Acephalous

Jonah Goldberg “traffick[s] in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago”

That theory being, of course, that what he says matters.

It doesn’t.

But what’s frightening is that in this isolated case, he may be right. (In all others? Not so much.) After trying to apply our new Internet Tradition to what Republicans said on the Sunday talk shows, it occurred to me that a weapon this dangerous can’t be allowed to fall into conservative’s grasp.

The power of Peak Exculpation must remain in our scheming hands and our mocking hearts for all eternity. Imagine if conservatives realized that they could say anything they wanted so long as someone followed with a note that they were merely “trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago”? That can’t become acceptable.

Sadly, given Jonah’s ability to influence conservative “scholars,” I’m sure it’ll become more than acceptable — it’ll become the excuse du jour among the professionally wrong. It’s not their fault they’re old and white and male, so how can they be held accountable for “trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago.”

If you have an issue with their obsolete positions, take it up with Father Time, Jefferson Davis and The Patriarchy.

NOTE: Someone who knows how to use the Twitter machine better than I should show @JonahNRO the power of his despicable phrase. Start a clever #hashtag and all. I’m just saying!

Thank you, Jonah Goldberg, for this new Internet Tradition

I’ve already kicked a downed Goldberg while having a laugh and taking a piss on him today, so you know that I wouldn’t target him again unless he wrote something so exquisite his nuts left my knees no choice.

Which is exactly what happened.

According to Jonah in the article the Other Scott linked, Niall Ferguson should be forgiven because he “was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago.” Not since “a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” has Jonah provided us with a sentence of such valuable vapidity.

Consider its lack of specificity: the “old theory” is “old,” but there’s no indication of how old it is; not that its age matters, mind you, because this “old theory” wasn’t merely acceptable back then, it was “perfectly within the bounds” of polite society; moreover, “not very long ago” this “old theory” wasn’t merely “perfectly within the bounds” of decorum, it belonged to the “intellectual discourse,” meaning that the right kind of people discussed this “old theory” all the time, whenever that happened to be.

Thanks to Jonah’s brilliant formulation, conservatives can now blame recent historical traffic — of an unspecified age and purview — for every vile thought that leaks through their lips. It’s not their fault that we’re unfamiliar with social etiquette from whenever it was.

Storify is uncouth and ugly, and but in this one case, worth it.

EXTRA! EXTRA! FEMINISM DEBUNKED! RAPE NOT REAL!

What are we going to do with all you lying bitches? Here we are generously giving you privileges you don’t deserve, and one of you pulls this shit? I just don’t—what else can I say?

We tried.

We tried to make you rational. We pretended not to ignore your vaginas and needs and civil rights and you repay us by having one of yours fake rape? Don’t you realize this discredits everyone who shares your junk? Christ—that’s it. I’ve had enough.

Feminism is officially cancelled.

Shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear it.

You don’t have the right to complain anymore. You could’ve stopped this one woman from fabricating this one rape but you didn’t. And I don’t want to hear about all the other rapes that are real or go unreported because I don’t.

I don’t want to hear about them.

This woman lied about a rape threat! Just imagine what the person she invented is going through right now. His fictional parents are crying great heavy tears at this false accusation against the son they never had.

If he already didn’t exist he’d be wishing he never had.

So that’s it feminists. If you can’t rally in defense of men who were never born then I just can’t fathom what you’re good for.

Why the Collins “non-story” will matter

The most important aspect of Jason Collins’s decision to become the first theoretically employable openly gay male in a major American sport isn’t that this “accomplishment” requires that many qualifiers, but that he has a twin brother who’s a heterosexual. So much of the rhetoric about homosexuality focuses on whether God made homosexuals gay or whether they’ve turned their back on the Lord by succumbing to learned perversions. The distinct sexualities of the Collins twins seem a boon to those who think homosexuals are etymological perverts: Jason has “turned aside” from the righteous path that is his birthright. Why did he do so? He was converted by childhood trauma or an agenda-driven homosexual into thinking his feelings for other men were normal; which is to say he “turned with” an individual who convinced him that other men were as attractive as women.

God didn’t put the gay in him — someone abused it into him. Whether that abuse is sexual or rhetorical in nature matters less than the simple fact that it’s abuse. That it’s become socially acceptable for prime-time faggots to queer the very foundation of marriage is a sign that American culture’s in steep decline. Children are being converted into perverts — are turning with those who would turn them aside — and political correctness prevents decent people from objecting to this abuse. But all this talk of conversion and perversion obscures the fact that homosexuals haven’t always had their agenda implemented as precisely as a Zionist plot. Homosexuals were once considered a diaspora of narcissists who wandered the world looking for themselves. They were inverts. They’d “turned inward” and demanded of others the love the mirror denied them.

Which is only to say that the operative metaphor changed.

What was once thought to be a loathsome inversion of God’s love has become what happens to children when they watch Glee. Because when you introduce contemporary American culture into the classic conversion narrative you end up with a system of dissemination indistinguishable from infection. You don’t need to convince someone to “turn with” you if society’s “putting in” or “doing to” them what the homosexual agenda wants it to. Which is why conservatives express their concerns about Collins’s revelation by not caring with thunder. So long as they ignore its importance the epidemic can be contained. They want Collins to become a non-story.

Hence the significance of the fact that Jason Collins has an identical twin brother who’s straight. The temptation to use Jarron Collins’s heterosexuality as proof that Jason was either converted to or infected by homosexuality will prove too great. That Jarron shares Jason’s DNA but not his perversion demonstrates once and for all that God doesn’t sanction the birth of gay babies. Jason couldn’t have been born this way because Jarron was too and look at him. Which means homosexuality is essentially a function of bad parenting: parents either didn’t pay enough attention to who tended to or played with their children or they allowed their children to be exposed to the pernicious influence of American culture. Better parenting can prevent children from being converted or infected by homosexuality by regulating who their children meet and what culture they partake.

That Jason and Jarron met the same people and partook of the same culture isn’t significant because the first theoretically employable openly gay male in a major American sport couldn’t have been born homosexual. Science says that stuff with the same genes is identical and therefore the gay can’t be genetic. You’ll see this argument repeatedly in the coming months — not because it’s valid but because Jarron Collins prefers sex with women. No grand conversation about how the same genes can express themselves differently depending on environmental factors will be had. The word “epigenetic” will not enter the national discourse. Why not?

Because as I type these words conservative “journalists” are combing through Jarron Collins’s life trying to discover where it differs from Jason’s. They’re searching for the Holy Grail of Gay and will use their rudimentary understanding of genetics to prove that someone either proffered Jason a sip or forced it down his throat. Jarron will become proof that Jason could’ve been “normal.” In short the “facts” of this particular case — as they understand them — accord too neatly with operative conservative metaphors for them to let it become a non-story. They will run with this because they mistake language for logic. They will run with this because they mistake logic for science. They will run with this because it eliminates God from the suspect pool.

And unless we point out that theories based on “conversion” and “infection” as are arbitrary as those predicated on “inversion” they will be successful.

Michelle Malkin loves a “Weatherman with a tan,” “has a herpe” (or How Twitchy “works”)

I’m beginning to understand why Michelle Malkin and “The Twitchy Staff” publish everything under the byline “The Twitchy Staff.” If I blamed a missing person for the Boston bombing on account of him being mentioned on a police scanner while wearing a Che t-shirt, I wouldn’t want my name directly associated with it either. Or with stories like “We’re pretty sure Dzohokhar Tsarnaev is not Tweeting,” which carry all the authority of a poorly sourced rumor just in case it really happens to be him so that Malkin can engage in some blog-triumphalism if the improbable turns out to be true. Would Malkin do this under her own name? Of course not. As proof I offer as evidence that she hasn’t. It looks like she has, but a quick read of that post shifts all potential blame where she wants it: on the “Twitchy Team.” Who’s responsible for this irresponsible speculation? One of these people. Which one?

Wouldn’t you like to know.

But you never will, because the site’s designed to facilitate irresponsibility. Despite all Malkin’s proud declarations about the importance of citizen journalists, in the end she’d rather hide, like the coward she is, beyond an anonymous byline because she knows “mistakes were and will be made.” How does she know? Because that’s the point of the entire site. She’s free to publish anything she’d like without having to worry about annoying things like “consequences,” because not only is she not directly responsible for what she’s published, she’s merely aggregating what other people have written on Twitter. It’s a perpetual bullshit machine powered by anonymity. She can take credit for its “findings” when some infernal occlusion causes it to belch out something accurate, but for the most part she denies via “UPDATE” the endless stream of bullshit it was designed to produce.

This is a more sophisticated version of the long-standing tradition among conservative bloggers of denying-without-denouncing the sexism and racism and homophobia and xenophobia of their readers. The bloggers are merely exercising their right to speak freely about their conservative values and extending their readers the same opportunity. When those readers inevitably reveal themselves to be within earshot of the whistle, these same bloggers claim to have no idea where all these dogs came from. The problem with this approach is that eventually the stench of urine sticks to bloggers who quietly encourage their readers to lift their leg on the America dream. So Malkin created a forum where figuring out where that smell’s coming from is as difficult as distinguishing one yellow stain from another — we certainly can’t blame her for the mess or the miasma.

But I think we can. I think we should force Malkin to take responsibility for the state of her house. She wants to shift the blame to her roommates or their friends but her name is on the deed. Anything they do or say is ultimately attributable to her. (Hence the title of this post.) I normally wouldn’t make such an insistence, but since her site is designed to allow her an unconscionable deniability, I’m not sure what choice we have.

Boy, I sure would hate to be Amanda Marcotte right now!

Because she just got burned in a totally effective manner by an actor! From a television show!

This @amandamarcotte claims to like quality television? Well here's one show she can no longer watch: JUSTIFIED. twitter.com/yesnicksearcy/…— nick searcy (@yesnicksearcy) April 13, 2013

The problem with this logic extends beyond the fact that conservatives devote Russian steppes of bandwidth to discrediting the idea that actors ought to participate in the public sphere. They start highly effective Twitter-campaigns to boycott actors and employers who make overtly political statements because they believe, deep in their ideological core, that people involved in the production of televisual entertainment have nothing to add to the national conversation. We're talking deep personal convictions here. They'd never enthusiastically embrace the statement of a character actor just because who am I kidding of course they would. They don't hate Hollywood -- they hate that the majority of it thinks their values are antediluvian. And when someone from Hollywood agrees with them?

They just can't handle it.

Every conservative celebrity-of-the-month becomes the John-Paul-George-and-Ringo of Twitter for awhile. (Adam Baldwin's either sitting alone crying on the abandoned set of Chuck or mercilessly pounding his Twitter trying to make Twitchy love him again.) But the thing about Twitter-campaigns and its meth-dependent scribe is that it all amounts to chatter amongst like-minded folks. Conservatives on Twitter form tiny circles of self-congratulation whose sole purpose is being sky-hooked into illusory importance by a service, Twitchy, that only exists to reinforce that delusion. No fiendish liberal could come up with a plan that mollifies conservative egos with the subtlety of Twitchy. Once they scale Malkin's xerostomic mount they feel like they've made it -- who cares if their throats are too parched to say anything else? It's not like they said much of value before.

Take Nick Searcy's declaration above. He will never be more beloved by bigots than he is right now. This is the summit for him. All that was required of him to reach it was a profoundly impotent public statement. No longer will Amanda be able to turn on her television on Tuesday nights and watch Justified because ... because ... because Nick Searcy said so. You'd think someone who's portrayed as many officers of the law as Searcy has would understand the concept of enforceability, but apparently he's more concerned with being Conservative Internet Hero Du Jour than actually saying something that might make sense. But at least he attacked Amanda in a way that might hurt her feelings!

Because I'm sure his empty threat to take away toys he doesn't own via means he can't control must really sting.

Ironically, she's not doing transwomen any justice.

I'm genuinely fond of Gail Simone's work—both in comics and combative internet forums—and I fully support what she says about the addition of a transwoman to the cast of Batgirl:

She added that she thinks most superhero comics readers don’t have a problem with increased diversity, but rather with stories that promote sermonizing over storytelling. Alysia will be “a character, not a public service announcement … being trans is just part of her story. If someone loved her before, and doesn’t love her after, well—that’s a shame, but we can’t let that kind of thinking keep comics in the 1950s forever.”

Except it's not "just part of her story," because it's just not part of the story. It's an interruption in Barbara Gordon's issue-wide interior monologue. Because in this issue Gordon has quite a bit of confessing to do:

You don't even need to enlarge the image to see that the majority of this conversation is filtered through Gordon's interior monologue—those black dialogue boxes speak for themselves. This is Gordon telling you a story about Gordon, which would be fine if this didn't happen:

I admit to having edited out three panels of hugging and a close-up of that message-cat, but that doesn't detract from my larger point: Alysia's confession isn't an organic element of the narrative. It's utterly forced. Consider the first set off panels above: it's a series of two-shots emphasizing the bond between Barbara and Alysia that "transitions" to an unnecessarily dramatic close-up on Alysia. Because it's not as if Barbara's confession of having been paralyzed and tormented and stalked lacks emotional weight. Her burden is even indicated, visually, by the purple half-bat that haunts her words. She can't escape what's been done to her and who she is, not even when she's telling her own story to herself. Which, again, is all well and good. I adore the confessional mode so long as it doesn't involve Don Draper talking about swimming. But a narrative written in the confessional mode simply isn't the best place to have someone other than the confessor make a grand gesture. My editorial work above may be a little dishonest, but it's certainly indicative of the issue's overall narrative emphasis. If Simone wanted to have Alysia's moment be hers, she should've placed it in a narrative that didn't belong to Barbara Gordon, because that makes it seem like an afterthought.

And that only provides more ammunition to people who think "cis-gendered" is just "another one of those terms invented in universities aimed at eliminating the word “normal” when discussing sexual preferences." Because people who think DC is pushing an LGBT agenda will feel like its being "shoved down their throat" when revelations like this are inserted into narratives so awkwardly. That close-up pushes Alysia into the reader's face in a manner liable to remind readers that the forced intimacy of all close-ups is actually really creepy, and when it comes to rhetorical effect, the difference between "shoved down my throat" and "thrust in my face" is without distinction.

How science becomes "fact" in conservative circles

On March 30th, The Economist published “Climate science: A sensitive matter,” in which James Hansen, formerly of NASA, noted that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” The article then outlines the many ways in which the scientific community is attempting to account for the fact that the mean global temperature is “already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models.” Different models are consulted, other mechanisms suggested, alternate sensitivities proposed, i.e. science happens.

Or, as Rich Lowry wrote at the National Review on April 2nd, “[i]n other words, the scientific ‘consensus’ [has] been proven wrong.” Granted, he actually writes that the consensus “will have been proven wrong” if the mean global temperature remains flat “for a few more years,” but that’s a difference without distinction. First, because he declares himself arbiter of a scientific consensus he doesn’t understand; second, because he chooses the scientifically precise date of “a few more years” before the consensus he doesn’t understand will be invalidated; and third, because he’s drawing the conclusion that “the ‘sensitivity’ of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated” despite the fact that his own article contains a paragraph about factors that might be mitigating warming. He tacitly admits that carbon emissions may still have a warming effect, it’s just that, for example, “new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.”

Which is only to repeat myself: he’s writing about a science he doesn’t understand; moreover, he’s doing so from a position of ignorance so profound he doesn’t even realize his arguments might be entirely compatible. In the same way that I can be both an athlete and a writer, so too can carbon emissions be pushing temperatures up while aerosols drive them down. Arguing that X doesn’t do Y because A does B isn’t much of an argument.

Unfortunately, he’s sharing his misunderstanding of logic and science in the influential pages of the National Review, which means that despite the fact that he misrepresents processes he doesn’t understand, his conclusion will shortly acquire the status of received wisdom as it’s repeated, in ever more ignorant forms, by other writers in the pages of the National Review. For example, today Victor Davis Hanson wrote “[t]he global warming hysteria—with no measurable planet warming in the last 15 years despite sizable increases in carbon emissions—is abating[.]” His evidence? He doesn’t need to cite evidence.

Lowry already established this new conclusion as a fact.

Which means I can propose my own new theory: based on the evidence above, conservatives require six days to transform science into stupid and stupid into ideology. I less-than-eagerly await the inevitable proof of my error.

I couldn't understand conservative outrage over Google's "Cesar Chavez" logo

Until I thought about what it looks like in their heads:

I'd be upset too if I expected something Christian like Easter eggs and saw that instead.

UPDATE: Turns out my sarcasm was prescient. Team Malkin for the win! Winners abound!

UPDATE II: And of course, [a] Glenn Reynolds [clone posting at Glenn Reynolds' site] can't help but add: "Twitchy.com notes that 'Google’s Easter insult sparks Twitter backlash, mockery,' as well it should." It's almost as if he doesn't know that the entire point of Twitchy.com is to manufacture and amplify "grassroots" "Twitter backlash." (Or like it's in his best interest to pretend not to be a party to the scam.)

UPDATE III: When I added the words "Glenn Reynolds" to this post, Typepad's "Related Posts" recommendations changed to:

I'm not saying nothing about anything. I'm just saying.

It’s as if millions of debate coaches suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced

I’m just a teacher of argument, not a lawyer, so I’m only going to address the merits of these arguments on their merits, not their legal standing. To begin:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr. Cooper, could I just understand your argument. In reading the briefs, it seems as though your principal argument is that same-sex and opposite—opposite-sex couples are not similarly situated because opposite-sex couples can procreate, same-sex couples cannot, and the State’s principal interest in marriage is in regulating procreation. Is that basically correct?

MR. COOPER: I—Your Honor, that’s the essential thrust of our—our position, yes.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Is—is there—so you have sort of a reason for not including same-sex couples. Is there any reason that you have for excluding them? In other words, you’re saying, well, if we allow same-sex couples to marry, it doesn’t serve the State’s interest. But do you go further and say that it harms any State interest?

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, we—we go further in—in the sense that it is reasonable to be very concerned that redefining marriage to—as a genderless institution could well lead over time to harms to that institution and to the interests that society has always—has—has always used that institution to address. But, Your Honor, I—

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, could you explain that a little bit to me, just because I did not pick this up in your briefs. What harm you see happening and when and how and—what—what harm to the institution of marriage or to opposite-sex couples, how does this cause and effect work?

MR. COOPER: Once again, I—I would reiterate that we don’t believe that’s the correct legal question before the Court, and that the correct question is whether or not redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would advance the interests of marriage as a—

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, then are—are you conceding the point that there is no harm or denigration to traditional opposite-sex marriage couples? So you’re conceding that.

MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, no. I’m not conceding that.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, but, then it—then it seems to me that you should have to address Justice Kagan’s question.

MR. COOPER: Thank you, Justice Kennedy. I have two points to make on them. The first one is this: The Plaintiffs’ expert acknowledged that redefining marriage will have real-world consequences, and that it is impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know exactly what those real-world consequences would be. And among those real-world consequences, Your Honor, we would suggest are adverse consequences.

Cooper argues, not in essence, but is actually forwarding the argument that redefining marriage will have real-world consequences that are impossible for anyone to predict, but which include the adverse ones he knows will happen. Cooper fails freshmen composition. But what are his real concerns?

MR. COOPER: Yes, Your Honor. The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus, refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults, of adult couples.

People might seek to meet the “emotional needs and desires of adults, of adult couples”? Why would the gays want the emotional needs and desires of all adult couples to be met? What did they ever do to them? Who really matters here anyway?

JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, suppose a State said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a State said that, Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?

MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, it would not be constitutional.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Because that’s the same State interest, I would think, you know. If you are over the age of 55, you don’t help us serve the Government’s interest in regulating procreation through marriage. So why is that different?

MR. COOPER: Your Honor, even with respect to couples over the age of 55, it is very rare that both couples—both parties to the couple are infertile, and the traditional—

(Laughter.)

The men. Of course. The men matter here, because they’re the ones who can continue to be fertile in perpetuity. So the emotional needs and desires of couples are less important to Cooper than the government’s commitment to protect the inalienable rights of viable sperm. But I’m sure there’s no precedent about marriage and its effect on children that might be relevant here.

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, they might try to make a different record about the effects on children. But there isn’t a record to that effect here. And the fourth point I would make, and I do think this is significant, is that the principal argument in 1967 with respect to Loving and that the commonwealth of Virginia advanced was: Well, the social science is still uncertain about how biracial children will fare in this world, and so you ought to apply rational basis scrutiny and wait. And I think the Court recognized that there is a cost to waiting and that that has got to be part of the equal protection calculus. And so—so I do think that’s quite fundamental.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Can I ask you a problem about—it seems to me that your position that you are supporting is somewhat internally inconsistent. We see the argument made that there is no problem with extending marriage to same-sex couples because children raised by same-sex couples are doing just fine and there is no evidence that they are being harmed. And the other argument is Proposition 8 harms children by not allowing same-sex couples to marriage. Which is it?

I wonder why Roberts didn’t want to address the argument that biracial children can fare well in the world? I can’t think of any reason why he’d want to avoid that issue. I’m sure he didn’t change the subject to avoid talking about the fact that the sitting President might be relevant to the argument?

I don’t read a lot of Supreme Court transcripts, but I do teach argument and did do forensics in high school, so I know both what the former entails and what the latter occasionally requires, i.e. having to take the AFF or NEG of a case based on a draw instead of a deeply held belief. You have to argue the case you have to argue, I get that, but honestly? Cooper couldn’t have made a more unsympathetic case about an issue which, though it will be decided on other grounds, needed an argument based on something more sophisticated than bigotry in order to acquire more popular support. It’s not just a freshmen composition course he failed today.

The Racists & The Shoe-Shine Boy

I'm still waiting for reputable conservatives to repudiate Scott Terry's statements, but I understand if they're reluctant because I couldn't prove that the Scott Terry whose reading list I linked to is the same Scott Terry from CPAC. Now I can:

Many of you are visiting this blog due to the recent CPAC controversy, where my friend Matt Heimbach and I, made national news by showing up and asking (in civil, articulate tones, mind you) a few simple questions.

What was our main concern?

There is a lot of rhetoric in the conservative movement about reaching out the mestizo demographic, or reaching out to the homosexuals and blacks.

Our question: why not reach out to whites?

In case you had any doubt about whether his concerns were racialist or racist in origin, here's how he answers that question:

This is exactly what the GOP needs to do, as a matter of fact.  Steve Sailer and the guys at VDARE have done an excellent job in pointing this out.  Please educate yourself about the Sailer Strategy.

It's not that he hates black people, he's merely upset that

The GOP wants us all to blend together into a mocha-colored, capitalist utopia!

And he's working on more reading lists! Here he is trying to define the "Kinist" canon. What's so bad about that? So long as you also believe that God ordained the social order and advocate that man's first duty is to "love one's own kind," absolutely nothing! And Terry takes "lov[ing] one's own kind" very seriously. Just look at his alarm clock:

A beautiful white girl was slaughtered while taking a ride in the top of a double-decker school bus; the cry was heard:  “Wake up!”

Another beautiful white girl, the more beautiful because she was in the late stages of a pregnancy, was attacked by a gang of twelve savage animals.  A white lawyer stands in passionate defense of one of the animals.  The sane yell “Wake up!”

If I were a professor of rhetoric, I might have something to say about Terry's choice of unnecessary adjectives here, if only because he seems as obsessed with the deaths of "beautiful white girl[s]" as a latter-day Nancy Grace. But that's not to say Terry doesn't have culture. He goes to the theater to see

a half-descent [sic?] portrayal of a group of Godless pagans, prancing around in their celebration of the downfall of Western Civilization.

Is that a pun or one of those Aryan-equivalent-of-Freud's slips? Doesn't matter. This man, with his belief in the separation of races and the divinely ordained social order (which he just so happens to sit atop), is clearly an outlier in the modern conservative movement. No real or respectable conservative holds these beliefs, or at the very least, no real or respectable conservative would air them this unabashedly.

A real or respectable conservative like National Review's Jillian Kay Melchior would write a paean to "[t]he simple shoe shine" in which, through great effort, she managed to avoid using the word "boy." She would write nothing of the divinely inspired social order, but instead  let the accompanying photograph say a little something about it:

And unbeknownst to Mechior, this shoe-shine man, Dino Wright, knows exactly which game he's playing when he "creat[ed] this entrepreneurial activity":

CPAC and events like it boost business for Wright. He says he thinks it’s because he “provides a very important service to this very image-conscious group.”

You'd have to be as dense as Melchior to believe the "service" he's paying to "this very image-conscious group" has anything to do with shining shoes.

Damn it, Bill

I defended Obama against Althouse et al.‘s unfounded and visually illiterate accusations, but I just can’t bring myself to back the Big Dog when he’s so obviously enjoying the view:

As long as the "conversation" about guns concerns hypotheticals about fictions ...

... I don't see the harm in adding more fictions to the hypotheticals. Given that the opposition's evidence is the "millions" of home-invasions that've been thwarted yearly, or most probably even hourly, by gun-savvy Common People Who Love The Constitution More Than Dirty Liberals Do, I don't see why Dirty Liberals oughta restrict themselves to reality. And so:

Q.E.D.

I only mock the brilliant, responsible students. (And only when they ask for it.)

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but since I sent in my absentee ballot, the election's lost a little luster for me. Turns out that voting ruins elections.

Go figure.

That said, look forward to much more on Game of Thrones from me in the near future. I've already written the posts, I just can't publish them yet because my students are on to the fact that I post my lesson plans before I teach them, which has resulted in a truly frightening situation in which they actually know everything I'm going to say before I say it. So I have to hold those back until after class on Tuesday. (Grumble stupid students being responsible grumble.)

But my students are still blogging, and they're producing all sorts of interesting material. I assign them 1,000 words a week, 500 of which I script for them via a prompt, the other 500 they're free to write whatever they want so long as it includes the course's critical vocabulary. Last week I covered the neuroscientific argument about frontality, the short version of which I discussed here, and now I have students who can't stop seeing faces everywhere. Including one particularly bright apple whose free post this week concerned Prometheus in a very interesting way. He began by noting that the film opens with an intelligent designer ceding its DNA to fertilize the Earth—the pun was intended in the original—and that the first scene in the film that includes humans opens thus:

Seems innocuous enough, right? But according to my student, Ridley Scott—whose name is but an inverted "d" from being "Ripley Scott," as my student pointed out—wanted to remind viewers that this was a seeded world with this shot. How so? By including evidence of intelligent design in the rock features:

See how sad that rock is? See? It's this sad:

Just tilt Mr. Intelligent Designer man about 35 degrees to the left and you'd have Mr. Sad Rock:

I'm not sure I buy this argument—and strongly suspect that I may have overplayed the frontality hand—but I can't help but admire the pluck of this close-reading, especially given the fact that stretched as it is, it does conform with the overall (and problematic) logic of the film, which is all about, as the audience is informed immediately after Mr. Sad Rock makes his appearance, the existence of "the same configuration" appearing across Earth and the universe. I informed my student that this was an impressively terrible argument—far too overdetermined to be correct—and he responded by saying I should put it out there for others to decide. I warned him about what happens on the wilds of the Internet, but given that he's taken legitimate points about frontality and merged them with a solid accounting of the film, he feels comfortable putting his theories out there.

So what do you think?

"This was probably scrubbed by a brown person. Let me help you clean that."

Paul Ryan's committed to doing work that doesn't need to be done because someone has to do it. Or something:

Is there anything more odious than conservatives pretending to do the work of a class for which they don't care one whit in order to secure the votes of those who spit on the very people these conservatives are pretending to be?

All you need to know about Paul Ryan’s skill as a debater

When you debate competitively there are some issues you know not to address. There are others you know to better than to pursue. Then there are those that must be avoided at all costs—that must not even be mentioned lest your loss become an object lesson in unwitting self-immolation. Whether Ryan’s handlers wanted to watch him burn or Ryan was simply too stupid to recognize the brutal inefficacy of his anecdote matters less than the fact that he said it with his “honest face” to Joe Biden’s actual one:

RYAN: Mitt Romney’s a car guy. They keep misquoting him, but let me tell you about the Mitt Romney I know. This is a guy who I was talking to a family in Northborough, Massachusetts the other day, Sheryl and Mark Nixon. Their kids were hit in a car crash, four of them. Two of them, Rob and Reed, were paralyzed.

The one thing you don’t address—the one you know better than to pursue—the one that must be avoided at all costs—the one that must not even be mentioned in a debate with Joe Biden is a tragic car accident. The attempt to elicit sympathy for Romney by anecdotal proxy is a poor enough of a play. The decision to do so via an anecdote about a tragic car accident in a debate with Joe Biden means you’re either a sociopath or possessed of an idiocy of immeasurable power.

Shorter Ann Althouse: Racists can't be racist because they love their racism.

So some of Scott Brown's staffers were caught tomahawk-chopping while war-whooping, which is absolutely not a traditional means of representing Native Americans as tomahawk-chopping, war-whooping, nothing-noble-about-them savages. There's no history of American cinema in which Native Americans were a violent bulwark against the tide of civilizing white men eager to manifest their destiny. There's no history of American literature in which Native Americans played the roles of "Captor #1" and "Captor #2" and let's just call them "Tribe of Captors" in popular captivity narratives that identified war-whooping with lady-taking and child-killing. None of that is real because Ann Althouse said so:

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.

See? "The Indian is his hero." Whose hero exactly? According to Althouse anyone doing the tomahawk chop. Which means that she believes that performing a racially offensive can't be considered racist because the performance itself is necessarily an act of loving emulation. For example, if one of Scott Brown's white staffers were to create a television show called

It couldn't be considered racist by definition because its use of the stereotypical Chinese immigrant is evidence of that this white staffer considers Chin-Kee to be "his hero." In all seriousness, Althouse's problem is that she's so ignorant that she doesn't realize that the stereotype of Native Americans that Brown's staffers invoke isn't historically accurate, which is why she can claim, straight-faced, that "these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians," when in actuality they're pretending to be racist stereotypes of Native Americans.

One day I will wake up in a world in which "Ann Althouse" is revealed to be the work of an art collective trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Sustained  Installation of  a Person Who Couldn't Possibly Exist. I pray that day comes soon.

In the meantime go read my other post. It'll cleanse this stupid clear off your palate.

The perils of writing about politics on Facebook

After reading the two posts I wrote yesterday evening, SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL decided that he’d had enough, but instead of just quietly cutting me adrift he decided he wanted to have the last word.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: I want you to know I’m blocking you, asshole. Every time you write about how much you love Romney you prove you hate America and the troops. I just wanted to be the man who manned up and said FUCK YOU to your face.

SEK: I think you meant “Obama.”

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: FUCK YOU!

SEK: You already said that.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: FUCK OFF!

SEK: Didn’t you block me?

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: ASSHOLE!

SEK: Would you like me to tell you how to block me?

After reading the comments that appeared after I posted the above as a status update, SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL wrote me back.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: You’re laughing at me!

SEK: I am.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: I can read it!

SEK: You can. My feed’s public.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: But we’re not friends anymore!

SEK: My feed’s public.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: Fuck your feed! Make it stop!

SEK: So far as anyone knows, I’m mocking a generic conservative bigot. As long as you don’t comment on it no one will know I’m mocking you.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: (comments on the previous post while I write the above, then demands) DELETE MY COMMENT NOW ASSHOLE!

SEK: You wrote it. Delete it yourself.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: I did. (he didn’t)

SEK: (so I did) Good for you.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: Now delete what you wrote.

SEK: No.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: DO IT NOW!

SEK: No.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: MAKE IT SO I CAN’T SEE IT!

SEK: My feed’s public.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: I DON’T WANT TO SEE IT!

SEK: Then don’t look at it.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: THEY’RE MAKING FUN OF ME!

SEK: They are.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: FUCKING DEMOCRATS!

SEK: If you insist.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: I DO!

SEK: Good for you.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: YOU DON’T KNOW ME! I FUCKING HATE YOU!

SEK: You realize I’m going to post this too, don’t you?

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: YOU BETTER NOT!

SEK: Why?

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: WE’RE NOT EVEN FRIENDS ANYMORE!

SEK: Then what reason do I have not to post it?

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: ASSHOLE! DON’T DO IT!

SEK: OBAMA COMMANDED ME. I HAVE NO CHOICE.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: …

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: …

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: …

SEK: That was a joke.

SOMEONE FROM HIGH SCHOOL: FUCK YOU I KNEW THAT!

Anyone wanna pay me $1,000,000 to produce a video of Obama choking on a matzo ball?

All I had to do was dither around the site to which I'd already linked to find evidence that my prediction about the next two months is correct. Because as it turns out I somehow missed this:

Breitbart News is doubling its reward—to $100,000—for one of the missing pieces of Barack Obama’s past, which may be the key to understanding his collapsing Middle East policy: the “Khalidi tape,” a video kept under wraps by the Los Angeles Times since April 2008.

The Khalidi tape shows Obama at a 2003 farewell party for radical Palestinian academic and activist Rashid Khalidi, and reportedly features vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric ...

The ties between Obama and Khalidi are deep, going back to the days when Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund with former terrorist Bill Ayers, and provided funds for Khalidi’s Arab American Action Network ...

Given Obama’s muted response to the attacks on U.S. embassies and troops throughout the Middle East today; his refusal to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week; his eagerness to sacrifice Americans’ free speech rights in fruitless gestures of appeasement; and his belated but effusive support for the now-radicalized Arab Spring, it is worth examining the roots of his misguided foreign policy.

The Khalidi tape may provide the key.

I'm pleased to introduce you to The New New Stupid, son of The New Stupid, inevitable father to the host of Newer Stupids due to arrive in the next two months. When FOX decided to blanket itself in that 1998 video of Obama discussing taxation as an anodyne form of redistributing wealth, all I could think was that someone in management thought tit-for-tat the most effective strategy to counter the release of the Romney video.* If they have videos, I imagined management saying, we will too. Put aside the fact that FOX claims to be an independent news organization and focus on the fact that executives at FOX believe that "video" is a unit, and that the only way to counter one unit of "video" is with another.

Breitbart News, so named because it decided to call itself that, literally doubled-down today in an attempt to produce a unit of "video" that will damage Obama's candidacy more than Romney's did his. This video, if it exists, will do maximal damage because it'll introduce Breitbart News readers and FOX viewers to shocking new ideas like "Obama has Muslim sympathies," "Obama hates Israel" and "Obama pals around with terrorists." As I noted in my previous post, the problem with this approach is that anyone who's going to believe that already does, so finding a unit of "video" that can be edited to demonstrate Obama's long-standing loathing of America and gefilte fish will have absolutely no impact on the election.

Yet it's incredibly important to conservative "news" outlets to find and disseminate as many of these units as they can between now and November. I would say that I don't know why, but I know that sucking at the conservative teat requires bona fides and that all these folks need them lest they be forced to leave the house and find a job that doesn't consist of shaming people who already have one.

*I also thought that "blanket coverage" made for an apt metaphor: FOX management ducked under the covers because thunder had thundered or monsters had crept from beneath the bed or Romney had opened his mouth.