Is it blue or is it green?
My ex-husband and I used to have a running argument about colors.
Before you say “no wonder you got divorced—what an asinine thing to argue about!”—let me just say that it wasn’t a hostile battle. It was a mild, intermittent, slightly silly, tongue-in-cheek-but-a-bit-serious-as-well disagreement about blue vs. green.
We agreed on some things. For example, this was undoubtedly green:
And this was blue as blue could be:
Ah, but those gradations and shades in between! Where oh where to draw the line?
The distinctions between colors are not arbitrary, but neither are they exact. And since the names of colors also are not infinite, we have to make decisions about categories of color and where they end.
When does green segue into blue, and back again? One individual can choose a different point than another—as can entire cultures and people in different language groups.
My ex-husband and I were from the same culture, but he was a man and I a woman (still are, in fact). Did that matter? Men are more likely to be color-blind, but that was not the case with my ex-husband. He could see colors well enough, as could I. Our differences had to do with naming them.
If you think that the naming of colors is a simple thing, you would think wrong. Think about those endless paint sample cards in the hardware store, and all those fine gradations between hues, and then think of the people who have jobs coming up with names like “Amazon Moss” and “Champion Cobalt”
Wiki lets us know how different cultures see it:
Different cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color terms to slightly different parts of the human color space: for instance, the Chinese character é’ (rendered as qÄ«ng in Mandarin and ao in Japanese) has a meaning that covers both blue and green; blue and green are traditionally considered shades of “é’.” In more contemporary terms, they are è— (lé¡n, in Mandarin) and ç¶ (lÇœ, in Mandarin) respectively. Japanese also has two terms that refer specifically to the color green, ç¶ (midori which is derived from the classical Japanese descriptive verb midoru ‘to be in leaf, to flourish’ in reference to trees) and グリーン (guriin, which is derived from the English word ‘green’). However, in Japan, although the traffic lights have the same colored lights that other countries have, the green light is called using the same word for blue, “aoi”, because green is considered a shade of aoi, similarly green variants of certain fruits and vegetable such as green apples, green shiso (as opposed to red apples and red shiso) will be described with the word “aoi”.
Lest you think these strange distinctions are an Asian thing, remember that English has its oddities as well; we just don’t think of them as odd at all:
Similarly, languages are selective when deciding which hues are split into different colors on the basis of how light or dark they are. English splits some hues into several distinct colors according to lightness: such as red and pink or orange and brown. To English speakers, these pairs of colors, which are objectively no more different from one another than light green and dark green, are conceived of as belonging to different categories. A Russian will make the same red-pink and orange-brown distinctions, but will also make a further distinction between sinii and goluboi, which English speakers would simply call dark and light blue. To Russian speakers, sinii and goluboi are as separate as red and pink or orange and brown.
I never thought of pink as light red. But of course it is.
Garland confirms no one who participated in January 6th has been charged with insurrection
Or rather, he sort of confirms it:
But, when asked by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) if any of the individuals who have been arrested for participating in the riot have been charged with “insurrection,” Garland told him “I don’t believe so.”
“Has any defendant involved in the January 6th events been charged with insurrection?” Gohmert asked.
“I don’t believe so,” Garland responded.
Garland is the AG of the United States, the head of the DOJ. He doesn’t “believe so”? He’s not sure? He hasn’t made it his business to know?
The question he was asked was not a deep philosophical one, it was a factual either/or. The answer is “no, no one been charged with insurrection – even though we would dearly love to do so – because we lack evidence for a charge of insurrection.”
But he couldn’t even find it in his heart to say that.
Alec Baldwin and the prop gun
Alec Baldwin has been a vociferous advocate of stricter gun control, but yesterday he fired a prop gun on a movie set, unintentionally killing the cinematographer and seriously injuring the director.
I’ve read quite a few opinion pieces that assume he was handling the prop gun negligently and may have been joking around. That should never be done with a firearm even if it’s only a prop.
But we don’t actually know the circumstances under which the gun was discharged. Was it part of filming a scene, or rehearsing for a scene? If so, and Baldwin was following the usual protocol, then I don’t see that he has any culpability. If he really was fooling around, that is a completely different story, even if there was contributory negligence on the part of the prop people who prepared the gun.
There have been deaths on movie sets as a result of the firing of prop guns before. The most famous was that of Brandon Lee. You can read the details here. In that case, a scene was being filmed and a prop gun had been prepared (by the crew, not the actor) in an inadvertently dangerous manner. There was also the death of Jon-Eric Hexum, who jokingly pointed a prop gun at his head, pulled the trigger, and was killed by a blank fired at such close range.
It seems to me that respect for the potential destructive power of even prop guns should be drilled into the heads of all actors and crew members on a set, and they should get serious training about this. That’s particularly true if someone isn’t familiar with firearms in the real world. Even with such training, accidents will happen if the gun isn’t prepared properly, as in the death of Brandon Lee.
I assume more facts will come out about Baldwin in due order.
RIP.
ADDENDUM: I just read a report that the gun had one live round loaded into it. That sounds like an error by the prop people. But if that’s true, what would live rounds be doing on the set?
Open thread 10/22/21
Are the Democrats afraid of losing an election?
Nonapod writes:
The administration seems to be behaving awfuly brazenly (or brazenly awful) for a president with such evidently low approval ratings. I guess they don’t care that so many people hate them? They just keep doubling down. They’ve all but openly declared war on American citizens. It’s surreal.
I believe that they don’t care all that much, for several reasons.
The first is that they learned from Obamacare that if they push through an unpopular program by hook or crook, it becomes very hard to dislodge. So they will push through programs they think benefit and enhance their own power, whether the people want them or don’t want them. It is all about power.
The second is that they think they have control of all the institutions, and that their propaganda machines will be able to calm down enough people that they can continue with their power grabs.
The third is that they think they can control the voting process in their favor. There are many many avenues for this. One is of course MSM propaganda, another is the control of social media (see for example this recent announcement about Google and YouTube). Another is weaponizing the DOJ and lawfare. Another is the ability to win elections by fraud, especially elections that are at all close.
In light of all this, I’m actually somewhat surprised that the Biden approval polls have gone down as much as they have. Of course, I think that Biden’s approval ratings should be around 1% at this point (or at any point, actually). But I realize how strong the Democrats’ propaganda machine remains.
The real question is whether reality will be stronger, and whether that will happen soon enough to avoid further disaster.
Condi Rice on CRT
Condi Rice spoke about CRT during an appearance on the TV show “The View”:
“My parents never thought I was going to grow up in a world without prejudice, but they also told me, ‘That’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You’re going to overcome it and you are going to be anything you want to be,'” Rice said. “That’s the message that I think we ought to be sending to kids.”
“One of the worries that I have about the way that we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow White people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past – I don’t think that’s very productive – or Black people have to feel disempowered by race,” she added.
“I would like Black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their Blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make White kids feel bad for being White,” she said….
“It goes back to how we teach the history. We teach the good and we teach the bad of history. But what we don’t do is make 7- and 10-year-olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin,” she added. “We’ve been through that, and we don’t need to do that again for anyone.”
These sentiments used to be mainstream for people who are black or white or mixed, right or left, Democrat or Republican. Now they are much less so, and therefore when someone such as Condoleezza Rice utters them it makes news.
And although I haven’t looked at the reaction to her statements on social media, my guess is that a great many on the left will insult and ridicule her because after all she’s just a Republican, which makes her another “black face of white supremacy.”
Open thread 10/21/21
Drew Barrymore, age 7, on the Johnny Carson show, discoursing on the subject of teeth:
Democrats propose more spying on your bank account
They’re now talking about the triggering amount being $10K:
Democrats are vowing to crack down on tax cheats by giving banks new requirements to disclose to the IRS accounts that have total annual inflows or withdrawals of at least $10,000.
The plan would help fund President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar economic agenda, potentially raising $700 billion and reducing the need for tax increases to offset the cost of new social spending. Democrats say this plan to catch tax evasion by the wealthy and boost federal revenues is critical to address inequalities in a tax system that forces middle-income people to pay all they owe, while high-earners can shield their income from the IRS.
“This is very clear this is about wealthy business owners at the tippy top of the top,” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. “If you don’t have $10,000 above your paycheck, Social Security income or the like coming in or going out, there’s no additional…
The Treasury is proposing two new data points — the sum of all the deposits and the total value of withdrawals — to add to a tax form where banks already report interest amounts and other account data to the IRS.
The proposal used to involve a mere $600, but I guess that dog wouldn’t hunt and now they’ve upped it to a gargantuan (that’s sarcasm) $10K. But we’re not talking about any “tippy-top” here.
Not that that matters. Once again, as with so many other things, computerized systems make this proposal relatively easy to implement; my guess is that it would have been difficult prior to computers storing all the information. The slippery slope of government intrusion is fully greased up these days and their plan is to monitor more and more people for less and less reason, and to use that monitoring for political ends.
And my guess is that they were never serious about the $600 threshold. It was just a stalking horse to make the $10K look so much better.
Is Joe Manchin considering leaving the Democratic Party?
There are rumors to that effect.
I say no, he’s not, and that if he’s talking about it behind closed doors that’s just to threaten the Democrats. Manchin now appears to be one of the most powerful people in the Senate, perhaps even the most powerful. I write “appears to be” because these jockeyings for power are so loaded with behind-the-scenes machinations that it’s hard to be certain about anything.
Manchin has a history of talking a moderate line and then caving and voting with the Democrats when it matters. I have to say that this time it sounds different. But isn’t that what Charlie Brown always says to Lucy?
Revolution and lyrics: personal change versus structural change
Commenter John Tyler writes:
Speaking of the meaning of songs, consider John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which came out in 1971.
If one did not know any better, you would think the lyrics were written by Karl Marx or Lenin.
This song is probably the favorite of Bernie Sanders and AOC, among others.
That brings up something I’ve long thought about – and written about several times, at least in the comments – whether song lyrics influence people in terms of big life decisions or political positions, and if so how common that is.
I’m probably on one end of the spectrum in that regard. Although I like music a lot and certain performers or songwriters or composers very much, I don’t think a song has ever influenced my political life or opinions. The most I can say about lyrical guidance is that sometimes I’m affected in the sense of the philosophical and emotional (for that latter, sometimes acting as a releaser for a good cry about something). For example, some of the lyrical offerings of Leonard Cohen have a philosophical attitude that appeals to me – in particular the songs “Anthem” and “Going Home.” But I don’t think they change my attitude much if at all.
I know there are people who are quite different, those who look up to musicians and/or lyricists (or did look up to them when young) as thought leaders in the political sense.
And let me add that I’ve never liked the song “Imagine” – not even musically, and not lyrically. The lyrics have always seemed to be those of “a dreamer,” just as the song says – a fantasy rather than anything that could be translated into reality. Nor does the singer even suggest a way to accomplish such a transformation into something realistically possible. The song is indeed an anti-religious, anti-capitalist, New-World-Order-ish sort of thing, but in a very vague way.
Has it influenced many people? I wouldn’t be the best judge of that, but this page about “Imagine” calls it “one of the most influential songs of the 20th Century.” The essay doesn’t point to any particular backing for the claim, but if it’s true then yes, the song has probably done some damage. But I see it more as reflecting what was already strongly in the air at the time, and then perhaps magnifying it.
John Lennon apparently wrote “Imagine,” but he also supposedly had written “Revolution” three years earlier (1968), in which the lyrics say:
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we canBut if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait…You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You’d better free your mind insteadBut if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
At the time of “Revolution’s” release, I had taken a course in college called “Russian Intellectual History,” which was deeply influential for me in understanding the Sixties years I was experiencing. I no longer remember the names of the Russian writers I’m referring to, but the gist of it was that same argument between improving oneself versus improving the world.
And so I saw Lennon’s message in both songs – for what it was worth – as consistent, because both songs were speaking up for personal transformation. “Revolution” was explicit about the personal rather than the activist collective, and “Imagine” seemed to be dreaming about how personal transformation would lead to societal transformation if enough people practiced it, rather than the other way around.
Open thread 10/20/21
Young people who do reaction videos to this song on YouTube have no idea what it’s about, although they usually like it. But even after they look up what it’s about, they still don’t what it’s about. How could they?: