You can chalk this up to the list of things that I complain about once a year. So feel free to skip this if you’ve heard it before.

Here’s the deal: the divorce rate, as conventionally calculated, is a near-useless statistic. Perhaps totally useless. The divorce rate compares the total number of divorces in any given year to the total number of marriages. This has an almost entirely distorting effect on the number: the pool of potential divorces to be factored into the rate is all existing marriages. The pool of potential marriages is just new marriages. The number of divorces in a given year can remain stable, and the number of new marriages can drop (due to economic downturn, for instance) and the divorce rate can jump, despite the fact that the number of existing marriages ending in divorce hasn’t changed. It’s a ludicrous way to calculate the statistic.

An honest divorce rate would involve looking at individual marriages and tracking them to see how many unique marriages end in divorce. This kind of statistical work is labor-intensive, but it appears from the best available data that the honest divorce rate likely never exceeded 40% or so, and that it peaked in the early 90s and has been heading slightly downward since. And, as I have argued before, a divorced/stayed married binary says very little about the aspects of marriage we find important for society.

Part of the reason I bring this up in frustration so often is because this isn’t some deeply contrarian idea or a piece of secret, hard-to-tease-out knowledge. Rather, it’s a fact that’s been long acknowledged by statisticians and sociologists; it’s been talk about it the occasional magazine and newspaper article; and yet it can’t ever seem to penetrate the popular consciousness. Once something has penetrated the conventional wisdom, disputing it is wading upstream.

Incidentally, if you aren’t aware the Statistical Abstract is online, and a very powerful tool for research.

Here are some facts that I find interesting!

The New York Yankees payroll is about $65 million dollars higher than the next closest team. That is an interesting fact! That means that the gap between them and the next closest team is almost as much as or more than the payroll of nearly a third of the league’s teams. This is interesting. The Yankees left infield made more this season than three major league teams and almost as much as a fourth. The Yankees three biggest free agent signings– the three biggest free agent signings of any kind, the best hitter and two best pitchers by a wide margin– made over $50 million dollars this year. That means that the Yankees three top free agents made half as much as the Chicago White Sox roster. The Chicago White Sox are a top ten team in payroll. I find this interesting.

Another interesting fact: the Yankees backup catcher makes just a couple hundred thousand dollars less than the Pittsburgh Pirates highest payed player. Alex Rodriguez made $8 million more this year than the Pittsburgh Pirates current roster. $8 million is as much as or more than the highest payed player makes on 5 major league teams. The Yankees five highest paid players make more than 23 major league teams. The Yankees four starting infielders make more than half the teams in major league baseball. In contrast, the Minnesota Twins, the Yankees victim in the first round, have an infield that costs a little more than Derek Jeter and over $10 million less than Alex Rodriguez. This is interesting. That the Yankees recently had huge contracts like those of Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina and Bobby Abreu come off of their books, and yet still have an enormously inflated payroll, is interesting. It is also interesting to think about how a team can swallow high-priced flameouts and spectacular GM failures like the aforementioned Giambi, Kyle Farnsworth, Carl Pavano and many others.

Here is another interesting fact: many of MLB’s brightest home grown stars, like Twins catcher and batting champion Joe Mauer, have an extraordinarily small chance of signing with the clubs that have brought them up into a loving fanbase, because of the enormous imbalances in baseball’s financial system. Even Albert Pujols, a mortal lock for the Hall of Fame, the past decade’s best player and a threat to be a top 5 baseball player of all time, is not certain to resign with his club when he enters free agency in two years. At that time he will be 31, in his prime for a baseball player.I read a rumor that the Yankees are keen to sign him.

Interesting.

The Old Women of the Ocean
by Pablo Neruda
translated by Jodey Bateman

To the solemn sea the old women come
With their shawls knotted around their necks
With their fragile feet cracking.

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence.

The obscene sea breaks and claws
Rushes downhill trumpeting
Shakes its bull’s beard.

The gentle old ladies seated
As if in a transparent boat
They look at the terrorist waves.

Where will they go and where have they been?
They come from every corner
They come from our own lives.

Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

They come from all the pasts
From houses which were fragrant
From burnt-up evenings.

They look, or don’t look, at the sea
With their walking sticks they draw signs in the sand
And the sea erases their calligraphy.

The old women get up and go away
With their fragile bird feet
While the waves flood in
Traveling naked in the wind.

Let me preface this by saying that I couldn’t care less about what people choose to eat, whether it’s no meat or all meat or no wheatgerm or whatever. I can’t imagine wanting to scold someone for eating meat, but I also can’t imagine giving someone a hard time about not eating meat– especially in the defensive, assuming-an-implied-critique-of-meat-eating way a lot of people do. Eat what you will, says I.

That said, on just a philosophical level, I understand radical Jainism more than I understand veganism. Certain strains of the Jainite religion have a diet that is vegetarian, allows the consumption of dairy or honey or other animal products that don’t involve the death of the animal, but disallows the consumption of root vegetables like onions, potatoes or carrots– because that kills the organism. So an apple or peas would be okay, if I understand the philosophy correctly.

That just strikes me as having more internal consistency than conventional veganism, which disallows the consumption of animal products like honey, but permits the killing of vegetables. In his recent essay on vegetarianism from the NYT magazine, Jonathan Safran-Foer asks “Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it.” My question for vegetarians who abstain from eating meat for moral reasons is, why is it permissible to end vegetable life but not animal life? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. The typical argument I get from vegetarians is no argument at all; it is usually just a snort, an assumption that I am just being a punk, or a refusal to take the question seriously. But the impatient insistence that a question is not serious does not constitute an effective response to that question, or a rebuttal to the notion that it should be asked in the first place.

I put it to you that it’s exactly that kind of elementary resistance– to considering a right to life or moral content for more organisms, to expanding the scope of what we consider to have some sort of access to rights– that vegetarians and vegans have pushed against for so long. The application of incredulity or dismissal in the face of the question of a right to life can’t be synthesized with the points that Safran-Foer and others are making.

What genuine arguments I have seen on this front usually involve arguments that right to life is a consequence of consciousness, or that the argument against eating meat is really an argument against causing pain, or similar. Yet I find none of these ideas adequately developed, and usually they exists only in the specific and limited instance of answering my question, not part of a larger lattice of philosophical belief about the right to life of any organism. Surely, the association of the prohibition against eating meat with consciousness, and the association with preventing pain, are both very troubled constructions, with a vast amount of logical consequences that I don’t think many vegetarians or vegans have considered. (For instance, consciousness is not a binary, but rather a spectrum, so the question becomes whether an animal has more right to life if it is more conscious– a cow has more right to life than a lobster, which has more right to life than an earth worm, etc.) While we’re in the business of considering the moral and philosophical underpinnings of vegetarianism and veganism, these questions have relevance, salience, and power.

Like I said, eat what you want, and advocate what you will. But as long as people like Safran-Foer are asking questions, I’m asking questions too.

Part of what makes the Israel-Palestine debate so wearying is that so many fundamental broken arguments have a remarkable persistence. This is largely a result of the huge role that emotionalism, ad hominem and innuendo have in the conversation. Consider this email to Andrew:

I’m sorry but that Yglesias “Quote For The Day” was utter bullshit. You are comparing a death cult who fires a missile and hopes it lands in a school yard to a country that makes mistakes, but venerates and celebrates life. What is it about Jews that drives people like you batshit? To object to the Gaza operation is to object to Israel’s existence. They were defending themselves.  From Goldblog to Peres at Davos, every Jew knows that. For a people that can’t agree on anything, Jews can agree for the most part on what Israel did during the Gaza operation was out of necessity, not out of malevolence.

Andrew is right to call attention to the immediate, knee-jerk accusation of anti-Semistism that has become such an unavoidable trope that when debating these issues we barely notice it. That’s, of course, part of the danger of reducing our duty to combat anti-Jewish hatred to a cynical, crass and empty political ploy; we start to tune out the accusation altogether. The use of such an accusation for partisan political ends cheapens and debases the accusation, and as such those who throw slurs of anti-Semitism around are no friends to the Jewish people.

On the larger level–I have written this so many times that frankly I am tired of doing so, but it remains as correct today as ever: there are very strange and illegitimate turns of moral logic here that you routinely see when discussing Israel that you never see anywhere else. Chief among them is the fact that we generally reject relative morality, whether in the vast scope of international affairs or in the day to day of human life. Saying one moral actor is superior to another is irrelevant to the question of whether that actor is moral. This is taken as such a basic element of standard human assumptions about morality that it goes unspoken, and yet it is routinely and flagrantly violated in discussing Israel. Children on the playground know that their actions are not rendered moral or immoral in relation to the other children but rather that their conduct has independent moral value. They likewise know that being of superior morality to some of the worst behaved children on the playground means nothing.

The emailer seems to think, as so many defending Israel do, that saying that Israel is better than a vile terrorist organization like Hamas is a ringing defense of Israel. But, of course, he or she is actually damning Israel with faint praise. I should certainly hope that a robust, functioning liberal democracy such as Israel would be of superior moral character to a group like a Hamas. And pardon me for expressing a rather proletarian vision of morals, but I think that whether Israel is “better than” Hamas just isn’t important compared to the question of whether Israel’s actions are moral. And there is frankly overwhelming evidence that in the incursion into Gaza in question the members of the IDF committed war crimes and caused great suffering to innocent civilians. We must hold Israel accountable for this behavior, no matter how much more we prefer Israel to Hamas. The crimes committed in Gaza in no way diminish my commitment to the safety and prosperity to Israel. But we have long ago decided that the way we prosecute military engagement is not suddenly unimportant if we deem the military engagement necessary. If we did, you can forget about condemning the My Lai massacre, or the firebombing of Dresden, or the Bataan death march, or any other atrocities in a time of war.

(Incidentally, a pertinent question is to ask why all of the Palestinian children killed in the Gaza mess deserved to die because of the actions of a missile-lobbing death cult that they have absolutely no control over.)

But then, that’s the situation again with Israel and Palestine: it is insisted that we have to treat Israel and Palestine in fundamentally ways than we treat any other conflict, and not just in how we view the situation but in how we talk about it. I know people who write freely about controversial subjects routinely and yet are afraid of weighing in on Israel and Palestine out of fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. In democracy, all aspects of government action– most certainly including foreign and military aid, and how we diplomatically protect favored entities– have to be on the table. Which means that we can’t responsibly equate very legitimate and important questions about war crimes and atrocities with being “driven batshit” by anti-Jewish animus.

By the way, you can consult this old post of mine when considering much pro-aggression, anti-accountability defenses of the IDF; you’ll find a great portion of these arguments fall into the fallacies that I describe.

The recently-interviewed Conor Friedersdorf is starting a twitter feed where he aggregates what he feels is the best nonfiction writing. Check it out at http://twitter.com/JournoCurator .

Via Alan Jacobs of Text Patterns fame, check out this amazing letter from Dwight Eisenhower from the last days of World War II. [Read more →]

Snarleyow
by Rudyard Kipling

This ‘appened in a battle to a batt’ry of the corps
Which is first among the women an’ amazin’ first in war;
An’ what the bloomin’ battle was I don’t remember now,
But Two’s off-lead ‘e answered to the name o’ Snarleyow.
Down in the Infantry, nobody cares;
Down in the Cavalry, Colonel ‘e swears;
But down in the lead with the wheel at the flog
Turns the bold Bombardier to a little whipped dog!

They was movin’ into action, they was needed very sore,
To learn a little schoolin’ to a native army corps,
They ‘ad nipped against an uphill, they was tuckin’ down the brow,
When a tricky, trundlin’ roundshot give the knock to Snarleyow.
They cut ‘im loose an’ left ‘im — ‘e was almost tore in two –
But he tried to follow after as a well-trained ‘orse should do;
‘E went an’ fouled the limber, an’ the Driver’s Brother squeals:
“Pull up, pull up for Snarleyow — ‘is head’s between ‘is ‘eels!”

The Driver ‘umped ‘is shoulder, for the wheels was goin’ round,
An’ there ain’t no “Stop, conductor!” when a batt’ry’s changin’ ground;
Sez ‘e: “I broke the beggar in, an’ very sad I feels,
But I couldn’t pull up, not for you — your ‘ead between your ‘eels!”

‘E ‘adn’t ‘ardly spoke the word, before a droppin’ shell
A little right the batt’ry an’ between the sections fell;
An’ when the smoke ‘ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver’s Brother with ‘is ‘ead between ‘is ‘eels.

Then sez the Driver’s Brother, an’ ‘is words was very plain,
“For Gawd’s own sake get over me, an’ put me out o’ pain.”
They saw ‘is wounds was mortial, an’ they judged that it was best,
So they took an’ drove the limber straight across ‘is back an’ chest.

The Driver ‘e give nothin’ ‘cept a little coughin’ grunt,
But ‘e swung ‘is ‘orses ‘andsome when it came to “Action Front!”
An’ if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
‘Twas juicier for the niggers when the case begun to spread.

The moril of this story, it is plainly to be seen:
You ‘avn’t got no families when servin’ of the Queen –
You ‘avn’t got no brothers, fathers, sisters, wives, or sons –
If you want to win your battles take an’ work your bloomin’ guns!
Down in the Infantry, nobody cares;
Down in the Cavalry, Colonel ‘e swears;
But down in the lead with the wheel at the flog
Turns the bold Bombardier to a little whipped dog!

I suppose I could tie this post to this latest interview of Richard Dawkins in Salon.com, but I don’t really need. It’s just the same; it’s always the same. Honestly, I really wonder about Salon sometimes. You can find at fairly regular intervals, in their archives, near identical interviews with the usual suspects of aggressive antitheism. They’re like the identical interview, every six months. I can’t imagine what Joan Walsh or whoever thinks the website or its audience is gaining by repeating the same interviews with the same small group of people and the same inane questions. But perhaps I am just exhausted by it all.

It is antitheism. Anti- and a- are profoundly different prefixes. If I tell you I am apathetic towards something that is denotatively and obviously very different from if I tell you that I am antipathetic towards that something. Dawkins et al are not lacking theism, they are oppose to theism. They’re entitled to it. But in the interest of a certain respect to the English language I think it behooves that movement to name itself correctly. Language indeed evolves, but I don’t think it has evolved or should evolve to the point where a- and anti- become synonymous prefixes. And so antitheists they are.

The louder proponents of antitheism are quite hostile to the idea that they operate similarly to religious evangelists. And, yes, I find those conflations to often be lazily applied. But there is an elementary consonance between evangelist religion and evangelist antitheism that I find inarguable, that both insist that their adherents have duties and responsibilities that are a product of their theological stance. I chafed early and often against the social expectations of atheism for a simple reason: I dislike being a foot soldier. I cannot work my mind to the headspace necessary to believe that emptiness insists that we must be conscripted into a grand cultural war. I have said before that the real benefit of being an atheist is that you never have to get up early to go to church or temple. I say that only partly in jest: to me, what makes atheism attractive as a practical matter is that it requires nothing of me. It asks me to observe no sacraments. It imposes no ideology on me. It provokes me to do nothing and leaves me only to live in a way consonant with my conditional and contingent values.

And, yes, those values compel me to oppose the influence of religion on government and public policy. Those are values that are shared by many who are religious and practicing. Indeed I have found in the experience of my own life that one person more dedicated to the separation of church and state than anyone else I know is a Congregationalist minister. This is again the simplest grace of democracy: that for all of the ways it fails in this, it offers at least the prospect of commensurability that is dependent on ideas and not on identity. A belief in the egalitarian necessity and pragmatism inherent in a rigorous separation of church and state is not necessarily a product of any particular inclination towards theistic claims. It is this, in part, that inspires a belief that tends to get me in the most trouble among other atheists: I find that the existence or nonexistence of God is utterly irrelevant to the question of how atheists should treat the religious.

Atheism is not a project. It proceeds towards no goal. It involves no work. Atheism is absence, an emptiness and, often, a comfort with that emptiness. If you are preoccupied with these questions, if you are like me and you find that you cannot pause waiting for the toaster or for the bus to come without questions of the natural universe and your place within it, the freedom of actual emptiness… . There is a freedom that is breathtaking and terrible in spiritual and theological nihilism that I find singular. But it is not an experience I share with antitheists; they are too filled with their belief in being unfilled, too bent by the force of what they are rejecting to understand or enjoy the awful quiet of actual atheism.

The antitheists can and should proceed with their project with all the force and lack of apology that they are allowed by the laws of our country and by the principles of democracy. I find many of them startlingly naive about just how quickly their minority complaints could become majority oppression; these things I know, that the history of humankind tells us that people do not get to equality and then stop but instead rather turn around and try to begin the cycle of oppression. But perhaps I am being unfair. Whatever the case, speak loudly, sometimes angrily– but give us back our word.

Conor mans the battlements re: my post on Douthat.

When the New York Times ended (or Bill Kristol ended) the absurd farce of having among their columnists an utterly discredited, partisan neocon whose every assumption and prediction about Iraq had proven brutally and terribly wrong, there was an immediate round of speculation about who might take the laurel of a column in the newspaper of record. A lot of that presumption centered around a David Brooks column that amounted to a series of shout-outs to young, vaguely heterodox conservatives, and a ringing endorsement of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party, their intelligent, sprawling, ambitious, occasionally silly tract on how to reform the Republican party for the new millennium. (Incidentally, the column also contains the assertion that “Sam’s Club conservatism,” Douthat and Salam’s term for their brand of rightwing thought, would someday certainly become the widespread gospel of the GOP. Given David Brooks’s predictive powers, I don’t know if that’s a good thing for the authors.)

Douthat seemed a natural choice, and I, and many others, advocated for him. He had long been an editor at the Atlantic, so he had the kind of big journalistic bona fides the Times liked. His status as a white, married, Catholic male who attended Harvard and various private schools neutered arguments about who the Times hires and why– no sop to political correctness, true, but also not the kind of identity politics stunt that could have inoculated the columnist from criticism in the eyes of the cowardly Times editorial board, as, say, choosing a black female conservative would have done. Douthat also had the considerable advantage, to my lights, of being a genuine social conservative, when the easiest, most reader-fellating move would have been to appoint another columnist with economically conservative but socially “mainstream” views. It would have flattered a certain swath of the Times readership to present them with the less-personal disagreement of economic policy, while avoiding the somewhat nastier, more “offensive” talk of social conservatism. Douthat is significantly to the right of what we might perceive as the Times audience when it comes to abortion, gay marriage, and sex and family issues. This is a not insignificant advantage if, like me, you aren’t interested in reading yet another in the long line of Tom Friedman-style neoliberal national columns that our media seems to enjoy so much.

Trumping all of that, of course, was the fact that Douthat is a gifted and thoughtful writer, always more prone to long, searching essays on deeper questions of community, faith and modern life than the one-off, disposable blog posts that are the norm. Grand New Party, besides a few groaners, is to my mind an essential political text, one I disagree with strongly but one that marks such a leap forward for conservatism in process that I suspect Brooks will be proven right after all. It does little good for an unabashed leftist such as myself to say so, but what I think is key is that the text presents fresh mechanisms for producing unmistakably conservative ends. His blog on the Atlantic, meanwhile, was rarely updated but almost always worth reading. Douthat has the rare and admirable quality, in his writing, of elevating his ideas without distancing himself from their negative consequences. Douthat may not have always arrived at the right conclusions, to my mind, but it was never for lack of considering the alternative or being honest about downside. It was that integrity, and the elegance of mind that accompanied it, that made him required reading, by my lights.

The question I have been faced with over the few months that he’s been working at the Times is to wonder where the hell that Ross Douthat has gone.

[Read more →]

the Beggar
by Ogden Nash
(After William Blake)

Beggar, beggar, burning low
In the city’s trodden snow,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy dread asymmetry?

In what distant deep of lies
Died the fire of thine eyes?
What the mind that planned the shame?
What the hand dare quench the flame?

And what shoulder and what art
Could rend the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to fail,
What soft excuse, what easy tale?

What the hammer? What the chain?
What the furnace dulled thy brain?
What the anvil? What the blow
Dare to forge this deadly woe?

When the business cycle ends
In flaming extra dividends,
Will He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Ford make thee?