Author: Andrew Sullivan

Capitulation Of The Day

[Re-posted and updated from earlier today]

A reader spots an “interesting bit of irony”:

The Washington Post article that criticizes Donohue’s ridiculous comments about Charlie Hebdo and the idea that offensive speech ought to be censored contains this cowardly disclaimer:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included images offensive to various religious groups that did not meet the Post’s standards, and should not have been published. They have been removed.

If any reader knows exactly what images they removed, let us know and we’ll post them here. Update:

I saw the WaPo story before the images were pulled down they were exclusively images aimed at insulting Catholics and Jews. I left a comment asking why they weren’t also running the images aimed at insulting Muslims – i.e., the images that were particularly newsworthy. Awhile later all of the images were taken down. Definitely not my intent in making the comment. I just thought it was hypocritical to run one set of cartoons and not the other.  Here are a couple of the images I remember seeing before they were pulled:

hebdo-covers

Another reader:

The CBC has also refused to air the cartoons. Here’s the internal memorandum courtesy web journalist Jesse Brown:

Blogger Down, Aisle 3

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Just a note to apologize for my absence from the blog since a little after Christmas. I got the flu pretty bad (yes, like most HIVers, I got the shot) and haven’t been mobile now for ten days. I’m waiting on blood-work results to make sure nothing else is going on, and feel a little better today. So with any luck, I should be back blogging very soon. My deepest thanks, as always, to the Dish team for making my absence so worryingly hard to discern. And my deepest condolences to the people of Paris and France. Nous sommes Charlie aussi.

The Urgency Of Blasphemy

https://twitter.com/shashj/statuses/553202822662356992

In the wake of the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo, Douthat stands up for blasphemy:

[T]he kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more.

Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.

Saletan refuses to pretend that the hyper-sensitivity to religious mockery that motivated this attack isn’t specific to Islam:

Islamic moderates who protest these caricatures are undercut by Islamic radicals. Charlie Hebdo insults all religions. Its current issue mockingly questions the existence of Jesus. But Christians haven’t responded with bullets.

Three years ago, after Charlie Hebdo’s office was bombed, its editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier, pointed out that the magazine was “provocative on many subjects. It just so happens that every time we deal with radical Islam … we get indignant or violent reactions.”

Now Charbonnier is dead. The problem isn’t just the violence. It’s the celebration from other quarters of the Muslim world. On social media, there are comments celebrating Wednesday’s “blessed” attack and telling the killers, “You pleased our hearts.” There are congratulations to the terrorists for shouting “God is great” and striking “a paper known for its abuse of Islam.”

But Sarah Harvard stresses that Islamic doctrine doesn’t actually condone killing those who create offensive images of the prophet:

So what does Islam say about depictions that are not in a positive light? Islam’s most poignant instance of aniconism came when the Prophet Mohammed returned to the city of Mecca in 630 AD. After years fleeing from persecution, Mohammed and his followers had marched back to Mecca to rid idol worshiping from the holy city. According to the critically acclaimed book Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, upon entering the most sacred point in Islam’s most sacred mosque, Mohammed destroyed all the pagan idols and paintings that were sacrilegious to Islam. (He specifically guarded images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.) Mohammed didn’t seek out the creators of the images or sentence those responsible for the idols and sacrilegious depictions to death.

Historically, Razib Khan argues, the Islamic radicals’ views of blasphemy are far closer to the norm than our modern, somewhat radical attitudes toward free speech in the US:

[T]he behavior of Islamic radicals is definitely not beyond comprehension. Rather, it is totally explicable, and in many societies and times would be entirely normal and healthy behavior. Attacking the religion of the folk is understood to be synonymous with attacking the folk. That is why Thomas Jefferson had to elucidate his views on religion in the first place, they did not come naturally to people in the 18th century. They had to be inculcated over generations. Even if Islamic radicals in the West prey upon the marginalized, they reflect ancient and primal methods of social outrage and sanction. What you see here is the reality of living in a multicultural world where there is no a harmony of values and norms, and free movement of individuals who don’t necessarily subscribe to the social viewpoints of the lands in which they settle.

To Michael Brendan Dougherty, the incident illustrates how modern secularism is not only a Western idea, but a Christian one:

We used to say of comedians, “He can make that joke because he’s Jewish.” In this respect, the Western world’s comfort with attacking Christianity is an inadvertent admission that Christianity is “our” religion. And so it elicits from us none of the respect, deference, or fear we give to strangers. Viewed this way, secularism looks less like universal principle than a moral and theological critique derived from Christian sources and pitched back at Christian authorities.

The great irony of Islam’s continued clashes with the Western way of life — whether its widespread riots over a YouTube video or the murderous actions of a crazed minority— is that it has revealed, to the surprise of everyone but Pope Emeritus Benedict, that modern secularism is a kind of epiphenomenon of Christendom.

Post-Post-Modern Lit

Jonathon Sturgeon hails the rise of “autofiction,” where autobiography and fiction blur and “the self is considered a living thing composed of fictions”:

knausgaardboyhoodislandWhat’s happening is that new novels — like … 10:04, The Wallcreeper, and My Struggle — are redistributing the relation between the self and fiction. Fiction is no longer seen as “false” or “lies” or “make-believe.” Instead it is more like Kenneth Burke’s definition of literature as “equipment for living.” Fiction includes the narratives we tell ourselves, and the stories we’re told, on the path between birth and death.

Nor is the infamous postmodern “pastiche” anywhere to be found in [last] year’s crop of autofictional novels. These authors have rejected the old patchwork of genres and styles and myths primarily because the life of the author is now the novel’s organizing principle. And life, drained of religiosity, often leads to questions of the body and its environment. It’s not surprising, then, that Zink’s The Wallcreeper concerns, in part, environmental terrorism, or that Lerner’s 10:04 frequently considers the impact of ecological disaster. And Lerner himself suggests that Knausgaard’s My Struggle “isn’t a story so much as an immersive environment.”

No, autofiction isn’t new. It could even be argued that it’s as old as literature itself, especially if you consider something like Hesiod’s Works and Days an autofiction. But it’s clear that what previously defined (most) autofictional novels was the tension between the real and the unreal, the “made up” and the “truthful.” (And this perhaps why critics can’t seem to let this debate go.) The new class of autofictions, on the other hand, having passed through modernism’s Joycean and Proustian portraits of artists, as well as the defiant relativism of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory, eschews the entire truth vs. fiction debate in favor of the question of how to live or how to create.

Sighting Elvis

Elvis

Today would have been the music legend’s 80th birthday, assuming you believe he’s dead. Adrienne LaFrance ponders our varied perceptions of the man and his demise:

The tricky thing about Elvis [is] that people can’t agree on the Elvis they think they know. There’s the Elvis who died in 1977, and the Elvis who’s still alive and eating cheeseburgers in western Michigan. There’s Elvis the hip-swiveling hunk who could break your heart, and Elvis the doughy 40-something who couldn’t get through a performance without stumbling over his words. This duality was strong enough that it prompted debate about which Elvis ought to be depicted on a postage stamp. From The New York Times in 1992:

“Postal authorities are not sure which Presley likeness to use: the young, svelte, hip-gyrating Elvis of the rock-and-roll ’50s, or the rotund, road-worn Elvis who died in 1977 near the end of the Age of Aquarius, reportedly after a struggle with drugs.”

If conspiracy theories are a way to impose order on events that can’t be controlled, Elvis sightings are perhaps a way of rejecting mortality, and preserving the American dream he came to represent. After all, it wasn’t just Elvis’ death that challenged his place in American culture, but his actual life. Insisting Elvis never died is also, then, a way of rejecting what he had become.

Update from a reader:

If you’re talking about Elvis, why not include the finest Elvis-related song if all time, Mojo Nixon’s “Elvis is Everywhere”:

On a higher brow note, I recommend the Philip K Dick award-winning novel Elvissey by Jack Womack. This sci-fi novel has corporate commandos sent to an alternate version of Earth to kidnap a young Elvis in order to use him as their nouveau Messiah in a world where Christianity has been discredited.

Another:

Your post made me think about Bubba Ho-Tep, one of the strangest and most delightful films I have ever seen. It centers around an elderly Elvis living in a rundown retirement home in East Texas, having switched places with an Elvis impersonator in the early 1970s in order to get away from all the fame and the pains that came with it. He befriends a man, played brilliantly by Ossie Davis, who believes himself to be JFK (a harebrained and delightful explanation is given) and together they fight a mummy who is sucking the souls of their fellow residents through there assholes.

As I said, it is a very strange story. But it is also a story about death, fame, old age, family, heroism, peace of mind and above all else, Elvis himself. It received a very small theatrical release but after very positive reviews from several top critics (and tremendous praise for the performance of Bruce Campbell who played Elvis) it gained a cult following. As Roger Ebert said:

The King explains all of this in a thoughtful, introspective voice-over narration that also deals with other matters on his mind, such as the alarming pustule on that part of his anatomy where it is least welcome. He talks about Priscilla and Lisa Marie, about his movies (not a single good one), about his decision to disappear, and about how he broke his hip falling off a stage. This narration is not broad comedy, but wicked, observant and truthful. “Bubba Ho-Tep” has a lot of affection for Elvis, takes him seriously, and — this is crucial — isn’t a camp horror movie, but treats this loony situation as if it’s really happening

(Photo by Flickr user Cliff)

Face Of The Day

Temperatures Drop Near Zero Degrees In Chicago

A woman tries to stay warm as she waits on an L platform in Chicago during the early morning rush while temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit on January 7, 2015. Most of the city’s schools were cancelled today as wind chill temperatures were expected to exceed -30. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. Update from a proud Chicagoan, who contests Getty’s caption:

It actually gets into some serious linguistic issues. “A woman tries to stay warm as she waits on an L platform in Chicago . . . “ The L – sans punctuation, lone capital letter – is not how Chicagoans refer to their train system.

The Chicago Transportation Authority insists that it’s ‘L’ (single quotations marks, or inverted commas for you Brits).  The scare quotes probably were originally meant to indicate “slang” usage, and probably originated when the vast majority of the system was elevated (now 2/3 of it is at or below grade, including lines down the medians of expressways). But this official usage is contested.  Many great Chicago authors, including Nelson Algren, write El – short, obviously, for Elevated, sans punctuation.  Like the T in Boston. I have worked on a number of books and other publishing projects where this conflicted usage has mattered, so I thought I’d share this Chicago minutia with the Dish’s discerning audience.

So it’s the El I take: to L with all other versions.

The Shrinking Economic Payoff Of Keystone

Michael Levi considers how plummeting oil prices might affect the pipeline:

Lower oil prices reduce both the costs and the benefits of approving the Keystone XL pipeline by reducing the odds that it will ever be fully used. There’s an outside chance that, if prices are sustained at an extremely low level, the Keystone XL pipeline won’t get built. That scenario isn’t likely – among other things, if Canadian production doesn’t grow, the odds of sustained low prices decline substantially – but it’s not zero. Lower prices also raise the odds that the pipeline will be built but not fully utilized. In that case, you still get the up-front construction stimulus, but you get less benefit from greater oil production, and less climate damage from the same. You also have a waste of economic resources.

The more likely scenario, though, is that the Keystone XL pipeline gets built and used. In that case, lower oil prices reduce its economic benefits without any clear impact on its climate costs.

Jordan Weissmann contends that “Keystone is neither irrelevant, nor especially critical to the future of Canadian oil”:

Keystone would probably be a small boon to the American fossil-fuel industry, even at this late date. Remember, the pipeline would send crude to refiners on the Gulf Coast. And what do refiners do? They buy oil, then transform it into gasoline, diesel, and other products to sell. The less expensive the oil, the easier it is for them to turn a profit, and the heavy crude found in the tar sands—which gulf refiners are specially equipped to process—is especially cheap, even compared to similar low grades from Mexico and Venezuela. This week, for instance, Western Canadian Select has traded at around just $33 a barrel. The refinery owners of Houston would surely love to get their hands on more it, but in a world of generally low oil prices, doing so isn’t exactly a matter of life and death for them.

Rebecca Leber wishes the Dems’ amendments to the Keystone bill didn’t focus on jobs:

Keystone emerged as a national issue when it became a symbol of climate change. Democrats ought to be marshalling their resources to remind people that Keystone is more about polution than it is about jobs. The pro-environment amendments have a slim chance at passing anyway. If Democratic amendments are hopeless from the start, they might as well go for bolder proposals, like a carbon tax, that will help at least to remind us of bigger things at stake than a few dozen jobs.

But Morrissey imagines that those amendments might get Obama to sign the bill:

If Democrats offer amendments that Republicans can support, the White House can claim that the bill has changed enough to their satisfaction — in essence, declare victory and depart the field before anyone asks too many questions.

Update from a reader, who corrected the first sentence of this post:

“Michael Levi considers how pummeling oil prices might affect the pipeline:”

“Plummeting”?  The Dish’s own eggcorn?

Busted. But apparently we’re not alone this week, as another reader attests:

It has been fixed now, but when I first read Chait’s column on the conservative glee over Harvard faculty outrage at having to pay copays, I’m sure it read:

As the Times reports, the changes are a response to Harvard’s own health-care experts, many of whom advocated for Obamacare. The story has thus entered the conservative mind as a case of liberal elites suffering under the yolk of a liberal program.

Who Won’t Republish Charlie’s Cartoons?

Mark Steyn wishes the MSM would grow a pair:

Amen. Christopher Massie finds a clear divide between digital and legacy publications:

With few exceptions, it has been digital outlets like The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Vox, and Slate that have exercised their constitutional right by republishing the cartoons that are thought to be the basis for the attacks. In contrast, many “legacy” organizations, from CNN, to The Washington Post, to The New York Times, largely withheld the images.

A Dish reader also called out the CBC, as well as an egregious example from the WaPo. Massie talks to Daily Beast editor Noah Shachtman, who calls not publishing the images “giving in to the monsters that just massacred a bunch of people.” Massie is on the same page:

While editors are regularly forced to make difficult calls about publishing sensitive material, and while yesterday’s murders show that worries about angering jihadists are not without basis, in this case, the obvious news value of the cartoons ought to have outweighed any trepidation. The absence of a confirmed storyline as to whether a specific cartoon ignited the attack means that a wide array of context, including the images, is potentially relevant. Furthermore, if readers want to understand the tragic affront to free speech, there is no replacement for seeing the cartoons, in their unabashed irreverence.

The Fossil Fuels We Can’t Burn

Unburned Fuel

Christie Aschwanden reads through a new study which “shows, in the finest detail yet, which fossil fuel reserves can be exploited and which should remain untouched if we’re to have at least a 50 percent chance of meeting the 2-degree limit”:

The calculations show that some large reserves simply shouldn’t be tapped. For instance, essentially all Arctic oil reserves and 99 percent of Canadian oil sands are rated as unburnable under the model, a calculation that will surely give ammunition to those opposing the Keystone pipeline. More than half the world’s unburnable oil lies in the Middle East, but the model shows that the region could exploit more than 60 percent of its reserves without blowing the global carbon budget. The U.S. and Europe have the greatest flexibility to extract its reserves and remain within budget, in part because their proximity to energy users makes it more economical.

Scott K. Johnson also examines the report:

The fact that we can’t even use all of our current reserves calls into question the value of discovering or developing new sources of fossil fuels.

No new production of oil and gas takes place in the Arctic, for example, in the simulations that meet the total emissions target. In an associated article about the study, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research scientists Michael Jakob and Jérôme Hilairenote, “Fossil-fuel companies must therefore ask themselves whether they should continue to invest in exploration for, and processing of, oil, gas, and coal, or risk losing billions of dollars of stranded assets.”

“To conclude,” the study’s authors write, “these results demonstrate that a stark transformation in our understanding of fossil fuel availability is necessary. Although there have previously been fears over the scarcity of fossil fuels, in a climate-constrained world this is no longer a relevant concern: large portions of the reserve base and an even greater proportion of the [total] resource base should not be produced if the temperature rise is to remain below 2°C.”

Andrew Freedman focuses on the coal industry:

[Study author Christophe] McGlade told Mashable the countries that will be hurt the most by the carbon budget constraints are those that are heavily dependent on coal the countries that will be hurt the most by the carbon budget constraints are those that are heavily dependent on coal, which is among the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels. “It’s companies and countries that hold large coal reserves that are going to suffer under a 2 degree scenario, and also the Arctic oil,” McGlade said.

For example, McGlade said that meeting the temperature target in the most cost-effective way means foregoing the exploitation of 80% of the world’s coal reserves. Over the past few years, coal has become more expensive in many countries, including the U.S., compared to natural gas, thanks to fracking technologies that have produced a glut of gas.

Tim McDonnell adds two cents:

Of course, the model has to make assumptions about future oil and gas prices that are basically impossible to be certain about. Unexpected changes to the price of oil, for example, could upset the cost equation for drilling in the US and re-shuffle the entire regional breakdown. But even as an estimate, the study really illuminates the vital need for policies all over the world that dramatically cut our dependence on coal.