Month: January 2011

Dan Savage creates one.

A reader writes:

The question that remains is clear enough at this point:  Even though we can’t with any degree of confidence draw a connection between political demagoguery (as Mac Donald rightly terms it) and the violence, why should we accept and tolerate, even encourage, the demagoguery?

It’s telling that, with the exception of MacDonald and one or two others, no one on the right, and certainly not the usual suspects (Limbaugh, Levin, Palin, Beck, etc.) are willing to acknowledge that, indeed, the attacks from the right have been demagogic, deliberately exaggerated, dishonest, and designed to arouse the enmity of their audience. Instead, they have indignantly denied that their words caused this tragedy—a straw man since no significant commentator or voice from the other side has argued for cause and effect here, without even attempting to defend their own record or that of their political allies. 

The rage exhibited in this response strongly suggests a recognition of guilt.  I believe that almost all of those who have offended—Limbaugh and the rest—know full well that their demonization of Obama, Democrats and liberals has been offensive and dishonest, and that it is unmatched by the left.

I guess at some level, we react to events with what is already in our minds. For the last two years, I have witnessed the fury of the right reach ever-ascending increasing levels of hysteria, extremism and hatred. Maybe being attached to this laptop has filled my soul with more of this rancid acid than others, and so brings these things to mind more swiftly when I see one of Palin's metaphorical targets literally targeted. But that nasty, vicious culture is real and pervasive. The rhetoric is vile. And if we cannot say it is reckless after what just happened, because it could happen again, it seems to me we have lost all sense of responsibility.

Which is, of course, what I believe has happened on the American right.

An update from the doctors:

 More good news:

“As a physician I’m going to get into a lot of trouble for this, but her prognosis for survival is 100 percent, as far as it being short term,” [trauma specialist  Dr. Peter Rhee] said. “Hopefully she’ll live to be 95 years old.”

(Hat tip: Hot Air)

Greg Ip calls out Paul Ryan:

What should be made of Mr Ryan’s rhetoric? The charitable interpretation is that he is pursuing a more patient strategy of adhering to the party line until Democrats cave on entitlements, and then he will put tax increases on the table. The less charitable interpretation is that as his prominence in the party has risen, he has morphed from a principled fiscal hawk to an old-school "starve the beast" Republican for whom lower taxes always trump deficit reduction. Deficit hawks earn their feathers by championing balanced budgets even when it crosses its own party's priorities; by that standard, Mr Ryan has work to do.

Ezra Klein follows up:

If you ask Ryan's office about this, you'll get an answer that sounds, at least to me, a lot like Ip's less charitable interpretation. Ryan's position is that fiscal responsibility is about more than deficit arithmetic. If government gets bigger, that's bad for the economy, too, even if it gets bigger while balancing revenues against spending. In other words, "lower taxes always trump deficit reduction." Or at least they do in every situation Ryan has been confronted with so far.

My take here. I really wish Ryan were George Osborne.

Very very very few people have contributed more poison and hatred and extremism to the culture than Rush Limbaugh. As every single conservative commentator joins ranks in calling the Tucson assassination a completely apolitical act, and as the right discovers that there is no connection whatever between political culture and political acts, we get this:

What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country.

Again, the statement is so offensive and absurd one has to pinch oneself to believe someone actually said that about a mass murderer. No one has said something that crudely partisan about Loughner and the GOP. So this is actually a classic example of what some of us have long been worried about in "conservative" discourse. Limbaugh is not mainstream, you say? National Review just approvingly reprints excerpts from Limbaugh's show. He is untouchable; and his tone will not change.

A controversial but cool stop-motion project:

TDW has details:

Ninja Moped’s latest stop-motion animation “Insert Coin” has garnered quite a bit of controversy since its release due to the question of whether it is in fact stop-motion animation in the traditional sense. A short how-it-was-done segment was tacked on to the end of the video (starts @ 3:11), but skeptics are still not convinced.

Instapundit impugns Tim Pawlenty's manhood because he actually said he would not put out campaign material with cross-hairs and individual targets on it. The metaphor is telling about a certain subculture, don't you think?

Stephen Snyder found the answer at a talk by Sex At Dawn author Christopher Ryan:

Ryan explained that the group sex we’d just been watching had been prompted by someone throwing some apples into the midst of the group. The part about the apples didn’t make any sense, until he explained to us more about bonobo society.

Bonobos like apples.  They like them a lot.   As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to do bonobo research without a supply of green apples to motivate them to do the experiments. But they like group harmony most of all.  And the sudden appearance of the apples in their midst immediately raises the threat of discord.  Who will get to eat the apples?

If these were chimpanzees, the strongest males would immediately claim the fruit.   There would be a fair amount of shoving, and possibly some bloodshed. But bonobos are so communal that the tension produced by something so precious as an apple in their midst must be dispelled by a gesture of community. In this case, everyone gets to cool off with a little sexual comfort from their neighbor. Then, self-interest replaced by a certain yummy group feeling, they settle down to share the apple.

(Hat tip: Charles Mudede)

William Galston uses the shooting to advocate for involuntary commitment:

How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?

James McWilliams makes his case against meat eating:

We can draw all the distinctions we like between humans and farm animals—we can produce operas, they cannot; we can do calculus, they cannot; we can send smug holiday greeting cards, they cannot. But none of these distinctions undermines the fundamental reality that we're both sentient beings capable of suffering.

If the ethics of eating matter in the least, then our understanding of animals must begin with this premise. Above all else, we must acknowledge that our shared sentience means that humans have a moral responsibility to treat farm animals differently than we treat objects. Specifically, as the philosopher Gary Francione has argued, all beings capable of suffering are entitled to the "principle of equal consideration." What this means is that, before using an animal in any way, we should evaluate what's at stake for everyone involved. We must do so, moreover, on the primary grounds of our shared sentience, thereby downplaying the many differences between humans and farm animals. Just because a farm animal cannot do math or send greeting cards doesn't mean that its capacity for suffering is in any way fundamentally different from our own.