Monday, October 10, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the pussy thing, and the debate. The topic was an embarrassment of riches, not to say a plain embarrassment, and here are some of the outtakes:

Regular readers will recall that Rod Dreher has been extremely Trump-curious lately (“The more things like this happen, the more sense Trump’s idea to halt Muslim immigration for the time being makes”). Friday morning Dreher was swooning for him, with “Trump To Catholics: ‘I’ve Got Your Back’” (“Donald Trump sent a letter to Catholic leaders gathering in Denver… I find this encouraging”) and an even more embarrassing post called "The Little Way of... Donald Trump?" Hours later Dreher was demanding Trump resign. “There is no way a pig like this will be elected president. None,” he wrote, the scales falling from his eyes, or his thumb falling from the scales. Later Dreher declaimed, “When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option [subject of Dreher’s new book] will be all we will have left.” By then there’ll have been enough born every minute to make it a best seller!

After the debate Dreher declared Trump the winner and wrote,"You know, I really think Donald Trump still has a chance — not much of one, but a chance — to win this thing. I did not expect to be saying that after this debate." That would be a good reason not to constantly make hysterical statements that you have to disown a few hours later, dummy.

The most interesting thing about Jonah Goldberg’s column on the subject was that it wasn’t totally stupid: He even said people who “still think Hillary Clinton would be worse” than Trump should “just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name.” I think that, while other big-name conservatives are secretly rooting for Trump, this campaign has really put the zap on Goldberg's head. Imagine that your biggest claim to fame is a book about how liberals are all fascists, and then one day your whole movement is taken oven by a guy whose campaign blueprint is the rise of Adolf Hitler. Even worse, the guy thinks you're a loser. If Goldberg’s entire career hadn’t been a geyser of poison shit I’d feel sorry for him.

UPDATE. You gotta be shitting me, Scott Gant and Bruce Peabody at the Wall Street Journal:
What’s next for the Republican Party and Donald J. Trump? After hearing Mr. Trump make a series of derogatory and sexually predatory statements in a 2005 recording that was leaked last week, Republican officials are openly fretting about the future of their party and its candidates. Some are calling on Mr. Trump to step aside so that a new presidential nominee can be chosen.

With Mr. Trump emphatically rejecting that idea, the best chance for Republicans to secure the White House (and improve their prospects down ballot) may be a different course: Mr. Trump could publicly declare that although he will remain the Republican nominee he will resign immediately after taking his oath of office on Inauguration Day, leaving his more-popular running mate, Mike Pence, to succeed him as president.

In this way, Republicans can effectively replace Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket, without having to endure the logistical and legal turmoil of formally nominating a new standard-bearer less than a month before Election Day.
"Logistical and legal turmoil" meaning "impossibility," in this instance.
...Under the 20th Amendment, the newly elected president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20. A President-elect Trump could recite his oath of office and then immediately resign.
I think they should let Trump do the inaugural address first. Maybe even sit in the Oval Office awhile and give away some pens.

Fantasies like this aren't meant to convince. They're just symptoms of dissociation. Conservatives want the benefits of a Trump campaign (all those nice new Nazi frog voters and energized hillbillies!), but they want you to believe -- they want to believe -- that it has nothing to do with them, because they're in a tower above the fray, swaddled in nice, reasonable discourse.

Friday, October 07, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Fuck all this shit. Beasties.

•   I know it's been days since this Lionel Shriver's boo-hoo but I happened to see an interesting comment about it on Facebook and it encouraged me to look harder. Shriver, you may recall, was given rough treatment at some stupid Aussie literary conference, allegedly because she championed writing characters of different ethnicities than oneself. Shriver has the right to create such characters, of course, and people who think she shouldn't have it are indeed idiots; originally I was left wondering why she cared what people who were clearly beneath her contempt thought about that or anything else. But then someone published excerpts of what Shriver actually said. Turns out she thought she was already oppressed -- that is, that she suffered the kind of oppression that doesn't actually prohibit you from writing or publishing or doing anything, really, but makes you feel righteously politically incorrect -- a feeling one gets from reading lookit-the-silly-college-stoonts stories in the Daily Mail. Jim C. Hines:
...Shriver presents the example of a party at Bowdoin College, wherein hosts were punished for passing out sombreros at a tequila-themed party. You can read more about that incident and form your own opinions. It’s interesting to note that this wasn’t an isolated incident at the school. “Last fall the school’s sailing team hosted a ‘gangster’ party where attendees were encouraged to wear stereotypical black clothing and accessories,” and “In the fall of 2014, Bowdoin’s lacrosse team held what was billed as a ‘Cracksgiving’ party that featured students wearing Native American garb..."
In other words, it sounds like the kids at Bowdoin were behaving, not like brave free-speech warriors, but like assholes, and the school regulated -- a questionable decision, maybe, but not the coming of the Fourth Reich. Oh, Shriver wasn't done with her catalogue of censorship yet: "At the American Music Awards 2013," she told the crowd, "Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha." And now she's in a concentration camp. Kidding! She remains one of America's richest and best-loved recording artists. But she, too, has known the oppression of not having everyone love her all the time.

Just before the Hines section I quoted, he said something that should go on a sampler or on the entablature of a building:
Look, if you’re going to claim you’re not allowed to write a certain type of fiction, you need to back that up.
And the Facebook comment I mentioned began thus:
Why do I always have to dig down five links to find an article that will actually tell me what the original offense was amidst some long list of grievances for these stories?
For the same reason that Rod Dreher's tales of homosexual tyranny always comprise thousands of waste-words and sputters, underneath which is usually buried a tiny noppression, e.g. someone saying curse words at a bigot: Because if people knew what such people were actually so worked up about, they'd never stop laughing.

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

HILLBILLY SNOWFLAKES.

Rod Dreher, who thinks a professor saying "Fuck you, asshole" to an anti-gay colleague is "Leninist and Stalinist," also thinks some effete writer-fella portraying Mike Pence as a rube in The New Yorker is a good reason to vote for Trump:
Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the [New Yorker] editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.
Have I got news for Dreher! "Li'l Abner," "Snuffy Smith," Them Hillbillies Are Mountain Williams Now, The Beverly Hillbillies -- it's been going on for decades! And some hillbilly jokes have even grosser punchlines, too ("Get off'n me, diddy, yer bustin' mah cigarettes!"). It's a holocaust, culture-war wise.

One thing I always thought about country folk, though, was that they were tough, and that they gave us city slickers as good as they got in the humor department. But that was before such as Dreher became their spokes-snowflakes. (On second thought, let's not blame the honest Tobies of the hinterlands for Dreher's conniption fits -- I'm sure most of them have never heard of Dreher, which is just as it should be; much of the time I wish I'd never heard of him either.)

UPDATE. Speaking of snowflakes, wingnut blowhard and Congressional sore loser Allen West was slated to speak at St. Louis University and, as part of his pre-show publicity, told his followers "Folks, I’ve just been CENSORED" because his operatives "were not allowed to use the words 'radical Islam' on any advertisements for the event." And isn't that what John Peter Zenger fought for -- the right to control collateral materials for his upcoming speaking engagements at a private college? West further raved:
I along with the [Young America's Foundation] activists will not back down from this challenge. And if this is just a case of ill-conceived political correctness, we’ll rectify that. But, if this is a case of the influence of stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organizations such as the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you will be exposed. And I recommend to the President of St. Louis University, you do not want it known that a radical Islamic organization is dictating speakers on your campus — that is not the type of PR you really want.
To recap: Because his hosts won't have "radical Islam" on the flyers for his speech, West accused its Muslim student association of "jihad" and threatened to denounce SLU as enablers thereof. In West's world of perpetual grievance that's what fills seats -- and also empties them, it would seem, because when it came time for West to speak a huge segment of the audience walked out.

Try to imagine how someone with an ounce of wit or class would have responded to that; a humble "well-played" is the least you might expect. But this sputtering I'm not the snowflake, you're the snowflake! response at Right Wing News is typical:
The students were members of the SLU Rainbow Alliance and the Muslim Student’s Association. Now let’s remember these are the Lefty folks who preach tolerance of other perspectives to all of us. And now look at them acting like immature children plugging their delicate ears with their sticky little fingers so they don’t have to hear the horrifying fact that not everyone, gasp, agrees with them! Good thing they left the venue. They probably had to be checked into the children’s program and go do some crafts and drink apple juice.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The true definition of "political correctness" is "someone refused to endorse my racist bullshit."

(Since SLU is a Jesuit school, I expect this will eventually be portrayed as part of Tim Kaine's Jebbie treason.)

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

THE LAST OF THE NEVERTRUMPS.

Peter Spiliakos at National Review:
I can’t have contempt for Trump supporters as a group. Some — Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich, for example — are contemptible, but they were that way when Trump was just a game-show host. I know and respect many Trump supporters in my personal life, and I know several of the authors in the Scholars and Writers for Trump group...
Scholars and Writers -- you mean these numbnuts? Bill Bennett? Roger L. Simon? Thomas Lifson, the biggest dummy at American Thinker? This is like saying, "Martin Shkreli's kind of a dick, but that Bernie Madoff, he's so mild-mannered."

Anyway, Spiliakos' shtick is Come Let Us Wingnut Together:
It isn’t clear that Trump has the slightest interest in the principles of American government — whether it is his desire to “open up” libel laws so that he can legally persecute his critics or his offhand suggestion that he would implement national stop-and-frisk policing despite a total lack of presidential authority to do any such thing. Trump’s only consistent principle is to do and say whatever is best for Trump in the moment. He is a demagogue.

But that does not, by itself, make the case against Trump. He is a demagogue, but he might be our demagogue.
Blink. Blink.
Let us remember the weaponization of the IRS by the Obama administration, and that the famous Citizens United case was about the government trying to prevent the release of a film that was critical of Hillary Clinton.
You mean when Tea Party operatives portrayed themselves as humble pastors of the Constitution, and propagandists portrayed themselves as artists, and they all got away with it?
Clinton is also a demagogue, who dismisses Trump supporters as “deplorables” and Bernie Sanders supporters as deluded, mom’s-basement-dwelling losers.
i.e.: Clinton referred ingraciously to racist nuts and Nazi frogs and, despite Spiliakos' debunked bullshit, with sympathy to the Sanderistas. She's just like Mussolini!
If we are reduced to a choice between two demagogues, each contemptuous of the rule of law, it might make sense to pick the one that is on our side.
I'm guessing even some National Review readers are looking at this and thinking, "Last weekend Donald Trump tweeted through the night about how Miss Universe is a whore because she sassed him back."
Except that Trump is not on our side. Trump is on Trump’s side...
C'mon, dude, shit or get off the pot.
This still leaves the argument that, even if Trump is a demagogue, and is unreliable, he is still better than Clinton. This is a strong argument...
Now I'm thinking: what's the market for this? Even in wingnut world is there anyone who would hang on the spectacle of Spiliakos mooning like a maiden in a melodrama over the simian figure of Trump? Eventually he tells us his plan is to "write in someone's name," and then huddle for warmth with his fellow conservatives:
...But if Trump wins, his principled critics and his principled supporters should work together to help him when he is right and oppose him when he is wrong.
(Last coherent thought as his body and everything within hundreds of miles turns to ash) "Well, we tried."
If Trump loses, those same groups should work together to build a post-Trump Right that addresses the concerns of Trump’s working-class supporters and earns the votes of persuadable Americans who could not be persuaded to vote for Trump.
"Gather round, boys, have some snuff! Or chaw if you prefer. Don't crowd, now, stand well back. You like wrestling, don't you? Well, our new candidate Son of the Undertaker is going to body-slam the deficit with STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING AHHH IT HURTS AHHHHHHH"
Whatever happens, we should recognize one another as friends divided by prudential differences in difficult circumstances. Whatever happens, we should reconcile on the basis of our shared principles — because whatever happens, we will share the same fate.
(Picks up papers from podium, waits for applause; hears instead in the distance the feral children from A Canticle for Liebowitz screaming "EAT! EAT!"; ceiling collapses.) A short life, but a merry one!

Monday, October 03, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about another fun-filled week on the trail with Trump, including post-debate spin, his obsession with the insolent Miss Universe, his bizarre suggestion that Hillary Clinton cheated on her husband, and the New York Times Trump tax story. It's a feast, jump in.

Friday, September 30, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Current mood.

•   Last Friday I mentioned a long-distance diagnosis of the allegedly dying Hillary Clinton by one John R. Coppedge, M.D., of Texas, every bit as ridiculous as previous long-distance diagnoses of Barack Obama I'd seen in crappy wingnut sites, but in this case published by the respectable D.C. tipsheet The Hill. Well, now look what The Hill is cooking:
Clinton’s sixth nerve palsy: What difference does it make?
By Zev Shulkin, contributor
This put in mind of Daniel Plainview crying "I am the Third Revelation!" The Sixth Nerve Palsy hath oped the Seventh Seal! Shulkin, "an ophthalmologist in Dallas, Texas," saw Clinton on the TV in 2013 when "Clinton appeared before Congress with thick glasses" and noticed "the left lens of Hillary’s glasses appeared hazy and a close-up of her black frames revealed a sticker with vertical lines. That sticker is commonly used to manage diplopia or double vision," leading Shulkin to "surmise from looking at the direction of the lines on Hillary’s glasses, that Clinton developed a sixth cranial nerve paralysis or palsy as the result of her fall" that year. No wonder she did so badly in the debate on Monday! Next week: The Hill finds a guy who can do EKGs with his personal Mind-Ray (patent pending).

•   Here's a screenshot of what appears at the top of disqus' alicublog comments section when I go to it:

I realize these come-ons are to a great extent tailored to me, or rather to an algorithm's idea of me and my interests based on what my internet usage reveals -- mainly that I'm an old white man who visits a lot of rightwing sites. I include this because it suggests, in its poetic way, the reason why Trump and his enablers are hammering on about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. People say Trump's obsessed with her and maybe out of control but -- at the risk of sounding like my more Scott Adams-ish friends who think everything Trump does is 12-D chess -- I think his logic is more like the logic of this advertising: That old guys like me are susceptible to the cheesiest, most LCD appeals, especially when it comes to women, and would be swayed by a story about this hot chick who acts all la-de-da and deserving of respect but she's really not because she was in a porn film -- well, okay, just Playboy magazine and a reality show, but don't worry, we'll find the good stuff if we keep looking! In other words Trump and his people, like the people behind this advertising, have a very low opinion of us, and offer us the opportunity to confirm it by electing him.  I think this is closer to the mark than most of the essays about what sub-classification of authoritarian Trump is.

•   Time for one more -- how about this doof from The Federalist? He's sort of Reform MRA -- that is, he accepts all the men-want-polygamy, women-want-hypergamy, alpha-males-get-all-the-trim red pill guff, a la:
If a man’s social status in its various incarnations plays a prominent role in his attractiveness to women, then a man’s promiscuity indicates that many women have recognized his social status. This effectively raises his standing further...
...but rather than portray this knowledge as secret wisdom with which dorks can get laid, he argues for the Restoration of Virtue, because he's moral, see, and thinks it's terrible that Young People Today are having sex, and assumes it's all very sad sex on account of a book he read, but doesn't like the implication that the girls are the "victims" of this very sad sex. In fact, he clearly thinks what's needed is more female victims:
In other words, any mutually beneficial bargain would have to restore chastity, slut-shaming, and early marriage while ending no-fault divorce... 
In the absence of the civilizing power of marriage and family and the virtue of chastity that facilitates it, it girls will always choose those boys to pursue, and the cycle will only ramp up as long as society overlooks this antisocial behavior of the girls because sensible people are afraid of being labeled misogynists for calling it out. 
If we want this ugly situation to change, then demanding more from boys while simultaneously disincentivising them from offering more is a losing proposition. The only viable time-tested option is to reverse course and begin recovering what we, as a society, have lost. 
We need to begin respecting men again. We need to recover the virtue of chastity even if it happens to make a slut feel ashamed...
Ugh. I never thought I'd say this, but at least the straight-up MRA guys seem like they're capable of enjoying themselves.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

IT'S SO NICE TO HAVE YOU BACK WHERE YOU BELONG.

Here's more evidence that Jonah Goldberg may be slowly coming out of his Trump funk. Who else in American letters would, in attempting to explain the power of (urgh) "narrative," come up with a passage like this -- not to mention leave it in:
President Obama understands this too. Just consider the way he talks about terrorism — often reassuring Americans that they’re more likely to die in a bathtub accident than in a terror attack.

And he’s right.

On the other hand, bathtubs aren’t trying to get nuclear weapons. Nor are bathtubs destabilizing the Middle East (often killing massive numbers of non-Americans) or otherwise plotting to conquer the world.
Thought experiment! There's a tornado coming! And your only hope of shelter is a local mosque! Sure, in a tornado you could get smashed like a mosquito -- but the Koran says you're a dhimmi, and in a room full of Muslims there's gotta be one who's gonna wanna dhimmi you up! At least the tornado has no ideology! What to do?

To be fair, Goldberg is trying to make a point about how narratives can be deceiving:
I’m not naive. Crafting stories to serve political purposes is as old as politics itself. But the problem seems to be getting worse.

Perhaps it’s because our country is so polarized and our media environment so balkanized and instantaneous. Politicians and journalists alike feel compelled to make facts serve some larger tale in every utterance.
You can take it from the author of Liberal Fascism! Ah, Jonah, it's been too long.

Monday, September 26, 2016

DEBATE ONE.

When he started sniffling it all suddenly made sense: The stream of consciousness. The inability to stop talking even when he had clearly run out of things to say. The ground chuck facial coloring. I understood why they came up with the whole shtick about how he never touched alcohol -- it was like Hitler and meth! Or Muskie and Ibogaine! And it doesn't even seem to be good shit -- it's like his handlers skimmed it and cut his share with baby laxative. Well, serves him right.

She was stiff and slow, and he made no sense to me whatsoever. As usual. Who knows what Mr. and Mrs. America think?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Presidential debate prep -- that is, rightbloggers trying to prepare Americans for the idea that facts are bullshit and it's just the exhilarating hatred Trump makes you feel that matters.  I used last week's ridiculous fist-shaking over Samantha Bee as an objective correlative, but I could have picked any of several dozen equally stupid controversies, including Zack Galifianaki's “Between Two Ferns” interview with Hillary Clinton, much in the manner of the one he did with Obama that enraged rightbloggers in 2014. The effects of the Hillary int were similar. Take Nick Gillespie of Reason, for example: “‘Between Two Ferns’ is a comedy bit, so nobody's expecting anything remotely tough,” he said in a brief moment of clarity, before lapsing into “but for it to actually be funny there's need to some edge…” Libertarianism and culture war -- the worst of both worlds! Others, like The Liberty Beacon, seemed not to know what they were looking at (“Hillary Furious after Comedian makes her Look Ridiculous in Interview!… Comedy and sarcasm have never been so poignant”).

Or I could have used the opening of the new Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which inspired Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media to list “Exhibits You Won’t Find in the New National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Among these: “Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing, plagiarism, and communist advisers,” “Unpatriotic black sports figures,” “The Democratic Party’s history of slavery,” etc.  In a follow-up, Kincaid answered the common charge that slaves built the White House by pointing out that in the War of 1812, slaves helped burn it down, so really it all evens out.

In any event, I have to say I'm in some sympathy with the debate commission's Janet Brown and her much-derided comment on big facts and little facts. Whatever the moderators might do to keep things honest, wingnuts will litigate the hell out of it -- like they did in 2012 with Candy Crowley, whose fact-check on Romney they continue to blame for his defeat -- in fact, their butthurt over that led to the GOP debate reforms that, one might argue, led to the nomination of Trump. So Brown's in a tough spot. This is what happens when you're forced to do business with shitheels. Here's hoping the voters have not ceased to recognize such people for what they are -- and, if they do, revile rather than identify with them.

Friday, September 23, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


This guy will be among the many acts at the Sounds of Freedom kickoff
for the Museum of African-American History and Culture this weekend.
Fun, ain't it?

•  You may recall in the column recently I reviewed rightwing distance-diagnoses of Hillary Clinton. There's a new bit, in (get this) The Hill by one John R. Coppedge, a politically-active "general surgeon from Texas" who saw Hitlery on the teevee and has determined that she has a condition known to the medical community as Questions Remain Brain Damage Vote Trump. I have never noticed anything particularly weird about her eyes, myself, but the video freeze-frame at the top of the story looked alarming. Turned out it was from a Conan O'Brien skit.
In 2014 Conan O'Brien did a spoof of Hillary Clinton's interview with Diane Sawyer about her lack of lingering health issues following her 2012 concussion. In an obviously photoshopped version Clinton's eyes are made to oscillate crazily. 
It was a very funny piece. Now, it may not seem so funny.
Then he links to one of those look-at-these-milliseconds-of-speech-in-super-slow-motion videos beloved of internet detectives. Why didn't The Hill put that at the top of the article, given that it was offered as evidence by the good doctor, instead of the skit? I think I can guess: Fronting this very serious analysis with the sort of thing your crazy Uncle Earl posts on Facebook would make it look unserious; a glossy fake is more in line with the appeal they're hoping to achieve -- maybe some viewers will come away thinking Hillary's eyes actually did that in a news interview. And that feller who showed it? He was a doctor! Ha, libtards, now who's anti-science? I tremble when I consider that we may have only the thinking people of America behind us.

•  It has been suggested to me that this thing by The Federalist's Daniel Payne about Hillary Clinton on Zack Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns webshow -- called "Zach Galifianakis Had A Responsibility To Challenge Hillary. He Failed" -- is a satire of the hard time Jimmy Fallon got over Trump. I disagree, for three reasons:
  1. Satire is funny.
  2. Rage at popular entertainers is a Pillar of Conservatism, and the bretrhen have flipped out over Between Two Ferns in the past.
  3. I've read Payne's stuff before -- including his attack on the socialism of school lunches, and "Girl Scout Cookies Prove We Need To End Child Labor Laws" -- and I have to say that if his whole career isn't a satire, none of it is.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

BY ANY OTHER NAME.

Damon Linker at The Week thinks we social-justice sissies are unfair to Trump voters, imagining them "motivated by bigotry, fear, and selfishness, all of which makes them angry that various outsiders are threatening to take away their abundant 'privileges.'" We've got them all wrong, he says -- what these people are is nationalists, and as Linker explains it they're not so bad:
But the real problem with the way [Vox's Zack] Beauchamp and so many others on the center-left talk about those on the nationalist right is that it displays outright contempt for particularistic instincts that are not and should not be considered morally and politically beyond the pale.
Wait. "Particularistic"? That's a new one.
On the contrary, a very good case can be made that these instincts are natural to human beings and even coeval with political life as such — and that it is the universalistic cosmopolitanism of humanitarian liberalism (or progressivism) that, as much as anything, has provoked the right-wing backlash in the first place.
Linker uses "humanitarian" or "humanitarianism" seven times in the same negative way. So, it would seem, "particularism" is the opposite of "humanitarianism," hence the backlash. But what's wrong with humanitarianism? In my day, a humanitarian was Albert Schweitzer, or the winners of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars like Jerry Lewis, Debbie Reynolds, Danny Kaye, et alia.

Apparently Trump supporters find something obnoxious about humanitarianism, and want particularism instead. But what is it? Let's find out!
Underlying liberal denigration of the new nationalism — the tendency of progressives to describe it as nothing but "racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia" — is the desire to delegitimize any particularistic attachment or form of solidarity, be it national, linguistic, religious, territorial, or ethnic.
Ah, "particularistic"! So, it could be a particular love of country, rather than love of the family of man; love particularly of English-speaking people, rather than non-English-speaking-people; love of your particular vale or holler, rather than anywhere else; and love of your particular ethnicity, rather than... other ethnicities.

Yeah, that last bit -- here in the real world (as opposed to punditland), we've all met people who'll explain why they feel that way, and that's pretty much where that form of "particularism," usually known by grosser names, gets its exceedingly bad rap. But Linker can't get why that should be:
If people gave up their particular attachments easily, conceding their moral illegitimacy, that might be a sign that the humanitarian ideal is justified — that human history is indeed oriented toward a universalistic goal beyond nations and other forms of local solidarity. But experience tells us something else entirely. The more that forms of political, moral, economic, and legal universalism spread around the globe, the more they inspire a reaction in the name of the opposite ideals. The Western world is living through just such a reaction right now.
This was much better explained by Lorraine Hansberry in A Raisin in the Sun, when Lindner offers the Youngers a deal to not to move into his similarly particular neighborhood.
LINDNER: Well, I want to give you the exact terms of the financial arrangement—
WALTER: We don't want to hear no exact term of no arrangements. I want to know if you got any more to tell us ‘bout getting together?
LINDNER (taking off his glasses): Well—I don’t suppose that you feel. . .
WALTER: Never mind how I feel—you got any more to say ‘bout how people ought to sit down and talk to each other? . . . Get out of my house, man. (He turns his back and walks to the door.)
LINDNER (looking around at the hostile faces and reaching and assembling his hat and briefcase): Well—I don't understand why you people are reacting this way. What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren't wanted and where some elements—well—people can get awful worked up when the feel that their whole way of life and everything they've ever worked for is threatened.
WALTER: Get out.
LINDNER (at the door, holding a small card): Well—I'm sorry it went like this.
WALTER Get out.
LINDNER (almost sadly regarding WALTER) You can’t just force people to change their hearts, son.
Call it "particularism" or whatever else you like, guy. We see you.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

A SOUNDING BRASS AND A TINKLING CYMBAL.

Remember when National Review did that NeverTrump thing and they included Erick Erickson, which was weird because he admitted straight up "I would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton," but he said some bad things about Trump and was wingnut-famous so okay? At his own site The Resurgent, Erickson now has video of himself talking to some fellow Christians about Trump. In the accompanying text Erickson tells readers,
My position is that if you want to vote for Trump, go for it. But Christians should not be actively, publicly supporting Trump.
In the video, he says:
I do think Christians in America, particularly those of us who have platforms, should not be supporting Donald Trump openly, because I think it’s harmful to our witness... 
If we are in the public square advocating for someone like that, what good are we as Christians to say we believe in the inerrancy of scripture?
Now, me, I look at this and think: So you don't want to be associated with Trump, because it doesn't look good, but you're cool with Trumping on the down-low, and possibly putting your fellow countrymen at the mercy of this yutz? And people wonder why their Jesus Fish bumper stickers aren't getting them so much respect anymore.

I'll leave the rest to djw at LGM, who looks upon that other prominent rightwing Christer Rod Dreher -- who denounced Pope Francis for an attitude toward refugees that, back before the faith got overrun by Ericksons and Drehers, was considered Christian -- and saith the sooth:
As you let that sink in, keep in mind two things. First, this statement is written by a man who has spent much of the last several years trying very hard to convince anyone who’ll listen that it’s contemporary liberals who’ve become an unprecedented threat to religious freedom. Second, as recently as just a few months ago Dreher routinely expressed horror and dismay at the rise of Trump, and what that rise meant for conservatism, and how evangelical acquiescence to Trumpism was evidence of a deep sickness in American Christianity and the Conservative movement. Watching Dreher, predictably, come home, it occurs to me that perhaps Trumpism is best understood not so much a betrayal or failure of politicized evangelicalism, but a return to its 1970’s roots.

Monday, September 19, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's claim that, birther-wise, it was Hillary all along, and the brethren's rush to go "that's right, boss, I seen it with my own eyes." Give 'em credit: at least they shovel shit snappier than Chris Christie.

One thing that struck me as I paged through my scrapbook of birtherism bullshit was how closely the Trump of today resembles the Trump of 2011. Get this, from Mediaite five years ago:
 “I always give my credentials," [Trump] told Rivera, "I like to give credentials. I’m a really smart guy. I’ve always been a really smart guy," noting that he had [gone] to "one of the best" schools in the world, apropos of nothing.
We actually thought Trump's reflexive solipsism was weird once upon a time! Ah, young and innocent days.

Among the outtakes: Not wanting to clutter it up too much, I didn't mention that among the "proof" rightbloggers, and the Trump campaign itself, are offering of Hillary's Real Birtherism is the long-available Mark Penn memo to the Clinton 2008 campaign, which mainly portrays Obama’s cosmopolitanism as a Clinton competitive advantage (“not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values”), explicitly stipulates that “we are never going to say anything about his background,” and never claims he was born outside the U.S.

For obvious reasons, rightbloggers are trying to portray this slightly sleazy tactic as birtherism. For example, The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro applauds Trump for his “Trolling Master Class” and judged his Hillary birther claim “at least partially true.” In evidence of this, he cites a report by colleague John Nolte, called "Hillary Invented Birtherism: 11 Things the Media Won't Tell You." (Spoiler: "The Media" already told you, and they show no such thing.)

Nolte also alludes to Clinton’s “questioning [Obama] ‘lack of American roots,’ her focusing on Obama's exotic ‘foreignness’” — which is a little closer to the truth. It’s also closer to Ben Shapiro in 2011, when he called Obama “a member of the same global community that despises America and tolerates Islamism, that slams American consumerism and praises Chinese communism, that rips evangelical Christianity while ignoring Muslim-imposed clitorectomy” — which, he said, was why “Americans are desperately seeking an answer to a simple question: why does President Obama appear to be so un-American?"

I guess, by the Hillary standard, Ben Shapiro qualifies as a birther, too -- which is awkward for him, since it's just gone out of fashion!

Friday, September 16, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Luscious Jackson got in my head this week and hasn't left.
Not complaining.

•   The New York Times has a story on Vladimir Putin's drive to make the Russian Orthodox Church into, as one observer puts it, "an instrument of the Russian state." The Church's shock troops are medieval in outlook -- one of its bishops "warned worshipers that new biometric passports, required by the European Union in return for visa-free access to Europe, were 'satanic' because they contained a 13-digit number" -- and of course favor the persecution of homosexuals, as Putin does. This gives Rod Dreher yet another opportunity to tell us how he really feels about secularism and its inferiority to the Every Knee Shall Bend model of governance. While he claims "it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy," nonetheless...
...as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars... 
The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model? 
Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions...
I understand why Glenn Greenwald et alia object to what they see as the revival of a Red Scare in this country, but come on: At least people who sympathized with the old USSR thought they were trying to advance human liberation. Dreher sympathizes with today's Russia for the opposite reason.

•   Donald Trump recently attacked the Food & Drug Administration as the "food police." Who knows why he does what he does anymore, but it gave us a chance to hear some straight-up bull-goose looney libertarianism from Nick Gillespie of Reason:
You get rid of "official" food inspectors and you know what will happen? To the extent that customers demand any sort of certification beyond public reputation, private-sector and nonprofit groups will be created to provide this or that level of inspection. We see that already with kosher and halal food prep, of course, not to mention other sorts of watchdog groups (think Fair Trade coffee and the like). Yelp or some other rating system would likely add some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-style process as well.
The yelpification of food poisoning! I can't put it any better than Kia on Twitter: "I would have given these diet pills one star but I am dead."

Jonah Goldberg complains about the obstreperous black guy who is interfering with his mild interest in football ("entertainment more than passion," Jesus Christ is everything about this guy terrible?). His premise is that "particularly among men, sports talk is a kind of safe space and common tongue all at once" and politics isn't supposed to interfere. He quotes and comments on a 2003 E.J. Dionne column:
And then [Dionne] added: “Politicizing everything from literature to music to painting and sports was once a habit of the left. The Communist Party’s now-defunct newspaper once had a sports column called ‘Out in Left Field.’ Now, it’s the turn of the right to politicize everything.”

I’m not sure that was entirely true then, but it’s definitely not true now.
Oh yeah? We need not get into the wider world of wingnut culture war here -- just remember that from 2011 until someone wised up, National Review ran a sports blog called "Right Field." This is from the inaugural post:
The facts of life are conservative, and in no sphere is that truism more manifest than in the world of sport. In the games we play, the same rules are meant to apply to all — and we are outraged at the injustice when they are not. There are winners and losers, and we don’t agonize over the self-esteem of those who do not prevail: We expect them to learn from defeat and improve...
Yuk. To this day we have conservatives like Matt K. Lewis claiming that sports blogs are "dominated by liberals" because no one wants to hear wingnuts snarling about political correctness instead of keeping their eye on the ball. (Yes, like every other thinking person in America I know about today's David Brooks column and his strange conviction that black people will be moved to reconsider their sports protests because they might make bigots mad and his Thanksgivings harder to enjoy, but by claiming conservatives don't go in for this sort of thing, Goldberg has effectively out-stupided even him. There can be only one!)

Thursday, September 15, 2016

FRENCHIE NEEDS A SAFE SPACE.

With Jonah Goldberg in a parlous state, David French is charging hard in the paint for the honor of being National Review's biggest dumbass. Earlier today I thought he'd outdone himself with this post, in which he discovered a study finding more self-identified conservatives among millennials than heretofore suspected and, despite having written umpteen articles about what little liberal shits Millennials are -- e.g., "Blame Parents for Millennials’ Laughable Fragility," "A Note to Entitled Millennials in the Workplace: Give Humility a Try," "Do Millenials Dislike Capitalism Because It’s Not a Safe Space?" and so on -- suddenly declared the kids are all rightwing; in fact, despite what he'd been writing for years, French claimed he'd been seeing this New Trend for years:
But roughly five years ago, I began to sense a change in the wind. I was encountering not one or two truly counter-cultural students but entire roomfuls of young conservatives who were openly disdainful of the dominant social trends in their peer group. Where their peers demanded participation trophies, these kids threw them in the trash. Where their peers dismissed traditional social conventions, these kids (particularly in the South) were reviving the use of “sir” and “ma’am” in conversations with elders...
And these New Millennials will "sir" and "ma'am" our great country back into its pre-homosexual greatness:  "...this new counter-revolution is ultimately built on devotion to God, enthusiasm for our nation’s founding principles, a healthy respect for tradition and our nation’s most valuable cultural institutions, and hard work. This revolution won’t be televised, but it will be on Snapchat..."

Gag. But I looked again tonight and, amazingly, French has topped himself. Get a load:
Free Speech Is Killing Free Speech
Has he changed his mind about Citizens United? I wondered. Ha, j/k -- that kind of free speech is great. But when the NBA moves the All-Star Game because it doesn't support North Carolina's anti-anti-discrimination laws, that's double plus ungood free speech. It's bullying! It's both micro and macroaggressive!
Increasingly, Americans are using their right to free speech to destroy free speech. Rather than seeking to inform, they intimidate. Rather than seeking to persuade, they publicly shame... 
It seems odd, given the widespread trolling on social media, to assert that America’s culture of free speech is under threat, but the cumulative effect of shame campaigns and intimidation strategies is that millions of people simply flee the field, leaving the battle to the most extreme voices or to those people who’ve slowly developed the thick skins necessary to maintain a public presence...
And God forbid people like French should have to develop thick skins -- that's for libtards like Katie Couric, who should roll with his punches as God intended. Just as French turned on a dime to declare Millennials soldiers of Christ, so he's flipped on the much-derided concept of a safe space; it's great, he's now decided, so long as he's the one safely spaced.

UPDATE. Comments are (as always) well worth your time, Mr. and Mrs. Blog Consumer. trex does us the favor of noticing that back in 2015, before he got the PC bug, French was all for offensive speech that cut a certain way, e.g.:
In 2007 San Francisco State University put its chapter of the College Republicans on trial for desecrating the name of Allah. At an anti-terrorism rally, members of the College Republicans stomped on paper representations of the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which contain the name “Allah” written in Arabic script. Bear in mind, this is a school where activists routinely burn or otherwise desecrate the American flag. Students charged the College Republicans with “attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of incivility.” 
At the time, I worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, and we filed suit, seeking an injunction against California State University–system policies that mandated “civility” and prohibited conduct that was “inconsistent” with the university’s “goals, principles, and policies.”
Which would be fine, albeit assholish, if French weren't now bitching that the spectacle of liberals boycotting Chick-fil-a is "progressive bullying" and diving into his den of coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I saw this Yahoo headline...
Trump campaign brings on A.J. Delgado as a senior adviser
...and thought, oh no -- not our A.J. Delgado! I first noticed her in 2012 when Breitbart.com pimped her culture-war book called, I swear to Christ, "Hip to Be Square: Why It's Cool to Be a Conservative." This repurposed press release tipped us to some of Delgado's hipsquare proof points: "An analysis of three 'South Park' episodes blasting the Left," "'The Lord of the Rings' and its conservative message," "Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bob Dylan defending Israel," etc. When I made fun of her about it, she came to alicublog to say I'd proven her point "about the general nasty tone of liberals these days."

I should have known then that Delgado was a rising star of her movement. She got picked up by National Review, for which she produced a bunch of Kulturkampf crap -- for example, a review of a film about Jim Jones and the People's Temple in which she asked the crucial question, "Does the film represent the truth — i.e., Jones’s leftism?" and decided it had because in some scenes Jones "bemoans issues at the top of any leftist’s top-gripes list: 'poverty, violence, greed, and racism.'" And what conservative would think those were bad things?

For National Review Delgado also did a screed against Nicki Minaj with lines like "gents might need a cigarette after watching the video," "How is this even sexy, rather than sad, desperate, and repulsive?" "This openly sexual, anything-goes mentality may have taken off several years ago, with Katy Perry’s 'I Kissed a Girl,'" "Beyonce, who once profited off her good-girl image, buried that persona last year under half-naked magazine covers," etc. Pitchfork really missed the boat on this one.

Delgado tried her hand at bullshit libertarianism, too, with "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police," presumably to give herself plausible deniability in case that Libertarian Moment thing that was going around took off. It didn't, of course, and now Delgado is with Trumpbart, where she is peddled as Trump's "Latina" advisor, e.g. "A.J. Delgado: Why this Latina is for Trump." She's also involved with Trump's female-voter outreach and was front-and-center for the unveiling of Trump's maternity-leave scheme -- which would be awkward if anyone knew what she was saying about maternity leave a few years ago.

But it doesn't really matter -- Trump's plan is just another grift, as is Delgado's support for it. And Trumpbart is just another place for for junior wingnuts to earn their stripes. Well, as those stressed-out-looking birds on The Flintstones used to say, it's a living.

Monday, September 12, 2016

RABID.

Let's see what's on at National Review's front page. Their top five stories:
Hillary’s Health — Let’s Talk about the Facts
Hillary Clinton, Allergic to Transparency

The Most Ridiculous Reactions to Hillary Clinton’s Fainting
  
(Spoiler: The "ridiculous reactions" are the ones suggesting she's not about to die)
Hillary Can’t Afford a Repeat of Sunday Morning’s Health Issue

The Historical Amnesia about Hillary’s Health
Notice a pattern? Rather than wade through each of these pieces of shit, let's take one equally emblematic example at Commentary by Jonathan S. Tobin. He starts with some phumphery about how the health problems of Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy demand Clinton's pneumonia "be treated with the greatest seriousness." But he knows he can't keep that up -- even Commentary readers have gag reflexes -- so he tries some more reliable shtick. For example, how about the old Questions Remain?
While most serious people dismissed the rumors about Clinton’s health that were being circulated by Donald Trump’s supporters, what happened Sunday morning will deepen suspicions both about her health and whether her campaign has been telling the truth about it...
It's not that we serious people really think something's wrong, but it's leaving deep suspicions, you see, into which somebody might fall and hurt themselves, and whose fault will that be? Besides which, since we're always calling her a liar, you pretty much have to believe our crackpot theories about her:
On hot days, people can get dehydrated standing around under the sun. But for Clinton to falter in this manner undermines her campaign’s preferred narrative, which characterizes all questions about her health as smears. And if people are prepared to believe the worst about Clinton’s health, it’s due in part to her consistently lying about matters such as her email scandal and the conflicts of interest involving the Clinton Foundation...
Guess they've left off #Benghazi for good. Eventually Tobin gets relaxed enough that he can afford to admit, "up until now, Clinton has actually been far more forthcoming about her health than Trump." Sure, why shouldn't he? After all, it doesn't matter, because she could be as transparent as The Visible Woman and it wouldn't make any difference:
It is no longer possible for her to refuse to give us more until Trump is equally forthcoming. Clinton must now come completely clean with detailed medical reports and allow her doctors to be questioned by reporters with medical expertise. Given his age, Trump should do the same. As is the case with his tax returns, it’s doubtful that the billionaire will release a single document. But he’s not the one whose health is currently in question. [emphasis mine]
Trump literally phones in his interviews, he's observably obese, and his face looks like corned beef from a Blarney Stone steam table, but if he refuses to give us his health records, well, whattaya gonna do? That darn Trump! OK, lady, pee in this cup.

The brethren have entered that weird phase of nontroversy -- the blind spot between polls, where they know everyone's paying attention but they don't know how everyone's taking it. They do know, however, that since their target is Hillary Clinton, Villagers such as Cokie Roberts ("it has [Democrats] very nervously beginning to whisper about her stepping aside and finding another candidate") will happily give them some big paddles with which to stir the shit.

This explains the hysterical edge in their coverage; they feel that, if only they can stir violently enough, the resulting stink will awaken the masses.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' 9/11 and how it perked up when Hillary Clinton got sick. The revival of the wingnut trope that Hillary is too infirm to serve as President was almost as funny/sad as their pivot, once it was revealed that Clinton had pneumonia, to outrage that she had briefly concealed a temporary illness and thus made them all look like idiots. National Review's Rich Lowry, who earlier in the day had disputed Clinton's claims of dehydration ("It isn’t a particularly hot day in New York City today; in fact, it is gorgeous"), upon being informed of her illness sputtered:
Here’s hoping she gets well soon, but...
Ugh, that quick "but" says so much, doesn't it?
...1) not for the first time, a Clinton has made his or her supporters look silly -- they spent a lot of time and energy pooh-poohing the health concerns...
Sure, it was Hillary's people who looked silly.
...2) she was diagnosed on Friday -- when did she plan on letting everyone else know?
I wouldn't be surprised if she had loose stools sometime during her illness. Would Lowry like updates when these occur? Maybe they can send him samples. The rest of the brethren are doing what they can with it; the New York Post says her diagnosis "settles nothing" because OKAY BOYS BREAK OUT THE ALEX JONES SHIT AGAIN: "We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too..."

I guess these days, fed as they have been on a diet of crap pseudo-news for decades, wingnuts are sufficiently addicted to conspiracy theories that they'll read something like that and go, "It's just like the black helicopters -- my friends told me they weren't real but then I saw that Transformers movie..." But are there enough of them to win a national election?

UPDATE. Rod Dreher brings the porch-biddy perspective: "A new angle. That poor woman." (Ha ha, oh please.) "Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?" Earlier Dreher published one of his famous reader letters, in this case purportedly from a doctor:
It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you...

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.
It's like those "I never believed Reagan coins would cure my cancer until today" stories popular in wingnut media. Was Rod conned, or is he the con artist? Why not both?

UPDATE 2. That Dr. Vinnie Boombatz gets around! Like Dreher, Scott Johnson of Power Line also has an anonymous alleged doctor -- a "prominent internist" who, based on his study of YouTube videos, diagnoses possible "aspiration pneumonia," which is "commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease" -- both, as it happens, popular wingnut conspiracy theories. Dr. Boombatz ends by saying "someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records... Every voter should know what’s at stake," which is a curiously stark political pitch -- but I suspect Dr. Boombatz had some assistance from his scribe.

Friday, September 09, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Saw Television at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday; they were in pretty good shape. 
But they didn't play anything from Adventure, which I love.
So here's some of that.

•   Matt Lauer is getting pounded from several directions for aggressively questioning Hillary Clinton while failing to impede Trump's river of bullshit.  One such complaint comes from Jonathan Chait, who says that the problem is Lauer's false equivalence: "television personalities like Lauer... are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian..." At National Review Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke leaps on this; Chait has written against political correctness before, he informs us, and that the entertainment industry is full of liberals! Yyyeah, A. Normal Person might respond, so? What's that got to do with a lame journalist letting Donald Trump steamroll him? Because Matt Lauer is more widely seen than your average New Republic writer, says Cooke; hence he is pop culture, and since pop culture is you liberals' fault so is Matt Lauer:
Or, to put it another way: Most people aren’t reading “elite print news sources,” they’re watching mainstream television and going to the movies, and these sources are both teaching them what to think in ways that political-opinion magazines never will. 
Today, Chait is less “may or may not be unfair” and more “horrified.” Why? Well, because now he believes that pop culture — which is just as shallow and dumb as it’s always been; Lauer is no anomaly — is hurting him and his party. And we can’t have that!

Welcome to the club, comrade. 
Because Cooke has a British accent, some people may assume him cultivated, yet he lumps journalism in with "mainstream television" (as opposed to edgy, fringe television like The Five, I guess) and movies, just like your average dumbass culture warrior who takes it on faith that Field Marshall Chomsky Cloward-Piven Alinsky is conducting everything that appears before the public (except some brave truth-tellers like the staff of National Review) in one grand symphony of socialism, and that if one Liberal Cultural Agent does something that fails to advance the cause, all libtarddom is thrown into a tizzy, or at least will be when Charles TMI Cooke calls them out. How a grown man can get through life without apparently meeting an artist and understanding why he does what he does (hint: it's not on orders from Moscow), I can't guess; more evidence, I suppose, that these changelings are raised in vats and educated in Skinner Boxes before being sluiced into their editorial pens and wingnut sinecures.


• To some sad specimens of humanity, everything is politics. At The Federalist Rachel Lu gushes at first over the Minnesota State Fair, where she had the opportunity to display her vegetables, which make her proud if not eloquent ("My tomatillos were bursting with freshness, still wet with morning dew, and packed with the trademark tomatillo tang" -- sounds like a cigarette ad from the 50s) as well as some ornamental gourds, which won her a prize. But then, after the ceremonies, Lu is told that they throw away the exhibits and she can't have hers back. She has an extended fit, and finally reveals that this condition appeared in the rules of the competition, presented to her ahead of time; since she is a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility, this naturally cuts no ice with her:
I had read the rule book. My eyes had passed over those words. If I had back-checked all the numbers, I could have deduced that my display would be peremptorily confiscated against my will. I just made the ridiculous mistake of assuming the rules would make some sort of sense.
When it comes to entitlement, Lu makes Megan McArdle look like Albert Schweizer. But the best part is the inevitable connection of Lu's personal inconvenience with sociamalism:
As a conservative, I do feel a little foolish for having learned the hard way that bureaucratic rules are unreasonable. Hadn’t I read about the Sacketts and their fight with the Environmental Protection Agency? Did I need a personal one-on-one with Clive Bundy to get this?...

It could have been worse. I lost eight beautiful gourds that I grew with my own hands, and gained a salutary reminder that nothing lovely should voluntarily be delivered into the clutches of the state. When bureaucrats are involved, the rules will trump beauty, truth, and human feeling every time. Even at the Minnesota State Fair.
Maybe next year she'll start her own, privatized state fair, safe from the clutches of the collectivist Minnesota State Agricultural Society. The entry fees might be a little higher -- nothing good happens without a profit motive! -- but it'll be worth it because you won't have to follow rules that don't make sense (to Rachel Lu, anyway).

Thursday, September 08, 2016

GRADING ON THE CURVE.

Fuckin' Dreher, man. He's just too rich a subject. There's his post about Brown University providing free tampons in its unisex bathrooms -- which he finds an outrage ("virtue-signaling at its finest, from tomorrow’s generation of American elites") and closes with a link to a video of Putin laughing, no doubt because this is how great civilizations fall: by failing to require females pay for sanitary products, the way St. Paul intended. (The really creepy thing about that post is, Dreher doesn't even bother to explain why anyone should find such a modest change a threat to society -- it's like free tampons are ungodly or something.)

Anyway, today Dreher pimps a Peter Hitchens First Things essay about how sure, Putin is bad, but the Soviet Union was worse so shut up about Crimea. One of the sections Dreher quotes is particularly worthy of note:
A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre [in Moscow], is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.
Very poetic, but if the grass and trees were being fertilized by human bodies, wouldn't they be flourishing, not stunted and bad? I guess maybe their growth was actually suppressed by totalitarianism, in a sort of reverse miracle.


Anyway Dreher swallows this whole, and then tells us about some kid who played Pokemon Go in a Russian church and, under the enlightened reign of the current not-Soviet leaders, faces five years in prison for it. Dreher:
They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.
If only the Bolsheviks had possessed Pokemon Go, and expressed their barbarism by catching imaginary creatures instead of Christians!  Later, after (apparently) even Dreher's fans protested, he updates:
Since so many of you asked, I would not give this guy five years. I would not give him five weeks. I would give him five days, max. What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces.
Sacred spaces yes, safe spaces no!
It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.
Next time you read some of Dreher's "You will be made to care," "Law of unmerited possibilities" bullshit about how transgender Hitler is trying to curbstomp Christianity with the power of the State, keep this in mind.


Oh, and if you can take any more, get a load of Dreher's post on the author of Eat, Pray, Love leaving her husband for a woman, and this update:
In an earlier version of this post, I had some very caustic commentary about Gilbert’s words here. A friend and reader of this blog e-mailed me to point out that I was guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Gilbert had generously blurbed a book of mine, and in this reader’s view, I was wrong to be so nasty about this affair in her life...
I like to think the "friend and reader" was his agent.