Month: May 2010

Packer describes it:

Wars that hinge on an unstable, highly personalized relationship seldom come to a satisfying end. This relationship in particular has come to resemble that of an exhausted mental health professional and a beleaguered patient who suffers from chronic delusions. The shrink doesn’t know whether to work with the delusions or puncture them, and he keeps switching between one approach and the other because neither shows any sign of succeeding. For the moment, the Obama Administration has decided to indulge Karzai by bringing out the expensive china, in the slender hope that he can be coaxed into changing his behavior. Unfortunately, this was roughly the approach of the Bush Administration for seven years, and it helped lead to the stunning resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Economist explains why the French left supports the ban. The magazine's final paragraph:

How it would be applied in practice remains unclear. As it is, the

Conseil d’Etat, the highest administrative court, has expressed worries about the legal grounds for a ban. If passed, Mr Copé says that it will apply not only to French Muslims, but to visitors from the Middle East too. Would such women be fined while doing their shopping on the Champs-Elysées? How can the government be sure that a woman is wearing the burqa under orders from her menfolk? Would it not lead to their further isolation, as they felt unable to venture out of the home? If that were indeed the upshot, it would be paradoxical for a law designed in part to ensure equality for women.

I have to say this encroaches too far on religious liberty for me. I find the burqa repulsive for any number of reasons, and the subjugation of women it represents appalling. But freedom for me is a more important value. I do not want to live in a society where such things are banned. It means that other things can be banned for the good of others. And we're not French, are we? A reader puts this a little more colorfully:

I get really pissed when people say a woman in America, or any other western country, should be banned from wearing anything she frickin feels like wearing. When I was a youth I had piercings, a mohawk, I wore doc martens and tried my best to look as scary as possible. I was punk rock, baby, and I loved it. And if anyone told me not to wear what I wanted, well I didn't give a shit. I was expressing my rebellion when I wore those clothes for everyone to see. Woman in burqas, veils or whatever are expressing their relationship with their God, and by extension their society, and accepting whatever harsh treatment they receive because it it, just like me with my punk rock clothes.

So if we are going to ban their clothes, lets start banning piercings, black clothes or other non-mainstream dress. Hell, let's ban Red Sox shirts too. And baggy pants. And tattoos that are dark or scary. And hoodies on black kids. And anything article of clothing that expresses any relationship with any god an any kind. Oh, I can hear the arguments about oppression of women. Yeah right. Who is more oppressed by the norms of society – the little girl wearing the ho clothes or the woman in the burqua? You are intimidated by a burqa clad woman in the grocery aisle? Oh please. That says a lot more about you then it does them. Grow up.

(Image: A burqa-clad Afghan woman on March 20, 2010. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Semi-Literate Former Gold Prospector Given Own Cable News Show

Felix Salmon brushes up on wages:

[R]eal wages in general have been falling, for the first time since the Great Depression. And with unemployment still at 10%, there’s not much hope that they’ll start rising again any time soon. If you want to see incomes go up in your city or region, your best hope is frankly just to get lucky, like [the city of Manhattan, Kansas] did. Because wages in the U.S. as a whole aren’t going anywhere.

TED interviews Nicholas Christakis, who recently gave a talk on how our social networks affect us:

Talk to your grandmother or your great-grandmother and ask her how any best friends she had when she was a girl. And, she might say, “I had one or two really best friends, and three or four close friends — we had a circle of five girls.” Ask a young girl that question today and you’ll get the same answer. Now, the young girl today will also have all kinds of other social interactions, but the fundamental reality of our interest in having close social relationships really hasn’t changed.

What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions. So you can make interactions between different pairs of people more efficient, and there’s no doubt modern technologies have done that, but what really limits our abilities to interact with each other and to influence each other is a more fundamental requirement. Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

Today on the Dish we saw Brown resign and Cameron take over as PM. Drama leading up to the dramatic switch here, here, here, here, here, and here. Andrew's thoughts on the developments here, Cameron's speech here, a warning from his right here, and how it could affect the American right here.

In Kagan coverage, Andrew scrutinized her careerism and elitism, readers continued to dissent with him over his outing inquiries, and others commented on her issues with recruitment on campus. Horton examined her views on the executive, Stuart Taylor did the same approvingly, Josh Green assessed the politics of the confirmation, Maggie Gallagher tried to decipher her stance on marriage equality, and a New Yorker commenter challenged Toobin on the closet. Andrew continued to mull over Kagan's identity here and especially here.

Finally, an answer appeared.

— C.B.

(Prime Minister Gordon Brown leaves Downing Street with his wife Sarah and children James Fraser and John after resigning on May 11, 2010 in London, England. After five days of negotiation a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government has been confirmed. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.)

She's not gay, according to close friends. That was easy, wasn't it? Even Eliot Spitzer says so.

Will Saletan pens the most penetrating and persuasive critique of my question as to the emotional orientation of Elena Kagan. He puts it better than I, but his argument is essentially that the personal facts of a supreme court nominee can lead to unending and cruel and prejudiced exposure, in a manner that distorts the process and wounds the person. He reminds me of the religious inquisition of the agnostic Robert Bork. It is indeed vile. What was done to Clarence Thomas was, in my view, viler – although I remain convinced that Anita Hill was telling the truth. Will also reminds me of my own words on this matter nineteen years ago, when I witnessed the brutal outing of Dick Cheney's then-spokesman, Pete Williams, on the utterly fraudulent grounds that he was somehow homophobic, because he spoke for a defense secretary who ran a military where openly gay soldiers were banned. I remain proud of the little essay and stand by its core point. The fanatical persecution of a gay man who simply wanted to do his job, was barely a public figure at all, and was in any way out of the closet, appalled me. That this viciousness came from other gay men made it no less, and in some ways much more, despicable. And that this viciousness was in the service of an ideological agenda made it worse.

But here's why I think Will's point falters, and why my argument of twenty years ago is much weaker now. Since 1991, a revolution in attitudes has occurred. Gay couples are legally married in several states. Large majorities of people support ending the military ban on honest homosexuals and enacting some kind of legal relationship status for gay couples. In my home country, there are now over a dozen openly gay Tory members of parliament. In the circles of the Acela corridor, and legal academia, being gay is often a plus. Ten years ago, I wrote another essay noting this amazing change and asking whether the press – in completely benign and empirical ways – was still required to sustain what were in effect glass closets of people who were out in some spheres but wished to remain closeted to the wider public. Things had evolved in such a way that some journalists were required to write things that were not true or avoid things that were obviously true in order to uphold stigmas that no longer existed. The case of the recent Washington Post story illustrates this dilemma perfectly. The job of a writer is to tell the truth first of all.

Ten years later still, we now have a mass media in which no gate-keepers exist, and in which anyone with a Google search on Kagan will immediately retrieve what the public is already trying to find out in massive numbers. We also have countless openly gay men and women in public life. We have an open lesbian judging American Idol and an openly gay minister praying at the president's inauguration. We have a president who is rhetorically committed to gay dignity and inclusion.

We also have a president who has specifically argued that his prime criterion for selecting a nominee for the Supreme Court is biography, and a personal understanding of how the law impacts real human beings. We have the details of that biography laid out in excruciating detail in the New York Times. From a rare and inadvertent inquiry into Bork's agnosticism decades ago, we have now come to the NYT providing details of a young girls' bat mitzvah and teenage smoking. Did Kagan give permission for every aspect of her personal life to be splayed out in the pages of the paper of record? Do the journalists at the NYT feel awful for exposing her cigar habit or her softball games or her deep relationship with her father? Or do they regard these details as part of what the modern world demands, and indeed as a way to allow readers to make the very judgment the president himself has asked us to make: what is this person's life experience? I simply do not know how to measure a person's life experience if I have no idea if she has ever had an emotional life or even if she has always lived alone. We knew this even of David Souter. But we know nothing of this with respect to Ms Kagan. 

Elena Kagan is a human being, with feelings and dignity and a right to choose how she presents herself to the world. But she is also now a very, very public figure, seeking a lifetime appointment, with extraordinary power, in a liberal administration from a liberal university, in the twenty-first century. We all accept that when we enter public life, we surrender certain things. I learned this the brutal way, being out in the mass media before I was in my mid-twenties, all but forced to acknowledge intimate details of my own health and sex life, pummeled for my religious faith or lack of it, analyzed in every personal way imaginable, exposed by right and left depending on the political uses of the time. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. It still stings. I have scar tissue where my heart used to be.

I am not seeking to expose anyone in this way at all, because I know at first hand how brutal it can be. I seek no cruelty at all. I want to know no details or specifics. But I do think a simple answer to a simple question about a core part of someone's identity should be possible. And I think a deliberate avoidance of this question is dangerous to public transparency and to the integrity of the process and potentially more invasive of someone's actual privacy in the long run than a simple, dignified statement that could get us past all of this now. And I think there is a real danger of treating emotional orientation as different from any other aspect of someone's personal life in a manner that is actually deeply complicit in prejudice and injustice. Doing so sustains stigmatization, which sustains discrimination, which perpetuates enormous and enduring human pain. Doing so is actually, in my view, simply wrong. Which is why I stand by my question and the raging debate that has ensued on this page.

But Will has persuaded me of one thing. I will say no more on this subject. I wish Ms Kagan all the best and hope the process is scrupulously fair to her. By all accounts she is a lovely person, a gregarious human being, a great persuader, and a judicial blank slate. I've asked one question I feel is legitimate and utterly without malice and I have received an answer. The answer is that I should not ask. I take it as a final one. I won't any more.

This question is now closed on this blog.

Damon Linker returns to an exchange between David Hart and Kevin Drum:

What’s most disappointing is Drum’s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is … the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.

Now of course Hart would prefer that kind of tragic atheism. He’s a believer, after all. But the fact is that a number of atheists themselves have staked out a similar position.

Take the example of physicist Steven Weinberg. In his 1977 book about the earliest origins of the universe (The First Three Minutes), Weinberg stated in passing that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” When some of his fellow cosmologists objected to the choice of words, accusing him of expressing, if only implicitly, some form of theological nostalgia for a non-scientific view of the world, Weinberg admitted that he is indeed nostalgic—“nostalgic for a world in which the heavens declared the glory of God.” Associating himself with the nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold, who likened the retreat of religious faith in the face of scientific progress to the ebbing ocean tide and claimed to detect a “note of sadness” in its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” Weinberg confessed to his own sorrow in doubting that scientists will find “in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role.” When it comes to God, what Weinberg believes to be true and what he wishes to be true simply do not coincide.

The whole post is worth a read.