Teenagers

Popular haircut sparks outrage across Texas - as restaurant threatens to ban customers sporting divisive style.

The bowl-shaped style - which has been compared to a modern Moe of Three Stooges and Spock of Star Trek look - is typically favored by Mexican-American young men who are known as 'Edgars'.

It is absolutely the most popular haircut for the middle to high school age kids around here (and it definitely looks intentionally awkward the first time you see it). I can easily imagine The Olds have sneering contempt for it, but the Olds are kinda racist and controlling in that way. It's really just a haircut.

In other news, Hawaii is exposing me to great musicians that I wouldn't otherwise really know. Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish are the only two names that I can remember off the top of my head, so I'll have to wait until she wakes up to remind me of the others.

Guest Post: let's tear this one apart, then build something with the pieces

Lurid Keyaki writes: Isaac Chotiner interviews John Ganz about his new book. (Archived article here.) The first portion of the interview is about Murray Rothbard, and the big-picture discussion after that is relatively vague. It's a quick read. I can't really find a quote to pull; I think the better prompt is just to ask whether any of you can identify precursors of the Trumpy future in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, the state of the U.S. in 1992, or the state of the world in 1992, that might have been missed in this account. Because I so often come back to gender with Trump, it's pretty wild to reflect on one piece of it: Bill Clinton getting tossed up as the election winner over two challengers to his right, vs. the treatment Hillary got from day one-- and then the plot twist with her candidacy twenty-four years later. But I'd rather let you all talk.

Heebie's take: I agree with Lurid's prompt, because I can't quite follow the argument in the interview. All the pieces of the 90s that are cited seem accurate - David Duke was a thing, Pat Buchanan was a thing, Hilary Clinton got treated miserably while Bill was given a wide latitude, etc. But that's not enough to call it the seeds of Trump. It feels more like, "If you pick any 5 year portion of American History, you sure can see how racism and sexism manifested in politics during that interval!"

Anyway, if you're going to reach for the '90s for the beginning of the modern Republican Party, I think you have to pin it on Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The racism and sexism have always been there, and I don't see anything particularly notable about how they showed up in the '90s.

Tea Leaves

Clearly (to me) is that the reason Florida turned red is that retirees used to come from New York, and now they come from the midwest. What I'm wondering is if The Villages has absorbed enough midwestern Republicans to help marginally tilt/solidify Michigan and Wisconsin as blue?

I googled for a solid three minutes and did not find an answer, so it must not exist.

Guest Post -- SE Searing

Mossy Character writes:

Rice:

"Most of us grow rice here. We have quite a bumper crop this year but the dry canals are badly impacting the transportation of our harvest," he said.
[...]
More than 80 canals have dried up in the Tran Van Thoi district of Ca Mau province, state-controlled news site VNExpress reported. According to local authorities, agricultural production is entirely reliant on rainwater and, given its scarcity this year, farmers were forced to pump water from waterways into their fields.

Fish:

"Whether the river is clean or brackish depends on the season, but that hasn't changed this year. What has changed is the weather. It's hotter than usual, and there's been no rain. Because of this, it's also harder to find fish. River levels are low, and the water is still brackish," he said. Since April, temperatures have often exceeded 40 degrees Celsius across the region, and the El Nino weather phenomenon is partly to blame for Cambodia recording its hottest dry season in 170 years.

Pepper:

"We have been prepared. We know about climate change, we have stored water, we built roofs to protect our peppers from the hot weather, but it was not enough." "So many pepper plants are dying," he said, adding that he no longer goes to his farms because it is too painful. "This year we think we will get nothing," he said, adding that what little can be harvested is of lower quality because of the weather.

(I wanted to do a whole popcorn-themed thing based on this ammunition explosion, but that was probably just Cambodia Camboding.)

Heebie's take: Ugh. That's all awful.

I just want to give explicit permission for conversation to turn towards this heat dome up north I'm hearing about. After we solve climate change, we can fight US-centrism, but one thing at a time.

Guest Post: Anxiety

NickS writes: Two links, the more fun of which is this piece about Inside Out 2, which will probably be relatable for many at unfogged:

Many people who live with a lot of anxiety would agree that anxiety is not a lot of fun. But I don't think it's a villainous emotion. As such, I appreciate the way that "Inside Out 2" gives its anxious antagonist a heart and some positive characteristics amidst its frantic quivering.

...

Riley isn't a parent. But her emotions are another story. They're parts of her. But they're also sort of her caregivers. Joy, especially, is a maternal figure, and expresses that mothering through what looks a lot like anxiety -- she's worried whenever Riley forms unhappy memories, and she tries to encourage her to forget and repress them. Which is not, the movie makes clear, an ideal coping strategy.

Anxiety keeps Riley from being her best self. But at the same time, (and this is the way in which anxiety is not a villain) Anxiety really does care about Riley, just as anxious parents care about their kids. And her maybe obsessive attention and investment gives her some insights that Joy doesn't have. ...

Less fun but perhaps also recognizable is this essay from Rick Pearlstein about the depressing experience of arguing about politics on twitter (via LGM):

I've spent half my life now, starting in 1997 when I was 27, trying to make sense of the right. It was a fortunate career choice. With each passing year, the right became more and more the star of the American political show. More and more, people began telling me, with aching earnestness, that what I did was profoundly valuable to them. I helped them understand their childhoods; I helped them fear the future less, because they saw what we had overcome before. They still feared the future, but they were grateful, because I inspired them to launch their own careers as activists or politicians to fight for it.

This has been a fortunate thing for my soul. Writing that last sentence, in fact, I misted up a little bit--which is a good thing, because for the last several days, I've felt so dead inside that I've hardly had any emotions at all.

...

So, saying you should vote for [Biden] anyway is a hard argument to make. Maybe I should be gentler on myself that I've not managed to persuade the literally thousands of people on the left raining abuse down upon me for making it. All the same, my failure is gutting me worse than anything that has happened to me before in my career.

What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can't convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen, then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?

Heebie's take: I have thoughts!

1. On Inside Out 2: I enjoyed it! My teens both said that it's pretty accurate on the representation of anxiety. It's less of an existential gut punch than the first one, because that one is about saying goodbye to childhood, and this one is about the onset of puberty. So it stands on its own as a story that tries to explain young teenage brains to the viewer.

2. On kids today: I almost posted something about dumb old Jonathan Haidt blaming all the kids' anxiety on cell phones, because he's been on a PR circuit meant to intersect as often as possible with my demographic.

On the one hand, I think his theory is dumb. On the other hand, my teenagers both have far more anxiety than I did. On the third hand, their father is Jammies and it is definitely not the phones, for either of them. Really.

3. On Perlstein: I'm marinating in this idea, which came up last week, that becoming demoralized is how Democrats lose, and how toxic it is. I'm trying to hold myself in check. But am I just a normal-moralized person in an objectively demoralizing world? (no! fight the drift! etc!)

Part of me sees public opinion as a primordial goop. To get anything done, you've got to collect enough goop into a barrel. But Republicans, Fox News, etc, they make the goop much more viscous. So it's harder to get it into a single barrel using our clumsy fingers, the goop leaks more easily between the slats of the barrel, etc. This is why we should strive to have as many analogies as possible on Unfogged.