Linky Friday: My God, What Is That Thing Edition

It is time once again…Linky Friday is the long-running tradition of Ordinary Times bringing you POVs from across the web and around the world. As always, the opinions in Linky Friday are solely those of the authors, and are presented for discussion purposes not as endorsements.

[LF1] Tokyo Prepares for Fan-Free Olympics as Virus Surges by By Ayai Tomisawa and Gearoid Reidy

The Tokyo Olympics will ban spectators from events held in Japan’s capital, revising an earlier decision to allow some fans, as the resurgence of virus cases pushed the government to declare a state of emergency in the city.

The decision, announced by Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa, comes after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga declared a fourth state of emergency for Tokyo, running from July 12 through Aug. 22.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga Declares Another Emergency Over Coronvavirus
A screen broadcasts a news conference of Yoshihide Suga in Tokyo, on July 8.Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg
Events held in neighboring prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa, which will remain under a quasi state of emergency, will also be spectator-less, the organizers announced late Thursday. Other regions, including Fukushima and Miyagi, located north-east of Tokyo, will have some spectators.

“It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure a safe and secure Olympics,” Suga told reporters Friday, adding the administration would do its utmost to ensure safety, especially through border measures.

It’s a reversal from a decision last month to limit the number of spectators at either 10,000 or 50% of venue capacity, whichever is smaller. Arrangements on how to deal with the already sold tickets will be decided later, according to the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee.

The organizers “decided to take a stricter approach than other sporting events because the popularity of the Olympics would mean there will be more flow of people,” Tokyo 2020 CEO Toshiro Muto said at a briefing.

Olympic Venues As Tokyo Ends Virus Emergency A Month Before Games
National Stadium, the main venue for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, in Tokyo, earlier in June.Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg
More than half of the 43 Olympic and Paralympic venues, including the 68,000-capacity National Stadium that’s set to host the opening ceremony on July 23, are located in Tokyo. Organizers had said that a no-spectator scenario was possible, depending on the virus situation. A decision to bar fans from overseas was announced in March.

The International Olympic Committee said it supported the decision, but said the planning committees “deeply regret for the athletes and for the spectators that this measure had to be put in place.”

[LF2] Edward Hopper’s Creative Process: The Drawing & Careful Preparation Behind Nighthawks & Other Iconic Paintings by Colin Marshall

Edward Hopper painted, but more importantly, he drew. His body of work includes about 140 canvases, which doesn’t make him especially prolific given his long life and career — but then, one of those canvases is Nighthawks. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Hopper’s “storyboards” for that time- and culture-transcending painting of a late-night New York diner. But those count as only a few of the voluminous preparatory drawings without which neither Nighthawks nor his other major works like Automat, Chop Suey, or Morning Sun Sea would have seen the light of day — or rather, the emotional dusk that infuses all his images, no matter their setting.

“It’s a long process of gestation in the mind and arising emotion,” says Hopper himself in the 1961 interview clip above. “I make various small sketches, sketches of the thing that I wish to do, also sketches of details in the picture.” This process entailed no little pavement-pounding: “Again and again, he would pick up his sketchbook and head for a cluster of New York City movie theaters,” writes the Los Angeles Times‘ Barbara Isenberg, covering Hopper Drawing, a 2013 exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “Sometimes it was the Republic or the Palace, other times the Strand or the Globe, places where he could study the lobby, the auditorium, the curtained area off to the side. Back at home, he’d pose his wife, Josephine, as an usherette and draw her portrait.” After 54 such drawings, the result was Hopper’s “monumental painting New York Movie.”

[LF3] Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ Ex-Lawyer, Heads To Prison For Attempted Extortion

Michael Avenatti, the brash California lawyer who once represented Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump, was sentenced Thursday to 2 1/2 years in prison for trying to extort up to $25 million from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity.

Avenatti, 50, was convicted last year of charges including attempted extortion and honest services fraud in connection with his representation of a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer who was upset that Nike had ended its league sponsorship.

Attorney Michael Avenatti, Sometime Scourge To Trump, Now Faces Federal Charges March 25, 2019
Michael Avenatti Indicted For Allegedly Stealing Paraplegic Client’s Settlement Money April 11, 2019
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe called Avenatti’s conduct “outrageous,” saying he “hijacked his client’s claims, and he used those claims to further his own agenda, which was to extort millions of dollars from Nike for himself.”

Avenatti, the judge added, “had become drunk on the power of his platform, or what he perceived the power of his platform to be. He had become someone who operated as if the laws and the rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to him.”

Before the judge spoke, Avenatti delivered emotional remarks, sometimes through tears.

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“Your honor, I’ve learned that all the fame, notoriety and money in the world is meaningless. TV and Twitter, your honor, mean nothing,” he said.

He ended his statement by saying what he expects of his three children, including two teenage daughters who wrote letters to the judge.

“Every father wants their children to be proud of them. I want mine to be ashamed. Because if they are ashamed, it means their moral compass is exactly where it should be,” he said.

Criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted Avenatti’s rapid ascent to fame. He also faces the start of a fraud trial next week in the Los Angeles area, a second California criminal trial later this year and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[LF4] The Meaning Of The Native Graves: They’re good, actually by Declan Leary in The American Conservative

This is quite possibly the most vile Op-Ed I’ve read in a long, long time…

This is not to discount the deaths of children altogether. Of course, it would have been better if each and every one of the First Nations tykes Christianized by the union of Church and state had lived a long and happy life. But it is absolutely to discount the blame fixed on the Church by vicious opportunists. If anyone is at fault here—and the residential school system, for all the good of its evangelizing purpose, was hardly without flaws—it is, without a doubt, the secular authority. Had the Canadian government, which in word endorsed the Christian mission of the residential schools, upheld that word in deed by providing the funding which Church authorities repeatedly said was necessary for adequate operation, living conditions could have been improved and a great many premature deaths avoided.

But this failure of the secular authority to sufficiently serve the Church does not in any way indict that Christian mission. And make no mistake, the residential schools were first and foremost Christian. Those who ministered to the Indians a century ago did so, like Jean de Brébeuf three centuries before, out of a sincere concern for the salvation of their souls. The political utility recognized by the Canadian government—that, as one bureaucrat put it early on, “the North American Indian cannot be civilized or preserved in a state of civilization (including habits of industry and sobriety) except in connection with, if not by the influence of, not only religious instruction and sentiment but of religious feelings”—is secondary. Likewise, the certain fact that souls were saved by the missionaries, the enduring belief of Christians that the Gospel is true and must be spread, is paramount; everything else is secondary.

Whatever good was present at the Ossossané ossuary—where those who had not yet encountered the fullness of Truth honored their dead as best they knew how—is increased a thousandfold in the cemeteries of the residential schools, where baptized Christians were given Christian burials. Whatever natural good was present in the piety and community of the pagan past is an infinitesimal fraction of the grace rendered unto those pagans’ descendants who have been received into the Church of Christ. Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace—the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families—is worth it.

[LF5] Women and War: Without the insights of women and other historically neglected voices, our knowledge of conflict is dangerously limited by Andy Owen in Arc Digital

Cross-cultural historical studies find that fewer than 1 percent of warriors in history were female. This extends through to who gets to decide how we reach peace at the end of conflict. One UN study in 2012 found that, in 31 major peace processes, only 2.4 percent of chief mediators and 4 percent of signatories were women.

That 1 percent, though, includes some incredible warriors and iconic leaders: Boadicea; Viking shield maidens; Joan of Arc; Queen Elizabeth I of England; Molly Pitchers in the American War of Independence; Tashenamani, who led the counterattack against Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass; Malalai, the Afghan poet and warrior who fought to defeat the British at the Battle of Maiwand; Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and Civil War heroine; Second World War Russian snipers at Stalingrad; and some of the soldiers I served with in more recent conflicts.

Despite this there is a perceived division between life-givers and life-takers. There are pre-existing gender disparities and gendered stereotypes that influence who is allowed to fight, which in turn influences whose perspectives are heard. These same stereotypes and disparities often leave it to women to pick up the pieces and at the same time make it more difficult for them to do so. Take, for example, one of the most persuasive stereotypes: the passive, waiting, dutiful wife.

The archetypical dutiful wife is found in one of the first stories that was written down. Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, follows Odysseus’s decade-long journey home, after the decade-long Trojan War. It focuses on Odysseus’s adventures, although we learn that, as time passes, his wife Penelope, back in Ithaca, must contend with a group of unruly suitors who compete for her hand in marriage. She devises various strategies to delay having to commit. Penelope is portrayed as loyal and patient. We must wait until Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad to hear Penelope’s perspective. As Penelope reviews her life from 21st-century Hades, she rejects the role of the ideal wife. She admits to just trying to survive. Generations of women have been left at home while their men went away to fight for years on end. They have raised children alone, managed estates, and fought the state for the rights that others, mostly men, were determined to deny them.

[LF6] Stop Debating Definitions by Freddie deBoer

I note with some distress that many people seem to have become inclined to argue almost exclusively by defining extremely narrow terms by which a given issue “should” be debated, and then engage only by relentlessly policing those terms rather than trying to reason more broadly in a way that actually deepens understanding. Yes, defining terms is important; it is useful to know, for example, what different people mean when they use the term “critical race theory,” particularly the progenitors of that term. We should though recognize that all terms, even previously-obscure academic terms, have shifting boundaries and definitions that are subject to public evolution. More importantly, argument about definition is very rarely fruitful. (I have recently been reminded of this fact by discussing the meaning of communism in the comments here.) Meanwhile, things are happening that deserve public debate. Some people want to change the way that race is taught in American K-12 schools. Some people are oppose to those changes. The way to determine whose feelings should reign is not by endlessly arguing over whether these changes do or do not constitute critical race theory but rather by deciding what is true and what is good.

(It is an absolute certainty that a commenter will quickly remind me of a time I have myself been guilty of this in the recent past.)

Are we changing education about race for the better? Should we reduce police funding or abolish police altogether? Was the Covid-19 pandemic caused by an accidental release of the virus that causes it from a lab, in Wuhan or elsewhere? These seem like good questions to me – good enough that people should stop torpedoing discussions about them with endless, pointless, driving-me-to-believe-that-democracy-was-a-mistake-and-we’ve-reached-the-collapse-of-human-society bullshit deflection. Just argue substance, I beg of you. Who cares if it’s critical race theory? I care if it’s the right way to think. I wish I knew what was causing this, it would be useful to know the origins in order to just kidding it’s Twitter the answer is Twitter literally all of our communicative and political problems come from Twitter.

[LF7] The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone By Jonathan Zittrain in The Atlantic

Before today’s internet, the primary way to preserve something for the ages was to consign it to writing—first on stone, then parchment, then papyrus, then 20-pound acid-free paper, then a tape drive, floppy disk, or hard-drive platter—and store the result in a temple or library: a building designed to guard it against rot, theft, war, and natural disaster. This approach has facilitated preservation of some material for thousands of years. Ideally, there would be multiple identical copies stored in multiple libraries, so the failure of one storehouse wouldn’t extinguish the knowledge within. And in rare instances in which a document was surreptitiously altered, it could be compared against copies elsewhere to detect and correct the change.

These buildings didn’t run themselves, and they weren’t mere warehouses. They were staffed with clergy and then librarians, who fostered a culture of preservation and its many elaborate practices, so precious documents would be both safeguarded and made accessible at scale—certainly physically, and, as important, through careful indexing, so an inquiring mind could be paired with whatever a library had that might slake that thirst. (As Jorge Luis Borges pointed out, a library without an index becomes paradoxically less informative as it grows.)

At the dawn of the internet age, 25 years ago, it seemed the internet would make for immense improvements to, and perhaps some relief from, these stewards’ long work. The quirkiness of the internet and web’s design was the apotheosis of ensuring that the perfect would not be the enemy of the good. Instead of a careful system of designation of “important” knowledge distinct from day-to-day mush, and importation of that knowledge into the institutions and cultures of permanent preservation and access (libraries), there was just the infinitely variegated web, with canonical reference websites like those for academic papers and newspaper articles juxtaposed with PDFs, blogs, and social-media posts hosted here and there.

Enterprising students designed web crawlers to automatically follow and record every single link they could find, and then follow every link at the end of that link, and then build a concordance that would allow people to search across a seamless whole, creating search engines returning the top 10 hits for a word or phrase among, today, more than 100 trillion possible pages. As Google puts it, “The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system.”

Now, I just quoted from Google’s corporate website, and I used a hyperlink so you can see my source. Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together. It’s what allows you to learn more about what’s only briefly mentioned in an article like this one, and for others to double-check the facts as I represent them to be. The link I used points to https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/. Suppose Google were to change what’s on that page, or reorganize its website anytime between when I’m writing this article and when you’re reading it, eliminating it entirely. Changing what’s there would be an example of content drift; eliminating it entirely is known as link rot.

It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.