Month: September 2009

William Brafford rounds up all the links in the ongoing discussion sparked by Jim Manzi's defense of Bob Wright against Jerry Coyne. Noah Millman, last week:

So the real question is whether Darwin’s theory radically undermined the persuasiveness of the idea that we are the pinnacle of creation – an idea that comes up again and again in the Abrahamic religions. And I think you’d have to argue that it does, for three reasons: first, because the idea of a natural heirarchy no longer is persuasive; second, because the mechanism of natural selection is repugnant to our usual conception of the Abrahamic God; and third, because if evolution is the mechanism of creation, then creation has not come to an end.

Manzi responds here.

The culture is indeed changing. A married lesbian will be a judge on the most mainstream – and red state popular – TV show; and the man who was once Doogie Howser is now an openly gay man in Hollywood, with a hit sit-com and a gig hosting the Tonys and the Emmys. Both Neil and Ellen are unthreatening types –  and yet also very recognizably gay in affect. What’s different about them, and why I admire both immensely, is their achievement of effortlessness with the gay thing. They both seem real. Their sexual orientation is part of who they are, but who they are is also larger and more complicated than that. It’s a real achievement – for them and America. It isn’t easy always being out. You don’t want to deny something but you also don’t want to be entirely defined by it. It was a lot harder in 1991 when I was suddenly turned into a poster-gay for a few minutes. Suddenly I had to be a spokesman; suddenly I was the gay pundit; suddenly my own writing on these issues seemed to be political acts requiring political resistance (mainly from fellow gays), simply because I was out and in public – and so few others were. People project all sorts of stuff onto you, good and bad, when that happens; and the handful of us in the public eye had to just carry on, hoping that the full scope of our work would eventually overshadow one aspect of our lives, but that our gayness could be celebrated as well. Anything but lies. And as more and more people are openly gay, and as more and more of them seem completely like your next door neighbor, it becomes easier. Harris and DeGeneres have helped a huge amount in this, but it still remains tough for these wholesome, white mainstream voices to strike the right balance. There is a personal toll to being the human bit in the cultural drill. See NPH struggle here:

In his late twenties, shortly after he starred in Rent, Harris was inspired by Danny Roberts, a gay cast member on The Real World: New Orleans. “He was a unique entity at that time, as someone who was seemingly so confident in their own skin that they didn’t need to wear their sexuality, uh—” He begins to stumble slightly, realizing he’s about to cross into a minefield of rhetorical missteps. “Or to flaunt their sexuality? To be more of one thing or another.”

He pauses to rethink. “And I—it’s a personal thing, I suppose, but I personally responded to his lack of overt grandstanding. Again, tricky waters, because if I say something like ‘He didn’t wave flags,’ it sounds like I’m disrespecting people that do, who I think are tremendously important, but there’s more than one way to get into people’s psyches.”

The simple truth is that a lot of closeted gay people out there need and yearn for representatives who seem straighter or more “normal” than some gays. And the difficult task is to accept that and be glad for it but never to forget that there is no cultural or personal criterion for civil rights or toleration. In my own defense of  masculine gays, there is an embedded injunction: “Leave No Drag Queen Behind.” Playing favorites with the majority culture is both demeaning in a way, and misleading. Everyone is a shade or two away from normal; and the pied beauty of humanity should not be carved into acceptable and unacceptable based on things that simply make us who we are.

This much I have learned, sometimes painfully, sometimes joyously. There should be no “good gay” or “bad gay”; there should merely be gay.

And if we work hard enough and simply endure long enough, one day “gay” will simply be another way of being “human”.

This piece from AEI is too soft on the Bush years but at least it offers some structural answers to controlling America's debt-addiction. I'm not an expert on these ideas but I'd be interested in your thoughts on them:

The reinstatement of the president’s power of impoundment, taken away by the Budget Control Act of 1974, would give the president much the same power as a line-item and would certainly be constitutional.

Taking away the power of Congress and the president to decide how to keep the government’s books would also be a big step in the right direction and require only congressional action. Wall Street recognized more than 100 years ago that corporate managements could not be trusted to keep honest and transparent books and neither can the managers of governments because, like corporate managers, they are human and therefore self-interested.

An independent accounting board, modeled on the Federal Reserve (which keeps the power to print money out of the hands of Congress) would accomplish that.

It should have the power to set the rules of accounting for the federal government, “score” the costs of new programs (which the Congressional Budget Office does now), and monitor all federal programs for cost-effectiveness (something Congress often forbids government agencies to do, obviously fearing what it might learn).

Finally, the adoption by Congress of a limit on total spending, so that it could only increase to reflect population growth and inflation, unless a two-thirds majority agreed to suspend the limit, would force Congress to make the hard choices it now works so hard to avoid. Several states have similar provisions in place, and these are the states suffering the least from the downturn in revenues due to the current recession. California’s budget began to go out of control in the early 1990s precisely because it effectively repealed such a law.

More Jungian thoughts on the tea-party movement.

Trogir, Croatia, 12 pm

The things that some people will write when dictated to.

Nate Silver tries to parse the new WaPo poll. Not easy. But even Rasmussen, which seems to be a constant outlier to the right, shows support for the overhaul at its highest ever:

In the days following the president’s speech, support for the plan has been moving up on a fairly consistent basis.

Still, the intensity gap continues to favor those who oppose the plan. Currently, 28% Strongly Favor the proposed reform while 38% are Strongly Opposed. (see day-by-day numbers). In late August, 23% were strongly in favor of the plan and 43% were strongly opposed.

The Hill notes that the Republicans, while gaining a little, have not broken out.

A reader writes:

The failure of the Darwin movie in the US isn't about the American right. If a distributor thought it would sell, he'd pick it up in a second – Michael Moore films do quite well, and they drive the right bananas; and Bill Maher's got his movie distributed even though it was a direct attack on the religious right. No, this is about the fact that distributors know that nobody in the US will pay to watch a movie about a 19th century scientist. Just think of the trailers: a slow stuffy Merchant/Ivory-style drama, but instead of buxom corruptible Victorian chicks, it will be about science (woohoo!).

My personal experience of the American healthcare system.