The White Peril 白禍

Eric doesn't like being labeled, and not for the usual tiresome I'm-too-free-spirited-to-be-defined reasons:

While I can say what I think about most things, experience shows that adopting any label invites conformity to it. (Especially criticism from those who claim it.)

Once you say what you are, some a**hole will come along and say that you're not, because he is.

Similarly, once you say what you aren't, some a**hole will come along and say that you are, because he isn't.

It's convenient that (small-l) "libertarian" suits me fine, because it tends not to set people off. I like "classical liberal," but (today's left) liberals often seem to think you're trying to dress up as one of them while being a closet fascist. ("Yeah, you're a liberal in the sense that, like, Mill would have meant it," someone sneered at me once.) And while my positions on many issues align with what we now consider "conservatism," I'm not fundamentally a conservative. (Well, I am when some gross guy is hitting on me. Then I identify myself as a "conservative" in a clear, forceful tone and mention that I'm a registered Republican. You movement conservatives don't mind the fib, do you? It's to the end of preventing casual homosexual intercourse, after all. And I really am a registered Republican.)

The only problem with calling yourself a libertarian--besides, as Eric alludes to, being invited by supposed fellow travelers to engage in poker-faced debates over the most inane hypothetical situations imaginable--is that a lot of people don't understand that it doesn't mean "libertine" or "anarchist." I can't count the number of times I've had to explain that no, I don't think all governing bodies should be dissolved so we can frolic naked in meadows all day and subsist on game and wild berries. In general, though, even those who conclude I'm just a closet right-winger seem to give me a fair hearing without rancor.

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My buddy grabbed my arm the other night and asked whether I'd seen Julie Burchill's inevitable column about the new Madonna album yet. He summarized it as "If I spent four hours a day at the gym, I'd look better than that bitch!" Not too far wide of the mark:

Madonna is everywhere, reigning over the just and the unjust, friend and foe alike; loving her or hating her is as futile as loving or hating the rain, wind or snow - it'll happen anyway.

...

If Madonna didn't devote her life to harassing us, what would she do with herself all day? Remember, this is a woman with so much time on her hands that she can spend four hours a day working out. I know I'm fat, but I have to say that if I spent four hours a day working out, I'd want to look a damn sight hotter than Madonna does; those vile veiny hands, that sad stringy neck - yuck!

Madonna has the sort of body that tends toward the plump/luscious side; you can see it in her early videos. Endomorphs like that who diet and exercise themselves into having no body fat often end up with skin that has a weird stretched look.

The rest of the column is the exact same thing Burchill writes whenever a Madonna record comes out, and it's as funny (and bawdy) as usual.

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Surprise! Hillary Clinton once said something nasty behind closed doors about white, working-class Southerners (via Ann Althouse):

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

And since some things never change, Clinton's spokesman responds with contempt when asked about the authenticity of the quotation:

A spokesperson for Clinton said the quote was taken out of context and did not reflect her true political philosophy. "This quote differs from the recollection of others who were in the room at the time this comment was allegedly made," said Jay Carson. "To be clear, that's not how she felt then and it's not how she feels now, and the proof is in how she has lived her life, the work she has done and the policies she has pushed and pursued over the last 35 years."

Asked to produce a witness who would say that Clinton had been misquoted, Carson wrote: "So, you've got two guys we've barely heard of remembering a verbatim quote from 13 years ago?... Sounds totally and completely reliable."

Remember the Clinton administration, when we were subjected to that kind of smear-and-spin routine almost daily when something or other threatened to blow up in the happy couple's faces? We could be mere months from going back to it!

Eric also noticed this story. (He didn't say much about it, but, then, he had to go to New Jersey, so he had plenty of pain to contend with already.)

*******

I don't think this post has enough parentheses.

[Added later: Or maybe I should have gone with "Your Imagination" as a title. "Love, Need, and Want You"? Maybe "When Will I See You Again"? "If You Don't Know Me by Now"? "Hate on Me"?]

I have a lot of affection for my home state of Pennsylvania. I grew up outside Allentown; my parents had the same house from the time they got married until I'd finished college. Then they moved four miles down the road, where they still are. My father was a plant worker for Bethlehem Steel while I was growing up, so there were a fair share of layoffs and lean years during the '80s.

Even though Barack Obama has been trounced already for his remarks about Pennsylvania, let me just add a bit. (Note to Tom Maguire about that headline, though: John Mellencamp is from Indiana. Keep your troglodyte-populated states straight! Then, too, I should be grateful he didn't quote "Allentown" by Illybay Oeljay, which I have something of a hangup about.) This is where the audio is, apparently, and the key paragraphs are these:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I'm not sure it's possible to do justice to how retarded that is--and I say that as an overeducated, corporate, atheist, homosexual urbanite who's spent the last dozen years in Tokyo and is now happily returning to New York.

The anti-trade part I do agree with. I've had (mild) arguments with my father over protectionism for the steel industry, which simply gives the shaft to American workers and their families further down the supply chain.

The rest is ridiculous.

As far as guns go, my father wasn't big on hunting, but my uncles and cousins went regularly, and I don't think they were taking out their job-related frustrations on the deer. Sport hunting is just one of those practices that the working class has in common with the aristocracy, and there are plenty of counties in the northern part of PA that are ideal for it.

Furthermore, most rural areas are by definition somewhat less densely populated than Hyde Park, Chicago. My mother has two handguns and takes shooting lessons because my father works nights quite a bit. If someone broke into the house, she'd have to fend for herself until the township police arrived. That's been a fact of life since long before manufacturing jobs started leaving.

I also think it highly likely that commonwealth history has something to do with attitudes toward guns. In Pennsylvania, at least in eastern Pennsylvania, you spend your childhood taking field trips to Valley Forge and Gettysburg. In the borough where I grew up, there's a preserved cabin, now nearly three hundred years old, called the Shelter House, where visiting schoolkids are lectured by their elders about the fragile existence of the first settlers as they carved out new lives in unknown territory. The idea that life can be harsh and that you may have to defend yourself violently is not alien to anyone who stays awake through state history classes.

By the way, you noticed that my hometown is called Emmaus, right? My parents now live in Old Zionsville. The second-largest city in the Lehigh Valley is Bethlehem. There's a Bethel in Berks County. Down toward Lancaster there's a town called Smyrna. There's also this little hamlet in Pennsylvania called Philadelphia--have you heard of it?--the name of which is Greek for "city of brotherly love" and is a place mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

That's, you know, in the Bible. Seekers of religious freedom were numerous among Pennsylvania settlers. William Penn was a Quaker whose beliefs had riled his father and the king. In Pennsylvania Dutch country, we're famous for having Amish communities. Lots of old Moravian and Lutheran churches, too. A combination of religious fervor and tolerance is movingly woven into Pennsylvania history from day one, and people in small towns have been going to church regularly since long before the decline of the rust belt economy. The insinuation that people just kind of started turning to religion to give them a sense of shallow comfort when the layoffs started is deeply offensive. I rejected the theology I'd been brought up with years ago as an accurate explanation for the origins of the universe, but it's just plain low to take cheap shots against the faithful.

Things like "antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment" are so vague it's hard to know what to make of them, but I will say that people tend to associate with those who are like them in New York and San Fracisco as much as they do in Reading. And the small towns have been diversifying, slowly but surely. It takes time for people to get used to one another, and everyone has prejudices that have to be discarded in the face of experience. That's hardly some sort of distinguishing characteristic of Pennsylvania.

Eric doesn't have anything up about this yet, but when he does, it's sure to be fabulous. In the interim, on a related topic, he's posted about Mayor Michael Nutter in Philadelphia, who's had the effrontery to compare himself to the Founding Fathers in signing gun control laws:

"Almost 232 years ago, a group of concerned Americans took matters in their own hands and did what they needed to do by declaring that the time had come for a change," Nutter said as he signed the bills in front of a table of confiscated weapons outside the police evidence room in City Hall.

Jeff at Alphecca has also posted.


Added on 19 April: Eric has posted.

James Kirchik is hardly a lockstep liberal, but in this post, I think he does actually make a typical liberal mistake in typical liberal fashion. His conclusion is this:

A top concern for voters in November will be a candidate's ability to raise American prestige. Rest assured that McCain will do just that.

Given its origins, the word prestige sounds like a perfect fit for McCain to me. That aside, I think Kirchik is wrong about most voters. Most Americans don't care what people think in New York and San Francisco, for Pete's sake, let alone in Paris and Berlin.

Or that's not entirely true. As one commenter puts it (nonmilagno posting Apr 2, 2008 - 4:30 pm), "It's not necessary that Europeans like us. However, it is important that they realise we have common interests." What worries Americans is not our lack of "prestige" but that we can't always rely on other Western countries to go to the mat for Western values. I think that if a presidential candidate convincingly demonstrated that he or she could get governments of other democracies to see why the WOT affects them, too, voters would care. But proportion of American voters who are hoping they'll be able to hold their heads higher among their European and Latin American friends at brunch on Sundays is small and very geographically restricted.

Kirchik's argument about whether people care about rebuilding our reputation abroad is wrong on its own terms, but so is his assessment of how our reputation got where it is:

The truth is that much of contemporary anti-Americanism is a manifestation of disgust with George W. Bush as an individual and will immediately dissipate as soon as a new president — Democrat or Republican — enters the Oval Office in 2009. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. French anti-Americanism, for instance, springs from economic inferiority and a lost empire, was flaunted as far back as 50 years ago when Charles de Gaulle was president and George W. Bush was but a little boy. Much of South America's anti-Americanism stems from 19th century American imperialism, something that no American president will be able to change.

What the next president can do to reverse the popularity deficit is distinguish himself from the current administration's most unpopular policies. On this score, McCain already has much to his credit. He has long stood out for his proactive stance on global warming, his opposition to coercive interrogation practices of terrorism suspects, and his support for closing the prison on Guantanamo Bay, all things which anger people and governments overseas.

Given the hedging in that first paragraph, it's hard to pin down how much anti-Americanism Kirchik expects to disappear magically on Inauguration Day. What proportion is attributable to anti-Bush sentiment? I'd say less than he thinks. Europeans and Asians loved the Clintons--they were lawyers with prestigious educations who talked a lot of big-government theory, which made them easy to identify with for a lot of elites there. And yet there was still plenty of bitching about America. Too prosperous, too confident militarily, too confident culturally, too friendly with Israel. They might like to see us hobble our economy with some drastic policies to combat global warming and stuff, but I don't think the basic attitude is likely to change soon, no matter who's president.

So I don't think Kirchik's argument in favor of McCain washes. Virginia Postrel has an intriguing and more convincing analysis of Barack Obama's glamour in The Atlantic:

Obama's glamour gives him a powerful political advantage. But it also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country.

...

To rely on illusions is to risk disillusionment. If Obama the dream candidate becomes Obama the real president, he'll be forced to pick sides, make compromises, and turn "hope" and "change" into policies some people like and some people don't. Or, like the movie star governor of California, he might choose instead to preserve his glamour by letting others set the agenda. Either way, his face won't make America's worries disappear, and his cool, polite manner won't eliminate political disagreements. Some of his supporters will feel disappointed, even betrayed. The result could be a backlash, heightened partisan conflict, and a failed presidency. George W. Bush ran as a uniter, and Jimmy Carter promised national renewal.

Anne Applebaum wrote a column on a somewhat related issue last year. The headline was "What Presidents Don't Know," and her point was that some learning on the job is inevitable. Wonkish expertise and a ten-point plan for everything are less important than a realistic sense of what the candidate is getting into:

In fact, there may be some sorts of experience that are actually detrimental to a potential president. I worry, for example, about Hillary Clinton's much-vaunted travels as first lady: She came, she made carefully prepared speeches, she received polite applause. It won't be like that if she's president, and I hope she doesn't think it will be.

...

Other kinds of foreign connections could prove useful. Even aside from his specific beliefs, John McCain happens to be particularly good at speaking to (and arguing with) foreign audiences: The director of a German foundation recently complained to me that the U.S. presidential campaign was spoiling his transatlantic conferences because it meant McCain couldn't attend anymore. Meanwhile, Obama, with his African relatives and Indonesian childhood, would start his presidency riding an enormous wave of international goodwill. His differences from our current president -- he's young, black, with a more complicated background -- would win him a lot of points in a lot of places, whether or not he knows the name of the Pakistani president (and whether or not he would bomb that country, as he recently seemed to imply he would).

I remember vividly when Ann Althouse linked Applebaum's column. A lot of her commenters seemed to take the above passage as an out-and-out endorsement of Obama--which gave me pause, because I hadn't. Applebaum seemed to me to be observing two things: that any new president will have expectations and a default way of reacting to new information, and that how other world leaders respond will be an important part of that new information. She appeared to be suggesting that Obama might be able to leverage his initial warm reception; Virginia says that his glamour won't be enough to save him if he gets into trouble but that he may have a realistic sense of its limits.

Yeah, I saw the latest McGreevey story, via Rondi, among others. Since I thought the guy was a parasitic jerk the moment the sentence "I am a gay American" fell from his mealy political mouth, I can't say my estimation of him has changed. And luckily, since I'm not tortured by constant exposure to American cable yak shows, I've been spared seeing Dina Matos McGreevey ham it up for the camera about how hurt and betrayed she was. (This is not to say the hurt and feelings of betrayal aren't sincere, only that a seasoned politician's wife in the middle of negotiating a bitter divorce is naturally going to make sure her presentation of them is blocked, lighted, and cropped to present them in the fashion most flattering to her. The probability of her delivering an unstudied outpouring of emotion is vanishingly low.)

As if the happy couple weren't setting new lows for vulgar exhibitionism on their own, the former household staff has apparently now decided to join in. The information itself is pretty shrug-worthy--you can see people having threesomes on CSI: Miami at this point...though at least then, one of the participants usually ends up dead and thus incapable of yapping about it to the press years afterward.

Anyway, it's the reasoning behind this guy's public statements that gets on my nerves:

Mr Pedersen said he had only decided to come forward with his claims after seeing Mrs Matos McGreevey criticising Mr Spitzer's behaviour on television.

"It's frustrating to hear her call Gov Spitzer a hypocrite when she's out there being as dishonest as anyone could be about her own life," he told the New York Post.

"She's framed herself as a victim - yet she was a willing participant. She had complete control over what happened in her relationship."

Is it now acceptable to air personal secrets, supposedly held in trust with other parties, just because one happens to feel "frustrated" with one of them? (Don't answer that.) Ick. Not that one should be shedding any tears for James McGreevey, of course:

However, Mr McGreevey, 50, insisted his former driver's claims were true. He said in a statement that he and his wife needed to move forward in their relationship for the sake of their six-year-old daughter.

Ah, yes. Nothing more salutary for the six-year-old daughter than to have Daddy appearing before the press to confirm that he and Mommy used to get naked with Driver on Friday nights.

While we were sleeping in East Asia, the Internets back home were humming with news of a new Eliot Spitzer scandal:

As recently as this past Valentine's Day, Feb. 13, Spitzer, who officials say is identified in a federal complaint as "Client 9," arranged for a prostitute "Kristen" to meet him in Washington, D.C.

The woman met Client 9 at the Mayflower Hotel, room 871, "for her tryst," according to the complaint. Client 9 also is alleged to have paid for the woman's train tickets, cab fare, mini bar and room service, travel time and hotel.

...

Spitzer, who made his name by bringing high-profile cases against many of New York's financial giants, is likely to be prosecuted under a relatively obscure statute called "structuring," according to a Justice Department official.

Instapundit has, naturally, the best round-up of links.

I think of Spitzer exactly what you'd expect me to think as a libertarian: he's repugnantly bossy and power-mad, and the showboating way he's strong-armed corporations into disgorging big settlements just ensures that higher costs will be shoved off on rank-and-file consumers. Should he be driven out of office (it hasn't happened yet, of course) for the hypocrisy of visiting a prostitute after having gotten all high-minded about operators of a prostitution ring he'd busted as Attorney General, well, what goes around comes around:

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

"This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," Mr. Spitzer said at the time. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring."

Hypocrisy is an easy charge to throw around glibly. We all fail to live up to our principles at times; that doesn't mean we aren't genuinely trying to. It can be very difficult to determine whether someone's hypocrisy involves slipping up at weak moments despite good-faith efforts to behave or (worse, I think we'd all agree) cynically applying laws to others that he doesn't apply to himself.

But it's hard to sympathize with Spitzer, for whom it's never been enough just to be sanctimonious. No, he has to be bullying and high-handed about his ability to use whatever office he's holding to make life suck for whomever he's got in the crosshairs. I assume we'll be listening to his "I'm so very sorry [that I got caught]" routine for a few days before we find out whether he'll be forced out of office for leaving the sort of communication trail he used to warn his enemies against.

Added later: Via Eric, Arthur Silber is suitably unsparing:

Prostitution involving consenting adults cannot defensibly be regarded as a crime. In that sense, Spitzer should never have been targeted at all for that alleged offense. But it is currently illegal, as all basically functioning adults are fully aware. [And whatever else might be said about him, Spitzer appears to be basically functioning. I'll be here all week.] Given Spitzer's unfathomable stupidity -- and in light of the fact that he is now the victim of the kinds of overreaching police state tactics that he himself has endlessly championed and utilized -- this can only be regarded as an instance of an especially objectionable, arrogant, overweening, power-mad, vicious son of a bitch himself getting exactly what he has been delightedly happy to dish out to others.

Virginia Postrel links to a true story with the kind of happy ending that can literally make you cry: Afghans get a new industry that provides environmentally-sustainable work and brings cash into the economy...and affluent Americans get access to a broader array of fabulous beauty products!

Anyone who writes to ask which part moved me more will be ignored.

Of course, every narrative like this needs a villain to add drama and make our heroine's eventual triumph sweeter, and this story has a great one:

The letter I received from him a few days later confirmed my premonition. It requested a ream of further documentation, such as a breakdown of the raw-materials cost of a bar of soap and our financial accounts from previous years. “Maybe even more importantly,” the letter went on,

we need to show the real raison d'etre for all of this. It's because there's real demand for your products. Demand is not your problem, Sarah, satisfying it is. You've already established a vibe in the market. You're selling in Manhattan and sundry other swanky places. You've had plenty of free publicity in media with the appropriate reach to capture the attention of the chattering class whose hands you're washing. The wind is now behind you and you've an opportunity to make a significant contribution to establishing Afghanistan as something other than a squalid state exporting only smack and terror. This is what USAID wants to hear.

Peppering this and subsequent communications were colloquialisms like "the first thing we've gotta make plain ..."

I replied, providing the requested information, but also a statement of frustration. I was swiftly scolded for my tone: "unbusinesslike, unmannerly, and just plain unaesthetic."

Ick. No one who uses gotta in a business context--who would, indeed, use gotta for any purpose other than transcribing soul lyrics--should be passing judgments on the aesthetic value of someone else's prose. Especially when he himself appears never to have met a cliché he didn't like. Guy should be sentenced to wash with Duane Reade soap ("Compare to Irish Spring!") for the rest of his life.

Anyway, seriously, Sarah Chayes's piece confirms what you hear elsewhere about funding provided by big-guns organizations for entrepreneurship in developing countries--namely, that it has a way of vaporizing in the pipeline from the West to the target population. It's a very good read.

Tokyo has had the same reaction to the Bhutto assassination as the rest of the developed world:

On the night of 27 December, Minister of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Takamura spoke to the press corps about the assassination of former Prime Minister of Pakistan [Benazir] Bhutto: "We had hoped that free and fair elections would be conducted; there aren't words to describe the heinousness of using violence to decide such matters." At the same time, "We fervently hope that Pakistan will ride out this tragedy and [do us all the favor of] treading a path toward democratization. Japan, too, wishes to support the democratization of Pakistan." *

Rondi Adamson cites Christopher Hitchens's reaction in Slate, in which he even-temperedly examines her strengths and weaknesses:

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in.

...

The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.

...

This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism.

That's just his view, of course, but it squares with what I remember from reports about her second tenure as prime minister: Bhutto was politically progressive by study and reasoning but also had the reflexive sense of entitlement and privilege of the daughter of a super-elite family. Her assassination is a tragedy in any case, but it's doubly unfortunate if she really was beginning to come around to harsh reality.

* Japanese readers who click through to the article will notice that I've translated もらう as if it were くれる. That wasn't a slip--"we will humbly receive the favor of..." didn't quite seem to catch the mood here of dealing with an unstable nuclear power with Muslim radicals in the population.

So the candidates have started pushing the electorate's God button for real now. "What do you think of that?" some friends have asked, adopting a "Gotcha!" tone that seems to assume I managed to reach age thirty-five without noticing that most registered Republicans aren't atheists.

Well, if you care, I think that religion is a repository of genuine wisdom about life that our civilizations have built up over time. If a given religion is the source of a candidate's deepest beliefs and those beliefs are going to be driving policy, I'd kind of like to know about it. That said, I essentially agree with what McQ says at the QandO blog here:

If you're a politician, I don't care what your religion is. I don't care if you are religious. What I care about is your character, your ethics, your public record and your ideas. And while I understand your religion could have a certain level of effect on the development of all of those things, that isn't the point.

It's one thing to explain to voters how your faith contributed to the development of your way of thinking; it's another to imply that simply being religious somehow makes you a better candidate for office.

In reality, I don't think it does. A lot of politicians seem to have found a convenient way to balance humility toward the Lord with high-handed arrogance toward their fellow citizens when using the coercive power of the government. That the humility and the arrogance are probably both genuine in most cases doesn't mean one excuses the other. McQ and a lot of other people are citing Peggy Noonan's latest column:

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.

I hope there aren't really grounds for such worries. Huckabee would have inclined in any case to play up his upright Christian-ness, but my sense is that he's chosen to do so in his current coarse way mostly because there happens to be a Mormon in the race. Most Americans already think Mormonism is slightly weird, and playing on that is an obvious way to get a tactical advantage. (And since most Americans think atheists are weird, playing on that was an obvious way for Romney to try to regain his balance.) Of course, it would have been nice if everyone had refrained from building themselves up by casting slimy aspersions on others' beliefs, especially when they're not directly relevant to policy. But we are, after all, talking about people who think they deserve to be president here.

Added later: Whoa. I thought I'd been on the cynical side, but that was until I saw this article in The Weekly Standard by Kenneth Anderson, a law professor and former Mormon (via Ann Althouse). The argument might have been made more compactly, but every paragraph has something to say.

My former confrères among the Mormons apparently do not count as Christian, yet somehow feel themselves bound by their allegiance to the teachings of the Nazarene to turn the other cheek and meekly suffer these attacks upon their spiritual fitness to participate in the public square. Admirably Christian, I suppose. I myself propose that Huckabee be horse-whipped in the square of public reason and turned out of politics so he can get on with writing The Seven-Day Diet of Creation and Mary Magdalene Got Skinny for Jesus and You Can Too.

...

The "all-out" answer that Romney gave was the denial that citizens might ever legitimately and ethically demand to know the content of religious doctrines professed by a candidate for public office. ("Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance.") It is multiculturalist because it essentially treats all private beliefs as immutable and beyond reason, and because it says that to propose to subject any of them to public scrutiny of reason is an act of intolerance akin to racism. It is a position traditionally asserted by the left on behalf of its identity-politics constituencies. It is dismaying, to say the least, that Romney would claim it for his own to deny the legitimacy of all questions.

It is, moreover, relativist in implication. Toleration is not an assertion of relativism. It is, rather, the forbearance from judging and acting on judgments in the public sphere that one might well believe oneself entitled to make in private. Toleration entails the suspension of public disbelief, or at least political action thereupon, about matters that one might nonetheless consider well within the realm of private moral judgment. Relativism, by contrast, is denial of grounds for judging at all. They could not be more different--and, crucially, relativism removes the possibility of toleration because it removes the possibility of reasoned judgment.

Added still later: Anderson also has an item on his blog about his piece. Interesting comments.

Greg Beato (that rare Reason writer these days who's nearly as funny as he thinks he is) has a column on that now-traditional holiday topic: killjoy secularization. He approaches it from the opposite direction:

While anti-bias truffle pigs like Brent Bozell, William Donohue, and Michael Medved insist the entertainment industry is out to crucify faith and traditional values, it somehow manages to produce a new crop of straight-to-Hallmark-Channel holiday weepies each year, and not one of them has ever featured Dolly Parton as an unlikely evolutionary biologist who reunites an estranged family by infusing them with that old-fashioned Darwinist spirit. Such powers, it seems, are reserved solely for angels.

Similarly, if you go looking for a Madalyn Murray O'Hair action figure at Wal-Mart, you'll have to settle for a 13-inch Samson doll from the faith-based toymaker One2believe. Christian entrepreneurs are better at providing earthly rewards than the folks who believe earthly rewards are our only salvation. In fact, the Lord has called so many believers to spread the Good News via faith-based salt scrubs and godly poker chips during the last few decades that the annual U.S. market for Christian-themed products, often dismissed as "Jesus junk," is now $4.6 billion.

Well, one of the reasons for that is that No-God is not the center of an atheist's belief system in a way that corresponds to God for Christians (and the faithful of other religions). The only reason I call myself an atheist is that daily interaction with other people is predicated on the assumption that we all have a god to talk about, so the word is useful for answering a question that frequently comes up. But I don't orient my life around some conspicuous void where God would be for other people, any more than I consider myself, in some defining way, an afairyist, achupacabraist, aboogeymanist, or a-Nessie-ist. (To me, it's similar, if not perfectly analogous, to the belief that government shouldn't be responsible for doing everything that needs to be done in society. People who've never conceived of things any other way will ask, "Well, then, who's going to do all that?" It's as if you simply had to designate a single entity your Keeper of Society, rather than being able to believe that responsibility for different social goods could be attended to in dispersed ways that no Big Brother is orchestrating.)

Of course, there are people who make a fetish out of their atheism, but there aren't very many of them, which kind of helps to explain the paucity of (non-existent Lord help us) Madalyn Murray O'Hair action figures.

Joel at Far Outliers usually posts excerpts from books and articles that are not otherwise readily available online. He has a very good eye, so his blog is worth reading just for that.

However, a few weeks ago when I wasn't looking, he started posting pieces of his own writing from twenty-odd years ago when he was teaching English in the PRC. It makes for fascinating reading. Back then, despite Deng Xiaoping's gingerly moves toward liberalization, most Americans didn't get much information about China. The multi-part documentary The Heart of the Dragon, which aired on PBS in the States, was about as good as it got. (Things were similar with the Soviet Union--anyone else remember watching the "Comrades" series on Frontline?)

One thing that caught my attention was a passage from this post:

In China those who have tap water don't drink it. Almost all the water and tea consumed each day by one billion Chinese goes through a kettle and thermos bottle first.

There must be at least a billion thermos bottles. If each thermos bottle is emptied twice a day, then four billion liters of water pour out of the mouths of thermoses each day.

Boiled water is the universal cleanser. Diners in China's typically grimy eating places often rinse their tableware with hot water or tea before they eat or drink anything. Some roadside eateries reassure their customers by bringing out all the tableware in a large soup bowl full of scalding water. The customers can rinse everything themselves.

Disposable eating utensils, like disposable medical supplies, are just coming into use in China. A recent China Daily letter to the editor lauded the growing practice of providing disposable chopsticks in restaurants in Beijing.

How times change. By 2000, disposable chopsticks were ubiquitous in China and had started to draw fire because so many trees were being cut down to make them. Last year, the PRC started putting taxes on them:

The disposable splints of wood, usually between eight and 10 inches long, have long been a target for Chinese environmentalists.

...

In recent years, the government has actually encouraged their use, in a bid to reduce the spread of infectious illnesses by sharing eating utensils.

A lot of China's product has been exported here to Japan; I read somewhere years ago that over 90% of the disposable chopsticks consumed here came from the PRC. It's been proposed that such exports be banned as early as 2008.

Perhaps China has reached a stage at which the tradeoff involved in not making disposable chopsticks freely available in order to preserve the environment is a good one. It's worth noting, though, that (as both Joel and the BBC mention) single-use utensils help close one path through which communicable diseases spread, which was no mean consideration in crowded, developing China.

Be sure to read Joel's other posts, too.

Rondi links to this piece by Bruce Bawer on "Norway's answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali":

Fortuyn's murder should have put an end to the character assassinations of the advocates of freedom. Nope. Instead they've only grown more sophisticated. Nowadays when someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali assails Islamic fundamentalism, the clever thing to do is call her a fundamentalist--because she's so uncompromising in her insistence on liberty, get it? In this spirit, a hijab-clad Dagbladet staffer compared Storhaug's call for Muslim women to "take the hijab off and embrace freedom" to "the rhetoric of the bearded fundamentalists" – thus equating an advocate for the victims of forced marriage and honor killing with the perpetrators of these barbarities.

...

As Dagbladet reader Hans-Christian Holm cogently put it, Norway's media are engaged in "a sick tolerance competition, in which whoever tolerates the most intolerance wins, and the one who suggests that we perhaps should not tolerate so much intolerance is automatically branded as the most intolerant of all." Storhaug's own concern, as expressed in an email the other day, is that the relentless demonizing of persons like herself by those who are determined to suppress open liberal debate about these vital issues can only strengthen the hands of both right-wing nativists and Islamists.

How difficult should it be to recognize that tolerance has to be reciprocal if a free society is to function? You can recognize people's right to beliefs you find repugnant without recognizing their ability to force other people to bend to them. Or at least you should be able to.

Eric posted yesterday about a case in southeastern Pennsylvania in which a newly married couple with problems asked successfully to have the marriage invalidated in court:

In a York County case, a Common Pleas Court judge invalidated a 10-month marriage, finding that a friend of the bride's who officiated at the wedding didn't have the power to do so under Pennsylvania law even though he had been ordained online by the Universal Life Church. The judge ruled the friend didn't qualify as a minister under state law because he had no regular congregation or place of worship.

…

By 1885, Pennsylvania had clearly developed two types of marriage licenses. The first required a "minister of the gospel, justice of the peace, or alderman" to officiate. The other let a couple solemnize the marriage themselves (a self-uniting license) and register it with the county.
Little changed until the legislature amended the law in 1953. While the law still allowed for both types of licenses, a reference to religious ceremonies was added to language describing who could obtain a self-uniting license. The law remains in effect.

Since the commonwealth government is not the United States congress, I assume it has more leeway to limit freedom of religion; why it would want to do so in this context is beyond me, though. If you succeed in getting a marriage license, it seems to me, you've passed such requirements as the government deems fit. (Pennsylvania doesn't even require a blood test, IIRC from hetero friends who have taken the plunge.) Who officiates, since legal marriage doesn't require anyone to certify that you're entering into the union mindedly or that you're not likely to split up.

Eric seems to feel the same; I like his idea for a new denomination, too:

I think the sudden firestorm is grounded in the fact that ordinations can now be obtained online. Big effing deal. What makes one form of communication between humans more suspect than another? Suppose a religious-minded blogger decided to form the Divine Church of the Holy Blog, and decided upon a common set of beliefs, based on articulable principles known and understood and agreed to by all interested joiners. Why wouldn't their congregation ("Holy Blogroll") and place of abode be just as valid as any other? What business is it of the government to decide?

I've been thinking about what makes a religion "legitimate" from a different angle over the last week or so, since a friend with whom I went to church growing up contacted me for the first time after a dozen or so years. I posted about this last week. Some consider the Worldwide Church of God a cult; others think it was a genuine Christian sect that got carried away on certain doctrinal points and was poisoned by a cabal of amoral leaders at the very top. (I'm speaking of the church up to about ten years ago; it's now made numerous doctrinal changes that have brought it into line with mainstream evangelical Protestantism. I think. There's something about converting to atheism that lessens your attention to theological points, so I may be overstating the case.) I think that this site does a real service in giving former members a place to read up on the inside dirt and share horror stories. The church was supposed to be the center of your life, and it's perfectly understandable that many people who took that to heart have had real difficulties adjusting since leaving it.

I do wish, though, that the people who posted were a bit more given to recalling that they freely chose to get involved with the WCG, in countries in which freedom of religion is protected. There's a page that has a long, long, long list of bullet points for which the ministry ought to apologize—ways the enforcement of church doctrine and culture played havoc with people's lives. Okay, point taken. But no one was forced at gunpoint to keep attending church, or to refuse to take her children to the doctor, or to fork over twenty percent of his gross income per year to church headquarters. Ministers are responsible for the destructive untruths they peddled, but they can't be blamed for the unusual eagerness of many members to believe them. Much of the WCG membership comprised, in my experience, people who felt like misfits and were bad at running their own lives. My parents frequently had discussions with friends who were positively relieved to outsource their decision-making about jobs and marriage and childrearing to their pastors and church elders, even when the advice they were given flouted all logic and sense. With the exception of people who were brought up in the church and had been prevented by devout parents from ever knowing any other way of living, I find it difficult to view church teaching as something that was done to sympathetic, pure-of-heart dupes. Being weak-minded may help explain why you're acting like a ninny, but it doesn't excuse it.

The couple in the York County case, similarly, was presumably aware of the difference between an experienced pastor of an established religion and a friend who obtained an ad hoc ordination as a clergyman. It's ridiculous for them to argue now that they should be legally able to pretend it never happened just because they discovered too late that they weren't compatible. I hope Eric's right and that the current decision is "eminently reversible."

Added on 15 November: Blogger Ironwolf, who was brought up in the same church as I was, has posted about yet another lectern-thumper who wants us to know we're all doomed. The specifics of how we're going to fry aren't all that interesting--social collapse, big-scary-nightmare empires established by the most populous Asian countries, nuclear holocaust--no one seems to bring much imagination to these things. (Just once, can't one of these doomsayers jazz things up by predicting that the Satan will launch the End Times from, like, a village in Surinam?) I point it out only to give an indication of the sort of talk that was common coin at church services and among my parents and their friends when I was growing up.

I had a busy weekend away from the computer, but I wanted to squeeze in a post before Veterans Day is over. Thanks to all those who have served. We haven't forgotten.

I've never understood why more people don't seem to do this kind of thought experiment (via Rondi):

Imagine a woman – let’s call her Beth – who has been an unthinking atheist all her life, just because her family and her friends are too. One day, she decides to convert to Islam. As soon as she dons the hijab, her neighbours start to swear and spit at her in the street. A brick is thrown through her window; while she is sleeping, her car is torched. When she speaks out publicly, the death threats come. She is a “whore” who will be “raped to death”. All the other converts to Islam are receiving the same threats. Some have been beaten. Some are on the run. When they approach the police, they are wary-to-hostile. The officers ask suspiciously: what have you been doing to anger these Muslim-bashers?

If this was happening this way, it would – rightly – be a national scandal. There would be Panorama specials, front page fury and government inquiries into Islamophobia. But it is happening – only in the reverse direction.

...

Women like Mina expose a hole in the stale logic of multiculturalism. She shows that secularism is not a 'Western' value: she thought of it all by herself, in a rural village in Iran. Yet the attitudes that lead to the persecution of apostates are widespread even within British Islam, because we patronisingly assume it is 'their culture' and do not challenge it.

I don't agree with everything in Johann Hari's piece. His "basic atheist truth," that because holy books are in fact nothing more than the productions of flawed humans, they can be interpreted however believers please, overstates the case. Even taking into account the difficulties of understanding ancient languages and determining which passages "belong" in a sacred text, the resulting book says some things and does not say others. As civilization evolves and expands our understanding of the way life works, believers do stop taking some passages literally and repurpose them as metaphor or what have you. But that doesn't mean there isn't genuine, concrete wisdom in holy books that can't be waved away as "superstition" that is infinitely "elastic."

I'm also, I must say, less hopeful than he that the "secular humanist" alternative will be alluring to many Muslims who are questioning their faith. I happen to think that belief in God is dodging unpleasant reality and that the wonder of life does not need to be legitimized by a transcendent, immanent personality—but that is not, to put it mildly, the way most people think, even those with a healthy level of intellectual skepticism. Judeo-Christianity at this point has a mature tradition of disinterested scientific inquiry, the separation of church and state, and tolerance of others' beliefs that make it possible for citizens to debate our differences without knives being drawn. Islam as a political force hasn't. In Western countries, conversion to Christianity is probably the obvious alternative for most Muslims who are alienated from the faith in which they were reared but don't want to dump their belief in an Abramic-ish God altogether. Those who think Islam can be reformed from within are not helped by condescending dismissals of barbarous behavior as a defining feature of their culture that needs husbanding.

It could be argued that Hari is wrong about the racism bit, too. There are white Muslims in the Balkans and elsewhere, after all. But I suspect that he's far more right than wrong, given the prevalence of thinking like this (via Erin O'Connor):

The [University of Delaware]'s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to "sustainability" door decorations. Students living in the university's eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a "diversity facilitation training" session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that "[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

The issue here is with a university in the United States, not with European social-democratic functionaries. Even so, the animating principle is the same: non-white people are underprivileged in some a priori way and should get a pass. If you question that, you're the one with the funny ideas.

Reason has an entertaining interview with fark.com founder Drew Curtis about how the site developed and what it says about the future of the Internet. Like other commentators I've seen, he thinks that some sort of personal-shopper model is what's next up, since we're all swamped by the amount of information available.

I like Fark. My only problem is that frequently the funniest tag lines lead to the least interesting articles. My favorite example from this week:



The link takes you to a decent but decidedly non-fabulous piece arguing that presenting a well-groomed, pulled-together image is good for your career. Yawn.

Reason also--I assume this month is some sort of media issue, but I'm too lazy to look--has this piece defending The Onion in terms I very much agree with:

Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.

The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regularly publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: "Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven In Abortion-Clinic Attack." "Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit." "Gay Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years." There's no predictable ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt truth about the world.

One common complaint about newspapers is that they're too negative, too focused on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is, how gingerly most newspapers dance around the unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance and compassion. The perfunctory coverage that traditional newspapers give disasters in countries cursed with relatability issues is reduced to its bare, dismal essence: "15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere." [The unforgettable dateline for that one was "OOGA-BOOGA LAND OR WHEREVER."--SRK] Beggars aren't grist for Pulitzers, just punch lines: "Man Can't Decide Whether to Give Sandwich to Homeless or Ducks." Triumphs of the human spirit are as rare as vegans at an NRA barbecue: "Loved Ones Recall Local Man's Cowardly Battle With Cancer."

A lot of what passes for irreverent satire is little more than sub-adult pushing of the obvious buttons. But skewering the tendency of journalists to airbrush any story into a palatable human interest feature, or to invest any story they write or broadcast about with selections from a tired laundry list of Deeper Human Significance it may not have, is a real service. And it's encouraging that it's so popular. Some satire is funny enough to stand alone, but most isn't. That people keep clicking on stories in The Onion and sending them to friends is a reasonable indication that they understand the news and issues that they're twisting into humorous new shapes, despite all the gnashing of teeth about how ignorant everyone is nowadays.

You know what's really annoying? All you silly people out there who think you're in the best position to make decisions about your own lives. What gives you the right to make your own trade-offs when planners--people with credentials--have figured out the one true way to live?

Well, don't expect to win. The latest from here in Japan is a litany of targets for achieving the perfect national balance of work and family life. Just look at all these numbers, each the glorious result of expert cogitation:

The government has come up with a long list of numerical targets to let men in their 30s to 40s work less and spend more time with their families.

...

One target is to halve in 10 years the percentage of workers who put in 60 hours or more a week from 10.8 percent in 2006.

Another goal is to raise the percentage of male workers who take child-care leave to 10 percent, up from the current 0.5 percent.

The draft guidelines were presented Thursday to a task force under a high-level council working on the issue. The council consists of representatives from labor and management, Cabinet ministers and other experts.

...

The government will consider measures to achieve the targets included in the guidelines and seek cooperation from business organizations and labor unions.

The draft charter emphasizes that it is essential to review the nation's working style to maintain the vitality of society.

The numerical targets are aimed primarily at lightening the workload of men in their 30s and 40s.

To make up for the reduced work, the government has set employment-rate targets for women and elderly people.

For example, the government aims to have 69-72 percent of women between 25 and 44 in the work force in 10 years, up from the current 65 percent.

For people in the age bracket between 60 and 64, the employment-rate targets, also in 10 years, are 79-80 percent for men and 41-43 percent for women, up, respectively, from the current 67 percent and 39 percent.

The government also aims to raise the rate of women in employment after their first childbirth to 55 percent in 10 years, up from the current 38 percent.

In 2006, men with a child under 6 years old spent an average of one hour a day on child care and household chores.

The government's target in 10 years is 2 1/2 hours.

Of course, most of these things will not be legislated directly. No prefectural governor is going to be taken out and shot if his or her jurisdiction doesn't reach the approved average of 2.5 hours' worth of male domesticity by 2017. But what happens with these things is that they expand from high-level technocratic committees into offices, community programs, and ad hoc task forces that suck up money without demonstrably serving citizens. (Also, while Japanese men spend more time with their families than they used to, I suspect that plenty of them would use the extra time off from work to heft golf clubs rather than toddlers.)

Japan's not the only island country to exhibit such impulses. Perry de Havilland of Samizdata linked indignantly to BBC coverage of a new government report that essentially tells each Briton, "You're a porker, but it's not your fault."

The largest ever UK study into obesity, backed by government and compiled by 250 experts, said excess weight was now the norm in our "obesogenic" society. [Don't let's be spoilsports and point out that we're otherwise hearing how rail-thin models and actresses are setting unrealistic beauty standards and causing an epidemic of eating disorders--that was last Wednesday's problem.--SRK]

Dramatic and comprehensive action was required to stop the majority of us becoming obese by 2050, they said.

The government pledged to draw up a strategy to address the issue.

But the report authors admitted proof that any anti-obesity policy worked "was scant".

Details, details. The experts haven't figured out exactly how they're going to force you to be healthier, it might be noted, though they're full of consciousness-raising ideas:

From planning our towns to encourage more physical activity to placing more pressure on mothers to breast feed - believed to slow down infant weight gain - the report highlighted a range of policy options without making any concrete recommendations.

...

"The emphasis on cross-governmental initiatives is particularly welcome, as is the importance of addressing issues across society whilst avoiding blame," said its president, Professor Ian Gilmore.

Perhaps Professor Gilmore is a Japanophile. He's certainly got the ability to settle blame everywhere and accountability nowhere down pat.

And the result in the UK will probably be similar to what we see here in Japan: distortions of economic decision-making with the attendant unintended consequences. Those consequences will, it goes without saying, be interpreted as yet more evidence that individuals are incompetent to make their own decisions without "guidance."

Added later: Okay, the only connection between this and the above is Catherine Tate, but Michael mentioned yesterday that Larry Craig is still going on television to make pathetic attempts at damage control. Am I the only one who's spent the last few months thinking, "Who, dear? Me, dear? Gay, dear? No, dear" whenever his name comes up?

Added still later, after a glass of Coke that was large enough to be satisfying but not so large as to compromise health--so there: Kim has, naturally, already weighed in on the obesity report. He leads into it with a discussion of restaurant eating habits:

I remember seeing a lady once go up to the salad bar at a restaurant, and my initial reaction was, “Ohh, good—she’s going to eat something healthy.” Then I watched her coming back to the table, and I was nearly sick. It looked as though someone had put a brick on her plate, and covered it with salad—and drenched the whole thing with about two cups of salad dressing. Then I watched her eat all of it.

And then she went back for seconds.

I worked at Golden Corral in high school, back when very few restaurants had all-you-can-eat troughs salad bar/buffets. The experience was very instructive about human nature, though it was nearly enough to put me off food for the rest of my life.

One of the things I've trained myself to do when back in the States is to eat at a normal pace no matter how much food is Matterhorned onto my plate. When you have a lot of food in front of you, instinct tells you to start hoovering it up because there's so much to get through, which means you end up both failing to enjoy the sensual experience of eating and feeling excessively full when you're done. (And in that case, why not just stay home and fortify yourself with cold oatmeal?)

I'll give Connie the last word:

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

And to add yet another of my pet peeves....

I did not suggest that there should be a law in what we should do. We can talk about the way things should be without bringing the law into it.

I noticed Rondi had added some election-related application on Facebook, so I clicked through to look at it. The text at the right said something like, "The 2008 election is almost here." I didn't do a double-take until a few seconds later--that's how accustomed I am to the idea that we're already in the run-up to the election.

The good citizen in me is not looking forward to the coming year. Following politics can be good, wicked fun sometimes, but I mostly do it because I consider it a duty. I will listen to the debates and read up on candidates' records as legislators and seek out the opinions of commentators whose judgment I find helpful. But I am expecting this to be the least fun election season of my adult life.

A lot of that has to do with Hillary. My sainted aunt, I am so sick of hearing about Hillary. I'm not referring to her relentless spotlight-seeking in and of itself--what else do you expect an ambitious politician with designs on the Oval Office to do? She's actually become much less grating to watch and listen to over the years. As an old-fashioned celebrity-loving gay guy, I've taken some pleasure in watching her develop a more bankable image. Work it, Hills, I say.

Unfortunately, there's a flip side, which is that everything she says or does is examined to death, by friend and foe alike, for what it might indicate about her emergent Hillaryness. Of course, every politician makes tossed-off comments or clothing choices that get overworked in the media, but with Hillary the enterprise reaches a whole new level. Some sources speculate that Clinton's newest shade from Clairol suggests her commitment to the reconstruction of Iraq is less than sincere.... I understand that there are reasons for it--she may lack Bill's charisma, but in her own weird way, she may be just as compelling a figure. A lot of her fans seem to think she's some kind of saint, and a lot of her detractors seem to hate her more than they do Satan.

[Added on 15 October: Thanks to Eric for the link. He uses the obvious word in this context: "cult [of personality]." The reason I didn't myself is that I think it really bothers Hillary that that's what she has. However ruthlessly loyalty may be enforced in the Clinton inner circle, I think that with respect to the electorate, Hillary clearly wants to be the natural, rational choice for thinking people. Not that she'll refuse the votes of blind partisans, of course.]

You can imagine what I think of her politics. Hillary represents just about everything I detest about arrogant, technocrat-in-group statism. Since she's such an inveterate triangulator, I'm not sure how many of her overweening policy points she would actually work to push through in their purest illiberal form, but I'd prefer not to find out.

I will say that in one sense I sympathize with her: She clearly wants to be a natural at winning over voters. She works and works and works at it, all to little effect. It must be frustrating to want so much to be good at something for which you have no talent, especially when you're married to someone who could charm the spots off a leopard. She always reminds me of Tom Cruise, who refuses to settle into being a movie star with a presence a lot of people will pay to see. He struggles mightily to be an Actor, and it doesn't work because you can always see the gears turning. Same with Hillary. The more "on" she is with her gestures and her speech patterns in technical terms, the more she comes off as an animatronic Anna Lindh doll. It would be nice to see her just cut the crap and be the steely, high-handed bitch she clearly wants to be. (And America needs a steely, high-handed bitch or two, now that Madonna's been domesticated and run through the Brit-erator.) She would be utterly fabulous at that. But it would obviously cost her the election, so it's not going to happen.

Instead, we're going to spend the next year in the spin cycle perfected when Bill was in the White House, only with a senate term and a grown-up Chelsea ("See? At least one person in this family is normal!") sloshing around in it. Eric has two posts up about Control of the Narrative. While they don't address the election explicitly, they're pertinent here. Apropos of something else, he says, "I think media culture and hypersensitivity tend to fuel each other, and the result is a latent hysteria constantly lurking in the background, and ready to break out upon the slightest provocation." We're so used to hearing that every bracelet Hillary wears may say something about what's going on in that calculating head of hers that I think a lot of people have started to buy it without realizing they're doing it. We're in for an annoying year.

[Added on 15 October: Thanks to Eric for the other link, too. If you haven't read that post of his, BTW, you really must. The situation he's discussing is absolutely hilarious. Of course, if there were serious threats issued or an injury that drew blood, that's not funny. But the indignant haggling over which type of identity-political aggrievement is warranted on the part of which involved party is like something out of Through the Looking Glass. Eric's final comment: "You'd almost think they were trying to avoid getting on the wrong side of Cotton Mather."]

Man, no one's given me a BJ like this for years:

We had been told that [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] would take a couple of questions from us during the show. Quite a rare opportunity.

We probed him on a deal he struck with London's mayor.

...

[London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson] has questioned why a country with such poverty is giving to one of the world's richest capitals.

"This man is stupid," Mr Chavez told us. "There are poor people in London. I have seen them."

...

He answered a question on his links with Iran by calling President Ahmadinejad "an extraordinary man".

He said he could deal with whom he liked and that he did not go round telling the UK prime minister that he could not be friends with the "genocidal George Bush".

It was classic Chavez - he has never been one to mince his words.

There are a few rote sentences observing how staged and lacking in dissent the event being covered was, of course; that's how you maintain "objectivity." But just how "probing" could those questions have been if they could be answered with sassy little quips? A close buddy of mine, an Englishman whose politics are pretty close to mine, likes to raise my blood pressure by sending me links to these things. His comment on this one was "Oh, please...."

Flamin' Nora, this is NEVER going to end, is it (via Henry at Gay Orbit)?

Sen. Larry Craig filed court papers Monday seeking to withdraw his guilty plea in an airport sex sting, arguing that he entered the plea under stress caused by media inquiries into his sexuality.

Craig, an Idaho Republican, pleaded guilty in August to disorderly conduct following his June arrest in a sting operation in a men's bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. A police report alleged that Craig had solicited sex from a male officer at the airport, which the senator has denied.

Okay, I can certainly understand being stressed out by the knowledge that the media are investigating your sex life. But you'd think that being under the gun that way would make you even more likely to protest your innocence as loudly as possible at every turn. Certainly, people who are stressed out often make snap decisions that don't make much sense to outsiders, but it's hard to interpret Craig's guilty plea as anything but an acknowledgment that he'd done something he knew he could be busted for. (BTW, what could that hand-swiping movement possibly signal? "I can pay by credit card if you're seeking genero$ity"?)

If some cop in a public toilet showed me his badge from a neighboring stall and told me to follow him out, I'd be pretty baffled about what he was on about. I don't pretend to be a choirboy; it's not that I'm unaware that sex goes on in toilets. It's not even that I never have throbbingly urgent homosexual thoughts in airport bathrooms--just that they're along the lines of, Damn it! This tube of Origins Make a Difference Rejuvenating Hand Treatment in my bag is WAY more than four ounces! Great...with my luck, it'll get confiscated, and for what? Do they expect me to terrorize a 747 full of passengers into submission by getting a flight attendant in a hammerlock and threatening to over-hydrate her skin? And you just know the drug store by the gate, if there is one, will have nothing but Jergens crap that goes on like motor oil.... A police officer who interrupted this reverie to inform me that any accompanying hand and foot motions suggested plans to engage in illegal behavior would get a blank look from me. "What...you think I was trying to sell you drugs or something?" Plenty of people plead guilty to crimes to avoid alternatives that seem worse, so a guilty plea doesn't necessarily imply moral culpability, but Craig seemed awfully defensive for someone who wasn't doing anything unseemly.

Maybe I'm just naive, but it seems to me that the best way to stop shenanigans in the rest rooms is to post prominent signs that say "PREMISES MONITORED BY POLICE FOR YOUR SAFETY," then to be sure a police officer does, in fact, look over the place once every ten minutes or so. If Craig really was caught by an excessively zealous patrol officer, then it's only reasonable to wish him the best in getting his name cleared. (Eric thinks there may have been a constitutional issue, too.)

But whichever way Craig exercised poor judgment, it was still poor judgment, and he's making himself and his party look like fools. I wish the guy would just stop the press conferences, quietly go about seeking his day in court, and devote himself to a life of anonymous service to others until he figures out how not to be such a public flibbertigibbet. Yeah, I know--it'll never happen, and I've just written a post about the whole ridiculous mess, which I'd promised myself I wouldn't do.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when I prayed the media would get back to obsessing over Britney.

The anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender always brings controversy over visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where fourteen men convicted as Class-A war criminals by the international tribunal are enshrined along with fallen military personnel. Yesterday, former Prime Minister Koizumi went, but of the sitting cabinet, the only member to make a pilgrimage was Sanae Takaichi, State Minister for (of all things!) Okinawan Affairs. The Mainichi also ran an article citing high-ranking sources stating that Emperor Hirohito believed that including the fourteen Class-A war criminals in the enshrinees at Yasukuni was a diplomatic error: "While the Shrine gives repose to the souls only of those who died in the war [itself], this would change its nature," and "[This move] will plant the seeds for deep-rooted trouble in the future with nations that were affected by the war."

I've always been of two minds about the Yasukuni issue. I have no trouble explaining why I disagree with the shrine's official position. (This is from the English site.):

According to the faith conveyed to us by the mythical accounts of the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, the Kami, Izanagi and Izanami, in giving birth to the country of Japan, also gave birth to the people. This is to say that the Japanese islands and people are both born from the Kami. Therefore, the soul of man is identical with the Kami. And so long as this universe continues to exist, the soul of man can be nothing else than eternal.

…

Isn't it a fact that the West with its military power invaded and ruled over much of Asia and Africa and that this was the start of East-West relations? There is no uncertainty in history. [!] Japan's dream of building a Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of Asia. We cannot overlook the intent of those who wish to tarnish the good name of the noble souls of Yasukuni.

…

To bring an end to war is the earnest wish of mankind. Regardless of whether we can realize this or not, the act of despising the souls of those who offered their lives for the national community by those who were left behind is no more than extreme ingratitude of a people without a country.

Note the way this allows the administrators of the shrine to have it both ways—positioning Japan as in line with the rest of mankind in desiring world peace while justifying the practice of honoring those who presided over Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanking. Japanese theology regards the souls of good and evil alike as passing into the next world-—fine. But that doesn't mean it provides a good defense for failing to draw moral distinctions among their actions while they were alive in this one.

On the other hand, one can visit a house of worship without necessarily buying into the full line pushed by those people in charge of it. Koizumi's stubbornness about making pilgrimages to Yasukuni always struck me as politically unwise, but his positions on the WOT, economic liberalization, and individualism were enough to convince me that he wasn't a closet Tojo fan. Koizumi probably does believe that you can perform rituals at Yasukuni without letting all the kami off the hook for their war conduct. Not so sure about others, including those on the cabinet.

Speaking of conflicting religious conceptions, this (via Instapundit) strikes me as very worrying, though hardly without precedent:

A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.
Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word "Allah" while celebrating Mass.

…

A survey in the Netherlands' biggest-selling newspaper De Telegraaf on Wednesday found 92 percent of the more than 4,000 people polled disagreed with the bishop's view, which also drew ridicule.

Huh? Words refer to ideas, and ideas have consequences, to coin a phrase.

It's one thing for Christians in a mostly non-Christian country to call God by the best local equivalent. Professor Bainbridge says, "Words matter. To a person of faith, no word matters more than the name of God," but in my experience, there is some give there. For example, Japanese Christians also call God 神様 (kamisama: kind of like "God, Sir"). However, those I've meet are keenly aware of the difference between their god and the Japanese kami themselves. And Dutch, presumably, already has a perfectly good word for "God." The substitution of "Allah" would presumably imply to the average listener that the speaker was mindedly shading it with the conception of God in Islam. I'm not sure what can be accomplished through that at this historical moment except the beclouding of distinctions between religions that it would be wise to keep in mind.

So we're back to discussing the difficulties of talking politics politely. Eric says:

I've noticed that the louder and more opinionated a person is, the more likely he is to see a political disagreement with his position as a personal attack. Perhaps it's because he's put so much of his persona into it by being so loud. I think these types are best dealt with in blogs, where insults and ad hominem attacks tend to be self discrediting, WHERE YOU CAN'T SHOUT ANY LOUDER THAN THIS, and the loudly opinionated boors are reduced to inferior-looking lines of text.

Real life is another, very ugly matter.

...

I've always had friends who disagree with me, but things are getting a little ridiculous where it comes to meeting new people. When I meet new people, I often wonder about the advisability of telling them what I think, especially if they show signs of being in kneejerk group agreement on a given issue.

...

Is there a duty to publicly disagree when that can turn an otherwise enjoyable social event into an ordeal?

I haven't lived in the States for years, and I frequently socialize in groups in which I'm the only American. Most of the time, conversation stays neutral: life in Japan, where else everyone has traveled, the wretched weather (usually not a bland topic in Tokyo, actually).

If talk turns to politics, people tend to register the stock surprise that a gay man could possibly be "right-wing"—-not the way I characterize myself, of course, though I try to resist the temptation to bore my dinner partners senseless by explaining how being a libertarian is different—-but I generally find that keeping an even tone and having a sense of humor gets me a fair hearing. In the overwhelming majority of political discussions I've had, I've been the only person to the right of Hillary Clinton but have been treated respectfully, if not always amiably.

One does at times, though, encounter people for whom it's not topics but positions that count as intrusively "political." More than once I've heard someone venture placidly over the rim of his gin and tonic that the Iraq invasion was terrible (or that America is turning into a police state, or that it's awful how Israel and its allies gang up on the Palestinians), clearly expecting the remark to be no more controversial than "What about all this rain, huh?" If, instead of murmuring assent and passing to the next pleasantry, you respond that you supported the invasion or that you haven't noticed anyone's opinions being suppressed in the US or that Israel happens to be the only liberal democracy in its neighborhood, you're accused of being an agent of acrimony--hijacking an innocuous discussion and trying to turn it into a political debate.

Well, okay. Frankly, I don't like conversations that give me indigestion any more than the next guy. Having been brought up the old-fashioned way, I avoid being the person to bring up politics (or religion) among people I don't know very well. But surely once a topic has been put on the table by others, it's fair game. I'd generally be happy to let these things pass were it not for the fact that they come from the sort of people who maintain that Americans are complacent and ignorant about the state of the world because we're not exposed to dissenting views!