Sydney Sweeney Blue Jean Ad Sparks Controversy, but Eugenics in Fashion is nothing new.

[NNadir]

38. It all depends on what one regards as "culture." For many years when I was a kid in the lab, people would come in...

...report what was on the latest episode of some television show series, Seinfeld, LA Law, whatever, and I had no idea about what they were talking. In some of the conversations these people would be speaking as if the characters were real people.

In general, they were fairly good scientists, but I'd like to suggest that they could have been better scientists if the fully embraced the culture behind their work, science.

Last year, my son brought home his girlfriend, a nuclear engineer from an inland state where they are both graduate students, who had never been to New Jersey. We rented a place at a New Jersey Beach where - I didn't know this - the "reality(?) show" Jersey Shore was filmed, Seaside Heights. To try to understand "New Jersey culture" apparently she watched the show (with my son).

So my wife and I who had never seen the show, got a few episodes out of the library and watched them.

We were appalled. (We live near Princeton, where people like Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, John Von Neumann, Kurt Wiles, Alan Turing, Toni Morrison, on and on and on worked and lived.)

I'm not a cultural anthropologist. I do feel educated enough and well within my rights to take short peeks into other cultures and be happy to understand that while I may not know much about a culture, I'm comfortable saying I'm not willing to go deeper. There isn't time in one's life to not rely in many instances on snap judgements.

(I have no problem with people rejecting New Jersey from watching Jersey Shore. As the best State in the Nation, and a geographically small state, we're overcrowded. I will say that as a young man growing up on Long Island, my opinion of New Jersey was rather poor, but it turned out that I was, just in time, disabused of my ignorance.)

I don't know who Sydney Sweeney is, and frankly I don't care, but I do think there is a genetic reductionist intent for the double entendre and frankly, I find it offensive, but not so much that I'm willing to spend all that much time on it.

The planet is going fascist, and while the ad may be trivial, I do see it as racist, and as I am more than a little raw over the affair, I feel comfortable with my outrage. I really don't need to know more about Sydney Sweeney to feel it.