The Epistle of Brooks to the Philistians

World-famous moderate leftist David Brooks out to troll his friends in the Twilight Zone! I don't think we've seen him doing that since Romney was running for president.

Henri Balland's smoked haddock (I think) from Le Boeuf d'Argent, Lyon.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Next Culture War", New York Times, June 30 2015:

I fully understand the pain and despair you guys must be going through as orthodox Christianity vanishes from our society, but a Benedict Option of the kind proposed by Rod Dreher where you all withdraw from the world to contemplate the Last Days in prayer and anguish might not be the best way to go from the political standpoint. Why don't you make use of all that selfless love and commitment like my homegirl Dorothy Day, serving the poor in the urban jungle?

Not a bad idea at all, especially since Dreher's Benedict idea seems to involve leaving the prayer and anguish to the wives, while he and his bros console themselves with the haute gastronomie at the Boeuf d'Argent and the Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, as we learned from Edroso last week. Because let's face it, nothing says martyrdom quite like a Nénuphar de Noix de Saint Jacques Marinés à l'Huile d'Olive d'Italie, plongées dans la Fraîcheur de la Verveine, or maybe Fraîcheur du Haddock Fumé aux herbes de Printemps, senteur de Vinaigre de Mangue et Huile d’Olive Vierge d’Italie for starters.

More Dred: Robert P. George is Stupid

John Schuyler in Frank Powell's A Fool There Was (1915). Via.

David Brooks:

Robert P. George, probably the most brilliant social conservative theorist in the country, argued that just as Lincoln persistently rejected the Dred Scott decision, so “we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation.”

Robert P. George:

Faced with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln declared the ruling to be illegitimate and vowed that he would treat it as such. He squarely faced Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s claim to judicial supremacy and firmly rejected it. To accept it, he said, would be for the American people “to resign their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

John Roberts is Stupid

Image via Bronx Banter.

Hahaha. On Ginsburg's beautiful opinion in the case of Arizona Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, holding that a popular referendum can require a state to get rid of gerrymandering in its decennial redistricting by means of an independent commission, in spite of the constitutional stipulation that

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations . . . .” Art. I, §4, cl. 1. R

The gerrymander-loving chief justice, Smilin' Jack Roberts, dissenting, decides to wax sarcastic, as quoted at the Political Animal, and extracted at slightly greater length from the opinion itself:

Was the Dred Scott decision biblical?

Jesuitical deception! The conservative Catholic site Patheos runs this image as Rembrandt's illustration of Paul's epistle to Philemon, but there is no such painting, and this is Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's representation of the parable of the Prodigal Son (1667-70). I call shenanigans.

Via Juan Cole, on the subject of biblical marriage:

And remember, if your sex slave runs away because you’re cruel to the person, the Bible (Philemon) says that other people have the duty to return the slave to you, i.e. basically imposes the duty of trafficking slaves back to sadistic sex maniacs who exploit them. But if the owner is nice and a good Christian, he might consider letting the sex slave go. But he doesn’t have to.

Off the subject of biblical marriage, it occurs to me that Chief Justice Taney's opinion in the Dred Scott case is biblically based: the Fugitive Slave Act is just what Paul's epistle to Philemon requires. Is that proof that the Confederate States of America were founded as a Christian nation?

Seems Frederick Douglass noticed it too:

#BlackLivesMatter

Via Quickmeme.

A line from Rich Lowry on the Confederate flag debate quoted by Edroso has been sticking in my head since midweek:

The fact is that if anyone banging on about the Confederacy at the moment on Twitter were born in the 1840s in the South, outside of a few select areas, they, too, would have fought for the Confederacy. (UPDATE: It should go without saying that this isn’t true of blacks.) That should lend a measure of modesty to this debate.

"Anyone other than about 40% of the population who I assumed were of no interest when I wrote this up but apparently some anal-compulsive readers thought they should be mentioned."

This is why we need to say that #BlackLivesMatter, because #AllLivesMatter needs a footnote:

#AllLivesMatter (UPDATE: It should go without saying that this is true of blacks.) 

It should go without saying, and maybe one day it will.

(Also: The idiocy of the argument, a classic example of the "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle" fallacy, should really go without saying, but I don't want you to think I missed it; to say nothing of the sheer falseness of Lowry's assertion, as noted in the comments: in that war of brother against brother there were plenty of southerners who fought for the Union, as well as northerners who supported the rebellion, and to suppose otherwise is to show basic historical illiteracy.)

Anthropology

Jihua shengyu haochu duo (Family planning has many advantages); Family Planning Leadership Office of Jilin Province, ca. 1975. Via NIH"s National Library of Medicine.

Fearlessly proclaim the truth about marriage and protect the rights of dissenters

National Review's Ryan T. Anderson has fully caught the genuine People's Daily tone in this dek text, though I think "resolutely" might have worked better than "fearlessly" here.

The truth about marriage?

Brussels louts

Updated 6/28/2015

Image via Wikipedia.

I'll get to Greece presently, but first I want to whip you around Friedman-style for a minute.

Remember the story 20 years ago of how the EU was going to force all the member countries to make cheese exclusively from pasteurized milk, thus basically destroying the ancient and glorious tradition of French, Spanish, English, and Italian raw-milk cheeses that are to dairy products what the symphony orchestra is to music? Have you ever wondered how that went down, or why your Camembert doesn't taste any different, although come to think of it it never has tasted quite the way it did that time you were in France?

The whole thing was bullshit. There was never any such EU plan, it was a stupid rumor. That particular bureaucrat in Brussels doesn't exist. Your Camembert isn't any better than you think it is, but it's because of the US authorities, who forbid the sale of any raw-milk cheese that has been aged less than 60 days, meaning

Dukes of Moral Hazard

On a bright day you can hardly see those stars and bars on the roof, and it's always sunny in Hazzardelphia.  But why can't you call it, say, the General Beauregard?

David Brooks writes ("The Robert E. Lee Problem", June 26 2015):

The debate about what I'll call the Charleston Bible study shooting, because even at this date if you assume it has something to do with race that could only hurt people's feelings, and I have this reputation for courtesy I have to keep up, has oddly transformed itself into a debate about the former Confederate States of America and their battle flag, which is not a trivial matter, because a flag is made of woven material and racism is a part of what it is woven from, though whether weft or warp is beyond my expertise.

Better start swimming, or you'll sink like a stone

Image via Heroes Not Zombies.

The "redefinition of traditional marriage" you keep hearing about actually got started two or three centuries ago, as it transformed gradually from the management of the relations between the Greater Sex and the Lesser to a voluntary association between individuals, partners in the language of founding father John Adams, who always used that word to refer to Abigail, and eventually equals, as women slowly achieved property rights, parental rights, and generally civil rights meant to be on par with those of men.

West of Eden: Throwing up Hurdles

In a medieval Persian Megillat Esther, the queen negotiates with the king over the status of the Jews, while Haman, back left, tries to torpedo the deal.

Ex-Advisers Warn Obama That Iran Nuclear Deal ‘May Fall Short’ of Standards

So runs the headline of a story by David Sanger in yesterday's Times, and the first paragraph goes on to tell us,

President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem&nbspIran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.

The bad faith of this opening is just astounding. The letter, as you can see by looking at it, was not written by "five former members of Obama's circle of Iran advisers" but by a "Bipartisan Group of American Diplomats, Legislators, Policymakers, and Experts", 19 in all, of whom

I win

Triumph of Titus and Vespasian, Giulio Pippi, 1537-40.

Note the date:

#KingvBurwell just died. http://t.co/DDr27jUOFn The Cato lawyer Cannon is bleeding flopsweat out his ears. I'm calling 6-3 to sustain #ACA

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 7, 2015

Malstrøm

David Hockney, The Maelstrom: Bodo (2002), via Museum Musing.

This is such an interesting little story, as we await the word from the Supreme Court this morning, from Nancy Marshall-Genzer at APM Marketplace, for what it says and what it doesn't say:

The King v. Burwell case before the Supreme Court is a challenge to the health care law, saying health insurance subsidies should only go to people who bought insurance on state-run exchanges. A decision is expected in days, and if the Court rules against the Obama administration, people in states using the federal insurance marketplace would lose their subsidies.

And they might just turn to Connecticut for help. Connecticut succeeded in launching its own insurance marketplace, or exchange, that worked even as the federal government and other states struggled. 

The TPPing point

Now updated with Paraguayan Super Snacks

Invasion of foreign ketchup. Indonesian kecap manis, via Roda Dua.

An exchange at LGM started off like this, and my riposte to Erik Loomis's rejoinders got too long to post there, so here it is.

Yastreblyansky says:

June 24, 2015 at 10:13 am

Maybe the worst thing about the way this debate is being conducted is the continual speculation over what ISDS mechanisms “will” do in the event the TPP is passed, as if the idea were a novelty that has never been tried before. There are some 3200 bilateral investment treaties using ISDS, in which the US has a track record going back to 1982 and belongs to some 50 treaties with ISDS provisions. If you’d like to investigate what the ISDS process has done, some helpful factual documents are here and here.

These help to explain why there has never been an outcry in the US over ISDS before now; there’s never been anything to cry out over. The US government has never lost a case. The resolution can impose money damages only, it cannot overturn legislation. The most frequently sued countries are the countries with the most inefficient legal systems: Argentina, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Egypt, Ecuador, and India in that order; the process starts only if the local legal system fails to find a resolution (there have been cases, like the Hong Kong Philip Morris suits against Australia and Uruguay, where big corporate money has been able to keep a suit going for an incredibly long and expensive time, but they still have not won).

It is very painful and weird for me to be in disagreement with the entire labor movement on this issue, but the fear of ISDS is just not rational. We’ve already had it for years and it isn’t a problem.

reply

Spiritual Pron

Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Sam Wood's Beyond the Rocks (1922), via TheLoudestVoice.

Shorter David Brooks, "Fracking and the Franciscans", June 23 2015:

Pope Francis, author of a new encyclical on the protection of the natural environment, is the kind of ideal human being I've been talking about who radiates goodness, generosity, humility, spiritual awareness. What an idiot, huh?

As with the largely leftist cast of The Road to Character, George Eliot, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Brooks wants us to admire the Pope's deep spirituality while ignoring everything he thinks. Wonderful man, but unfortunately stupid on geological, biological, economic, and political issues; you should listen to a smart guy like Brooks, otherwise known as a narcissistic blowhard, instead.

R.I.P. Gunther Schuller

Paul Klee, Die Zwitscher-Maschine (watercolor, 1922).

The great musician was principal French horn in the Metropolitan Opera and on Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool album at the same time, and his often wonderful work as a composer all the way up until now covered the same kind of range. He was 89.

Cheap shots: Goobernatorial

One third of the Texas Navy. Photo by David Martin Davies via Wikimedia Commons

Wonderful piece by Seth Robbins and Paul J. Weber at TPM detailing Texas governor Greg Abbott's plans to supplement his $3.5-million gunboat navy (for real, six boats!) with his own state border patrol, with a price tag of $800 million (in a budget that cuts a little over a billion dollars for programs like full-day preschool, family planning, and Medicaid). Apparently the situation is pretty urgent: illegal immigration in Texas is down 44% over last year, so if he doesn't hurry it just might stop itself before he gets a chance to stop it.

This detail portrays the fear-stricken residents:

Declarations, continued

Via somebody's Zachary Taylor Pinterest page.

OK, I hope you all don't mind this extension of the previous post. I think it should be the end. One part of it continues the stupid debate over whether (white) Christian churches ran the abolition movement in the 19th century, with a backing off the position:

Rich Puchalsky 06.20.15 at 11:35 pm

Getting back to the thread, Jerry V. writes:
“What I mean is that neither of those other languages had the kind of penetration that would have been required of a mass movement in opposition to a society-wide problem like slavery. “

Declarations

This Declaration mentions a Supreme Being, but the nontheism of the authors is universally acknowledged. Image via VideoGamesAndTheBible.

Spent an awful lot of time yesterday commenting in a vast and fancy-ass academic thread at Crooked Timber, which ran for some reason a post by the George Washington University political theorist Samuel Goldman arguing, in a post on Danielle Allen's Our Declaration (2014), that you can't really comprehend the meaning of the Declaration of Independence unless you believe in God:

Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God? ....  On the level of intention, the Declaration presumes a personal and providential deity. 

...while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them. This is important because the Declaration is not, as Allen claims, “a philosophical argument”. Instead, it is a call to arms. People generally don’t fight for “commitments” and “grounds”. For better or for worse, they do fight for what they believe God demands...

I'm running most of my own comments here, with a little continuity, because it's my blog so I can do it if I want, and to take the opportunity to edit some. You should totally look at the whole exchange, though, which covers an enormous range of topics, and contributions, as always happens there, at a very high level along with some idiocy.

Ain't life elemental?

Alexander Granach as Renfield in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922).

Looks like we won't get to find out how David Brooks responds to the white-terrorist attack on the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, the papal encyclical Laudato Si, or Donald Trump's presidential campaign, all questions of some spiritual interest, because he's still on that book tour (Oregonians can catch him this weekend at branches of Powells) and hasn't got time to look at the papers unless he has special orders, as in Tuesday's TPP column (for which, as I've suggested, somebody else must have done the reading and all he needed to do was to lay out the index cards on the hotel-room shag and then type them up).

Instead what we get is another installment in the crowd-sourced characterology museum he started last month, where visitors to the Road to Character website record the ways in which they found a purpose in life, and then he cuts them up and pins them to the wall with bits of his own prose for continuity:

Like are you saying racism is intrinsically *bad* or something?

The first Memorial Day or Decoration Day was apparently held in Charleston by freed men and women of color, May 1865, when they went to "decorate" the mass graves of mostly white Union soldiers dead in the local POW camps in love and respect. Via Damario Solomon-Simmons.

I never know what to say on occasions for despair like this white-terrorist massacre in Charleston. I'm good to go with Obama's statement, which I thought was very just though almost too sad to bear, and the things all my favorite people have been writing today, I don't have any special insights of my own.

No, wait, there's one thing, in the area we're all talking about, of the weird insistence of the right wing that we shouldn't call the killer a terrorist, or a racist, or refer to the crime as a "hate crime". Like, I can understand why they'd want to say he isn't a conservative, because that would suggest there's something wrong with conservatism.  But for that very reason it's pretty weird when they avoid saying he's a racist, insisting instead that it's wholly unknowable, like Governor Nikki Haley: