Month: November 2010

Heather Mac Donald opposes the DREAM Act:

It continues to send the message that the U.S. is not serious about its immigration laws, but will always eventually confer the same benefits on people who break the law entering the country as on those immigrants who respected American law.

Will Wilkinson disagrees:

The DREAM Act sends the message that although American immigration law in effect tries to make water run uphill, we are not monsters. It says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens. It signals that we were once a nation of immigrants, and even if we have become too fearful and small to properly honour that noble legacy, America in some small way remains a land of opportunity.

A reader writes:

I have to ask why you have repeatedly put asterisks in the word "nigger" while keeping "faggot" uncensored?  Your quotation marks are enough. When I teach American literature, I always have to do a lecture on the proper use of racist language in classroom discussion and papers. 

I give an overview of the history of the word in question, examine how it was used to dehumanize slaves and their descendants to justify one man owning another in a nation where "all men are created equal," and then make damn clear that whenever we use the word in a paper or class discussion, it's in quotation marks.  We're exploring, in part, what the word means, how it signifies in conversations about American identity, how it marginalizes and how it can perhaps be re-claimed.

But we have to use the word, not the various dodges: The N-Word, n——, whatever.  In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it's "nigger Jim," not "African-American Jim" or "n-word Jim" or "n—— Jim" or "ni**er Jim." While in-group/out-group sensitivity should always apply  in any serious discussion of prejudice and America (I would never use the word in casual conversation), we cannot stoop to such typographical dodges.  It's an ugly word, but when its ugliness is the point, why dance around it with asterisks?

A parallel: you believe in showing photos of the actual carnage war causes, dead men, women and children.  This word is the linguistic equivalent of that, and when the psychological carnage caused by slurs like "faggot" and "nigger" are the very subject of your discourse, use the word.

This is indeed almost my only act of squeamishness on this page. The reason? The word is bound up with this country's history of slavery. It is very hard to use it directly without giving some small breath of life to that evil. This is not a matter of proper use, just a very gut feeling on my part. And yes, I give it more weight than "faggot." We were tormented and destroyed from our souls outward for centuries; but we weren't as a class actually enslaved (although, of course, many slaves were also gay).

Gregory Johnsen comes out against drone strikes in Yemen. He doesn't think there's a purely military solution to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP):

The model for defeating AQAP should come not from Pakistan but rather from Saudi Arabia. From 2003 – 2006 Saudi Arabia waged a multi-faceted war against another branch of the terrorist organization, also calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

That campaign combined the hard fist of military and police power with the softer approach of encouraging qualified Islamic scholars to challenge al-Qaeda’s claim that it represented Islam. But most importantly it used al-Qaeda’s mistakes against itself, leading to a public backlash that left the terrorist organization nowhere to hide. This new branch of AQAP in Yemen has to be exposed in the same way. Before any military action can succeed, the group will have to be delegitimized in the eyes of the Yemeni public.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan was recently selected to the head U.S. bishops. James Carroll regrets the choice:

Archbishop Dolan is popular with his confreres because his fierce fundamentalism on sexual morality comes clothed in what one bishop described as "that jolly outgoing personality." … The election that made Dolan the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was unusual because the favorite for the job, Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, was cast aside—an unprecedented insult to a sitting vice president. But Kicanas was regarded as a "social justice" Catholic, one whose moral concern extended to more than abortion and gay marriage. His rejection by the American bishops was the real sound of something cracking. Timothy Dolan's job is to put the best face on the reactionary hierarchy's slow motion act of self-destruction. The surest sign of this crisis is the jovial conviction that there is no crisis.

"It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh. Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!" – a disgruntled TSA agent.

A wonderful e-mail exchange satire.

Here's what I have noticed: whenever Israel actually seems to have the slightest pressure on it (a pressure only made possible by Israel's indefensible and illegal colonization of the West Bank), a bevy of voices chirps like a dawn chorus. I've already noted the Ben Smith story this morning that quotes ten hardline Netanyahu supporters and one Palestinian. The sources Smith relies upon include "a top Israeli official involved in diplomacy with the U.S.", "a hawkish Netanyahu ally", "Netanyahu’s closest adviser", "Beni Begin, a cabinet minister from Netanyahu’s own Likud Party," and the "deputy director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs".

Washington Post editorial writer Jackson Diehl comes back with that old, old meme.

Obama's preoccupation with stopping Israel's settlement expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem [is] a campaign that even Palestinian and Arab leaders have watched with bafflement. True, almost everyone outside Israel regards the construction as counterproductive, and only a minority supports it inside Israel.

But that is just the point: The dream of a "greater Israel" died more than 15 years ago. Even the Israeli right now accepts that a Palestinian state will be created in the West Bank. The settlements have become a sideshow; the real issues concern how to create a Palestinian state in a Middle East where the greatest threat is not Israeli but Iranian expansionism. What to do about Hamas and Hezbollah and their Iranian-supplied weapons? How to ensure that the post-occupation West Bank does not become another Iranian base? Those issues did not exist in 1983 – and the Obama administration seems to have no strategy for them.

Where to begin. How about: if Greater Israel is dead, why is there such enormous political pressure in Israel to defend every single Greater Israel settlement and expand many more? If the settlements are a "side-show," why have they doubled in size in the last ten years? For that matter, if they are a trivial side-show, why not just agree to get rid of them in a grand bargain that makes a Sunni-Israeli alliance against Iran more feasible? The answer:

Because the Netanyahu coalition would collapse. And it's hard to see why a coalition could collapse over a trivial side-show. Then observe Diehl's seamless pivot to Israel's demands – that a two-state solution be put on hold until war has been declared on Iran, something that would ratchet up the global religious war to unheard of heights, and destroy any chance of a two-state solution for ever. And the notion that Obama is not concerned with the Iran threat is absurd: why else the new missile shield? why else the mass of military goodies for Israel as a bribe? why was Clinton poring over security details for the Eastern boundary of the new Palestine?

I have a new test for neocon commentators: if they say the peace process won't work, what they really mean is that it suddenly might just work. And they desperately want to stop it.

Theocons rush to limit the damage from the Pope’s recent gaffe:

If someone was going to rob a bank and was determined to use a gun, it would better for that person to use a gun that had no bullets in it.  It would reduce the likelihood of fatal injuries. But it is not the task of the Church to instruct potential bank robbers how to rob banks more safely and certainly not the task of the Church to support programs of providing potential bank robbers with guns that could not use bullets.  Nonetheless, the intent of a bank robber to rob a bank in a way that is safer for the employees and customers of the bank may indicate an element of moral responsibility that could be a step towards eventual understanding of the immorality of bank robbing.

Alrighty then. This is the nub of the matter:

The Holy Father is not articulating a teaching of the Church about whether or not the use of a condom reduces the amount of evil in a homosexual sexual act that threatens to transmit HIV. The Church has no formal teaching about how to reduce the evil of intrinsically immoral action.

My italics. What this means is that the church has no moral teaching for gay men in their sex lives and relationships except total celibacy. And yet even the Pope found some room for a spectrum of morality in the actions of an HIV-positive prostitute. You try making sense of that.