A Thing That Bugs Me

With all that's going on the world, you'd think my occasional post would consist of commentary on something of importance. And it does.  Just not what most would think is important.

I know the answer to the question, but I'm going to ask it anyway: Why the hell do people on the internet not only scorn music they don't like, but impugn the character of people who like music they don't?

Any YouTube user knows how it can happen.  This post at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has over 240 comments because it devolves in to a long pissing contest over "Who's The Worst Band EVAH!!!!" and I threw up in my mouth a little.  It's assumed that bands like The Eagles, Journey, and Styx will get mentioned (my favorite review of any rock album was of Styx Paradise Theater, in which the reviewer said it was a parking lot of whale vomit).  Other, newer bands - Limp Bizkit, Radiohead, Coldplay - get honorable mention.  Pearl Jam came up a few times.  Finally, of course, straight from the headline, is Alberta's own Nickelback, a favorite punching bag.

It would be far better if people just let other folks listen to whatever they wanted and shut the hell up.  Seriously.  It doesn't matter to me one bit that other people not only like different music than I do but might not like what I listen to.  Who?  Cares?

You think the Eagles performed a few songs that are pretty good?  OK.  You would invent a time machine to prevent the parents of members of Roxy Music meeting so none of them would be born?  A bit extreme, but OK.  Don't listen to them.

If you don't like something, there's an easy enough solution: Don't listen to it.  Go listen to what you like.  Don't waste precious hours tearing apart the personalities and morals of others whose tastes differ.  You might miss out on something you like, spending all that time on the Internet telling the world how awful Nirvana really was.

I know that Internet trolls are the same whether it's politics or social issues or music.  "Pay attention to MMMMEEEEE!!" lies at the heart of it, along with a good dose of, "How cool am I?  Oh, and I know the difference between the Phrygian and Ionian modes therefore EXPERT!"  The Internet is a great boon to people with serious status anxiety issues, but really people: get a therapist.

Again, hardly the worst thing going on in the world, but all the same - if you find yourself wanting to engage in an epic struggle over whether Grand Funk Railroad was the worst band ever, take a deep breath and realize it just doesn't matter.

No End Game

So we're in Day 3 of shutdown mode and I wonder about a few things.

I wonder if any of the Republicans in the House, and Cruz and Lee and Paul in the Senate, had an end-game in mind.  That is, allowing members a couple days of spittle-flecked rage at one another, do they have a plan to get from where we are to a functioning federal government again?  From the looks of things, I kind of doubt it. In fact, from the looks of things, they aren't bright enough to have had a game, let alone an end-game.  There is no way any of this ends well for the Republican Party.  If you play a high-stakes game like this without some inkling of what the conclusion will be, then you're screwed.  That no one seemed to believe a plan for an end-game was necessary tells me just how ridiculous these folks are.  They had to know the country didn't really want this, and would blame them, and would continue to blame them more as time goes on.  Believing their own rhetoric about the unpopularity of the ACA, that it doesn't work, blah-blah-blah, they refused to consider reality in their plans.

The result is the clusterfuck before us.

I wonder why people keep talking about John Boehner as if he is either (a) cowering before an alleged rump of his own party; or (b) secretly wishing for a light that illumines his way out of the tunnel in which he finds himself.  It seems pretty clear to me that the Speaker of the House, like the rest of the far right nincompoops in the House of Representatives, actually believes that the ACA isn't working; that the heroic stand he and the members of his Party are taking will be seen for what it is and praised by the American people soon enough as they clamor for release from affordable health care.  In other words, there is no actual evidence that John Boehner is secretly sensible and attuned to reality.  Rather, he is as delusional as the allegedly small group who is leading him and his party in the House over the cliff (even if the country doesn't follow, which isn't necessarily the case).

In the real world, John Boehner is the one person who can end this by doing the one thing he refuses to do.  That he refuses to do it is evidence enough that he isn't so much cowed by some small group, but a member of them.

Finally, I wonder about the repeated reports that there is only a small group of Republicans insisting on a die-hard position regarding tying a Continuing Resolution to repeal of the Affordable Care Act.  If this is true, why didn't a majority of Republicans vote with Democrats on Monday against that kind of bill, forcing the Speaker to bring a clean CR to the floor of the House?  For years I've been hearing about "moderate" Republicans, reading anonymous quotes in the press complaining about the right-wing of the party.  Where the rubber meets the road - in roll-call votes on the floor of the House of Representatives - I see zero evidence there's some huge war going on in the Republican Party.  The fact that over the past couple days former IRA fellatist Peter King (R-New York) is held up as a "moderate" tells me that, in fact, there are no moderates left.  There is no small group of fire-breathers holding the rest of the Party hostage.  This is what the Republicans want to do.  This is what the Republicans said they would do.

Did the Republicans believe the President would cave before allowing a shut-down of the federal government?  It's certainly possible they believed that.  That they didn't plan for the contingency with which we're now faced shows, as I said above, we are in the hands of morons.  They cannot save face.  They cannot escape responsibility.  Regardless of what they and their allies think or believe - this is disastrous for the country; this is disastrous for millions of Americans who are and will continue to suffer very real harm because of this; and this is disastrous for their Party, much worse than the 1995 shutdown.

So we coast or float or drift with no end in sight because there was never an end planned.

Autumnal Equipoise

While the calendar may have the next season beginning later in the week, yesterday and today up here on the prairie are giving us a taste of things to come.  It's been cool, even crisp.  Yesterday was damp, but today is sunny, the sky the kind of blue you see in early fall and mid-spring.  One of the hummingbird moths that frequent our flowering hostas got in our garage yesterday.  By late afternoon, it had moved from the ceiling to the back door.  I gently removed it from the door and set it on one of the plants outside.  It sat for a few minutes, then took off, feeding at our hostas again.

There is something marvelous about autumn.  Last week we had a blast of hot, humid air, reminding us that summer wasn't quite over.  Now, though, it feels like things are settling in as they should this time of year.  The languor of summer is passing, the busyness of fall has begun and now, at last, the weather is making such busyness feel a bit less like a burden.  Daylight hours shorten, the year's twilight reminding us the cool sleep of winter is coming soon.

As I write this post about the peacefulness of the onrushing seasonal change, the situation at the Washington Navy Yard is still unfolding.  Ten people shot, with reports of 2 to 4 people dead.  How many have died in Syria's intramural slaughter while the world dithers over one type of weapon, leaving tens of thousands of other deaths of seeming less importance, beneath the world's need to act?  How many children have died of curable diseases because nation-states and multinational pharmaceutical companies refuse to provide cheap preventive medications to poor populations around the world?  How many people have died from gun violence over the past 24 hours right here in the United States?

The reality of death and violence makes me uncomfortable with my own sense of peace and ease in this time of seasonal change.  I cannot ignore the immense privilege that grants me space and time to reflect on this bubble of peacefulness around me.  I cannot ignore the reality of pain and suffering around me because it harshes my mellow.  An full and honest accounting of autumnal equipoise would include the reality that I cannot rest within this space of quiet rest, but move out in to this world so beloved of God, a world so broken by sin and death there is no safe place for far too many, no peace and quiet for billions of God's children.

I understand Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, that desire to build a tent and stay forever in the presence that is so full of beauty and peace.  That, however, is not our lot.  The world is not yet that Mount.  It's our job to drag it there, kicking and screaming if need be.  Such is the real equipoise of autumn: The hope and promise that what is reality for me can be for others.  It isn't  about me giving up anything.  It's about others, indeed the whole world, having the opportunity to experience this same space and time.

That is our calling.  That's what we're to be about.  The Gospel message is meaningless if we aren't living out God's abundance with the world.

Getting It Done Right

With the United States and Russia agreeing on a protocol for Syria to follow for surrendering its chemical weapons arsenal; with the Syrian ambassador to the UN formally agreeing to adhere to the chemical weapons treaty, including allowing UN inspectors to weapon sites; with diplomacy moving forward even in the midst of a brutal civil war; all this, and the question on too many lips is: Was Obama duped, first by his Secretary of State then by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in to accepting a diplomatic solution that appears to weaken the United States?

It is both unanswerable (at least at this point) and irrelevant whether Kerry's remarks on Monday about a possible diplomatic solution were a "gaffe" that got out of control or part of a much larger strategy that included a threat to use force as a cudgel to beat Syria to the bargaining table.  Whether it was or not, the Obama Administration took it and ran with it in ways both smart and timely.  The President's much anticipated speech on Tuesday night included a plea for Congress to postpone a vote on the authorization to use military force to let the diplomats get their work done.  This comes just a few days after it was thought he was going to lay out a case for military action alone.

One feature this week was the New York Times op-ed appearing under Vladimir Putin's name that many on the right - and not a few on the left - thought was wonderful for any number of reasons.  As someone who has read a few things about international relations in my time, I found the contents neither surprising nor interesting.  They were, in fact, the kinds of things a foreign leader would say to the people of another country: trying to flatter the people at the expense of their leader in order to create mistrust and disagreement.  The fact remains that Putin said nothing that the Obama Administration wasn't already in the midst of doing.  The tongue bath Putin received from American conservatives was odd, unless one considers that he is (a) pretty hard-core in his reactionary positions; (b) playing by a rule book American conservatives understand (brute force plus ruthlessness plus a disdain for social and political and diplomatic niceties; and (c) the kind of leader too many on the right wish America had, i.e., one who is white, authoritarian, and unafraid to keep things simple and direct even if that means trampling the lives of others.  American conservatives have loved dictators since the 1920's, when they heaped praise upon Mussolini.  Since then, fascists from Franco through the Greek military junta of the 1970's, Pinochet in Chile - well, really, pretty much any Central or South American dictator in the 60's and 70's was the subject of much American praise, official and otherwise - and the Shah of Iran have all been held up by American conservatives as "statesmen".  Shoot, Lyndon Johnson said that Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam was the Winston Churchill of southeast Asia!

There are many things that remain the be done.  There are many steps that need to be taken, and with Syria in the midst of a bloody civil war, those steps are made far more difficult.  There are many questions that I think are important to ask, including whether chemical weapons are different in kind from conventional weapons, which renders the hundreds dead because of them in Syria of some kind of different importance than the nearly 100,00 who have already been killed while the United States sat on its hands.  This last, in particular is an important question, and deserves some discussion.  All the same, at the moment international law sees such weapons just that way; the President reminded the American people, and the rest of the world, of that; the diplomats in Washington and New York and Geneva are doing the grunt work while the world watches, a far better way to verify than a UN inspection regime.  All this because of the deft way President Obama has spoken and acted over the past couple weeks.

As  far as I'm concerned, this justifies his Nobel Peace Prize.  Even with his initial martial bluster, or perhaps because of it, an international outlier long criticized for its refusal to conform to international law on chemical weapons has, in the midst of an ongoing, bloody, and still-inconclusive civil war, agreed to abide by the terms of the chemical weapons convention.  These are good things.

Good job, President Obama.  No.  Most excellent, Mr. President.  Thank you for reminding us that diplomacy can and does work.

Honest Interest In A Response

Over at LGM, there's a post highlighting something written by right-wing blogger Robert Stacy McCain (who defended the lynching of Emmett Till, so we know what kind of . . . "person" . . . he is).

Date rape is an apparently common campus crime that usually involves two drunk young people, one of whom has an erect penis, and the other of whom is unable to avert what the erect penis typically does.

Now my question is simple: Is this describing rape?  Is it describing bad communication between a man and a woman (she calls it rape; he says he was aroused and couldn't help himself?)?  Is McCain's claim that erect penises take over the mind and body of men a valid defense?

I ask these questions for reasons of clarification.  I really would like to know whether the two gentlemen who seem to believe there are such things as "sluts" that are identifiable by their dress and/or behavior would take the next step and insist there is more than a grain of truth in this notion that date rape is just two drunk people caught up in the moment, only one of whom seems to have regrets. 

The Week That Was: The Good, The Bad, & The Beautiful

Yesterday, President Obama surprised pretty much everyone and said that any decision about the use of military force would wait until he received Congressional authorization.  This is without a doubt a smart political move, a smart diplomatic move, and certainly Constitutional.  While not asking for a declaration of war - if the Republicans call his bluff on this and do that . . . - it at least acknowledges that Congress has an equal role in American foreign policy.  So - good.

Yesterday's Washington Post op-ed page carried a piece that argued - and I swear I'm not kidding - that statutory rape between students and teachers should be decriminalized.  I first heard about it on Twitter on Friday night, thanks to @AngryBlackLady.  I refuse to link to the article, because I'm now convinced it was only written as "link bait" - something to generate traffic - and I have no wish to give it any.  It should be easy enough to find.  Of course a few on the right are screeching about how the "liberal" WaPo now supports pedophilia, blah-blah-blah, but the only substantive criticisms I've read have been . . . wait for it . . . from left-wing and liberal sites.  Not a single liberal or "liberal" of whom I'm aware has said anything other than it is horrible, morally and in every other way.  Considering she ends the piece by arguing that since clergy can't seem to keep their knickers buttoned around kids and never face any punishment, teachers should face the same beneficent treatment.  Similar in logic to Feodor's "Guys have balls that produce testosterone so women should assume they're rape-bait and just accept that fact," I'm surprised he isn't supporting the argument at WaPo.  The death of print thanks to horrible stuff like that . . .

And now for the beautiful.  I'm not a fan of "praise music" in "contemporary worship" would be an understatement.  I find it theologically vapid, aesthetically mediocre, and is rooted in a business model - the Contemporary Christian Music industry based in Nashville, a branch of the Country Music establishment - that seeks to separate people from their money rather than give due honor and praise to God.  With that in mind, I offered the following this morning on FB as my kind of praise music:

Since the Latin title means "Give Glory To God", which is the sum total of 90% of the lyrics of most praise music, I would suggest that people who carry on about "praise music" learn things.

Heroes, Traitors, And Common Criminals

With Chelsea Manning's * conviction this week in the Wikileaks case, some pretty harsh lines have been drawn as to whether one believes her a hero or a traitor.  Similar in many respects to the discussions among those on the left about Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, there seems to be little room to breathe.  One either support Manning and Snowden and is therefore a full member of the left, or one does not support them and one is at the very least an Obama Apologist, or worse, a defender of the National Security & Surveillance State.

Had Manning (a) leaked only the video and information about the killing of journalists by the US Army and the subsequent cover up; (b) and done so to a reputable news source in the United States, I would say she was a whistleblower who acted in the best interests of openness.  What she did, though, is hand over 700,000 documents without going through them to a foreign national whose only concern was personal publicity.  While I don't consider her a traitor - she gave no direct aid and comfort to enemies of the United States, nor did she do so according to the testimony of two separate witnesses - neither is she "a hero".

What, precisely, was someone with her known issues - she was clear about her gender dysphoria with superiors prior to the leak - doing with the kind of security clearance she had?  This is not to say that people with mental illness (depression resulting from extreme gender dysphoria was part of her defense) are ipso facto a security risk; it is to suggest that the specifics of this case should have been at least a matter of concern for those who review security clearances.

As for Snowden/Greenwald and the revelations about PRISM, all I can say is . . . ugh.  None of this was new.  I wrote about it six years ago.  Anyone naive enough to believe that a new President would just give up a particular executive power because of his party deserves to be angry.  At themselves.  Since private corporations keep and store all sorts of data on us; since the federal, state, and local governments keep and store all sorts of data on us; since millions of us use social media to advertise everything from what we had for dinner to scurrilous attacks on those we've dumped or who dumped us, complaining that the feds have a database of our phone calls and the IP addresses of our emails is kind of silly.  Snowden and Greenwald conspired to commit a crime - Snowden contacted Greenwald and offered to take the job he had in order to steal the documents in question in order to leak them to Greenwald, making him at the very least guilty of fraud on his job application - then Snowden ran first to China then to Russia, neither of which could be described as having American interests at heart.  Recently Greenwald had the audacity to say that, for Snowden, Russia is preferable to the United States where he faces possible prosecution.  Considering Greenwald's possible reception were he to travel to Russia given the enactment of recent anti-gay laws there, this statement crosses from farcical to insulting.**

We can and should have a discussion about the over-classification of information; we can and should have a discussion of the continuation of the National Security State and our on-going surveillance state.  Neither discussion has been helped by either of these cases or the people involved.  They are neither heroes nor traitors.  They are common criminals, and deserve to  be considered such.

*I really don't want to get in to a discussion of Manning's gender dysphoria and its possible relationship to this case.  I recognize it was part of his/her defense, but to me it is a totally separate issue, as is the question of whether she receives hormone treatments in prison.

**When Greenwald's partner was detained earlier this week at Heathrow Airport, there was much hand-wringing.  Simply put - the guy was acting as a mule, and authorities in London had every reason to suspect he carried stolen classified documents.  That he was detained for a long period of time is pretty standard procedure.  That Greenwald was discomfited by the event, while understandable - who wants to see their loved one in police custody? - ignores the fact that he sent the guy to carry stolen classified information and bring it back to Rio.  And, no, I do not consider Greenwald a "journalist" anymore than I consider myself an architect.

Our Horrible Fellow Americans

I wish I had more time to delve through the unfettered racist id of my fellow citizens.  The racist freak-flag, once hidden behind layers of froth and coded language, flies free for all to see.  Whether it's a Colorado state representative (a Republican but we knew that without looking) carrying on about how "the black race" is poor because they eat chicken, the states of North Carolina, Texas, and Ohio instituting measures designed to suppress minority voting, or the right-wing press exploiting the senseless murder of a college student in Oklahoma to make some kind of point, we can at least rest easy that the bigots among us no longer feel compelled to hide.

I do so hope Art comes along and either demands I "prove" racism or at least explain what the hell his fellow righties are on about with the murder in Oklahoma.  Because that would be true to form, at least.

I am only slightly mollified by the thought that this kind of thing creates the illusion of huge numbers of people who think this way.  One is too many.

Words Without Knowledge: A Review

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 
‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? - Job 38:1-2

The Jin Dynasty in China was relatively short lived, fro 265 through 420 by the reckoning of the Western calendar.  A chronicler of that dynasty, Zhang Qu, wrote of peasants in Sichuan Province digging up dragon bones for use in medicines.  We now understand that what those peasants were using were the fossilized remains not of dragons, but dinosaurs.

Which description of the finds by these Chinese farmers is correct?  Was the contemporaneous description "They are dragon bones," wrong because we early-21st century westerners know that dragons have never existed and that, being dinosaur fossils, those long-dead Chinese peasants were wrong?  Were we to find a time machine that landed a paleontologist in Sichuan in the midst of these farmers and their discovery, and using a translator told them they were wrong, how would we go about doing so?  Would it be possible, without dragging things like evolution, the billions-year-long age of the planet, DNA, and contemporary scientific practice, to make these folks understand that "dragon" and "dinosaur" are not just two different descriptions for the bones they've found (and descriptions that sound eerily similar), but one is right and the other wrong?

Keith M. Parsons's Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars would, I believe, insist not only that it would be possible to do so, but that posing the dilemma as I have done ignores the simple fact that they really are dinosaur bones, not dragon bones.  Setting up the situation as I did in the second paragraph, what I have done is bought in to the target of much of Parsons's ire, what he calls a "constructivist" view of science.  On page 82 he writes:

I see constructivists as committed to one or both of the following these:

Relativism Theory (RT): All epistemic standards, including those of natural science, are necessarily relative and parochial.  All such standards reflect only the epistamic conventions of particular social groups.  No set os such conventions is objectively better than any others.

Nonrationality Thesis (NT): Even when "rational" and "objective" standards are in principle available, scientific consensus is a product of conflict and negotiation in which rhetoric, politics, and other "nonrational" social factors determine the outcome. (italics in original)

Parsons uses some well-known controversies in paleontology - the wrong skull placed upon an apatosaurus  skeleton in Pittsburgh that created the non-existent brontosaurus; Robert Bakker's arguments for endothermic dinosaurs; David Raup's very public switch from critic of the Alvarez theory of mass extinction due to the impact from an extraterrestrial object to enthusiastic supporter - to criticize the constructivist claims about science and defend what can best be described as a kind of naive realism, best summed up in the following passage (emphasis added):

It is salutary to be reminded often that we all have axes to grind, and that our motives may be due to internalized social influences. . . Lacking a God's eye view, we simply have no choice but to follow our hunches and intuitions, realizing that these have certainly been shaped by our social milieu, but trusting scientific practice to give nature the final say. (p. 157)

Of the many things wrong with this work, the least of them is the assumption, here written out in full for anyone to read, that there is something called "nature" that dictates the outcomes of scientific experiments and controversies.  The list of far more egregious errors include: the use of the antonyms "rational" and "irrational" without ever coming within whispering distance of definitions for either; cursory (and often wrong) interpretations of figures with whom he disagrees, including Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and W. J. T. Mitchell; an entire chapter devoted to defending a Whiggish view of the history of science, by which he means our current practices and understandings judge and determine those of previous generations and find them wanting; a description of "science as contingent social practice and convention" without understanding there are varieties of social conventions and practices and that such a description hardly means "whimsical"; asking questions and demanding answers in terms that, to be generous, are open to interpretation and at worse miss the obvious point that differing vocabularies and interpretive schemes render such questions either meaningless or moot.

Parsons says this work grew out of his dissertation in philosophy and history of science.  I cannot imagine sitting on his committee without noting that he never once, and certainly not up front, defines and explains the position he supports and how the constructivist claims not only threaten it epistemologically but normatively.  I cannot imagine reading this, with his cursory dismissals of Popper, Feyerabend, and Lakatos (he only calls the positivists by their group name; they were, apparently, beneath notice) along with Kuhn and Shapin and Latour, and asking for longer, more detailed explanations of what these men said and how the position Parsons defends is both epistemologically and normatively superior.  Finally, I can't imagine reading this without directing Parsons to Ernst Mayr, who argues that biology (and paleontology, while a polyglot discipline, is a branch of biology) works not only with different methods but different assumptions, different criteria for theory acceptance, and different epistemic and ontological presuppositions than physics.  I would also note that the pattern and outcome of the controversies Parsons uses are open to multiple, equally legitimate interpretations, including ones exactly opposite from those Parsons insists are the "correct" ones.

I would certainly use this book in a graduate/post-graduate seminar on the history and philosophy of science.  I would use it as a primer on how not to do those things.

N.B.: Two things.  First, the title of Parsons's book is taken from the Biblical book Job, so I thought it apt to use another such quote as title and epigraph.  Second, while my time is limited, I hope to write a post or two in coming days delving in to more detail some of the many ways Parsons's book fails utterly and completely.

White Feminist Privilege And Hugo Schwyzer

As I've written recently on feminist topics, the near-total and very public meltdown of a formerly prominent self-avowed male feminist academic has brought to the surface lingering anger at the myopia of many white feminists toward their own privilege.  One of the long-standing bills of complaint against Schwyzer was his often vicious attacks on women of color, including threats to their professional careers.  With his admission - in the midst of much narcissistic argle-bargle in which his confession of sins became an attempt at more attention from people sympathetic to his formerly expressed views - he has yet to come clean about his own pattern of bigoted behavior.  White feminists have been slow in admitting their own complicity in silencing the voices of women of color.  I thought, especially since one of the women named in this controversy, Amanda Marcotte, is someone I respect.  The complaint against Marcotte - that a book she wrote had a racist cover which was defended by Schwyer - is straight forward (and I should add, legitimate; had it been me, I would have pulled the book from the shelves rather than let it go out to the public, which speaks to a certain tone-deafness on Marcotte's part).

I should add I had never heard of Schwyzer before.  I had not heard of the incident involving Marcotte's book.  A person can't be aware of everything, even in communities to which that person pays attention.  I do think any man calling himself a feminist is troubling; I support feminist issues, but I would never call myself a feminist.  In much the way too many of my (white) Facebook friends put up images of a hoodie after the Trayvon Martin verdict in what was, to me, total ignorance of their own privilege - they will never be stopped and frisked because of their color; they will never be pulled over while driving because of the color of their skin; they won't be followed by security in stores because they are black; they won't be hunted by a vigilante because they are the wrong skin color for a neighborhood - I think part of my own duty as a white man is, as many women of color are now insisting white feminists should do, to shut up and listen.

I will admit my own myopia on this matter.  Just because I thought there was no color barrier in feminist communities doesn't mean there wasn't one.  On the contrary, I have often thought that some feminist pro-choice arguments were and continue to be remarkably racist.  Recognizing this one blot over here, however, doesn't excuse any instances where I failed to see how my own privilege blinded me and closed my ears when there were voices I needed to hear.

There is a lot of soul-searching going on, and for some African-American women, it's too little too late.  That this soul searching is necessary is evidence enough of the unexamined privilege of white feminists, and their continued silencing of the voices of African-American and Latina voices, ignoring their realities, and limiting the reach of cfeminist discourse by insisting white women's experience is normative for all women.  That someone like Schwyzer was able to find a favorable audience among white feminists, all the while displaying very public disdain for African-American women, and displaying symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder along with addictive behaviors should demonstrate we have a long way to go.

Opening The Bathroom Door

California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that allows students at public schools to choose bathrooms and sports teams based upon their own gender identity.  By creating space for trans people, the law also creates space for ignoramuses and bigots.

The funniest part of all this - and you need to look for the funny in the roiling cauldron of hatred and fear - is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council carrying on about biology (and engaging in a form of the fallacy known as "the appeal to nature"), a science he holds in disdain most of the time.

What's truly sad in all this is bigotry, ignorance, and fear get a seat at the table as some kind of principled opposition to opening up spaces in public services for trans kids.  It's bad enough they get treated poorly by other kids; having adults on television telling them they are just confused and need to get their heads straightened out I'm sure does wonders for them.

Of course, what else do we expect from people whose whole appeal is reinforcing bigotry and hate-filled nonsense around gender issues, from same-sex attraction and abortion to women's rights to near total ignorance about trans people.

 As for the whole, "What about the children?!?" argument, all I can say is - school is a place for teaching all sorts of things, including understanding people who are different.  Anyone who says that such education could violate a parents's rights is essentially insisting that parents have the right to teach bigotry, hatred, and fear.  Since part of a school's job is to get young people ready to live in a diverse society where they will encounter all sorts of people, and since such parents can take their kids out of public schools if they want, I suggest that offer be made rather than insist that schools reinforcing on-going marginalization of trans people.

Any time a community, state, or nation opens itself to the different ways people live their lives, we should celebrate that.  As for the hate- and ignorance-mongers, rather than give them a seat at the table, it would be far better to just call them out and move on.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. (UPDATE, UPDATE II, UPDATE III)

A couple weeks back, a woman of my acquaintance told the following story.  She was out shopping on her own when she noticed a man glancing at her.  The man saw her notice and walked away.  A few minutes later, he walked up to her and said, "I just wanted to tell you, if you're married, your husband is a very lucky man."  She said, "I am married and we're both lucky."  The man walked away.

My first thought upon hearing this life-anecdote was, What the hell is wrong with people?  My second thought was, I hope she made sure this dude-bro didn't get her license plate number.

A few months back I wrote a short piece in which I made clear that rape-prevention begins with instilling in boys and men the most basic lesson: Don't rape.  Apparently, for some, this simple message wasn't clear enough.  As I said in the very first paragraph of that post:

I was going to avoid the story, because, honestly, how is it possible to say something on the topic of rape that isn't an easy way to make oneself look good?  Like the whole kitten-burning trap, one would think it takes zero moral imagination to speak out against rape.

Across the internet, there has been a rising chorus of women's voices speaking out against the ubiquity of online rape threats women receive when they speak out on matters related to pervasive, systemic misogyny.  Writing at Feministing, Syreeta calls this "The New Normal" and insists that it be met with ongoing publicity.  The post itself concerns both racism and misogyny, and the way they are used to silence women and people of color who have the audacity to speak out against them.

I have my own Katzenjammer Kids here who somehow believe I am full of soap on the matter of violence against women; that supporting anti-slut-shaming campaigns is somehow elitist; and that women who get raped in all probability deserve their victimization, the result of their own "poor choices" or the fact that men are nothing more than mobile penises, incapable of resisting the tiny voice from down below.

The whole point of my occasional posts on the topic of violence against women has been, and continues to be, to clarify the ways in which, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary; despite the many real and substantive gains made by women here and around the world; at the end of the day, most women most of the time spend at least part of every day dealing with men who believe it is their right to intrude upon their lives in ways big in small.  Whether the creep in the grocery store who, I am quite sure, thought his action the height of politesse, complimenting a woman he did not know on her appearance; or the daily abuse heaped upon women who dare to speak out - not just verbal but all too often physical; women live with the reality that most men most of the time assume a relationship of superiority toward women, a relationship that must be maintained even with the threats and reality of violence.

That is why rape has nothing to do with how women dress (the whole point of the anti-slut-shaming movement); it has nothing to do with the irresistible call of the penis.  It is, rather, an act of violence against women as women, done because men believe it their right and privilege just to do it.  Rape is about power, not sexual attraction.  That is why date rape and marital rape and the rape of sex workers are still struggling to be recognized as real crimes.  Everyone can sympathize when, say a child or older woman is sexually assaulted.  When a woman in college wakes up in a strange bed, realizing the cute guy at the bar slipped her a roofie and had sex with her while she was passed out; when the wife rolls over crying because her husband has forced himself on her yet again, insisting she fulfill her marital obligations; when a prostitute is dragged in to the bushes and raped, she knows her assailant is quite right that no one will believe her story because of what she does; when these things happen there are far too many voices willing to insist that what happened was not rape.  Women in such situations find few defenders and far too many willing to blame them for the actions of others.  I will say it again for the slow learners who insist I am wrong: Violence against women does not have anything to do with sex, or how women dress, or how they act, or what choices they make in their lives.

Thus the simple, necessary demand that people start teaching boys at a very young age, "Don't rape."  It does seem a no-brainer.  Yet, the growing awareness of how far we still have to go - not just here but around the world - and the rising chorus of the voices of both men and women demanding change demonstrate how far we still have to go, as well as how far we have come.  It's a message that needs to be repeated no matter how simple and clear it sounds.  It's a message that more people need to hear.  Blaming women for their own victimization only perpetuates this "new normal" that empowers men (I love the description in the Feministing piece of some doofus typing a verbal assault while ensconced in Mom's basement; it's an Internet cliche but no less true for all that) to believe it is OK to attack women verbally and physically because they have the audacity to speak out in ways that threaten these men in some way.

It will stop only when all people who understand the reality that none of this is about sex or those dirty whores and how they dress but about men terrified of the thought a woman might well have at least as much power and authority as they do.  Not just demystifying rape, but deconstructing male power, needs to be done each and every time some bit of this ugliness raises its blighted head.

UPDATE:  I knew I should have waited to read Amanda Marcotte before writing this post.

I’d like to recommend a couple of interesting pieces by Paul Mason and Lindy West, who have a point that I think bears stressing: Trolls are real people and they have an agenda outside of some vague “need for attention”. They are misogynists, and as I said during the CONvergence panel on this subject, it’s important to understand that misogynists believe they are in the right. Indeed, they are incredibly dogged and self-righteous, as Mason found out when he first decided to explore online misogyny—they get really mad when you do this, by the way, because part of their self-righteous worldview includes a belief that they should be able to push their agenda without being examined or questioned too closely.

Sounds familiar to me.  When called out for being a mansplainin' concern troll, someone heads to an online dictionary to demonstrate I'm trying to shut him down.  How dare I refuse to hear his considered words of wisdom?

Mason interviews the guys who claim they’re just in it for the “lulz” and discovers to no one’s great surprise that actually, these trolls have deep hatred and resentment of women and actually do take the mission to silence women very, very seriously. They just can’t quite admit that to themselves, because part of the identity of the misogynist is to deny that he is a misogynist—he loves women as long as they know they are subhuman sex/reproduction appliances put here to serve, so how can he hate women?!—so the amount of rationalization that goes on is astounding. 

I was once ridiculed for claiming that too many men see women as baby factories.  Imagine!  Unpossible!

 There is a sea of boiling anger out there because men are taught from a young age that women are here to serve, and then they grow up and discover that women often elect not to do that. Some misogynists—the Rick Perrys of the world—calmly react to this realization by deciding that women’s rebellion is a temporary, feminism-induced insanity, and that the proper legislative pressure plus a good dose of condescension can return them to their natural state of servitude. Some men get a sick pleasure out of stripping away the “illusion” that women are equal and violently showing them exactly how inferior they are. The online troll population has these kinds of characters in it, but the dominant class is men who don’t get the level of sexual attention they feel entitled to from women, and therefore have concocted elaborate, dogged theories about how women are broken, because they cannot ever allow that women have a right not to like them personally. (Or that if they started acting like decent people, maybe they would actually be more likeable.) All misogynists get upset when women are given attention for their talent or skills; it violates their core belief that women are here to serve. This is why writing on the internet while female means getting everything from laughably delusional men pretending to “critique” your writing while barely concealing their rage to rape and death threats. Particularly if your writing is not upholding the opinion that women are inferior servant class.

Simple, clear, plain English gets to the heart of the matter.  Every word typed denouncing feminism demonstrates just how fragile these men are, how threatening a woman actually being a human being is to their shriveled sense of self.

 That’s why it’s uncomfortable to have so many people insist that there’s an easy fix for troll targets, the “ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” fix, usually spouted by people who haven’t considered for a moment that the trolls may very well be actual people who are trying to protect and perpetuate sexism.

Which is why I don't so much ignore what my twins from different ideological poles write as point out what it is and carry on.  It enrages them, but then again that is the coin of their realm - rage that some might well see through their self-proclaimed concern for the seething mass of neurosis that it really is - and the best way to win the game is not to play.

West is right; it’s time to stop thinking of trolls as idiots who are just seeking attention, and see them for what they are: Misogynists with a political agenda. These are men that absolutely do not want to live in a society where women are treated equally, and they are obsessed with silencing the women online whose writings they rightfully fear are going to help push society in a more feminist direction. They want to harass feminists into silence. If we keep this understanding front and center and discard useless theories about “attention-seeking” or “lulz”, we can begin to have a more productive conversation about what the hell to do about the problem.

I disagree slightly; I do think attention-seeking is a huge factor.  Especially when touting one's moral and intellectual superiority.  The point, however, is well taken.  Highlight it, call it out, and remain on topic.  All part of those simple instructions: Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

UPDATE II: In case you're wondering if I'm being hyperbolic about the whole rage and violence thing, let us cruise through Wonkette to discover what hilarity a Republican Political Action Committee finds humorous:

[A] Republican superPAC, “The Hillary Project” has recycled this hilarious “Slap Hillary” game on its website. The game allows the viewer to administer a slap to a cartoon Hillary or to hear one of two brief audio clips that the producers must think are inflammatory. And as Buzzfeed notes, it was created in 2000, but the Hillary Project site “began spamming reporters to its existence Monday with the tweet ‘Have you slapped Hillary today?’” Oh, and did we mention the cartoon Hillary figure is wearing a pink pantsuit? This is cutting-edge political satire, kids.

Because nothing says "healthy" like the desire to assault someone with whom you disagree on politics, or offering others a chance to fulfill that same fantasy.

Misogyny - you're soaking in it.

UPDATE III: It isn't just adult women who deserve getting raped for their slutty clothes and poor choices.

Boy, it sure is hard to know when you can rape (or, as they say at Yale, have “nonconsensual sex” with) a kid, isn’t it? We know the Catholic Church has a hell of a time figuring it out. Like, sure, there are “laws” about how you’re not supposed to have sex with someone who does not consent to having sex with you. And there are “laws” about how a minor cannot give consent because she or he is, you know, a kid. But those are really more like suggested guidelines, aren’t they? Like, okay, yeah, you probably shouldn’t fuck a kid, but what if she’s a totally hot kid and she’s wearing make-up and she runs with a fast crowd and she’s, like, TOTALLY asking for it, you can tell, she’s got that look? Talk about a gray area!

The piece gives examples: a prison guard in Louisiana who raped a 14 year old inmate, insisting she seduced him; an English rapist who got off because the 13 year old was "egging him on";  the 11 year old gang raped, with the girl described as "dressing older" and "hanging with teenagers"; the 13 year old pressured in to sex then became pregnant, described as a "whore" by her neighbors because she became pregnant.

All of these fit neatly in to Feodor's and Art's little church-lady lecturings about poor choices and white privilege and blah-blah-blah.  The piece ends up with this bit of sage advice that Art and Feodor seem to believe is beneath them:

When can you have nonconsensual sex with someone? NEVER. Not even if she’s really hot or mature for her age. Not even if she’s wearing make-up. Not even if she has older friends. Not even if she’s “egging” you on. Not even if she’s drunk. Not even if she’s a total slutbag who has had sex with, like, a million other dudes so one more shouldn’t make a difference. Not even if you’re really horny. Not even if she only says no twice. Not even if it’s a day that ends in “y” or pigs flew by your window or you watched some porno where the chick said no but seemed to like it or your mother didn’t love you or some Republican said there are varying degrees of rape and some of it isn’t really rape or you think you can get away with it and no one will ever know.

Because if you do sex to someone who does not give you her permission to do sex to her — or cannot give you her permission because of how she is a child — you are a rapist and a bad person and if there is in fact a hell, you will burn in it. Even if a judge takes sympathy on you and the legal system lets you off the hook with a warning (or, in Yale’s case, a written reprimand). It is wrong and bad, and you are wrong and bad, and seriously, it should not be that difficult to understand that you should only fuck grown adult women (or men, whatever floats your boat, we don’t judge — UNLESS YOU’RE RAPING SOMEONE) who can and do give their consent for you to fuck them.

A Tale From The Trip

He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’ Luke 19:40

While walking through the dinosaur/extinct mammal/really old stuff exhibit at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum, I chanced across this:

Remnants of life on Earth that are three and a half billion years old.  It boggles the mind.

Evolution-deniers are idiots.  This world of God's is far more wonderful, mysterious, and complex than anything we humans can imagine.  Reducing life and time to suit the puerile needs of the cosmically bereft and terrified mocks human intellect, it mocks God, and it mocks the magnificent creation of which we are a part.  To say that evolution "denies God" is to refuse to theologize out of the wonders around us.  It is, rather, to idolize the dead words on a page instead of worshiping and praising the God of Life, a life for which evidence extends beyond our ability to do more than form words.  Creationists are, in fact, creation-deniers, refusing to learn from the bounty around us as well as use the intellect with which we've been blessed to discover the power of Life, which is rooted in the God who created and who creates and sustains through grace and love.

A simple rock with some rings sings more praises to our God than all the creationist claptrap combined.

Surreal

When I posted this photo I took on Facebook a friend of mine who attended Seminary with me wrote, "It must have been surreal being there."  In fact, for me at least this whole vacation was surreal; from last Friday and Saturday nights' high school reunion through three and a half days in the nation's capital, it was an jarring yet wonderful time.

Of course, I've been back to my hometown.  I've followed old high school friends on Facebook, even run in to a few from time to time.  There is little to prepare a person for a gathering of folks with whom you grew up, and from whom you've since moved on.  It was really quite wonderful; it was also quite strange.  Many of the people gathered I'd met in grammar school.  There was at least one person there who was in my kindergarten class!

I have to say there is much to admire.  The gentleman who has owned his own hair salon for almost 25 years.  The DVA nurse who is also married to a United Methodist minister.  One person is setting up a support group for people raising their grandchildren.  The single father of three, far more brave than I ever could be.  The survivors of life's curve balls like cancer and family tragedy.  We've lost four through the decades, but we keep on.  A good looking bunch who have managed, somehow, to reach middle age and retain the ability to laugh together, drink together, and share both old times and new experiences with equal fervor.  Oh, and I still feel bad not recognizing a couple of you.  Hair styles were longer back then. . .

Then it was off to Washington and a whole different experience of surrealism.  We arrived and before checking in to our hotel, toured the National Cathedral.  After checking in, we walked down to the White House, then made our way back to the hotel for some sleep to ready ourselves for the week.  The National Zoo, the various museums of the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, around the Vietnam War Memorial with Miriam, through the Holocaust Memorial Museum with Moriah.  Of course, we stopped at Wesley Seminary which is undergoing a facelift.  Lisa and I took a stroll through the old neighborhood, much as we did each morning, wondering what our life would be like.

I will always cherish my time living there; our time, my wife's and my first years, first courting then our first year of marriage, will always remain among my fondest memories.  We have moved far beyond what and who we were when we were younger, poorer, and wondering what life held in store for us.  Being back, those questions surfaced and even though I know they've been answered - not always the way either of us wanted - it was nice, for a brief moment, to remember what it was like to be young, have all the answers, and be ready to conquer the world.  Settling for the struggles of life and family and the relative quiet of a small city in the Midwest has been its own reward.  I would like to think that, in our own way, we have done a small part in changing the world for the better.  Arriving home yesterday afternoon, being greeted by our St. Bernard and our cats and my in-laws who were house-sitting, that same sense of surrealism overcame me, followed quickly by the two best words in the English language: "I'm home."

N.B.: The highlight in many ways was taking Moriah's advice and heading to the East Building of The National Gallery of Art.  Along with some special exhibits and a whole room dedicated to the work of Alexander Calder, I turned a corner and there on the wall was this:

Pollock's #1 1951 is an amazing piece of work I first encountered on a high school trip to Washington in 1980.  It is stunning, arresting in its power and beauty, and was the first painting I ever saw that made me think, "Yes!  Someone gets it."  To see it again after all this time was a real treat.  I sat and gazed at it for about ten minutes.  Miriam came and sat with me, the two of us together sharing a moment with one of my favorite pieces of art.

N.B.II:  Before I forget, as we walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial I was gratified to find this:

The angle of the sun was wrong, but the spot where Dr. King stood and gave his speech to the 1963 March on Washington has been commemorated.  To stand where he stood . . . It gives me chills.

Consent (UPDATE)

A couple months back I wrote a little piece about how the American right doesn't understand the legal concept of consent.  In the midst of exploiting the kidnapping/murder saga recently discovered in Cleveland as a cudgel to beat liberals, I made the unsurprising and uncontroversial point that folks such as me who support charging Mr. Castro with murder for the death and miscarriage of a fetus are not being hypocritical because the hinge upon which abortion rights swing is consent.  There is no hypocrisy involved in such a position because it begins with the assumption that women are capable moral agents and have both the ability and the right to make decisions that impact their life and health, including whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term.

Flash forward to this comment on a Roy Edroso piece lambasting Jonah Goldberg for yet another failed typing exercise, and we find this comment which is far more pithy and concise than my overlong post:

No, seriously though, conservatives really don't understand the concept of consent. It's all about their madonna/whore complex, which is why rape is only bad if the victim was a pure, chaste lady who didn't go to bars or dress revealingly.

The context is the issue of child pornography and why it's qualitatively distinct from adult pornography: children do not have the capacity for consent, thus eliminating any arguments about whether or not they can participate in pornography of their own free will.  This latter position - that adult women participate in pornography of their own free will - is opposed by the (anti)feminist arguments of people like Catherine MacKinnon who insist that women are incapable of granting consent because of the structural imbalance between men and women in American society.

Neo-Puritans like MacKinnon (and Feodor) do not see women as competent moral agents, free to choose to be sexual beings, including choosing to dress for a night out in hopes of finding a man.  To do so is to create the conditions for their own victimization.  Anti-choicers do not view women as competent moral agents, capable of deciding what is in the best interests of their life and health when it comes to carrying a pregnancy to term.

In both cases, the issue of consent is central - are adult women able to choose to act in one way and not another, understanding the ramifications of their choices?  In the case of our concern trolls - who, after all, are only looking after women's best interest in chastising them for looking like sluts - I doubt too many women fail to understand there are men who will view them as freely available regardless of the woman's particular preferences.  To paraphrase the thought of such folks: they are dressing like they are asking for it, so they get what they deserve.  In the case of abortion, setting to one side the largely false nonsense about the "preborn", consent is eliminated at the moment of conception as women are now a slave to the zygote.  Questions of women's health and welfare, even a woman's preference as to whether or not she wishes to carry a baby to term are not legitimate because women surrender consent when the sperm fertilizes the egg.

What's fascinating to me, apart from the self-righteous moral grandstanding, is the total absence of real people in these arguments.  Real people get to make decisions including ones with which we disagree.  For folks for whom consent for women does not exist, there are no real women.  They're either "sluts" or baby factories.

Just some observations on what happens when people don't get the whole idea of consent.  People disappear in to thin air.

UPDATE: Lawyers, Guns, and Money should charge because their pieces and comments are just the best.

And in a related story:

Today on the Internet, an ignorantly privileged person made an offensive [comment] and subsequently took offense to people taking offense to his initial offensive post.

It almost seems as if they let anyone post on these things.

I changed one word that summarizes the shock - SHOCK! - expressed by Art and Feodor that we might prefer to make fun of their ridiculousness than sit and gaze in awe at their moral superiority.  And the shock that people on the internet behave the way internet people do. 

More Reasons For Anger And Sadness (UPDATE, UPDATE II)

This week has been hard.  Listening to the racist celebration of the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial - and the on-going trashing of the memory of a dead 17-year-old whose sole crime was walking home through a neighborhood one person didn't believe he had a right to - it's been a strain not to scream.

To top it off, the other day I saw this:

An openly gay New Mexico high school student who spoke out against bullying died Tuesday after his family removed him from life support following a suicide attempt over the weekend.

Carlos Vigil, 17, posted a suicide note online on Saturday where he described being the target of bullying, and wrote, “The kids in school are right, I am a loser, a freak and a fag and in no way is that acceptable for people to deal with.” 

Here's the young man's suicide note in full:

I’m sorry to those who I offended over the years. I’m blind to see that I, as a human being, suck. I’m an individual who is doing an injustice to the world and it’s time for me to leave. Pleas e don’t ever feel sorry for me, or cry – because I had an opportunity at life and that opportunity is over. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to love someone or have someone love me. I guess it’s best though, because now I leave no pain onto anyone. The kids in school are right, I am a loser, a freak, and a fag and in no way is that acceptable for people to deal with. I’m sorry for not being a person that would make someone proud.

I’m free now. Xoxo.

Carlos

The first time I read this story, I couldn't read the note through.  It broke my heart.

Then I became angry.  Just like the blind hatred of young black men that lets self-avowed Christians celebrate the death of one at the hands of a remorseless vigilante, the visceral hatred of sexual minorities led one young man to apologize to the world for offending it just by being alive.

This cannot go on.  It has to stop.  Those who talk about gays and lesbians as if they are some kind of deviants - you are the reason Carlos and people like him die, whether by their own hands or at the hands of others.  Those who insist that people who are attracted to others are some kind of danger to the rest of us - you are the reason young men and women like Carlos turn to drugs and violence and self-mutilation and finally tell the world they're sorry they were ever alive and kill themselves.

To anyone who thinks that this is about mental illness - it is.  That mental illness is called bigotry, the inability to see human beings who are different than oneself or one's self-identified group as bearers of worth and dignity.  Just as the Zimmerman verdict has overturned a rock letting us see and hear the racist bugs crawling through the mud of American life*, let us honor Carlos Vigil by calling out all those who hate.  Let us not let them blame another dead kid for his own death.  Let us remember Carlos the best way we can - by showing the world he was not a freak and he had nothing to apologize to anyone for.  It is we who did not do enough or say enough in defense of Carlos and others like him who owe the apology.

We owe them more.  We owe them a world where the thoughts and words and deeds of Carlos Vigil are no longer possible.

UPDATE: And the world turns and more decent pretenses drop to the floor as naked racism appears at National Review, a publication with a history of it, going back to Bill Buckley's attacks on MLK and the Civil Rights Act.

Quite apart from its incongruity - why is Sharpton the tree in this picture? - and using lynching as a device for political commentary, I just wonder why Al Sharpton makes so many on the right incoherent in their rage.

UPDATE II: When I say that the right-wing bigots aren't bothering to hide, all anyone need do is read Roy Edroso's Village Voice column.  Be warned, though.  It's biased the same way Media Matters is biased.  Roy uses actual quotes from right-wing bloggers which is obviously proof of bias and lies.

*I should note that I am not suggesting there were no expressions of racism before the verdict.  The coded messages of racist rhetoric were always clear enough.  That facade, never very sturdy, has collapsed under the weight of  celebration for the killer George Zimmerman.  Shorter point: These folks aren't bothering to hide behind code anymore.  They are waving their racist flags high.

Fear & Justice

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible … except by getting off his back. - Leo Tolstoy

Following the right-wing celebrations at George Zimmerman's not guilty verdict has been an exercise is trying to find room for compassion for people who hate and fear so much they can shrug off the taking of the life of an innocent 17 year old kid.

The linked post at Patheos led to this post.  While the context is anti-gay bigotry, it fits in well with any form of hatred:

So, in the interest of public service, I have decided to help my fellow Christians out a bit — and offer some loving advice on how to not be viewed as a bigot. After all, that is obviously the greatest fear out there in Evangelical land (second only to the unspoken fear that we gays will destroy the fabric of society and make straight marriages illegal. Or something). Poor Ralph Reed. He really, really, didn’t like the idea of being a bigot. So let’s help him out, shall we?

- - - -

 10) Understand that we’re not you.

What does this mean? Simple. We are not interested in squelching your rights like you have done to us for decades. We’re not interested in preventing you from getting married. We’re not going to pass a law that makes it legal for someone to fire you because you’re Christian. We’re certainly not going to make Christianity illegal. Our agenda is, and always has been for you to STOP doing this things to us.
Frankly, you’ve been punching us on the face for years. It’s not an infringement on your rights to say “stop punching them in the face.” Never has been, never will be.

The thought that real justice might yet prevail in the land leads to fear that the tables might well turn.  Thus the claims that Christianity will be outlawed and/or Christian persecuted.  Thus the constant barrage of claims that those seeking justice for Trayon Martin are "race-baiters" and "the real racists".  Thus the lack of remorse on Zimmerman's part when he told Sean Hannity he would do the same things in the same way even knowing what he knows now.  Thus Dan Riehl's claim that Trayon Martin got what he deserved, even wanted.

Such fear is hard to excise.  Yet we must.  For all our sakes.  Most of all, for the memory of a young man who only wanted to get back to his father's house and had his life ended because someone in the neighborhood through which he walked was terrified of his mere presence.

The Exorcist

I was waiting to gather my older daughter and a friend from a One Direction concert last night, idly flipping through Facebook on my phone when I saw the news: George Zimmerman was found not guilty. I happened to be standing next to an African-American man at the time. I must have said something because he looked over at me and asked me what was wrong (he and I had chatted briefly about kids these days and how happy we were our children had the chance to go to a show like this). I hesitated for a moment, then told him. At that moment I wanted to be anywhere else, be anyone else. Emotions passed over his face so quickly it was impossible to say what they were, or even if they were. Then he sighed, shook his head, and said, "It's OK."

I didn't ask and there was an uncomfortable silence for a couple minutes afterward, but his statement had to be directed to me. The fact is, it is not OK. It will not be OK. Charlie Pierce, as usual, is most eloquent on how and why it is not now and will not be OK.

Some night very soon, if he so chooses, George Zimmerman can load his piece, tuck it into the back of his pants, climb into his SUV, and drive around Sanford, Florida looking for assholes and fucking punks who are walking through neighborhoods where he, George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, doesn't think they belong. He can drive around Sanford, Florida and check out anyone who is dressed in such a manner as might frighten the average citizen who has been fed a daily diet of "Scary Black Kids" by their local news and by their favorite radio personalities, and who is dressed in such a manner as might seem inappropriate to their surroundings as determined by George Zimmerman, crimebuster. He can drive around Sanford, Florida until he spots an asshole or a fucking punk and then he can get out of his SUV, his piece tucked into the back of his pants, and he can stalk the asshole or the fucking punk, the one who is in the wrong neighborhood, or who is dressed inappropriately, at least according to George Zimmerman, protector of peace. If the asshole, or the fucking punk, turns around and objects to being stalked -- or, worse, if the asshole, or the fucking punk, decides physically to confront the person stalking him -- then George Zimmerman can whip out the piece from the back of his pants and shoot the asshole, or the fucking punk, dead right there on the spot. This can happen tonight. That is now possible. Hunting licenses are now available and it's open season on assholes, fucking punks, and kids who wear hoodies at night in neighborhoods where they do not belong, at least according to George Zimmerman, defender of law and order, crimebuster, and protector of the peace, because that is what American society has told George Zimmerman, and all the rest of us, is the just outcome of what happened on one dark and rainy night in February of 2012.

We should be able to do better than this. But we can't. Some people, some lives, just aren't as valuable. At a time when crime has become far less common than a decade ago, and rare compared to a quarter-century ago, there is still this lingering fear that none of that is true. We still live in fear of the All-American Bogeyman - the young black man.  Where he is, how he's dressed, these are always changing because at the end of the day it comes down to the same monster stalking our national dreams.  Perhaps it was to much to ask of those six women on the jury, to let George Zimmerman and America know there are no such things as monsters.  Perhaps it was asking too much of these six women not to hear "black youth" and "hoodie" and "crime wave" and not see in George Zimmerman someone who acted as any of them would, as any of us would.

We are a nation that lives in fear of monsters.  Even as the reasons for that fear shrink with each passing day and year, we seem to want monsters to be out there to justify the fear we continue to feel.  To some of us, at least, George Zimmerman demonstrated a recklessness that should have led to his conviction.  To the six people on that jury, the only ones whose opinion mattered, it was far better that George Zimmerman be told he committed no crime.  Exorcising monsters, after all, is an honored profession.

Something You May Not Know

Did you know the federal government ran a budget surplus in the month of June?  It's true!

I wonder how long before the Republicans in Congress start screeching "Tax Cuts!"

Instead of, you know, lifting at least part of the sequester, so stuff can get done.

Egypt. Again.

I will always remember the moment.  Watching events unfold in real time thanks to Al Jazeera English streaming live, I sat at my computer and watched the announcement that Pres. Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

The roar from Tahrir Square was deafening.

It has happened again and I have to say that I am less than enthusiastic this go round.

The removal of Mubarak created the conditions for the election of Mohammed Morsi to the Presidency.  While certainly no fan of his increasingly obvious desire to make Egypt conform to a restrictive interpretation of Islamic law and social practice, it is impossible to ignore the reality that he was elected by a majority of the Egyptian voters.  There are democratic solutions to democratic problems.  That the Egyptian military continues to hold the whip-hand in Egyptian politics is all the more reason to mourn this week's coup;  Morsi directly threatened their domestic perquisites at a time when continued economic stagnation kept much of the population restive (to be understated about it).

Americans should not be applauding this, anymore than they should have complained years ago when residents of the Gaza Strip elected Hamas to represent them.  It's their democracy; they can choose their own leaders.  We should be adult enough to deal with the even when we don't particularly like them.

The folks at Lawyers, Guns, And Money sum it up well.

Brooks’s argument that democracy is a mere “process” that should be disregarded when it produces disagreeable substantive results is quite remarkable. Let’s consider the (largely accurate, as far as I can tell) bill of charges against Morsi — hostility to the rights of women, civil liberties violations, rank incompetence, divisiveness, disastrous misuses of the violent power of the state. So Brooks would have thought that a military coup against the second Bush administration was perfectly OK, then? (Particularly since the election of Bush was pretty shaky on the “process” metric as well.) At what point do the bad (by whose standard?) substantive results of democratic elections trump democratic procedures? Brooks lacks a clear answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the percentage of the electorate that consists of white people.

Once you begin accepting the violent removal of democratically elected leaders whose policies are disagreeable, you remove the whole raison d'etre of democratic government.  Of course, as the US has never sat idly by in such instances - Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973 come to mind - it is hardly surprising that a fluffer for the powerful like David Brooks is insisting the Egyptians, and by extension Muslims in general, don't have the capacity to sustain democratic systems.  Still, it would be nice if someone in the United States of America, in the week we celebrated our independence, took a stand for the democratic process rather than bad real politique arguments about American interests.

I am not sanguine about what happens next in Egypt.  Whoever comes to power in Egypt knows the price of the Presidential office - kissing the military's butt.  And the Muslim Brotherhood has also learned something: That democracy is a farce, especially if the world's most powerful democratic republic refuses to defend the values of democracy.  This is a formula for more violence and instability.  Folks like Brooks should be proud.