Swill.

Tee-ball captain and founder ex officio of every Glee Club in America George F. Will has seen the enemy, and it is . . . rent control. Obama is going to usher in a new age of cryptosocialism. Meanwhile, "McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that such spreading is most of what Washington does." For nothing says "plucky foe of spreading wealth" like communizing energy resources. When will it end, oh Lord, when will it end? Didn't John McCain vote for the $700 billion giveaway. If yes, then what? Why? How?

The United States has always been a mixed economy, from the national road to the Erie canal to the bailout of AIG. It's one thing to argue that this has been a persistent flaw in our society, quite another to propose that a system of state capital is "un-American." It is distinctly American.

Hope We Can Change For

They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

-The Times

Ho ho ho. Yes, let's not get stuck with some crazy system where innocence is presumed and convictions aren't foregone conclusions. That would be insane!

The Wilderness

Ha ha! Exactly twelve seconds after losing every election except for some dogcatcher post in Idaho, the Grand Old Party rediscovers fiscal conservativism and obstruction! Aux barricades!

If You Love Me

...you will go immediately and cast your write-in vote for dead commie Gus Hall for SecDef. We lost the election, but not the war!

The Vetting Process

Andrew Sullivan wants to know what it means that almost half of America voted out of hillbilly cultural affinity rather than sober assessment of a candidates intellectual ability, emotional maturity, managerial authority, and ability to govern. Isn't it obvious? It means that democracy is retarded. It should be replaced with the drawing of lots, the spinning of bottles. It's a feature of the system in which we live, in which any moron is enfranchised. Jesus hell fucknshit, it's been ever thus.

Bail. Out.

What the fuck? On the one hand, this is marginally less loony than spending $700 billion on valueless securities, but on the other hand, only marginally, and shouldn't we all blink once or twice at the idea that the Treasury can get that much money for one thing and then be all like, Oops, maybe we'll do something else! Who's steering this fucking ship? The blind are leading the stupid here, clearly.

At this point, shouldn't we take the economy out back and put 'er down? I hate watching anything suffer.

I know, I know. Liberals think that they're going to take over and do something rational or sensible or Seussical or whatever, but the great waxy ball of truth at the center of this Tootsie Pop is that nobody anywhere has any idea what to do, in large part because there is nothing to do. The pooch is screwed. The egg is scrambled. The cream is whipped. Constructing vast and expensive monuments of atavism will not restore things to the way they once were. The problem with the economy is that it was full of phony money. Now it's gone! These things happen. Poo-tee-weet. Jesus Christ, people, even fucking stars blow up. Nothing is too big to fail.

Novel Ideas

All I can say is that I am almost done with Tom McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, and I'm pretty sure this dude is the new Calvino.

De rerum natura

I like all the sober, serious commentary on whether or not it makes sense to bail out GM, versus allow it to go into bankruptcy. As if. Because what a Democratic Congress and a new Democratic administration really want to do is to allow a situation where a bankruptcy court invalidates a bunch of autoworker CBAs. And causes a work stoppage! In an already lousy economy with rising unemployment. Nah. Gahnna. Happin.

On the merits, of course, we should probably just evacuate the lower peninsula and let it revert to a haven for browsing mammals and waterfowl.

The Free Man

The Lieberman thing is pressing the predictable buttons out in Netrootsia, with smarter Donks feigning shock and dumber ones actually feeling it, as the Governing Class shows itself more inclined to embrace and forgive one of its own than to cater to impotent bloggers who will raise money and vote for whomever they're told to vote for regardless. Uh, what Digby says:

I think it's also pretty clear that if anyone thought there would be any investigations into Bush administration atrocities or judiciary committee hearings into the abuses of the executive branch, they can forget it.

Ya think? Perhaps this was meant as parody, because I find it difficult to imagine any breathing human being seriously entertaining the idea that Barack Obama's first order of executive business would be to strip himself of powers accrued to the office during the previous administration.

I suppose I'll never stop repeating it: the "atrocities" of the Bush administration were atrocities perpetrated by America for years, for decades. That they were practiced with less circumspection, and by a factional opponent against whom some electoral purchase might be gained--these are the only reasons todays putative liberals care. You can imagine when some of these "atrocities" are shown to have roots in the Clinton administration, in the Carter administration, under Kennedy, back to Wilson . . . well, Smears! Right Wing Noise Machine! Media!

President Obama will avail himself of the full powers available to him. He'll make placatory cosmetic changes--"closing Guantanamo"--to please his base, but does anyone think he's going to stop running black ops in Pakistan, that he's going to repudiate his bellicose posture toward Iran, that he's going to actually leave Iraq, as opposed to drawing down and retreating to heavily-fortified garrisons from which we might "respond to the contingencies in the region"? Hell, of course they're letting Lieberman stay. They're on the same side.

An extremely primitive and paranoid culture

So, in order to patrol the seas in search of non-existent enemies that do not threaten the existence of the United States, the whales, well, sorry guys. One of these days some superwhale is going to come here and blast us with some of their own loud, mid-frequency sonar, and let's see how you like that, John Roberts.

Fornication

The idea that children are uniquely vulnerable to profanity is probably valid insofar as children parrot things that they hear. That said, the fact that we tolerate violence and sex on the television, but you can't say fuck without censure, that is seriously fucked up. On any number of prime-time network sitcoms, you will hear obvious sexual double-entendres that are much grosser than the f-bomb. The American obsession with dirty words is bizarre, especially given their prevalence in our day-to-day vocabulary. Is there some groundswell of popular animus against vulgar language? Cuz I gotta be honest, the vigilance our censors display on this issue creeps me the fuck out.

Proposition 8

I want to respond to Mona's retraction and to the Pam's House Blend post that she links to. Look, people who have the idea that the black vote was the proximate cause for the passage of Prop. 8 in California are wrong, but the salient point is that African-American votes substantially supported the ballot measure and that the black church, which remains at the social and political heart of black communties, specifically mobilized against it. The accusation is less that black Christians singularly scuttled gay marriage in California, but that it is especially tawdry, vicious, and unfair for a demographic that suffered commensurate discrimination within living memory to actively oppose the expansion of civil rights. There have long been historical antipathies between black activists and other minority groups, especially East Asian immigrants and their descendants, and there is a troubling tendency among some to reify the African-American experience, to make other discrimination incommensurable because only African-Americans experienced American slavery. The attitude has much in common with the insistence by many Jews that the Holocaust likewise represents a singular and inapproachable catastrophe, and that any historical comparison inherently denigrates its memory.

Homophobia may be less prevalent among black christians than among White evangelicals, but the historic discrimination and oppression of blacks in America places an additional moral burden on their sympathies, and requires them to do more to support equality for others.

The Same, but It's Different!

Columnists who write about popular economics tend not to understand how industry works, and so you get globetrotting supermoron Tom Friedman penning critiques of the domestic auto industry that come to this conclusion:

I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

The final paragraph is throwaway, but some bait is too tempting to ignore. Neither the iPod nor iPhone were the products of Steve Jobs' singular inspiration transmogrified overnight--or in a year--into consumer products. They represent the culmination of years of vigorous research and product design. Now it is probably true that Jobs and his creative team could come up with some pretty neat design ideas for a car, but seriously, does Friedman have any appreciation for just how complex is the modern automobile, even the cheap-o models, just how much time and effort goes into design and testing, just how expensive and difficult it is to retool an auto plant to produce something entirely new and different?

Which leads us to the penultimate paragraph, where Friedman suggests that Detroit's future will be best served by beginning a ten-year-plan to produce the cars it should currently be making. Meanwhile, the idea seems to be that if only we all drove hybrids, our energy and pollution woes would be over. This conviction, that technological innovation will obviate the need to make any actual changes in the domestic economy and human geography, paralyzes intellects across the whole of American politics and culture. They imagine the future as a sort of Jetsons pastiche, where everything is the same, except that it flies.

Phallibertarians

Everyone should go read Kerry Howely's posts on libertarianism & feminism. Kerry is being sly in the first post when she writes that "For some reason, various libertarian-leaning men are only capable of acknowledging the limiting nature of social norms when those norms result from recent political action." She calls the tendency "extremely weird," which is polite, because what she really means is that it is extremely stupid.

Male libertarians who denigrate the pervading social constraints on women and people of minority racial groups and people with less common sexual predilections--i.e., most male libertarians--do so because their ideology is grumpy and reactionary; it is forged of the same stuff as crybaby conservativism; its concerns with genuine liberty are purely tactical, and entirely personal. These scattershot beliefs, which consist principally of disliking taxes, regretting surveillance, and smoking weed hardly constitute a political identity at all. Sometimes they involve opposition to imperialism abroad; sometimes not. They're the reason libertarianism in general is routinely mocked as a kind of solipsism: it is! A guy like Radley Balko is the rare case who actually goes out of his way to consider the plight of minorities and impoverished people, especially as relates to the drug war, but many, many self-identified libertarians are in fact bourgeois white men firmly ensconced in a patriarchal heteronormative social order that they fundamentally do not wish to change. The seek to remove impediments to their petit bourgeois hedonisms , and they have the vague sense that if the government got its mitts out of business, everything would be fine.

I've largely stopped thinking of myself as a libertarian; obviously the drift of this blog has been toward blow-up-the-world-and-die-laughing anarchism. But a truly minarchical social order requires a revolutionary change far, far beyond that which most internet spouter-offers envision. It would require a deep, abiding alteration in almost every aspect of daily existence; it would require the complete dismantling of the current economic order; it would require redrawn political borders, disbanded militaries, the destruction of whole industries, the wholesale dislocation of huge populations. Even very particular policies that libertarians might seek to ameliorate represent immense alterations in our extant society. Freeing the majority of the 2 million prisoners in our penal system requires more than deciding to decriminalize marijuana. It requires a wholesale restructuring of our jurisprudential understanding, a change, from top to bottom, in the way that justice is delivered, from beat cops to DAs to judges to jury selection to the appeals process . . . and so on.

Feminism's challenge to our bedrock assumptions are to be embraced, not dismissed, by anyone actually dedicated to the radical change that such libertarianism envisions, but most soi-disant white male libertarians don't actually contemplate radical change. They contemplate the one part of their anatomy that once connected them directly to a member of the second sex.

Are we to think that a hypothetical future world in which there is absolutely no government and no coercion (as traditionally defined by libertarians) but in which most women choose to spend their days jobless, giggling, and stripping (without pay) in front of males to get their attention and approval is in some way unlibertarian? It may be offensive. It may be stupid. It certainly doesn’t sound feminist to me, and maybe it’s even a bad idea — but it’s free,

says Todd Seavey, to whom Howley has been responding. To which one is tempted to reply that future hypothetical counterfactuals, or whatever, do not a counterargument make. This is libertarianism as practiced by Glenn Reynolds, full of joyous Barbarellas, nanobots, and manly men doing manly things, like shopping for gadgets and dreaming of meeker, more compliant chicks.

Fishing Trip

What could the word “willing” possibly mean here? It can’t mean “of his free will” because it is precisely the point of the “planned deliberate actions” Rumsfeld speaks of to bend, if not break, the will of detainees. “Willing cooperation,” if it is achieved, is a theatrically produced state and the opposite of the real thing. (If there is a real thing; there has always been an argument that human agents cannot freely will anything, but that is not an argument I want to take up today.)

-The Poisson

You have to grudgingly respect a guy who looks at torture, throws up his hands, and says, Hey, there's no such thing as free will anyway, so let's talk about the history of rhetoric instead! Oh well, remember:

If the point of academic inquiry is to interrogate diverse bodies of material with a view toward understanding their structure, history, intellectual affinities, etc., taking classroom time to make your students into good citizens or to improve their character or to move them in some political direction is a departure from that point and a blurring of the task’s distinctiveness.

At least, ye gods, it's an ethos.

He sallies an argument that psychologists aren't actually doctors and so less constrained by all that Hippocratic poetry than MDs and psychiatrists. You will hear no argument from me countering the proposition that psychology is a lesser calling, a chiropractic of the mind . . . but a "behavioral science"? Really? Whatever, guys. Psychiatrists with some biology and neuroscience in their portfolio might reasonably claim to study the life of the mind, but psychologists are just sociologists with sample sizes to small to produce meaningful statistical data and with higher hourly rates. "As a matter of fact, psychological skills are purchased and deployed as commodities all the time," says Fish. Well yes, because it's a discipline rife with whores. I mean, there are plenty of MDs who will tell lies as expert witnesses too, but their per capita occurrence in the medical disciplines is low. The only people who lie more often in courtrooms than psychologists are cops.

Psychologists in our torture camps are there not to produce more effective interrogations. Most of the people we're interrogating are ignorant illiterate peasants! Guantanamo is full of innocent men. How many times must it be repeated: the point of torture is not to elicit accurate information, nor to produce "intelligence." The shrinks' presence isn't medical, but aesthetic. It's a veneer of scientific objectivity and medical oversight, designed to make brutality appear clinical, routine, technological, sound.

Dem Stillers

I've been shamefully remiss in Steelers blogging this season. Yesterday's game was execrable, but let me just say this about that. I am generally in agreement with the NFL ethos of sticking with your QB through good and bad play. Let's not forget that the Steelers, despite losing the division lead, still have a winning record. I wouldn't have pulled Ben because he was choked up last night. Football isn't baseball. There's no relief system.

I would have benched him because he's fucking injured. Mike Tomlin and team management can talk all they want about the all-clear MRI, but anyone can see that he's not in top form. The logic of letting a banged-up player get smashed even more in a mid-season game when you have a perfectly competent backup escapes me. Ben Roethlisberger has taken a lot of sacks this year, and separated his shoulder. There's no zip, and even 15-yard passes float. He needs a week off if we want to have him down the stretch.

Aaaaaand . . . Scene!

Yeah, well, wow. I, for one, am totally shocked that behind a public, election-year façade of partisan vitriol, in the end, everybody's buddies, and let's all go invade Afghanistan some more! Career courtiers want to curry favor with the newly current king? Color me confused. Can campaign claims consist consistently of crap, composed to complement the rancorous climate concerned conciliators constantly claim is crushing any capacity in the congresscreatures in the capital and Capitol of the country to craft policy cogently and competently? Quel crazy!

Seriously. These people would be shocked to find Hamlet and Claudius having a beer after the show.