Dreher is watching coverage of the fertilizer plant disaster:
West is a town of 2,500 people, which makes it about the same size as my own town. Here’s an interesting thing: Piers Morgan asked the woman he was interviewing by phone if her husband, Marty, is a professional firefighter. No, she said, he’s a volunteer. Everybody in the West Fire Department is. Marty is an air-conditioning and heating installer. The plant was on fire, and he ran to help put it out. And even though there’s still a great deal of danger there — toxic fumes, chance of second explosion — and his house is destroyed, and some of his friends and colleagues have been killed, Marty still won’t come home. Because he’s needed.
President Obama announced this week that the FBI is treating the Boston bombing as a case of terrorism, since explosives were used to target civilians. Yesterday, I likewise wrote that “happened in Boston was an act of terror.” Lisa Beyer demurs:
Actually, that’s not right. The U.S. federal code and the Federal Bureau of Investigation both include in their definitions of terrorism an element of political motivation. Having spent nearly a decade based in Israel, I understand the common impulse to fit any grave disturbance into an obvious narrative. While politicians, commentators and bystanders can afford such assumptions, the responsible authorities cannot. I remember a particular car bombing in Israel, which the media, as a matter of course, treated as a terrorist act. Evidence later emerged proving the bombing was an internal mob hit.
That’s a helpful perspective. My own definition was based on a simple idea: violence designed to terrorize a broader community – violence random and dangerous enough to affect far more people than those directly hurt. There’s no question that many Bostonians were terrorized by the bombings. But that definition would definitely fit Newtown as well – arguably more broadly. Maybe I was painting with too broad a brush. It’s also true that unintentional violence can terrorize. I cannot imagine how the citizens of West, Texas, feel this morning. They just witnessed an explosion far larger than Oklahoma City. (Despite the location near Waco and the mid-April date, I am assuming no one was behind the explosion.) Ackerman agrees with Beyer:
For some, “terrorism” will equate to an act committed by Muslims, no matter how many pre- and post-9/11 acts of terrorism were committed by non-Muslims.
It’s not fair. But it is real. That association can have dire consequences for innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, both from ignorant fanatics and from law enforcement. One of the biggest sources of speculation in journalism and on social media concerned a Saudi national questioned in the bombing. Yet Boston police commissioner Ed Davis said flatly [yesterday], “There is no one in custody.” The investigation is just beginning to interview Bostonians.
That’s to be expected: law enforcement has to run down what one investigator called the “voluminous” leads emerging in the hours after the explosions. After reports came through social media about police questioning Arabs who among the thousands running away from the Copley disaster area, people grimly joked that “Running While Arab” is the new “Driving While Black.”
The Saudi national, a student, turned out to be simply a victim himself. Brian Beutler blames Benghazi for the focus on the T-word:
The media was listening for that word yesterday because they identified it as a potential source of a future, contrived political controversy; reporters were acting as opposition researchers for the people they cover, and identified a sin of omission. Like the inverse of when Obama said the private sector was “doing fine” and the press corps zeroed out everything else he said in the same press conference.
Words certainly matter, but the idea that if we use the word “terrorism” to refer to a particular attack then we’re being strong, brave, and resolute, while if we call it, say, an “attack” then we’re being weak and cowardly, is just insane.
Yes, that’s a fetish now common on the let’s-panic right. It’s not about what happens. It’s a form of partisan self-expression. Which may be reason alone to be more circumspect before using it.
(Photo: Shattered glass covers items in the front of a thrift show after the West Fertilizer Company exploded April 18, 2013 in West, Texas. A massive explosion at the fertilizer company injured more than 100 people and left damaged buildings for blocks in every direction. The death toll from the blast, which occured as firefighters were tackling a blaze, is as yet unknown. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
Quitting masturbation is a trend on Reddit now, in the “NoFap” forum:
The goals for all these men, regardless of their personal lives or relationship statuses, seemed to be similar: to return to a more charged, natural self. It’s a throwback notion—virility as integral to manhood—but many of these anti-masturbators regard it as truth. “I feel like a man again” is a common refrain. One NoFapper referred to his 90 days without masturbation as “a passage into manhood.” They see masturbation as a failure of masculinity—not because it’s shameful or forever associated with adolescence, but because, on a fundamental, even chemical level, it’s draining their true potential.
The medical profession isn’t convinced. Every doctor and psychologist I spoke with informed me that “there’s no evidence” to link masturbation to sexual performance, and that it’s an oversimplification to think that frequent masturbation is the cause of delayed ejaculation.
The thing about jacking off is, it’s so personal it’s mystical: There is only you, and the feeling that arises in you. No one can judge that relationship better than you—as opposed to abstainers, who like ardent ex-smokers can judge and browbeat you, Mr. (or Ms.) Self-Abuser, as only the zealous convert can. For my part, jerking it makes me a calmer, happier, more compassionate person. I am confident in my body. I am exultant in sex and sensitive to anyone I’m lucky enough to share my sex with. And in compartmentalizing masturbation as separate from the finer pursuits of life, I feel more mindful of my surroundings, not less.
It’s worth recalling that the formal, theological case against masturbation is identical to that against contraception and gay marriage. It is sodomy, as defined in the early modern period, i.e. ejaculation outside the vagina of a married female. So, as I argued at length a decade ago, we are all sodomites now. Men, anyway. Has any priest now living not masturbated?
For the record, I could never grasp why this was so wrong. My instinctual reaction to my first teenage orgasm was total wonderment. Of course, I had been taught nothing about this strange liquid coming out of my dick. It happened while I was reading – of all things – one of the Don Camillo short stories by Giovannino Guareschi. Not the most predictable erotic trigger – but when you’re fourteen, it could be the ceiling and you’d hit yourself in the eye if you weren’t careful.
To me, having this amazing thing suddenly come alive in my body was so obviously marvelous, so instantly ecstatic, it never occurred to me that God forbade me to forsake it. Why give me this 24-hour, unlosable instrument of blind, transcendent pleasure – and then bid me not to touch it? I had never experienced anything so simply pleasurable in my whole life until then. If we’re talking natural law, all I can say is that masturbation was the single most natural thing I had ever done at the moment in my life. More natural than watching television or riding a bus. If I felt guilt, it required some excruciating effort – until I realized that the most effective thing to trigger the constantly loaded rifle was thinking of another man. Usually naked. I had no porn or access to it. So I drew the men I wanted (and they all looked scarily like my husband). It was only then that the culture began to bear down on my nature.
But as I’ve grown older, and mercifully less driven by my dick, I can see the point of self-denial. In your teens, you have a constant unstoppable production of more sperm than could ever merely reproduce (another natural refutation of natural law). By your forties (unless I’ve just had my testosterone shot), not so much. So a little self-restraint definitely increases the pleasure and intensity of the orgasm you eventually get. And no, I feel no guilt about it whatever. It’s so psychically natural, so obviously intuitive, it was the first step for me toward dismantling the strange doctrines of natural law on human sexuality, devised in the early middle ages by men who knew a lot at the time – but tiny shards of truth compared to what we know now.
Rod recently discussed his political evolution and the current state of conservatism:
When I was in college, and first became a conservative, it was the liberals who had a reputation as rigid, doctrinaire, snide, and off-putting. I’m generalizing, but in those days, liberals were the ones who were far more likely to be brittle, who weren’t willing to look around and adjust their prescriptions to changing circumstances, who seemed disconnected from the world as it was. It seemed to me that liberals had emotional and ideological touchstones in a bygone political and cultural era, and they dealt with changing times by insisting on greater ideological purity in the ranks. Whatever else 1980s liberalism wasn’t, it wasn’t attractive. It seemed outdated and exhausted, both in terms of substantive policies and in terms of the way it presented itself to the public.
I began my college career as a liberal, and it slowly began to dawn on me that I didn’t really believe in liberalism so much as I couldn’t stand Reagan and the people who loved him. I spent my freshman year fuming over the fact that my dad and all his friends were Reagan Democrats living in false consciousness; it never once occurred to me to wonder why it was working-class men had ceased to identify with the Democratic Party, and whether or not liberalism had anything wrong with it. My side was losing, but we found it easier to blame the fools who voted for Reagan, or to blame Reagan for being such an accomplished liar, than to examine ourselves and our own beliefs. (When I did begin to do that, my liberalism, which was primarily attitudinal, faded away.)
This is pretty much the case with conservatism today, I’m afraid. We could argue, and should argue, over what the policies of conservative government should be today; that’s not my point in this blog entry. My point here is that there is no creative ferment on the Right, no breathing space, few places where new ideas can emerge. All the energy on the Right seems aimed at hunting down the heretics within. That, and making life as hard as possible for the opposition, not because they have something better in mind, but as an end in itself.
Tomasky praises the president’s remarks (above) after the Senate’s gun-control bill failed:
Obama’s words were the most powerful he’s delivered in years. Call it failed if you want, but this was leadership: knowing that he was probably going to lose on the Hill, but putting everything he had into the fight anyway. He took on not only the NRA and its whores in Congress, he took on the blasé complacency of a pundit class that said repeatedly: he’ll never win, so why do this; he should have struck while the iron was hot; he should have talked to Republicans more. Yes, it was clear that a challenge to the NRA was likely to lose, but that isn’t what always should dictate a politician’s actions. He behaved out of conviction. This is rare enough among politicians that Obama certainly should not be nitpicked for this or that little thing he did or didn’t do.
Obama does a fine job of empathizing with the parents of Adam Lanza’s victims. But that is something any decent human being should be able to manage. Where he has trouble, despite his lip service to the idea of putting himself in the other guy’s shoes, is in empathizing with his opponents. He not only says they are wrong, which is to be expected. He refuses to concede that people who disagree with him about gun control are acting in good faith, based on what they believe to be sound reasons—that they, like him, are doing what they think is right. His self-righteous solipsism is striking even for a politician.
But the way in which the NRA re-framed the debate dishonestly was “bad faith.” And after Heller, and more than a decade of looser gun restrictions, what more do Second Amendment enthusiasts want? When you look at the balance of things – and I’m not a big enthusiast for more gun control, but see the obvious sanity of universal background checks – the NRA has taken its own achievements as the middle ground and keeps moving ever further right. They remind me of AIPAC – and they distort public policy just as toxically. Drum looks ahead:
President Obama was right to call this “round one.” This kind of thing is a long-term fight for public opinion, and only after you get the public firmly on your side do you have any real chance of passing serious legislation. So the question today for liberals is simple: Is this issue important enough to keep banging away on it for years on end, the way the NRA does? If not, nothing will ever happen.
In an earlier post, Drum examines public opinion on gun control:
Gun control proposals poll decently all the time. But the plain truth is that there are only a small number of people who feel really strongly about it, and they mostly live in urban blue districts already. Outside of that, pro-gun control opinion is about an inch deep. This is a classic case where poll literalism leads you completely astray. Without measuring intensity of feeling, that 90 percent number is meaningless.
Almost everybody may support background checks, but not every American knows the actual content of every bill that gets a vote. Look at health-care reform. Americans overwhelmingly favor nearly every provision of Obamacare, but oppose the law because they had a general sense of not liking it. Likewise, opponents have turned the debate into a general discussion of “gun control,” which is way less popular than a specific law about background checks. Lisa Murkowski explains her No vote thusly: “In Alaska you’re pretty much pro-gun. That about sums it up.”
Adam Winkler wonders if proposing an assault weapons ban was a mistake:
If President Obama had pushed for a law only requiring universal background checks—maybe coupled with the NRA’s proposal for more funding for school security—he might have been able to persuade Congress to consider his proposals in February, when Newtown was fresher in our collective memory. The four-month delay enabled the NRA to rally its troops—and, more importantly, its allies in Congress.
Manchin-Toomey was “branded” about as well as any gun bill can be, endorsed by a man whose state handed Barack Obama a defeat in every county and a man who spent most of his life in politics trying to primary Republicans. The watered-down bill was only as watery as a background checks bill that narrowly failed in 1999, with more Republicans supporting it. Democrats had come to view the NRA as unsavory liars who had to be beaten on something legislatively, just as they were beaten at the polls in 2016, to shift back the center of debate. They failed.
George Packer bemoans the plight of Afghans who have assisted American forces and thus face grave dangers once the US withdraws. Why American visas are hard to come by:
[N]o one wants to own this problem. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by a consular officer, State Department diplomat, or Homeland Security official, other than the satisfaction of living up to a high standard of conduct, and perhaps saving a life. And letting in the wrong kind of Afghan could be a career killer. That, anyway, is the fear–or the purported fear. The only official Americans who habitually make this an issue are the troops who know exactly how important those Afghans are–who feel a debt of gratitude and sometimes a bond of brotherly or sisterly love. But those in uniform don’t count for much in Washington as individuals, and they aren’t necessarily adept at manipulating the levers of government.
Noam Scheiber highlights the ties between the Obama administration and the consulting industry in Washington:
[T]he highest-profile White House grads don’t so much join consulting firms these days; they found them. A boldfaced Obama name can rake in upward of $25,000 per month from a client just by dialing into a conference call and drafting a memo from time to time. Four clients means more than a million dollars a year with virtually no overhead. “You can run a business like that on an iPad and a cell phone,” says the former administration official. The godfather of this approach is ex-Clinton strategist Doug Sosnik, famous for conducting his business meetings in jeans from coffee shops and hotel lobbies. David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter have both adopted the Sosnik model.
He describes the effort required to manage the move from the nominally anti-lobbying administration to the private sector:
[M]any aides look longingly at the handful of industries where you can make a small fortune while still passing as virtuous—a kind of holy grail of post-Obama buckraking. Near the top of the list are the tech-consulting firms, like Blue State Digital, that help clients master social media, wage online marketing campaigns, and generally leverage Big Data. “They all say, ‘I was the real guy’ ” behind Obama’s new media operation, says a former administration official.
Laura W. Murphy flags a new public opinion poll on immigration:
A key factor that contributes to this unjust system is that, despite its crushing consequences, deportation is a civil penalty, not criminal. Deportation hearings therefore lack many of the due process protections associated with criminal punishment. No right to a speedy trial. No guarantee of going before an immigration judge for a bond hearing. No right to counsel, even for children traveling alone and people with mental disabilities. Costly mass imprisonment of immigrants without any reason to think they would flee or threaten public safety. Separation of U.S. citizen children from their parents (more than 200,000 such parents were deported in 27 months from 2010-2012).
If Americans knew how different the immigration judicial system is from what they are accustomed to when they serve on juries or watch Law & Order, they would be appalled and demand change. That’s exactly what this poll found: decisive majorities of Americans support fundamental values of due process and human rights for immigrants.
Google resurrects six famous authors – Shakespeare, Dickens, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Poe and Dickinson – for a fun writing program. So what happens when you plug in the first paragraph of Moby Dick?
It turns out even the Great American Novel isn’t safe from edits. Dostoyevsky made the first change in my document, rewriting the opening line:
Next I tried adding the collaborators’ own names into my version of “Moby-Dick” (since writers are such notorious self-promoters, as we all know), like so: “Call me Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare deleted his name and rewrote the line as “The handsome and lovely Shakespeare.”
Edgar Allan Poe, having none of that, then edited it: “The dreadful and lonely Shakespeare.”
“Now, now, play nice,” I wanted to tell my collaborators. Meanwhile, Dickens was editing “street” to “busy thoroughfare” and “people’s” to “fellow-being’s.” Nietzsche and Dickinson were, throughout this entire exchange, noticeably absent.
Poe then ended the whole mess, pounding out “THE END” at the bottom of my document, abruptly cutting it short.
(Photo: a window view from the room where Melville composed Moby Dick)
The Dish 