Acephalous

"Madame Secretary of State has been drunk a while, correct. What the fuck is that to you?"

At the Corner, Andrew Johnson thinks it's great news for Hillary that CNN's film division hired Courtney Sexton:

After the RNC voted the network from hosting future presidential debates if it follows through on plans to produce a Hillary Clinton documentary, the network’s films division has announced it will bring on film executive Courtney Sexton, who has a long history of working on left-leaning flicks.

Deadline details that Sexton’s past works include Al Gore’s climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, as well as 2010’s Climate of Change, which “focused on the efforts of everyday people all over the world who are making a difference in the fight against global warming” ...

“Any concerns the Clinton team had are all gone,” RNC communications director Sean Spicer told Politico in an email in reaction to the announcement. “This puts the ‘p’ in ‘puff piece.’”

Talk about punting the story. Sexton worked on Deadwood. If we use Johnson and Spicer's deterministic logic, that means we'll soon be seeing a completely different side of Hillary:

ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE: BE BRIEFED!

HILLARY: BE FUCKED!

Or:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hillary, your presence at the UN Commission on --

HILLARY: I don't drink where I'm the only fucking one with balls.

Can't say I'm not looking forward to this.

The asemic style of conservative politics

As outlined in the book of the same name, the paranoid style of American politics requires a philosophical rigor that contemporary conservatives simply lack. There’s a baroque grandeur to the pattern of perceived slights that’s admirable in its own way — as if a master archer decided to “paint” a pointillist self-portrait one arrow at a time. The style of contemporary conservatives is equally absurd, but it lacks the pointless beauty of paranoia — it’s akin to child who tosses a handful of bird shot into a lake and finds in the resulting ripples a fair resemblance of himself. By insisting his reflection is the result of his “artistry,” he communicates that he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of causality.

Put differently: if he pissed on a mirror he’d crow about the transmogrifying powers of his urine.

Because he’s not paranoid — he’s an idiot. He’s out there kicking a watch to prove to David Hume that God designed the world to exist. At The National Review, for example, Stanley Kurtz recounts reading a book by James Kloppenberg in which Mike Kruglik “recalls that Obama had a special interest in the work of the radical historian Howard Zinn” in 1985. I had to add the date because Kurtz didn’t want to sully Kloppenberg’s account of Kruglik’s twenty-eight year old recollection of Obama’s “special interest” with its proper context. Had he done so, Paul Mirengoff of Powerline wouldn’t have been able to draw attention to “The Obama-Zinn Connection,” nor would he have been able to transform Obama’s “special interest” into overt “fan[dom],” and if he couldn’t call Obama a “fan” of Zinn, he couldn’t link to The National Review‘s “summar[y]” of “Zinn’s errors and distortions.”

This isn’t paranoia — grandiose or otherwise — it’s the self-fulfilling stupidity of three kids kicking a turtle they’ve mistaken for a watch who think they’re proving God and Samuel Johnson right. They’re not exactly sure how they’ve done so, but they’re damn sure that they have because it looks just like them.

Heh. Ha heh ha, heh heh ha, hold on now -- let me, heh, catch my breath. He drew a -- a what? Ha heh, heh, ha heh heh ha, heh, indeed!

Thank you, National Review Online:

For this “cartoon” demonstrating that George Zimmerman’s acquittal is analogous to the legacy of white-on-black violence in America because Al Sharpton is a knotted oak. Only a racist would look at that and think it referenced something so vile as a lynching. Those noosed truths — like someone else we know — don’t even have heads. For all we know they’re wind chimes in their Sunday finest. Only a racist would notice that they’re headless necks from root to wick, because only a racist would associate something as basic to the human condition as fire to the history of racism in the United States. Without fire generations of Americans of all races would’ve frozen to –

– and I can’t do it. Michael Ramirez’s “Lynched” serves a single purpose: to allow the overwhelmingly white readership of NRO to believe that the imagined lynching of an abstract value is morally equivalent to the actual lynching of actual human beings. Because it’s been a long time since white people could really enjoy an image of a lynching. Some of them probably thought the day would never come again.

But thanks to Michael Ramirez, white readers of NRO can stare with childish wonder at the shapes of men dangling from a limb and feel glee instead of having to fake guilt.

UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot this! It's only like my favorite scene in Maus:

Ha heh heh! Heh heh ha heh! Ha ha heh ha heh!

Seriously, about that Rolling Stone cover

I was initially dismissive of the “controversy” concerning the latest Rolling Stone cover because it originated from people making arguments like this:

The cover of Rolling Stone was once reserved for the newest bands, the hottest singer-songwriters or the pop culture phenoms grabbing the country by the scruff of its neck.

Christian Toto, the author of this one, strikes me as one of those “internet researchers” whose store of knowledge consists of ideas half-mastered and mistakenly remembered, the sort that require a quick search to “confirm” that Rolling Stone is “about” music. He has no personal connection with or real knowledge of the magazine and doesn’t desire any. This lack of intellectual curiosity is made manifest in the rest of his post, which consists of quoting “celebrities” like Ralph Macchio re-tweeting the sage words of “one of the creative forces behind HBO’s Entourage.” The limitations of such critics notwithstanding, they accidentally stumbled over a solid point. To quote joe from lowell:

The picture they chose to make the cover of Rolling Stone looks too much like a rock star. It looks like a zillion Rolling Stone covers we’ve all seen. The graphic designers were clearly going for that “ordinary, attractive person is really a monster” effect that the text describes, but they picked the wrong pic. The photo doesn’t read as “ordinary, attractive person who might live next door,” but as “the latest pop star Rolling Stone wants to promote.” It gets in the way of what they were trying to do and muddles the message. They should have used a photo in which he looked a little goofy, or a photo of him at eight years old, instead.

The criticism here isn’t that a lowly music magazine is breaking from routine and lionizing Tsarnaev — it’s an aesthetic judgment that acknowledges what Rolling Stone tried and failed to do. The difference, in other words, between conservative and aesthetic critics of the image is that only the latter are capable of correctly assessing its intent and judging its effectiveness. Conservative critics legitimately believe that Rolling Stone‘s trying to disseminate images of dreamy Islamic radicalism to impressionable American youths, whereas aesthetic critics can read the words beneath the image and understand that the cover fails rhetorically. I think Other Scott need not fear the progeny of strange bedfellows — this is just the most recent case of deliberate conservative misprision. They see what they want to, so when they look at the Rolling Stone cover, instead of seeing what’s printed:

They see what’s politically convenient:

The context is still technically there, but it’s rendered inscrutable by the controversial imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that all should become offended by a universal flaw.” Defining the entire cover down to Tsarnaev’s self-portrait — treating it as if the words didn’t exist — allowed conservatives to circulate an ahistorical and acontextual version of it that’s offensive to everyone. Much like the fight between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman began when Martin landed his first blow, conservatives have managed to bracket the conversation about this “controversy” such that the image being discussed is, by and large, the second one above. Having done so, they can rally their cultural warriors against the Shariah-loving editorial board of Rolling Stone with the usual dishonest gusto.

But liberal and aesthetic critics should have sense enough to realize that the problem with this cover wasn’t in its intent so much as its execution. In all honesty, I don’t think Rolling Stone should be criticized for its visual-rhetorical failure here, but for rehashing the tired trope of “The Monster Next Door.” That’s Keith Morrison‘s bailiwick, and Saturday mornings on MSNBC would be infinitely poorer if Rolling Stone put him out of business.

Your black best friend isn't an "Unfamiliar Black Male"

I'm getting more than a little annoyed with the self-righteous proclamations of conservatives that George Zimmerman's been proven innocent of profiling by virtue of his acquittal on charges of manslaughter and murder. The evidence all points to Zimmerman becoming increasingly obsessed with the presence of black males at his apartment complex in the months leading up to Trayvon Martin's death. Prior to April 2011, Zimmerman's 911 calls were the work of the neighborhood busybody. For example, he called to report:

• 12 August 2004: "a male in a green Ford pickup"
• 20 August 2004: "an open garage door"
• 27 April 2005: another "open garage door"
• 17 March 2005: "pothole that is blocking the road"
• 21 September 2005: "a stray dog"
• 10 June 2009: "fire alarm going off"
• 7 September 2009: another "pothole in the road"
• 22 September 2009: "yellow bike ... doing wheelies"

But starting in August of 2011, Zimmerman's calls took on a decidedly different note. He reported:

• 3 August 2011: "[a] black male last seen wearing a white tank top and black shorts," who he "believes ... is involved in recent [burglaries]"
• 6 August 2011: "two black males ... in their teens"
• 23 September 2011: yet another "open garage door," but specifies reason for calling is "neighborhood watch [meeting] last night"
• 1 October 2011: "two black males ... 20 - 30 [years old] in Chevy [possibly] Impala at the gate of the community," about whom Zimmerman's concerned because he "does not recognize [the subjects] or [vehicle] and is concerned due to recent burglaries"
• 29 January 2012: children "running and playing in the street"
• 2 February 2012: "[black male last seen wearing] black leather jacket, black hat, printed PJ pants [who] keeps going to [the same] location"

And then on 26 February 2012 he calls about Trayvon Martin. There's a pattern here obvious to anyone without an investment in not seeing it. What began as annoying 911 operators with pointless complaints escalated to notifying the authorities any time he saw a black male he didn't know. The argument that he's not racist and wasn't profiling is based on the fact that he "mentored black children" and "had black friends" and is entirely beside the point, because it presumes that he's an overt and deliberate racist. Those who make it claim victory when they demonstrate that he never wore a white hood or bedecked his body in Nazi ink.

I'll grant that that Zimmerman didn't pine for the days of short ropes and sturdy limbs.

I'll grant that he didn't dream of goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées in his dress browns.

But I won't grant that race didn't color his judgment when it came to young black men with whom he wasn't personally acquainted. From 3 August 2011 forward he's increasingly -- and almost exclusively -- concerned with unfamiliar black males in his apartment complex. Maybe confirmation bias is more the problem here than racism, but the fact remains that the bias being confirmed is that young black males are suspects until proven otherwise. You can't look at the 911 calls in the months immediately prior to the shooting and argue otherwise. (At least not honestly.) He transformed from a harmless nudnik into someone very concerned with the presence of unfamiliar black males, which at the very least means that by 11 August 2011 his worldview contained the category "Unfamiliar Black Male" and that the presence of people belonging to it warranted calling 911.

That's indisputable.

Whether he volunteered the race of Trayvon Martin to the 911 dispatcher or responded to a question about it is immaterial. As evidenced by previous calls, this one was triggered by the presence of an "Unfamiliar Black Male." And as the escalation of 911 calls indicates, he was becoming increasingly frustrated with the presence of people belonging to this category. Because, in his words, "These assholes always get away." You can argue that he's simply referring to generic burglars of an undetermined and irrelevant race, but doing so requires ignoring the larger context of Zimmerman's recent 911 calls in which all the subjects were of a determined and relevant race.

But if you want to make that claim in order to win an argument with someone on the Internet, by all means, please tell me about call from 2007 in which he reported seeing two Hispanic males with a "slim jim," or the one from 2009 in which he didn't identify the race of the people "going into the pool and trashing the bathroom." Feel free to ignore the cluster of calls immediately before the shooting in favor of the ones from three and five years previous, because we all know that beliefs don't develop and concretize over time. While you're at it, continue to insist that people who instigate confrontations are in no way culpable for their outcome. You know why? Because to everyone but you your argument amounts to this guy:

Being in the moral right to shoot away should he decide that the danger he sought is more dangerous than he thought it'd be.

It contains all the colors of the rainbow, from white to white.*

Before you laugh, you should know that intellectual heavyweights like the Internet's own Jeff Goldstein are a crucial part of the movement to make "North Colorado" the 51st state. The movement's "willing to make our voices heard even while being labeled kooks and 'fringe' elements," which is a good thing, since it sounds like something concocted by kooky fringe elements. Who are these people? Don't know. But according to Jeff they

represent a growing number of contiguous outlying counties that surround the Denver/Boulder doughnut hole owned by the hipsters and Democrats, and the many out-of-state (and illegally out-of-country) imports who have taken over Colorado government, at least for the time being[.]

I wonder what those counties have in common? Let me see now:

• Kit Carson - 94.8 percent white
• Logan - 92.2 percent white
• Morgan - 92.8 percent white
• Phillips - 96.9 percent white
• Sedgewick - 96.0 percent white
• Washington - 96.2 percent white
• Weld - 93.4 percent white
• Yuma - 97.5 percent white

They "represent" a group wants to form a state that will be on average 94.94 percent white. They specifically want to exclude urban areas like Denver County, which threatens their Great White Fever Dream with its 10.4 percent blackness. Not that their desire for a white state prevents them from explicitly comparing their plight to the Civil Rights Movement. Except if you scroll down, you'll see that their new white state will require that "the streets run with blood like we've never seen before." (That sounds ominous until you remember how low a benchmark that is for shut-ins like these.) So it'll be just like the Civil Rights Movement, only with lots of guns and violence. I bet Jeff's sitting at home right now thinking about rolling naked on the floor -- I mean grappling -- and choking the life from some dusky liberal relativist. Because there's nothing racist about wanting to create a white state if it's just an accident of ideology that everyone invested in its creation is white. Unrelatedly:

*Stolen from a comment David Cross made when I saw him perform at the Irvine Spectrum Center many years ago.

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.