Category — Musings & Rants

Debbie Schlussel calls Sean Hannity’s Freedom Alliance charity a scam.  If a charity is only spending 12% (or less) of the money it brings in to provide the services that the charity was set up to provide when the appropriate benchmark is somewhere around 75%, then if that charity was soliciting me for money, there’s no way in hell I would give them anything.

St. Patrick’s Day is America’s favorite ethnic holiday. It is also the strangest. In a calendar crowded with Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, and gay pride parades, St. Paddy’s is the one chance for the white, middle-class majority to dress garishly and get drunk while celebrating a history of suffering overcome.

No doubt, most St. Pat’s revelers have been motivated by nothing other than the desire to have a little fun. But it’s worth asking why this desire took the form it did. Many white Americans really are Irish, of course, but the reason so many white people of all ethnic backgrounds celebrate this one ethnic holiday rather than, say, Oktoberfest, goes deeper. It would be a little weird, not to say unseemly, for Americans of English or German descent to parade in the street celebrating their ethnic heritage. To do so would be like dancing in the end zone of colonial history. And so, because the Irish were actually the subjects of discrimination and oppression, Irishness has become the go-to white ethnicity.

St. Pat’s isn’t the only example of this cultural phenomenon. When Margaret Mitchell set out in Gone With the Wind to create a narrative of white suffering and triumph, she chose an Irish protagonist with green eyes and a green dress. Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara, a proud Irishman who named his plantation ‘Tara’ after the ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland. This is a strikingly explicit ethnic background for a family meant to represent the overwhelmingly Protestant and Anglo Reconstruction- era South. But her unusual choice makes perfect sense. In order to tell a narrative of white suffering that would not seem laughable beside the injustices visited on enslaved blacks, Mitchell had to turn to the one group of whites that had been oppressed: the Irish. Thirty-million books, a Pulitzer Prize, and an iconic film later, a white southern lady had displaced Uncle Tom as the great American symbol of injustice suffered.

Being half Irish myself, I think there are many good reasons to celebrate St. Patty’s, not least Ireland’s impressive religious and literary heritage. But I think it is weird that one of the reasons the holiday exists is to give the privileged a chance to dress up in the drag of historical oppression.

Sean Penn:

Because every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

Emphasis added.  Via Popehat.  I’m no fan of Chavez, but I’m not sure he qualifies as a dictator yet (I think “wannabe dictator” is more like it).  Still, if you’re trying to say that someone is not a dictator, I’m pretty sure demanding that those who disagree be thrown in jail is probably the wrong way to do it.  But that’s just me.

Orin Kerr has a preliminary summary up of the argument in McDonald v. Chicago from this morning.  As one may have anticipated, it looks like the Court is going to sidestep the opportunity to correct the wrong that was the Slaughterhouse Cases.  That’s too bad.

Check out the line at 11PM last night to get into this morning’s oral arguments on McDonald v. City of Chicago.  It’s almost as if the possibility (however remote) of restoring the privileges and immunities clause was a big deal.  For comparison, I went to oral argument on the day that the Court heard both the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris school voucher case and the Atkins v. Virginia death penalty case, a rare two-fer of highly contentious, high profile culture war cases, and the line to get in wasn’t even this long at 4 AM, when I got there.  Even then, I didn’t get in to see the arguments until well the second case, Atkins, was about 30% finished.

Reading both Andrew’s comments on the Atlantic’s site re-design and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am reminded again of the importance of creating something personal with new media, that blogging is not journalism exactly, and that bloggers themselves are more rightly the “brand” in question than the publications they write for (though, in all honesty, there is and should be a mix – Coates and the Atlantic are in some sense a dual-brand, neither one the same without the other.  Same goes for all the Atlantic bloggers.)  As Andrew notes,

[A] blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I think this cuts to the heart of the matter, and cuts directly to why so many people – myself included – really dislike the re-design at the Atlantic.  It’s not the aesthetic that I find so bothersome – and indeed, I don’t notice much of a change at all at Andrew’s digs – but the transformation of the other blogs into essentially archives, subsumed into the larger “channels” and thus stripped, to some degree, of their personalities.  Since the draw of these ‘voices’ has always been one of the Atlantic online’s strongest features, I find this disappointing to say the least – but like Andrew notes, it is the philosophy behind it that is most troubling.  This passage from Coates is worth reading also:

For my part, you have to understand that, to a large extent, whatever beautiful things have happened here, over the past two years, were, essentially, a fortunate mistake. What you’ve gotten is me hopping online and rather carelessly deciding to be myself, to talk to you, as much as possible, in the same way I talk to the people I know. And then basically curating the comments, banning people, deleting, and coaxing until there was a comments section that I, personally, loved reading.

It wasn’t market-tested. When I first got here, we didn’t even really have a web editor, and none of us expected this to grow into what became. We didn’t discuss whether it would be a good idea to have a post about Barry Sanders, next to a post about the Real Housewives of Atlanta, next to a series about the Civil War. We didn’t discuss commenting policy. We just kinda liked each other (me and my editors here) and decided to try something.

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive. And it’s fucked up, but it’s only as I’m writing this that I’m actually getting that that really is the point, and a big part of the draw. I kind of knew that, but it’s only in the absence of a coherent thing that I’m really seeing that.

This unintentional process is important.  There is something spontaneous and personal about blogging that is a serious if intangible change from traditional journalism. It is also, I think, the most important thing about a successful blogger – this ability for readers to connect and empathize with them. Similarly the community created around a blogger or a project is vitally important.  Jaybird has likened our own humble digs to a bar where we can all sit around and talk politics and culture and whatever over beers.  I have adopted this analogy in how I think about The League.  Indeed, I have come to think of The League as more than just a site, more than just a cadre of writers, but as a community unto itself, with all our commenters as part of the larger project.  The place would not be the same without the many commenters who liven up the threads – from Jaybird to Bob Cheeks to Michael Drew to North to greginak and so on and so forth – the list is too long to name you all. 

One of my great struggles writing elsewhere has been the lack of this relationship.  (New technical limitations have limited my own ability to respond to comments here in a timely fashion, but I do read each and every one.)  Indeed, though I am paid to write at True/Slant, I find myself devoting more time and energy to my writing here – and not just because it is a project that I helped start and continue to help shape, but because of this ongoing conversation we have gotten ourselves into – I can only frequent so many bars, I suppose, and this is my bar of choice.  (I know there is some crossover between commenters here and at True/Slant, but to be honest the comment system there is somewhat inhospitable.  And I dislike, perhaps, being just one of several hundred writers, whereas here I feel like I am part of a team, or at least a band of misfits…)  There is something organic about it that I enjoy.  I can anticipate who will be sitting where and drinking what, and who will storm out angry and who will chuckle at the antics and so forth.   And part of this is the site design, how we have worked to make the comments an integral part of this site, how we have kept the site fairly clean and ad-free, and so forth.  Perhaps it is also human nature to seek out communities (and bars) which we feel comfortable in. 

However, one of our original intentions with this site was to create a place where sustained, internal dialogue between writers, commenters, and guest-writers could be nurtured and grow into something rather unlike anything else on the interwebs.  I think, to some degree, in our push to increase traffic, to link to (and be linked by in return) Really Important Bloggers, we have let that part of our mission fall to the wayside.  I know others here have expressed a similar sense that this is the case.  Whether this has been an inevitable side-effect to creating a successful site, or to simply running out of things to talk to each other about is hard to say.  For my own part, I know that I focused a great deal on increasing traffic, on making the site as good as possible – and I admit to feeling a bit of a rush when I’d pick up a link from the Dish or get a good response from Larison or other bloggers who I had read and admired.

Either way, I wonder how the readers and commenters feel about this (not that the two groups, I hope, are mutually exclusive).  After just over a year, it’s incredible to see how far this blog has come.  We have gained and lost bloggers.  We are still (I hope, and believe) producing good, interesting, and relatively unique content.  We are still ad-free and entirely self-funded or funded by the generosity of the best damn commenters on the internet.  But have we lost some of that original vision?  Some of that original intent?  I would be interested to hear from both writers here and commenters on how, if at all, we could right the ship, reorient to bring back some of the conversational aspects of the original mission.  Make the site even better and more lasting.  We ditched the “series” function, but perhaps went too far in ditching the concept of series altogether.

In other words, this is a space to talk about blogging, this blog in particular, how it is doing things right and how it is doing things wrong, and so forth.  Thanks.

So who are you anyway?

I’m a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute. Here’s my professional page. I’m especially proud of Cato Unbound, the Institute’s monthly ideas journal, which I help to edit.

Ah, so you speak for the Cato Institute?

Nope. My opinions are my own, and they shouldn’t be taken to represent my employer. I write here purely as a private citizen.

Didn’t you used to write at positiveliberty.com?

I did.

So what happened?

Our web host’s quality of service declined dramatically in late 2009, culminating in the loss of our domain name to a squatter through no fault of our own. By that point we’d already lost about half of our readership owing to the repeated and extensive downtime. It pained me, but I determined that the domain name wasn’t worth fighting over.

The data, however, is safe, and there is some chance that the old site will return, headed up by one of the other PL bloggers. At the moment I am not actively working toward that goal. I blog so I can write, not so I can spend time talking to customer service.

(Update, March 4: The site has limped back to life, for now. I’ll be writing there as well, or at least trying to.)

Are you here for good, or just as a guest blogger?

I plan to be here for good.

What are your interests?

Libertarian political thought, futurism, science fiction, marriage and family policy, and religion.

How do you tie all that together?

I don’t.

So tell me all about your personal life!

I’m married. To a guy. He’s an aerospace engineer, and we’ve been together for going on twelve years now. We got hitched in 2003, which is earlier than nearly anyone else in a same-sex marriage. We went to Canada to do it, so we’ve really been the guinea pigs in the whole social experiment. Last year we adopted a newborn daughter. I try to respect my family’s privacy, so you won’t see too many baby pictures from me.

Would you be interested in writing for [insert other venue here]?

Perhaps. E-mail me and we’ll talk. It’s my first name dot my last name at gmail.com.

Is the GOP really becoming the party of torture? For the past several years I have been assuming that the torture would eventually stop for good, that both parties would disown what had been done, and that we would return to being a country of people who believe that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. I felt especially hopeful when McCain, whose anti-torture stance was both adamant and personal, won his party’s nomination instead of Giuliani or Romney. The reaction to Bob Barr at CPAC, National Review’s refusal to call a spade a spade, Thiessen’s interview on EWTN, and a hundred other considerations have forced me to realize that this assumption was unrealistic. The GOP seems to becoming a party whose considered, institutional policy is that we should torture everyone the executive branch suspects to be a terrorist.

I wrote some posts about torture last Spring when the whole blogosphere was talking about it, but like most bloggers I moved on to other issues. Less than a year later, despite what sounded at the time like deafening condemnation from all but a few shrill paranoids, those shrill paranoids seem to have convinced one of our mainstream political parties that selling your soul is a small price to pay for the illusion of perfect security.

With the recent release of the OPR report, I feel obliged to weigh in again somehow, lest anyone mistake my silence for an iota of consent. But the battle seems fundamentally lost, and I have personally lost a good deal of the stamina required to make the same basic arguments over and over again. Thank goodness for Andrew Sullivan and Mark Shea on that count.

So where do we go as a country from here? Does the opposition institutionalize and grit its teeth for the long haul, as pro-lifers did after Roe v. Wade? Should we prepare to open a new front of the culture war? Are we ready to slog away for decades with the hope of convincing our compatriots that torture is a discredit to our country and a betrayal of our most basic political principles?

In addition to an art museum and a center for the arts, Princeton, New Jersey has a “Center for Dental Aesthetics.” These institutions are more common than one might think, and I’d like to ask what they say about art and dentistry.

Dental Aesthetics, of course, is just a name for what some still call dentistry. But it is not the only name for it. Philadelphians who prefer the austere mid-century classicism of Mies van der Rohe can take their teeth to Modern Dental Concepts, while those who prefer a more current avant-garde aesthetic presumably go to Advanced Dental Concepts. Residents of New York face a no less dizzying array of choices. Tribeca Dental Design and Tribeca Dental Studio share a neighborhood, but  presumably embody two wholly different schools of the dental art. It’s not the humble work of filling cavities that one pays for, it’s the concept, the aesthetic, the design that is valued.

Dentists seem willing to claim any competence other than that of simple dentistry. In New York, there is also the Dental Phobia Treatment Center, which bills itself as a psychiatric practice as much as a dental one. There is also the Manhattan Dental Spa and various practitioners of holistic and alternative dentistry. The insecurity runs so deep that many claim to be practitioners of dental “cosmetics,” a name that evokes the career path of night-school alumnae. But few beauticians seem so embarrassed of their own profession.

Dentistry is an interesting middle case in the prestige spectrum of American careers. To become one, one needs professional training in some ways comparable to that of a doctor or lawyer. But one is trained to do little more than pull, shift, and whiten teeth. One is not a priest of the metaphysical “law.” Unlike a doctor, one holds no power over life.

There may be something particularly comical about the rise of dental Concepts and Aesthetics, but the reluctance of dentists to think of themselves as workers in a humble and dignified craft only reflects the latest advance of a longstanding trend. Once the humble workman could serve as a model for even the most exalted artist or skilled technician. Now advanced technical competence, or even the romantic vision of the artist, must be the model for the most ordinary gentleman.

Ages, places, and nations sometimes have characteristic architectural forms. Sometimes these forms, like vinyl-clad McMansions, or the decrepit and vaguely totalitarian National Mall, tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know, and surely most places and times have an architecture of that kind. Other forms are characteristic not only of some virtue or vice in a society, however, but its self-understanding. The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.

Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below. This gratification, I suggest, is one of the many ways in which modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages.

Nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble. The systematic use of the method, institutionalized in journals and laboratories, is characteristically modern, but the psychology of the scientists who employ it represents a Christian ideal. Many scientists seem to feel a passionate, personal joy at the ordered reasonableness of the universe, or more specifically, that it is reasonable, but its reasons are never exhausted. This joy is a species of the joy in being qua being that Aquinas, speaking for the Christian tradition, claimed to be the proper disposition of all Christians toward the created order.  You have to know some scientists personally, I think, to realize that scientists are like this, because scientists themselves are not encouraged to articulate it, though sometimes you do hear statements in the press about how a new finding is “really darn cool.”

Being happy merely to see and to understand, as scientists are, is the feeling responsible for observation decks, whose most intellectually incurious and aesthetically stolid visitors thrill with joy as they marvel at the works of Man and discover how familiar neighborhoods tessellate. Though surmise about the psychology of ages past is hazardous, I’ll venture to guess that the civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history.

I write all of this by way of introduction, since this is my first post at the League and much of my blogging will be characterized by choleric and occasionally intemperate hostility towards liberal democracy and industrial capitalism, such that you might mistake me for a Front Porcher in an ordinary gentleman’s clothing. So, while I am interested in the alienation of man from himself that is peculiar to modernity, I don’t forget that modernity has created new possibilities of experience we would do wrong to abandon. I also believe that the joy I described above animates the best bloggers on the internet, and I hope it will characterize my own blogging here.

Memo to the conservatives who suddenly discovered that they were in favor of limited government when George Bush left office: if you want people to believe that your conversion is real, it would probably help if you don’t whine and complain about Big Government Obama (see also: Ed Driscoll, AJ Strata) when he actually proposes a cut to a program that you just so happen to like.  Either you’re for limited government, or your not.  You don’t get to pick and choose the areas where you think limited government is good and bad and still claim to be an advocate for limited government on the whole. 

Say what you will about the various proposals for health care reform, at least they have a goal in mind that is intended to help people in the here and now that are, in fact, hurting.  But what, exactly, is a mission to the moon supposed to accomplish in the here and now that makes it so necessary to keep in the federal budget at a time when we’re running unprecedented budget deficits? 

Either you’re for limited government, or you’re against it.  Being for it only when the Democrats try to create a program you don’t like, and against it whenever they cut a program that you do like….well, it kinda sends a mixed message.  It also has a tendency to result in y’all not caring too much about fiscal restraint when you actually do return to power, one day.  And, one day, you can rest assured, you will in fact return to power, probably even one day soon.  It would be rather helpful to the cause of limited government if, when you return to power, you didn’t seem to care more about expanding the programs that you do like than about cutting the programs that you don’t.  It kinda makes it a bit more difficult to fight the Democrats when they’re in power on limited government grounds when you insist on fighting for the expansion of government when we’re talking about your pet projects.  And right now: YOU’RE NOT HELPING!

Sincerely,

The Libertarians

With today’s launch of the Apple iPad, this old MadTV sketch takes on a new meaning.  Warning: NSFW