Abolish Everything

A few days ago a friend of mine expressed the not-uncommon view that rather than advocating for gay marriage, we should fight to "get the government out of the marriage business." I agreed. Yes, he mused, what we really need are universally available civil unions.

This is the moderately more radical position of some gay activists who see in the fight for access to civil marriage an unfortunate kind of assimilationism, an attempt to gain access to one of the very institutions of bourgeois, heteronormative, and patriarchal oppression that have for so long stood in the way of real liberation, and yet many of these same activists will then quickly turn to the benefits of civil unions, marriages in all but name really, made available to all.

But it seems to me that if you advocate for civil unions, you accept by implication that the government does have a compelling interest in the private social and economic arrangements of its citizens, because however such unions might be styled, they will in the end provide benefits and privileges to people in certain types of relationships not available to others, and will moreover continue to privilege some fairly traditional familial norms of cohabitation and economic interdependence over, for instance, living a single life.

And if you accept that the government has such an interest, then you accept the government's right to discriminate between those relationships which do or do not live up that interest, which are or are not in the best interests of a stable, moral, sustainable society.

The real radical position is neither that the government should let gays marry nor that it should transform civil marriage into civil unions to avoid the trouble of terminology. It is instead that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether, and convey no additional privileges (nor duties nor obligations) on anyone for any kind of relationship or domestic arrangement.

He's carrying the cure to NAS

Cyberczar? Offensive cyberoperations! Cyberbattles!? Just remember not to download more than 80 megabytes unless you use a doubler!

Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields.

“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,“ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”

Although Pentagon civilian officials and military officers said the new command was expected to initially be a subordinate headquarters under the military’s Strategic Command, which controls nuclear operations as well as cyberdefenses, it could eventually become an independent command.

“No decision has been made,” said Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, a Pentagon spokesman. “Just as the White House has completed its 60-day review of cyberspace policy, likewise, we are looking at how the department can best organize itself to fill our role in implementing the administration’s cyberpolicy.”

Seeing as how the FBI still uses Ask Jeeves, we may be forgiven our skepticism. I know that we are all supposed to be terrified of Chinamen hackers busting into our webcams and watching us masturbate to youporn and pick our noses, but for reals, the way to protect sensitive information is to keep it off networked computers, y'all.

I would be less skeptical if this didn't sound suspiciously like McG's early draft of Terminator 5: Knock a Little Louder, Sugar.

Om Mani Padme Hum

It's interesting to see how qualities and virtues are eliminated from public life in an effort to render public lives opaque, as in, "the quest for the right confirmation language." At the same time, we live in a biography-besotted age. One of Sonia Sotomayor's principle qualifications, after all, was her "life story." But from Montaigne to Didion, the moi-même that is the subject of autobiographical scrutiny has puzzled over this precise conundrum: that lives aren't stories. The structure of narrative is imposed from the outside. One of the reasons classical epics and biblical tales can seem so alien and frustrating to modern readers is that though they usually have some sense of narrative progress--Odysseus leaves Troy, sails around the Mediterranean, eventually gets home, kills a bunch of dudes, shacks up with his wife again--they are at the same time frustratingly amorphous and insistently episodic. Anyway, a "life story" like Sotomayor's is at once supposed to reveal her as a woman of many virtues and a woman of none at all. She has learned about real life, but she is not ideological. We should not from any aspect of her private or professional person infer that she will behave in any particular manner. She has strong beliefs, values, morals, commitments, but none of them has any bearing whatsoever on her current or future behavior. She is in fact the Buddha. Each moment is a pearl of total now-ness. There is no future nor past. Her incarnation exists in the infinite present.

Apostasy

"Too Soon To Say If Afghan Plan Working." You can say that again. The West has been trying to do . . . something or other in Afghanistan since Alexander. What did Zhou Enlai say about the French Revolution? In the meantime, from my perspective in the near provinces of the New Rome, the twenty-first century is seriously starting to resemble the latter end of the fourth. I suppose that makes Barack Obama Julian or something.

And Fuck You Too, Pericles

Obviously the idea that 18,000 gaymarriages are not prohibited by California's state-constitutional prohibition on gaymarriage because they occurred during a brief window of legality is absurd. Can you imagine some post-bellum South Carolinian arguing that the 13th Amendment didn't apply retroactively? The CA supreme court tried to split the baby and ended up with blood and guts all over its hands. Now a new referendum seeking to repeal with prior referendum will go on the ballot and will probably succeed. This is all to say that no matter how it is constituted and exercised, democracy on a large scale is a sham.

Augery

An as-yet little remarked result of President Obama's perhaps infelicitous use of the word empathy to describe one quality he seeks in a major judicial nominee is the final ratification of Judicial Review. Opponents of Obama's nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, have not quite figured out how to calibrate their Outrage to the task of a Femaxican-American, and have fallen back to arguing that her occasional and totally unextraordinary observations that the interests of justice are best served when appellate judges are able to contextualize their rulings both socially and legally, recognizing that legal rulings aren't exercises in formalist textual criticism and that they have actual consequences, indicate some radically expansive departure from whatever narrow view of The Law the judiciary is supposed to take on any given Tuesday. A justice's sole and singular duty, the critics bellow, is to rule on the Constitutionality of laws . . . none of this women and minorities bullllllshit. Plainly hilarious. Article III is thoroughly ambiguous on this point, and when Marshall and the Gang arrogated to themselves the power of judicial review, it raised hackles that lasted right up to the present moment. Bear in mind that the very people who now intone gravely that the court's unique duty is the solemn exercise of the review were twenty seconds ago screeching about some or other example of so-called judicial activism, i.e. ruling on the constitutionality of some or other law or statute, i.e. exercising judicial review. Well. To everything, turn, turn, turn.

Though not a new observation, it bears repeating: principled opposition to judicial nominations is rare, and observed objectively it usually breaks down to reveal a gaggle of congresscreatures and political operatives attempting to divine whether or not a nominee is tempermentally predisposed to rule in their favor on the issues that matter to them.

Mineshaft Gaps

One of the purer pleasures of the ongoing economic clusterfuck is the revivification of the old defense of Marxism (or Communism, or Socialism, or whatevers) against the abject failure of the Soviet Union to produce anything other than failure-prone nukes, gray concrete, and really cool graphic design: that Soviet Communism was not the real thing, that it was a debased and perverted form of whatever it was that Marx et al. imagined, and that Soviet failures proved nothing, nothing about the underlying validity of the system. In some respects I view this sort of apologia with sad sympathy. It is, after all, possible to imagine a planned economy that isn't so horribly, badly planned. I am in general wholly unsympathetic to the idea that economies are systems of such impossible mathematical complexity that the planned allocation of resources can never result in reasonable levels of general equality and prosperity, at least as compared to the pinnacles of Western capitalism. There are, to my mind, more compelling arguments against collectivist societies than the lousy state of the former Soviet auto industry. The defenders of so-called free markets are fond of noting greater productivity or more innovation in market societies, although both terms are notably ductile, and in any case this argument raises the uncomfortable specter of the correlation/causation fallacy, not to mention the even older question of the chicken and the egg. Also, despite the mumbojumbo of the hoodoo high priests of the Christian Science of scientific disciplines, economics, the means of exchange are not the most fundamental aspects of human societies, but are only one of a myriad features that collectively compose society and civilization.

Anyway, all across our grayscale spectrum, the defenders of capitalism now insist that what we are seeing isn't it. The Party cannot fail, it can only be failed.

Miles to go before I sleep

Like a seventh-grade poetry class confronted with some late, sentimental Frost, The World, by which we mean a fair cross-section of the chattering and governing classes, seeks meaning in the North Korean nuclear tests. I don't know that they mean anything, but they do demonstrate the folly of trying to maintain a system where some states have nuclear weapons and some do not. Fission weapons were developed more than sixty years ago. Any group or nation with sufficient funds to build the industrial capacity to create the necessary materials can build a nuclear weapon. The possession of such weapons isn't a guarantee of security, but it certainly makes invasion and occupation by a foreign power less likely. While America and its allies bicker about whether or not deterrence works, North Korea ably demonstrates that it most certainly does.

Amateurs

There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

-Ross Douthat

Douthat's bracing counterintuitive suggestion, that habitual opponents in the so-called culture wars can make common cause from time to time, is neither bracing nor counterintuitive. It suffers the additional indignity of a miserable parentage. God bless you, Catherine MacKinnon, but your crusade was not a success. We have now lived through nearly two full post-80s decades, and they've been pornography's golden age. The medium is the message, lovers. The internet is more powerful than moral atavism. Amen. Banality, not moral outrage, will be the end of pornography as we know it. Yawn your way through an afternoon on xtube and its various sister sites if you don't believe me. Ubiquity undermines stigma but also eliminates interest. It's hard to be titillated by 50 second cell phone clips, especially when there are millions of them.

In any case, Douthat only mentions the failed campaign against porn as an example of the sort of common struggle that we can now wage against the scourge of "single motherhood." Notably absent: advocacy for access to contraception and abortion services. Presumably these too bear the moral taint. Rather than making these practical means to control reproduction readily available, we should construct new folkways out of thin air, never an easy task. Conservatives, who claim to be opponents of social engineering and defenders of "tradition" seem uniquely incapable of appreciating the slow and unpredictable evolution of social mores. Stigma now!