Okay, so this may be a cheap shot … wait, no. Strike that. It is a cheap shot, but it’s also awesome.

Okay, seriously, Palin is a joke, and her supporters are laughably ignorant. It hardly needs saying, and isn’t some huge revelation.

That being said, it does point to a larger problem though, that there is great appeal in the modern political climate for oversimplification of issues, and for the idea that there are simple solutions to complicated problems. The appeal of this worldview is twofold.

First, of course, if there are easy solutions, then hey, we’re not that bad off! Drill, baby drill! Ignore the complications and context! Just do it! It’s easy!

Second, if there are easy solutions and your political opponents are not taking them, but are instead insisting on complicated trade-offs between competing values … well, it becomes much easier to believe that they’re not just mistaken but actually malevolent.

I think this POV is poison to democracy. It exists across the political spectrum, and (of course) there have been times historically when it concentrated on the left, but I think modern day it’s fair to say that it’s far more concentrated on the right.

It’s what lay behind tarring Al Gore and John Kerry as ‘eggheads.’ It’s what lead ‘policy wonk’ to become something of a slur, rather than the compliment it ought to be. It’s what lead pundits to wonder if Barack Obama might just be too smart for his own good¹. It’s the reason Glen ‘oligarhy’ Beck has a job. This surging anti-intellectualism, as I said, isn’t exactly new, but that doesn’t stop it from being worrisome.

EDIT: Steve Benen makes some great points on this very topic here, while riffing off of Ross Douthat’s recent column.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

1. Well, that and racism, I mean. (back)

A few choice quotes

What he was accused of is not only considered rape because she was underage, and not only because he gave her drugs and alcohol to set it up, but also because he did it while she was saying no and telling him to stop.

There’s nothing ambiguous about that.

That is an account of a rape.

And

This plea bargain was set up by the family and their attorneys because they saw no other way to protect this girl from a trial that would take away her anonymity and subject her to an endless media frenzy. They did not set up that plea bargain because they had any doubts about being able to prove her original charges. They set up the plea bargain because they saw a system that could not adequately protect this child, so they felt that they had no other choice but to compromise and settle for something less than justice.

In the way he always does, Jay lays things out incredibly clearly, and absolutely demolishes every single objection from Polanski’s supporters.

Basically, what it comes down to is that Jay Smooth is a badass and Roman Polanski is a jackass.

Oh, sorry, I meant rapist.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

I have conservative friends who argue that it’s unfair of the left to paint them all as a bunch of tea-party-attending, Glen-Beck-listening yahoos. They argue that conservatism has a rich intellectual foundation, and that by cherry picking their worst-sounding supporters, we willfully ignore the writers today who uphold that intellectual foundation.

Writers like the folks at The National Review.

Writers like John Derbyshire¹.

Why do I bring this up? Well, its just that as Faiz Shakir points out over at Think Progress, John Derbyshire went on Alan Colmes’ radio show yesterday and took a stand against female suffrage.

DERBYSHIRE: Among the hopes that I do not realistically nurse is the hope that female suffrage will be repealed. But I’ll say this – if it were to be, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.

COLMES: We’d be a better country if women didn’t vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Probably. Don’t you think so?

COLMES: No, I do not think so whatsoever.

DERBYSHIRE: Come on Alan. Come clean here [laughing].

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Okay, so that’s bad enough, but Alan Colmes, rightly gobsmacked by this, next asked

COLMES: What’s next, you want to bring back slavery?

DERBYSHIRE: No. No, I’m in favor of freedom, personally.

COLMES: But women shouldn’t have the freedom to vote?

DERBYSHIRE: Well, they didn’t and we got on along ok.

He goes on to argue against The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course.

Anyhow, all this illustrates two things for me.

First, it really perfectly encapsulates the strange sort of doublethink you see in conservative political philosophy all the time.

“We believe in individualism! (Just so long as you don’t have sex in ways we disapprove of.)”

“We believe in freedom! (As long as people who disagree with us are not allowed to vote.)”

“We believe in free speech! (But people who criticize the (Republican) president should watch their goddamn mouths.)”

You see this a lot in discussions about economics, where the argument is that government intervention and collective solutions are illegitimate (not just wrong, mind you), no matter how much of the electorate is in favor of them. You see it in the faux-troversies about President Obama’s legitimacy. You see it in Glenn Beck’s rhetoric about how ‘real Americans’ are opposed to President Obama, despite him having won the presidency by an overwhelming majority ². You see it in the analysis we hear every election about how “if it weren’t for the African-American vote, Democrats would be a permanent minority party³ ”

The central idea is this: If you disagree with them, you ought not be allowed to participate in the democratic process in the first place. I contrast this with the way the liberal ACLU operates, fighting for the free speech rights of white supremacists and the religious rights of fundamentalists, both groups who are not (to put it mildly) their ‘core constituency’.

‘Rights for all,’ versus ‘rights for the people who agree with me.’ That’s the difference.

Hell, John Derbyshire makes no bones about it! He says outright, “The conservative case against [female suffrage] is that women lean hard to the left.” That’s not an argument. That’s thuggery.

Anyhow, that’s the first thing I took from it.

The second thing I took away is that when people talk about the rich intellectual tradition of Conservatism, it’s guys like John Derbyshire they’re talking about, so … jeez … maybe they mean something different by ‘intellectual?’

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people

1. Who, as Andrew Sullivan ably documents, continues to believe that gay people are all child molesters. Or at least enough where we shouldn’t let them around our children, best to be safe, etc, etc, etc. (back)
2. And the Democrats having won both houses! (back)
3. Hey look, here’s an example or two from a while back. (back)

Via Boingboing, this is a great clip of an interview with Savana Redding, the girl who, at 13 years old, was illegally strip-searched by her school.

The money quote for me is when she says:

When I was a kid and they asked me to do this, I didn’t know that … y’know, that it was wrong. I didn’t know that I could say no.

She didn’t know that she could say no. Think about that.

Well, first off, she shouldn’t have had to say no. Women shouldn’t have to say ‘don’t rape me,’ either. No means no, but she didn’t even know it was an option, and she shouldn’t have had to. It’s not a child’s responsibility to remind an adult of what is ethical.

Second, the similarity of this language to the kind of language we hear from people who have experienced statutory rape or were molested underlines that this was a sexual violation, and (like statutory rape and child molestation) one premised on taking advantage of her age, inexperience, and deference to authority.

I’m sure that that’s not how the vice principal intended it, but it doesn’t matter what the intentions were. A crying 13 year old girl was humiliated by being forced to strip in front of adults.

It astounds me that anyone would even try to come up with a justification.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people (even people under 18).

As long as we’re discussing Libertarianism, I was struck today by a bit from one of Kevin Drum’s posts:

And the second piece of TV news? Something that’s close to my heart: broadcasters have promised Congress that by September they will have standards in place that prevent commercials from being wildly louder than the TV programs they’re embedded in. Hooray! It’s only taken them 40 years to finally address this. “We get it,” an industry flack told Congress about loud ad complaints. “As a matter of pure economics, we do not want to lose viewers.”

The bad news, however, is that the industry’s sweet talk has convinced Congress to halt work on legislation to force broadcasters to address this. Too bad. Like the Do Not Call list, this is one of those things where ideology plays no role for me. I don’t care if this is liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anything else. I just want it to stop, and I don’t care a whit whether or not it’s a justified interference in the free market. JUST MAKE IT STOP!

I think that, in broad terms, this is how most people think about politics. It’s not about whether a certain action is libertarian/socialist/whatever/etc, it’s about, “I want X.” In as much as the free market provides X (quieter commercials, safer food, telemarketers leaving me the fuck alone), they’re happy to go with the free market.

When the free market fails to provide, though, as it can arguably be said to have failed in those examples, I think most people have no problem with compelling action through government means.

An essential part of free market ideology is the idea that, left to its own devices, the market will give customers what they want. So this then, to me, is the ultimate rebuke: the reason why the huge regulatory framework has grown up around certain issues is because the free market explicitly did not give customers what they wanted, and they turned elsewhere. They didn’t turn elsewhere because they love regulation … they just want the effect.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

As a follow-up to Jeff Fecke’s excellent post on the creepily racist GOP response to Judge Maria Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, I wanted to point out Matt Yglesias’ post on Tom Tancredo equating La Raza with the KKK.

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

Okay, first, let’s look at the ridiculous phrasing of, “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” Sure, I get that what he’s saying is that La Raza is racist, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but the cavalier way in which he dismisses the “hoods and nooses” is interesting to me. The hoods and nooses are pretty damn vital to the conception of the KKK, aren’t they? It’s as if he thinks that the fact that the KKK was fucking murdering people regularly had nothing to do with why folks have a problem with them. It’s like saying, “The Republican Party is just the American Nazis without the antisemitism, the fascism, the desire for genocide, the Roman salute, the annexation of Poland, the speaking German, …”

As for whether La Raza is racist, or is actually, “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses,” Matt helpfully points out that not only is La Raza a mainstream (Incredibly mainstream, actually. My high school had a student chapter) Latin@ organization¹ , Republican luminaries like John McCain and Mel Martinez have spoken to and received awards from the group, both with nary a peep.

It is unclear to me whether Tom Tancredo is saying that both John McCain (who delivered a keynote address to the group) and Mel Martinez were unfamiliar with the unsavory and racist associations of La Raza, or whether he was saying that it’s not out of character for Republicans to pal around with racist organizations. If it’s the first, that would be awfully surprising, and I guess we should expect to hear their denunciations of La Raza pretty quickly. If it’s the second … umm … points for honesty, I guess?

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. And look, if there are people out there who really believe that La Raza is a racist hate group, I want to direct you to two great posts that came up the last time Republican were smearing Latin@ pride organizations, specifically, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA. They’re both from 2003. The first is Orcinus, here, which goes into some detail about the slogan “Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.” The second is Ted Barlow @ Crooked Timber (Fun Fact: Ted Barlow used to play in a band, Greenhouse And The Tender Ju Ju Coins, with one of my college buddies.) talkign about some of the same sorts of things. Now both of these posts are about MEChA, but here’s the thing: MEChA is (as I understand it) more radical than La Raza. And it’s not a hate organization by a long shot. Calling either one the moral equivalent of the KKK demonstrates stunning contempt for Latin@ people everywhere. (back)

First, a video that made me cry. Philip Spooner, an 86 year old Maine resident, veteran of WWII, and lifelong Republican:

Next, a video that made me laugh. Roy Zimmerman and Laura Love, performing his song, “Summer of Loving”:

Finally, a question:

For those of you who oppose marriage equality, what would it take to convince you that your stance is wrong?

I ask because we’ve got Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and 5 US states. Same Sex Marriage has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000. We’re quickly nearing the point where appeals to how SSM will destroy society can be met with empirical evidence as to how it hasn’t. Bare appeals to tradition (in addition to being logical fallacies) hold less weight the more tradition there is behind SSM.

Because I’m serious about asking what it would take to convince SSM opponents that their stance is wrong, my normal comments policy is not in effect here.

Our very own commenter, the snarky and perspicacious Jake Squid, has narrated ‘Chump Change‘, a just-aired episode of Escape Pod. His reading is stellar, and if you listen to it, you’ll be that much more able to imagine his comments in his voice, which adds something, I think.

Escape Pod is the science-fictional sister podcast to PodCastle, Mandolin’s excellent podcast of fantasy short fiction. Over the past year or so, I’ve worked my way through every single episode in the the archives of PodCastle, Escape Pod, and Pseudopod, their horror affiliate, and I can say with conviction that if you’re not listening to them regularly, your life is empty and meaningless.

Since we’re all very deeply concerned with the issue of Somali Pirates now, I thought it would be a great opportunity to repost a video from a little while back about piracy, government thuggery, and the difference between them. Special guest star: Saint Augustine!

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Speaking of how the marriage segregationists have already lost, here’s a great video, via Andrew Sullivan, of Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refusing to support an effort to amend the Iowa Constitution to forbid same sex marriage. Without his support, the amendment cannot move forward.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

From the Burlington Free Press:

The Legislature voted Tuesday to override Gov. Jim Douglas’ veto of a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry. The vote was 23-5 to override in the state Senate and 100-49 to override in the House. Under Vermont law, two-thirds of each chamber had to vote for override.

The vote came nine years after Vermont adopted its first-in-the-nation civil unions law.

It’s now the fourth state to permit same-sex marriage. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa are the others. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.

Let the marriage segregationists push their hate. Let them rail against the concept of two loving people committing to one another for life. Let them insist that people who don’t follow the dictates of their chosen faith should be second-class citizens. Let them argue against love.

The fact is, they have already lost.

Hallelujah.

Video after the cut.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Read the rest of this entry »

Through a kind of weird set of circumstances, I ended up acting in a TV show last night, playing Paul Stine, victim #7 of the Zodiac Killer. I’ve included a couple of pics, but at least one includes movie-gore, so I’m putting them behind a cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

In all the discussions about Same Sex Marriage, the rarely-acknowledged elephant in the room is that there is no coherent non-religious opposition. The religious opposition, of course, boils down to “people who are not members of my chosen religion should nto have the same civil rights as people who are members,” so it makes sense that opponents of SSM would cast about for a reason beyond the sexual orientation of Paul. When I tried to bring attention to this lately, there were quite a few protests, and cries of, “but my opposition has nothing to do with religion! I just don’t see SSM as part of the American legal tradition,” or, “I just think that past examples of SSM in other cultures have been transient.”

But here’s the thing. Those reasons are religious.

There was gay marriage in ancient Rome. When did it stop? When Christianity took over the empire.

There were socially sanctioned same sex relationships among many indigenous North American civilizations. When did they stop? When they were converted, often forceably, to Christianity.

Every (or nearly every … I’m not encyclopedia-man here) post-Roman Western European  civilization was officially Christian. The legal tradition they handed down to us was a Christian legal tradition. Christian morality became inexorably bound up in the law, to the point where things like blasphemy were considered crimes.

Thus, when someone says, “Hey, those traditions of Same Sex Marriage in other cultures sure seemed temporary,” what they’re really saying is, “Hey, those traditions of Same Sex Marriage in other cultures sure are part of a non-Christian tradition that ended when we made them convert.”

When someone says “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in western civilization,”¹ what they’re really saying is, “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in civilizations with enforced Christianity.”

When someone says “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in the United States,” what they’re really saying is, “I just don’t see examples of legally/socially sanctioned Same Sex Marriage in a country whose legal code grew from laws based on Christianity.”

And of course, when someone says, “I’m opposed to Same Sex Marriage because marriage has always been between a man and a woman,” what they’re really saying² is, “There was a time when it was against the law to follow another religion, and I sure miss that.”

There was a time when it was illegal to do business on a Sunday. There was a time when adultery was illegal. That was because of this. There was a time when sodomy was illegal, and that was because of this. As time has gone on, those things have been jettisoned from the American legal tradition, in part because of the understanding that there ought to be a distinction between the legal and the religious. The same is true here.

Beyond all that, of course, argument from tradition is a logical fallacy. Knowing how people used to do things ‘way back when’ doesn’t hold any logical or moral weight. If it’s a good idea, we should do it now. If it’s a bad idea, we shouldn’t. Whether or not the Hittites, the Franks, the Normans, or the Aztecs allowed Same Sex Marriage or not is a hell of a red herring.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. And by the way, even phrasing the argument in such a way that you talk about ‘western civilizations’ is really very racist. In order for it to make a lick of sense, I would have to be convinced that we somehow have more in common with the 11th century French than we do with the Iroquois Confederacy whom we based much of our Constitution on. More in common beyond “but America’s supposed to be white,” I mean. (back)
2. Aside from, “I am ignorant of history and other cultures” (back)

Matt Yglesias has the goods, but what it comes down to, basically, is that Michele Bachmann does not see the difference between China making an internal decision about what currency to use as their reserve currency and the institution of a sinister One World Currency, outlawing the dollar.

Not to harp on a point, or anything, but in my last post I talked a bit about how fundamentally unserious the Republican approach to government has become. This is like that times a bajillion. It’s either profoundly ignorant or profoundly deceptive, and I’m not sure which would be worse for the country and her constituents.

After Jeff Fecke wrote his “Once Again, We’re Sorry About Michele Bachmann” post, there were some people in the comments who tried gamely to defend her argument … and actually, hey, maybe that argument had some tiny kernel of truth buried deep within it that could be teased out into the light. Maybe.

As far as I can tell, this simply doesn’t.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

Okay, so the new Republican budget proposal has come in for a lot of mockery lately, and rightly so. Much has been made of the utter lack of numbers attached to their proposal¹, and I enjoyed Robert Gibbs’ reference to the ‘windmill picture:chart with numbers‘ ratio of the proposal (1:0, for those who are keeping score). Neither of those, though, are what caught my attention when I read through the proposal². 

No, what caught my attention is how consistently, throughout the entire proposal, they refuse to refer to the Democratic Party by its proper name. It’s there in the very first paragraph (the one that’s double size and blue, so you know they mean business), “Democrat Budget” and it continues throughout. It’s even in large print on the front page of their website.

Now here’s the thing. I understand that there’s a place for juvenile mockery. Hell, I’m a blogger, juvenile mockery is kind of what I do. And I understand that pretending not to know how the English language works is a proud and long lasting tradition within the Republican Party … but c’mon, guys. Isn’t this supposed to be a serious policy proposal? Should you have maybe considered that it was neither the time not the place to regress to Junior High?

I’m not sure what the equivalent would be, really . . . Obama releasing a budget with monocles and top hats photoshopped into any photos of republicans? No, maybe there isn’t an equivalent. Good. This isn’t a race to the bottom that the Democratic Party (see?) ought to join.

It’s not a big deal, really. It’s just a silly little tease that Republicans never got tired of. It doesn’t infuriate me or anything, it just reminds me once again that the Republican Party is fundamentally unserious. If you want your ideas to be taken seriously, you present them seriously. It’s striking that in the midst of the greatest financial collapse of my lifetime, in the midst of rampant unemployment, in the midst of the utter disintegration of the financial sector, presenting serious ideas in a serious way is something that this current collection of jokers and fools is frankly unable to do.

It’s sad.

It would be nice to have an opposition party worth a damn.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. On a quick read-through, though I saw a lot of numbers included, they were all numbers taken from, or referring to, the Democratic budget. (back)
2. Feel free to check it out for yourself, by the by. It’s a quick read. (back)

This afternoon my lovely girlfriend got home from work, took me outside to our deck, proposed to me, and became my lovely fiancée! Yay us!

Everyone else is posting it, so I certainly should too.

Warning: May lead to weepyness.

“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

This is the thing, right?

This is the thing that I just can’t get past, no matter what the arguments on the other side are.

No matter how many times they make up blatant lies about how “same sex marriage has never ever been tried before in the history of humanity,”¹ or how same-sex parents just aren’t as good as opposite-sex parents, or whatever their bullshit du jour is, none of it, even if it were true, would stack up against this.

None of it would stack up against happy couples and happy families who love each other. None of it would justify telling these families that they don’t deserve the same rights as any other.

The scale is weighted so heavily on the one side, I just can’t imagine what they could come up with to try to balance it on the other, but I do know that their hate and fear mongering isn’t enough. Not when stacked against this.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

1. And that is a lie, oh yes it is. It’s also a lie if you say it’s never been tried before in “western civilizations,” which hey, way to exclude most of the world, dude. Hell, you’re not even 100% if you say Same Sex Marriage has never been a Christian Rite! I really need to write a post about this. (back)

It’s rare that I post something mainly for the enjoyment of RonF, but this was too good to pass up.

Blagojevich Claims Behavior Was Just Elaborate Plan To Surprise Patrick Fitzgerald With Senate Nomination On His Birthday

Courtesy America’s Finest News Source, naturally.

I was having a conversation with a friend a few weeks back, and the talk turned to his romantic difficulties. He’s a good guy, but has limited romantic experience, and tends to put women on pedestals and engage in bouts of self-pity punctuated by occasional dips into ‘chicks dig jerks’ territory. As you can imagine, these tactics have not led to astounding romantic bliss.

Anyhow, I was explaining that I think that part of his difficulty is that he thinks of women as essentially different from men, where I don’t believe that they are. The topic of different ‘gendered messages’ that people get came up, and I found myself saying, “I don’t actually think that any gendered messages, no matter how ostensibly positive the messages may be, are actually good.”

He was taken aback, and asked, “Wait, none of them are good?”

I thought a minute before saying, “No. None of them are good. Do you have an example of a gendered message you think is actually good?”

“Yes! Women should be taught that their bodies are sacred.”

That’s when I realized it was probably hopeless. *Sigh*

Anyhow, I open the question to you, dear readers . . . are there positive gendered messages? I figure things that rely on differences in biology are a gimmie (Men don’t need to be taught that they have the choice of whether or not to carry a child to term. Women don’t need to be taught to wear a condom. Etc.), but beyond that, can you think of anything? I’m uncomfortable with absolute statements, but right now my position is fairly absolute, which is why I’m opening this up to discussion.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.