Another embarrassing moment for Deadspin.

It’s almost as if you shouldn’t run completely unsubstantiated, unverified stories from functionally anonymous emailers and then convince yourself that there’s some, like, totally deep and challenging thinking behind the process that led you to make the mistake in the first place, because you’re raging against the man and his antiquated “rules” about journalism. (Even though 90% of your content comes from the old man’s media, in one way or the other.) That’s the big problem, really, with all of Gawker media– this oppositional, “we’re revolutionaries for a cause” thinking forces them into believing that all of their various indiscretions can be excused as part of some big fight against traditional media. And frankly, that’s bogus. I mean, try this on for size. This is not an apology. It’s the definition of a non-apology apology. But they really made a mistake, that baseball coach really had his reputation damaged, and it really is an instance where it would be appropriate to just say “we screwed up” without all the excuses and rationalization. I just really wonder if Deadspin is capable of straight-up apology when they’re so obsessed with fighting “the old guard” or whatever.

I think the real problem is the commenters. Check the comments on these posts and you’ll see that the commenters take offense at the idea that Deadspin should apologize for anything. Partially, I think this is an artifact of how cynically Nick Denton has manipulated the people who care about his sites the most. By creating these multiple tiers of commenting privileges, by having commenter “auditions” and gated comments, Gawker Media creates this sense of exclusivity and importance that a lot of the commenters seem to crave. (I’ve got a commenting star! I’m somebody!) And so they get invested emotionally in the whole endeavor, even though Denton would sell any one of them out for a couple dozen more page views. Whatever the reason, this “Gawker can do no wrong” attitude is exactly why Deadspin isn’t taken seriously when it wants to be, when it publishes long-form journalism it clearly sees as serious and worthwhile. Because you can’t have it both ways; you can’t be a trove of unsubstantiated rumors and innuendos at one moment and then a publisher of serious reportage the next. It doesn’t work that way.

Dick joke.

Update: In the interests of full disclosure, my Facebook account is banned from Deadspin, as it is on fellow Gawker blog Gizmodo. So that may say something, I dunno.

Like James, I find that almost everything that needs to be said about this Ron Rosenbaum hit piece has already been said by Steve Menashi. It”s a thorough and fine job by Menashi and one that I could hardly do as well as him, so you should really read it.

There are a few things I want to highlight, though. The first is Rosenbaum’s strange notion that most evil in the world is done by people aware that they are doing evil. This just seems, well, backwards to me. Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of any of history’s great monsters that weren’t assured of their own righteousness. From Osama bin Laden to Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot to the Spanish Inquisition to the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide to the Hutus and the Tsutsis, horrific crimes against humanity have been committed by people assured that they were doing the right thing– for God, for their sect, for the people, for the proletariat, for moral values. The comfort of the child’s vision of right and wrong is that he or she lives in a mental world where only monsters perpetrate crimes. Here on planet Earth, people who are certain they are doing right murder and terrorize. It’s a cruel world.

But what this Ron Rosenbaum piece really amounts to, in my mind, is yet another in one of Slate’s favorite (unofficial) series, the Anti-Fascist Super Heroes. Like many publications whose editorial culture is fundamentally childish, Slate often reaches for access to moral seriousness by invoking issues that are tragic or “grandly historical”. (Permanent disclosure: I once applied for a job at Slate and I didn’t get it.) Nazism and genocide and totalitarianism and oppression, oh my, and don’t they make your  website seem so much more important. If you can’t generate gravity through the usual methods of intellectual and moral responsibility, then you can just grab hold of some of the saddest and most terrible moments of human history, and squeeze out importance and pathos like juice from an orange– and the only cost is that you are reducing human loss to fuel for careerism. What a bargain.

Luckily for Slate and its editorial staff, they have a small stable of writers who are very vocal in, and very proud of, their opposition to fascism. And they say so, over and over and over again, in the pages of Slate.

Take Christopher Hitchens on Gunter Grass. If you see Christopher Hitchens, tell him with my love and a kiss that if he were some tiny fraction of the writer or person that Gunter Grass is, he’d perhaps have a little justification for that galactic ego of his. Grass has produced one of the most essential and powerful works of art concerning totalitarianism and genocide ever written. Hitchens has produced dozens of near-identical, argumentatively empty bits of self-fellatio that rage against Islamic fascism and those who question the righteousness of our hideous failure in Iraq, bankrupt pieces of Auto-Text dross that accomplish little other than fulfilling Hitchens’s only real imperative, celebrating his own righteousness. To put the ethical, artistic and philosophical accomplishments of Grass alongside those of Christopher Hitchens is among the most damning comparisons I can imagine. And despite all of his foot stamping, all of his fuming and chest-pounding, I think Hitchens knows the simple fact: that Grass’s work stands as a vastly more powerful and more meaningful statement against totalitarianism than anything Hitchens can ever produce. This is, I find, a constant tension in these kind of self-styled anti-fascist takedowns– the bare anxiety of influence, the desire to tarnish the reputation of thinkers and writers more successful than the one writing the screed. Neither man has succeeded in actually fighting fascism. Poetry makes nothing happen; men with guns are the ones who fight fascists. But in the intellectual and artistic space where artists and poets and thinkers can oppose fascism, Grass’s delicacy and anguish trumps Hitchens’s certitude and bombast totally, embarrassingly.

Take Clive James on Sartre. Jean Paul Sartre is an intellectual titan, a man whose philosophical project permanently altered the tenor and attitude of his age. Clive James is not. Safe from some tony apartment and a vast distance from the terrible physical danger of fascism and the Nazis, James prosecutes Sartre for insufficient opposition to the Nazis. Never mind that Sartre’s philosophy stands, in its self-doubt and ethical formlessness, about as far from Hitler’s corrosive ideology as you can get. And never mind that Sartre was engaging in the kind of resistance that you’d expect from a physically frail writer and philosopher, the limited resistance of art; no, for James, Sartre just wasn’t fighting hard enough, and James writes this with the sanctimony and derision that are only accessible by those under no physical threat whatsoever. Sartre had no such luxury. He lived, in the time of the occupation, under the constant threat of death that faced all occupants of Vichy France; Clive James is a talk show host. But oh, the courage it takes to sit at a keyboard and attack someone, long dead, for not doing enough to oppose totalitarianism.

Take Anne Applebaum on, well, almost anything. I know two things about Anne Applebaum after reading dozens of her columns over the years: she is an apologist for the Polanski rape, and she is opposed to fascism, both the real variety and the made up “Islamofascist” kind. Her output, in Slate and elsewhere, amounts to a endless screed against that army of straw that defends Islamic terrorism, totalitarianism and the destruction of the West. Like all of the others, she valiantly declaims against an imaginary enemy. She stands against a cohort of no one and nothing and seems to think herself a brave warrior for doing so.

And now Rosenbaum has joined the ranks of this valiant group of people speaking truth to no power. They are the Anti-Fascist Super Heroes. They are angry, they are vocal, they are insistent, and they are proud, proud, proud– proud of a fight in which they do no actual fighting, proud of a fight in which their safety was a given and in which their victory, as they argue against an ideology no one is defending, is assured. None of these people has ever actually done anything, none of them has risked their life. But still they are proud– proud, and envious. Because what undergirds all of these narratives, what throbs from their work, unbidden but as obvious as the text on a page, is their glaring envy, the embittered jealousy of writers and thinkers who are vastly more accomplished and successful than they are. Christopher Hitchens knows that his output is a poor joke compared to the wrenching achievement of The Tin Drum. Ron Rosenbaum knows that the idea that he will be remembered after Heidegger or Arendt is absurd. And this professional and personal envy compels them.

The Anti-Fascist Super Hero tendency, because it is cheap, easy and self-glamorizing, is and will remain popular.

Now, where I’m from, we don’t harp on opposition to fascism because we think such opposition is a given. Where I’m from, we don’t revisit history’s great monsters and great crimes with the intent of polishing our own political bona fides. Where I’m from, we don’t need to prove our moral seriousness with constant invocations of vicious totalitarianism and we don’t pretend that we can stake a claim to virtue by trodding on the reputations of long dead predecessors. The stand against Nazism and all fascism is our duty, but it is one that we wage best by recognizing as one that can remain unspoken. The reduction of that duty to grist for the mill of professional ambition dulls its edge and trivializes one of our most important political responsibilities.

Emmanuel Faye wants to get Heidegger out of the canon because he was a Nazi.

Hey, you know who were really good at getting books out of the canon? The Nazis! They just fucking threw the books they didn’t like on a fire and burn, burn, burn. I’m sure it was very efficient. Mr. Faye will settle for labeling Heidegger’s work “hate speech” and relegating it to a section of the library for dirty, sinful people. Of course, calling his work hate speech is a kind of exclusion that has nothing to do with exchanging ideas and everything to do with forbidding.

Heidegger’s affection for Hitler is despicable. His philosophy is incredibly generative, and he stands as one of the five greatest philosophers of the 20th century. This is the old Wagner question, still vexing, but rather boring– and, I would say, a largely resolved issue. Heidegger’s Jew hatred and support for fascism, like Wagner’s, are unforgivable. His philosophy is brilliant. Geniuses sometimes are hateful, ugly, and unworthy of our personal respect or admiration. Film at eleven.

Let’s get real: this has everything to do with what philosophies Heidegger has contributed to. It has everything to do with the assault on “postmodernism,” that capacious and vilified term that encompasses just about every straw man to be stacked up as a straw man against lefties and their various relativisms. If Heidegger’s philosophy had contributed to some new entrenchment of objective values, some neo-classicists return to “good sense and order,” I submit, his terrible personal failings would be relegated to the same margins that we relegate, say, the despicable support for slavery of many of the philosophers responsible for Western civilization.  Existentialism, post-structuralism, constructivism, subjectivism– whatever you call them and to whatever degree they are actually consonant systems, they have been despised for decades, and the recipients of a massive and sustained assault that accuse them of all manner of sins. They are corrosive! They are subversive! They are incapable of defending us from fascism and totalitarianism and Marxism and Islamism and various other frightening things! Ah, but now we see the real story– they’re all secretly corroded by Nazism, I can hear the argument now. There we have it, the magic bullet to kill the beast.

Never mind that the actual content of all of these -isms is as far from the certainty and Manicheanism of Nazi ideology as is possible. Never mind that all of the greatest villains in the history of the world, every one, thought that they were in possession of just the kind of righteous certitude that this postmodern tradition tells us we can never really have. Never mind that the great advantage of the philosophy of people like Richard Rorty is precisely because it engenders caution, care and delicacy in the pursuit of actualizing ones values. Never mind that it is a banal and uncontroversial notion that we can take the pieces of a thinker’s work and incorporate them into our own philosophy while distancing ourselves completely from other, hateful aspects of their ideology.

No, never mind all that. Never mind it because, as the Times piece quotes, there are “residues and connotations” in Heidegger’s philosophy. Residues and connotations is all it takes, apparently. If I thought that our intellectual space had room for an understanding of real irony, the generative kind, I would suggest that we think hard about this kind of thinking– the kind that engages in guilt by association; the kind that engages in purity tests; the kind that declares vast phyla of disconnected and independent philosophical schools “good” or “evil”; the kind that declares certain ideas dangerous not because of what they say, but because of how you can connect the dots to bankrupt and hateful rhetoric like that of anti-Semitism; the kind that takes nuance and complexity, and casts them on the fire…. .

Desiree Jennings, who notoriously got distonia from a flu vaccine, has made a stunning recovery.

But she probably never had distonia, and almost certainly didn’t get her condition from a vaccine. And here I’ve grown accustomed to the level-headedness and restraint of the anti-vaccination crowd….

Sea Fever
by John Masefield

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.” –Antonin Artaud

One thing that continues to surprise me is the continued application of the belief that libertarians are some sort of neutral party when it comes to partisan politics. See, for example Megan McArdle, who very frequently posts about these little analytic posts about partisan politics where she speaks as though we should expect some sort of balance or partisan neutrality. The problem with that pose is that Megan hates Democrats. And that’s okay! She’s entitled. It just doesn’t suit her to post ostensibly neutral political pieces. She’s a committed and philosophical libertarian but she really, really doesn’t like Democrats. I trust her neutrality on partisan issues about as much as I trust a lot of writers at the Corner– capable of being honest about bad news for Republicans but far from a disinterested party.

This is a piece with a larger aspect of libertarianism that, I think, is a little frustrating and leads to that “glibertarian” tag. A lot of libertarians– not Megan, incidentally– really are just functionally anti-leftist. In what they argue about, how passionately they argue about it, what hills they decide to die on, many libertarians care far more about resisting what they perceive to be a dogmatic or empty liberal agenda far more than they care about implementing their own agenda. There are tons of libertarians who aren’t like this, of course. Will Wilkinson and Brink Lyndsey and our own Mark Thompson and commenter Jaybird, to name a few. But this is a phenomenon that seems to me to occur more on the libertarian side than anywhere else. When you see Reason magazine and its assorted blogs going all-in on support of the Tea Parties, I think you can see why someone like myself would think that there is an aspect of larger libertarianism that is not intellectually mature or responsible. Writing hagiography about the Tea Parties is, among other things, saying, “That whole gay rights thing– we’re just not THAT into it.” It’s saying that the social side of your agenda, which supposedly balances your economic disagreements with liberals, just isn’t that important. I assure you, most of the 20 and 30-something libertine urbanites who write and work for the Reason foundation would not like living in a Tea Party America. But the social freedoms and civil liberties that both liberals and libertarians espouse seem to drain from many libertarians’ message when an opportunity to really give it to the lefties pops up.

I imagine that sometimes this is a result of the College Republican syndrome, where people become anti- the culturally liberal mainstream and back into political beliefs out of a conviction of what they are not. When you presume that a certain kind of social engagement going on around you is ideologically situated, and when it annoys you, it becomes natural to defy that environment with a loudly antagonistic political philosophy. But even for those who have a more intellectually grounded basis for their beliefs make themselves vulnerable when they become oppositional before they are constructive. The problem is that being anti- anything leaves you with a remarkably credulous attitude to anyone else who is anti- that thing.

He knows what he’s talking about.

I know that, here at the League, and among most decent people, we’d like to believe that the true strength of argument comes from mutual respect, argumentative decorum and a dedication to the exchange of ideas.

But seriously, fuck this guy.

“One Hundred Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do.” Just a hundred! Why so reticent, Bruce? Couldn’t you have come up with 200 if you really tried? I mean, you haven’t made it quite clear enough how spoiled you are. You know, I don’t think I could come up with a hundred things that I wouldn’t want a surgeon who was about to operate on me to do. A waiter? A waiter. A hundred things. A hundred rules to follow to please Bruce Buschel. Seriously, if I ever become so entitled that I think I’m within my rights to demand one hundred rules of people who are literally serving me, please, tell me to STFU. I’ll richly deserve it.

If you are such a shrinking violet that you require that many rules, I mean if you are so delicate and so needy and so unable to adapt, and if you so lack the empathy for your fellow man to the point that you don’t want people from lower socioeconomic standing than you to touch the lip of your glass (rule #12)– I mean, imagine! Your glass being touched by a poor!– if you’ve degraded in your basic emotional and empathetic process to that point that you criticize people for having the temerity to compliment you (rule #42), if you’ve sunk that low, for God sakes, keep it to yourself. Do us that favor. I know that this universe permits that kind of hideous emotional poverty, but I prefer to let it fester in the cold, barren wasteland of your apartment and not be pushed in front of my face in the New York Times.

Waiters and waitresses have a tough job. You can make a lot of money as a waiter or waitress, but only in the right restaurants on the right nights. There’s plenty of evenings where you make very little at all. There’s never much guarantee that you’ll make any real money at all, thanks for the fact that your actual wage is much less than the minimum wage. On the nights when you do make a lot of money, you are certainly working hard, and putting up with a lot of stuff from moral detritus such as Bruce Buschel. Nobody mistakes being a waiter for a cush job. No one mistakes it for the kind of place where you’re going to make a mint. And it’s a job that  reminds you again and again that the world is full of social midgets, people who are so retarded in terms of empathy and compassion and caring that they simply do not care about concerns beyond their own selfish, petty concerns.

Really, if you set out to craft a piece of writing that announces that you are shrill, entitled, and childish, you would be hard pressed to succeed as well as Buschel does in that piece. Now, I’ve never been a waiter or a bartender or hostess or busser. I am, however, in the possession of the knowledge that everyone who does fulfill those roles is a human being and is thus entitled to being treated according to basic rules of decorum and elementary human respect. So when you say, for example, “7. Do not announce your name”– well, if you said that this was one of your rules within earshot of me, I’d slap you in your face. Right in your smug, self-righteous little face.

So: I say without reservation or apology, Bruce Buschel, that you are a terrible, whiny little child, and you shouldn’t be allowed out in public, let alone out to eat, and if there was any justice in this universe you’d be cursed to work long hours waiting on self-absorbed, socially retarded yuppoid nothings like yourself, for all eternity. Grow up, get over yourself, try to pierce your pathetic little shell of entitlement and self-absorption, and do it soon. It hurts me to know people as selfish as you exist.

Update: To be clear, I don’t disagree with the cleanliness rules. But they come in such a context of dehumanizing and insulting a waitstaff that I chafe at the way they are presented.

Via Andrew, Andrew Exum complains that Glenn Greenwald cherry picks which experts on the ground to listen to about the conditions in Afghanistan. Fair enough. But this is actually an argument against foreign occupation by democratic countries. As I have argued for some time, it is impossible for the members of a democratic polity to have even a rudimentary understanding of the realities on the ground in foreign countries. Exum is correct to say that we can’t know which experts to trust– which means that, perhaps, we shouldn’t put ourselves in this position in the first place. It asks too much of democracy to include the reality of foreign politics and foreign problem within the responsibility of a culturally, geographically and politically separate people.

Read Conor Friedersdorf.

One thing I failed to point out in my initial post is that part of the problem with running a weekly column is that every one that comes out it is a real statement. It’s your vision of the world for that week. NYT columns generate a lot of buzz and a ton of play on blogs, more than even the most controversial and high profile blog posts. This makes every one fraught with importance for how you are judged by the blogging world, where someone’s opinion can ebb and flow literally over the course of a day depending on their output. As I said before, I think Ross is in an almost untenable position: as he is going to be seen as the New York Times pet conservative, he has to be sufficiently conservative that he is not tuned out entirely, without sacrificing the open-mindedness and heterodoxy that made him such an appealing figure in the first place. It’s a narrow path he has to walk, and at worst it could result in the kind of “one for this side/one for the other side” dance that ideologically promiscuous pundits sometimes have to do. But this is exacerbated by the weekly publishing schedule. When you write one statement of your beliefs a week, each one needs to send just the right collection of signals. A blog, meanwhile, can ruminate on so many different issues over the course of a week that you don’t need to worry about treading any particular ideological paths. Your perception can merely be the aggregate impression of everything you’ve had to say.

(There is a separate conversation to be had, by the way, about the self-censoring aspects of constant bias accusations. When you become convinced that all of the media is a conspiracy to silence your point of view, you winnow the number of acceptable fora within the media that you are willing to listen to. Which in turns limits the prospects of like-minded pundits in terms of where they can work and be taken seriously by your movement, perversely limiting the ability of your message to spread. But I digress.)

The point is this: give Douthat a goddamn blog, New York Times. He can keep writing his column. You can ask that he talk about stuff in his column that doesn’t appear in the blog. You can insist that he operate in a different voice in the column than he does on the blog. You could even have the proviso that it be a blog about policy, or culture, or whatever. But give the man a blog on your website. Let him post about things that are a little less consequential. Let him stretch his feet out a bit. You hired this guy because you think he’s talented. Why not given him broader ranger to show it?

And you, dear bloggers– spread the word. And if you like this image, spread that too.

Forgive me for rerunning a post and looking like I’m not doing my homework. But there’s been some discussion about our racial dialogue lately, and it seems to me that while genuine progress is made in racial disparities, our racial dialogue only grows more embittered, poisonous and unproductive. Anyway, I wrote about this last year, and I still feel largely the same way that I did, and I thought I would post the whole thing up here, lightly edited. Sorry if you’ve read this before.

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