Month: May 2010

A secret admirer solicits a date over Craigslist. Money quote:

I’m not going public unless I meet Kagan and she tells me she wants me to go public, both of which are independently improbable.

A Baltimore condo could require its residents to submit DNA samples of their dogs to catch the culprits of unscooped poop.

Pivoting off this thought, a reader proffers another classic Pascal pensee:

A more uplifting Pascal quote:

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, man is still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying  and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of of this."

Or put more simply by Prem Rawat (I'm paraphrasing): "I hear people say 'I am just a speck of dust in this vast universe'…but oh what a speck!"

I can't say either of these quotes gives me total comfort. Ever since I was five, I have been gripped now and then by dread and panic in the face of the certainty of my own death and an unshakable faith that what comes after my life is exactly what came before it — nothing. These episodes usually occur in the early morning as I'm lying in bed, when my mind's defenses are still slumbering. "You will die. YOU". My heart seizes up, and I am sometimes driven to utter an "uggghh" at the thought. The only comfort I have ever found is to have someone I love (a friend, a lover, my sister) sleeping next to me. It is not 100% effective, but I will take it, just as I will take life in all its beauty and horror and hope and dread over non-existence.

The notion that I won't be there to experience my own non-existence provides no comfort. Consciousness is the supreme creation of the universe. I am conscious now, and consciousness rightly rebels at the thought of its own annihilation. The fear of death is rooted in a love of life, a love of consciousness. It's just hard to remember that sometimes.

From Slavoj Žižek's new book:

Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves."…Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood.  She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority — she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked.  Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama's physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears.  Here we have "post-feminist" femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the "first dude" as a phallic toy.  The message is that she "has it all" — and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream…No wonder that the Palin effect is one of false liberation: drill, baby, drill!

Tyler Cowen says this is maybe "what you would get if Andrew Sullivan were a Lacanian and a Hegelian." And while you're at it, don't miss Claire Berlinski's wonderfully frank take on Going Rogue in the American Review. Money quote:

No one wishes to be in the company of snobs, so it is uncomfortable to report the plain truth about Sarah Palin’s autobiography—it is ridiculous and it is awful…

I have no quarrel with the values Palin claims to hold dear. I am all for fiscal conservatism, hawkish defence, free markets, tax cuts and patriotism. God knows I am in favour of God. Nor am I much perturbed by what her critics claim are the book’s many strange factual contradictions and lies. All adults know, after all, that a serious forensic exploration of Palin’s political record would not begin in the ‘autobiography’ section of the bookstore. My objection is otherwise.

The book is artless; it is juvenile; it is dull; it is vulgar; and it is above all phony. It does not seduce; it is not a guilty pleasure; it does not succeed in conveying universal experiences or emotions; it does not elevate. No character in it comes alive. Indeed it is so awful that it is almost impossible to find a single sentence in it that is not awful.

It is only cynical, cowardly politics that prevents so many American conservatives from saying the same thing. And it is only money that persuaded Jonathan Burnham to publish this fictional dreck. And it is only ratings that prompts Roger Ailes to keep this farce alive.

My problem with Palin is no longer Palin; it is the stench of media and political corruption that has enabled this total phony to thrive.

Marc Tracy interviews Peter Beinart:

I really believe that if Israel becomes more and more callous toward the right and dignity of non-Jews, it is naive to believe it will not become more callous to the rights and dignity of certain Jews. I think the two cannot be separated. Whether it’s the rights of gays and lesbians, or the rights of women who want to pray at the Kotel, or soldiers who want to speak out.

When we protect the right of Arab Israelis, we’re also protecting the rights of Jews against the government, and a Haredi population that I think at times is willing to use violence.

A reader writes:

Your reader comments on the spiritual argument about waves and water reminds me of a famous story about Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, when he was a young monk. Hui Neng was an illiterate peasant who had experienced a sudden awakening upon hearing the Lotus Sutra recited aloud, and went to join the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch of Zen. The Patriarch recognized that Hui Neng was in the process of awakening, but rather than openly acknowledge this he assigned him to care for the pigs on the outskirts of the monastery to protect him from the academic and spiritual corruptions of the other monks.

However, one day as Hui Neng was going about his work he heard two monks nearby engaging in a classic argument about spiritual reality. They were watching the large monastery flag waving in the wind, and one monk was arguing that it was the flag that was moving, while the other argued that it was the wind that was moving. These two arguments correspond to classic spiritual viewpoints about the nature of reality, and while listening to the learned monks argue, Hui Neng could not hold back. He interrupted them and told them, "It is neither the flag that moves, nor the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves".

The two monks were silenced, and Hui Neng went about his work tending to the pigs.

That's what they are calling Ilario Pantano. Steinglass summarizes:

[Pantano] a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, told the Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin last week that he had been impelled to run for office by Eric Holder's move to investigate the legality of the CIA's interrogation techniques. "What our men and women were doing in enhanced interrogations was not torture and the prospect of investigations smacked of politics," Mr Pantano said.

What Mr Pantano did while serving as a Marine in Iraq wasn't torture, either. On April 15th, 2004, he unloaded some 50 rounds at point-blank range into two unarmed detainees, stopping in the middle to reload a fresh cartridge, then posted a sign over their bodies reading "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy", an unofficial slogan of the Marines. The military charged him with premeditated murder and with desecrating the corpses, but dropped the case because the chief witness was considered unreliable.