Month: March 2012

Wednesday, Romney discussed his leadership roles in the Mormon church and how it helped him understand working-class problems:

Sprung is unsurprised:

In Mitt Romney, Community Organizer, I noted that Romney, in his capacities as the Mormon equivalent of parish priest and a bishop, actually engaged quite deeply in the lives of his fellow Mormons. I suggested that he really has to invoke this experience to counter the perception that he's lived his life in a superrich bubble. … I expect to hear more in this vein.

A reader has a much different take on Romney's religious background:

Has anyone ever thought that part of his "problem" speaking with all of us "99 percenters" isn't just because of his financial background?  What isolates him and makes him so tone deaf to us isn't just that he lives "a life of financial privilege." It's that this mirrors how he was brought up in the core part of his life: the Mormon church.  

He hasn't been a mere "parishioner" for a long time.  He was raised to be a ward bishop and then stake president.  This is someone who systemically has ALWAYS been a "decider" on the inside of a non-democratic structure, someone who only knows how to give orders to his flock.  For his whole adult life.

In his positions at Bain and the church he has been the one dispensing solutions. It's all very omnidirectional – all output, no input.  As we have seen in the Catholic church, mid-to-upper level people in the power structure ARE insulated and isolated from the rest.  But, more to the point, they aren't looking for, desiring, even expecting to hear input – what their flock tells them.  The important thing is the output – what they tell their flock.

Benjamin Percy describes his vasectomy:

Today in the United States, one in six men over the age of 35 have been cut. It is the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do. I know this. The prolonged use of birth control pills may increase a woman's risk of cancer. A hysterectomy, along with the standard risks of major surgery, has such long-term psychological and physical risks as depression, hormonal imbalance, sexual pain, osteoporosis, and heart disease. Tubal ligation in women also has a much higher rate of failure (one in every 200 cases as opposed to the vasectomy's one in 2,000). Contradictory as this may seem, by getting a vasectomy, I'm manning up. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Rush isn't walking back on anything:

Friedersdorf points out the obvious:

It isn't just that he seems to misunderstand that birth-control pills cost the same whether someone has sex once per month or twice every single day. The problem isn't just that he misrepresented the fullness of her testimony. Beyond all that, he has once again shown himself to be coarse, vulgar, bullying, callous, and needlessly cruel.     

Tod Kelley expects Limbaugh's rant to hurt the party:

For a while now the Right has held tight to the belief that if the ratings are high and whatever you do pisses off other people, you must be doing something right. And in a way, they are correct: Battling contraception and calling women that are on the pill sluts that should have to be taped having sex so they can whack to it does indeed increase ratings, and it does indeed piss off other people.  So they’ve got those things down pat. What it doesn’t do is win elections, contribute to the dialogue we should be having, or make your party particularly relevant.

Massimo Calabresi agrees:

Limbaugh and Santorum’s hostility to contraception will appear to many female voters as an attempt to roll back 50 years of progress for women. Limbaugh’s final over-the-top assertion — that if Fluke wants to be paid by taxpayers for sex, he "want[s] something in return," namely, that she post videos online of herself having sex — just ties up the whole alienating package with a big "Vote for Obama" bow. 

Earlier coverage here.

Mormons posthumously baptized Daniel Pearl (b.globe.com/A32pRm). How do they do that & why? Background:nyr.kr/z2LLLI

— Amy Davidson (@tnyCloseRead) February 29, 2012

Eugene Volokh yawns at the question:

Either the Mormons are right about their theology, or they’re wrong. If they’re right, then the posthumous baptism will do good. If they’re wrong (and, being not a Mormon, I by definition think they are wrong, or else I’d be a Mormon), then the baptism will have no effect whatsoever: It is just some people going through some ineffectual — by hypothesis — rituals in their own temple, and I don’t see what it should be to me that those rituals use the names of (say) my late relatives, however much I love those relatives.

Ari Kohen, on the other hand, decries the practice:

My problem with posthumous baptism is that it’s disrespectful. Assuming that the dead people don’t know that they’re being disrespected, we can nonetheless assert that it’s disrespectful to the group deemed to be in need of posthumous baptism. Indeed, I’d say it is about as clear a statement as we can get of one group’s belief in the inferiority of the beliefs of another group. It amounts to an invalidation of the choices that people make in their lives and a direct paternalistic challenge to their agency: "We know better than they do and, thankfully, we’ll be able to help them out."

I'm with Kohen. In fact, I'd go further. It's deeply disrespectful to and invasive of other faiths to be posthumously coopted in this fashion.

I've been interested in taking my Light Study photo series and evolving them into motion pieces. I shot a lot of footage for a VJ gig for FITC San Francisco. So I edited together those stop motion sequences, mashed up some audio from the Tron Legacy trailers, and out came Light Drive. The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.

Jon Lee Anderson reflects on the Syrian regime's retaking of Homs:

With the end of the siege of Homs, Syria is in a momentary limbo. At such an interval, there is ample opportunity for the players to shift directions, and to alter the course of events. But I would hazard a bet that, historically speaking, rather than representing a final, fatal, setback for Syria’s rebels, Homs will be remembered as an iconic crucible, the turning point in which Syria’s uprising became a civil war.

Paul Waldman charts it:

The explanations for this drop vary; a declining interest in hunting and the steady exodus from rural areas to suburbs and cities almost certainly play a role. Whatever the combination of causes, there have been steady declines in gun ownership among all age groups. Of particular note is the decline among young adults. In the GSS studies in the 1970s, around 45 percent of respondents under 30 years of age reported that their household owned a gun; in the most recent surveys that number has fallen below 20 percent, a decline of more than half. 

Kevin Drum asks:

I'm not sure what's going on. Gun sales to individuals seem like they've increased a fair amount over the past decade, but the number of households reporting gun ownership has decreased a bit. Does this mean that fewer households own guns, but the ones that do own guns have more and more of them?

"I will say that only twice before in my memory, and maybe thrice in American history, has there been as much carefree talk about war and unprovoked strikes as we've had concerning Iran in recent months, including from candidates other than Ron Paul in the GOP race. The twice in my experience were: during the runup to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, and in the "bomb 'em back to the stone age" moments of the early Vietnam era," – James Fallows. 

A reader writes:

I'm Pakistani and I've lived there for over 15 years. Two simple reasons why this is a very bad idea:

1. Anything handed out by Americans will rile up suspicion, even the Koran.
2. Non-Muslims touching the Koran is a massive taboo. Even Muslims aren't allowed to touch the book or recite it without performing wu'du or ghusl (ablution and cleansing) first. Women aren't allowed to touch or recite it when menstruating.

Progressive Muslims disagree with these rules, but that's clearly not who we're talking about here.

Another backs up those points with firsthand experience:

I wasn't surprised to hear about the Afghan riots around alleged burning of Korans at Bagram. This incident, and the reaction to it, was inevitable, given the politics of Westerners handling that particular book. We had a similar issue in Kandahar in late 2008. There had been an attempt to reach out to the Afghan people through the distribution by the military of Pashto-Arabic Korans. Very ornate, beautiful books. But Westerners couldn't be seen to handle the books, our Afghan advisors felt, so direct gifting was impossible. So we attempted to give them through the Afghan military, where I was an advisor. This was also problematic.

The military didn't like getting Korans from Westerners' hands either, and they couldn't really give them out themselves, because they knew their defiling origin. So that was a non-starter. We also started to see returns of holy books previously given, as word spread that the words might somehow have been adulterated or bowdlerized by Westerners. It being, of course, impossible to disprove that particular negative, the whole Koran-gifting thing basically shut down.

This, though, created another problem: what to do with the books now? Neither holy nor unholy, they could not be disposed of in any rational manner. The Afghans would not take possession under any circumstances, nor would they give them back to our control (because they were, at least somewhat, still the word of God). This proved a very difficult issue to negotiate, and as I recall ended with basically everyone just agreeing to pretend they weren't there.

I have no doubt that the supply of burnable copies of the Koran at Bagram airbase ended up there in some similar fashion. This is not a goodwill gesture, it seems, that can ever, ever work. Furthermore, as the Western presence winds down and seacans are emptied and their contents disposed of rather than shipped home, one should expect similar such incidents in future.

(Photo: Activists of Pakistani political and Islamic party Jammat-e-Islami (JI), hold up Korans and placards during an anti-US protest over the recent burning of Korans in Afghanistan, in Karachi on March 2, 2012. Two US soldiers were killed by Afghan colleagues on March 1, the latest in a series of such attacks after the burning of Korans at a US base sparked widespread violent protests. In Afghanistan 40 people have been killed in six days of violent demonstrations as protesters targeted Western bases, plunging relations between US-led Western forces and their Afghan allies to an all time low. By Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)

A very British scandal.