Monthly Archives: April 2007

Why We’re Not Parasites

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Yesterday Oliver Kamm accused bloggers of being “parasites” and charged that political blogs stifled healthy debate. He did this in the Guardian blog site, Comment Is Free. I’d never heard of Kamm, so I did some checking. He appears to be one of those faux-leftist neocons of the Christopher Hitchens / Martin Peretz ilk. An overeducated twit, in other words. Anyway, he begins,

Political blogging has come of age. At least, that was the idea behind the BBC’s Newsnight screening of a report by a high-profile blogger who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. His film argued that blogs provided more acute and independent political analysis than traditional journalism, owing to the absence of an editor, proprietor or regulator. Theatrically insisting on being filmed in darkness to maintain his supposed anonymity, “Fawkes” debated his thesis with Michael White of this newspaper.

It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging’s central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.

Yes, there are plenty of bloggers who write in ignorance of facts. However, these days there are plenty of paid “professionals” working with benefit of editors, proprietors and regulators who are just as ignorant. In fact, some of the worst offenders among the bloggers are getting their misinformation from the pros.

Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide.

I actually think there is a glimmer of truth in what Kamm wrote above. I am very much dependent on commercial news media for most of the information I provide in this blog. I get annoyed with bloggers who think that, somehow, “citizen journalists” will someday replace professional news bureaus. Very little of what we bloggers do even faintly resembles what news reporters do, even though technology is effecting enormous changes in how news is gathered and disseminated.

However, if you want to know why we’re not parasites, read Glenn Greenwald. Glenn says that — glory be! — Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is finally catching on to what the U.S. Attorney scandal is about. Just two weeks ago, Hiatt was still in “nothing to see here; move along” mode. But today — today, mind you — Hiatt published an editorial that suggests maybe some U.S. attorneys were fired because they didn’t bring phony charges against Democrats that might have helped Republicans win elections.

Today, he figures this out.

As Glenn says, there’s nothing in this editorial that hasn’t been well known for weeks, even months. Josh Marshall has been blogging about it since December 2006. I wrote a month ago, after one of the document dumps,

As has been widely noted in the recent past, the pattern suggests that the White House and the Republican Party generally have been using the Justice Department as part of their election campaign process. In other words, Karl and Co. have been turning our criminal justice system into a Republican Party machine.

Thanks mostly to the work of professional reporters — some of whom work for the Washington Post — all of the evidence has been Out There for some time. But media establishment figures like Hiatt would not look at it. Just like they won’t investigate the apparent sandbagging of Nancy Pelosi. It was this same thick-headed obliviousness on the part of major news media that drove a lot of us into blogging. The establishment guys seem to need someone to smack them in the head (figuratively) and holler Look! Pay attention!

In this light, I highly recommend Gary Kamiya’s piece in Salon titled “Iraq: Why the Media Failed.” Here’s a snip:

The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm.

The psychological category is the most amorphous of the three and the most inexactly named — it could just as easily be termed sociological. By it, I mean the subtle, internalized, often unconscious way that the media conforms and defers to certain sacrosanct values and ideals. Journalists like to think of themselves as autonomous agents who pursue truth without fear or favor. In fact, the media, especially the mass media, adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say. Network television provides the clearest example. From decency codes to subject matter, the networks have always been surrounded by a vast, mostly invisible web of constraints.

Seen in this light, the mass media is a quasi-official institution, an info-nanny, that is held responsible for maintaining a kind of national consensus. Just as our legal system is largely based on what a “reasonable” person would think, so our mass media is charged with presenting not just an accurate view of the world but also an “appropriate” one.

What “appropriate” means in absolute terms is impossible to define. In practice, however, its meaning is quite clear. It’s reflected in a cautious, centrist media that defers to accepted national dogmas and allows itself to shade cautiously into advocacy on issues only when it thinks it has the popular imprimatur to do so.

Smack dab dead on, I say. Kamaya goes on to describe the journalism elites and insiders who “swim happily in the conventional wisdom that flows all around them.” And he says “The blogosphere represents the beginning of a national revolt against the now-discredited media gatekeepers.” Amen to that.

I think a big part of the problem with news media is inherent in mass media and, even more, media monopolies and conglomerates. Before the mass media age most people got their news from (mostly) independently owned newspapers of wildly varying quality. Yes there were newspaper syndicates, but it would have been unusual, I think, for a media corporation to own more than one newspaper in the same media market. And most cities had more than one newspaper.There was true news competition, in other words. The system we have now gives us journalism that is less competitive and more conformist. There is not only less independent coverage of news, but in recent years media corporations have been downsizing their reporting staffs to cut costs.

That said, I don’t know that basic news-gathering is being done any less competently than in the past. I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1973, which means I was there just as Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post investigative reports of Watergate were getting attention. This time is looked back on now as some kind of golden age of journalism. But I remember my professors — many of whom were, literally, old newspaper guys with years of reporting experience [*] — sniffing at all the hoopla and saying it just showed that most reporters were asleep at the wheel. Why did only Woodward and Bernstein investigate what was behind the Watergate burglary? Too many of the Washington press corps, the professors said, were lazy sots who just took press releases from the White House and rewrote ’em.

Time and time again, we leftie bloggers look at facts being reported in the mainstream press and see patterns and significance in them the pros don’t see until months later, if ever. Often we have little or no information we didn’t get from the MSM; what differs is how we put the facts together and interpret them.

I think we’re seeing the end of the Mass Media Age, although it’s not clear to me what’s going to replace it. I only hope that soon the Washington media elite and the “pundits” who can’t see what’s right in front of them will seem as antiquated as typewriters and carbon paper.

[*] This post is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Thomas Duffy, a crusty old geezer with DTs who used to scare the stuffing out of me, but who taught me a lot, and who told wonderful stories about reporting on the Chicago mob in the 1930s.

Shocked Jocks

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As I remember it, the “shock jock” phenomenon started ca. 1980, about the same time the Reagan Administration started. Actually shock jocks had been around for awhile, but it was about that time mainstream pop culture took notice of them, and they became the rage. (Coincidence? I wonder.) Radio stations all over the nation hired their own pubescent pottymouths to attract attention and listeners. I never found any of them to be the least bit amusing, so I tuned out.

Apparently it’s a Big Bleeping Deal that Don Imus was suspended for two weeks. I wouldn’t miss him if he disappeared entirely, but that’s me. Never once having listened to Imus for more than five minutes at a stretch — and that maybe twice a year — I have absolutely no idea why he’s popular. Nor can I imagine on what planet it is funny to call the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.”

Sometimes there can be honest disagreements about what constitutes racism, but I don’t see room for disagreement on this. Nor was calling Gwen Ifil the “cleaning lady” anything but racism. Sometimes offensive speech is defensible, but in this case, it isn’t. And for the life of me I can’t comprehend how anyone could defend it. Yet they do.

On an almost related note — in the early 1980s (possibly longer) there was a morning radio host on WLW am radio in Cincinnati who was genuinely funny without ever being vulgar or mean. I still think about him sometimes and chuckle, even though I haven’t listened to his program since 1983. His shtick was receiving phone calls from a cast of demented recurring characters (played by himself). Is there anyone reading this who knows who I’m talking about and can remember his name? I’m drawing a blank.

Sandbagging Pelosi Update

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There’s a must-see video at Crooks and Liars in which former ambassador Richard Holbrooke slammed guest-host David Gregory for peddling unfounded GOP talking points about Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Syria. And Think Progress has a video in which Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) in which he confirms that Pelosi told Bush of the trip to Syria a day before they left, and Bush did not object.

Update: See also Scott Lehigh in today’s Boston Globe.

Update2: See Dan Radmacher of The Roanoke Times:

Some reporters — especially those covering the nation’s capital — are egotistical, lazy, complacent and addicted to their access to those in power, however little they use that access to actually benefit the public.

Many reporters also believe they’ve done their job if they simply quote both sides of an issue — as if most issues only have two sides — with no further effort to get at the truth of the matter.

A good friend of mine, one of the best reporters I’ve ever known, calls that “bracketing the truth.” It’s depressingly common.

For instance, President Bush recently came out with some harsh criticisms of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi because of her trip to Syria to speak with President Bashir Assad.

“Photo opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they’re part of the mainstream of the international community when, in fact, they’re a state sponsor of terror,” Bush said, and the press dutifully reported.

Most then dutifully reported Pelosi’s responses. Her press secretary said, “The Iraq Study Group recommended a diplomatic effort that should include ‘every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq.’ This effort should certainly include Syria.”

Very few reports mentioned that at the same time Bush was complaining about Pelosi’s trip, a delegation of Republican members of Congress, including Virginia’s Rep. Frank Wolf, were in Damascus meeting with Assad. Bush not only didn’t criticize Republicans for their trip, an aide to one of the congressmen suggested the White House helped arrange the visit.

If not for bloggers like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, that blatant hypocrisy would never have been exposed. It still went unmentioned far too often in newspaper and radio reports….

…The coverage of the new Democratic Congress is just as rife with lazy reporting that accepts far too many political proclamations at face value.

Along these lines, there’s an outstanding article in Salon by Gary Kamiy called “Iraq: Why the Media Failed.”

The End Is Almost Near

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Andrew J. Bacevich is a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran with 23 years of service in the U.S. Army. Today he is a professor of international relations at Boston University, and he has an op ed in today’s Los Angeles Times. He says there is no point asking presidential candidates about their plan for Iraq, because Iraq is irretrievably screwed.

Recall that Bush saw Baghdad not as the final destination of his global war on terror but as a point of departure. He imagined that liberating Iraq might trigger a flowering of Arab democracy. He was counting on Saddam Hussein’s ouster to jump-start a regional transformation. He expected a forthright demonstration of U.S. military might to enhance America’s standing across the Muslim world, with friend and foe alike thereafter deferring to Washington.

None of that has come to pass. Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute.

As a consequence, the “global” effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.

For his part, the president increasingly preoccupies himself with tactics at the expense of statecraft. Much as Lyndon Johnson once reviewed lists of targets to be bombed in Hanoi, Bush now ponders how many brigades will be needed to impose order on a handful of neighborhoods around Baghdad.

Ritualistic allusions to freedom as the antidote to terrorism still occasionally crop up in presidential speeches, but rhetoric no longer translates into action. An administration that once touted its expansive and principled approach to preventing another 9/11 has abandoned principle. Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today’s news out of Baghdad isn’t any worse than yesterday’s.

Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president’s would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it.

First, I cringe every time Bush or some other politician says that “commanders on the ground” in Iraq must not have their “hands tied” by “artificial timetables” or other such “constraints.” The fact is that the commanders have their hands tied now by Bush’s determination to stay in Iraq as long as he’s president. The Dems’ timetables are no more a “constraint” than Bush’s stubbornness. It is not up to the generals “on the ground” to decide whether to stay or to go or what their mission is or what grand strategy their efforts are serving. That’s primarily the President’s job, yet he won’t do that job.

The generals are charged with the job of carrying out the mission they’ve been given, whatever it is. They don’t have the authority to say “this is a stupid mission” or “we really shouldn’t be here.” Even assuming the current crew of officers are good at their jobs, there’s not a whole lot they can do except make the best of a bad situation; try to do some good, try to achieve some tactical successes, guard flaming idiot senators who want to be filmed strolling through a Baghdad market. The decisions that need to be made are not up to them to make.

On the other hand — I think someday when the smoke clears we might find out that Bush, Cheney et al. have been micromanaging the war a whole lot more than they pretend to; probably increasingly so as time has gone on. And a whole lot of those “generals on the ground” will be writing books about Bush being a bleeping idiot who tied their hands every time they turned around. I have no proof of that; just intuition and long observation of human nature. People as driven as Bush and Cheney to make the war “work” are not going to be able to sit on their hands and let other people handle the job.

Finally, I think we have reached the “talking to the portraits” phase of the Bush II presidency. Frank Rich thought we had reached it last December, and he may have been right, but now it’s pretty certain.

Sandbagging Pelosi

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Paul Krugman today writes about the Little Lie Technique. You’ve heard of the Big Lie, of course. Krugman defines the “little lie” as

… the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

Little lies can be manufactured from trivial things, like the falsehood that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet or the Bill Clinton haircut story. These stories sometimes arise from sloppy reporting, but I think most of the time political operatives make them up and feed them to reporters. There’s little fallout when the story turns out to be false, because it was such a trivial matter. But the Little Lies add up. And, of course, the Little Lies get repeated by the political hacks doing commentary on CNN and Faux Snooze and MSNBC, and by bloggers. By the time the stories are debunked everyone’s attention has wandered somewhere else.

Krugman continues,

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.

First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her “arrogance of extravagance” — then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.

Now there’s Ms. Pelosi’s fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as “bad behavior” — unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich’s trip to China when he was speaker.

Ms. Pelosi has responded coolly, dismissing the administration’s reaction as a “tantrum.” But it’s more than that: the hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.

Josh Marshall wrote late last night, “From the start of this sub-controversy over Speaker Pelosi’s comments in Damascus I’ve suspected a tampering hand from the White House.”

You may have heard the story that Pelosi said she had conveyed a message from Israel to the Syrians, but Prime Minister Olmert’s office issued a statement that seemed to contradict what Pelosi said. “With admirable diligence,” Josh snarked, the Washington Post took the Olmert statement at face value and blew it up into a big bleeping deal. And ever since news stories and commenters have repeated this story that either showed Pelosi was lying or didn’t know what she was doing.

Josh quotes a Ha’aretz article that straightens out what actually happened, and of course this vindicates Pelosi. Josh also writes,

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) is the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Holocaust survivor and very close to AIPAC. He was with Pelosi in the key meetings in Jerusalem and Damascus and he says “The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister and the acting president asked.”

Josh also quotes an article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampeas. This is Kampeas:

If that was the case, why did Olmert need to make a clarification, as Israelis were not speaking on the record. Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House.

“It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,” said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. “I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.”

Pelosi was sandbagged? And get this —

Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.

These people so creep me out. Anyway, Josh just posted a YouTube video about this.

TPM TV: April 9, 2007

And get this, from Think Progress —

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), who traveled last week with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as part of her delegation to the Middle East, said this morning on C-Span that Pelosi told Bush of the trip to Syria a day before they left, and Bush did not object.

Rahall said, “The Speaker had met with President Bush in the halls of the U.S. Capitol just the day before we left and mentioned to him that we were going to Syria. No response at all from the President.” …

… Despite the White House’s public rhetoric that the trip was a “bad idea,” President Bush “did not tell her not to go, nor did the State Department tell us not to go,” Rahall said. “The State Department was certainly aware of our traveling to Syria and our full itinerary. And there were State Department officials in every meeting that we had on this codel. So that is all hogwash as far as I’m concerned.”

She was sandbagged, people. The Bushies must be scared to death of her.

Update: The little lies fabricated about Barack Obama are a tad feeble.

You Can’t Please Some People

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Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for an anti-American occupation rally in Baghdad yesterday, which was the fourth anniversary of the coalition takeover of Baghdad.

The ever-accommodating Associated Press emphasized that the rally was a celebration of the fall of Baghdad. The first sentence: “Tens of thousands draped themselves in Iraqi flags and marched peacefully through the streets of two Shiite holy cities Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s fall.” There are variations on this article drizzled about the web; this one doesn’t mention the anti-American aspect of the demonstration until the third paragraph. If you want to study how the AP has revised this story today, go to The Huffington Post and check out the “compare other versions” feature.

Then compare the Associated Press story to how other news bureaus reported it. For example, the Chicago Tribune headlined its article “Sadr stokes anti-U.S. fervor / Thousands head to rally; 10 GIs killed.”

Calling the United States the “great evil,” powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr on Sunday ordered his militiamen to redouble their effort to oppose American troops and argued that Iraq’s army and police force should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”

The cleric’s verbal assault came as the U.S. military announced that 10 American soldiers were killed over the weekend, including six Sunday in attacks north and south of Baghdad. At least 69 Iraqis also were killed or found dead across Iraq.

Even so, the comparatively mild Associated Press story drew the wrath of the rightie blog Newsbusters.

The Associated Press reported rallies celebrating the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein — without ever mentioning Saddam Hussein. Lauren Frayer’s article makes it sound like the American forces deposed a city, not a dictator: “Tens of thousands marched through the streets of two Shiite holy cities Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s fall.” Nowhere in the article is Saddam even mentioned. The headline was also “Rally marks anniversary of Baghdad’s fall.”

Like I said — there’s no pleasing some people. If one were trying to be accurate, calling yesterday the “anniversary of the fall of Baghdad” should be perfectly acceptable, since it’s a bit hard to pin down exactly when the Iraqi dictator was officially deposed. Taking a capital city doesn’t automatically depose a dictator. Hussein still had some protection and influence in part of Iraq for a few more days, maybe weeks, even though his attempts to rally support for his dictatorship didn’t go anywhere. I would argue that he wasn’t officially deposed until July 2003, when the Iraqi interim council began meeting. But that’s a meaningless technicality, IMO.

Anyway — how ’bout that surge, huh?

The New York Times reports that the “new security push” is changing patterns of violence, and reducing it in some places, but the “push” doesn’t seem to be reducing violence overall. We’re just moving it around, in other words. And the rate of American deaths has gone up. See the BooMan and Paul Kiel for commentary.

See also yesterday’s Frank Rich column, “Sunday in the Market With McCain.”

It can’t be lost on those dwindling die-hards, particularly those on the 2008 ballot, that if defending the indefensible can reduce even a politician of Mr. McCain’s heroic stature to that of Dukakis-in-the-tank, they have nowhere to go but down. They’ll cut and run soon enough. For starters, just watch as Mr. McCain’s G.O.P. presidential rivals add more caveats to their support for the administration’s Iraq policy. Already, in a Tuesday interview on “Good Morning America,” Mitt Romney inched toward concrete “timetables and milestones” for Iraq, with the nonsensical proviso they shouldn’t be published “for the enemy.”

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to “pass emergency funds for our troops” even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for “pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war,” though last year’s war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president’s own request for money for bird-flu preparation.

Mr. Bush’s claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn’t sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we’ll already be on the threshold of our own commanders’ late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what’s the crisis?

The president then ratcheted up his habitual exploitation of the suffering of the troops and their families — a button he had pushed five days earlier when making his six-weeks-tardy visit to pose for photos at scandal-ridden Walter Reed. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines,” he said. “And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to.”

His own failures had already foreordained exactly these grim results. Only the day before this news conference, the Pentagon said that the first unit tossed into the Baghdad surge would stay in Iraq a full year rather than the expected nine months, and that three other units had been ordered back there without the usual yearlong stay at home. By week’s end, we would learn the story of the suspected friendly-fire death of 18-year-old Pvt. Matthew Zeimer, just two hours after assuming his first combat post. He had been among those who had been shipped to war with a vastly stripped-down training regimen, 10 days instead of four weeks, forced by the relentless need for new troops in Iraq.

Most of the United States is no longer talking about whether to withdraw military from Iraq, but when. The real debate these days — everywhere but in the White House, anyway — is whether to withdraw all military personnel from Iraq or leave some sort of non-combat personnel to advise and train Iraqi security forces. I say that anyone who wants to carry out the second option had better get behind pulling combat troops out asap. I suspect the longer we’ve got combat troops patrolling the streets in Iraq the more likely it is that, someday, Iraqis will chuck us out of their country entirely.

Update: See also —

Juan Cole (at Salon) “John McCain’s Iraq Problem”

Mark Benjamin (at Salon) “Injured troops shipped back into battle“

Bloggers Behaving Goodly?

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The front page of the New York Times today features an article by Brad Stone titled “A Call for Manners in a World of Nasty Blogs.” In brief, some techie bloggers have thought up code of conduct rules intended to make the web a little less hostile.

It strikes me that many of their supposedly brand-spanking-new recommendations are things that I and other political bloggers started doing a long time ago. The techies need to catch up.

One of the techies, Tim O’Reilly, summed up the recommendations thus:

    1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

    2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

    3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

    4. Ignore the trolls.

    5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

    6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

    7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

The first two items already are in effect here and on many other leftie blogs. As you know, I keep a pretty tight lid on comments here. Some hostile commenters take offense when I delete their comments and accuse me of “censorship.” But as I see it, this blog is not a public utility; it is my personal property. I pay for the bandwidth, and I’ve worked damn hard for nearly five years to build up a readership. I feel no obligation to allow anyone to piggyback on my work to publish smears, vulgarity, lies, or anything else I find offensive. Anyone who is deleted or banned from this site can start his own blog.

This policy has paid off, IMO. I love it that you regulars often write long, thoughtful comments, whereas comments on some other blogs are mostly one-liners. There are plenty of other places on the web in which to indulge in flame wars, if that’s what you like.

There are many blogs on Right and Left that don’t allow comments at all, or hold comments in a moderation queue for approval, or that don’t allow comments without prior registration. I think that’s fine; individuals need to do what feels best for them. If I’m getting a lot of hostile traffic from a link on a right-wing site I sometimes suspend comments on a particular post, or I’ll turn on the moderation queue for a while so that nothing gets posted until I approve it. Usually in three or four days the flamers get discouraged, lose interest, and go away.

I think if I allowed flamers to post here freely they would have taken over the comments a long time ago. Allowing a pack of bullies to dominate comments is not “free speech.” It’s “mob rule.”

Regarding #3 — I don’t mind if someone is anonymous if his/her comments are within comment guidelines. I require commenters to provide an email address (which could be bogus, I suppose), but this is mostly to discourage spam. I get thousands of spam comments every day, most of which are filtered out automatically without my having to deal with them. Sometimes legitimate comments get caught in the spam filter and are not posted, and I’m sorry about that, but without the spam filter I’d have to turn off comments altogether. Technically, I wouldn’t know how to ban anonymous posters. I could require registration, but lately there have been many new registrants that I believe to be bots. I assume this is part of an attempt to circumvent the spam filter.

Regarding #4 — I don’t ignore trolls. Trolls are disruptive. If I conclude a commenter is a troll, I ban that commenter.

Regarding #5 — No, sorry, I don’t like to take conversations offline. I’ve got other things to do with my life that carry on ceaseless email arguments. I respond to emails about my posts once in a blue moon, but mostly I ignore them. I want all comments and discussions about my posts to be in the comments. If someone’s arguments are so offensive I delete them from the comments, this is probably someone I don’t want to waste time arguing with, period.

Regarding #6 — Occasionally I do caution people they are skating on thin ice and risk being banned. Or sometimes I just ban people outright; it depends on how nasty the comment is, what mood I’m in, the weather, the phase of the moon, etc.

Regarding #7 — That I do not do; I am much snarkier on the blog than I am in person. Good blogging is being gut-level honest about what one really thinks. Face-to-face discussion has a bigger element of social interaction that must be respected.

I do wonder why the New York Times thought this story was so important it deserved being on the front page. I guess the (formerly) Gray Lady just couldn’t pass up a chance to wag her finger at us unwashed peasants and tell us to mind our manners. ‘Twould be nice if the Times and other news outlets showed as much concern for the quality of their own work.

Update: While we’re talking about blogging — why I’ve got no respect for the TTLB Ecosystem.

Update2: What Digby says.

Global Idiots

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Will someone please explain to these scientifically illiterate twits that the phenomenon of global warming doesn’t mean the planet is getting warmer in a uniform way. My understanding is that climate changes are causing shifts in long-established patterns of air circulation around the planet as well as disrupting ocean current patterns like the Gulf Stream. These changes are causing some places to get colder because air is moving more directly from the poles to those places that it used to. But it’s the warming of the oceans, among other things, that is causing the changes in wind and current patterns. Hence, global warming is causing some parts of the planet to be cooler. Some scientists argue that we ought to be talking about “global climate change” rather than “global warming” to avoid confusion.

Every time I see some dimbulb rightie hoot because there’s a cold snap in his neighborhood (hence, global warming is a myth) I feel embarrassed for our species.

Update: The same scientifically illiterate twits turn out to be economically illiterate twits as well.

Update2: As Atrios would say … the stupid! It burns!

Discover Jesus

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Easter is a bipolar holy day, in which the faithful commemorate Jesus’ transcendence from fleshly corruption and death with pagan fertility symbols — bunnies and eggs. That’s genuinely weird, if you think about it.

The Venerable Bede, a sixth-century theologian, was the one who claimed the name Easter came from an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre, who was associated with eggs and bunnies. However, I understand there is no earlier record of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre, and some people think ol’ Bede made her up.

Regarding Jesus — Historian Paula Fredriksen argued (persuasively, IMO) that the historic Jesus was a devout Jew who did not claim to be a Messiah. I’ve come to agree with Thomas Jefferson that Jesus’ life story is more compelling without the miracles, and with Richard Rubenstein that the deification of Jesus is an unfortunate distraction from his remarkable teachings.

But that’s me. For those who have faith in the Resurrection — happy Easter.

Which takes me to the topic of today’s sermon — “Religion: What Is It Good For?”

This essay by James Randerson asks the question, “Would we be better off without religion?” I agree with Randerson that many of the supposed benefits of religion are questionable. For example, it’s true that religion inspired much great art and music, but there’s plenty of great art and music inspired by other stuff.

Randerson quotes the Baroness Julia Neuberger: “In my view if we didn’t have religion, we would be more selfish, self interested, certain and cruel.” So what about the hordes of religious people who are selfish, self interested, certain and cruel? It seems to me that for every Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, or Aung San Suu Kyi there must be thousands of selfish, self-interested, certain and cruel little creeps like Ralph Reed or Pat Robertson, not to mention some standout evildoers like Torquemada or Osama bin Laden.

I think the real basis of most moral behavior is good socialization and the ability to feel empathy for others. A religious sociopath is not cured by his faith. Rather, religion becomes the context, and excuse, for his sociopathy; cruelty is OK if you’re doing it for God.

It’s assumed that religion causes people to be virtuous, but philosophical Taoism says it’s the other way around — religion is what you fall back on when you lose virtue (see, for example, verse 38 of the Tao Teh Ching). Religion in ancient China was more about ceremony and ritual than it was about faith, but I don’t believe the old Taoists would have had much use for faith, either. Anyway, I question whether morality and ethics developed from religion, or whether they developed out of some shift in human consciousness during the Axial Age that subsequently reformed religion.

Put another way, did religion cause our species to (mostly) transcend barbarism, or did we transcend barbarism through other means and then drag religion along after us?

“The real question,” Mr. Randerson says, “is whether the best of humanity is already inside us or whether it needs faith to bring it out.” That’s a good question. I think faith does bring out the best in some people, but it seems to inspire the worst in others.

In America, it always seems that the people who blather on most about “God’s love” and “Christian values” are the same ones who promote homophobia and harass women outside abortion clinics. I can’t blame the non-religious for being distrustful of religion. But I don’t think religion, including Christianity, by itself is to blame. If you look at the long history of Christianity, you might notice a pattern — Christianity tends to get ugly when it becomes The Establishment. The worst things done in the name of Jesus were truly done to defend or strengthen a political or social authority in which religious institutions had become inextricably embedded. Grand Inquisitors like Torquemada were working on behalf of the monarchy as much as for the Church.

In spite of official (not always enforced) separation of church and state, Christianity is The Establishment in America. Particularly in conservative parts of the country, the large evangelical and pentecostal denominations are accustomed to being the dominant, privileged tribe. When Christians are denied use of government resources for the purpose of maintaining their dominance, or when Christianity is not given special deference or privilege above other religions, it is perceived by some Christians as oppression. To non-Christians, this whining about the oppression of Christians is just plain irrational. It’s like a whale complaining that a minnow is taking up too much ocean space.

I think much of what this essay by Simon Barrow says about the established church in Britain applies to the U.S. also.

I think the reason for mostly conservative Christians feeling discriminated against is this. They have grown up accustomed to the idea that Britain is a “Christian country” and that Christian institutions, symbols, representatives and (what they take to be) Christian values have a fixed place at the centre of our national culture.

Others now point out that practising Christianity is a minority pursuit in a multi-conviction society. They say that, in any case, Christians are a mixed bunch who disagree among themselves pretty vociferously. So privileging one outlook (particularly, one faith) is no longer tenable.

This means that Christians no longer automatically set the ground rules. They have to negotiate with others – and their Christian identity is not necessarily the ground on which this will happen. … to those who have been used to their cherished ideas holding sway in the public square, the removal of the ground from under their feet appears pretty threatening.

I think that’s exactly right, although I have no idea how to get the whiners to understand this. Simon Barrow calls for “reasoned argument.” Yeah, right. Good luck with that, dude.

But then Barrow goes on to say this —

For my part, I’d like to argue that Christians are entirely on the wrong track trying to defend the vestiges of a “Christian nation”. The gospel message, long submerged by the churches’ collusion with the state, is one of radical equality, a reversal of social norms, even. It argues that the first shall be last and the last first.

For this reason, Christians should not be out to defend their institutional privileges, let alone denying equal rights. On the contrary, they have an opportunity to embrace (rather than fear) a new status as a creative minority within a society which, helpfully, tries to offer a place for all. That fairness is something worth arguing for. But it cannot coexist with privilege.

E.J. Dionne wrote something along these same lines last week.

As for me, Christianity is more a call to rebellion than an insistence on narrow conformity, more a challenge than a set of certainties.

In ” The Last Week,” their book about Christ’s final days on Earth, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, distinguished liberal scriptural scholars, write: “He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the Kingdom of God, God and God’s passion for justice. Jesus’ passion got him killed.”

This speaks to why a mortal Jesus is a more interesting, and compelling, figure to me than a divine one. Here was a man who, after a dark night of the soul in the wilderness, realized something wonderful. And he went out and tried to explain this something to people, and maybe his followers understood him, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe his words are pretty much faithfully recorded in the synoptic gospels, and maybe much of what he said got scrambled. And much of institutional Christianity seems unconcerned about what Jesus was trying to teach. Instead, Jesus became a blank slate onto which generations of saints and sociopaths projected their deepest desires for transcendence or dominance.

(And might I add that I realize there may not have been a historical Jesus; maybe his story is a fabrication. You can say the same thing for the Buddha, and in a sense it doesn’t matter. What’s important are the teachings. But especially in Jesus’ case it makes more sense to assume the teachings originated with some guy whose followers revered him and attempted to preserve what he taught. If later generations of people projected miracles and eventually godhood onto the guy’s memory doesn’t mean Jesus never existed.)

Thus, you get people like Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Georgia), who supported a bill to display the Ten Commandments in the U.S. House chamber, but could only name three commandments (sort of) when challenged to do so. This suggests the congressman cares about the 10Cs as a symbol of something, not for what they actually say. And I think what they’ve come to be symbolic of is more about worldly power and authority than about God.

And this, children, is why Christianity is bleeped up.

Let’s go back to what religion is good for. If Jesus’ message was primarily about radical equality and justice, then we’re still not finding something unique to religion. Although radical equality was Out There in the first century, today lots of non-religious people promote it or something like it.

So we come to religion as comfort. Faith, and reliance on a higher power, is a great comfort to people who are troubled and afraid. One might argue that religion in this sense is just an emotional crutch. And if the higher power is imaginary, it’s a placebo.

Belief in a higher power that looks out for his followers also gave us George W. Bush, who has mistaken his own almighty ego for God, with disastrous consequences.

There is confusion, I think, about what religion actually is. These days people use the word faith as a synonym for religion, and I don’t think that’s accurate for many religions. In the West, when people want to learn about a foreign religion the first thing they ask is “What do the followers of this religion believe.” When you are dealing with most of the Asian religions, that’s the wrong question. You can memorize the entire panoply of Hindu gods, for example, and still not understand Hinduism. The point is not to believe this or that, but to realize the true nature of everything that is, including yourself. In this sense, belief in gods and myths is not the point of the religion, but rather are means to an end that transcends gods and myths.

Google “etymology religion” and you get all manner of answers. The most common answer is that it comes from the Latin word religio, meaning “to bind.” But another source says it comes from relegere, “to treat carefully.” So it could refer to a discipline, or a submission to rules, or binding to God. It might refer to something that needs your attention and careful treatment. It could mean a lot of things that may or may not involve beliefs.

Jesus went on and on about the Kingdom of Heaven and how people should be seeking it. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. [Matthew 13:44, English Standard Version]” Much church dogma claims this Kingdom is something that will happen in the future, or perhaps is where you go when you die, but I think an unprejudiced reading of the gospels suggests Jesus taught the Kingdom is here-and-now; we’re just not seeing it. I don’t think Jesus wanted people merely to have faith in it; he wanted people to see it.

Finally we stumble onto what religions is good for. I say it is a means to the realization of something dangling just outside the scope of conceptual knowledge, something unreachable by logic or cognition. And that something, when seen, changes everything; it transforms how you understand yourself and everything else. In human history teachers and mystics from myriad religious traditions have had transformative realizations. And all the gods and rituals and beliefs and dogmas of all the religions of the earth are just provisional means for achieving this transformation. As the Buddha said, once you’ve reached the other shore you don’t need the boat any more.

But religious institutions, particularly powerful ones, in time become more interested in maintaining power than in religion. Then people who are selfish, self interested, certain and cruel come along and put religion to their own ego-driven uses. This happens in all religions; Christianity is no more or less susceptible than any other, I don’t think.

Maybe someday conservative Christians will stop trying preserve the vestiges of a “Christian nation.” When they do, maybe they’ll rediscover Jesus. That would be nice.

    1. Therefore, the full-grown man sets his heart upon

 

    1. the substance rather than the husk;

 

    1. Upon the fruit rather than the flower.

 

    Truly, he prefers what is within to what is without. — Tao Teh Ching

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I posted the photo of Grace Coolidge because it cheers me to think there was once a First Lady who kept a pet raccoon in the White House. I don’t think much of Calvin, but I believe I would have liked Grace. The lady in the stained glass window at the top of the post is Mary Magdalene.