Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

Bestial Topics of Conversation

Relief from the Sanchi Stupa in Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, representing the three favored residences of the Buddha at Jeta's Grove, photo by Anandajoti Bhikku, Photo Dharma of Sadao, Thailand via Wikipedia.

From the Kathavatthu Sutta, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu; I landed on this text when I was looking for something else:

on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Savatthi at Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's monastery. Now at that time a large number of monks, after the meal, on returning from their alms round, had gathered at the meeting hall and were engaged in many kinds of bestial topics of conversation: conversation about kings, robbers, & ministers of state; armies, alarms, & battles; food & drink; clothing, furniture, garlands, & scents; relatives; vehicles; villages, towns, cities, the countryside; women & heroes; the gossip of the street & the well; tales of the dead; tales of diversity, the creation of the world & of the sea; talk of whether things exist or not.

Then the Blessed One, emerging from his seclusion in the late afternoon, went to the meeting hall and, on arrival, sat down on a seat made ready. As he was sitting there, he addressed the monks: "For what topic of conversation are you gathered together here? In the midst of what topic of conversation have you been interrupted?"

Short story shorter—this is a kind of shaggy dog story which gets bulked up by repeating the list of bestial topics three or four times—the Buddha reproaches the monks for their foolish preoccupations and urges them to talk about things that are worth talking about;

"It isn't right, monks, that sons of good families, on having gone forth out of faith from home to the homeless life, should get engaged in such topics of conversation.... There are these ten topics of [proper] conversation. Which ten? Talk on modesty, on contentment, on seclusion, on non-entanglement, on arousing persistence, on virtue, on concentration, on discernment, on release, and on the knowledge & vision of release. These are the ten topics of conversation. If you were to engage repeatedly in these ten topics of conversation, you would outshine even the sun & moon, so mighty, so powerful — to say nothing of the wanderers of other sects."

It's a little disappointing that he ends up motivating them with the thought of competition with rival monks instead of just being better people and liberating themselves from the endless cycle of rebirth, but that initial list is a beautiful summary of what idle everyday talk really consists of, two and a half millennia later, and what we call punditry as well (a pandit is a Sanskrit scholar, of course, and the kind of self-satisfied thinker against whom the Buddha was originally protesting).

Milestones in shamelessness

Coaster.

David Brooks on the Tellyvision (via Crooks & Liars):

I do think we somehow have to get involved. As the panel said, it has to be political. I think they do have to commit to a — the Iraqi constitution is a regional constitution. It’s a federal constitution which devolves a lot of power. That didn’t happen in practice. Maliki centralized everything. And that was obviously a poisonous and terrible decision.

And there you have it, ladies and gents: the real problem in Iraq is that Maliki turned out to be one of those liberals.

Wonder if he also failed to discourage Iraqi teenagers from having babies before they got married. Or failed to get a handle on runaway government deficits.*