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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.
World’s smartest person calls women’s chess ‘inherently damaging’
In a recent “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade, a reader asked columnist Marilyn vos Savant why there are women’s tournaments for such competitions as chess and billiards where size and strength confer no particular advantage.
Part of her answer: “Hosting events for women may be a well-intentioned effort to encourage more female activity, but they imply inferiority, which is inherently damaging.”
Vos Savant, 76, holds the now-retired Guiness Book of World Records mark for highest recorded IQ, an achievement that inspired the Parade newspaper supplement to give her a column in 1986 where she would field random questions like the one about women’s chess. It’s a harmless conceit. Very few if any of her answers exhibit extraordinary brain power, though this one is spot on.
Separate competitive categories for women outside of athletics ought to be permissible only for limited times when women are first entering a field long dominated by men.
Separate awards for male and female actors doesn’t make any more sense than separate prizes for male and female writers or singers, but I suppose those categories remain on various award shows to boost audience interest rather than to suggest any differences in talent.
And vos Savant was also right 32 years ago when she infuriated thousands of readers with her solution to “The Monty Hall Problem,” which Wikipedia summarized this way:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
Vos Savant answered yes, it’s definitely to your advantage to switch to door No. 2, and “approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them calling vos Savant wrong.”
The extensive Wikipedia page on the problem shows in detail why the counterintuitive answer is indisputably correct, and before you write to me insisting that the odds of door 2 and door 3 remain identical at 33% no matter what the host does or says, I invite you to get out some scratch paper and run the experiment.
Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses
Some of these messages are in reference to items in last week’s issues of the Picayune Sentinel.
Rick S. — I was struck by the way Ken Burns’ Holocaust series illustrated that the American people have been a motley bunch from the very beginning with a reputation that far exceeded reality.
“American exceptionalism” — the comforting idea that our geography, our history, our political structure and our abundant resources exempts us from the fate that afflicts or has afflicted so many nations — is a dangerous myth. We are human and prone to the same destructive impulses that have given rise to tyranny and murderous civil strife. Superior self-regard makes us more susceptible to devolution, not less.
Harris M. — In terms of eliminating offensive place names, how about renaming Indian Boundary Golf Course as “Caucasian Boundary,” since I have not seen any golfers of color in my two times there?
The course and the park on the Northwest side are on what was literally a boundary between settlers' land and indigenous land. I don't think "Indian" on its own is offensive. But I might be wrong. Could easily be "Settlers Boundary" though.
Peter Z. — We have the Russians dropping ordinance close to nuclear plants and you are worried about who Pat Sajak takes pictures with? How about some perspective here?
Just about every other news or human interest story pales in importance next to the threat of global climate change, to the rise in right-wing extremism around the globe and the ominous developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I admit to chasing after certain other sticks that the news gods throw, including frivolous talkers like the disquieting politics of a prominent game-show host.
Steve H. — I enjoyed watching that video of you, Neil Steinberg and John Williams kicking off last week’s Mincing Rascals podcast. I thought the discussion of the name of Neil's book, “Every Goddamn Day,” was pretty funny. Having read Neil’s blog — “Every goddamn day” — since its inception, I thought the "goddamn" ship had sailed by this point.
In the video we have WGN bleeping the word. Yet here's what Neil wrote when he started the blog, which still remains in the "For the offended" sidebar to the right of his posts:
"I can set your mind at ease right now, by drawing your attention to the lower case 'g'—it's 'goddamn,' not referring to your one-and-only God at all, not the uppercase Almighty, King of the Universe, Lord of Lords, or whatever personal deity you hold in far higher regard than your fellow mortals. No, this a small 'g' minor deity—Hermes, perhaps, or Pallas Athena, unless you worship those; then it's someone else."
The distinction between capital-G Goddamn and lower-case-g goddamn is clearly lost on listeners and probably lost on readers as well. The title of Steinberg’s blog is somewhat self-effacing, as though it’s a question from an exasperated reader, “Neil Steinberg? Every goddamn day?” Or perhaps it’s a solemn promise from the writer: “Yep, every goddamn day.” But either way it’s a stretch to think of this use of “goddamn” as a literal entreaty to the Judeo-Christian God — or any god — to consign someone or something to eternal damnation.
As Steinberg uses it — as many people often use it — “goddamn” is just an intensifier, an impolite word dropped in to impart special emphasis. “Fuckin’” is frequently deployed for the same purpose, and indeed Steiberg could have called his blog and his new book “Every fuckin’ day” to almost identical effect.
But there are still some — I have no idea how many — who consider even such oblique uses of “goddamn” offensively blasphemous and categorically worse that the famous sexual and scatalogical oaths. To quote from Catholic Culture’s summary of the catechism:
Blasphemy is directly opposed to the second commandment (not to take the name of God in vain). It consists in uttering against God — inwardly or outwardly — words of hatred, reproach, or defiance; in speaking ill of God; in failing in respect toward him in one's speech; in misusing God's name. … Oaths which misuse God's name, though without the intention of blasphemy, show lack of respect for the Lord.
In that sense, context doesn’t matter. Which is something we are told about the use of certain racist terms that may not be spoken aloud, even for educational purposes. It’s very raw and resonant for many people. For that reason, my feeling is that the WGN censors did the right thing bleeping the word for the small if general audience for that video. But how do you vote?
The shameful origin of the name ‘Proud Boys’
I found this excerpt from Andy Campbell’s new book, “We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism” to be particularly telling:
The Proud Boys name first came to (group founder) Gavin McInnes while he watched, with disgust, as a 12-year-old boy with brown skin sang a musical number on stage at a school recital. …”Fuckin’ musicals, man," he said during an early episode of his online talk show, “The Gavin McGinnis show.” “My wife's a fag hag so I had to sit there and just not laugh. I couldn't say to my boys, ‘Don't ever fucking do that or I will be the opposite of proud.’ … This little Puerto Rican kid comes out, and he goes, ‘I'll make you proud boy!’ It was the gayest fucking song," he said. “When I was watching I was like, this is obviously the Hispanic son of a single mom.” …
The origins of The Proud Boys, the nation's most notorious political Fight Club, can be traced to one reactionary bigot behind a microphone who hated a child he figured was a fatherless Puerto Rican.
Ya gotta see these tweets!
I often run across tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently:
Vote for your favorite. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.
There’s still time to vote in both the conventional Tweet of the Week poll and the all-politics version!
Thank you for supporting the Picayune Sentinel. To help this publication grow, please consider spreading the word to friends, family, associates, neighbors and agreeable strangers.
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Ordnance.
I could not choose one visual tweet. They all had me laughing too hard.