"The great thing about 'Dont Look Back' is he is an asshole in that movie and there’s no effort to hide it."

"It’s endlessly delightful to me, even as I can acknowledge that I would have probably hated being around this guy if I were in that hotel room when he is screaming about who threw the glass."

Says Ian Grant, quoted in "What Do Dylanologists Think of ‘A Complete Unknown’? The writer Lucy Sante and the podcast host Ian Grant, both Bob Dylan experts, dissect the director James Mangold’s biopic starring Timothée Chalamet" (NYT).

And Lucy Sante responds that in the film "all about him hunching his shoulders and ignoring everybody to the left and to the right. That kind of works.... [but] you don’t get Dylan’s wit. The kind of conversation he was capable of having... you don’t get much of the sense of that mind."

Here's the "Dont Look Back" scene with the interrogation about the glass (and I'm just noticing for the first time that the movie title doesn't have an apostrophe):

"... I’m an asshole. Much like Sacha Baron Cohen is an asshole. Although unlike Sacha, I labour under no illusions about my assholeishness..."

"... and am fully resigned to my status. Sacha, on the other hand, is so sure that he is not an asshole that his 'representatives' have been trying to stop publication of a memoir by the Australian actress Rebel Wilson in which she claims that he is one. It’s classic Hollywood. Just the sort of classy bantz Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn got up to. Indeed, Wilson claims that Baron Cohen is more than just an asshole. She claims he is a 'massive asshole.' Which, to be fair, is no laughing matter. I think I am right in saying I am widely perceived only as 'a bit of an arsehole' (to anglicise the trope).... This story has perhaps gained the traction it has because of Wilson’s initial decision not to name Baron Cohen, but merely to reveal that her forthcoming memoir would contain tales of 'an asshole' with whom she once worked, followed by the later revelation that 'now the asshole is trying to threaten me … He’s hired lawyers … but the book WILL come out,' before finally revealing: 'The asshole that I am talking about in one chapter of my book is: Sacha Baron Cohen.'"

Writes Giles Coren, in "The real Sacha Baron Cohen has always been on show/Rebel Wilson may be right about the Borat creator, but being an ‘asshole’ is part of what makes him a comedy great" (London Times).

I'm giving this my "Streisand effect" tag!

"If nothing else, reflecting on the social roots of your political opinions and behavior should prompt some humility."

"Even if you hold the 'correct' political beliefs, you may not deserve to congratulate yourself for them; your moral righteousness could be an accident of birth or a product of good social fortune. So on what grounds are you permitted to feel snidely superior to your peers who — simply because of their different life circumstances — wound up on the other side of the political aisle?... The contingency of our own positions also raises the distinct possibility that others’ opinions contain overlooked elements of truth."

Writes sociology professor Neil Gross, in "When It Comes to Politics, Are Any of Us Really Thinking for Ourselves?" (NYT).

Another occasion to roll out the old adage, "All the assholes are over on the other side":

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap....

"Inside the hall, the three presidents sat in matching white armchairs and took the stage to strains of 'Born to Run' by Bruce Springsteen, the unofficial bard of the Democratic Party...."

I'm reading "4 Presidents, 2 Events and a Preview of Campaign Clashes to Come/President Biden raised $25 million at a Radio City Music Hall event, adding to his huge cash edge, after Donald Trump pushed his law-and-order message at a wake for a police officer killed on duty" (NYT).

Three Presidents were sitting in white armchairs before people who'd paid up to $500,000 apiece to sit in the audience in the most beautiful theater in the country. The comments over there are mostly about the fourth President. That guy, Mr. Trump, steals focus from everything.

Also stealing attention were the protesters at the 3-Presidents event. They were shouting "blood on your hands." Obama chided them: "You can’t just talk and not listen. That’s what the other side does." Seems to me protesters on Obama's side have interrupted more speeches than those on the other side. But it's subjective, and the old adage is as true as ever: All the assholes are over on the other side.

I suspect that Trump, on his own, is pleased that he inspires Biden to splutter dirty words.

I thought nothing of it when I saw — in Politico — that Biden, speaking in private, has called Trump a "sick fuck" and said "What a fucking asshole the guy is.” There is nothing the slightest bit surprising about this. I remember half a century ago, when people were surprised and censorious about Nixon's dirty words on the Watergate Tapes. But is there anyone sentient who didn't already know Biden says "fuck" in the White House?

But this morning I'm reading "Trump tells supporters 'Biden just called me a sick F-word!' in fundraising email" (NY Post). So Trump is making something out of it:

When Obama won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 — "It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America."

"How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one? Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened.... Trump has played on that resentment.... Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley 'Birdbrain.'... Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity...."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her column this week, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman" (NYT).

To repeat the question: "How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?" Does Dowd really believe it's all Trump's fault? Couldn't Obama himself have used his presidency more effectively and built American optimism? He promised hope, but why didn't he deliver more of it? Why did we end the Obama years with so much division and strife? Dowd puts no responsibility on Obama. It's all about the reactionaries — the countermovement that automatically follows any movement. It happens "every time." Dowd chooses to portray the American people as a machine, behaving mechanically — and perversely. And yet somehow it is Trump who is devoted to "tearing down faith in humanity." 

"Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds."

"I think, for example, of my fellow Post columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out as president of Harvard several years ago after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s. So while both sexes perform about as well on average, the women might tend to cluster near the middle, while the men are overrepresented at the bottom and the top — the latter being where elite programs draw from."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "The world could use more jerks" (WaPo).

The wrong masculinity.

The photo, the headline, and the caption say it all, don't you think? Must we go on to read this thing? I've come this far without reading it. Why are we called to loathe this man, Josh Hawley, as he "gestures toward a crowd of Donald Trump supporters"? 

Well, Josh Hawley wrote a book called "Manhood," so he's asking for it and I'll give you a little of what French has to say:

"AITA for participating in my neighborhood’s easter egg hunt that was meant for children?"

A hilarious "Am I the Asshole" posting gets cross-posted at "Am I the Devil" (a subreddit for cross-posting when it's obvious the answer is yes).

"This is one of those where I read the title and went 'I can't imagine how you could not be the asshole' and then read the post and went '....oh.' "

"NTA. I am not normally a scene-making person, but this is the kind of thing that making a scene is for. I am not normally one for publicly shaming someone but this is what public shame is for. Sometimes someone's behavior is so far beyond the pale that the kindest and most righteous act for everyone else involved is to make a goddamn scene."

Top-voted comment at "AITA for telling my SIL no [one] cares that she’s pregnant" at the subreddit "Am I the Asshole?"

"It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would."

"It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology."

Tweeted Richard Dawkins at 1:26 a.m., and I think that's why "eugenics" is trending on Twitter this morning. He followed up, an hour ago, with this: "For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it."

Here's #eugenics — in case you want to see what people are saying right now. It's a slog to get through all the many people who are saying I see eugenics is trending. I'll just cherry-pick some good substantive stuff (which sounds kind of eugenics-y!):

"The thing about people who believe in eugenics is that they always believe themselves to be the superior kind of human. No-one ever thinks that it could make *people like them* obsolete..." (Joanne Harris).

"I mean, the biggest problem with Richard Dawkins take on eugenics is that he'd probably consider his own traits to be superior and then the world would be full of insufferable assholes" (Nick Jack Pappas).

"While Richard Dawkins is a noted biologist, his science on eugenics is bad. We turned magnificent wolves into pure breed dogs with severe genetic defects causing joint and heart problems and cancer. In fact, many Cavalier spaniels develop mitral valve and neurological disorders"/"Eugenics does not create superior species. We turned mighty buffalo herds roaming the plains into factory farmed cows, the independent stallion into the pony, and the wild boar into the pig. We weaken the gene pool selecting for traits desirable for us but not for the subject" (Eugene Gu MD).

"All of Dawkins’ tweets make more sense if you add '... Mr Bond' at the end of them" (Ned Hartley).

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker re-named the state capitol "holiday tree" the "Christrmas tree," and the new governor, Tony Evers, renamed it back to "holiday tree"... and declared that it would "celebrate... science."

Students are always invited to make ornaments for this tree, and this year, the invitation — from the Governor — was "to make holiday ornaments that celebrate what science means to them, their families and their communities" — HuffPo reports.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald called it “‘PC’ garbage,” while Assembly Speaker Robin Vos tweeted: “We all know it’s a Christmas tree no matter what @GovEvers calls it.”

But Walker had the biggest reaction, firing off multiple tweets, including these...

You'd expect something really harshly judgmental to follow, but it's just a photo of a very conventional Christmas tree in a private residence and the line "This is a Christmas Tree that is used by people celebrating Christmas 🎄 / This is not a holiday tree." There's a second tweet: "Type this word on your iPhone and look what emoji comes up: Christmas 🎄" — which seems to be a new form of the kind of quip that goes if you look X up in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of Y.

The HuffPo article proceeds to embed 12 tweets reacting to Scott Walker. 11 are from "blue check mark" people. The best one is the one that's not a blue check marker: "Oh, is it War on Christmas season again? Already? It seems to start earlier every year... 🙄"

I'll just feature the blue check mark person Matthew Dowd — because I have a tag for him and because he's using that asshole tactic of being informative:

You do know that trees were stolen from a pagan holiday? And Christ wasn’t actually born on December 25th? It was a day celebrated by Roman pagans and taken over by the church in the fourth century. And that many faiths put up trees that aren’t Christians.

Stolen! Does Matthew Dowd know that stollen is a traditional German fruit and nut cake that is popular in Wisconsin during the Christmas season? Does Matthew Dowd understand that all culture and tradition is handed down and borrowed and adapted and that it sounds very mean to say "stolen" and it's triggering when the homophone "stollen" is the very cake we share amongst ourselves at Christmastime in the hinterlands of Wisconsin?


CC-Ulrich van Stipriaan

HuffPo has nothing about the science theme given to — imposed on — the children this year. The tree becomes a free-speech forum for the children, and it would violate free speech to have viewpoint discrimination, so how can there be a science limitation on the ornaments? Presumably, the ornaments will be accepted even if they express the idea that "what science means to them" is that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so you could believe in him and have everlasting life.

Has the Tony Evers science tree attracted any litigation? I haven't looked. I hope not. Can't we all be generous and kind during the dark cold weeks that are so well stocked with holidays... like raisins in stollen?

"Warren’s same-sex marriage quip captures what some find exciting — and others distressing — about her."

A WaPo headline. Text:

About 90 minutes into Thursday’s forum on LGBTQ issues in Los Angeles, a gay rights leader posed a question to Sen. Elizabeth Warren: How would she respond if a voter approached her and said, “I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman?”

Warren (D-Mass.) responded with a theatrical seriousness. “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she deadpanned, pausing a beat for the audience to catch the joke. Then she added, “And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman — I’m cool with that.’ ”

She finished with a zinger: “ ‘Assuming you can find one.’ ”

After landing her punchline, Warren turned, took a few steps and smiled broadly as the room exploded in laughter. Her response went viral online, and by Friday afternoon, Warren’s campaign team, which rarely brags about such things, was crowing that the clip had garnered more than 12 million views on Twitter.

It didn't just get views. It garnered them.

So she's kind of a secret asshole? "Assuming you can find one." She had to add that. She could have stopped at the conventional light-hearted way to respond to this problem, which is that if you don't believe in same-sex marriage, then don't get same-sex married. (It's like if you think abortion is wrong, don't have an abortion.) That is, she could have stopped at "Then just marry one woman." Question answered. "I’m cool with that" is a breezy, cheerful touch. And that seems to be our Elizabeth, the nice lady. But another side popped out. She demeaned the imagined man: "Assuming you can find one."

How did that happen? Was it because she was speaking to a specific crowd that could be expected to scarf up a quip like that? They've been down so long it's time for them to have fun kicking around an imaginary man, a faceless, generic entity with traditional morality. That guy! It's fun to give him hell. If she were really nice, she wouldn't have thought of kicking him after denying him his way. He knows — this imaginary man — he knows he lost the same-sex marriage fight years ago. But her instinct was not to offer him a way to get along in a society where the law will not enforce his morality, but to taunt him about whether any woman would ever want him.

She kind of called him an incel.

"Is this really true? Did you really pack up your mother-in-law's things and lock her out after she gave you the house? Umm yeah, YTA."

A clear response at r/AmItheAsshole.

I'm a big fan of r/AmItheAsshole and have read all the entries for the last few weeks. Usually, it's more of a conundrum or it's somebody who needs and deserves assurance that they are not the asshole. But this one takes the cake. I kind of especially enjoy when a true asshole posts with what looks like the expectation that they are not the asshole. I have a natural inclination to defend the absent party, so I like when someone who thinks they're right is met with a response that understands the other perspective and represents it well.

UPDATE: Reddit moderators have taken the post down and locked the comments over there. They explain:

You want assholes to post on this subreddit? How about next time you don't eviscerate OP in the comments. I don't care how much you think they're the worst, be fucking civil on this sub.

And in case you're one of those people wondering, "Why am I suppose to be civil in a sub about assholes?!" Read this.

From that:

I’m supposed to “Be Civil” in a sub about “assholes”?

• Yes. For the purposes of this subreddit, “asshole” is not a bad word or an insult.
• The purpose of this subreddit has always been to help people see where they may have been in the wrong. It’s not about calling someone “an asshole” it’s about finding who “the asshole” is in a situation.
• The title of this subreddit is not an invitation for you to be cruel. Treat others with respect, no matter how big of an asshole they may be.
• We are ALL "The Asshole" at one point or another in this lifetime. Please remember this when you comment here.

The "Who's on first?" of dog names.

"While extremely high I decided that the greatest dog name ever thought of is Askim, because when people ask me his name and I tell them about 50% of the time they’ll awkwardly bend down and ask my dog it’s [sic] name. It’s hilarious...." That is from the amusing subreddit Am I the Asshole?

Once you know people don't like your joke, is it okay to keep having your fun?

"But as John Stuart Mill argued, those who have never 'thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently … do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.' "

"It seems natural to conclude that the social role of philosophers is to help people think things through by confronting them with counterarguments to their current views. But since there’s no way to do that in a non-philosophical context without coming off as an arsehole, there’s no way for a philosopher to be a good citizen without having the courage to look like a bad one. Which brings us, with inexorable familiarity, to the figure of Socrates, who injected philosophical reason into the Athenian body politic and got sentenced to death for his troubles. 'The modes of trolling are many,' writes Rachel Barney in her wonderful mock-Aristotelian treatise, 'On Trolling.' Characteristic techniques include treating small problems as if they were large ones, disputing what everyone knows to be true, criticizing what everyone knows to be admirable and masking hostility with claims of friendship. If that sounds like the kind of thing Socrates got up to, this is no accident—for like Socrates, the troll claims 'that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to "stir up" the thread it would become dull and unintelligent.' The difference, says Barney, is that while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls. The troll, by contrast, intentionally aims to generate 'confusion and strife among a community who really agree,' whether for amusement or for profit or for partisan gain. Socrates was a philosopher, in other words; the troll is just an arsehole. Yet there is surely a sense in which Socrates was trying to generate confusion and strife among Athenians (and hence, from a certain perspective, to 'corrupt the youth')...."

From "On Being an Arsehole: A defense" by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).

"I've got the 'spergers and I thought it was hilarious. Don't take it so seriously."

Comment on a Reddit discussion about the episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (Season 9, Episode 6, "Namaste") in which Larry David claims to have Asperger's syndrome to avoid retribution from a man who was offended that Larry said "You're black!" to him when he met him in person after speaking to him on the telephone. Larry got the idea after encountering a kid who he was told has Asperger's but might just be an "asshole."

Another commenter said:

It was a bit cringy to me due to having kids on the spectrum. My wife went a bit silent during those scenes and I could tell it was bothering her as well. We struggle a lot with both of them, especially with school. And our lives are really stressful, it's nice to take a break and watch some curb. But then it was a bit of a gut punch seeing comedy based on your children's disabilities. =(

"Here’s something I do: If you’re in the process of interviewing with us..."

"... I’ll text you about something at 9 p.m. or 11 a.m. on a Sunday just to see how fast you’ll respond."

"I’m usually not afraid to make myself look bad."

"Somebody came up to me recently and said — I wrote it down exactly because I’d never heard anybody say it, and I wasn’t hurt when she said it, I just thought, Oh, that’s interesting — 'I think part of your charm is that you’re kind of a [expletive]. You’re not a complete [expletive], but you’re kind of one.' I think you would take that stuff out if you were that concerned with your image, but when you leave it in, then most people will think, Oh — he’s like me."

From the "condensed and edited" interview David Sedaris did with the NYT Magazine interviewer Ana Marie Cox.

Sedaris is promoting the book that I've already read (non-consecutively) at least twice: "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)."

ADDED: Doing the tags for this post, I was assuming the deleted expletive was "asshole," but I see the article "a," so I'm going to assume it's "shit."

"Climbers I find are assholes at the end of the day!"

Said a climbing partner of Ueli Steck, greatest mountain climber in the world, who recently fell to his death near Mount Everest. The quote appears in a short New Yorker piece by Nick Paumgarten, who expresses surprise that Steck "had returned to a place he disdained for its crowds and its bitter base-camp politics." Back in 2013, he'd had to abandon an Everest climb:

He and his climbing partner that year, the Italian Simone Moro, had got into a dispute with a group of Sherpas who were fixing ropes on the Lhotse Face and felt that the climbers were endangering them. Moro called one of them a “motherfucker” in Nepali, a grave insult. A group of Sherpas later attacked Steck and Moro with rocks, at Camp 2. The climbers, convinced that their lives were in danger, fled down the Khumbu Icefall.

Paumgarten quotes Steck's own description of his personality, and I invite you to consider this as an account of how it feels, from the inside, to be what they call an asshole:

I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.

I am a public figure. This has gradually happened and I can no longer change it. I have accepted it and the only thing I can do is change my attitude. I have sacrificed some of the lightness of being for it. It doesn’t bother me as long as I can still follow my path. I can no longer do what I want, and I am aware of it, but I still can lead a life, which makes me feel happy and content in the evenings.

I still need the liberty to do the things I love doing, though. I don’t worry about other people, and I don’t let them influence me too much. I try to find out what I want to do, and not what other people want me to do.