"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: 

"Survivor 44 recap: Why all old puzzles need to go/With players memorizing puzzles before they even step foot on the island, it's time for producers to start anew."

That's the headline for Dalton Ross's new column.

The problem, as — spoiler alert — you saw in this episode, is that the show re-uses old puzzles, and some players, before beginning their stint on the show, have made 3D printed copies of these puzzles and practiced. This week, we saw Carson do a complicated puzzle speedily and then heard in the voiceover that he'd done the puzzle a thousand times at home. He also openly celebrates nerd power — uses the word "nerd" to rally the other nerds. 

Ross asks: 

[I]s that really what we want to watch as viewers — someone just putting together a puzzle they already learned how to solve before they even stepped on the beach? 

Okay, let me nerd out in my particular lane of nerdery — language usage. I have no problem with Ross writing "before they even stepped on the beach." But I don't like the wording in the headline "before they even step foot on the island." 

I don't like seeing Elon Musk flaunting this kind of hostility.

Link.

ADDED: Musk's tweeting this is ambiguous. He could mean I am this person. But he could mean Guys like this are pathetic and dangerous. Presumably, he intends the ambiguity. And the simplest interpretation is that he wants us to heat up Twitter with debate about what the hell this means. 

What is the book Albie is reading 20 minutes into "In the Sandbox," Episode 4 of Season 2 of "The White Lotus"?

This is a key moment in the story, so I especially wanted to know what book it is...

... but I'm generally very interested in what books characters are reading in all episodes of both seasons of "The White Lotus." There's so much reading in these things, often "performative reading." The characters are on vacation, usually reading out in the sun by the pool. The writer/director, Mike White, is clearly big on reading. 

We see the back cover of Albie's book, and it's partly covered up, but I figured out that it said "Or, What Is the Power of Shit?," which is the second part of the title of "The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?"

"The final phase of criticism’s arc began with the rise of a figure that Roger Kimball memorably described as the 'tenured radical'..."

"... and which we might think of as the Scholar-Activist. For her [sic], the proper task of criticism was to participate in social transformations occurring outside the university. The battle against exploitation, she claimed, could be waged by writing about racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism, using an increasingly refined language of historical context, identity, and power. Literary artifacts (poems, novels, and other playthings of the élite) could be replaced as objects of study by pop-culture ones (Taylor Swift, selfies, and other playthings of the masses)...." 

Writes Merve Emre, in "Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner," (The New Yorker).

"Nerds are winning."

I said to a trick-or-treating kid just now, and he seemed amused. I am taking a survey, giving all kids a choice between Twix — which I consider the mature choice — and Nerds Ropes — the funny choice.

The near west side of Madison has voted and the choice is clear: Nerds are winning.

I don't know what this necessarily means for society at large, but it seems to me it's a vote for fun.

"Black nerds unsettle the myth of a monolithic Blackness."

"In an American imagination that has historically stereotyped Black people as alternately ignorant and emotional or sexualized and cool, the nerd — smart and cerebral, unsexy and decidedly uncool — creates cognitive dissonance. Not only do Black nerds confound racist stereotypes, they also pierce the protective orthodoxy of Blackness passed down in the United States across generations. Under slavery and Jim Crow, Black people maintaining — or at least projecting — unity proved a necessary protective practice. Strength came in numbers, as did political influence and economic clout. What would happen if we all announced publicly that we were going to start doing our own human thing without regard to the group? Few considered it worth the risk to find out. But who in 2021 benefits from thinking of Black people as just one thing? Certainly not Black individuals, who, like all individuals, are complex amalgams of shifting affinities, of inherited and chosen identities. And certainly not Black nerds, whose very existence is often rendered invisible because they present an inconvenient complication to a straightforward story of Blackness in America..."

From "The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture/By pushing back against centuries-old stereotypes, a historically overlooked community is claiming space it was long denied" by Adam Bradley (NYT).

I learned the slang term: "blerd."

Elon Musk rages about the "politicians & unelected bureaucrats who stole our liberty."

He's an opinion leader — I think — so it's important that he's saying this:

Well said! Please run for office. The politicians & unelected bureaucrats who stole our liberty should be tarred, feathered & thrown out of town!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 15, 2020

What does it mean that Elon Musk is in a particular position? Does it make it cool? Does it make it nerdy? Does it make it cool-nerdy and nerdy is cool?

How does Elon Musk affect the perception of the anti-lockdown position?

He makes it seem cool.

He makes it seem nerdy.

He makes it cool-nerdy — because he makes nerdy cool.

His opinion has no significant effect on me or, I presume, other people, other than people I'm not interested in.

He makes it seem more flaky and unrealistic.

It's less what dummies think. More what a super-intelligent person believes.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"As a student, Dr. Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work."

"He could be easily distracted by what he called 'nerdish delights.' He once went on a flexagon binge... [working with] 'polygons, folded from straight or crooked strips of paper, which have the fascinating property of changing their faces when they are flexed.' He built a water-powered computer, which he called Winnie (Water Initiated Nonchalantly Numerical Integrating Engine).... Hired at Cambridge as an assistant lecturer, Dr. Conway gained a reputation for his high jinks (not to mention his disheveled appearance). Lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he might bring in a turnip as a prop, carving it one slice at a time into, say, an icosahedron, with its 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went.... Dr. Conway invented a profusion of games — like Phutball (short for Philosopher’s Football, which is a little like checkers on a Go board)... [He] published the Monstrous Moonshine conjecture, investigating an elusive symmetry group that lives in 196,883 dimensions.... Asked by a reporter... about his life of the mind, he replied: 'What happens most of the time is nothing. You just can’t have ideas often.'... He gave over his summers... to teaching at math camps [where] his talks were advertised vaguely as 'John Conway Hour, NTBA' (Not to Be Announced). He would take topic requests from students and deliver an extemporaneous lecture. Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. 'He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious.... to him, fun was deep... he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.'"

From "John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82/He made profound contributions to number theory, coding theory, probability theory, topology, algebra and more — and created games from it all. He died of the coronavirus" (NYT).

In Wisconsin, we are specifically forbidden to play ultimate frisbee.

From the Wisconsin Emergency Order, issued today:

11. Essential Activities. Individuals may leave their home or residence to
perform any of the following....

c. Outdoor Activity. To engage in outdoor activity, including visiting public and state parks, provided individuals comply with Social Distancing Requirements as defined below. Such activities include, by way of example and without limitation, walking, biking, hiking, or running. Individuals may not engage in team or contact sports such as by way of example and without limitation, basketball, ultimate frisbee, soccer, or football, as these activities do not comply with Social Distancing Requirements. Playgrounds are closed.

I know, they needed to make a list of the wrong kind of sports. They had basketball, soccer, and football, and then they decided to add ultimate frisbee. Care to speculate about why? I'm thinking it's some sort of "diversity" concept, and I googled what kind of people play ultimate frisbee. Funnily, I got a Reddit discussion begun with my question, word for word, except for that last word, "frisbee" (because the name of the game was changed to just "ultimate" a while back).

Here's an NPR interview from 2008. It says that "For decades, ultimate has been popular among the tech-savvy elite of Silicon Valley," and "it's self-refereed, appealing to the libertarian ethos of most computer engineers." We're told it's "kind of a nerd sport," and "There's a lot of nerds who play it."

I'm picturing the drafters of the Wisconsin order — in the midst of all the coronacrazy — worrying that it might seem racially biased to permit walking, biking, hiking, and running and forbid basketball, soccer, and football. They brainstormed What's a contact sport that white people like?

Ah, yes, remember "Stuff White People Like"? #110 on the list was "Frisbee Sports":

It is important to know that when you hear a white person saying “we should do some ultimate this weekend” or “I’m so pumped for ultimate,” they are talking about a sport and not an “ultimate solution”-type race war. Though a quick look at a field full of Ultimate Frisbee players might lead one to surmise that an ethnic cleansing has taken place....

It can be jarring to see people who look like they should be playing acoustic guitars yelling at each other about whether or not Blake stepped out of bounds.... Since the sport has yet to be integrated, you could command a high fee in terms of money or favors if you agree to join one of the many white leagues in your area....

"As Mike Bloomberg celebrated his 48th birthday in 1990, a top aide at the company he founded presented him with a booklet of profane, sexist quotes she attributed to him."

"A good salesperson is like a man who tries to pick up women at a bar by saying, 'Do you want to f---? He gets turned down a lot — but he gets f----- a lot, too!' Bloomberg was quoted in the booklet as saying. Bloomberg also allegedly said that his company’s financial information computers 'will do everything, including give you [oral sex]. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.' At the time, some Bloomberg staffers said, they laughed off the comments in the 32-page booklet, 'The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg,' as a macho side of one of the nerdiest men on Wall Street.... After The Post informed the Bloomberg campaign that it planned to put online a copy of the full booklet, spokesman Stu Loeser said, 'Mike simply did not say the things somebody wrote in this gag gift, which has been circulating for 30 years and has been quoted in every previous election Mike has been in.'"

From "Mike Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments" (WaPo).

And here's the booklet.

From the booklet. I read it. His favorite song is "My Way." He likes to mention blow jobs. Like this:

"I think I'm going to switch over to Hickenlooper."

I say out loud, as I'm reading "John Hickenlooper, Former Colorado Governor, Declares Candidacy for President" (NYT). Last December, as you may know, I suddenly said — also out loud — "Why aren't the Democratic candidates better? I'm just going to be for Amy Klobuchar."

But I've been worried about Amy. There was that comb-as-a-fork business, and just yesterday I was thinking there are too many Senators in the race, and I think we need a governor. There's Jay Inslee, but I'm thinking he's all about the Green New Deal. So I welcome Hickenlooper:

John Hickenlooper, the two-time Colorado governor and former brewpub owner who has overseen Colorado’s remarkable economic expansion, declared his candidacy for president on Monday.

Mr. Hickenlooper, 67, a socially progressive, pro-business Democrat who has called himself an “extreme moderate”...

Extreme moderate — I like!

Here's his video:



Best line: "As a skinny kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a funny last name, I’ve stood up to my fair share of bullies."

Hickenlooper was term-limited out of his governorship, but he seems to have been a very successful governor with what the NYT calls "a careful, consensus-building approach that won him praise from both sides of the aisle and helped him guide Colorado out of a recession and through a series of floods, wildfires and mass shootings...."

Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate, predicted that Mr. Hickenlooper would appeal to primary voters because “he does not have a lot of pretensions.” But Mr. Hart noted that the candidate would have to harden his stances fast, in order to attract the most passionate party activists in the run-up to the primaries.

Eh. Too many Democratic candidates have hardened up stances. I'm for the radical moderate who wants to bring people together and to get things done. There needs to be someone for those of us who loathe "the most passionate party activists."

Mr. Hickenlooper moved to Colorado in 1981 to work as a geologist in the oil industry. After a layoff, he opened a downtown Denver brewpub, eventually expanding to 15 pubs and restaurants, mostly in the Midwest. Soon, he was helping to reshape Denver’s dilapidated core. By 2003 he was mayor; in 2007 he won re-election with 87 percent of the vote...

By 2011, he was governor. In that position, Mr. Hickenlooper pushed through Medicaid expansion under a divided legislature, and signed the gun control package, a major shift for the state. Colorado also gained national attention when Mr. Hickenlooper helped the state establish a national model for recreational marijuana regulation, despite his personal opposition to legalization....

But progressives in the state reserve much of their criticism for his environmental legacy, arguing that he has not gone far enough in regulating the state’s powerful oil and gas industry. In recent years, some residents have faulted him for failing to push well projects out of their neighborhoods. (Mr. Hickenlooper has been so eager to promote the industry that he once drank fracking fluid.)

I guess there's something disgusting about every candidate. Amy Klobuchar ate salad with a comb, and John Hickenlooper drank fracking fluid. I like his brand of disgusting. It's pro-business. And he's a geologist who worked in the oil industry. He must know something. What other Democratic Party candidate has any wide-ranging business experience and has worked at multiple levels of the executive side of government? Hickenlooper was mayor of the 19th biggest city (Denver) and governor of the 21st biggest state. That's a lot of executive experience, and he seems to have handled it well. He's worked as an employee in a scientific field, and he's been a successful entrepreneur making the beloved American product, beer.

The governor, a lanky, guitar-playing, twice-married father of a teenage boy, has long been considered the state’s geek in chief, often running gimmicky advertisements in which he makes himself the butt of a joke. As governor he showered in a business suit for a political ad in which he swore off dirty politics.

Geek in chief. That's what I want.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hickenlooper, Lauren Hitt, said that the governor learned long ago how to make bullies feel uncertain, and she compared a potential Hickenlooper-Trumpov election to “a 'Revenge of the Nerds’-type situation.”

Excellent positioning!

"Tesla’s Elon Musk, definitely a visionary brain genius and not at all a manic idiot spaz and brazen fraud, has invented the future of mass transit for which we so desperately clamored."

"A narrow, jagged death-tunnel through which, uh, one Tesla-brand car at a time can, ah, drive ... the person who owns it, plus maybe two or three other people ... from one place to another ... at 49 miles per hour."

Mocks Albert Burneko at Deadspin.

Didn't we all agree back in 2006 that the word "spaz" isn't acceptable? That was when Tiger Woods called himself "a spaz," and the British press reacted very negatively. Here's what Language Log wrote at the time:

So how did the word spaz become innocuous playground slang in the U.S. but a grave insult in the U.K.? There's no question that spaz is a shortened and altered form of spastic, a term historically used to describe people with spastic paralysis, a condition... now commonly known as cerebral palsy.......

Here is the earliest cite [for the derogatory use] in the OED, from film critic Pauline Kael in 1965, along with another cite I found from that year in a New York Times column by Russell Baker:

1965 P. KAEL I lost it at Movies III. 259The term that American teen-agers now use as the opposite of 'tough' is 'spaz'. A spaz is a person who is courteous to teachers, plans for a career..and believes in official values. A spaz is something like what adults still call a square.

"Observer: America's New Class System," New York Times, Apr. 11, 1965, p. E14 Your teen-age daughter asks what you think of her "shades," which you are canny enough to know are her sunglasses, and you say, "Cool," and she says, "Oh, Dad, what a spaz!" (Translation: "You're strictly from 23-skidoo.")

So by the time Kael and Baker noticed teenagers using spaz, the sense had already shifted to 'uncool person,' without reference to lack of motor coordination.... [T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with... Steve Martin... playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz"...

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s... the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

And then in 2014, Weird Al Yankovic had to apologize for this song lyric:

Saw your blog post
It's really fantastic
That was sarcastic
'Cause you write like a spastic

Anyway, I wouldn't use "spaz." It makes an insult out of comparing somebody to a disabled person. You shouldn't want to cause that collateral damage.

That said, Musk's Tesla tunnel is absurd.

"I never thought I’d be urging my daughter to attend parties with drinking, drugs and who knows what else, but..."

"... if she doesn’t experiment now, in the safe space of a nurturing high school and a loving home, won’t she be awkwardly out of step with her peers when she starts college next year?," writes Debby Berman in "I worry my homebody teen is too much like me. But she has something I didn’t at her age" (WaPo).

Is she isolating herself to her own detriment? The truth is that although she isn’t the life-of-the-party teenager I expected, she is hauntingly familiar. When I was her age, I hung out mainly with one close friend, color-coded my class notes and never partied or touched trouble...

College was an awkward awakening. The first frat party I was lured to, just a few days into freshman year, turned me off from ever attending another one. Nothing bad happened, I just hated the whole scene....

The hidden, unspoken similarity between mother and child unnerves me. Why does she delay drinking, drugs and romantic encounters when she has opportunities to engage? No one guided her to this slow path, and no one is holding her there, at least not that I’m aware of.....

My thoughts, in order: 1. I'd worry about this too, 2. Is this about Kavanaugh? 3. No, not even mentioned! Weird. 4. Humblebragging.

"For two years, Natalie Hampton ate lunch alone. So after she changed schools..."

"... whenever she saw someone eating lunch alone, she would invite them to join her friends at their table. She knew that by saying 'sit with us,' she protected other children from becoming untouchable. 'Each time, the person’s face would light up, and the look of relief would wash over [it],' she says. 'Some of those people have become some of my closest friends.' Natalie was willing to give up her social capital, but she discovered that when a person has friends, spending social capital by befriending those without it lifts people up without bringing anyone down. If 'sit with us' became the ethos in middle school, bullying would be a thing of the past."

From "Meet the Teen Who Discovered the Secret of Social Capital/Natalie Hampton turns the (lunch) tables on a social system that breeds bullies" (Psychology Today).

I'm sharing this story for what it ostensibly is but also because I had the weird twinge of a thought: Isn't this kind of how Trumpov became President?

ADDED: Another solution to the schoolkid's horror of sitting alone in the lunchroom: Hiding in the bathroom.

And here's a Reddit discussion of the problem where the top-rated answer is: "I used to bring a book with me or my sketchbook. After a while, I didn't even care if others would stare at me since I was preoccupied with something." Another solution there is: "look for the nerdy table. I used to sit at a table with a couple of nerdy friends and we always accepted anyone that walked up. We all had some form of social anxiety. Some of the guys barely talked and that was alright by us."

ALSO: I've created a new tag, "Trumpov and bullying," and I'm going back and adding it to old posts. There are, of course, many old posts that discuss the portrayal of Trumpov as a bully, but I've found at least one that matches the insight above. In a May 2017 post — "3 Civil War historians react to Trumpov's Andrew Jackson comments line by line" — I quoted a historian who said that "Historians have come to a consensus that slavery is the reason" for the Civil War. I said:

Experts rely on this word ["consensus"] so much these days. It makes me suspect that they intimidate and discipline each other into toeing a party line. Why don't these experts perform their expertise for the people when they are invited to speak in a general forum like the BBC? It's especially bad when you add moral opprobrium. Here, the message was, the experts all agree, so you should just adopt our conclusion, because it's what we say. But on top of that there's this dire warning: And if you don't accept our consensus, you're going to look like a racist. One of the reasons Trumpov won was because he offered the common people liberation from that kind of bullying from the elite.

Boldface added.

Should a Jew feel responsible for the bad behavior of other Jews — like Harvey Weinstein, Leon Wieseltier, and Anthony Weiner?

Harold Pollack (of University of Chicago and The Century Foundation) says he feels responsible (and questions Glenn Loury about whether he feels responsible for the bad behavior of other people in his group):



At one point, Loury suggests that Jews should feel some pride in what Harvey Weinstein did because it shows that they're not all nerds!

Pollack responds that he "would take more pride" if Weinstein were "a swaggering playboy."

Yikes.

I used the word "nerdily" (in that last blog post) and Meade, proofreading, questioned it: "Nerdily?"

I questioned that, and he said "I question all adverbs."

Now, I want to get him a hat that says "Question Adverbs." You know, like the old slogan "Question Authority." Where did that slogan come from? Ah, Wikipedia — I love Wikipedia — has a page for "Question authority":

The slogan was popularized by controversial psychologist Timothy Leary....

It is intended to encourage people to avoid fallacious appeals to authority. The term has always symbolized the necessity of paying attention to the rules and regulations promulgated by a government unto its citizenry. However, psychologists have also criticized Leary's method of questioning authority and have argued that it resulted in widespread dysfunctionality. In their book Question Authority, Think For Yourself, psychologists Beverly Potter and Mark Estren alleged that the practice of Leary's philosophy enhances a person's self-interest and greatly weakens the ability to cooperate with others.

Since — as quoted in the previous post — "Everybody's shouting "Which side are you on?,'" I'm on Timothy Leary's side.  About questioning authority. About questioning adverbs, I'm on Meade's side. I question them, but — as with authorities — after questioning, I sometimes go along with them.

Leerily.

I don't watch the show, but I enjoyed "The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory."

It has some great points to make, and it supports those points — nerdily enough — with evidence. That is, there are plenty of clips from the show, so you don't have to know the show to understand what is being talked about.



It's possible that there's an unfair selectivity to the chosen clips and that other templates could be imposed, but even if you're resistant to the idea that this — and other — TV comedies deploy real sexism under cover of nerdiness, you should answer with evidence of your own and not with discourse-averse categorical rejection.

I found that clip through Metafilter, where somebody says:

I can't watch the show. I've tried. (Full disclosure: I have tried because more than one person, on more than one occasion, has informed me that I am very... Sheldon, or anyway what Sheldon would be if he were female.) It's a show that does not genuinely like any of its characters, makes unkind and hurtful fun of all of them, and is sexist in a way I see all the damn time in geek culture. It's not funny there, either.

I attempted to watch the show approximately once, but I couldn't get through it, because I feel like a complete alien to the culture where actors say one gag after another and an audience (or machine) laughs on cue over and over. I can, however, see that "The Big Bang Theory" has been one of the top-3 highest-rated TV shows for the last 5 years.

Ah! Here, you can watch "The Big Bang Theory" without the laugh track. It's put together by someone who hates the show and thinks he can "expose how unfunny the show actually is" by taking out the laugh track. To me, the laugh track is the worst thing about the show. I am not fooled by laugh tracks into thinking things are funnier than they are. I get hostile and think they're less funny than they'd be without the laugh track.

So I prefer the no-laugh-track version of "The Big Bang Theory," even as it's dark and depressing. I'm reminded of what bothered me when I did try to watch the show: The characters are supposed to be very smart, but they don't say smart things. They say stupid things.

"Is it just me, or has testosterone been in the news more lately? I blame Donald Trumpov!"

"Or maybe Rush Limbaugh. Althouse links to this recently rebroadcast episode of This American Life about testosterone, where there’s an interview with a woman who 'transitioned' into being a man with the help of colossal doses of testosterone."

Says Instapundit, pointing at something I wrote yesterday. After quoting the interviewee's saying that she "became interested in science," he continues:

It’s funny, I was talking to a friend a while back who was very interested in math and science pre-puberty, but lost nearly all interest afterward, and she said, “when the estrogen came in, the science went out.”

Some other stuff in this interview reminds me of my friend (and former editor) Norah Vincent, who lived as a man for a year and wrote a great book, Self-Made Man. She, too, said that as a “bulldyke” woman, she was very masculine, but as a man — in her case, without hormones — she wasn’t all that masculine for a man. And that it was a lot harder to be a man than women think.

Meanwhile, also from This American Life, the most NPR line ever: “I have rage. Unfortunately, it’s impotent rage.” Also, the highest testosterone level among the NPR males is 274, which I believe is treatably low. . . . .

Plus: “If I can’t be the most manly in public radio, where the hell can I be the most manly?”

You might want to connect this to the recent episode of "Survivor," in which a gay man outed a female-to-male transgender. Writing about that a couple days ago, I mentioned that we'd been watching the show believing that "we were looking at a not-terribly-masculine gay man." Varner, the gay man who outed the the other contestant wasn't someone I would assume was gay. He'd have to tell me. Now, Varner caught hell not just for outing his tribe-mate (Zeke). He was also condemned for characterizing closetedness as deception. Here's an interview with Varner:

"I will say that I have spent 10 months stewing in this awful, horrible mistake I made. I have been through I don’t now how much therapy with the show’s therapist, with a local therapist, I have met with and spoken to several LGBT organizations, I have joined the board of a couple of them, I joined a national study on outness. This has changed me drastically. But I don’t want to spend two minutes talking about my experience because this isn’t about me. This is about Zeke. And I can only profusely apologize."

There's a lot there about etiquette and human decency that's complicated by the competition (which everyone knows entails deception and manipulating other people's fears about being deceived and played for a fool (with $1 million at stake)). Varner blundered and is paying a big price. But I wonder how he, as a gay man, felt about Zeke's presenting himself as a gay man. Those of us in the majority — the nongay — should perhaps not be so judgmental about how a gay man feels when a transgender male chooses to present as gay when that person seems relatively unmasculine.

The transgender person Instapundit quoted also said that her — and later, his — role models were James Dean and Jason Priestley, and that "I was better at that as a dyke than I am as a man, I have to say." And:

"It's a bit of a disappointment. It's a bit of a disappointment. I often ask people, what kind of a guy am I? What do you see? And unfortunately, people often respond that they see a nerd, which I never was before. I was always really cool and popular and hip and whatever.

So this person was perceived edgily masculine by people who were seeing what they thought of as a woman, but a boring nerd by those who were perceiving a man. And that was with the testosterone.

ADDED: Nothing against nerds. Nerd can be the identity you embrace. If that's what you want, go for it. 

"My least favorite was the clue on NERDS (46D: Brainy high school clique)."

"'Clique' my ass. This makes it sound like NERDS are some exclusive / exclusionary bunch. I guarantee you that NERDS are more than happy to nerd out with you, no matter what you look like, how much money you have, etc. You don't have to be rich to rule their world. 'Clique'! Boooo! Everything about the word 'clique' is non-nerd."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword.