Announcing his support for marijuana legalization, Josh Marshall claims, “odd as it may sound, gay marriage probably had as much as anything to do with changing my mind”:
A decade or two ago I didn’t support gay marriage. I was one of those civil union folks. It wasn’t that I had any personal objection to gays marrying as such and certainly no issue with gays in themselves. It just seemed like such an outlandish and politically implausible idea that it wasn’t something I supported.
I would suggest that it’s difficult for people under the age of 35 or 40 to grasp just how differently people saw this issue 15 or 20 years ago. But I’m not trying to make excuses. I think I’m simply of the political breed that what I think and my pragmatic sense of what’s possible are difficult to distinguish, often even in my own mind. This meant that I was against the various referenda trying to ban or preemptively outlaw gay marriage while also not being precisely for it either. Civil unions seemed sufficient to address the concrete issues at stake. What I didn’t grasp at the time was how the stigmatization of the LGBT community itself was at the heart of the issue.
But the rapid — not just rapid but mind-bogglingly rapid — rise in public support for gay marriage has made me realize just how quickly our society is changing (on a number of fronts) and made me think I need to learn to flex my own moral imagination a little aggressively.
I just want to say how grateful I am for Josh’s honesty. Very, very few pro-gay liberals in the 1990s backed marriage equality, including the gay pro-gay liberals. Even my good friend E J Dionne reviewed Virtually Normal positively, except to say that he couldn’t buy the marriage argument, which was the crux of the case. For the first ten years, the idea was resisted by the left; for the next ten years, it was brutally exploited and attacked by the right. But with each assault failing to end the argument, the argument continued. And since we had by far the better one, we slowly persuaded people, including Josh.
When left-liberals proclaim that a majority of Americans are dumb, would never elect a black president, let alone support gay marriage (which was and is the consensus in some smug-suffused cocoons), those of us who still have faith in democracy can point to the marriage equality movement and prove them wrong. We will end Prohibition of marijuana in this country the same way: persistence, persuasion, evidence, and patience.
Daniel McCarthy responds to Dreher’s description of antiwar protesters as “nasty and hysterical” left-wingers:
That’s certainly not a fair description of all anti-Iraq War protesters. It’s not even a fair description of most anti-Vietnam War protesters. But in mass politics perception counts. Vietnam protesters had a bad reputation with much of the public, and Iraq protesters who aped their activism naturally came in for the same rep. And even beyond those associations, what was a normal person meant to think about protesters with puppets? …
When I make this argument to left-wingers, I’m typically met with one of the following responses. 1.) “We have to do something!”—as if doing something that’s ineffective or counterproductive earns brownie points. 2.) “That’s a smear!”—you bet it’s a smear, but what are you doing to establish a more sympathetic image in the public’s mind instead? 3.) “Well, what do you suggest?”—what I suggest is not something any “activist” wants to hear: don’t take any action until you understand public opinion in some detail and can relate every individual tactic you propose to a specific, demonstrated mechanism that gives it a chance to be effective.
At the time, even anti-war Salon was somewhat taken aback by the extremism of the anti-war left:
Considerable creative energy went into some attacks on the president. One large one read “Stop the Fourth Reich — Visualize Nuremberg/ Iraq.”
On the other side were rows of doctored photos of all the top-ranking Bush administration officials wearing Nazi uniforms and officers’ caps, each with an identifying caption. Bush was identified as “The Angry Puppet” and Mind-controlled Slave/ ‘Pro-life’ Executioner.” Cheney: “The Fuhrer, Already in His Bunker.” Powell: “House Negro — Fakes Left, Moves Right.” Rice: “Will Kill Africans for Oil.” Ashcroft: “Faith-based fascist, sexless sadist.” “Field Marshall Rummy,” “Chickenhawk Wolfowitz — Jews for Genocide,” and “Minister of Dis-info — Ari Goebbels” rounded out the field.
I went to the major DC march: plenty of sane, good people. But mixed in with those who openly told me they thought Saddam was preferable as a human being and legitimately-elected political leader to Bush. My post at the time:
Notice the personal attacks – “Draft the Bush Twins,” “Sorry, Dubya, Have a Pretzel Instead.” Notice the idiotic moral equivalence: “Who’s The Unelected Tyrant With The Bomb?” It’s hard not to feel demoralized by a culture that can throw up such things as genuine pieces of protest. It’s as if an entire generation or more has forgotten what an argument is.
Dreher asks, “What would an effective antiwar movement look like?” My own view: make the core argument that there is not a serious threat to US national security, if that’s the case (as it was with Iraq and is with Iran); that the last two wars were disasters; and that we can’t afford any more. And then march without equating the president with Hitler or Stalin. Here’s British foreign minister Robin Cook, who resigned rather than follow Tony Blair into the vortex:
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term‚ namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons program is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? …
He was right, wasn’t he? But he didn’t stop a war, did he? And he was our key ally’s foreign secretary.
(Photo: About 50 people, including a man dressed in a mask portraying President George W. Bush and devil horns, demonstrate against Bush’s veto of the war appropriations bill along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House on May 2, 2007. The protest was organized by MoveOn.org, Code Pink and other groups calling for an end to the war in Iraq. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
About the only argument you can make for Ryan’s budgets (or roadmaps, or pathways) is that they aren’t budgets at all: they are political manifestos. A few years ago, well before he was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I asked Grover Norquist, who knows a thing or two about Republican politics, what function Ryan performed in the G.O.P. and why, even then, he was taken seriously by pundits and party elders. “Ryan’s role is to point to the Promised Land,” Norquist replied.
[The budget] sacrificed seriousness for “seriousness,” by promising to reach budgetary balance not over the long term (as budgets 1.0 and 2.0 did) but in a ten-year window. This is not going to happen, and more importantly there’s no reason why it needs to happen: Modest deficits are perfectly compatible with fiscal responsibility, and restructuring the biggest drivers of our long-term debt is a much more important conservative goal than holding revenues and outlays equal in the year 2023. What’s more, the quest for perfect balance leaves the House G.O.P. officially committed to a weird, all-pain version of Obamanomics — in which, for instance, we keep the president’s tax increases and Medicare cuts while eliminating his health care law’s assistance to the uninsured.
Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.
The reality is that he’d be promoting the same policies even if the federal budget were in balance. His plan would just have more tax cuts. Let’s don’t let the wrangling over deficit numbers obscure that simple fact.
Kornacki thinks Paul Ryan has lost some of his appeal:
[Y]ou’d never know that just a few months ago he was the nominee of a major political party for the second-most powerful office in America. Watching his latest budget rollout, there’s no evidence Ryan enjoys any additional clout or stature thanks to his vice presidential campaign. He’s playing the same role he played before Mitt Romney drafted him onto the GOP ticket last summer. In fact, if his VP bid is affecting him now, it’s probably a net-negative, with some in the press taking a more critical view of his plans than in the past.
CNN spent the day talking about the pope. Joe Scarborough and his chums seemed more interested in the soda ban. Politico was still fixated on Obama’s “charm offensive.” The Senate Democratic budget actually got more play. Hell, the National Review Onlinedevoted more digital ink to the pope election today than to Paul Ryan and his 10-year plan. I think the apex of mainstream Beltway press attention was when Luke Russert live-tweeted his own reading of the budget for like a half-hour. I think — and let’s all hope I’m actually right and not just being incredibly hopeful — this finally confirms that Ryan is “over” as a figure the Beltway press treats with incredible reverence.
Aside from its base-stroking unrealism about a balanced budget in 10 years, there is a subtle sort of realism about this new Ryan budget. In its very lack of creative “new ideas,” there is an admission that “The Path to Prosperity” no longer has the magic-rabbit power it had after the 2010 midterm election. It’s a budget document scarcely worth more than the PDF pixels in which it’s displayed. I think Ryan knows this, and expended very little effort to hide the fact.
Wilkinson wonders if the familiarity of the plan is the point:
I hazard that Mr Ryan seeks to make his vision of government seem decreasingly radical and increasingly reasonable simply by repeating it. You can think of Mr Ryan’s fantasy budget as a gambit in a diffuse cultural negotiation over the bounds of reasonable opinion in the ongoing negotiation over fiscal policy—a sort of ideological meta-negotiation. You may think that proclaiming the same “radical”, “deeply unpopular” ideas again and again and yet again can’t possibly make them more palatable and mainstream, but there’s a queer phenomenon psychologists call the “mere exposure effect” that suggests otherwise.
This year, Ryan is even more vague about how he’d simplify the code and lower taxes without disproportionately impacting revenues or lower-income Americans. The budget he proposed Tuesday only commits to “making the tax code simpler and fairer,” without any mention of the kind of base-broadening that’s become synonymous with junking certain tax preferences. So it’s even less clear how Ryan’s proposed tax cuts would be achieved without blowing a big hole in the budget.
1. If the GOP’s Medicare reform plan is such a good idea (and budget deficits are such a problem), it should be implemented before 2024. Ryan knows this, surely. 2. There’s no Social Security reform plan. 3. The plan repeals Obamacare, which is highly unlikely. Better to have shown how the ACA can be fixed.
Suderman wants a plan that isn’t simply against what Obama is for:
[G]iven the nation’s dismal fiscal outlook and its sluggish economic performance, opposition is not necessarily a bad place for the GOP to start, especially as a minority party with limited ability to set the legislative agenda. But it’s only a start. For Republicans to begin winning the fiscal argument with Obama, they’ll eventually have to figure out more than what they’re against—and make a sustained case that they’re for something too.
And Gleckman notes that Ryan’s revenue target “falls far short of what Democrats are willing to accept”:
Thus, we remain at square one. Until there is a middle-ground on a revenue target, there will be no tax reform and no grand bargain. The Ryan plan provides little hope that such a consensus is near.
After reading the scores of questions put to accused murderer Jodi Arias by the members of her Arizona jury, Gideon wonders whether the “juror questioning” model should be expanded to other states as well:
I’ve written about proposals permitting questions, among others, and of a proposal to permit Q&A during closing arguments (which I still think is a fabulous idea), but the idea that jurors will get to ask questions of my defendant sends a shiver or two down my spine. The initial knee-jerk negative reaction stems from the fear of losing control, as evidenced by what’s happening with Arias. Losing control of the defense and perhaps undoing some of the work done to that point and also losing control of the trial itself when jurors ask absurd questions designed solely to disclose their displeasure or incredulity.
On the other hand, the allure of knowing just what the jury is thinking and being given a limited opportunity to address or reinforce their doubts is far too tempting. I’d always want to know, rather than not. I’m the lawyer who hangs out in the courtroom after a verdict so I can talk to jurors, because I want to know why they voted one way or another, so I can learn and put it to good use next time. But that’s merely educational. Wouldn’t it be great to know what they’re thinking while the trial is going on?
Peter DeFilippis sees a clear benefit to the questioning:
I think this process insures that the jury is better informed and makes its decisions based more likely on facts gleaned from testimony under an oath than on conjecture. The individual juror is presumably happier and more satisfied if inquiries are answered via live testimony as opposed to not at all or by speculation in the deliberation room (which is frowned upon by the court). Keeping jurors interested and engaged through this active participation in the legal process is of paramount benefit to the litigants and jurists. Perhaps it might increase attentiveness and help to mitigate the tedium and boredom often complained of in connection with serving as a juror on a trial (especially a lengthy one).
Judy Stone questions the logic of drug screening and its widespread use:
Among full-time workers in the US, 42.9% reported that tests for illicit drug or alcohol use occurred as part of “pre-hire” testing—so more than 47 million adults were subjected to testing as part of the hiring process. (2004) Further, 29.6%, or 32 million full-time workers reported random drug testing at work. A 2010 study reported about 130 million drug screens.
In the second part of her essay, she argues that drug testing destroys workplace trust:
Drug screens are but one example of the increase in surveillance throughout our society. Such intrusive testing inherently sets up an adversarial relationship as well. Many people likely work better in an environment of respect and trust. I’ve seen a dramatic change in the working atmosphere of some hospitals over the years, as the institutions adopt fingerprint scans to clock in and out, GPS phones that track employees’ movements, measure the response time to answer a call light, etc. These processes are dehumanizing and counterproductive.
Levi Asher recently watched the 1953 film written by Dr. Seuss, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, which he describes as being so bad it left him “traumatized for days”:
This was the only movie Dr. Seuss ever tried to make, and it went over so badly with audiences in 1953 that he never tried again, and the movie nearly disappeared from view. It was almost crazy and psychedelic enough to gain a second life as a midnight cult flick, but it’s too excruciatingly boring for the midnight circuit. It’s hard to watch without wincing…often.
5000 Fingers doesn’t start out too badly: a sweet kid is suffering through a piano lesson in an antique parlor (this setting must recall Theodor Seuss Geisel’s own childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts). The boy falls asleep and has a bad dream in which he’s persecuted by his nasty piano teacher, Dr. Terwilliker, who is also scheming to marry the kid’s widowed mother. In this dream, the kid wears a glove on the top of his beanie, is chased by weird chubby thugs in brightly colored suits who resemble proto-Oompa-Loompas, dodges a pair of roller-skating old men who share a common beard, and is forced to participate in a 500-kid piano performance on a swirling 5000 key piano.
I assure you that I just made the movie sound better than it is.
A compelling collection of adult film actresses with and without their makeup. Ryan Broderick’s take:
These incredible transformations prove that just about anybody can “look like a porn star.” Here are the revealing images of the actresses with their stage name, the number of films they’ve appeared in, and their age. These photos are originally from xmelissamakeupx’s Instagram account, which were then uploaded to Imgur and shared on Reddit.
Update from a reader:
I’m a straight guy, and I was looking at today’s “Faces of the Day” and you know what? I didn’t see “anybody can look like a porn star.”
I saw a group of attractive women make a transformation that is pretty familiar to women and to those of us who date them. Almost across the board these were women you’d be flattered to talk to in a bar. I saw a group of women who were working *hard* – this isn’t powdering your nose, this is an elaborate process.
I saw a group of women demonstrating a skill that Broderick didn’t even seem to see: the ability to sell yourself as a fantasy. Not just their bodies, or their costumes and makeup, but a posture and an attitude that is completely calculated. I perform for a living – that requires deep knowledge of your audience and of yourself.
I’m not saying that pornography is massively skilled labor, but it’s clearly freakin’ hard work. If anyone can look like a porn star, then anyone can look like an Abercrombie model. Step one – three hours a day in the gym …
Ian Stansel wonders why his own experience in the suburbs didn’t match the portraits found in the novels of Richard Yates, John Updike and Richard Ford:
My streets in my suburbs were less affluent. There were many single parents. There were large minority and recent immigrant populations. There was frequent turnover in those rental townhouses and apartments, people moving either up or down the socioeconomic ladder, holding fast to what they had and hoping for better days ahead. There weren’t a lot of cocktail parties in my suburbs.
This is all to say that while I love these books, when I look at the genre of suburban fiction—particularly the suburban novel—I find a significant lacuna. The fact is that the American suburbs are diverse and complex in ways that contemporary novels rarely acknowledge. According to 2010 census data, the suburbs are home to more minorities, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, than ever. The ‘burbs are also older, as baby boomers age and remain in place while their children move to the cities.
And perhaps most significantly, the median income for families in the suburbs has dropped. According to the Brookings Institute, even before the housing/economic crisis of 2008, the percentage of suburbanites considered poor has grown by 25% just since the turn of the 21st century, which makes suburban areas home to a greater increase in poverty than cities.
The source of the disconnect:
When we talk about the suburban novel we are usually talking about books about suburbia, rather than about the actual suburbs. This seems to be an important distinction to keep in mind. The suburbs evolve. They grow and shrink. Their populations change, and with these changes so do the cultures of these towns. The suburbs are full of people.
Suburbia, on the other hand, is a static construct. It is more idea than place. It is populated by notions and types. It is homogenous and, generally, economically secure. And it is only when a book works on some level as a reaction to this construct of suburbia that we tend to think of it as a suburban novel. Suburbia has been frozen in time, so the settings of these volumes resemble more the suburbs of past decades than those of today.
According to FFN Research, the average user of FanFiction.Net in 2010 was a 15.8-year-old girl from the United States who didn’t write fan fiction herself. Not to say that 45-year-old mothers and adolescent boys don’t also read it, or that fan fiction is only written in English; but the odds are not good. And with a community that is 80 per cent teenage and 80 per cent female, with three-quarters signing in from Britain or one of its former colonies, can it be a surprise that the Harry Potter books have such a dedicated following?
Update from a few readers:
While I don’t doubt that the majority of fan fiction readers are teen-aged girls, the flawed methodology of the referenced study seriously undermines its conclusions.
The web site doesn’t require registered users to provides age/gender information, and the analysis is based solely on the small minority (10% or less) of users that voluntarily offer that data. It is not unreasonable to believe that younger facebook-generation readers are more willing to reveal their ages, or that boys might be less likely to fess up to reading fan fiction than girls. And while there are three times as many Harry Potter stories on the site than the second-most popular fandom (Twilight), the study was based on readers who registered in 2010 … after the peak of Pottermania. Those signing up in 2010 were far more likely interested in mindless-stories featuring angsty vampires.
The other:
As a longtime author and longer-time reader of fanfiction, I would submit that those statistics don’t show you who reads fanfiction so much as it shows you who reads fanfiction as a registered user at fanfiction.net. FF.net, despite its size and visibility, has had for years the (apparently well-deserved) reputation amongst the fanfic community of being entirely given over to giggling sixteen-year-old girls. Fanfiction.net is merely one of many archives, along with the collections at livejournal.com, on tumblr, at archiveofourown.org (the home site of the Organization for Transformative Works) and at innumerable fandom-specific sites.
And, honestly, I would suspect that getting any kind of accurate data on the true nature of the readership would be tricky: fanfiction is still Not Entirely Respectable, as hobbies go. I’ve been a fanfic author for years – and am proud of what I’ve written – but as far as my family and meatspace friends are concerned, I am so far in the fanfic-writing closet that I can see Narnia from here.
This one – part of Jim Fallows’ series of posts – is one I really should never have held. But I did. I prided myself on a conservatism that understood that democratic norms are only built from within cultures through centuries of conflict and compromise. You cannot remake that overnight. Partly, I was overly influenced by the new democracies of Central Europe – but I should never have listened to the apolitical utopianism of the neocon right or the liberal hawks, even though many of them may have meant well. I sure did. But moral certainty combined with historical ignorance is not a prudential position. Here’s Fred Kaplan telling it like it is:
Ten years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast “a very large shadow” indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.
As we see in Syria and Iraq, the imperial borders of the region make a mockery of thinking of it as post-Soviet Europe, and the intervention was bound to unsettle things further. Back to Kaplan:
The question is how far this unraveling goes. Will civil wars erupt in one artificial state after another? That is, will the path of Syria be followed by Lebanon, then Jordan, then (hard as it may be to imagine) Saudi Arabia? Will Sunnis or Shiites, or both, take their sectarian fights across the borders to the point where the borders themselves collapse? If so, will new borders be drawn up at some point, conforming to some historically “natural” sectarian divisions? There have been many such alternative-mapsproposed over the years, none of them quite alike, which raises the possibility that the definition of “natural” borders may itself be a contentious matter, likely to set off its own disputes or wars. Will these new borders conform to the results of these new battles? (Borders, like histories, are usually drafted by the winners.)
Or will it simply unleash a new round of warfare and ethnic conflict? The Iraq war, in retrospect, may be seen as breaking more than a country, but an entire region. As someone once put it:
Those who in the Elysian fields would dwell.
Do but extend the boundaries of hell.
(Photo: An Iraqi searches for body parts in a pool of blood and sewage at the site of a powerful car bomb which exploded in a Baghdad market, 06 May 2007. The blast sent shrapnel scything through a crowd in the Bayaa neighbourhood, a mainly Shiite district lying on one of the city’s many dangerous sectarian faultlines, killing at least 20 people and wounding 45 more. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 