There’s been a long and somewhat intense discussion going on in the comments over at Kyle’s sub-blog about the Obama administration’s rule requiring Catholic institutions to provide coverage for contraception in their health care plans. There are a number of interesting threads I’d like to pull out here and state explicitly in a post that’s longer than a comment. It’s really long, so I’m just putting the whole thing behind the fold.
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(Spoilers for the first three episodes of ‘Homeland’ follow. Be warned.)
I’ve been working on catching up with the Showtime series “Homeland” for the last couple days on the recommendation of basically everyone on the entire internet. It’s an entertaining show, although I’m not convinced it’s quite as entertaining as I’ve been led to believe. More importantly, though, I’m getting the growing sense that some of the basic assumptions of the show are just really gross.
First, let me say that I am only three episodes in, so it’s possible I’m completely wrong about all or most of this. Maybe I’m not supposed to identify with any of these characters. Maybe they are all supposed to strike me as incredibly horrifying little tyrants. There is plenty of season left for the show to do something very smart and change my mind. But I’m not betting on it.
Let’s start with one of the basic metaphysical facts that seems to be underlying the whole show: there is a large (or powerful, or something) terrorist organization that represents a serious threat to the United States. This is false. Just completely and totally false. Al Qaeda represents as much of a threat to the United States as an angry PTA. Probably less, actually. Again, the show may be misleading me on this count, but the complicated money laundering scheme at the end of episode three (in which a CIA informant is killed so that her necklace may be stolen and converted into a house that will somehow eventually be used for terrorism) makes me think I have the basic handle here. Terrorism is A Serious Problem that we have to do something about.
The main plot of the show – that a returned soldier (Brody) who was tortured for eight years might be a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda – is utterly preposterous, but it’s not any more preposterous than the notion that Al Qaeda is A Serious Problem once you filter that through the lens of TV. Using the logic of TV, if Al Qaeda is a clear and present danger to the US, then of course they would use an insanely complicated Manchurian Candidate-level plan eight years in the making. It’s stupid, but it’s not especially problematic.
What is problematic is what every single government-employed character does. The deputy director of the CIA, along with some other military fellow whose rank I missed, try to pressure one Brody’s friends into getting him to re-enlist, go on TV, and sell the war. They know Al Qaeda is a real problem, they think the American people are too stupid to keep supporting indefinite war, and they need some way to turn the dials of public opinion. This is fine for what it is, I guess. It’s played fairly transparently as a ploy by some self-serving politicos to drum up support for their little project. It’s enough to make you lose faith in government, but it’s not enough to make you worry about the basic morality of the people who made this show.
Then you have the lead, Carrie, an agent for the CIA. She is the one with the notion that Brody is a sleeper agent, and she is determined to prevent him from “hitting us again” (she even uses that timeless phrase of the neoconservative agitator, in case you were in danger of not being made completely uncomfortable by this show). So, before he gets home and rejoins his family, she has his entire house bugged. She can watch most (not all, which becomes a plot point) rooms in his house, with full sound. She mostly uses this power to watch him have incredibly uncomfortable sex with his wife, because this is pay cable. Again, this could all be a subtle critique of the surveillance/anti-terrorism state. Carrie is even mentally ill, leaving that particular door wide open.
The final nail for me, though, was what happened when her boss/mentor/whatever discovers that she is illegally spying on Brody. He initially reacts with horror, threatening to run it up the chain of command and get her fired. She, of course, throws herself at him, and he (admirably) reacts with revulsion and horror. So far, so good, but then… He decides to go to a FISA judge and use some unrevealed indiscretion in the judge’s past to leverage a warrant making the surveillance legal for four weeks, so Carrie will have a chance to prove her suspicions.
The whole thing adds up to just an incredibly gross worldview. This is basically 24 for smart people. Terrorists are a major threat to the United States, and when the government is overzealous or, you know, commits felonies in the process of uncovering their insanely complicated plots, we can just tweak a couple things and make their actions retroactively legal.
Again, maybe I’m badly misreading this. I will watch the rest of the season and report back.
EDIT: All that said, the other show I am trying to catch up on is the BBC version of “Sherlock”. I agree 1,000% with Alex Tabarrok: it is absolutely perfect.
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Andrew Sullivan has written a long piece for the magazine version of Newsweek responding to the prevailing critiques of Obama from both the right and left. He charges that the criticisms aren’t just “out of bounds” but “simply – empirically – wrong”.
First, I will say something nice. I think his critique of the right is pretty good. The notion that Obama is some left-wing ideologue dragging the country kicking and screaming into a socialist dystopia is so at odds with reality that it doesn’t even merit a response, but Sullivan somehow finds the energy to give it one. That he can do it without even once using the word “moron” is probably a credit to his character.
His response to the left’s criticisms of Obama’s domestic policy also seems pretty much right. As Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and the rest of the Beltway Brain Trust will tell you over and over again (whether you actually want them to or not) is that Barack Obama can’t legislate by fiat and he can’t give a speech that will magically produce 60 votes in the Senate. (Note: I am leaving aside the question of whether he should give more forceful speeches anyway, use the bully pulpit, etc.) And, even, leaving that aside, I am not a good water bearer for this set of critiques. I am skeptical of the power of stimulus and somewhat lukewarm on the bailouts. Should middle class mortgage-holders have gotten some kind of bailout of their own? Of course, but that doesn’t mean the banks shouldn’t also have.
Don’t get me wrong. I do hate Obama’s style. I think he has badly misread the moment, and his persistent need to seek compromise and bipartisanship with Congress has been a real tactical error. The way he almost completely caved during the debt ceiling negotiation was infuriating, but ultimately it seems to have done little real damage to the country. It remains the case that a more forceful Obama would make the left feel better but probably would not accomplish much more in advancing liberal policy goals.
Now, enough being nice. Sullivan seems to realize that his case against the left’s foreign policy argument is not very strong. Here is the entirety of his position (in a four-page article):
Yes, Obama has waged a war based on a reading of executive power that many civil libertarians, including myself, oppose. And he has signed into law the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial (even as he pledged never to invoke this tyrannical power himself). But he has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return.
The two things he mentions are bad enough (even without noting that we shouldn’t have to rely on the president’s benevolence in not enforcing laws that shouldn’t exist in the first place). Illegal wars and indefinite detention were, after all, two of the things the left (and Sullivan) spent most of the Bush administration screaming about!
What’s worse is what Sullivan ignores. Authority to unilaterally assassinate US citizens? Secret drone strikes – and the resulting “collateral damage” – without any consultation with the American people about exactly how they serve our strategic interest? And, while it’s not precisely foreign policy, I’m throwing the massive ramp-up (to record annual levels) of deportations in here too. This is not a record that any liberal should be proud of, even if we imagine a hypothetical long game of eleven dimensional chess (meep meep).
I don’t really begrudge anyone who chooses to support Obama in the upcoming election because he’s the lesser of two evils. That he is better than Romney is unequivocally the case. (Nor, to be fair, do I begrudge anyone who supports Romney because he’s the more conservative candidate. That is also the case, even once we leave off this nonsense about Obama’s secret socialist plans to bankrupt the universe.) I do begrudge liberals who support Obama without an honest assessment of just how much of a disaster his foreign policy has been for liberalism.
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As you might expect given the title, this post is going to contain some spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire, right up through the end of the last book (A Dance With Dragons).
Time to take a deep breath and post about something even more frivolous than Ron Paul’s campaign.
George R. R. Martin has posted a sample chapter from The Winds of Winter. You can read it here if you’re so inclined. A couple initial thoughts:
1) This doesn’t really answer very many of our outstanding questions. Since it clearly takes place before the end of Dance (and Martin says as much on his Not a Blog), it doesn’t really provide much help on the matter of what happens in the Stannis/Bolton showdown.
2) Looks like Bran is about to jump into matters in a big way. I’m not totally sure why Asha wants Theon out on the island with the weirwood, but it’s pretty clear Bran has the birds whipped into a frenzy. That could be fun.
3) The Theon chapters of Dance were, in my opinion, among the very strongest elements. It’s good to see more of him here, and it’s really good to see more Stannis (who, as many/most of you should know by now, is one of my two favorite characters [the other is Davos] in the whole series).
My favorite lines from the new chapter:
“Never call him that!” Spittle sprayed from Theon’s lips. “Ramsay Bolton, not Ramsay Snow, never Snow, never, you have to remember his name, or he will hurt you.”
[Stannis:] “He is welcome to try. Whatever name he goes by.”
and
[Theon:] “The north remembers. The Red Wedding, Lady Hornwood’s fingers, the sack of Winterfell, Deepwood Motte and Torrhen’s Square, they remember all of it.”
I didn’t really like Dance, and I’m still worried about where Martin is taking us here, but it’s safe to say my excitement is fully rekindled.
UPDATE: Oh jeez, I missed the obvious rejoinder to point #1. Stannis’ prediction that Massey might hear about his death, combined with a description of the inner workings of the United Raven Postal Service, makes it pretty clear that the letter at the end of Dance is a fake.
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A friend pointed me to this op-ed by Richard Russo in the New York Times about Amazon’s latest tactic to establish itself as the sole source for buying… well, everything, to be honest. Basically, the gist is this:
…Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases (up to $5 per item, and up to three items).
Russo notes that books were excluded from this deal but not music or DVDs. And, of course, even if you can’t use the credit to buy a book, you have still already discovered that Amazon sells the book cheaper, and so you are probably going to buy it from Amazon anyway. The damage, either way, is done.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with out-competing your rivals, even if your methods are a little tasteless. As Dennis Lehane says in the op-ed, this is “scorched-earth capitalism”. Amazon is under no obligation to make sure that their competitors survive a price war. Of course, there is the side problem that Amazon has largely used its tax-free status to become a corporate mega-behemoth, at which point it pivoted to use its mega-behemoth leverage to set up sales tax schemes to its own benefit. That is well within the traditional purview of the particular rent-seeking form of capitalism most firms adhere to, but you can pretty easily raise principled objections without any kind of rejection of capitalism in general.
In any case, what really interests me is the question of whether Amazon is destroying (or helping destroy) a literary culture of some kind. There is no doubt that book stores have historically been a kind of gathering place. They are the first line for book talks, readings, or signings. They, especially in their smaller or more independent forms, create a space where like-minded people can share thoughts and favorites. Take away book stores and this stuff goes away, right?
Not clear. We are in no way running out of space for like-minded people to gather. The League itself is testament to that, even if the only thing our minds tend to have in common is snark. E.D. Kain runs book clubs (sort of) from the front page here; Alyssa Rosenberg hosts discussions at her place over at ThinkProgress; Brian Cook recently did a Q&A with an author at MGoBlog. (These are all recent experiences I’ve had that I pulled off the top of my head; they may or may not apply to you in any way.) There are listservs for basically every author with any kind of following at all. I am not suffering a shortage of people who want to talk – and talk intelligently! – about any book I can think of talking about.
Where I’m going with this, I think, is that Amazon seems to be more a symptom of a larger cultural change that really doesn’t have much to do with Amazon’s business practices. The internet has radically redefined how we connect with people (and corporations, which are also people). It is so easy to find someone who shares my interests that I don’t need to wander around a bookstore or ask the owner for suggestions. Book culture just isn’t something that takes place in folding chairs in a Barnes & Noble any more (says a guy who was very recently at a book talk and signing at the Barnes & Noble in Bethesda).
Amazon has some shady business practices; I won’t deny it. But they also make it very, very easy to get ahold of almost any book you can imagine, at the best possible price, no matter where you live. Then you can fire up Google (one of the world’s other most evil corporations) and find literally thousands of people to talk about it with. You may not get to talk to anyone you’ve ever met in person, I guess, but I think the cost-benefit analysis clearly works in your favor on this one.
UPDATE: Farhad Manjoo largely beat me to the punch on this.
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Since yesterday was Opposite Day, I didn’t really want to break up the party by posting this, so it got pushed back a day. Then I realized it might actually be Opposite Week. In any case, this is not the opposite of anything, except maybe good taste.
A little background: for the second year in a row, I wrote a preview of all the college football bowls for a friend of mine. She’s a Michigan grad, a solid football fan, and she lives in Boston (which should, I hope, provide enough of an explanation for how this is pitched and who the intended audience is). She likes a guide, and my exhaustive (or: obsessive, pathetic, pick your favorite adjective) knowledge of the game means that I get to write it.
For each game, I list the date, the bowl’s name, the teams involved, a short description, and a rating. The ratings are on the following scale: DON’T BOTHER, CAN SEE, SHOULD SEE, MUST SEE.
I thought some folks here might be interested in seeing it, so click through the fold if you’re so inclined.
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I expect that this is going to be a somewhat unpopular post, judging by the feedback I’ve gotten on Twitter for suggesting it in the first place, but I want to hear what other people think.
First, the background. During halftime of the Steelers/Chiefs game on Sunday night, Bob Costas took to the air to deliver one of his Rooney-esque, moralizing lectures. This week was about touchdown celebrations and how they’re a symptom of a depraved culture. Watch for yourself:
Now, obviously, the correct first response to this is, “Oh brother.” It’s precisely the kind of sanctimonious nonsense that certain folks (the aforementioned Andy Rooney among them, although see also Mitch Albom) love to spout about things because that’s just kind of their shtick. It comes from the same grumpy place that all social conservatism comes from, but it’s then spiced up with a little extra sermonizing and some charming name-calling (“knucklehead”). The appropriate rejoinder is probably something along the lines of pointing out that there’s nothing especially graceFUL about going on TV and haranguing other people about their lack of grace. Especially given that you work for a company that makes billions of dollars off of the images you’re fulminating against.
But I’m not quite comfortable stopping there. The rant skeeves me out for more than just the usual anti-smugness reasons, I think. Isn’t it also kind of a bit… well, racist? I’m not claiming that Bob Costas is a racist, or that he’s animated by antipathy for black people, but the image of a white guy haranguing (mostly) black players for lack of grace or class? I don’t know; it gives me the creeps.
The rant seems, to me, part and parcel of a general cultural dominance-and-submission thing that’s fairly pervasive. In an effort never to let a topic on the League die, I’ll link back to Tod’s post about the War on Christmas from the other day, because I think some of the same anxieties are implicated. It’s not enough for certain people that Christmas is the dominant cultural theme for an entire month of the year (even if commercially bastardized in some uncomfortable ways), or that there are Christmas trees and lights (and Santas, which aren’t Christian, per se, but are explicitly associated with the Christian holiday and not the Jewish one) all over the place. A slight rise in secularism (or pluralism, more accurately) really has created a world in which Christmas, while dominant in the extreme, isn’t exactly the only game in town. So these folks imagine that there is some cadre of secular boogeymen out to get them, and every “Happy holidays” becomes a declaration of hostilities.
That’s a long way of saying that I see something similar in Costas’ rant about the NFL. Whether he intended it or not, the whole thing struck me as a welling-up of some racial anxieties at work more broadly in the culture. I don’t believe it’s the celebrations that bother Costas so much as the character of the celebrations. Why didn’t we see a clip of Tebow ostentatiously praying to God every single time anything of note happens? Why doesn’t that offend Costas as much as players ribbing Plaxico over the fact that he shot himself in the leg (which, to my mind, is a much more appropriate use of a player’s celebration time in the first place)?
I’ll close with a tweet from Andy Hutchins from SBNation:
Exactly.
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Last night, after a week of horrifying revelations, Penn State’s Board of Trustees decided to show Joe Paterno the door (along with university president Graham Spanier). If you haven’t yet, you should read E.D. Kain’s post about this scandal over at his other home. It’s good, and it draws an interesting parallel between the Catholic Church and Penn State’s athletics department over these disturbingly-similar scandals.
A lot of words have been written about this, so I don’t want to rehash all that much. What I’d like to focus on is the part of E.D.’s post where he talks about these two institutions as institutions. What Penn State and the Church (and any number of other institutions) have in common is that they are explicitly trading on an image and your or our membership in or ownership of that image. Take my own alma mater, for example. When someone starts talking about what it means to be a Michigan Man, I tear up like an old RAF pilot remembering the Blitz. Every Saturday in the fall, more than 100,000 Penn State fans get together in the stadium and scream “We are… Penn State!” at the tops of their lungs.
I think it helps to understand these cover-ups against that backdrop. For Penn State, as for the Catholic Church, it can be difficult to imagine something more fatal to the institution than popping that bubble, exposing the mystique of the program for what it is: fantasy. And we saw a little of what that means last night, when students at Penn State apparently lost their minds and took to the streets, even going so far as tipping over a news van and kicking out the windows. For these kids, an attack against any arm of the athletic department is seen as an attack against them.
I don’t know what the solution is. Taking membership in these institutions with a grain of salt is obviously called for, but that’s pretty tough. Understanding that your membership means holding them to higher standards and calling them out for failing is probably an easier virtue to instill than skepticism. If Joe Paterno had paid a little more attention to the part of Penn State’s alma mater that says, “May no act of ours bring shame”, perhaps we would have been able to avoid some of this. Above all, as E.D. says, finding some way to enforce transparency is key.
In any case, I hope some of those kids who were out in the streets last night wake up this morning and think pretty seriously about the message they sent.
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