Perhaps it’s unfair, since this was said in the heat of a debate with Bill Maher. But this is how my friend Glenn Greenwald described the US last Friday night:
It’s amazing for you to say “Look at all these Muslims. The minute you give them a little freedom, they go wild and they start being all violent” … How can you be a citizen of the United States, the country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades and say “Look at those people over there? They are incredibly violent”?
I’m very much with Glenn on American denial about the consequences of our own actions. I’m with him in believing that we have a very dangerous capacity to whitewash our own sins and highlight those of others. I do think the US – mainly since 9/11 – has been generating violence on a large scale, most recently by invading and occupying Iraq and not providing minimal security for its inhabitants, leading to a sectarian bloodbath bigger even that Syria’s current horror.
But really: the US has generated more violence and militarism in the last sixty years than any other country? Has Glenn heard of the Cultural Revolution? Or the reign of Pol Pot? Or the brutal legacy of Stalin?
“I think I shall have to give up teaching females after this year. The nervous irritation caused by two hours’ contact with them is intense. I seem to hate every movement of their minds. The minds of the men, even when they are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellent” – John Maynard Keynes.
It seems to me that we can readily acknowledge and accept many unpleasant features of Keynes’ life (like his misogyny) without thereby impugning his economic arguments. If you want to read the ur-smear-job, check out the latest from Forbes, which manages to compile every little thing that could possibly alienate a reader about Keynes, without any serious attempt to relate it to his economic ideas. (The accusation of pedophilia is based on nothing but use of the term “boys” to mean tricks. The youngest man Keynes slept with was 16, which is the current age of consent in the UK.) Yes, his broad argument for the economy was culturally counter-intuitive (which “moralist” in the early 20th century would think that there are times when thrift is collectively self-defeating?) – but it remains supported by the data, even now. Perhaps especially now. That’s how I view Keynes’ “immoralism”. It was about rejecting conventional morality if the real world showed its empirical futility. And, of course, I think he was absolutely right to dismiss any moral difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. He was just way ahead of his time.
I have no doubt that Keynes sexual orientation might have given him an outsider’s view of what “morality” was deemed to be, and he was understandably and bravely skeptical about it. That may have given him the impulse to challenge conventional wisdom, but the products of his prodigious mind seem to me to be best analyzed by economists on their merits. On sexual matters and economic ones, in the long run, Keynes is very much alive – and helping future generations in ways most of us would dream about.
David Barash reflects on our primate need for foes and our tendency to be ”especially prone to exaggerating them”:
“Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy,” wrote Nietzsche, “has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.” It is reported that at the end of the Third Punic War, after Carthage had finally been destroyed and pillaged, her people killed or enslaved, her land sown with salt, a kind of sadness came over the victorious citizens of Rome, an awareness that with their defining struggle behind them, they would never be the same.
All too often, nationhood, or even selfhood, is defined by one’s opponents. Imagine: Ahab without Moby Dick, the Hatfields without the McCoys. As each has been defined by the other, enmity has subtly been transformed into dependence. If Moby Dick had died of old age, or in the sweet embrace of a giant squid, or by someone else’s harpoon, Ahab would probably have mourned rather than celebrated. But Ahab was a fictional character, while the rest of us—and our enemies—are very real. Equally real is the fact that sometimes these enemies go away, leaving us frustrated, empty, and strangely alone.
This is especially true about Americans and terrorism. The reaction to the home-grown pressure-cooker bombs by two losers in Boston reveals the degree of the 9/11 PTSD the country is still reeling from. And the panic and hysteria doesn’t actually help the war on Jihadist terror. We gave the Tsarnaev brothers what they craved: full metal media orgasm. They may have killed three people in a horrifying attack – but it led to saturation coverage (yes, we joined in) and to the publicity post-Qaeda Jihadists live for.
In that sense, Pete King is as big an unwitting recruiter for Jihadist terrorism as he was a very witting supporter of Irish terrorism against innocent civilians. He once gave mass-murderers money; now he gives them publicity. What we haven’t yet figured out is that once we have disabled the organized terror groups like al Qaeda, the best thing we can do with rogue Jihadists is to treat them with withering contempt.
At times, many Republicans like King almost seem unconsciously to want there to be another 9/11 – to justify their inability to move past that event.
Well, they finally have something. The talking points provided by the CIA were pushed back against and effectively edited by the State Department’s spokesperson, Victoria Nuland. The key emails, it seems to me, are the following. Nuland showed classic bureaucratic in-fighting as the CIA sought to highlight its own warnings, ignored by State. The reference to elements of al Qaeda in the country, highlighted by the CIA:
“could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”
That’s prima facie evidence of politically spinning the facts. The “either”, however, refers to previously mentioned legitimate wariness of tipping off the Jihadists that the US was onto them. Notice how the second statement was utterly unnecessary – and purely political, defending State and Clinton. And even when the specific reference to Jihadist elements in Libya was removed, Nuland still cavilled:
“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my buildings (sic) leadership.”
My building’s leadership? Who can that mean but Clinton?
As Joe Klein has noted, these are venial sins, not mortal ones. And the premise of the Republican argument that immediately including the possibility of a pre-planned Jihadist attack would have deeply wounded the Obama campaign seems ludicrous to me. He decimated al Qaeda in Af-Pak and killed bin Laden, but a minor, if foolish, attempt at unnecessary spin after an embassy siege would have undone this legacy in the eyes of voters? Come off it.
All of this is a grotesque over-reaction – for transparently political purposes. The GOP does not know any more how to propose constructive policies that actually might improve the lives of Americans. But they sure know how to construct a “scandal” into a mountain when it is only a bump in the tarmac.
Would U.S. intervention–no-fly zones, arms, aid to the opposition forces–make things better? It depends on what one means by better. It would certainly intensify the civil war. It would also make the regime of Bashar Assad more desperate. Perhaps Assad has already used chemical weapons; with his back against the wall, he might use them on a larger scale. As for external instability, Landis points out that if U.S. intervention tipped the balance against the Alawites, they might flee Syria into Lebanon, destabilizing that country for decades. Again, this pattern is not unprecedented. Large numbers on the losing side have fled wars in the Middle East, from Palestinians in 1948 to Iraq’s Sunnis in the past decade.
If the objective is actually to reduce the atrocities and minimize potential instability, the key will be a political settlement that gives each side an assurance that it has a place in the new Syria. That was never achieved in Iraq, which is why, despite U.S. troops and arms and influence, the situation turned into a violent free-for-all. If some kind of political pact can be reached, there’s hope for Syria. If it cannot, U.S. assistance to the rebels or even direct military intervention won’t change much: Syria will follow the pattern of Lebanon and Iraq–a long, bloody civil war. And America will be in the middle of it.
Anyone who wants to insert the US into such a bloody, violent, increasingly sectarian civil war needs his or her head examined. We couldn’t control or even understand one while we were occupying Iraq – and, as Fareed notes, scores of thousands were murdered under our very noses, with millions of refugees. An entire country is afflicted with communal PTSD of the most severe kind. Last month, the deaths in Iraq’s continuing civil war reached a post-occupation record of 700. And that’s after we invaded, occupied and tried to set up a non-sectarian government. What are the odds we can guide yet another sectarian civil war from the skies?
Brent Sasley claims that the recent Israeli strikes on Syria can succeed where the US can’t because their goals are pragmatic and limited:
The economics debate in this country these past few years is almost a microcosm of the problem with ideological politics. In response to the worst recession since the 1930s, the right immediately rejected Keynes’ core analysis of the Great Depression and turned any idea of stimulus or spending and borrowing to tackle the recession into a gloom-ridden, terrifying harbinger of hyper-inflation and insurmountable debt. The zero House votes for the Obama stimulus reflect that rigid lockdown of the mind. We know where this aversion comes from – the misappropriation of Keynesian emergency economic management as a general theory of full employment and growth in the 1960s and 1970s. And there is a strong argument that misreading Keynes in that era of hubristic liberalism was indeed an error that needed a correction.
But that doesn’t rebut Keynes’ central claim about our current predicament: that in a liquidity trap, austerity is counter-productive and fears of inflation are over-blown. Bartlett:
The core insight of Keynesian economics is that there are very special economic circumstances in which the general rules of economics don’t apply and are, in fact, counterproductive.
This happens when interest rates and inflation are so low that there is no essential difference between money and bonds; money, after all, is simply a bond that pays no interest. When this happens, monetary policy becomes impotent; an increase in the money supply has no stimulative effect because it does not lead to additional spending by consumers or businesses.
This is not an eternal ideology – determined as “on the left” and therefore impermissible on the right or center. It’s a specific analysis of a specific problem, which happens to be where we are now. A true conservative would throw ideology aside and look at the real world. Which is the difference between today’s GOP and a genuine conservative, like Bruce. I’m not a Keynesian for ever. But I am a Keynesian for now.
The above video shows an Israeli airstrike in Damascus on Saturday night, reportedly targeting regime munitions bound for Hezbollah. It comes on the heels of another attack late last week, on missiles stored at Damascus airport. Assad’s regime now declares it will retaliate, and the IDF says this won’t be the end of the strikes:
Officials [in Israel] are concerned that as the Syrian state devolves into chaos, sophisticated weapons not previously available to Hizballah will make their way across the border to Lebanon, altering the military equation between Israel and the well-armed Shi‘ite militia sponsored by Iran and aided by the Syrian government.
We are told this was not an act of war. Why? Er, because Israel did it and therefore it is not an act of war. It may have killed close to 100 Syrian army soldiers, among many others; it may have been the biggest single explosion in Syria’s capital city throughout the entire conflict; it may have required entering another country’s airspace and bombing its capital city; but this is not a war. Moreover, this not-war is embraced by the US. Because Israel did it:
In a series of high-level meetings between U.S. and Israeli officials over the last year, the Israelis explained in detail the conditions that would lead them to attack targets inside Syria. Israel’s “red lines,” articulated in private and public, include the shipment from Iran of advanced anti-aircraft weapons, advanced missiles, and chemical or unconventional weapons to the Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah, according to public reports and U.S. officials. … President Obama signaled Sunday that the U.S. had no objections to the strikes.
Which begs the obvious question:
If Syrian planes bombed Israel’s Ramat David Airbase because it houses US-supplied weaponry, what would the appropriate Israeli reaction be?
Imagine a foreign military bombing Washington. Would we not regard that as an act of war? At what point are we going to admit that, in our view, all the rules of international law apply to every party but the US and its allies? Blake Hounshell considers the impact of the air strikes on all parties:
[W]ow, this is awkward for the Syrian opposition. The regime will seek to exploit the raids to tie the rebels to the Zionist entity, after spending two years painting them as an undifferentiated mass of “terrorist gangs.” (Syrian television is already testing out this line, according to Reuters: “The new Israeli attack is an attempt to raise the morale of the terrorist groups which have been reeling from strikes by our noble army.”)
But the propaganda can cut both ways. The rebels can point to the Israeli attacks as yet more evidence that Assad’s army is for attacking Syrians, not defending the country. It’s not clear to me which argument will carry the day.
The strikes also promise to hypercharge the debate over Syria in the United States. Advocates of intervention will ask: If Syrian air defenses are so tough, as U.S. officials have been saying, why was Israel able to breach them so easily? Of course, a no-fly zone is a much more difficult and risky endeavor than a one-off raid, but you can expect that important distinction to get blurred.
It was, in fact, amazing to see how Israel’s complication of an already metastasizing conflict did not prompt concerns in the US about the war expanding – but immediately gave us commentary that this proves how easy war against Syria can be – and so why are we waiting? Yes, a decade after “Mission Accomplished” we are asking why not go to war in a Middle Eastern Muslim country racked by a splintering insurgency? Here’s why:
What he said about Keynes’ sex life, poetry, homosexuality and caring about future generations is stupid, offensive, and absurd. He has now issued an apology:
During a recent question-and-answer session at a conference in California, I made comments about John Maynard Keynes that were as stupid as they were insensitive.
I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.” The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.
But I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.
My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.
My colleagues, students, and friends – straight and gay – have every right to be disappointed in me, as I am in myself. To them, and to everyone who heard my remarks at the conference or has read them since, I deeply and unreservedly apologize.
I am obviously an interested party to this. I’ve known Niall as a friend since we studied history together at Oxford. This has not deterred me from criticizing his public arguments on the merits, so I’m not a suck-up. But I have known the man closely for many years – even read Corinthians at his recent wedding – and have never seen or heard or felt an iota of homophobia from him. He has supported me in all aspects of my life – and embraced my husband and my marriage. He said a horribly offensive thing – yes, it profoundly offended me – but he has responded swiftly with an unqualified apology. He cannot unsay something ugly. But he has done everything short of that. I am biased, but that closes the matter for me.
And one other small thing: if he really believed gay men had no interest in future generations, why would he have asked me, a gay man with HIV, to be the godfather to one of his sons? And why would I have accepted?
Update: Readers respond here.
(Photo: Author/historian Niall Ferguson poses for a portrait at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 9, 2011 in Oxford, England. By David Levenson/Getty Images.)
That’s a good question asked by Jamie Kirchick. It’s the organization – the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination – that polices the mass media for perceived anti-gay slights, awards those pro-gay media outlets who give it money, and occasionally engages in re-education camp rituals for people guilty of saying dumb or even – a worse sin – funny things about gays. Hence the horrifying punishment of a man like Brett Ratner being forced to atone in public – again and again and again – for a stupid joke using the word “fags” in a manner that was obviously not intentionally homophobic. Even the president of GLAAD conceded: “I believe he was never a homophobe, and I value all of his contributions and consider him a friend.” But that was after the forced confession, as part of a fundraising event. It made me physically sick.
As readers know, I cannot stand this pious policing of speech, especially when the culture has moved on so swiftly that it has made this kind of organization increasingly irrelevant. I long for the day when we can end the gay rights movement and get on with our lives, with formal equality under the law. I long for the day when HRC shuts its doors because its task is complete. And I think the last thing any journalist should do is receive an award from a special interest group – especially one that rewards a particular political stance on a divisive issue.
But the article was written by Jamie Kirchick, a young gay conservative whose core passion is the defense of Greater Israel and the stigmatization of those who disagree with him as anti-Semites. By his logic, it’s quite obvious the Anti-Defamation League should be shut down as well. American Jews are far further forward in public cultural acceptance than gays. How about it, Jamie? Tell Abraham Foxman to retire.
Jon Favreau has a must-read in the Beast today. It pushes back against the infantile MoDo notion that the stalemate in Washington is a function of the president’s poor political skills, rather than a completely gerrymandered and dysfunctional Republican House, special interest group abuse of the system, and a nihilist GOP base that has basically decided to give up any thinking about policy in order to rely on opposition to anything the president does as one wing of a losing, bitter culture war struggle.
Favreau also notes the recurring rhetorical theme of this community-organizer president in Obama’s own words:
This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.
There is another factor, I think. The president understands his role differently than his predecessor. He is not the “decider”; he is the catalyst for change that must come from below and from the other branches of government. He is not a legislator. And the Congress is the part of government that is currently failing us – not the president.
I’ve often talked about the fact that in his days as a community organizer, President Obama studied and taught about power relations. Its clear to me that he has an understanding of the power of partnership and is constantly calling on us to join him in exercising that power.
Practicing leadership from a position of “power with” requires that you have an independently strong ego and don’t need to dominate in order to prop it up or feed it. And it also requires trust in the people you set out to lead. These are some of the characteristics I most admire about President Obama and ones that are often most misunderstood by his critics on the left and the right.
Its only natural that when people are so used to the power of dominance that they would dismiss the reality of the power of partnership. Its why we so often hear Obama criticized as weak and naive. But history tells us that all of the battles won by the left in this country have been based on a partnership model of power … enough people finally spoke up in ways that couldn’t be ignored. We see that in the battle for civil rights, unions, women’s suffrage, anti-war, etc.
The archetypal achievement of this president in that regard is his deployment of “power with” with respect to gay rights. The power to change came from below – but he masterfully guided it, nudged it, and helped without getting in our way. Ditto universal healthcare when he refused to impose a bill, but demanded that the Congress come up with one along similar lines.
The striking paintings of Wal-Marts we featured this morning are not alone. Michelle Muldrow targets, among other supermarkets, Target. She calls these photographs paintings “Cathedrals of Desire.” Cathedrals used to function as a way to transcend desire into love, the worldly into the unworldly. Now these new consumer cathedrals make the worldly sacred and turn desire into a virtue.
I have to say that Target in particular engenders in me an instant version of what some hyper-lefty Germans called Konsumterrorismus: a total panic caused by the option of limitless shopping. (The definition is not undisputed). In my case, this phobia is compounded by the lighting – especially in Target. Aaron took me there once and I could not really get past the doorway. It was just horrifying. If I go to Hell, I will not have my ankles licked by fire. And I will not be lit from below. I will be subjected to giant, constant, overhead fluorescent lighting – what Michael Cunningham once called less lighting than the “banishment of all darkness.”
That gets it right, I think. All darkness must be banished to promote and encourage the purchase of things. This is what a huge amount of our culture now rests upon: the purchase of things. I guess you have to banish the literal darkness to disguise the shallow yet impenetrable darkness our shopping civilization represents.
Charlie Savage has created a tumblr of detainee reading material. Dan Colman notes:
According to news reports, the library currently has 3,500 volumes on pre-approved topics. Prisoners have to order books in advance. (They can’t just wander through the stacks.) And the most popular books include Agatha Christie mysteries, the self-help manual Don’t Be Sad; The Lord of the Rings; and, of course, Harry Potter.
I’m relieved the president reiterated his support this morning for closing one of the most potent recruiters for Jihad against the US on the planet. I await his executive decision to release the innocent Yemeni prisoners to their country of origin. Or is this more bullshit/impotence? But Gitmo’s awful impact on American soft power is nothing compared to its potency as a toxin against the Constitution. Read Joe Nocera on a man captured at the age of 20, with no proof of his involvement in Jihad, and now destined to live a life sentence, if the US Congress has its way. Life-long detention without ever having committed any actual crime? That’s now the meaning of America, as represented by the Congress? Yes, it is. This is America, as recorded in a must-read diary from GTMO. In August of 2003, after days of “interrogation”, a prisoner was seized from his cell and taken out on a boat in the Caribbean:
My first thought was, they mistook me for somebody else. My second thought was to try to look around, but one of the guards was squeezing my face against the floor. I saw the dog fighting to get loose. I saw [-------] standing up, looking helpless at the guards working on me. “Blindfold the motherfucker! He’s trying to look—” One of them hit me hard across the face and quickly put goggles on my eyes, earmuffs on my ears, and a small bag over my head. They tightened the chains around my ankles and my wrists; afterward I started to bleed. All I could hear was [-------] cursing, “F-ing this and F-ing that.” I thought they were going to execute me.
The other guard dragged me out with my toes tracing the way, and threw me in a truck, which immediately took off. The beating party would last for the next three to four hours, before they turned me over to another team that would use different torture techniques. “Stop praying, motherfucker. You’re killing people,” [-------] said, and punched me hard on my mouth. My mouth and nose started to bleed, and my lips grew so big that I technically could not speak anymore. The colleague of [-------] turned out to be one of my guards; [-------] and [-------] each took one of my sides and started to punch me and smash me against the metal of the truck. One of the guys hit me so that my breath stopped and I was choking. I felt like I was breathing through my ribs. …
Inside the boat, [-------] made me drink salt water, I believe it was direct from the ocean. It was so nasty I threw it up. They put an object in my mouth and shouted, “Swallow, motherfucker!” I decided inside not to swallow the organ-damaging salt water, which choked me as they kept pouring the water in my mouth. “Swallow, you idiot!” I contemplated quickly, and decided for the nasty, damaging water rather than death.
[-------] and [-------] had been escorting me for about three hours in the high-speed boat. The goal of such trip was, first, to torture the detainee and claim that the “detainee hurt himself during transport,” and second to make the detainee believe he is being transferred to some far faraway secret prison. We detainees knew all about this; we had detainees who reported flying four hours and finding themselves in the same jail where they started.
If I had read this in my teens, I would have assumed this was a description of a Soviet Gulag or a South American fascist dictatorship. But this is America – and it tells you everything you need to know about the profound corruption in the ship of state that the man who authorized all of this was just feted by all living former presidents. As for accountability, here’s who has been held accountable: [--------].
As part of his “eulogy for the blog”, Marc Tracy touches upon the evolution of the Dish – which he praises as “a soap opera pegged to the news cycle”:
[T]oday, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.
We will still have blogs, of course, if only because the word is flexible enough to encompass a very wide range of publishing platforms: Basically, anything that contains a scrollable stream of posts is a “blog.” What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.
I wish he had some solid data to back that point up. Of course, blogs have evolved – and this one clearly has from its early days. What began as one person being mean to Maureen Dowd around 12.30 am every night is now an organism in which my colleagues and I try to construct both a personal and yet also diverse conversation in real time. But that doesn’t mean the individual blogger – small or large – is disappearing. Our entire model requires, as it did from the get-go, links to other sites and blogs – and we have not detected a shortage.
One reason we have had to grow and evolve – and this started as far back as 2003 – is that the web conversation has grown exponentially since this blog started (when Bill Clinton was president). Yes, many bloggers now get employed by more general sites, or move on to more complex forms (think of Nate Silver, a lone blogger when the Dish first championed his work and now part of an informational eco-system). But every page on the web is equally accessible as every other page. Blogs will never die – but they might form a smaller part of a much larger online eco-system of discourse.
My own view is that one particular form of journalism is actually dying because of this technological shift – and it’s magazines, not blogs. When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.
The first NBA player to come out is both African-American and a beautiful writer:
The recent Boston Marathon bombing reinforced the notion that I shouldn’t wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect. Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully? When I told Joe a few weeks ago that I was gay, he was grateful that I trusted him. He asked me to join him in 2013. We’ll be marching on June 8.
No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly.
It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time. I still had the same sense of humor, I still had the same mannerisms and my friends still had my back.
What I found particularly ballsy was his embrace of his Christianity:
I’m from a close-knit family. My parents instilled Christian values in me. They taught Sunday school, and I enjoyed lending a hand. I take the teachings of Jesus seriously, particularly the ones that touch on tolerance and understanding.
And his physical aggression:
I’m not afraid to take on any opponent. I love playing against the best. Though Shaquille O’Neal is a Hall of Famer, I never shirked from the challenge of trying to frustrate the heck out of him. (Note to Shaq: My flopping has nothing to do with being gay.) My mouthpiece is in, and my wrists are taped. Go ahead, take a swing — I’ll get up. I hate to say it, and I’m not proud of it, but I once fouled a player so hard that he had to leave the arena on a stretcher.
I go against the gay stereotype, which is why I think a lot of players will be shocked: That guy is gay? But I’ve always been an aggressive player, even in high school. Am I so physical to prove that being gay doesn’t make you soft? Who knows?
That may be a mind blower for some. But the gay athletes and soldiers and cops I know are some of the toughest motherfuckers out there. And not just the lesbians.
I want to salute Collins for making more space in the world for more people barred by social norms from being fully who they are. He has single-handedly increased the level of oxygen gay athletes can breathe.
We’re all mortal. We all only have now. Why not tell the truth? It’s as liberating as Jesus predicted. And as transformative as the last two decades have been – as the truth has slowly won out over ignorance and prejudice. But it only did so because it was accompanied by its most powerful partner: courage.
Recent video claiming to show victims of a chemical weapons attack in Syria:
The Obama administration has some evidence that chemical weapons are being used in Syria. Jeffrey Goldberg – surprise! – calls for intervention:
There are no good choices — good outcomes in Syria are impossible to imagine. But if it is proved to a certainty that Assad is trying to kill his people with chemical weapons, then Obama may have no choice but to act, not only because he has put the country’s credibility on the line (Iran and North Korea are undoubtedly watching closely), but also because the alternative — allowing human beings to be murdered by a monstrous regime using the world’s most devilish weapons, when he has the power to stop it — is not a moral option for a moral man.
The US has the power to stop a lot of things with military power. That doesn’t mean it is in our national interest to do so. And that phrase – “a monstrous regime using the world’s most devilish weapons” – rings a bell, doesn’t it? Does Jeffrey really want the US directly involved on one side in a Muslim sectarian war that is now metastasizing into “Iraq”? How many more Tamerlan Tsarnaevs does he want to produce?
Alas, along with Obama’s ill-advised public disavowal of containment of an Iranian nuclear capacity, the president has only himself to blame for boxing himself in on this. But that box may be larger than McCain, Butters and the usual neocon chorus will allow, as Max Fisher explains:
The two times that Obama personally articulated his administration’s red line, he used pretty vague language on what happens if Syria uses chemical weapons. The first time, in August, he said, “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” The second time, in March, he said “we will not tolerate” chemical weapons use and “the world is watching, we will hold you accountable.”
One of the more striking things about the charges against Dzhokar Tsarnaev is the use of a “weapon of mass destruction.” Legally, that’s certainly valid, given the current definition in the US criminal law with respect to terrorism:
any “destructive device” defined as any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas – bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses
any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors
any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life
That includes a pressure-cooker Internet-recipe bomb that killed 3 people and injured many more. But why is a version of an AR-15, as used by Adam Lanza, that killed 28 human beings, not treated the same way? Why was that act not treated as a suicide bombing would be? If something that kills three people is responsible for “mass destruction”, why not a military weapon that can kill 28 and end in suicide? The AR-15 can be adapted to have a hundred bullets in a Beta C-Mag magazine. Here’s a fantastically phallic drawing of how many bullets can be fired:
You could kill dozens of people with those large, bullet-packed balls – and a terrorist could murder and maim many more human beings than were killed and injured in Boston. But it isn’t legally or technically a weapon of “mass” destruction. In fact, having one is a constitutional right.
The Knesset has approved a further extension of the “temporary” order known as the ‘Citizenship Law’ (83 votes for, 17 votes against). This temporary provision prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from attaining citizenship.
This “temporary” law is now more than a decade old. And, as you can see, the Knesset doesn’t seem likely to repeal it any time soon. I know what it’s like to be legally married to an American and yet denied citizenship because of my HIV status (a situation now mercifully over). It’s an attack on the family, a way to prevent Israeli-Palestinian understanding, and an effective second-class status for Arab spouses of Israeli citizens. It surely risks radicalizing Arab spouses, rather than helping to integrate them.
This kind of racial discrimination is also seeping into US law. Israel wants to join the 37 countries that allow travel to the US without a visa. But AIPAC wants this free visa exchange to be different than any other country’s. They want to retain an ability to discriminate against Arab-American or Muslim American citizens. Even the most loyal toadies for the Israel Lobby see this as a step too far:
“It’s stunning that you would give a green light to another country to violate the civil liberties of Americans traveling abroad,” said a staffer for one leading pro-Israel lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Notice the anonymity of the quote. Not that they’re scared of AIPAC, of course. To say that would be “anti-Semitic.” And note the bipartisan nature of this AIPAC campaign.
George Saunders ponders the effects of computer technology on his life and work:
I have noticed, over the last few years, the very real (what feels like) neurological effect of the computer and the iPhone and texting and so on – it feels like I’ve re-programmed myself to become discontent with whatever I’m doing faster. So I’m trying to work against this by checking emails less often, etc etc. It’s a little scary, actually, to observe oneself getting more and more skittish, attention-wise. I really don’t know if people are “deep reading” less these days in favour of a quick fix on the internet – I think this is a thing one hears a lot, but when I travel to colleges here in the US there are always people reading Joyce and DFW and debating about literary difficulty and praising William Gaddis and so on.
I do know that I started noticing a change in my own reading habits – I’d get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialed 911. So I had to start watching that more carefully. But it’s interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It’s almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way: smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist.
Reading this and watching this riveting Tedx talk on the impact of online porn on young male brains – essentially numbing them to actual sex with real human beings and creating an epidemic of young men with floppy dicks (I refuse to use the term “erectile dysfunction” when simpler English can do) – has woken me up a bit. Writing and editing and producing 50 posts a day – and doing something very similar almost every day since Bill Clinton was president – must be affecting my brain. It’s not as powerful as the effect on the younger, developing brain, but, yes, skittishness, dissatisfaction, and constant stress have doubtless changed my entire mindset. And I can see the point about online porn making physical sex more difficult – especially if you spent your most formative sexual adolescence under the spell of constant, dizzying varieties of sexual imagery and video. How can one woman or one man even begin to replace that cornucopia of dopamine?
Our brains were designed to be turned on. But not this often, this instantly, this pleasurably and without any consequences at all. Once again, our frontal cortex is getting way ahead of our primate DNA. And the Tower of Babel grows ever taller.
The former executive editor of the New York Times recently wrote the following sentence on his blog:
The editors (I was one at the time) argued that what constituted torture was still a matter of debate, that this issue was not just linguistic but legal and had not yet been resolved by a court, and that the word was commonly applied to such a range of practices as to be imprecise.
This is untrue. As I subsequently pointed out, there is a plethora of court cases that deal with the techniques Bush and Cheney authorized, and all of them found them to be torture. None had even the slightest equivocation about it. In fact, the one torture tactic that both former president Bush and former veep Dick Cheney have openly bragged about – waterboarding – has been ruled torture by domestic and international courts for decades. You could argue that there was a debate about some of the techniques, but not waterboarding in any way shape or form. If you were squeamish, you could have used the term “torture and other brutal interrogation techniques” in the NYT to describe the policies of the US government under Bush and Cheney. But Keller didn’t. Even that was too daring for him.
A factual untruth is still sitting on the blog of the former executive editor of the NYT. He has now written a subsequent post without any correction of the previous one, and not responded to the mountain of comments taking him to task. He appears to be compounding his cowardly refusal to use the English language when editing the paper with uncorrected factual untruth on his blog. And people wonder why journalists are held in such low regard.
If the former editor of the NYT doesn’t bother correcting the record, why should anyone else?
One major piece of disappointment came with Pope Francis’ endorsement of the on-going inquisition of American nuns. I’m not sure entirely what to make of it – is it an early indicator of Francis’ theological conservatism or simply acquiescing to a process already long underway? We will see by the disciplinary actions eventually taken (or not). The nuns would seem to have more in common with the Jesuit Francis, if only because he is aware of the need for outreach among religious orders – even to places and people that discomfort others. That was Jesus’ call, and Saint Francis’ and St Ignatius’. We’ll see what transpires in the end, but, obviously, I hope the Sisters can soon renew their vital work without constantly looking behind their backs.
But three other developments strike me as encouraging. The first – and least sexy – is the establishment of a global council of advisers in the governing of the church. This may seem a trivial reform. It isn’t. It restores the Second Vatican Council’s desire to place the Pope in a less dictatorial position, and to open up areas of authority within the global church as a counter-balance. And so this new governing commission – made up of highly effective cardinals in every continent – is a big shift:
More profound thinkers have read the Pope’s creation of a group of advisers as a bold new step towards fully implementing a model of ecclesial government evoked by the Second Vatican Council – one that is less centralised, more collegial and based on the principles of subsidiarity.
“What Pope Francis has announced is the most important step in the history of the Church of the last 10 centuries and in the 50-year period of reception of Vatican II,” said the noted church historian Alberto Melloni. Writing in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, he said the Pope had “created a synodal organ of bishops that must experiment with the exercise of the consilium”. In other words, shared governance of the Church between the Bishop of Rome and all the world’s bishops.
Detailed proposals for this were put forth in Archbishop Quinn’s book, ["The Reform of the Papacy"] which in 2005 appeared in Spanish. Pope Francis read that work when he was still just a cardinal in Argentina and, at around that time, he reportedly expressed his conviction that at least some of its ideas should be adopted.
More surprising is the support for civil unions for gay couples that seems to be percolating on the margins. The Pope argued for them in Argentina within the Jesuit branch he ran (it was the sole argument he lost in his years in president of the Conference), and earlier this year, some wiggle room for gay couples in civil law was mentioned by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. This was only a defensive action against civil marriage rights for gay couples, but it was a concession to reality one cannot imagine Benedict XVI ever making. Now this:
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