[G]un control supporters have no shared social activities, no common identity and no companies that cater to them. Their jobs don’t bring them together. Unlike gun rights advocates’ they don’t find and stay in touch with each other without a conscious and sustained effort to do so. Under these conditions, it is not surprising to find far more effective mobilization of sentiment on the gun rights side. So even if there was significant intensity of feeling on the part of a sizable minority of gun control advocates, (say 10% of the 90% favoring background checks) we should expect them to have greater difficulty in channeling those feelings and building durable political organizations.
If you’re picking your battles, background checks are as good an issue as any to lay down. For one thing, as I’ve suggested, guns loom disproportionately large in the political world of red state Democrats. Guns are the way they signal home state cultural affinity, giving themselves a chance to get their economic message heard. Their A rating from the National Rifle Association is powerful shorthand. And yes, the NRA is crazy and partisan, and was opposing a bill it used to support and that most Republicans support. But none of those facts overcomes the blunt reality of the A rating’s political value.
What’s more, this particular gun vote was an especially good time for Democrats to defect. None of them cast the deciding vote; it fell six votes shy of defeating a filibuster. The bill was already a compromise of a compromise, something that would have stopped a tiny fraction of gun crimes. Even if it passed the Senate, it faced steep odds of passing the House, where it probably would have died, been weakened further, or even turned into a law that weakened existing gun laws.
Julia Ioffe, who spent her early childhood in Russia, explores the significance of the Tsarnaev brothers’ struggle to assimilate in the US as Chechens:
If the YouTube channel that is said to be [older brother] Tamerlan’s really is his, you can see him fervently clinging to this torn identity: It is full of Islam and Russian rap, which makes sense given the Soviet policy of Russifying Chechnya. In fact, Chechnya is still part of Russia and Russian, as well as Chechen, is its official language. Dzhokhar, who was either 9 or 11 when the family moved, may have been more assimilated than Tamerlan, but if that VKontakte page is his, it too is telling: VKontakte is the homegrown Russian rip-off of Facebook. The mere fact that he had a page on an exclusively Russian social network shows that the assimilation was not a complete one. Because emigrating at 11, or even 9, is hard, too. (The most revealing image of Dzhokhar is not the one of him hugging an African-American friend at his high school graduation, but the one of him sitting at a kitchen table with his arm around a guy his age who appears to be of Central Asian descent. In front of them is a dish plov, a Central Asian dish of rice and meat, and a bottle of Ranch dressing.)
Rod shares why he thinks American conservatives have such a problem with the French:
Even in March 2003, at the onset of the Iraq War, Rod was defending French culture in the pages of National Review:
I think there’s a conservative point to be made here. The French are an old country, and the love they have for their culinary traditions, and its unparalleled excellence, come from a profound respect for tradition and culture, for civilization. When they make fools of themselves beating up the neighborhood McDonald’s, I find it hard to condemn them, because we all live in a world that doesn’t ask What is beautiful? What is delicious? What is worthy; we live in a world that asks only, What is quick and easy? Many of the French resist this modern, very American impulse. They do it in bad, stupid ways sometimes, but their instinct is right. As someone who grew up in a disposable culture, the effort the French put into aesthetic excellence never fails to move me, and makes me want to learn from them. …
… I can’t hate France, and when this ugly time passes, I’ll be back. I’ve got a little boy of my own now, and rather than just tell him about the wonders of France, as Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda did for me, I’m planning to take him there one day and show him. I want him to see the cathedral at Chartres, the experience of which first stirred me to seek Christian faith (wondering what kind of religion would inspire men to build something so magnificent to the glory of God). I want him to see the castles of the Loire Valley, the vineyards of Bordeaux, and the graveyard at Normandy, where so many of his countrymen died to make France free. I want him to see Paris, the world’s most beautiful city, and the bridge over the Seine where his father kissed his mother one warm spring evening when they were first in love, and to walk over to Berthillon on the Ile St-Louis to taste the best ice cream in the world. France is for him to love too, and not even the perfidious pomposities of Dominique de Villepin can take that from him.
There are many nuances to the story of Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev – and there is no doubt that, like all human beings their acts were, as my shrink often unhelpfully puts it, “multi-determined.” And there is a huge amount to learn from the stoner kid who got caught up in his brother’s religious fanaticism. But Glenn Greenwald veers into left-liberal self-parody this morning:
The overarching principle here should be that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is entitled to a presumption of innocence until he is actually proven guilty. As so many cases have proven – from accused (but exonerated) anthrax attacker Stephen Hatfill to accused (but exonerated) Atlanta Olympic bomber Richard Jewell to dozens if not hundreds of Guantanamo detainees accused of being the “worst of the worst” but who were guilty of nothing – people who appear to be guilty based on government accusations and trials-by-media are often completely innocent. Media-presented evidence is no substitute for due process and an adversarial trial.
But beyond that issue, even those assuming the guilt of the Tsarnaev brothers seem to have no basis at all for claiming that this was an act of “terrorism” in a way that would meaningfully distinguish it from Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tuscon and Columbine. All we really know about them in this regard is that they identified as Muslim, and that the older brother allegedly watched extremist YouTube videos and was suspected by the Russian government of religious extremism (by contrast, virtually every person who knew the younger brother has emphatically said that he never evinced political or religious extremism).
Legally, the case for the presumption of innocence is absolutely right. But come on.
One reason the Miranda rights issue is not that salient is that the evidence that this dude bombed innocents, played a role in shooting a cop, shutting down a city, and terrorizing people for a week is overwhelming and on tape. And yes, of course, this decision to commit horrific crimes may be due in part to “some combination of mental illness, societal alienation, or other form of internal instability and rage that is apolitical in nature.” But to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that this was also religiously motivated – a trail that now includes a rant against his own imam for honoring Martin Luther King Jr. because he was not a Muslim – is to be blind to an almost text-book case of Jihadist radicalization, most likely in the US. Tamerlan may have been brimming with testosterone as he found boxing an outlet for his aggression, bragging to his peers of his coolness and machismo and piety, and all of that may have contributed. Who knows if the delay in his citizenship application because he was beating his wife was the proximate cause. But does Glenn wonder why Tamerlan thought it was ok to beat his wife, whom he demanded convert to Islam? Does Glenn see no religious extremism here:
The dramatic confrontation between Tamerlan and his imam began when the 26-year-old interrupted a solemn Friday prayer service three months ago. The imam had just offered up assassinated civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. as a fine example of a man to emulate – but this reportedly enraged Tamerlan.
‘You cannot mention this guy because he’s not a Muslim!’ Muhammad recalled Tamerlan shouting, shocking others in attendance according to the LA Times. Kicked out of the mosque for his outrageous behavior, Tamerlan did return to the prayer service after his outburst according to Muhammad.
‘He’s crazy to me,’ said Muhammad. ‘He had an anger inside.… I can’t explain what was in his mind.’
This is from the Daily Mail – which is almost as unreliable as the New York Post – but the sourced quotes from his own imam seem legit. So we see perhaps the core of what is in front of our noses: this was not about Islam or being Muslim as such. Look at Tamerlan’s family and his own imam. They all saw a young man drifting into something far more extremist, fundamentalist and bigoted. His uncle saw it:
‘I was shocked when I heard his words, his phrases, when every other word he starts sticking in words of God. I question what he’s doing for work, (and) he claimed he would just put everything in the will of God.”
We see the sexual puritanism of the neurotically fundamentalist. We have his YouTube page and the comments he made in the photography portfolio. To state today that we really still have no idea what motivated him and that rushing toward the word Jihadist is some form of Islamophobia seems completely bizarre to me.
When will some understand how dangerous religious fundamentalism truly is? And when will they grasp that a religion that does not entirely eschew violence (like the Gospels or Buddhism) will likely produce violence when its extremist loners seek meaning in a bewildering multicultural modern world? This was an act of Jihad. That does not mean we elevate it above crime; it means we understand the nature of the crime. It only makes sense in the context of immediate Paradise, combined with worldly fame. And those convinced of the glories of martyrdom – of going out with a bang – are the hardest of all to stop.
(Video: Introductory clip from the YouTube account of Tamerlan Tsarnaev)
Update from a reader:
In your recent post about the issue of religious extremism and the alleged acts of terror by the Tsarnaev brothers, you said: “But does Glenn wonder why Tamerlan thought it was ok to beat his wife, whom he demanded convert to Islam?” Just a quick fact-check query. The coverage I seemed to recall reading and hearing indicated that although the elder brother, Tamerlan, was charged in some kind of domestic violence incident, as I understand the facts, it was for something he did to a former girlfriend who is NOT his current wife. And separately, as I understand the reporting, he did in fact push and convince his current wife to convert to Islam when they married, but it appears that that was not concurrent with domestic violence against her.
Paul Rivot’s grandmother is 90 years old. She lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the advents of AM/FM radio, television, and the internet. In the above video, she tries out the extraordinarily powerful Oculus Rift virtual reality headset for the first time, and it is positively heartwarming.
Back in January, Glenn Derene described his own experience test-driving the headset:
With the goggles on my head, I was in a digital representation of a medieval village in the midst of a light snowfall. There were no rapid-fire guns or enemies to fight, just a highly detailed world to “walk” through. [Joseph Chen, the company’s senior product manager] encouraged me to look around and look up to see the snow falling down and the cathedral steeple rising up into the night sky. “Rotate your head and look behind you,” he said. I look in the direction of Chen’s voice and find nothing but a lonely street. A walk into the cloistered entryway of the cathedral felt claustrophobic, but a few steps more and the cathedral opened up to a sprawling interior with arched ceilings.
After a few minutes of this, Chen asked me to stand up, and I was struck by how difficult this task suddenly seemed. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll put my hand on your shoulder to make sure you don’t bump into anything.” He had me turn around and I could feel myself being guided through two different worlds at the same time: The real world, where Chen was making sure I didn’t bump my shins into my chair, and the virtual world, where I was looking through the falling snow at a bridge in the distance.
In March, Paul Waldman wondered if videogames will save future seniors from the despair of getting old:
Considering how much more complex, immersive, and graphically and narratively rich today’s games are compared to those of a few decades ago, just think what they’re going to be like 40 or 50 years from now. Frankly, by the time my ungrateful kids shunt me off to the home, I’m going to be pretty pissed if we don’t have full-on holodecks, where I can play a set against Roger Federer at Wimbledon, chat with Richard Feynman about the nature of the universe while sipping coffee at a Left Bank cafe, then blast some alien invaders, all in the same afternoon and with an almost perfect level of realism. And of course, in the holodeck I will be unburdened by my decaying meatsack, and will do all these wonderfully stimulating things while in the body of a particularly healthy 20-year-old. It’s almost enough to make you believe growing old won’t be so bad after all. Almost.
Theo Hobson profiles the “new new atheists,” who he claims are more nuanced, diplomatic, and “admirably refuse to lapse into a comfortably sweeping ideology that claims the moral high ground for unbelief”:
Crucially, atheism’s younger advocates are reluctant to compete for the role of Dawkins’s disciple. They are more likely to bemoan the new atheist approach and call for large injections of nuance. A good example is the pop-philosopher Julian Baggini. He is a stalwart atheist who likes a bit of a scrap with believers, but he’s also able to admit that religion has its virtues, that humanism needs to learn from it. For example, he has observed that a sense of gratitude is problematically lacking in secular culture, and suggested that humanists should consider ritual practices such as fasting. This is also the approach of the pop-philosopher king, Alain de Botton. His recent book Religion for Atheists rejects the ‘boring’ question of religion’s truth or falsity, and calls for ‘a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts’. If you can take his faux-earnest prose style, he has some interesting insights into religion’s basis in community, practice, habit.
Christians ought to welcome this new development, and not because it signals a softening of opposition to theism. In some ways, this signals an intellectual danger for Christianity. Brash, exhaustive, generalized statements about the nature of reality of the kind perfected by the New Atheists (e.g., “Religion poisons everything”) are always more easily defeated than relatively nuanced, careful positions of the variety advanced by the Newer Atheists. Therefore it is this newer atheism, with its measured and non-dogmatic anti-theism, that poses the larger intellectual challenge to theistic belief.
Nevertheless, the shift away from Dawkins-ism is a welcome one for Christians because it signals a steady and perhaps increasing global interest in religion.
Edward J. Blum examines the depictions of Jesus’ race throughout the ages:
Because of America’s history and its contemporary demographics, there is almost no way to depict Bible characters without causing alarm. To call Jesus ‘black’ signals political values that are associated with the radical left. In 2008, President Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright almost cost him the Democratic nomination because of his claims that ‘Jesus was a poor black man’. However, to present Jesus as white in a society where African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latino Americans make up increasing numbers of the population is quickly understood as a code for a conservative worldview. Little wonder, then, that some Americans are choosing to describe Jesus as ‘brown’ as a way to avoid the white-black binary. If one attends an anti-conservative rally in the US, for instance, one is likely to find a poster that reads: ‘Obama is not a brown-skinned, anti-war socialist who gives away free health care. You’re thinking of Jesus.’
What MLK said on the subject:
In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr’s advice column in Ebony magazine received a letter that asked: ‘Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?’ King answered with the essence of his political and religious philosophy. He denied that the colour of one’s skin determined the content of one’s character, and for King there was no better example than Christ. ‘The colour of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence,’ King reassured his readers, because skin colour ‘is a biological quality which has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the personality’. Jesus transcended race, and he mattered ‘not in His colour, but in His unique God-consciousness and His willingness to surrender His will to God’s will. He was the son of God, not because of His external biological makeup, but because of His internal spiritual commitment.’
If you already live in the heartland, the message is to stay. If you come from the heartland and have left, the message is to return. But what if you’re one of the tens of millions of people who can’t stay in or go home to the heartland because your home — your roots — are in the BosWash corridor of the Northeast or the urbanized areas of the West Coast? …
If he’s a consistent localist, he should tell me to put down roots and immerse myself in community where I am — or perhaps in my “hometowns” of New York City and Fairfield County, Conn. But is this even possible in a place where paying my mortgage and other bills requires that my wife and I — like my equally striving neighbors — devote ourselves to high-stress work during nearly every waking hour of our days? If I were independently wealthy, perhaps the good life that Dreher describes would be a possibility in the Philadelphia suburbs. But alas…
[M]aybe the lesson is that the good life is not possible in the Philadelphia suburbs, or any place where in order to keep your head above water, your job has to own you and your wife, and it keeps you from building relationships. There are trade-offs in all things, and no perfect solution, geographical or otherwise. Thing is, life is short, and choices have to be made. It’s not that people living in these workaholic suburbs are bad, not at all; it’s that the culture they (we) live in defines the Good in such a way that choosing to “do the right thing” ends up hollowing out your life, leaving you vulnerable in ways you may not see until tragedy strikes.
The life Ruthie lived is a compelling alternative, the witness of which changed my heart. And like the Good Book says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Craig Hubert interviewed Sebastian Junger about his new documentary:
I wanted to create a platform where [Tim Hetherington]’s work can live and be seen and appreciated. I also wanted to continue what interested Tim, about young men in war and, it’s kind of politically incorrect to say this, why war is so compelling and even attractive to young men. That is true in this society, in many societies around the world. It’s not just a massive manipulation by the military industrial complex, it really is a very ancient thing. I wanted to understand that and Tim did as well.
“I think everyone who goes to war goes to war for very personal reasons,” [Junger] says.
“Sometimes it’s dressed up as patriotism and duty or, for journalists, it’s sometimes dressed up as ‘these stories must be told’ or horrible situations must be documented. All those things are true on paper, but I don’t think anyone risks their life for completely noble reasons. They do it because they have a powerful personal motivation. I think war is seen by many people as transformative – it will turn you into a man, it will turn you into a caring human being – whatever it is, there is a very strong personal component. It’s also a glamorous, romantic, admired job.
“When Tim got killed” has become Junger’s line in the sand; it’s the day he decided he was done with combat reporting for good. Junger was supposed to be with Hetherington in Libya but had to stay home. At first he couldn’t shake the idea that if he’d been there, he might have been able to stop the bleeding. Now he knows he probably would have had to watch his friend die. He’d never been taught how to fashion a camera-strap tourniquet, nor had Tim, nor have hardly any of the freelancers who make up the majority of the frontline reporting corps. Last year, Junger started a foundation called RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues) to provide free medical training for experienced freelance combat journalists. “It’s a way to minimize the number of Tims in the world,” he says.
Ferris Jabr goes through the research suggesting that e-reading may come up short when it comes to comprehension and memory:
[E]vidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people’s attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
The Dish 