Deep politeness

Proposed outfit for the evangelical baker. Via americanrevolution.org.

I wanted to add, to the discussion of old Brooksy's Deep Politeness column, that I am totally on board with the wedding exception to any legal sanctioning of discrimination against same-sexers. The problem isn't, to begin with, that the customer just has to screw that cake out of those nasty people, it's that she or he has to experience the humiliation of being told, in the middle of the complex negotiations, "Oh, are you one of those people? Afraid I can't do a cake for you. God, you know."

People with that point of view are not going to be good bakers or photographers and you don't, gay or straight, want to walk into their shop at all, but especially, if you happen to be planning a same-sex wedding yourself, to be forced to listen to some asshole telling you you're not qualified for one of their fucking cakes because they're just too morally exquisite for a wretched pervert like yourself. Hence the proposal that they should identify themselves, with a well-placed sign in the window, say, saying "We prefer not to cater to the sodomitical nuptial" or words to that effect. So you won't get trapped into any interactions that will leave you shaking with rage. It's only fair.

David Brooks thinks we ought to take our cue in not discriminating against religious bigots from the "deep politeness" of the broader Jewish community:

In the Jewish community, conservative Jews are generally polite toward Orthodox Jews who wouldn’t use their cutlery. Men are generally polite to Orthodox women who would prefer not to shake their hands. In the larger community, this respectful politeness works best.

Actually I think Reform Jews are pretty courteous in this context on the whole too, and Carlebachers and Reconstructionists, and Marxists, and even a lot of goyim, but that's not what I really wanted to say.

What I wanted to say is that the Orthodox woman takes on some of the responsibility for the politeness by identifying herself with the characteristic "modesty" of her dress, the stockings and the wig. You're not left having your hand rejected out of hand by some woman looking at you as if you were a leper, you know in advance not to extend it.

What Brooks calls "orthodox" Christians (no, I don't think he's entirely clear on the meaning of that one either) in the bakery or photography studio or what have you ought to render the same courtesy to those they are not comfortable serving, perhaps by wearing a wig and thick stockings, so you'd know to stay clear of them, and the mildewed flavor of their bigoted wares.

Amazing space

Update: Thanks, Steve and Tengrain, for the shout-outs, and a warm welcome to visitors. And hey, stick around for a minute, because today's a very special day!

From that store that I will never be able to visit because of Justice Alito and the 1993 RFRA.

So David Brooks is out with his 112th career use of the word "amazing" in today's Times, on behalf of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the one just passed into law by the Indiana state government, but the old 1993 federal one:

This moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results. Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization and prejudice.

Something tells me Brooksy isn't at all clear what the original RFRA did and didn't do.

I'm personally very glad that the right of Native American Church members to perform their traditional peyote ceremonies is established and the sacred character of Native American burial grounds in general protected. I'm also not sorry that it didn't protect the children of John W. and Faythe A. Miller of Sugar Land, TX, from having Social Security numbers, even though the Millers' religious belief held that such numbers would burden the kids with the Mark of the Beast as prophesied in Revelation 13:16-17. But I don't quite see where the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization, and prejudice (all of 'em, Katie!) come into it.

Hard out there for a hegemon

Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky, potrait of Anna and Varvara Gagarin, 1802.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "The Method to Obama's Middle East Mess", March 29 2015:

Guess what, Bush was wrong. Cheney was right. If you keep trying to stop killing people, somebody could get hurt. The only way to ensure world peace is perpetual war.

The Bush would be the George W. Bush of ca. 2006, who suddenly realized that allowing Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the government was making him unpopular and staged a bit of a palace coup, with the help of George H.W. Bush's CIA director Robert Gates and, no doubt, other veterans of the brief reign of George I, and the Monsignor is stepping out to take a position against the coup and for the not-so-ancien régime.

No, he doesn't say that. Indeed, he doesn't mention Bush or Cheney at all. But after a good deal of work, much too tedious to report, trying to figure out what he is talking about in this piece, I've decided that's all he can mean, with a column devoted to attacking the concept of "offshore balancing", something that has only been mentioned, as far as I can determine, three times in the history of the New York Times (each time by Ross Douthat, starting last July), as if it were at the center of an ongoing controversy.

The Cruzible

Members of the 1953 Broadway cast, via Hana Theatre.

...if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair. Ted Cruz, frankly, wouldn’t enter into his thinking.
(Charles C.W."Cheese Whiz" Cooke)

Act 1

Spring 1692, a bedroom in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, where his little daughter Betty lies, apparently paralyzed, Parris kneeling in prayer at her bedside. The door opens, and the minister's enslaved Barbadian maid enters, rushes toward the girl, then steps back.

TITUBA: My Betty be hearty soon?

Templates in your head

Via SparkleBox.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Field is Flat", New York Times, March 27 2015:

Democrats could easily lose the presidential election next year. For one thing, they probably won't take Georgia, Arizona, or Texas. Besides, the voters have templates in their heads.

World-famous moral philosopher David Brooks seems to have been stuck for weeks on a slumming trip in his filthy old haunts, in the ghetto of ordinary panditry, whether owing to the agenda of his hidden masters or just boredom with moral philosophy. As far as I'm concerned it's more fun when he does the moral philosophy, but he doesn't care about my needs.

Today it's the elections looming just 20 months away, and a couple of articles from the National Journal, neither of them for some reason by Ron Fournier.

Note on Yemen

Updated 3/28/2015

The Main Bazaar in Old Aden, 1930s. Wikimedia Commons.

Iran Daily did a remarkably good Shorter for their dek text, though it's hard to see how they could have been doing it on purpose:

US Republican Senator John McCain has applauded the offensive launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies against Yemen, speculating that the “conflict will probably escalate” into a regional war in the Middle East.

C'mon folks, let's put your hands together and give it up for regional war! One can only hope, huh, Uncle John?

Not that he can't find something to have a sad over:

Annals of derp: Ted Cruz is an ignoramus

,

Via Flat Earth Society.

Senator Ted Cruz, as reported by Bloomberg:

"Today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers," Cruz said. "You know it used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier."

Galileo never denied that the Earth was flat, matter of fact, because he never in his life met anybody who thought the Earth was flat. It would have been impossible to even bring it up in conversation. He denied that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and got jailed for it by the Vatican, but the more-or-less sphericality of the Earth was entirely well-known to every educated person including his jailers. Ted Cruz is an ill-educated idiot.

Core element of their mental architecture

The Tehran Twist, 1960s, via Dr. Kaveh Farrokh.

Brooks asserts today that there are "three major strains of anti-Semitism circulating, different in kind and virulence, and requiring different responses," but seems to have lost track and made his 800 words with only two strains, strangely, and it's pretty clear there's only one he really cares about:

Verbatim David Brooks, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism", New York Times, March 24 2015:

In the Middle East, anti-Semitism has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray....

This form of anti-Semitism cannot be reasoned away because it doesn’t exist on the level of reason. It can only be confronted with deterrence and force, at the level of fear....

Lee Kuan Yew

Prewar shophouses in the "Chinatown" district of downtown Singapore in the Kodachrome years, 1960s or 70s?

One feature of the 50-odd years of People's Action Party rule over Singapore that I don't disapprove of the way I did in my first couple of years there in the early 1980s is the replacement of most of the island's "colorful" old neighborhoods with gigantic high-rise new towns, gray slabs of concrete looking from a distance like Clockwork Orange nightmare environments.

Cheap shot: Welcome to the Goat Rodeo, Senator Cruz!

Mabel Normand, I think in the 1915 short Mabel and Fatty's Married Life, directed by Roscoe Arbuckle.

Teaser for the New York Times editorial on Senator Cruz:

Anyone familiar with how government works, or with reality in general, will find the senator’s vision for the country problematic.

Hahahahaha. It has come to our attention, Senator, that you may not be familiar with some of the more mechanical aspects of our Constitution. It is unlikely that as president you will have an opportunity to abolish the Internal Revenue Service or exercise your First Amendment freedom to prevent people you disapprove of from getting married. Perhaps you'd like to get some lessons from Foreign Minister Dr. Zarif (Ph.D. University of Denver, 1988), who has a better grasp of some of the nuances, I believe. Not to mention reality in general.

Sure it's racist, but is it really that bad? (Spoiler alert: Yes)

Registering to vote in Arizona (the History Channel wrongly says New Mexico), 1948.

So Binyamin Netanyahu made this election-day video where he begged the rightists to come out and defend themselves against the Saracen hordes:

The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out! (text via Politico)

So Bill Maher wants to know, is that really so terrible? I was reading about it at +972 and had to check the fuller text from Haaretz before I could really believe what they were saying:

Lede, buried: Insulin

Reginald Denny and Mary Astor in Oh, Doctor! (1925), by Henry A.Pollard.

Once upon a time diabetes was a fairly quickly executed, though exceedingly painful, death sentence, and then once upon a more recent time, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, scientists began figuring out how it worked, and developed effective treatments, culminating in the late 1930s with the development of insulin derived from pig or cow pancreata, which enabled patients to control their own symptoms.

Then in the 1970s, with the development of recombinant DNA technology, it became possible to manufacture a synthetic human insulin, which might have worked better in some cases, and was more expensive and hence profitable for the manufacturer, with the upshot that today in the United States the older animal insulin is no longer available and now we have patients dying because they can't afford the $400 a month it costs to treat it with the newer product. This according to an NPR story from this morning reporting on research by Jeremy Greene and Kevin Riggs published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine:

West of Eden: No good guys?

Baghdad Jewish quarter, 19th century.

Over at the Frogpond, BooMan is lamenting that there are no good guys in Iraq and he doesn't know any answers:

I can't say that the Obama administration does, either. It's not their fault, or mine. There are no moderates in this fight. It's sectarian and it's among radicals.

I posted a comment:

Global Warping

Stop Global Warming II by Luminous Luminance at DeviantArt.

Wisdom from Grand Strategy Practitioner David Brooks:

National elections take place within a specific global moment.

True, they tried to repeal the laws of physics in 2014, but Boehner couldn't put the votes together. It was doomed when Tea Party members insisted on a poison pill provision repealing biology as well.

In the 1990s, there was a presumption that we were living in an age of rapid progress. Democracy was spreading. Tyranny was receding. Asia was booming. The European Union was building. Conflict in the Middle East was lessening. The world was cumulatively heading toward greater pluralism, individualism, prosperity and freedom.

It was raining gerunds. It was safe as long as you kept your windows closed. Twenty years later, though, it's starting to get old. And one of them, "receding", seems to have switched sides:

Clarification

Shorter Binyamin Netanyahu:

I never said I was opposed to the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, in fact I totally support it. I simply said it wouldn't be achieved while I was prime minister. Unfortunately I'm an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of my desires. What do you expect me to do about it?

West of Eden: Friedman has a hangover

Peace, from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, Siena, 1337.

Mr. Pierce and Driftglass invite us to contemplate a bizarre paragraph from Friedman's piece yesterday:

O.K., so we learn to live with Iran on the edge of a bomb, but shouldn’t we at least bomb the Islamic State to smithereens and help destroy this head-chopping menace? Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

Pierce, with his clinical interest in amnesia, is mainly interested in reminding us that the other times we were fighting a war on behalf of Iran had to do with Friedman asking someone or other he didn't like to Suck On This.

I had to read this several dozen times before I understood that the middle question wasn't a typo, because I was getting it as "are we sure we're doing the right thing arming ISIS?" and I was positive we were supposed to be not doing that, or at least trying pretty hard not to, but it's now pretty clear that he meant the Friedman-pitch contrarian question, "are we totally sure we're doing the right thing not arming ISIS?" and he doesn't mean it to be taken seriously or anything. He means in this crazy old world it just keeps getting harder to arm or not arm anybody or bomb them to smithereens or anything without giving a boost to somebody you don't like. Ha ha ha.

Netanyahu is now saying he continues to support Palestinian statehood but reality is unfortunately against it:

Oh well

Via.

Not the worst thing about the Israeli election results, but one of the most disheartening to me, is what the takeaway might be over here for Likud's US allies in the Republican Party, that Netanyahu's craziness on the last day, promising that there would never be a Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister and calling his supporters specifically to counteract the behavior of certain Israeli citizens who were Voting While Arabic in larger than expected numbers as if that were somehow indecent or unaccaptable, is what brought him over the line at the end, and that doubling down on violence and racism in the last hours of a campaign is a great way to win an election in general.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, mystax aegypticus, released from the need to talk sense to the Israelis and engaged once again with the voices in his head, thinks it isn't all that important that Netanyahu's finally admitting publicly that he opposes the two-state solution:

Everyone goes to conferences

Photo by Julochka, December 2013.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Skills in Flux", March 17 2015:

For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks.

Or maybe social courage is the quality of a person (not quite nice, in the opinion of mannerly David Brooks)

Insult or compliment? God knows.

William Blake, God judging Adam. Via SHAFE.

Everybody wants to be a critic—

Jeffrey Goldberg:

Critics of the Jews have often called us stiff-necked, but sometimes this insult can be understood as a compliment.

Yahweh:

Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. You are a stiff-necked people. If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you. Now take off your ornaments and I will decide what to do with you. (Exodus 33:3)

Anti-Semitic or just snarky? You be the judge. Wait, no, better not. One thing for sure, faint praise is probably not a good sign.

It wasn't an accident

Port Vila, Vanuatu. Photo by Inga Mepham/AFP.

Waiting three days for the world media to tell me whether Cyclone Pam, which hit the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu on Friday, was or wasn't aggravated by global warming.

Duh. The media don't seem interested. It took Vanuatu's president Baldwin Lonsdale to bring it up, as I finally heard from BBC. And The Guardian:

He said the cyclone seasons that the nation had experienced were directly linked to climate change.

“We see the level of sea rise … The cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected ,” he said.

“This year we have more than in any year … Yes, climate change is contributing to this..."

Yes indeed. You can see, if you're curious, what the Pacific Climate Change Science Program predicted in 2012 for Vanuatu in the 21st century: continuing warming, continuing rise in sea level, fewer cyclones but greater intensity of precipitation events during the rainy season, which is now (Vanuatu is hit by some 23 per decade, none previously with the devastating effect of this one). The violence of this storm and severe flooding are unquestionably consistent with that, whether they are directly caused by it or not.