Stalinism in Pursuit of Equality

If you need convincing evidence of the Feckless Authoritarianism™ (a subset of Squishy Totalitarianism) that animates American liberalism, look no further than Eugene Robinson, here proposing that the antidote to discriminatory "profiling" is . . . what? A further, massive increase in the totalizing surveillance powers of the state. I might turn a phrase: the solution to discrimination is to behave indiscriminately. Wait, what? That doesn't make any . . . Is that . . . ? Huh?

At this rate, the only guarantee of total human security is extinction.

Quantum Security

No. I will not settle for absolute security. I require, I demand the United States Government guarantee a negative probability of anything bad ever occurring to me. I demand that the chances of my not suffering from any external danger exceed unity. I order civilization to hack the seething quantum foundation of spacetime itself.

Thirdspace

Who the fuck is Marc Thiessen? Where does the Washington Post find these people?

Whatever. I am totes in love with the idea that "Al Qaeda" terrorists are neither criminals nor soldiers "in a war Congress authorized." Here is a guy who is explicitly claiming that these guys are exempt from habeas and Sixth Amendment protections because they are belligerents in a duly authorized, legal conflict while also and simultaneously claiming that they are "violat[ing] the laws of war." How? By fighting in one? It's like claiming that Sidney Crosby should be fined and ejected from the NHL for lacing up his skates and going out on the ice.

It's the best there is, said Doc Daneeka.

Purple

You can read this and other fine recent Daniel Larison for an explanation of just how shameful this sort of post-hoc rationalizing of murder and destruction really is, but what actually strikes me as the most inhuman, the most anti-human idea of all the inhuman ideas lodged in the reptilian, blood-drinking brains of Thomas Friedman and his crocodilian cohort, is the horrific notion that the highest lifetime achievement is voting in an election. Seriously. The pinnacle of the human experience at the ballot box. It is quite seriously insane. It elevates a procedural aspect of one particular form of government to a categorical moral virtue. It proposes that participation in electoral politicking occupies the same plane of significance and value as orgasm or childbirth, as making a home, as cooking a meal for one's family, as meeting a new lover, as seeing a beautiful work of art or hearing an ingenious piece of music, as singing, as dancing, as getting a good night's sleep, as spending a day on the water, as bartering and bargaining at the marketplace, as religious ecstasy, if you're into that sort of thing . . . I mean, there is a whole panoply of centrally human experiences, and while a weak argument can be made that these are more readily available under some forms of governance than others, acts of civic engagement just aren't that fucking important. A life without elections or a life without lovemaking? If you had to choose. And that is what's so goddamned monstrous about Friedman. We destroyed these people's lives, and we propose to buy off their suffering with congressional campaigns? Jesus wept.

Pinned

Oh, lord, yes, so long as our support is never varnished.

Someone Get Ross Douthat a Tissue

Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

-Douthat

The last time I had a tremor of bliss and a dark night of the soul, there were three guys in leather jock straps watching from the other side of the room. What is it with this Douthat character and the orgiastic?

In any case, he is more or less totally wrong in his notions of the, uh, spiritual nature of past religious practice. Yes, all religions have their mystics, but religions in their native environments were practical, ethical, legal, moral guides to upright living, an expression of shared, enforced, and reinforced norms and mores. That is true of Judaism among the desert tribes as much as Catholicism in Medieval Europe, of Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and Shinto and so on and so forth. And the reason that the centrality of religious experience to lived human life is so radically altered today is not that we have become less, uh, numinous; it is because the social and moral conventions of antique traditions no longer comport themselves to the needs of individuals and their communities. If anything, today's Christians are far more mystical than your average Western European peasant circa the 13th century, for whom Catholism was simply and totally embedded in his daily experience, like, I don't know, like traffic laws to a modern American--sometimes rational, sometimes arcane, usually observed, sometimes bent and skirted, occasionally opaque, but ultimately just there.

Failure Is Not Not an Option

I am going to poach Prof. Crisy's habitual hunting ground and scatter some buckshot in the direction of the New York Time's own Mama Rose, Frank Rich. The column is a cavalcade of Donk hackjobbing, but fortunately for us, its full fatuousness is revealed in a single sentence:

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.

Oh, do we?

Manufacturing a false crisis while strongly implying the necessity of lesser evilism in a single sentence is a turn of propaganda worthy of Goebbels, and yes, Mary, I did just compare Frank Fucking Rich to Goebbels. If, in fact, Obama's presidency is a skein of false starts and dissapointments, broken promises, bad faith, failure, retreat, and defeat, than why is its early end an "alarming prospect." Oh, oh, wait, I think I know. Because the Republicans are so much worse, right? They are, um, well, to coin a phrase, "The Party of No." Right? A cackling gang of incoherent nativist xenophobes in paradoxical thrall to foreign military adventurism with a strong undercurrent of anti-Constitutional authoritarianism. Unlike the current Donk gang, who only appear as such because they happen to be aping and enforcing and expanding all of those hated anti-Democratic, unconstitutional, illegal, unfair, unjust, ad inf. policies, not that they actually believe in it. It's just, if you want to unmake an omelette, first you have to make more omelettes

The "President's" health-care bill, his "signature issue," is a piece of shit. The fact that the Republicans misidentify it as Communism doesn't make it by some magical property of implied alchemical transference any less of a piece of shit. And if it fails, if The President fails, then that is because they are totes, legit failures reaching their fabulously FAIL apotheosis, or nadir, or, you know, whatever.

Insider Trading

I've written plenty of press releases in my professional life, and I fucking know one when I see one. Or, in this case, a couple.

Show us your portfolio, Friedman!