At the Larch Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Students Nationwide Carry Mattresses to Protest Campus Rape."

It's the "Carry That Weight" protest.

I presume the name "Carry That Weight" is meant to evoke the Beatles song by that title, which addresses not a female but "Boy." I never really understood why the boy in the song had to carry a weight "a long time" or even what the weight was:

I never give you my pillow
I only send you my invitations
And in the middle of the celebrations
I break down

I guess when you're a Beatle you get invitations that you pass along to boys you don't sleep with. But what are the celebrations in the middle of which you break down if you've given your invitation to somebody else?

Here's what Wikipedia says about the meaning of the song:

Music critic Ian MacDonald interpreted the lyric as an acknowledgment by the group that nothing they would do as individual artists would equal what they had achieved together, and they would always carry the weight of their Beatle past. McCartney said the song was about the Beatles' business difficulties and the atmosphere at Apple at the time. In the film Imagine: John Lennon, Lennon says that McCartney was "singing about all of us."

Ah, well, now the lyric about the struggles of some males who voluntarily joined together, achieved a happy congress, and then felt burdened by the requirements of groupdom has been appropriated by females who agonize over the involuntarily juncture with males and now feel burdened by the aftereffects of something that was never good.

"A new and massive poll of 2,029 18- to 29-year-olds from Harvard’s Institute of Politics just released..."

"... found that of those who say they will 'definitely be voting,' 51 percent want the GOP in charge, 47 percent favoring Democratic control."

Scott Walker opens up a big lead against Mary Burke in the new Marquette University poll.

Suddenly — after tying in the last poll — it's 50% Walker, 43% Burke.

In the new poll, Walker enjoys a significant lead among independents, who have bounced around more than partisan voters in this race. Among likely voters, Walker leads among independents 52% to 37%.

One other shift in the new poll: Burke's personal ratings have worsened, while Walker's haven't changed much.

Among registered voters, 38% view Burke favorably while 45% view her unfavorably. Among likely voters, 39% view her favorably while 49% view her unfavorably.

"It's the first time we've seen her that far upside down or under water on favorability ratings," said poll director Charles Franklin.

What has changed? Well, there were 2 debates. Burke seemed able to stand with equal weight next to Walker. She tended to attack him and call him not good enough, perhaps without explaining what she could do better, and he tended to speak optimistically about accomplishments. Maybe that made a difference. The other thing that changed is that Burke has identified herself strongly with the Obama administration with 2 big appearances alongside Michelle Obama.

It's post-poll, but worth mentioning here that President Obama himself appeared with her yesterday [CORRECTION: I originally thought the appearance was today.]

The event was at North Division High School, in a ward where Obama outpolled Republican Mitt Romney 843 to 5 in the 2012 presidential election, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The somewhat risky bet that Burke is making is that Obama, polarizing as he is, will help turn out Wisconsin’s urban Democratic base for her next Tuesday....

Burke is one of the very few candidates to welcome Obama, whose unpopularity in the polls has made him somewhat of a pariah amongst vulnerable Democrats in tight races. But Wisconsin’s labor-heavy, populist base hasn’t always loved Burke, a millionaire former executive at her family’s company, Trek Bicycle. Thus the gamble with Obama, whose presence risks putting off independent and suburban voters....

“I think it reflects the fact that she’s the candidate of Washington. We’re not bringing Washington surrogates in,” Walker told reporters after an event Tuesday in Wausau.

And I'm a little skeptical of October surprises — why are we getting this one week before the election? — but I feel compelled to acknowledge this new item in Wisconsin Reporter by M.D. Kittle, "Trek sources: Mary Burke’s family fired her for incompetence."

The [European sales staff] threatened to quit if Burke was not removed from her position as director of European Operations, according to Gary Ellerman, who served as Trek’s human resources director for 12 years. His account was confirmed by three other former employees....

A former employee with the company told Wisconsin Reporter that John Burke, Mary’s brother and current Trek president, had to let his sister go. The former employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal from the Burke family, said Mary Burke was made to return to Wisconsin and apologize to a group of about 35 Trek executives for her treatment of employees and for the plummeting European bottom line.

Managers in Europe used to call Burke “pit bull on crack” or “Attila the Hun,” one source said.

You know, she could spin that in her favor. Some of us might like a "pit bull on crack" or "Attila the Hun" standing up to the entrenched interest groups here in Wisconsin.

“There is a dark side to Mary that the people at Trek have seen … She can explode on people. She can be the most cruel person you ever met,” said Ellerman, who started a consulting business after he was “asked to leave” Trek in 2004 over a difference in hiring philosophy.

Come on! "She can be the most cruel person you ever met"... that could be a great political slogan.

Anyway, read it yourself and decide what to make of it. I tend to think Walker doesn't need or even want this kind of help. He's avoided attacking Mary, perhaps because he doesn't want to be thought of as the cruelest person, even though many Wisconsinites have wanted to portray him that way. Here's a picture I took during the protests of 2011:



ADDED: Finally, here's the link to the Marquette page. Additional information of interest:

"I'm not sure how long this beating lasted — perhaps an hour, perhaps only 20 minutes. Toward the end..."

"... I heard the leader approach and braced myself for another blow. It didn’t come. Instead, he knelt close to me and whispered in my ear: 'I hate Americans. All of them. I hate you all.' After this, I lost track of time. I dreamed that the fighters were rolling my body in a winding sheet and lashing my ankles together with golden straw. In the days after this dream, I thought, I have seen the winding sheet, so I must be quite far along in the killing process. But every time I asked myself if I was alive or dead, the answer came back, You are most certainly alive. I thought, The custom must be to wrap the corpses in the winding sheets before they are entirely dead. How peculiar. I didn’t know."

From "My Captivity/Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria" (in the NYT).

San Diego University students hold a "Shit-In."

"We find that restrooms and lockers rooms are the places where transgender people encounter aggression and micro-aggression... The most important thing is everyone needs a safe place to do their business."

Lawyers for Kaci Hickox — released from New Jersey quarantine to quarantine at home in Maine — say she won't do it.

"She doesn’t want to agree to continue to be confined to a residence beyond the two days," said Steven Hyman of the New York law firm McLaughlin & Stern.

Maine health officials have said they expect Hickox to agree to be quarantined at her home until 21 days have passed since her last potential exposure to the virus. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period for the Ebola virus....

Another attorney representing Hickox, New York civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, said she would contest any potential court order requiring her quarantine at home. “The conditions that the state of Maine is now requiring Kaci to comply with are unconstitutional and illegal and there is no justification for the state of Maine to infringe on her liberty,” he said.

Hickox is certainly advancing the debate about quarantine. Her essay was extremely effective in making New Jersey look oppressive and abusive putting her into custody. She made a lot of people think differently about what's right and wrong, but now she's resisting the home-based quarantine, which seemed to many of us to be a respectful and safe enough middle ground.

But she's stepping it up and demanding more. This empowers those who like the extreme approach of state custody, because you can't trust these health-care workers to sacrifice their self-interests to the public's demand for protection. Those who empathized upon reading the essay of one woman abused by government are unlikely to have such warm feelings in response to the words of a bunch of lawyers expounding legalistically.

ADDED: As a number of commenters are prompting, this story needs to be connected with the news this morning that "The city’s first Ebola patient initially lied to authorities about his travels around the city following his return from treating disease victims in Africa, law-enforcement sources said."

Dr. Craig Spencer at first told officials that he isolated himself in his Harlem apartment — and didn’t admit he rode the subways, dined out and went bowling until cops looked at his MetroCard the sources said.

"About what fraction of your regular readers are male, do you think?"

Asks Bearing in the comments to the previous post. I ramble:

It's really hard to say, because screen names don't always come across as gendered and one might pose as the other sex, and most readers don't comment.

I think readers of political blogs and the large number of readers who've come here by way of Instapundit tend to be male.

I assume the readership here is majority male, though it probably doesn't skew male as much as most political blogs, not that I see this as mainly a political blog.

I think I've been subjected to criticism for years from the feminist blogs, and I'm sure this means that many potential female readers are lost. I'm very familiar with the way people who lean left get the idea that those who don't signal acceptance of their ideology are toxic.

Then I decide to do a poll:

What sex are you?

Male

Female

Some mixture of the 2 or somewhere in between

Neither

 

pollcode.com free polls

Althouse, the "big fool"... the "cock-tease"... the "provacateur"... "the intellectual flirt"... the lawprof who reminds men of the "manipulation, deception, or disloyalty in women close to them"...

Last night, I put up a post that started a discussion about why conservatives — or at least the class of conservatives in the Instapundit commentariat — think I'm a big liberal. I joked that these people ought to come to my hometown and workplace, where I am regarded as a big right-winger. I see the consistent theme: I make people feel that I'm not what they are. I trigger the shunning reflex. Or, to put it less self-effacingly: I've hit the contrarian sweet spot.

It was interesting to me to read the comments thread here on my blog, where people tend to write, I think, if they like hanging out, for whatever reason, including the stimulation to disagree with me. But there's one comment I want to single out for separate discussion, because it has 7 itemized ideas, really detailed and insightful ideas that I want to think about and that I thought you might find useful to examine.

This is what Carl Pham wrote in what was the middle of the night here in Madison, Wisconsin:

1. Only some see you as a big liberal, most see you as a big fool, who was conned by Obama and will be conned again, or as a cock-tease who pretends to get the male/conservo-libertarian concerns, but returns privately to predictable female/collectivist tendencies.

2. For a wide swathe of traditional men, the judicial/law professor temperament is distasteful in a woman: it reminds them unpleasantly of manipulation, deception, or disloyalty in women close to them -- one they may have trusted to their regret. Indeed, I would argue it is attractive to a fairly narrow range of men in general (aside from outright betas who agree they need sensitivity training to be aware of when they leave hairs in the bathroom sink and who wouldn't dream of fondling an ass without politely asking permission first). Men don't mind reserve in a woman, but when it starts to seem calculating (which it has to be in the professor/judge role) it tends to trigger unease, ranging to paranoia in some cases.

3. There's tension between your occasional Woman/Womanhood As Victim ruminations and Instapundit's Men/Manhood As Victim ruminations. It's a very unusual person who can be neutral in the ancient battle of the sexes to win the Most Misunderstood And Exploited prize, or even see the merit that there might be in both sides of the endless argument.

4. There's blood in the water. After eight long years of a baffling preference of the majority of their fellow citizens for a smooth-talking prissy sleazebot and mealy-mouthed collectivist nostrums, there's the sense that now the red-blooded God-fearin' straight-shootin' black-coffee-drinkin' American they thought they lived amongst has finally woken up and is about to throw these changelings and cuckoos the hell out -- and the anticipation raises the blood pressure, while the possibility of a slip 'twixt cup and lip jangles the nerves. Result, partisan fervor.

5. Instapundit himself has changed (perhaps partly because of 4 above). There is less moderation and reflection, less non-political stuff, less independent libertarian stuff, and much more reflexive Obama hate.

6. Most bloggers and persistent commentariats tend to fossilize over time (and the comments in that thread are highly stereotyped). I think it's because it's extremely hard after a while for either the principal or the dinner guests to back down from an iffy and misguided thought -- you get savaged. So after time people tend to be less intellectually adventurous and open. This is a well-known effect in business: the larger the meeting, the more fossilized and traditional the positions. You only really get true experimentation and adventure in the ideas people express when the discussion is small, intimate, and private -- three adjectives that cannot possibly describe public blogging and commenting.

7. You also have a streak of provacateur or the intellectual flirt: you say things sometimes just (or mostly just) to provoke reaction and hot discussion. That makes all kinds of sense in your profession, of course. But, again, in a woman it can make many men uneasy -- few like a tease, which is kind of what this is.

Man, these people need to come to Madison and do PR for me.

The commentariat at Instapundit seems to view me as a big liberal, itching to vote for Hillary.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of interesting stuff, but I'm going to frontpage Carl Pham, who put up a very substantive 7-point analysis at 3:39 AM (not that he's necessarily in the Central Time Zone). I wasn't through point #2 when I decided I wanted to put this up for more detailed discussion. In fact, I'm going to make this a new post. Hang on.

Photographing colors.

"The French minister for culture has caused a stir by revealing she hasn't read a single novel in two years."

"In the interview on a Sunday evening television show, [Fleur] Pellerin said she had enjoyed a 'wonderful lunch' with [Patrick] Modiano after he was named this year's winner of the Nobel Literature Prize."

But she admitted she couldn't say which of his titles she preferred because she hadn't had time to read his books - or indeed any others - since taking up a ministerial post two years ago.

"I admit without any problem that I have had no time to read over the past two years," she said, adding: "I read a lot of notes, and legislative documents. I read a lot of news. But I read [for pleasure] very little."

MORE: At the NYT:

At the French site of The Huffington Post, Claude Askolovitch, a writer, said... “Barbarism is here.... If one can be culture minister without reading, then we are mere technocrats and budgeters." He chided her for prioritizing the reading of ministerial memos over the uplift provided by great literary works....

“One can salute her frankness, understanding that the life of a minister leaves little time for the calm required for reading, and even salute the spontaneity of Fleur Pellerin,” noted an article in Le Point titled “Fleur Pellerin hasn’t read Modiano! So what?”...

Are we supposed to read novels? It used to seem so. Does it still?

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything."

"But that is not so... He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment. The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve."

Said Pope Francis.

Walking while female... in New York City.

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

God so many people who I generally respect or like are trying to pick this apart or go "oh so I'm not supposed to talk to people on the street? Ok" on social media and it just makes me want to delete them all from reality.

"Over the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and 'Aspergery.'"

"(These are verbatim descriptions; I keep a running list.) But I had not previously heard Netanyahu described as a 'chickenshit.'"

From a Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic titled "The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here." Subtitle: "The Obama administration's anger is 'red-hot' over Israel's settlement policies, and the Netanyahu government openly expresses contempt for Obama's understanding of the Middle East. Profound changes in the relationship may be coming."

On the boardwalk...

... through a boggy part of the UW Arb.

"I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day."

Says Alexis Wiggins, who has 3 big observations:

Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting....

High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes....

You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long. I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention.... In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students.... Of course it feels ridiculous [to the teacher] to have to explain the same thing five times, but suddenly, when I was the one taking the tests, I was stressed. I was anxious. I had questions. And if the person teaching answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again. I feel a great deal more empathy for students after shadowing, and I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a way of creating a barrier between me and them. They do not help learning.

The life of a censor is not easy.

Pity the poor Facebook/Twitter/YouTube censor.

For the first few months, Rob didn’t mind his job moderating videos at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno. His coworkers were mostly new graduates like himself, many of them liberal arts majors.... But as months dragged on, the rough stuff began to take a toll. The worst was the gore: brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents...

"It is a misunderstanding of freedom... to suppose that choice is not free when the objects between which the chooser must choose are not equally attractive to him."

"It would mean that a person was not exercising his free will when in response to the question whether he preferred vanilla or chocolate ice cream he said vanilla, because it was the only honest answer that he could have given and therefore 'he had no choice.'"

Wrote Judge Posner (in a 2003 case that comes up in my Religion and the Constitution class).

"The GOP's Giddiness Over Hillary Clinton's Jobs 'Gaffe' Will Backfire."

That's the title of a New Republic article by Brian Beutler, and I'm sure it makes some liberal-lefty readers feel good, but a competent consumer of propaganda begins with a thought like: So I guess Democrats are terrified that Hillary's pandering to the you-didn't-build that crowd is going to destroy her.

How can Beutler purport to predict that this sound bite cannot be exploited without backfiring? The Democrats won the last presidential election by exploiting one awkward thing Mitt Romney said.

Beutler doesn't mention that, but he makes much of the Republicans' use of Obama's "you didn’t build that" remark, which didn't prevent him from winning in 2012. 

[I]n hindsight, many conservatives acknowledged that the GOP’s obsession with that gaffe revealed more damaging truths about the Republican Party than the gaffe itself revealed about Obama.

“One after another, [Republican businessowners] talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single—factory worker went out there,” Rick Santorum told activists at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

The fixation on [Hillary's] gaffe foreshadows another Republican presidential campaign centered on the preeminence of the entrepreneur, to the exclusion of the wage worker and the trade unionist and the jobless.

"Gaffe" is not the right word. The point isn't: Ha ha, you made a ridiculous mistake. It's: You said what you really think in a revealing way and we're going to use that against you. That's obviously part of American politics, and in 2012, both the 47% thing and "You didn't build that" were revealing and useful. Both were used, and if Obama won, I doubt that it's because the Republicans shouldn't have exploited "You didn't build that." It's more likely that Democrats (and their media friends) jumped on the 47% remark and used it ruthlessly.

The trick is to use these revealing statements well. It would be foolish for Republicans to take the advice to leave the Democrats' overly leftist lines alone. If it's good advice, you'd have to believe that Democrats would leave the Republicans' overly right-wing lines alone. Who believes that?