Tiberius and Gaius Speaking...

I am so fucking ashamed.

    One can be ashamed of something that one is not responsible for. And I am ashamed of my country right now because it looks like the torture bill will become law. We have lost our way as a people. The only morally acceptable response to this is to throw out every Republican who voted in favor of it. Anyone who disagrees can go fuck off.  I love my country, but...what the fuck has happened?

    P.S. Fuck all those people who think there is no difference between the parties. The Democratic caucus voted 44-1 against the bill and the Republican caucus voted 50-4 in favor.  Fuck'em. Greens talk to me some other day, but not today.

Long Night

    I just spent all night preparing for a lecture tomorrow, so I don't have much to blog. Here are a few things though:

1. Kevin Drum absolutely nails it here. I can't remember a Kevin Drum post that was more dead-on. I would love to see all the so-called moderates who say "Dems need a plan on Iraq" actually come up with a freaking plan.
2. A good antidote to all that "Dems are just RepublicansLite" crap.
3. What the hell? Four people go to Fashion Week on Project Runway? Come on Heidi, show some stones and kick someone off!
4. Turns out religious folks more pro-torture than secularists. Knock me over with a feather.
5. Barack Obama stands up. Now let's hear about torture.

Quote of the week

    Bill James, on legendarily ugly baseball player Don Mossi:

"Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure ... man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch."

Heh.

 

France-bashing

    I love France-bashing almost as much as I love France. It is one of the great American pastimes, going back to the Hamilton-Jefferson debates about whose side to pick in the French Revolution. Still, Matt Yglesias wonders where the current manifestation of French-bashing "French as cowards" came from.

    I believe the answer lies with the French unwillingness to let the US use their airspace to attack Libya in the 1980's after Libyan sponsored terrorism. It was generally perceived that the French did it almost entirely out of fear of retaliation if they were seen as helping the United States. The dreadful French performance during WWII, and their even more inexcusable collaboration with the Germans afterwords (at least Mussolini said 'no' to hand over Italy's Jews, at least initially) are really reasons adduced later to support the pattern.

How do Newsweek editors view the American public?

    Answer: they see them as gullible idiots.

    It reminds me of a conversation between Charlie and CJ concerning the President not liking green beans.

CJ: Everyone is stupid during elections.
Charlie: No, everyone gets treated stupid during elections.

I don't know who's right. I go back and forth.
 

The worse case of unseriousness...

    I know, I know, another post about Althouse, but this is actually something I have seen in the broader right wing context. And this is a good LSAT question.The NIE has been partially declassified:

The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

And Althouse concludes:

So the NIE underscores the importance of victory in Iraq.

    Now, it should be obvious that the NIE does no such thing. Or, at least, the highlighted quotation does not such thing. The NIE doesn't say that victory in Iraq would be a body blow to international terrorism in general or AQ specifically. It doesn't say that we if we "lose" Iraq that AQ will suddenly become super powerful. It merely states that if the jihadists feel like they have lost, some of them will quit. But of course, it is entirely plausible that, since our presence in Iraq creates new jihadists, our extended but "victorious" presence in Iraq will create more jihadists than a quick withdrawal that is perceived as a "defeat." And this is granting that an extended stay can actually result in a substantial "victory" for American forces AND that there is no way to withdrawal but play it such that it results in a defeat or a perceived defeat for the jihadists.

    Besides, since victory is no longer possible, it seems that underscoring the importance winning is pretty irrelevant.

Clinton goes crazy! Boogata Boogity!

    Yep, if it is anything that the American people really, really want, it is cold-blooded wonkery over hot-blooded partisanship. If only those Democrats would stop being so partisan, then those voters would just vote for the Democrats in droves. Certainly, this is demonstrated by the ascendance of rabid partisans in the GOP, the popularity of Fox News, and the common voter complaint that Democrats don't "stand for anything."

    I don't know what annoys me more about Althouse's post: the obviously false claim that the real problem with the Democratic Party is its partisanship, or the fact that Althouse completely ignores the calm and cool-headed reasons and analysis that Clinton provides at different points in the interview. Leave it to that conservative hack (and thank goodness that Althouse has dropped the act and started referring to 'feminists' and 'liberals' as the other side) to focus only on style.

    So it goes.

Prostitution

    An interesting post up at Feministing about prostitution, but I must admit that I found the motivating sentiment a bit mystifying. Jessica says:

Ok, I have mixed feelings on people who have cheated--I think if you're building a life together, forgiving someone for cheating is understandable. But that's not what we're talking about here. The big question isn't whether he's remorseful about betraying her trust. To me, it's about whether or not you really want to be with someone who is fine and dandy about buying sex and commodifying women. Personally, there ain't no fucking way I would stay with someone who bought sex. 

But then, after saying this to myself out loud as I read the column, I felt conflicted. Because I support sex workers' rights. How do I reconcile my belief that it's morally wrong to commodify sex with my support of women who do sex work? But then I realized that I don't have to. I can want to ensure the safety and rights (health, work and otherwise) of sex workers while still believing that buying bodies isn't right.

    But, of course, we buy and sell bodies in the morally non-problematic sense all the time. When I go to the dentist, or hire a contractor I rent out someone's body and mind for my purposes. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, provided that the person is not coerced to do it through economic dependence and associated unfairness. Prostitution does not involve the buying and selling bodies, but the contractual renting of the body in a way that doesn't strike me as inherently different from other ways we rent people. As good Kantians, we should not treat people merely as objects to rent, but there is no objection to treating them like that as long as we also treat as ends in themselves by respecting their rights, honoring the contracts, fairly contracting in the first place, etc.

    Now, there are many reasons why prostitution, as it is currently manifested, is very objectionable. Prostitution is often violent and exploitative, and women are often driven to it by economic hardship and a lack of opportunity. And this is all very obviously condemnable. But of course, any economic relationship that was characterized that way would be condemnable. It isn't like prostitution is somehow uniquely evil qua prostitution.

    I mean, you can be a kind of Marxist-Kantian and argue that any capitalist relation would involve treating someone as a mere means, but I see no reason to think that Jessica adopts such a strong (and by my lights, implausible) position. The real issue is not the act of prostitution as somehow inherently evil, but the contingent fact that prostitution as it is currently instituted usually tends to have some bad effects and properties. This is how the post ends:

     As Amanda said to me, "I think men should avoid prostitutes, but I find it much easier to understand slipping up with someone who's got health care, freedom, etc."

So, my question is "why should we avoid prostitutes under those circumstances?" In a society in which there exists, more or less, equality between the sexes and an individual woman freely chooses, with all the opportunity and freedom that she has, to become a prostitute, why should men avoid prostitutes? We pay chefs to make us food, comedians to make us laugh, so why not prostitutes to get us off?

Nota bene: This is somewhat orthogonal to the point of the post, which discusses prostitution in a context where women are not free and equal members of their society. Still, would Jessica object to any economic relations with someone from the third world? Just ones that exploitative and violent, like lower class prostitution and sweatshop labor? What is the principle here?

Yup...

    There is a set of people in the "sensible" middle who seem to think that acting independent and fair-minded is somehow more important than actually being independent and fair-minded. Althouse is a great example of the obsession moderates seem to have with style and appearance:

Here's the thing: Broder is only interested in the theatrics of independence -- whether it be Lieberman's claim to represent mainstream opinion on Iraq, or McCain's elaborate showdown with the White House on torture. At bottom he just wants to tell a story -- one which implicitly flatters himself and a few chosen fellow warriors as heroically fending off extremism on both sides -- and the theatrics of independence offered by Lieberman and McCain give him the dramatic material he needs to tell it. Reality and real-world impact be damned.

    Why do they do this? Why does Althouse claim that it is wonderful that Bush "sounded" moderate in a speech without any actual consideration of his or his party's policies? Why do Broder and Cohen like McCain, whose actual voting record seems to involve a) totally batshit crazy right wing policies and b) cosmetic moderation that he lets get gutted without a peep (campaign finance, torture)?

    It is probably stupidity, venality, and intellectual laziness in equal parts, but part of the answer is that the GOP really has changed in the last 15 years. Kevin Drum:

But then the Republican Party turned over its leadership to guys like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, George Bush, and Karl Rove. During that same period, the Democratic leadership was made up of people like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George Mitchell, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt. If American politics has become more extreme and more polarized over the past decade, which group of men do you think was largely responsible?

The question answers itself, and Broder was around the entire time to watch this saga unfold. So how is that after all this time he can still pretend that both parties have drifted equally away from centrism, and that it's Republican pseudo-moderates who might save us? It boggles the mind.

Precisely. Neo-conservative crypto- facists have taken over the party, and I think that paleo-conservatives like Uncle Stanley can agree that this has happened with catastrophic results. But so-called moderates continue to act in their shadow-puppetry. If the contemporary press gets indicted for anything in the tribunal of history, it will be that they were asleep at the switch when American politics was violently shoved in an ugly and terrible direction by a set of fanatics.

    Yeah that last bit was ranty, but I don't care. I have been working 40 hours a week on top of being a student and my baseball team sucks. Deal.

Some things do give you hope...

    Doesn't it warm your heart that being an unreconstructed racist might actually be bad for your reelection chances? And in Virginia no less! Silly George Allen, don't you know that in this day and age the modern independent voter will only vote for subtle crypto-racists? Of course, there is about 35 percent of the population that would vote Republican even if the person invited little children to play hide the pickle at his own little Neverland Ranch. Still, one thing at a time....