Month: June 2010

Mark Schrope looks at innovative tweaks being made to the New England fishing industry meant to stem overfishing, save lives and protect endangered fish. And yes, I'm in Ptown now.

Virginia Postrel sizes up Obama's "glamour":

Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour.

Douthat tries to square the conventional wisdom that millennials are especially idealistic with a new study showing that today’s college kids are less empathetic than their counterparts of the ’80s and ’90s:

[M]aybe they actually go hand in hand. There’s a kind of humanitarianism that’s more interested in an abstract “humanity” than in actual people, and a kind of idealism that’s hard to distinguish from moral vanity. Perhaps this is the spirit that’s at work among the empathy-deficient world-changers of Generation Y — visible, for instance, in the way that community service has become a self-interested resume-padding exercise for ambitious young climbers, or in the way that Barack Obama’s rhetoric (“we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” etc.) managed to appeal to younger voters’ idealism and flatter their egos all at once.

On the other hand, this could also be grounds for a defense of narcissism, at least up to a point. Maybe too much empathy is crippling, and a little solipsism is a necessary spur to action. If a little “look out world, here I come” self-centeredness is what it takes to get young people involved in charity work or political campaigning, the theory might go, then so much the better for self-centeredness!

A former president of the United States openly champions the use of torture. So much for my sad attempt to get him to atone. To place the full weight of the presidency behind war crimes is sign of where this country is – as is the Congress's refusal to shut the detention and torture camp at Gitmo. This remains a live issue. A future Republican president will almost certainly now embrace torture as integral to American values and law.

Instant BFFs – in an amazing, must-watch clip from NatGeo:

Wieseltier, in a brilliant little piece:

Rules of military engagement that allow soldiers to fire on political activists (I leave aside the question of their humanitarianism for a moment) may signify something still deeper and even more troubling. It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks. It does not seem to care about what even the United States—its only real friend, even in the choppy era of Obama—thinks. This is not defiance, it is despair. The Israeli leadership seems to have given up any expectation of fairness and sympathy from the world. It is behaving as if it believes, in the manner of the most perilous Jewish pessimism, that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it. This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.

In the past, the US Catholic bishops have remained neutral on the question of whether there should be discrimination protections for gays and lesbians in the workplace. I always found this bizarre. I can see how super-libertarians might oppose employment non-discrimination laws for gays (along with everyone else), but I naively imagined that the church would actually support a bar on firing people solely because of an innate sexual orientation (and, yes, the church itself understands homosexuality to be, for many, "innate"). The church has no problem with anti-discrimination laws when it comes to, say, race or immigration status. It has no objection in principle; au contraire. It declares itself a champion of the weak and marginalized and vulnerable.

But Benedict's church is different – when it comes to gays. The latest statement from the Bishops reads as if it were drafted by Robbie George, and reflects a total capitulation to theo-conservatism in the American hierarchy. Legally protecting gays from employment discrimination is now, apparently, illegitimate for Catholics. Why? Because non-procreative sexual acts violate church doctrine, and protecting employees who might engage in such acts in private therefore violates church doctrine. How does anyone know that the gay person in the office or factory is engaged in non-procreative acts? You don't. You assume it. But the assumption is enough. And so firing gay people cannot be made illegal – or it would be a restriction on "religious liberty."

Notice that there is no attempt here to argue that straight people who violate church doctrine – anyone who masturbates or uses contraception, is divorced or re-married – should not be protected from discrimination. It is always just the gays who are the target, because their identity inherently proves their iniquity, while most straight people can hide theirs. Notice also that the focus here is entirely on the victims of discrimination, not the perpetrators.

So the church that emerged from a man who preached the story of the good Samaritan, is now in the business of identifying Samaritans and ensuring they remain the targets of discrimination in the workplace. It does not matter whether they are good at their job; their orientation, even if no one even knows it results in sodomy, is sufficient to allow them to be fired and no law be broken.

The Bishops also argue against non-discrimination laws for gays because the laws imply that gay people are equal citizens and if they are equal citizens, the right to civil marriage will not be far behind.

And so we have a prudential political argument in defense of an obvious evil – persecuting people for something that they cannot change. The bishops say they'd like to protect gay people, but only if they can be seen as in no way endorsing sexual acts. But you can't do that. You can't enact a law protecting some gays from discrimination while omitting others, the distinction being whether they are engaged in non-procreative acts. It would be unenforceable, as the Bishops seem to imply.

And so they have a choice: favoring a civil society to protect individuals from unjust discrimination or not. When it comes to gays – and only gays – the Bishops have taken a stand. It is a de facto endorsement of obvious injustice. It is a profound betrayal of the core message of Jesus: that the already despised should be embraced not stigmatized, that the victims of discrimination be protected not marginalized.

More meditations here.

Good move. And he retains total editorial control.