Tim Walz’s daughter announced that she was accepted into a graduate school but has decided not to attend, stating that as a “privileged white woman,” she does not want to support institutions that fail to protect student protesters. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/F995YVHPrl
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) March 30, 2025
Nothing more privileged than choosing to do nothing. She's just doing nothing for a year. But that's okay. She's "not really in a rush."
I wonder which institution "said institution" was. It would help in understanding how much of a sacrifice this is. In some cases, an ambitious person, who can afford to take a year off, could do things to bolster her credentials and gain access to a more prestigious school. Why, this public declining of an offer is itself a credential! Especially in some fields... so I have to wonder what she majored in, undergrad. Sociology? I looked it up. It was indeed sociology! And a minor in women’s gender and sexuality studies.
So, great viral video. Great audition tape.
I remember when feminism involved seeing woman as the victim, but now we see young women contemptuous of that viewpoint and not worried about whether I would be protected.
They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:
This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3
But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."
Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.
If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.
"... in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s 'remixing' of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on 'a shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on' to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of 'us.' ... [Roy writes] 'Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings'.... Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of 'Westernization' is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and 'Succession,' what’s actually ascendant are 'weak identities' constructed through that 'collection of tokens.' It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. 'You do you,' they say...."
Rothman writes "I’m one of those people who is 'spiritual, but not religious'" — people who is?!! I'm one of those people who remember when The New Yorker had a noble tradition of meticulous editing. Has that degenerated into a nonculture of if it sounds good, write it? But we've already analyzed this grammar issue and come up with the answer. It's a rule. If you don't follow it, your venerable institution is crumbling. You're just a random collection of scribblers who happen to publish under the same cover.
Rothman's last paragraph gestures at the struggle over immigration that's roiled American politics:
The article is by Joel Achenbach, who cites this study:
Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 Boy Scouts and separated them into two groups camping at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Only after a week did they learn that there was another group at the far end of the campground.What they did next fascinated the research team. Each group developed irrational contempt for the other. The boys in the other group were seen not just as rivals, but as fundamentally flawed human beings. Only when the two groups were asked to work together to solve a common problem did they warm up to one another.
Ironically, the top comments over there are about how Republicans are fundamentally flawed human beings.
Presidential advisers said the term was a reference to Norbert Elias, the 20th century German sociologist who described how self-restraint and social inhibitions had civilised Europe, first in royal courts and then among the rest of the population, in his book The Civilizing Process.
This resonates with me because I once used the word "civilized" in the presence of sociologists and experienced the iciest silence of my entire life. Used it jocosely... I'd thought.
Macron is said to believe the process has gone into reverse in what one adviser called a “Trumpisation of minds and a denial of reality”.
Trump gets blame for what the left is doing... in France.
"They reported that, on tests, creative people preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images. ... [T]hose preferences also happened to match up with the tastes of the mid-century educated classes. To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.... [In 'The Cult of Creativity,' Samuel W.] Franklin argues that the appeal of workplace creativity was that it addressed two anxieties about modern life: conformity and alienation. Postwar intellectuals worried about the 'organization man' (the title of a book by the journalist William Whyte) and the 'other-directed' personality (diagnosed in the sociologist David Riesman’s 'The Lonely Crowd'). These were seen as socially dangerous types. People who did what they were told and who wanted to be like everyone else, who were not 'inner-directed,' were people easily recruited to authoritarian movements...."
You might wonder how Menard argues his way to the notion that "now we're stuck with" individualism and nonconformity. I can't quote the whole article, but it has to do with capitalism capitalizing on the concept of creativity. As Franklin puts it: "The concept of creativity never actually existed outside of capitalism."
"... versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. 'Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!' Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email."
I was surprised that the research chair in social neuroendocrinology used an exclamation point! But what is social neuroendocrinology? I don't know! Is it more like sociology?
Here's something from a clearly identified sociologist:
There was a lot of talk about soul — one big soul— "The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God." And a "sacred flame" of liberty that "lit our way" and "still burns" and "will guide us forward." It took a Biblical tone against those who "live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies."
There's lots of material at that Wikipedia article, I'll just copy the 14 principle tenets identified by political sociologist Anthony Squiers:
"There is an incredible contempt and disdain for all kinds of politics just because Russians are completely certain that there is no possible way to change anything through politics, that no change is possible in general. So for that reason, people prefer to lead their private lives. They have opportunities to do that because most of them are better off under Putin. Any kind of political activity is all just complete nonsense to a vast majority of Russians. If you believe in extraterrestrials, that’s at least interesting. If you are into politics, you’re silly. Particularly for people in business, that’s a complete no go. I always say the best way to spoil the party is to start talking about politics in Russia. You will never be invited again.... The vast majority is either in denial of what is going on in Ukraine or assume this attitude of passive support that the narrative produced by the state is enough for them to keep leading their everyday lives.... The TV show House was actually incredibly popular in Russia precisely because the motto is 'Everyone lies.' This is so to the point with what Russians feel. Everyone lies. There’s no truth at all. It’s endless relativism. And the media was saying all the time that you should never trust anyone, including the media, of course...."
"... religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career.
However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.... When [the] elites criticize religion, they often do so on the grounds that faith (in their eyes) is irrational and not evidence-based.
But one can agree with the liberal critique of conservatism’s moral and political goals while still acknowledging that religion orders the lives of millions of Americans — and that it might offer social benefits...."
The article is by Ilana M. Horwitz, "an assistant professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Tulane University and the author of 'God, Grades, and Graduation.'" Focusing on Christian denominations , she "followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016."
Talking to NYT readers — the highly educated, professional/managerial people — Horwitz seems to be saying: Don't be so dismissive of religion, because it may be the best substitute for the privilege that benefits you. Religion is practical. Not for you, of course, because you don't have the need. But for the others.
Doesn't that sound more elitist than looking down on religion?
Speaking of wanting to do things that work, it's not practical to disparage religious people... at least when the cameras are running.
ADDED: You may sacrifice educational and career opportunities if you prioritize parenthood, altruism, and service to God, but you may sacrifice parenthood, altruism, and service to God, if you prioritize educational and career opportunities.
"... that the growth of factories and cities, and the movement from farms and towns, was leaving people isolated and alone. Over the next century, all sorts of thinkers, from the Romantics, De Tocqueville and Marx to Hegel and the utopian socialists, agreed that something called 'society' was coming apart.... In a 1953 book called The Quest for Community, the American sociologist Robert Nisbet lamented the modern state’s 'successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances.'... Nisbet, the man who quested for community, was something of a misanthrope. At home, he liked to watch Gunsmoke on the family’s black-and-white television, play croquet with his kids and potter in his rose garden. He went to church only at his wife’s insistence. He did not enjoy society. 'I very much like individuals,' he’d say, adapting a quote from Linus Van Pelt in a 1959 issue of the Charles Schulz comic strip Peanuts. 'It’s people I can’t stand!' There is no such thing as society, Thatcher would say later. There are only individuals. Thatcherism, in the end, came from Charlie Brown. Conservatives had long placed their faith not in society, but in the free market. But the gap between liberalism and conservatism closed in the 1950s, when liberal intellectuals, terrified at the prospect of a collapse of liberal democracies into totalitarianism, lost faith in the idea of society and abandoned their commitment to social democracy.... Instead, they strove to protect the individual, and the individual’s ability to make choices, as if the act of choosing, and the market-driven rhetoric of choice, could inoculate the masses against becoming a mass...."
"They saunter down the sidewalks and sleep in the streets. Some eat from the hands of humans, and they all eat from the trash.... 'It became like an everyday thing,' said Eugene Notkov, 35, a chef who lets his dog play with the boars that putter around the local parks. 'They’re a part of our city'.... Bumping into one is 'like seeing a squirrel.'...'I wish we could all in Israel learn to live like they live in Haifa,' said Edna Gorney, a poet, ecologist and lecturer at the University of Haifa. 'It’s an example of coexistence — not only between Arabs and Jews, but also between humans and wildlife.'... 'They are controlling the streets now,' said Assaf Schechter, 43, a port worker confronted recently by a boar on his porch. 'It’s a very crazy situation.'... 'At night, I would go out, after a drink, and recycle the beer,' Professor Malkinson said. 'It’s two for the price of one — you fertilize the trees and you try to deter the wild boars... Essentially the conflict is between those who oppose having wild boars in the city and those who don’t... It’s not an ecological problem... It’s a social problem.'"
I'm reading this because it's being criticized on Twitter by some people I follow (Titania McGrath and James Lindsey). Graham identifies himself as an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology and Coordinator of Old Dominion University's Cybercrime Program.
Here is a list of some black intellectuals who are skeptical of claims of systemic racism:
Wilfred Reilly Thomas Chatterton Williams Jason Reilly Coleman Hughes John McWhorter Glenn Loury
For lack of a better term, I will call this the "integrated" group. This group...
That's 1/15, so let me just quote the rest. Boldface added and paragraph breaks changed. "Modal" in sociology — according to the OED — means "representative" or "typical":
Twenty years ago, Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, published "Bowling Alone," which documented how Americans had become increasingly disconnected from one another; how participation in social and community organizations, from bridge clubs to churches, had plummeted; and how norms of reciprocity, honesty, and trust had steadily declined across society.... [Putnam's] new book, “The Upswing”... argues that increasing levels of social solidarity in the course of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, followed by a sharp decline at the end of it, largely track with a number of other important trends, including the country’s degree of political polarization.... Economic mobility stalled [in the 1960s], community and family ties frayed, and American culture turned inward, losing focus on the common good. He labels this pattern the “I-we-I” curve, arguing that America clambered from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” ethos, only to revert back.
In Putnam’s work, Biden might find a road map for national restoration, one that involves collective effort and a fostering of a collective American identity. “No one party, no one policy or platform, and no one charismatic leader was responsible for bringing about America’s upswing as we entered the twentieth century,” Putnam writes. “It was, instead, countless citizens engaging in their own spheres of influence and coming together to create a vast ferment of criticism and change––a genuine shift from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Similarly, it is wishful thinking to imagine that Biden, or any single individual, could engender a movement for the common good. But, if anything has been made plain by the Trump era, it is that the Presidency offers a megaphone to shape the broader culture. A narcissistic President drives a narcissistic culture. A movement toward “We” in America could start with a President less focussed on “I.”
ADDED: Reading this out loud for the podcast, I realized I put it up because I thought it was bland and unbelievable. I don't think Trump makes people narcissistic, and he actually does "foster[] a collective American identity." He's all about the brand "America," and the people who like him seem quite happy and inspired about that.
"In other words we've become acculturated to a weak and stigmatized social safety net. Every situation becomes a zero-sum event. In those circumstances, we have to be wary of every new face, we have to arm ourselves to defend against crimes that we know the police can't prevent, we have to have AR-15s to be ready for the rebellion of the poor and nihilists we see looming just behind the Black Lives Matter protests, we have to protect our property values and our children from incursions of undesirables, and we have to hoard our advantages to meet yet-unimagined contingencies. Paranoia is the central thread of the pathology."
Krugman's idea is: "Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account. This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call 'freedom' is actually absence of responsibility. Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility.... Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness...."
I looked up "sacralized" in the OED. It's a good word, based on "sacred," but making it clear that human beings have endowed something with sacred significance. Krugman used "sacralized" as a verb (in the past tense), and that's been around since its introduction — in sociological anthropology — since 1899. "Sacralized" as an adjective has been around since 1979, and the OED gives 2 historical examples, the second of which is a little surprising in its disrespect for minority religions:
1986 P. B. Clarke Black Paradise vi. 81 Rastafarians also present themselves..as a chosen race, along the same lines as the Jews; this, some may argue, is simply a sacralized form of racism.
If Republicans have sacralized selfishness, what have Democrats sacralized?
"'If this succeeds, the first casualty will be jantelagen,' Annie said. 'We’ll be so pleased with ourselves.' Yet as the death toll rises, a significant number of people believe Sweden may have made a fatal error of judgment.... The state claims that the curve of infections has flattened. But as the weather warms up there are fears that the numbers will rise sharply if partygoers ignore the rules. For Plan B and other venues, their future livelihood may depend on their ability to enforce social distancing while still holding public events. 'I hope they don’t impose more rules,' said Ellen. 'Otherwise the summer could be ruined.'"
Jantelagen — I'd never heard of that! It means the Law of Jante. Jante is the name of a fictionalized town in a novel by Aksel Sandemose called "A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks." Sandemose — who was was Dano-Norwegian — was satirizing the culture of Nordic countries. Sandemose identified 10 rules these people were following:
"... when we peel off the mask. Today, we’re front-stage in so many ways and across so many platforms that it’s utterly exhausting. We perform the just-right kind of politics. (See my latest tweet about the latest outrage!) We perform our perfect vacations and Tuesday night cocktails. (Look at my Instagram, and note that you, dear follower, were not invited to those cocktails!) We perform our brilliant professional identities, networking and hustling during hours once devoted to relaxation. Built into any front-stage setting is the expectation that we’ll project happiness, confidence, success. Depression is, by definition, a backstage emotion. It’s private, idiosyncratic, isolating. Those comedians who’ve elected to discuss it are still giving performances, ultimately, working off careful scripts and landing their punch lines; they aren’t climbing onstage and actually being depressed for us.... 'I think people are sick of everyone promoting their best selves,' Gulman, 49, told me... 'I mean, comedians were always self-deprecating, but even Rodney Dangerfield’s self-deprecation was so clearly a lie. He’s saying he doesn’t get any respect, but he’s hosting an HBO show. Everyone admired him, was in awe of him.'"
Gulman says that Rodney Dangerfield's self-deprecating "no respect" act was "so clearly a lie," because he was so successful. Really? I wrote some jokes for Rodney, and knew him a bit. Rodney's self-deprecation was anything but a lie. He felt lousy about himself, and was clinically depressed his entire life. Should he have talked about his deep depression onstage? Perhaps, but it was a different time. Or perhaps his "no respect" act was a bit too subtle for Mr. Gulman. Because despite his public success, that's the way Rodney really saw himself, and in his way, worked it out onstage and turned it into making millions of people happy. RIP, Rodney. We miss you.
"... their penchant for collaboration. But there are troubling signs too—a victim mentality, an intolerance of viewpoint diversity, a distrust of institutions, a wariness about human nature, an aversion to risk, a cynicism about the whole American experiment.... Politically and ideologically, Mosaics are a tsunami-in-waiting. Four million will turn 18 this year. Another four million next year. And so on, for as far as the eye can see. If you’re wondering why the new guard of the Democratic Party has put forward such an audacious agenda this year—wealth tax, carbon-neutral economy, tuition-free college, Medicare for All, universal child care, racial reparations—wonder no more. They’re racing left to keep pace with their future base, which wants leaders who shoot for the moon... The drought in social trust among the young is especially worrisome. In a fast-paced entrepreneurial economy, trust is the grease that keeps the gears from grinding. In an increasingly pluralistic society, it’s the glue that holds the mosaic together. In a self-governing democracy, it’s a rationale for voting and predicate for pragmatic compromise. Why are Mosaics so distrustful?"
"Mosaics" is Taylor's word for the post-millennial generation. The idea is that these people "want to live in a society where boundaries of race, gender, and sexual orientation are porous, and everyone is free to be whoever he/she/they wants." It's not about Moses, it's about the artwork made up of lots of individual tiles...
(Mosaic of female athletes playing ball at the Villa Romana del Casale of Piazza Armerina, 4th century AD.)
By the way — I just learned this — the word "mosaic," for the artwork, is not derived from the name Moses. It goes back to the Medieval Latin musaicum ‚ "mosaic work, work of the Muses." It's about Muses, not Moses.
"Later volumes included 'We Are All Multiculturalists Now' in 1997 and 'From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City' in 2007.... A child of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Nathan Glazer was born on Feb. 25, 1923, in New York City and spent his early years in East Harlem. His father, Louis, was a garment worker, and his mother, Tilly, was a homemaker. Nathan was the youngest of seven children, and when he was 10, the family, which was crammed into a four-room apartment, moved to the wider spaces of the East Bronx. Mr. Glazer’s interest in urban affairs stemmed directly from personal experience, and his upbringing had an impact on his later ideas. His East Harlem tenement block, dominated by the iron structures of elevated trains, had no trees or green strips. It was, Mr. Glazer once said, a 'bad place to live.' Only a few blocks away was Central Park, where a boy could lose himself in the meadows and woodlands, enjoying a respite from the city’s noise and grime. For Mr. Glazer, the park was a 'wonder' of childhood, and in years to come, when some urban planners challenged Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of a pastoral retreat within a crowded city, he spoke out in Olmsted’s defense.... Mr. Glazer’s turn to neoconservatism followed an almost paradigmatic path. Throughout the 1950s, and even after he went to work for the Kennedy administration’s Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1962-63, he continued to consider himself a radical. But if, as his longtime friend Irving Kristol put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then Mr. Glazer got hit over the head...."
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