americanka-a-podzim-v-cesku-sber-hub-dusicky-a-vylet-do-krkonos-64112592

From my elderly Czech correspondent.

I forget, does America defend the Czech Republic nowadays? Because if their military needs are covered elsewhere, the health care budget might be much different.

It's been almost a week, and I still can't get over this photo of a Trump protester.

What's it like to think a cartoon of Trump in a sci-fi/Rambo depiction is an idea you want to share with those around you? On a flag? When you're old enough to have a grey beard?

What's the inside of this guy's head like? Does he still dream of getting the really good deserts from the line at the school cafeteria before all the tough guys take them?

No idea, re the Czech military.

In the meantime, this looks hilarious. It's almost enough to make me want to create a Quora account, but aside from my not wanting to register everywhere I go, Quora would obviously be a terrible time drain. (But a fascinating one!)

https://www.quora.com/As-a-child-where-did-you-think-babies-came-from

One entry, from 3 years ago:

"'God takes something from a man and something from a woman and uses them to make a baby.'

"My mom told me and my little siblings this growing up.

"I assumed you got a baby in much the same way you caught a cold. Or maybe it was a bit like the fertilization of plum trees…

"I thought if you sat too close to a boy you liked you might get pregnant.

"I grew up around animals.

"One would think that observing the animals mating would have remedied my ignorance but my mom had a sage saying for that, too.

“'Dogs are animals and we're people. God made dogs so they could make babies this way but people are better than that...'"

And another:

"Yeah, I’ve got an amazing story about this.

"When I was a child, I had an idea of what children came from, but I wanted to confirm this with my mother, since she was around a lot, and was the most accessible.

“'Where do babies come from,' I would ask.

“'I’m really busy right now, Wes, let’s talk about this later,' she would say.

"So, my Mom’s a busy lady, as all mothers are. Her being busy denies me an answer. Let’s check if she’s busy before asking her questions, that way we know if we’re gonna get answers. Makes sense, right?

"'Are you busy, Mom,' asked I.

"'Of course not! I’m never too busy for you...' "

And:

"Even as a young child I knew babies came from inside mommy -- we had cats and when they had kittens, my mother encouraged us to watch the miracle and explained that it worked the same way for humans. I didn't have the foresight to think of how babies got there. It was just assumed that once you got married, they grew inside the mother as a matter of course.

"When I was in the sixth grade, I still hadn't questioned this naive belief until a local boy brought in a deck of pornographic playing cards he found in his uncle's bedroom. My friends and I were immediately fascinated by the rare..."

And:

"I grew up in India in the 90s in a small town.

"When Titanic got released, I was 8 or 9 years old. Almost everyone in my class watched movie as it was a big fad saying 'I watched Titanic'. Anyways, though the nude scenes were censored off in India. We still got to see some of the intimate scenes.

"So, one day in class, we started discussing about how Rose(Kate Winslet) got pregnant after Jack (De Caprio) had died. Everyone was under the assumption that when you get married, you get pregnant and babies are born after some time.

"One guy, who had recently joined our school from a big city joined our..."

(snip)

I'm guessing the real question was, why DIDN'T Rose get pregnant by Jack?

I forget, does America defend the Czech Republic nowadays? ~ Crid at January 14, 2021 9:15 AM

The Czech republic (Czechia) joined NATO in 1999.

It's been almost a week, and I still can't get over this photo of a Trump protester. ~ Crid at January 14, 2021 9:34 AM

That level of hero worship of a sitting president is kinda creepy.

This one has always fascinated me. There's a sequel, too, and there was a whole series planned. Don't know what's going to happen to that plan now that Biden's got this other gig.

I'm guessing the real question was, why DIDN'T Rose get pregnant by Jack? ~ lenona at January 14, 2021 10:39 AM

The real question is why she didn't slide over. There was room for both of them on that piece of wood.

Now THAT's weird. After all, the film crew could have easily reduced the size of the wood!

Of course, one of them had to die, because this is supposed to be about a tragic historic event, after all, and it would be kind of tacky, in such a movie, for the lovers to live happily ever after. Even Rose, after surviving and escaping her hated fiancé, would have faced tough times for years, with nowhere to go. So even SHE isn't really more fortunate than any of the other women or children.

Moar idolatry.

Very interesting Vox article on the 1920s Klan and parallels with white supremacists today. The subject is Linda Gordon, a history professor at New York University and author of a book on the 1920s Klan.

I attended a college history class taught by David Chalmers, a history professor at the University of Florida and author of Hooded Americanism a comprehensive history of the Klan, so it was interesting to compare her comments to what I learned Chalmers' class.

Gordon compares the 1920s Klan to the Capitol riots and modern white supremacy.

I’m not on top of the demography of the current white supremacists, but I will say two things that are not true. And that is that people in the 1920s, as well as people now, who don’t like what the white supremacists are doing, very frequently want to think of them as stupid, uneducated, very crude. In other words, really insulting their intelligence. That’s what people were saying all the time about the second Klan.

And we now know that they were wrong. The members of the 1920s Klan were as educated as average Americans. They included not only many white-collar people but even professionals, middle-class businessmen.

So one thing is it’s wrong. But the other thing is that kind of talk — that this was just a bunch of stupid, uneducated oafs — that just merely confirmed their view that the people who were the elites had nothing but disdain for the people who were the real salt of the earth in America.

I experience that today. There’s a lot of attacks, for example, on Trump, as if he was stupid. I have no idea if he’s stupid or not, but I’m not sure that stupidity is the problem. There’s obviously many other forces, like the tremendous desire for power.

But I do suspect very strongly that if we ever got a real systematic tallying of who were members of these white supremacist groups, we would probably be surprised to find that they are just as well-educated as the average American.

I disagree with her later assertion, "a lot of liberal groups are really committed to proceeding in ways that are objective, that are looking at both sides of an issue." Seems to me that too many on either side are uninterested in understanding perspectives other than their own. That way lies madness.

Still, the article was interesting.

"This one has always fascinated me. "

That cover art is full-on "Kang and Kodos".

Let's hear again how only those who cross the right wing have to fear for their lives.

Retired Chicago firefighter, David Quintavalle, bears a striking resemblance to a Capitol rioter in a CFD hat, the one who threw a fire extinguisher.

After being outed on Twitter, Quintavalle received death threats, was called a "terrorist" and a "fucking murderer," and was stalked by the media. Turns out he was in a Chicago grocery store buying food for his wife's birthday dinner at the time of the riot. In addition, he had shaved his beard before Christmas. Luckily, Quintavalle saved his receipts - both from the grocery trip and from a trip to Home Depot the next day.

And the bearded guy in the CFD hat? He was retired Chester (PA) Fire Department firefighter, Robert Stanford. He's been arrested.

This is why we should not listen to mobs. That way lies madness.

There was some of that going on after Boston, too

Though I don't think the retribution machinery was quite as tightly coiled as it is today.

There was some of that going on after Boston, too ~ Crid at January 14, 2021 2:53 PM

There's always someone who wants to make death threats. I don't know why.

When he was on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth's home run record, Hank Aaron received death threats. When he was on the verge of breaking Lou Gehrig's iron man recored of consecutive games played, Cal Ripken, Jr. received death threats.

These threats were before the era of social media and the ability of psychotic loners to make their voices widely heard.

Maybe it's a power thing, the illusion of having power over someone.

I thought the Vox piece was terribly weak: The dialog between the interviewer and the academic, with their volleys repeatedly highlighted by their names in boldface text, was like a satire of dimwit, careerist journalistic traditions: Precisely what we should expect from Vox. They chat like a provincial schoolmarm patting the head of a favorite student, with the schoolchild spitting back flattery in return—

"I’m glad you brought up this perception that people either...."

"[S]everal off-duty police officers … the CEO of a Chicago-area tech company, the son of a Brooklyn judge, and more than a dozen state lawmakers" describes quite precisely who I'd have thought was involved in this riot— Especially when the link for the "CEO" identifies no one at all… Such that it might have been a guy who sold a few RS-232 connectors in Reagan's second term before selling out the garage "tech company" to his brother brother-in-law, the one who *wasn't* an alcoholic, and who was the majority owner anyway.

I'm from Indiana, which in the early twenties was almost literally governed by the Klan. Things had been pretty much mopped up by the Depression, though my mother knew some the people in that most famous photograph, if only in the Hey!-That's-Andy's-Mom-&-Dad!-kind of way. The genuine atrocity of race hatred needs no pornographic explication for me.

(For whatever reason, the bitter feeling stopped in her generation. When I asked both my mother and her sister, in their last hours of clarity, why that had happened, and why even their father had cleaned up his attitude before I was born, they both replied in as many words that "Times had changed," though both also gave credit to Christian faith.)

But when you look at the Vox page, you'll notice that ALL of the illustrative photos are from the 1920's… Except for the last two, perhaps a hundred hours old, but instructively presented in black & white to help Vox's readers experience the smug lineage of fearful, condescending continuity in their naive presumptions.

Fuck Vox with a stick.

2021 is not 1921, and it's pathetic to make your living pretending it is.

I thought the Vox piece was terribly weak:

Rereading it, the interview was kind of cloyingly pseudo intellectual.

Having studied the Klan in college, it was interesting reading the perspective of another author who wrote about them.

2021 is not 1921, and it's pathetic to make your living pretending it is. ~ Crid at January 14, 2021 3:56 PM

But they do have a lot in common; not in the Klan / white supremacy way, but the random violence way. The 1920s were pretty violent. The worst school massacre in the US occurred in 1927 - the Bath School bombing.

In 1919, anarchists launched a bombing campaign aimed at government offices and big business. The worst terrorist attack on US soil until 9/11 occurred in 1920 below JP Morgan's office on Wall Street. In fact, you can still see the holes the shrapnel made in the walls of 23 Wall Street. That bombing campaign was the impetus for the founding of the FBI.

There was a theory few years back that the US sees violence every 50 years. The 1920s were one of those violent periods with bombings, strikes, and anarchists. The 1970s were pretty rough, too. The 2020s are shaping up to be another period of violence.

I'd prefer to pretend that it's a precise 50-year interval, such that some of the wretchedness might be behind us, even if more might follow:

In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance.

I thought the Vox piece was terribly weak:

I was also struck by her observation that "progressive" elites in the 1920s tended to dismiss everyone who didn't agree with them as uneducated rubes. Plus ça change.

I'd prefer to pretend that it's a precise 50-year interval ~ Crid at January 14, 2021 5:46 PM

Unfortunately, I think it's more of a rough 50 year cycle.

We may be past the worst of it, or we may be in for much worse. The 1870s violence cycle started with John Brown in 1859 and went through to at least 1870; this one included the Civil War and the first-iteration Klan. The 1920s violence cycle started with a bombing campaign in 1919 and went through to the late '20s to the Great Depression. The 1970s violence cycle started in around the Democratic convention riots in 1968 and went though to the mid-70s. Now, the 2020 violence cycle has stared with street riots in the summer of 2020. Sadly, we probably have another 5 years to go.

Well, Crid, nut butters are tasty!

Here's a thing that I did not know. (There have been others.)

There's entertainment to be had from the scope and hues of paranoia in the replies.

> tasty!

And good fer 'em.

It is only beginning, Conan.

Once again the Democrats are talking about stuffing the Supreme Court.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democratic-senate-will-test-viability-of-expanding-courts-d-c-statehood-11610706600?mod=hp_listb_pos1

Now that the incoming president has a massive crisis of legitimacy why not expand that illegitimacy to the supreme court and other branches of government? Brilliant!

Always begin a comment with a countermand.

Now that the incoming president has a massive crisis of legitimacy...

Not among people who are grounded in reality.

Now that the incoming president has a massive crisis of legitimacy why not expand that illegitimacy to the supreme court and other branches of government? Brilliant! ~ Ben at January 15, 2021 7:11 AM

Massive?