Jason Russell, 33, was taken into custody after he was found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of something, according to Lt. Andra Brown. He was detained at the intersection of Ingraham Street and Riviera Road.
Some relevant video:
Update 2: I’m taking a seminar with an old lefty U of T prof (Gad Horowitz) who pointed out that if you’re going to have a naked psychotic breakdown in public, you might as well masturbate. Indeed, sir. Indeed.
The Jesus of the gospels was a bit of a hippie. Not totally or always (Matt 10:34-35, not so hippie-ish), but more often than not. Mike Lux over at the HuffPo put together some numbers (always a dubious game, but it has its uses). Money quote:
In fact, as I noted in my piece about Todd Akin, Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.
That is a lot of verses, 258 by my count, where Rick Santorum’s savior and George W. Bush’s favorite philosopher sounds like a tried and true, solid to the core, far-out, lefty liberal. And all those where Jesus sounds like a conservative? I couldn’t find a single one. He never once condemns abortion, even though it was very common in ancient times.
That last bit really struck me. Maybe partially because I’m chin deep in the Game of Thrones books (crack, but really, really good crack), and there’s a kindof morning-after pill called “Moon Tea” that almost all of the adult female characters casually reference having taken at some point or another, and in at least one instance a character (Queen Cercei) references a more dramatic procedure she underwent when she actually did become pregnant. (The books are set in a feudal fantasy universe.)
All this is to say that I was primed, when I read the bolded sentence above, to smack myself on the forehead because OF COURSE people have been getting abortions forever, and OF COURSE forever includes 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.
What I’m saying is, dude is right, it’s pretty ridiculous that THE locus of religious political identity for what seems like the vast majority of the most politically vocal Catholics and Protestants in North America is abortion when Jesus didn’t care enough to say anything even close to explicit about it.
(For your interest, here’s the best Biblical case for abortion opposition I was able to turn up in a lazy Google search — lemme know if you find a better one. This one makes A LOT of interpretive leaps.)
It occurs to me that one might argue that Jesus didn’t talk about abortion because, as a man, he may not have known about it. I call BS on that line for two reasons: (1) He hung out with prostitutes. (2) He’s supposed to be God.
So why is abortion THE issue for so many of these folks?
In addition to Game of Thrones, I’ve been reading this book called “Faces of the Enemy” — a psychoanalytic investigation of propaganda cartoons portraying, you guessed it, the faces of whatever enemy the propaganda was out to monsterrify (<3 making up words). One motif the book identifies as almost always coming into propaganda campaigns is “enemy as baby-killer.” Everyone has used it, and they’ve used it because it works. It’s in our brain stems that babies are for protecting, and few things are harder wired (breathing, maybe).
This is exactly the rhetoric the abortion issue opens up for political Christians of a certain rightward bent — a very powerful one (not like that “love your enemy” broth Jesus kept ladling), as far as provoking emotion-driven responses in people, and action that serves your ineterest. Political people like power more than almost anything. Therefore, political Christians of a certain rightward bent love the abortion issue. Q.E.D.
(Hat-tip to TMM for posting the article on fb)
PS – Here’s a Wikipedia entry on “The History of Abortion.” Teaser:
The first recorded evidence of induced abortion, is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE.[3] A Chinese record documents the number of royal concubines who had abortions in China between the years 515 and 500 BCE.[4] According to Chinese folklore, the legendary Emperor Shennong prescribed the use of mercury to induce abortions nearly 5000 years ago.[5] Many of the methods employed in early and primitive cultures were non-surgical. Physical activities like strenuous labor, climbing,paddling, weightlifting, or diving were a common technique. Others included the use of irritant leaves, fasting, bloodletting, pouring hot water onto the abdomen, and lying on a heated coconut shell.[6] In primitive cultures, techniques developed through observation, adaptation of obstetrical methods, and transculturation.[7]Archaeological discoveries indicate early surgical attempts at the extraction of a fetus; however, such methods are not believed to have been common, given the infrequency with which they are mentioned in ancient medical texts.[8]
Interestingly, while Jesus didn’t seem to care about it, the Romans apparently did, though they didn’t see it as baby killing:
Paulus wrote in his Sentences that “those who administer a beverage for the purpose of producing abortion, or of causing affection, although they may not do so with malicious intent, still, because the act offers a bad example, shall, if of humble rank, be sent to the mines; or, if higher in degree, shall be relegated to an island, with the loss of a portion of their property. If a man or a woman should lose his or her life through such an act, the guilty party shall undergo the extreme penalty.” And also Ulpian, as it appears in the Digest regarding to the instutition of curator ventris (protector of the womb): “An unborn child is considered being born, as far as it concerns his profits”.
Suzanne Dixon, a senior lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland, writes that abortion was a threat to traditional power structures in the classical Roman world. A husband had power over his wife, her body, and their children. She explains that writings from the classical world portray abortion as expressions of an ideological agenda where men maintain or reestablish patterns of power between the sexes, not as information about historical realities.[25]:27Punishment for abortion in the Roman Republic was inflicted as a violation of the father’s right to dispose of his offspring.[11]:3Because of the influence of Stoicism, which did not view the fetus as a person, the Romans did not punish abortion as homicide.[26]
It’s delish! Teaser:
Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.
And here’s what a list of credible experts looks like:
Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D., Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section National Center for Atmospheric Research, La Jolla, Calif.
Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Richard Somerville, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University
Rasmus Benestad, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, The Norwegian Meteorological Institute
Gerald Meehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences; Director, Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, Princeton University
Peter Gleick, Ph.D., co-founder and president, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security
Michael C. MacCracken, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Climate Institute, Washington
Michael Mann, Ph.D., Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University
Steven Running, Ph.D., Professor, Director, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana
Robert Corell, Ph.D., Chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment; Principal, Global Environment Technology Foundation
Dennis Ojima, Ph.D., Professor, Senior Research Scientist, and Head of the Dept. of Interior’s Climate Science Center at Colorado State University
Josh Willis, Ph.D., Climate Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Matthew England, Ph.D., Professor, Joint Director of the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia
Ken Caldeira, Ph.D., Atmospheric Scientist, Dept. of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution
Warren Washington, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Terry L. Root, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University
David Karoly, Ph.D., ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia
Jeffrey Kiehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Donald Wuebbles, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois
Camille Parmesan, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, University of Texas; Professor of Global Change Biology, Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, UK
Simon Donner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada
Barrett N. Rock, Ph.D., Professor, Complex Systems Research Center and Department of Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire
David Griggs, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University, Australia
Roger N. Jones, Ph.D., Professor, Professorial Research Fellow, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Australia
William L. Chameides, Ph.D., Dean and Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University
Gary Yohe, Ph.D., Professor, Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, CT
Robert Watson, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Chair of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
Steven Sherwood, Ph.D., Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Chris Rapley, Ph.D., Professor of Climate Science, University College London, UK
Joan Kleypas, Ph.D., Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research
James J. McCarthy, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University
Stefan Rahmstorf, Ph.D., Professor of Physics of the Oceans, Potsdam University, Germany
Julia Cole, Ph.D., Professor, Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona
William H. Schlesinger, Ph.D., President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona
Eric Rignot, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine
Wolfgang Cramer, Professor of Global Ecology, Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France
Link. Highlight for me:
Another claim in the article is that “a recent study by William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls … ” Well, let’s ask Nordhaus what he thinks of that. In Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog he stridently disagrees with that statement:
The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others) … I can only assume they [are] either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.
Kapow!
Also links to another debunking by Joe Romm. Highlight:
Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.
Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record. As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.” Doh!
And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:
… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s…. our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.
Double Doh!
Nir Shaviv was actually born after WWII (a first on this list), and has a decidedly non-white-man-sounding name, though I think Jews are considered white now, right? Right. He’s a white man. It doesn’t really matter.
Anyhoo, Shaviv seems to actually have some climate-science cred, via astrophysics. In 2003 he published a theory accounting for global temperature variance having something to do with our solar system’s passage through the Milky Way’s galactic arms. Thing is, in the paper making this case, his object of study isn’t the current drivers of climate change, but the drivers of climate change over the past 500 million years. And while he finds that, over that period, “at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy,” that doesn’t imply that 66%+ of every variability is attributable to a cause. Basic statistics. And he acknowledges as much:
As a final qualification, we emphasize that our conclusion about the dominance of the CRF over climate variability is valid only on multimillion year time scales. At shorter time scales, other climatic factors may play an important role.
Even its relatively benign claim was seen as problematic by…
…who published a review in Eos that concluded,
Two main conclusions result from our analysis of Shaviv and Veizer [2003].The first is that the correlation of CRF and climate over the past 520 m.y. appears to not hold up under scrutiny. Even if we accept the questionable assumption that meteorite clusters give information on CRF variations, we find that the evidence for a link between CRF and climate amounts to little more than a similarity in the average periods of the CRF variations and a heavily smoothed temperature reconstruction. Phase agreement is poor.The authors applied several adjustments to the data to artificially enhanc the correlation.We thus find that the existence of a correlation has not been convincingly demonstrated.
Our second conclusion is independent of the first.Whether there is a link of CRF and temperature or not, the authors’ estimate of the effect of a CO2 doubling on climate is highly questionable. It is based on a simple and incomplete regression analysis that implicitly assumes that climate variations on time scales of millions of years, for different configurations of continents and ocean currents,for much higher CO2 levels than at present, and with unaccounted causes and contributing factors,can give direct quantitative information about the effect of rapid CO2 doubling from pre-industrial climate.The complexity and non-linearity of the climate system does not allow such a simple statistical derivation of climate sensitivity without a physical understanding of the key processes and feedbacks.We thus conclude that Shaviv and Veizer [2003] provide no cause for revising current estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2.
Undeterred, Shaviv has taken to the Internet, self-publishing a number of anti-anthropogenic polemics on his website (e.g.).
In the example, he argues that while there is, in fact, an impressive correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures over not only the last 400 thousand years, but over the last century, the causality is ambiguous. Anyway, blah blah, “we don’t fully understand the aerosol effect on cloud formation!” QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS and then he points out that there’s ALSO been a correlation between the last century’s increase in temperatures and an increase in solar activity, to which he elsewhere attributes something like half of the century’s warming.
He’s been in a fight over this with Michael Lockwood (meteorology prof at the University of Reading) and Claus Froehlich (of the World Radiation Centre in Switzerland) who argue that solar outputs since the 80s have actually been at historic lows, while the warming effect has continued. Here’s the actual paper. And here’s a 2010 inter-disciplinary lit. review (well cited) substantiating the conclusion that solar variation falls short of accounting for recent temperature changes.
Shaviv responded to Lockwood and Froehlich’s findings in a memo published by a self-described “conservative” science blog called “Reference Frame,” but no where else that I can find.
As for ulterior motives, he apparently wrote to SourceWatch “if you’re looking for dark secrets about my funding…you’ll find none,” and it doesn’t appear that they have.
Conclusion: This guy’s got more cred than anyone yet, but his respected work doesn’t appear hugely relevant to the current climate situation, and his work that does relate to it seems not particularly respected in the scientific community, which begs the question — is this really the best they can do?
PS – I’ve asked r/AskScience if they can comment on his credibility within the scientific community on this subject. Will update if/when I get any good responses.
Updated: From “FormerlyTurnipHunter,” who is an expert in “Quantum Information/Quantum Computing/Quantum Optics”:
Not every skeptic or denialist is an outright crackpot. Some scientists do really think they found a different mechanism to explain global warming and they should be taken seriously.
However, these skeptics’ theories usually don’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. This is also the case for Shaviv’s theory on cosmic rays. He is not the only one propagating cosmic rays as the main cause for warming btw., there’s also Svensmark.
Their physics is not completely wrong, their [sic] is definitely a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, which in turn influences the climate. The problem however is that the cosmic ray theory can’t explain the warming over the last three decades, in which solar activity was decreasing.
So why would these scientists still hold on to their theories despite a lack of evidence? I don’t know, but I’m a scientist myself and I know how hard it is to let go of your ideas sometimes. Especially when there’s a big enough lobby happy to believe you and give you money to talk about this research of yours.
According to desmogblog, a great resource on climate denialism, Shaviv at least doesn’t deny anthropogenic warming completely, he just places our contribution at roughly 1/3 (its more like 3/4).
So instead of a paid denier like many others I would say he’s simply a mediocre scientist who won’t let go of a disproven theory.
What’s interesting is the coda. What I’m saying is that you should watch the whole thing through.
Cass Sunstein wants you to imagine his “soft paternalism” as that of a nurturing mother elephant, nudging you in her/his great and democratically inaccessible wisdom into better serving your own interests — or so implies the cover of his manifesto. His choice of the word “paternalism” is a bit funny, in light of the image. I guess calling it “soft maternalism” would have been too girly. Or maybe the whole mother elephant thing is bullshit window-dressing for what’s nothing more than a rationalization for an only slightly abashed pseudo-technocratic (and anti-democratic) power grab. Because what’s the matter with Kansas is that it’s been inadequately “cognitively infiltrated” by the powerful.
Naturally, David Brooks is on board, and all the more so since OIRA’s come under “withering attacks from the left.”
[T]he White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and its administrator, Cass Sunstein, have been the subject of withering attacks from the left.
Withering.
The organization Think Progress says the office is “appalling.” Mother Jones magazine is on the warpath. The Huffington Post published a long article studded with negative comments from unions and environmental activists.
If you step back and try to get some nonhysterical perspective….
Pause for a second. David Brooks’ colleagues, more and more, have bought into the standard web practice of providing links when they refer to articles — a fine practice spearheaded at the Times by Frank Rich. That Brooks refuses to adopt said practice makes me think Brooks doesn’t akshully want you to read said articles; to assess their relative hysteria/non-hysteria for yourselves. What better reason could Brooks give you to read the referenced articles and assess them for yourself?: the Think Progress hysteria; the Mother Jones hysteria; and I think this is the HuffPo hysteria he’s referring to, but I’m not sure. Anyone got a better candidate? Note that in all cases, major claims are substantiated. This will be important later.
Moving on…
…you come to the following conclusion:
Oh I do, do I?
This is a Democratic administration. Many of the major agency jobs are held by people who come out of the activist community who are not sensitive to the costs they are imposing on the economy.
Examples? I can think of a number of former industry lobbyists and academics. What exactly are these policies they’re proposing that are so insensitive to cost? Remember how those “hysterical” articles substantiated their claims?
[Parenthetical update: As the hysterics were pointing out, a large proportion of the programs kiboshed by OIRA have been related to fighting climate change. As the International Energy Agency's latest report put it in their most recent report, “… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]…. Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.” So I guess Brooks meant “insensitive to short-term costs within the false economy.” Seems like somewhat less of a condemnation put that way, isn’t it?]
President Obama has a political and philosophical incentive to restrain their enthusiasm.
Who-tf are you talking about??
Oh shit, here’s a thought: Maybe you actually understand substantiation itself as hysteria. That makes me sad. You and yours used to just call it shrill.
Anyway, in your language: more hysteria please!
He has, therefore, supported a strong review agency in the White House that does rigorous cost-benefit analyses to review proposed regulations and minimize their economic harm.
That’s nothing like any broad conclusion I would ever come to regarding OIRA. But go on…
This office, under Sunstein, is incredibly wonky. It is composed of career number-crunchers of no known ideological bent who try to measure the trade-offs inherent in regulatory action. Deciding among these trade-offs involves relying on both values and data.
Their ideological bent is unknown because they’re beyond any democratic accountability that might demand that they make it known. Or actually, their ideological bent isn’t really that unknown. Some of Think Progress’ hysteria:
During a six-month period, Sunstein’s office literally met with nearly 6,000 lobbyists, 65 percent of whom represented industry, compared to only 12 percent representing public interest groups.
Their ideology, one might fairly assume, is for whatever counts as normal in D.C. lobbyist culture.
But back to Brooks…
This office has tried to elevate the role of data so that every close call is not just a matter of pleasing the right ideological army.
Leaving aside the dubious assumption that data deployed under conditions of questionable intellectual honesty (and basically no transparency) is necessarily ideologically transcendent, you’re imputing a lot of great motives here. On whose word do you take them? Sunstein’s? Doesn’t power always imagine it has a great soul? (h-t) I’d really enjoy even just one small example of OIRA successfully doing what you’ve described. Or, you’re just gonna move on, aren’t you?
Over all, the Obama administration has significantly increased the regulatory costs imposed on the economy. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind.
One might point out that whatever regulatory costs have been imposed would have to be pretty fucking steep not to pale trembling in the shadow of the costs we’re still paying for three decades of radical deregulation.
Brooks goes on for a couple paragraphs about the costs of regulation under various recent Presidents, concluding with this:
George W. Bush issued regulations over eight years that cost about $60 billion. During its first two years, the Obama regulations cost between $8 billion and $16.5 billion, according to estimates by the administration itself, and $40 billion, according to data collected, more broadly, by the Heritage Foundation.
Not exactly sure how “cost of regulation” is estimated, but you can bet it involves making a lot of assumptions. You can further bank on the Heritage Foundation having made every cost-inflating choice with their assumptions they thought they could get away with.
Considering Obama’s fetish for jumping straight to what’s perceived as the ideological mean, I’m not sure the opposite could be said to be true.
Either way, links to reports again would be nice, Mr. Brooks.
Nor is it clear that these additional regulations have had a huge effect on the economy. Over the past 40 years, small business leaders have eloquently complained about the regulatory burden. And they are right to. But it’s not clear that regulations are a major contributor to the current period of slow growth.
The US Chamber of Commerce has “eloquently” complained about the regulatory burden. The US Chamber of Commerce is not a “small business leader.” It’s a lobbying organization representing “the interests of” about 300,000 businesses and organizations of “every size, sector, and region,” and counts among its membership a “handful” of “non-U.S.-based (foreign) companies.” I wonder what proportion of its budget is supplied by genuinely small businesses. There certainly aren’t many represented on their decidedly “big business” board of directors.
According to a recent study by McClatchy, of a random sampling of small business owners….
None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.
But that’s neither here nor there, is it Mister Brooks? It’s certainly nowhere in your column, which goes on…
The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks companies why they have laid off workers. Only 13 percent said regulations were a major factor.
That’s actually kind of similar. Doesn’t make your previous paragraph any less fatuous though.
That number has not increased in the past few years. According to the bureau, roughly 0.18 percent of the mass layoffs in the first half of 2011 were attributable to regulations.
Oh?
Some of the industries that are the subject of the new rules, like energy and health care, have actually been doing the most hiring. If new regulations were eating into business, we’d see a slip in corporate profits. We are not.
Well reasoned.
There are two large lessons here. First, Republican candidates can say they will deregulate and, in some areas, that would be a good thing. But it will not produce a short-term economic rebound because regulations are not a big factor in our short-term problems.
And, in all likelihood, it’ll open the door still wider to the kind of systematic fraud that saw us into the Great Recession in the first place, but why consider that? Not like that’s relevant.
Second, it is easy to be cynical about politics and to say that Washington is a polarized cesspool. And it’s true that the interest groups and the fund-raisers make every disagreement seem like a life-or-death struggle. But, in reality, most people in government are trying to find a balance between difficult trade-offs. Whether it’s antiterrorism policy or regulatory policy, most substantive disagreements are within the 40 yard lines.
Yawn.
Obama’s regulations may be more intrusive than some of us would like. They are not tanking the economy.
This is your point? Really? Fuck you, Mr. Brooks. This was not what your column was about. This required none of the fatuous bullshit and unwarranted aspersions ladled all over the the front end and middle of your column to stand. No one reasonable disagrees with this. This is the most banal kind of common sense.
What your column was about, David Brooks, was sneaking a bunch of fatuous bullshit and unwarranted aspersions into the discourse under the banner of the most banal kind of common sense.
That he seems to be the only one of the Republican contenders willing to pick the low lying fruit (e.g. the below) in criticizing his opponents is in itself pretty…. encouraging isn’t the right word.
A senior Paul campaign source emails to push back, and hard: “We agree, of course, with former Speaker Gingrich — this is a country of people of enormous talent. Those who deliver thousands of babies like Dr. Paul and those who spend their time focusing on promoting themselves for profit. We even have those who lobby, but don’t call it such because, as they say, they can make $60,000 per speech. While those of us in the Paul camp might disagree with Newt Gingrich about whether Donald Trump is the right man to host a serious political debate, we do agree New York is a wonderful place to go at Christmas. We are sure two average Americans like Speaker Gingrich and Donald Trump will have a wonderful time picking out gifts for their wives. We suggest a place called Tiffany’s, we her it is quite nice this time of year and given their celebrity status they can probably get special deals and $500,000 lines of credit.”
Second thought: He obviously won’t be the nominee precisely because he’s willing to pick said low-lying fruit.
Alix pointed this out to me a few months ago at what I think was her birthday party, suggesting that the two events were maybe not entirely unrelated. Later that night, she handed me her copy of Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, and emphatically recommended the long piece of McCain 2000 campaign reportage, “Up, Simba!,” contained therein (she also, at various points that evening, handed me Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed” and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” point being that Alix is a generous soul with excellent taste in books).
I only just now got around to cracking Consider. Up until now, I thought the implication that DFW killed himself because of the Palin pick was kinda ridiculous. Then I read the following passage:
Here’s what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an N.V. statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription “McCan—famous air pirate” [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the lifevest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90º to the side with the bone sticking out. This is all public record. Try to imagine it. He finally got tossed on a Jeep and taken only like five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison—a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton, of much movie fame—where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound ) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. The media profiles all talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was mostly delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then, after he’d hung on like like that for several months and his bones had mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up, they brought him to the prison commandant’s office and closed the door and out of nowhere offered to let him go. They said he could just . . . leave. It turned out that U.S. Admiral John S. McCain II had just been made head of all naval forces in the Pacific, meaning also Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. And John S. McCain III, 100 lbs and barely able to stand, refused the offer. The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a way longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The prison commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break McCain’s ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Forget how many movies stuff like this happens in and try to imagine it as real. Refusing release. He spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a special closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different profiles of McCain this year. It’s overexposed, true. Still though, take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between McCain getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer: What difference would one less POW make? Plus maybe it’d give the other POWs hope and keep them going, and I mean 100 pounds and expected to die and surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a real doctor or else you’re going to die, plus if you could stay alive by getting out you could make a promise to God to do nothing but Total Good from now on and make the world better and so your accepting would be better for the world than your refusing, and maybe if Dad wasn’t worried about the Vietnamese retaliating against you here in prison he could prosecute the war more aggressively and end it sooner and actually save lives so you could actually save lives if you took the offer and got out versus what real purpose gets served by you staying here in a box and getting beaten to death, and by the way oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery and painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair . . . can you hear it? What would be happening in your head? Would you have refused the offer? Could you have? You can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment, much less to know how you’d react. None of us can know. But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, mostly in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know , for a proven fact , that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: McCain does want your vote, after all. But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68—right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him—that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign (see sub), that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb it’s hard to ignore. The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered—voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. And yes, literally: “moral authority,” that old cliché, much like so many other clichés—“service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism”—that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain of recent seasons, though—arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire THMs—something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear clichés as more than just clichés and start trying to think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. To think about whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?
Consider the above in light of his famous “This is Water” commencement address to Kenyon. In particular, passages like this (transcription taken from the Guardian):
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home – you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job – and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register. Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
David Foster Wallace had a vivid imagination for torture.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Only by gathering the force of will from ____ (he never really satisfactorily fills this blank, as Dreyfus and Kelly point out in All Things Shining) to totally reject the egotist perspective that turns everything that’s bothersome into a vindictive, personal act on the part of the universe (personal as in “this time it’s personal!”), and instead observe your situation from a point of peaceful reconciliation.
If he ever managed to sustainably achieve such an perspective, I guess it’s impossible to know. But I think that the fact of his suicide strongly suggests he never did. But McCain somehow did, we can at least imagine Wallace thinking.
McCain’s situation was personal. When he crash-landed in Hanoi, was bayonnetted and had his shoulder broken by a mob of North Vietnamese, the pain they inflicted was for his identity as an American bomber pilot. After the prison commandant put the prospect of his early release on the table only to have it rejected, the torture he suffered was about him — who he was the son of; his immediate act. And yet he persevered, and, as Wallace saw it, kept the principled core of himself through five years of a continuous torture that requires far less than Wallace’s prestigious descriptive talent to imagine and be horrified by. One can only wonder at how Wallace imagined McCain managed this. I posit that he couldn’t, and recognized that he couldn’t, which was why he admired the man so much — saw him as transcendent of the millennial world Wallace arguably observed more keenly and understood more fully than almost anyone.
And then McCain, out of nothing but an apparent total self-abandonment to cynicism, tapped her on the shoulder.
It was a great few days for yours truly to make peace with some ideological foes. On the plane out to Los Angeles, who do I bump into but Bill Bennett and his wife, cordial and respectful as ever? On the way back, I kid you not, Andrew Breitbart was in the seat next to me. We’ve never met, but we’ve emailed over the years. He’s hot-headed and a bundle of bearish energy and nerves. But we had a blast on the plane, with him sharing his latest pop music obsessions on his iPod with me.
Breitbart is actually a kind of straight gay: loves pop music, hates rock n roll, lost interest in radio music around the time of grunge (as did I) and now believes there’s a revival of joyous pop going on. Oh, and, yes, we talked Trig a little. How could we not?
Anyway, I happen to personally like him, and Bill, and am touched they don’t take my public debating personally.
I actually find it disturbing (if unsurprising) that they don’t take criticism of their cynical, debate-subverting bullshit personally. Criticisms of them for their behaviour absolutely amount to evaluations of them as people.
Breitbart especially is a cynical nihilist profiting by subverting the possibility for rational democratic debate at a point where America’s claim to even being a democracy is growing more and more tenuous. This is a line that Sullivan has argued before. Dude is a resentment monger, and has directly worsened the conditions of society’s worst off through, for example, his campaigns against ACORN and Planned Parenthood.
If Sullivan takes these things seriously, I don’t really understand how he can “like” someone like that, regardless of how personable they are. Is it a Jesus thing? Jesus was all about loving thy neighbour, but I don’t think he ever said you had to like them.
I mean, I like my fair share of assholes, but I only like assholes I respect. I could never respect Breitbart.
