Jude A. O'Christian

Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.

-Snarls Warhammer

This is interesting, because the common forms of the word Rabbi didn't appear until about 200 A.D., and what we now call Rabbinic Judaism didn't emerge as the dominant strain of Judaism until sometime around the 6th or 7th century, after the codification of the Talmud.  Well, maybe Snarls knows some Karaites, although I'm not sure that Karaites have rabbis; in fact, I think they rather disapprove of them.  But now, look, leaving aside the age-old question of what exactly J-Chrizzle meant with the whole Render unto Caesar rap (but he meant taxes), Judaism is in fact perfectly clear: with few exceptions, it is not only a legal obligation to pay taxes to secular authority, but a religious one: it is chillul Hashem to avoid 'em--literally, a desecration of the name of god, and you know how strongly Jews feel about that whole name of god business.

Hashem knows, you'll rarely find me defending the Oh, Brother administration, least of all its Good-News justification of American social programs even as it bombs the hell out of all and sundry, just like Jesus would've, but the idea of the state as a redistributive agency would have been no more alien to a Davidian king than it currently is to a gopher in the tunnels of the Center for American Progress.  And since the kohenim worked for the state, the whole argument becomes even nuttier.  The temple treasury and the state treasury were indistinct--when they weren't dragooning the poor into forced labor projects, both the state and the temple, which were one and the same, helped the poor.  Constitutional libertarianism or whatever was a lot more fucking weird, which is a polite way to say nonexistent, in the ancient world than the dole.  Riddle me this, Krauthammer: in a society without class mobility, what else do you do with the poor but feed them from the granaries of the state?

Doin' It Wrong

I think the charge of hypocrisy is not quite correct.  Liberal objections to these sorts of things were always mainly procedural and aesthetic.  They didn't like the way Bush went about doing things.  It was the way, not the things.  Nothing is impermissible as long as the process gives the appearance of being rational and deliberative.

Squee de coeur

Now I made plenty fun of the internet when it discovered man's inhumanity to man in the form of the Soapy Pipes act, but boy-oh-boy is the recording/broadcasting industry lame by comparison:

We all share the goal of a safe and legal Internet.

Fuck no we don't!  We want review copies of the complete second season of Game of Thrones.  We want last week's Top Chef and it ain't up on Hulu yet.

Your revolution is over.  The bums won.

Government Jeez

Here is David Brooks using a football metaphor as a counterargument to the notion that the ideal society functions "like a military unit."  He thinks society should be more like a rain forest.  I think society should be more like a vacuum, personally, or an exoplanet maybe, but if wishes were horses . . . what was I saying?  Ok, look, Brooks is a dummy, and lord only knows he's made the plural of anecdote into a sort of holy writ, but I am actually on his side here, sort of.  The progressive view of society is martial and mechanistic--expert-driven, kid-tested, mother-approved, market-researched, etc.  Though it admits the humanity of gals and gays and the African diaspora more readily than the supposedly countervailing conservativism whose atavistic yearnings are for a non-existent era of greater cultural homogeneity in which chacun avait son rôle à jouer or whathaveyou, liberalism's own future Utopia is decidedly grim, sterile, and selfsame: a rationally run central bank . . . increasing the monetary supply . . . to stimulate growth . . . forever.  So, you know, obviously I'd rather live in an Amazon than a biodome, and for all the errors of emphasis, Brooks has almost sortakinda got a point.  Which is why the goddamn football thing is so extremely jarring; the entire sport is a military metaphor; the whole game is a symbolic enactment of warfare.

Anyway, I've read enough to suspect that somewhere deep in Brook's middlebrow mindfile, a program that actually believes in a non-mechanistic humanity hums away, but it is always and forever overruled by a random received-wisdom generator that says things like:

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

Well, you could say it was caused by a lack of money.  But we'll stick with him.  It isn't an unreasonable point, even if it's uttered with the gaseous phffft of truism.  It's complicated, see?  And you can't address it from a, you know, policy perspective by crafting some kind of monomaniacal good-management program; you can't regulate it away.  I'm with you, David, so far.  Then he concocts Sh'tangwéa from da Hood--he doesn't name her as such, but I grew up in Dave's own demographic, and I know exactly what pops into his mind's eye when he imagines

there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.

She's not named Madison and she ain't brunette, lemme put it to you that way.  And fuck it, let's even grant that she wants to experience the joie et souffrance of motherhood--she isn't seeking the approbation of male peers; she isn't just horny, god forbid; she wants to be a mommy.

So how do you prevent this?  Well, first of all, why do you want to?  Because of poverty?  But you just said that poverty is a complex ecosystem of technocrats, or something.  So it isn't exactly because teenage parents generally remain poor; it's more about morality: namely, it's that teenage pregnancy is inherently morally dubious.  So you "surround her"--uh, flood the zone; how many military metaphors do we need to make this point?--with faith groups.  They make people want to serve!  They don't ascribe to contemporary norms and mores, i.e., that Tashondanette can have as many babes as she wants, and whenever, because welfare.  In any event, the argument becomes that since you cannot craft a simple social policy to alleviate poverty, you must instead construct a monumentally complex one.  Brooks is not making a libertarian argument here; he isn't arguing that some sort of market of social philanthropy will fill in the blanks where no government agency exists.  He wants an explicit federal policy to promote churchketeers in the ghetto.  Vouchers and programs and subsidy and so on.  These things are somehow supposed to be the opposite of technocratic liberal overreach, when in fact they are of precisely the same order.  Everyone wants to avail themselves of the same government to achieve their peculiar ends; no one laments the bureaucracy, merely the particular drawers.

Chance Broadcaster

I remember leaving the bus saying to myself – here’s a multi-millionaire who loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Fox Blitzkrieg

When speaking, Blitzer is completely incomprehensible; he speaks an alien language beamed in from the Klingon empire in which the interrogative is expressed in an undifferentiated string of declarative sentence fragments. The writing on "Blitzer's Blog," on the other hand, is so consistently gnomic and bizarre that I am tempted to call it wisdom, or poetry. Every individual paragraph reads like William Carlos Williams. It is extraordinary.