It’s an old tradition that during a leap year women could propose to men. This was usually depicted as old or ugly women trapping men, but some art focused more on the role reversal and could be quite cute.
I have a soft spot in my heart for the last one because it plays on the idea of “undesirable” people, a tall masculine woman and a shy effeminate man, finding each other but instead of mocking them depicts it as sweet that she could finally ask him because he was too shy and insecure to ask her.
My politics were actually probably somewhat anti-populist until I started spending time in DC. At the start of college I thought that “elite” in political contexts was a largely meaningless buzzword used to describe someone you don’t like, and that political experts were the people best prepared (and thus most entitled) to participate in politics.
My progressivism turned populist once I did an immersion-type seminar in US politics in DC, and that change has been reinforced by working in politics here for the last year or so. I realized first that “elites” do exist as a category of overly-job-secure people who derive power from both their position and their networks, and who exercise that power without concern for accountability or democratic input (see Wedel). US politics primarily occurs through competition between different sects of elites (see Mills, Ferguson, etc.)
But more to the point, elites aren’t actually very “smart.” They’re informed, but many elites have been consistently and demonstrably wrong for decades on-end, and yet only ever lose prestige or position when betraying their network. That’s because politics is an exclusive club rather than a meritocracy, and there’s no incentive to actually be smart beyond what’s necessary to appear smart. There’s a certain language and dogma you have to learn to speak depending on what particular bubble you’re in, but if you master that game of appearances then you’re free to be as stupid as you please without consequence.
Who gets to be called “smart” and who gets called “dumb” is not precisely arbitrary. It is, however, frequently ideological, mediated by institutions (like Yale, or Virginia’s State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded) shot through with ideology. Even on the grounds of science, what counts as “intelligence” is more difficult to pull out of the complexities of social experience than we usually think. The most convincing debunking of the science behind The Bell Curve, for example, dismantled the very notion that there is such a thing as “general intelligence,” renderable via the single variable g—the same variable that returned in that 2012 paper purporting to prove that conservatives were inherently stupid.
It’s very curious: If there were such a thing as an innate, inborn, inherent quantum of cognitive ability, and we could agree on who possessed it, why should we grant it moral value? After all, every child knows you don’t judge someone’s worth by their appearance. Why should we just because they’re “smart”?
The experience of history suggests we shouldn’t even grant intelligence much in the way of utilitarian value. In a 2007 Guardian essay, Daniel Davies writes, “as far as I can tell, the career trajectories of nearly everyone commonly regarded as a ‘genius’ seem to be marked by one boneheaded blunder after another.” He cites former Harvard president and economics wizard Lawrence Summers, and observes, “Being extremely intelligent is rather like fucking sheep—once you’ve got a reputation for either, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of it.”…
“Smart” is an identity. “Smart” has a politics. “Smart” can be a road to authenticity, or “smart” can be a con. (Think of Elizabeth Holmes, who founded the biotech startup Theranos after studying Mandarin as a child, launching a company during college at Stanford, and then dropping out; she gulled George Shultz and Henry Kissinger into serving on her new company’s board of directors, becoming “America’s youngest self-made female billionaire in the world,” according to Forbes, even though the technology she was selling apparently didn’t even work.) “Smart” carries within it its own logic of domination, resistance, resentment—the logic that produces both reactionary pedants and ferociously winking liberal elites…
Also in 2012, after JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion in a single boneheaded trade, President Obama defended CEO Jamie Dimon because he was “one of the smartest bankers we got.”
And so on. By the time of the Dimon pronouncement, we all knew Obama’s foreign policy doctrine was “don’t do stupid shit.” It is a powerful symbol of the moral evasion of the politics of “smart”: as if the people responsible for the Iraq War thought they were doing something stupid, not to mention the architects of the Vietnam War, whose fundamental strategic logic, known as “graduated pressure,” was specifically rooted in the insights about game theory of the late Harvard University economist Thomas Schelling, should anyone doubt how dumb “smart” can truly be.
“Thomas Jefferson once said the American people won’t make a mistake if they’re given all the facts,” Ronald Reagan liked to say. Thomas Jefferson, naturally, never said such a thing—and just as naturally, by “won’t make a mistake” Reagan meant “won’t disagree with Ronald Reagan.” Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a chimp. He was not “smart.” Which was why, a Carter White House staffer once told me, Carter’s strategists in 1980 were confident that if they could only get Reagan standing next to Carter for one head-to-head debate, they would have the election in the bag. They finally got that debate scheduled for a week before the election. At the time, the two candidates were running about neck and neck. Reagan, of course, ended up winning in a landslide.
It’s pretty remarkable how “smart” people keep on making the same mistake.
TIL that poor neighborhoods in 60’s-era Washington DC suffered massive rat infestations until Julius Hobson began catching the “possum-sized” rats in a cage, strapping it to the roof of his car, driving them to the rich neighborhoods, and threatening to release them.
Hobson caught “possum-sized rats” in Shaw and Northeast, and transported them up to Georgetown, promising to release the cage full of rats in the middle of the wealthy district unless the city government acted to curb the epidemic.[1] Since he was, as a piece in The Washingtonian put it, “[a]ware that a DC problem usually is not a problem until it is a white problem,”[2] he decided to go ahead and make it a white problem.
Every Saturday, Hobson would have almost a dozen huge rats on top of his car, hosting “rat rallies” where he would loudly reiterate his threats. He claimed to have a “rat farm” somewhere in the city, where he and his associates had “chicken coops” full of rats, and they vowed to release them all unless the government implemented rat extermination programs that would range outside of rich and white neighborhoods.[3] What’s more, Hobson had done his research, and found that he had no legal obligation to keep the rats once he caught them, so he could not be prosecuted for following through on his threat. As many of the city officials (not to mention Congressmen) lived in Georgetown, this, naturally, sent the city government into a panic…
In reality, Hobson never had more than ten rats at a time…
However unorthodox they were, Hobson’s strategies were undeniably effective. In the rat protest’s case, the results were almost immediate: after some panicked phone calls, the city funded rat patrols for Northeast and Southeast.[9]
Reminiscing about the operation in later years, Hobson said that despite the fact that he never had more than a dozen rats, he had intended to fulfill at least part of his promise if the city didn’t back down: “I was going to turn those rats loose on Georgetown,” he said…[9]
Yall ever heard of disorders that cause low empathy??
COMPASSION is a choice. You can be compassionate without having empathy. Low empathy isn’t a choice but having compassion is. Some of the most compassionate people I’ve met have low empathy.
I loved Rosa SO much but was wayyy too energetic and crazy for the poor cat to handle at first. I was much more used to playing with dogs but once I learnt the right approach we got along very well. I miss her. Do you guys have any childhood cat stories?
The study is led by Charissa Cheah, a professor of psychology at UMBC. She is joined by Shimei Pan, assistant professor of information systems at UMBC, and Cixin Wang, assistant professor of school psychology in the department of counseling, higher education, and special education at UMD.
Cixin Wang added, “We aim to study the unfolding outbreak and related discrimination against Chinese Americans and other Asian populations to identify specific ways to promote resilience and support children and families during this challenging time. The results can also help us be better prepared for future epidemics like this.”
Okay but this can be interpreted as a lesson about disability, illness, and mental health. It might take *you* ten seconds to draw a big old orange line, but for some people it’s an enormous accomplishment. People whose hands shake, people with executive dysfunction, people with poor hand-eye coordination. This snail.
It may be easy for you to go out for groceries. Some people barely manage to get out of bed.
It may be easy for you to express yourself. Some people were never given the tools.
