Month: December 2008

November voting, now in convenient December form.

Farhad Manjoo has a guide to blogging. He spoke with Ambers:

…the best way to stick to a blogging schedule is to write quickly, and a good way to write quickly is to write as if you’re talking to a friend. Marc Ambinder, the political-news maven at the Atlantic, told me, "I’ve found that I tend to write the way I speak. Short, staccato sentences, lots of parentheticals. That annoys purists, but it’s uniquely my own voice, and I think it helps to build a connection with the reader." Also remember that your readers want you to get to the point. "Be clear, not cryptic," Salmon says. "Blog readers have neither the time nor the inclination to read between the lines; blogs aren’t literature."

That’s good advice. My own essay on what blogging has done to writing is here.

The cramped view of the Pope finds an honest expression in the views of many fundamentalists today. The universe is binary – male and female – and each half has a prescribed role. Here’s how fundamentalists see the role and freedom of women:

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a woman’s nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Blue Texan notes Prager’s own experience with two divorces. But he has fought like hell to prevent me from getting married.

The description of homosexual orientation as evil, of course, is linked to the view that women’s physical subordination to men is intrinsic to nature and must be enforced. You cannot extricate the two concepts. The erasure of homosexuals is deeply, theologically connected to the subjugation of women.

Bryan Finoki interviews Tom Hilde:

…it’s not that torture had been non-existent in liberal states until the torture shown in the Abu Ghraib photos. The US torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Baghram, and elsewhere reflects the techniques developed through CIA documents dating to the 1950s. The liberal state, more generally, has always functioned on an opposition between its conception of civilization – grounded in a liberal conception of rationality – and what’s beyond civilization.

That is, "barbarism." In the name of basic liberal principles and of rationality itself, the liberal state must be defended against its barbarian enemies. But since these principles – of, for instance, autonomy, liberty, dignity, etc. – in the liberal political-philosophical tradition are taken as universal (for Kant, for example, grounded in natural law), and since torture is a fundamental denial of those principles, the liberal state had to conceal torture. Foucault suggests something similar in Discipline and Punish. Torture, when practiced by liberal states, could never find a place in actual law. Otherwise, we’re no longer talking about liberal states, but something else.

Torture is fundamentally extra-legal in this sense and this is why there’s so much talk of states of exception and states of necessity. But this is also why the Bush administration’s institutionalization and attempted legalization of torture is so radical. It’s an assault on the foundational principles of the liberal state.

But it remains a fact that the torture examined and tolerated by the CIA in other states and societies was never imported wholesale into the American Constitution before Bush and Cheney, let alone regarded as inherent in the American presidency. Which is why what they have done in this respect has been so radical.

They have imported a solvent into the rule of law. Which is why, if we are to recover, they must now be subjected to it.

You’ve read the press accounts in which the Pope allegedly spoke of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The actual text, brought to us by Rocco, is more complex, but essentially argues that the forms of male and female as created by God can know of no complexity or variance. The fact of same-sex sexual and emotional orientation – displayed throughout nature and expressed by human beings since the beginning of time – is, in the Pope’s view, a divine error. The entire universe must fit into the binary Thomist vision, or we are allegedly divorcing humankind from our own nature. And nature must be divorced from all new knowledge of the human and animal sciences. Well: at least the knowledge we have gained since the Middle Ages.

Read the whole thing. There is little new in it, although that is not a criticism for a Pope. What I found telling is how this Pope, in his summary of the recent history of the Church, simply erases the Second Council from reality – just as he erases homosexual orientation from the arena of open inquiry or meditation. For Catholics, this passage will say a lot (which is why, of course, it never made it into the headlines):

The year just concluding has been rich by way of retrospective glances on important moments in the recent history of the Church, but also rich in events which carry within them pointers to direct our journey towards the future. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII died, fifty years ago John XXIII was elected Pope, Forty years have passed since the publication of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, and thirty years since the death of its author, Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical banning all forms of contraception eclipses the entire Second Council for this Pope. We have not yet really absorbed what a reactionary he is.

(Photo: Christophe Simon/Getty.)

Noah Millman responds to Jacobs:

Religion (as opposed to conscience) is a corporate rather than an individual matter – Milton may have belonged to a sect of one, but most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.” This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

And yet it always comes back to the impossibility of humankind ever being able to know the Godhead with sufficient certainty to use power to restrain the heretic. Again: the true believer will, in my view, seek freedom for God rather than power against heresy. To repeat Montaigne:

"Some impose upon the world beliefs they do not hold; others, more in number, impose beliefs upon themselves, not being able to penetrate into what it really is to believe."

And others believe.

Whenever I find myself being quizzed about the new media and what it all means – and it happens all the time these days – I find myself thinking back to Max and Gabe. No one ever captured the spirit and essence the way they did:

Alan Jacobs considers Philip Jenkins’ call for interreligious dialogue:

What always fascinates me about these arguments is that, in their focus on how proponents of different religions can get along, they invariably forget to raise the issue that for most religious believers is the central one: truth. If “intolerance” of other religions means denying that they are equally valid means of accessing the divine, that’s only a bad thing if all religions are equally valid means of accessing the divine — but that is just the point at issue. The constant and never-questioned assumption of people like Jenkins is that, if there is a God, that God will be tolerant and open-minded and accepting of a great variety of ways of trying to get to Him or Her or It. But as far as I can tell, the only reason for believing in so all-embracing a God is that we’d prefer to. Looking around at the world — the natural world as well as the human world — I do see some reasons (none of them definitive, of course) for believing in a God, but I don’t see much warrant for believing in a God who is nice.

And the lies keep coming:

The efficacy of torture is not a close question anywhere outside of Fox television anymore. Darius Rejali has definitively studied the question and showed that torture does not elicit truthful confessions. In his book How To Break a Terrorist, former interrogator Matthew Alexander agrees that abusive interrogation techniques don’t work and endanger Americans. FBI Director Robert Mueller recently told Vanity Fair‘s David Rose that he doesn’t "believe it to be the case" that enhanced interrogation stopped any attacks on America. And the stunning bipartisan report issued earlier this month by the Senate armed services committee confirms that lawyers in every branch of the military consistently warned top Bush officials that torture wasn’t effective. The handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who are still blathering about how well torture works do so in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Then this astonishing denial of fact:

Some of his finest overstatements of this past week include the assertion that those prisoners still left at Guantanamo Bay represent "the hard-core." Oh good grief. Even the CIA stopped believing that hooey six years ago.

Anyone who believes that Gitmo actually isolated "the worst of the worst" and that those who remain are a) all guilty or b) the "hard-core" would not be allowed to pass a basic news quiz. Yet this man was de facto president for eight years.

The hardcore torture advocates like Cheney were always alone among those who had any actual idea of how the world works. What Cheney lacked in a grip on reality he sadly made up with such bravura certainty and bureaucratic shamelessness that an entire administration went along for eight long years.

Prosecute him.