Month: March 2006

Is there a connection between the direction of a hair whorl on your head and your sexual orientation? Is homosexuality somehow correlated with left-handedness? Is left-handedness thereby an "objective disorder," as defined by the current pope? Some fascinating data can be found here, in an article in Cerebrum, a journal published by the Dana Foundation. The article is called "Left Hand, Left Brain: The Plot Thickens," and it’s by Carolyn Asbury. Let’s say it’s suggestive, sometimes funny, but definitely suggestive. More research please?

This is from an interiew with Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army, and founding member of Delta Force, the U.S.’s crack counter-terrorist unit. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I was struck by this exchange:

"Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney …

A: (Interrupting) That’s Cheney’s pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It’s about vengeance, it’s about revenge, or it’s about cover-up. You don’t gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It’s worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

I’ve argued this on Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He’s an employee of yours. It’s worse than ridiculous. It’s criminal; it’s utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I’m saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don’t do it. It’s an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument. … The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what’s legal and what we believed in. Now we’re going to throw it away.

Q: As someone who repeatedly put your life on the line, did some of the most hair-raising things to protect your country, and to see your country behave this way, that must be …

A: It’s pretty galling. But ultimately I believe in the good and the decency of the American people, and they’re starting to see what’s happening and the lies that have been told. We’re seeing this current house of cards start to flutter away. The American people come around. They always do."

As Churchill noted, that’s true – eventually.

Sorry, I meant Ayds. Another unintentional black-humor ad from the 1970s.

A reader writes:

Just a quick note re South Park in Canada.  While it frustrates me that Canada’s Comedy Network is not yet showing the new South Park episodes (if they follow the pattern of previous years, they won’t start airing them until October), they are currently re-showing the episodes from last season. Your Canadian readers might be interested to know that The Comedy Network (according to my digital receiver TV listings, online TV listings, and the Comedy Network website) is planning to re-air "Trapped In The Closet" on Friday (9:30 pm Eastern/Pacific).
They’ve been re-airing season 9 in order, and this is NOT the episode that should be airing next.  They’ve undoubtedly adjusted their schedule based on the events of the last couple of weeks.  (It’ll be interesting to see if their plans change in the next four days…)

Canada is now ahead of the U.S. in terms of free speech? Maybe Viacom and Tom Cruise don’t get to veto what TV viewers can watch there. My Sunday Times of London column on the cartoon wars can be read here.

Who needs Wikipedia when you have a blog? A reader writes:

I’m a professor of American history at Catholic University. We met outside the Danish Embassy and chatted briefly about my book on Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling; and your book on conservatism. It was a pleasure meeting you, and here’s a small service I can render to your blog. The earliest reference to the word neo-conservative, of those that I know, is from Partisan Review, July-August 1943, v. X. no. 4, coined by none other than Dwight MacDonald in an essay titled "The Future of Democratic Values."

It is an essay against pro-war intellectuals and those turning away from progressivism, of which MacDonald seems himself to be a questionable enthusiast:

"The neo-conservatives of our time… reject the propositions on materialism, Human Nature, and Progress."

One example is Jacques Barzun, a "modern obscurantist." He is a new type, the conservative liberal "attempting to combine progressive values and reactionary concepts" (like Mosca, Michels, Pareto and Burnham).
A bit pedantic, I know, but there it is for the record, though quite possibly not the earliest use of the word.

1943. Anyone beat that? If not, let’s place on the record that Dwight MacDonald coined the term.

Finally, Americans have grasped the fact that the Republicans have abandoned their role as the fiscally responsible party. In the new Time poll, we find the answer to the question: Which party would do a better job of managing government spending? Democrats get 46 percent; Republicans 31 percent. Yes, the GOP will as usual talk about "big-spending Dems" and "big government Dems." But this rhetoric may have made sense in the 1980s and early 1990s. We now have clear evidence that if you want bigger, more corrupt and more debt-laden government, you should vote Republican. Republican profligacy should be punished the only way they understand. Depending, of course, on your local representative or senator, your impulse as a fiscal conservative this fall must be to vote Democrat. They may not be much better; but they couldn’t imaginably be worse; and punishing the GOP for betraying a fundamental principle is the only way they’ll rediscover its importance.

Er, yes.

Rick Hertzberg brought my attention to this little gem of an essay by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the life and writing career of Dwight Macdonald, a man who has inspired many of the best left-of-center writers of our day. Macdonald had a fearless streak, and his intellectual independence made finding a congenial publishing home for him sometimes awkward. If he were alive today, I’d expect him to have a blog. If you’re a writer, his story is inspiring, in its way. He died a pretty miserable death, but so do many writers. Orwell springs to mind, an austere English suicide of sorts. I enjoyed this early dig at Bill Buckley:

"Of late, Mr. Buckley has been much celebrated, what with his 80th birthday and the 50th of the National Review. As an antidote, try Macdonald on the ‘very argumentative and very ambitious’ Bill Buckley, whose book defending Joseph McCarthy was ‘written in an elegantly pedantic style, replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings, giving the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men‚Äôs room.’ (Mr. Buckley’s first critics, by the way, included Peter Viereck, McGeorge Bundy and August Heckscher, whom Macdonald called ‘three leading spokesmen for the neoconservative tendency that has arisen among the younger intellectuals.’ Does any language maven know an earlier sighting of that potent word than 1952?)"

A good question. Any takers?

(Photo: Henry Grossman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images).

This time from Hindus protesting a cartoon depicting Bush as Lord Shiva. They’re going to burn Bush in effigy as a protest, which seems a little unfair on the president. But no one seems to be threatening the paper, the IHT; and no one is threatening violence.