Month: August 2011

Alyssa Rosenberg is peeved about J.J. Abrams implying that a potential gay character in his new Star Trek sequel would be "oh that stupid distracting subplot about you know, you know, that minority:"

Someone should tell Abrams that it’s not a victory over tokenism to keep gay people invisible, especially when that invisibility is increasingly obviously at odds with the Star Trek vision of a progressive future.

Ryan B. counters:

We have to assume the Federation is pretty pro-gay (unless the liberal agenda gets severely made over sometime in the next couple centuries), so none of the characters would think it’s at all weird for two dudes or ladies to just start kissing. Put that on the screen, front and center, and let our discomfort be the story. That might be a good film, and it might be a film I would like quite a bit, but it would be a very hard thing for a major studio to allow in one of its tent-pole franchises. Maybe that’s the point, and it certainly would be appropriate in some sense for Star Trek to “boldly go” there, but it sure is asking a lot.

Alyssa's rejoinder here.

(Video of the first interracial kiss on television from the original Star Trek.)

Karen Abbott weaves a fascinating tale of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read:

Accounts vary as to how Anne met Mary Read. According to Johnson, Rackam’s ship conquered Mary’s somewhere in the West Indies, and Mary was among those taken prisoner. After the engagement, Anne, dressed in female attire, tried to seduce the handsome new recruit. Mary, perhaps fearing repercussions from Rackam, informed Anne she was actually a woman—and bared her breasts to prove it.  Anne vowed to keep Mary’s secret and the women became friends, confidantes and, depending on the source, lovers.

The piece also uproots many myths about life at sea:

The notion of “walking the plank” is a myth, as are secret stashes of gold. “Nice idea, buried plunder,” says maritime historian David Cordingly. “Too bad it isn’t true.” Pirates ate more turtles than they drank rum, and many were staunch family men; Captain Kidd, for instance, remained devoted to his wife and children back in New York. Another historian, Barry R. Burg, contends that the majority of sexual dalliances occurred not with women but with male shipmates.

(Image: Anne Bonny (left) and Mary Read, as rendered in A General History of the Pyrates)

James M. Lindsay provides a comprehensive overview of the Texas governor. It does neglect one important issue, however.

Nate Silver runs the numbers. His conclusion is ambiguous:

For Democrats, all of the t-statistics are large and positive, indicating high degrees of statistical significance. In other words, Iowa matters and provides us with salient information that is not available from the national polls. This holds even if you include (as I do) the unusual case of 1992. But for Republicans, there is no statistically significant effect from Iowa. In some of the models, the effect of Iowa is positive but not quite statistically significant. In others, it’s actually negative (although also not to a statistically significant degree)…But I think it’s sophomoric to conclude, as a narrow reading of this evidence might, that Iowa does not matter at all for Republicans.

Studying the human genome has disproven the possibility that we sprang from two people:

Karl Giberson – who taught physics at Eastern Nazarene College until his views became too uncomfortable in Christian academia – says Protestants who question Adam and Eve are akin to Galileo in the 1600s, who defied Catholic Church doctrine by stating that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was condemned by the church, and it took more than three centuries for the Vatican to express regret at its error.

"When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face," Giberson says. "The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it."

The backlash from the literalists has been intense:

Harlow, who like Schneider has tenure and considers himself a committed Christian, said that the backlash reflects the views of fundamentalists within the Reformed denomination, not what most people think. "I work in the mainstream of Biblical scholarship, and we believe that the early chapters of Genesis are divinely inspired stories which imagine the human condition and creation of the world. Their intent is to make theological statements. They weren't written to provide geological or biological information," Harlow said. "My college freshmen seem to be able to handle this, but fundamentalists get all bent out of shape over this."

But the evangelicals are not the only ones hoisted by, er, truth. John Farrell notes a particularly tough Catholic problem:

The Catholic Church indeed of all the Christian churches faces a particular quandary. The Council of Trent is quite explicit on the topic. Catholics are required to believe not only that Adam is the single father of the human race, but that Original Sin is passed on by physical generation from him to the entire human race. It’s not something symbolic or allegorical (although it is regarded as ultimately mysterious). The First Vatican Council reiterated the doctrine, as did Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Catholic apologists who point to Pope John Paul II’s 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as evidence of the Church’s acceptance of evolution often fail to notice that the late Pope completely passed over the question of monogenism, and indeed never did discuss the problem that genetics poses to the doctrine.

So much innovative and imaginative and faithful responses to modern science's revelations are required by the Church. Now more than ever. And yet the fundamental response by today's reactionary Vatican is mere silence or denial. In my view, that is a fundamental abdication of responsibility.

A reader writes:

I think it is worth linking to Rick Perry's announcement.  While I do not agree with his politics, Christianism, or think his arguments are logical, his focus on the economic condition and his continual direct attack on President Obama are altogether different and more effective than any other Republican candidate I have seen, especially with statements like this:

Since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America. Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent of all the new jobs were created in that state.

It is like George W. Bush on steroids – with scarcely a mention of the culture wars. He will win the nomination easily, and unless the current economic condition improves, he will be a strong contender for the presidency. While I don't think the majority of Americans want a Christian preacher for president, they will be focused on jobs and the economy over social issues.

WaPo's "Fact Checker" counters Perry's "40 percent of all new jobs" claim, among many others.

David Kurtz is concise:

[A]nemic fundraising, a weak campaigner, and a guy who couldn't throw enough red meat to GOP primary voters.

Michael Grunwald believes that dullness would have been a key asset against Obama. Weigel sums up the primary season for Pawlenty:

He was more acceptable to the Republican elite than Bachmann was. If she faded, he would have been well positioned to take her support in Iowa. Social conservatives found him acceptable. Fiscal conservatives liked him better than Romney. In retrospect, though, he might have euthanized his campaign at the second presidential debate in New Hampshire. After trying out a new line on campaign stops — calling Mitt Romney's health care plan "Obamneycare" — Pawlenty dialed it back, and passed on the chance to attack Romney after moderator John King gave him multiple chances to do so. After that, some voters and donors that I talked to worried that Pawlenty lacked the grit to be a successful candidate against Barack Obama. Pawlenty never overcame that.

Yglesias rounds up more of T-Paw's not-so-greatest hits. Jonathan Bernstein diagnoses how Ames did him in. Contra Ben Smith, Larison doesn't believe Pawlenty's political death is a repudiation of Sam's Club Republicanism:

As Smith notes, Pawlenty didn’t propose any policies informed by this, and his economic plan was notable for how little it focused on including any provisions that would have mattered to working- and middle-class voters. The main idea behind Ross and Reihan’s Grand New Party was that the Republican Party should actually try to serve the interests of its constituents with policies aimed at providing services and benefits. They took Pawlenty’s “Party of Sam’s Club” rhetoric and tried to make it into a policy agenda, but Pawlenty didn’t govern according to anything like that agenda, and he certainly never campaigned on it. We have to make a distinction between Pawlenty’s pseudo-populist use of his biography in his stump speeches and a policy agenda that was at least attempting to address problems of rising inequality, wage stagnation, and decreased social mobility that most Republican politicians ignore in their paeans to American exceptionalism.

T-Paw for Senate?

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, leaves the stage after addressesing the crowd assembled for the Ames Straw Poll at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. By Tom Williams/Roll Call)

So Bachmann reiterates a debunked untruth in Mark Steyn's latest and Andy McCarthy repeats it again. Yes the fact would be "flabbergasting" if it were a fact. But it isn't. I know that doesn't matter in the FNC media-industrial complex, and especially Steyn's statistically challenged mind, but for those of us left not in a postmodern world, reality still counts.

"Everyone looks for meaning in their lives – but all they find is shopping," – Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass, on Britain's social ills.

Yglesias counts down the top ten:

These stances are well to the right of where Republican candidates have traditionally positioned themselves. Indeed, even Michele Bachmann has not, to my knowledge, deemed Social Security unconstitutional. The propriety of a federal role in regulating the banking industry has been the subject of bipartisan agreement since the Madison administration. All in all, the book should give political reporters plenty of questions to ask Governor Perry as he introduces himself to a non-Texas constituency.