Helen writes:

Gender differences matter; men and women are not equivalent; gay marriage pretends that they are, and so reinforces a falsehood that’s already dangerously prevalent.

Everyone I know who favors gay marriage, myself included, also believes that men and women are different.

Is the belief that men and women are "equivalent" really "dangerously prevalent?" I’ve lived in many of America’s most liberal enclaves — not to mention a few Western European cities — and among my wide network of liberal friends I cannot think of even one who subscribes to that position. Nor can I find a writer in my Google Reader who asserts as much. As I think back on every movie and television show I’ve seen in the last 5 years, every single one counted differences among the genders as an implicit premise. The same goes for every love song on my iPod, every commercial advertisement I’ve seen, and every comedy routine to which I’ve listened. A politician who asserted that there is no difference whatever between men and women would be laughed out of an election, and ridiculed by conservatives as a left-wing radical hopelessly out of touch with mainstream Americans… and I’m supposed to believe that this view is so mainstream as to be dangerous?

Gender differences are so obvious and immutable that the most concerted campaign to eliminate them would fail miserably — in fact, deliberate attempts to raise  kids in such a way as to rob them of their gender have failed miserably. But I am to believe that the mere recognition of gay marriage will undermine one of the most obvious, immutable traits that humans generally share?

A culture that cannot acknowledge gender differences has hobbled itself: it can’t speak the truth and, if we know one thing about truth, it’s that it always comes out one way or another. If we can’t talk about gender, we can’t  develop helpful ways to deal with it; if we can’t deal with it, we guarantee that, when gender differences do surface, it will be in unhealthy ways.

In America we talk about gender all the time. We have gender specific schools, blogs and magazines, advertising that targets people based upon their gender, and endless public debates about gender differences. I’ve no doubt that radical feminists can be found to assert that all gender differences are due to socialization, that it is beyond the pale to assert any difference between men and women, etc.

Theirs is a fringe view, not a mainstream position, let alone a dangerous trend.

Andrew thinks this remark of Glenn Greenwald’s points in the right direction:

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don’t really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

Out of context, it actually points toward a complete tautology: look at the work the word ‘giddy’ is doing. In context, on the other hand, Greenwald is reading Michael "Corleone" Goldfarb against other, less bloodthirsty, supporters of Israel’s latest small war, and sure enough Goldfarb comes out the worse for wear:

There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than "Terrorism," the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term.  But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing:  slaughtering innocent civilians in order to "send a message," to "deter" political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and — best of all, from the Terrorist’s perspective — even their own children and other family members.

I have long railed against the degenerate form of politics known as "sending a message." (On a somewhat milder level, you can see it in the latest Scion xB ad campaign, which says, I think, "Love it or hate it, the xB is built to send a message." What message, you ask? That’s incidental; like "making a statement" that actually is no statement, it’s merely an inarticulate display of power: "Look! This is this! It’s here! Attend this!" The message-sending mindset reaches deeper than our politics, I fear.) And I credit the essential obviousness of the force that a military occupation and its constant, looming threat has in hardwiring despair into a society and a culture. But I prefer to dwell on the question of how to speak well politically about moral issues than on the role that Michael Goldfarb might play in that question, and I want to urge people to be very careful about the loose and abstract terms in which they condemn the non-giddy supporters Greenwald describes. So let’s return to Greenwald’s phrasing, which grows somewhat elastic further down his piece:

If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings:  as "barbarians" — just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats — then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer. 

Suddenly, whereas giddy supporters "don’t see the Muslims they want to [be] kill[ed] as being fully human," even non-giddy supporters apparently don’t see their enemies as being fully civilized human beings — a mistake or crime just as bad as seeing Jews as not fully human! Seeing a certain, particular group of Muslims or Palestinians as less than civilized, Greenwald claims, is the same moral error, and of the same moral magnitude, as seeing all members of a nationality, ethnicity, or race, as less than human.

Certainly, if we stop here, the moral logic of this comparison simply doesn’t wash. Greenwald wants to connect up this first claim, however, to a second claim: that killing, or supporting the killing, of a particular group of people you think are less than civilized leads to a morally blinding enthusiasm for a kind of killing that is as bad as the kind of killing we are likely to wind up blindly enthusing over when our enemies are people we consider, on account of their nationality, ethnicity, or race, to be less than human.

That’s an argument with a much stronger moral logic. (I also think that in at least some important circumstances it can be defeated, and indeed has to be, if any small-l liberal culture is to flourish.) But the terms in which it’s framed build in an unfortunate sloppiness or fudge factor of its own moral character. Too often, I think, moral partisans on Greenwald’s side want to insist that the parsing I’ve done here is morally unnecessary to reaching the right answer — that someone who’s disciplined about showing that Greenwald’s first claim is shoddy and dangerous unless sharpened by making it dependent upon his second claim is himself morally suspect. Anyone not carried along by the force of rhetoric of the sort that Greenwald uses, that is, is probably concealing a deep moral defect.

It is ringing rhetoric, but it turns on words that make politics more, not less, dangerously passionate — giddier, if you like. What, for example, is the difference between the terms "human" and "fully human," or between the terms "subhuman" and "something less than human"? By reference to which set of terms — unqualified ("human / subhuman") or qualified ("fully hman / something less than human") are we to decide who is "giddily supportive" of Israel’s attack on Hamas to a degree worthy of moral condemnation and who is not? Because it should be clear how much easier it is to pillory someone by use of the qualified set of terms than the unqualified: "Well, you say those Palestinians are human, but you really don’t think they’re fully human;" or "yes, you deny these murderous jihadis are subhuman, yet you talk as if you think of them as something less than human." These fudge words are in fact moral fudge words, words by which we can accuse and condemn our opponents of doing something or being someone just as bad as something they actually aren’t doing or someone they actually aren’t. (I’d love to see what happens were Greenwald to reconsider the case of Michael Goldberg from this perspective, in good part because I think his criticism would actually improve.)

It is this rhetorical move that inspires angry charges of "moral equivalence" we hear in debates like these — this moving of the moral goalposts mid-game. It leads to difficult efforts like Andrew’s own to speak in both terms:

In a contest between Israel’s flawed democracy and Hamas’s theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst".

I’m at a loss as to what respect human beings as human beings demand in this instance — or what this means that we can’t say in a better way. And that’s not because I don’t like human beings — it’s because "respect" strikes me as exactly the wrong sort of word to help us prevent the rhetorical giddiness that transmogrifies the "merely human" standard into the "fully human" standard and the "subhuman" test into the "something less than [the ‘fully’ is quite implicit] human" test. The merely human, by my lights, is a much trustier and firmer foundation for making moral judgments than the aspirationally fully human, which considers what is due not just persons or people but flourishing persons or people. (So the central debate in ethics in liberalism turns out to be whether we have a moral duty to make aspirational moral judgments — judgments through which we must conduce toward the progressive increase in flourishing of any and all human beings of which we become aware. My bottom line is that we do not have this duty, either as liberals or humans, and that those who think we do characteristically attempt wrongfully to enforce that duty politically, by law and/or by the rhetorical force of political speech.) And it strikes me as an absurdity that the respect paid humans on account of their humanity be identical, morally or otherwise, to respect of the sort that betokens full human flourishing. Indeed, in a Homeric or noble warrior ethical schema, the respect that betokens full human flourishing involves honorable fighting and dying — a good not extended to noncombatants!

Even within that schema, indeed, the warfighting practices of Israel in the occupied territories or the Union during the American Civil War come in for logical moral scorn. Which goes to show that the difference between thinking of "fundamental human rights" in terms of mere humanity or full, flourishing humanity is an important, but not exhaustive one. We would flatter ourselves to imagine that our particular moral framework, which is ad hoc, contingent, and negotiable at the margins, is the best of all possible moral frameworks, or even the most intelligible. When faced with what seem to be hard core challenges to that framework, however, we best rely on moral certainty with regard to its own hard core. My own particular suggestion would be that high-flying, highly-charged rhetorical abstractions — like "respecting the full humanity of the Other" — float far above our moral framework’s intelligible hard core.

Giselle Melanson wasn’t really clear on what her other coworkers did. She wasn’t clear on her company’s directive. And she really wasn’t clear on how it was supposed to survive.

Chris Asch didn’t quite convince me that one needs to study public service in order to, uh, serve publicly. But if that’s a given, his call for a public service academy seems fair.

J. Last on on the most interesting, thoughtful, culturally relevant TV show in maybe forever.

Alan Jacobs, time machine.

Am I the only person who loves television but hates Mad Men?

When AMC aired the pilot episode I watched expectantly and was underwhelmed. I thought the show was lifeless and inconsequential.

But over the next year came the awards and rave reviews and I wondered if I had missed something. So I returned to the DVDs of the first season only to find that it was not only lifeless and inconsequential but tedious as well.

Part of the problem is that Mad Men is the type of “smart” TV show that doesn’t think its audience is all that smart. The bulk of every episode consists of scenes in which the writers want us to gape and say, “Can you believe they used to do that?” Whether it’s smoking (in public, while pregnant), drinking (in the office, while pregnant), or sexually harassing secretaries (in public, in the office, while getting them pregnant), Mad Men adds an exclamation point to each taboo action so that we – the people who normally would be watching Two and a Half Men — will not miss The Point.

Take, for example, a scene from the third episode. A five-year-old girl runs through the house with a plastic dry cleaners bag covering her head and torso. The mother calls the child over and warns her…that the clothes that were in the bag better not be on the floor. It’s a total surprise because we thought she was going to express some concern over her child’s safety! Okay, not really. Anyone who has watched the previous episodes knew what to expect. The Point of the scene, like the meaning of every heavy-handed point on Mad Men, is that “Times Were Different Back Then.” This was, after all, 1960, an era when people had never heard of suffocation.

The worst examples of The Point, however, are the scenes featuring Salvatore Romano, the closeted gay man who works in the art department (You get it? Because gays are creative!). Salvatore (A gay Italian!) is treated as a stereotype rather than as a character. The poor guy is rarely given anything to say unless its to signal to the audience that he’s gay (and yet no one knows because they didn’t have gaydar in 1960!). Take, for instance, this typical piece of dialogue:

Salvatore Romano: [replying to Dr. Guttman’s statement about smoking and a death wish] So we’re supposed to believe that people are living one way and secretly thinking the exact opposite? That’s ridiculous.

Yes, this is the Family Guy-style dialogue you’ll often find on the show. (By the way, if TV is so gay friendly why do they spend so much time mocking homosexuals?)

Mad Men has all the subtlety of an SNL skit, but just as we’d forgive Lorne Michaels if his show were ever consistently funny, we could forgive AMC if they gave us a show we any characters that were even remotely likable.

The main character, Don Draper, is a corporate conformist with the angst of an existentialist, as if there was a mix up in the printing of White’s The Organization Man and Camus’ The Stranger. But Draper could be standing on a beach shooting an Arab rather than sitting in a boardroom smoking Lucky Strikes and he still wouldn’t be interesting.

Draper is at least handsome, which is no substitute for interesting but at least its something to distract the audience (at the least the women and the Italians). The other characters, especially the woman, tend to be both dull and homely. For instance, Draper’s secretaries Peggy Olson and Joan Holloway are neither pretty nor intriguing, yet every man in the office wants to sleep with them. Maybe we can’t expect Shirley MacClaine in The Apartment (a flim which beat Mad Men to The Point by 48 years) but do all the woman have to look like they are on British TV?

In his review, Kyle Smith says that Mad Men has a “Cheeverish quality: Everything’s happening, nothing’s happening.” Indeed, nothing happens quite a lot and a lot does happen sometimes, though, nothing that will really matter, either to the characters or to the audience.

Which may be the reason that the show is so consistently uninteresting. Draper and all the other characters are almost all completely amoral. The characters aren’t necessarily immoral – though most are – but rather they seem to live in a universe without any moral structure. (Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe the moral structure is Appear to Be Repressed but Live Like a Libertine.)

Contrast this with Battlestar Gallactica (the greatest show on television). On BSG, most every character has made morally ambiguous choices that affect not only their own lives but also the lives of the entire human race. There is more resonance and depth in a single episode of BSG than in the entire season of AMC’s spectacular failure. Even the robots on BSG are more human than the humans on Mad Men. (In one way, though, the shows are similar: both have brilliant set designs.)

So why is Mad Men praised so fawningly? Perhaps because after the end of The Wire and The Sopranos, and the last seasons of Lost, BSG, and The Shield, that we are desperate to hold onto the idea that we are still in an age of Quality TV. Perhaps we don’t want to admit that nothing last forever and that the end is nigh. We are moving from the Golden Age of Television into something new, yet very, very old. We are returning to an age of laugh-track sitcoms and shows about talking cars and that realization frightens those who aren’t quite ready to let go of our remotes.

And that group includes me. I’m not quite ready to give up on TV. But if “quality” means shows like Mad Men then maybe I need to give another chance to Knight Rider.

Update: I didn’t realize when I wrote this that Peter had written a review for National Review that says much of what I was thinking…only he says it in a smarter, more insightful manner:

Chief among them is Don Draper, a senior creative executive at the firm, and the show’s point-mensch. Played with marvelous, dour intensity by Jon Hamm, Draper exudes an air of timeless, chiseled elegance. He’s so effortlessly suave that you half expect to find out that his mother sipped a martini during childbirth and that he was born wearing gold cufflinks. Of course, this is partly just a natural reaction to the fact that Draper’s a mystery, a man whose past is known neither to viewers nor to the other characters. "Who knows anything about that guy," a colleague wonders. "No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman." Maybe not Batman, but there’s more than a touch of Bruce Wayne–a man who would be alluring but blank without his alter ego, which is exactly how Draper comes off.

In other words, Draper looks sharp, but he’s empty, and that more or less sums up the show. It looks gorgeous, of course, but fine china encased in glass rarely stirs the heart. Meanwhile, there’s not enough to the rest of it. The larger narrative is thin and uninvolving, a serious pitfall in the era of the sprawling, Dickensian, multi-season arcs now common on shows like The Wire and Lost. Nor are any of the characters worth coming back for. Thanks to the societal strictures the show is so keen on highlighting (and critiquing), nearly everyone is just one variation or another on privileged WASP repression. Perhaps Thoreau would be thrilled to find a show that seems to take his line about all men leading "lives of quiet desperation" as its guiding principle, but for the rest of us the question quickly becomes, why should we care?

Reading Manohla Dargis is like standing in a room listening to two competing stereo systems at full blast, one playing Bach, the other blaring The Locust: There are interesting, occasionally even beautiful bits that shine through, and it’s certainly a novel experience — but even if you’ve got a lot of patience for experimental oddities, it’s often just maddening, and the only thing you can do is shut it off. Which is pretty much how I felt after reading her seemingly incomplete essay explaining and defending one of her favorite movies of 2008, Synechdoche, New York.

Dargis is the Times‘ resident enthusiast for all things loud, strange, surreal, and self-consciously freaky — your go-to gal for glowing reviews of awesomely nihilistic action trash like Domino –  so it’s no surprise that she’d Charlie Kaufman’s innovatively bizarre directorial debut (the trailer only hints at the film’s strangeness). I rather enjoyed the film myself, though I confess I didn’t pick up on all the symbolic details or work out all the narrative puzzles. So I was thrilled to see that the film’s staunchest defender was going to explain it all to me.

Problem is, she gave us this instead:

“Synecdoche, New York” might be the story of a life condensed into a single minute — specifically, in the minute it takes for 7:44 a.m. to become 7:45 a.m.. — but then, it might not. The film doesn’t answer its riddles in one sitting, which makes sense given it’s about one of the greatest mysteries: a human life. Its dense texture, thicket of literary references, medical terms, mordant jokes, eccentric images and myriad preoccupations are not there simply to drive you crazy (though they might) or show you how smart Mr. Kaufman is, or make you feel clever for catching its allusions. Rather, the film is a representation of Caden’s inner world or, I’m guessing, Mr. Kaufman’s, which of course would make it a synecdoche.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. She doesn’t know! She just knows what she likes, which is weird stuff, and Kaufman’s movie, no doubt about it, was weird! The key graf above actually isn’t too bad, though (just a little thin). The real problem comes when she only bothers to follow this by only explicating about 1/3 of the film and totally ignore all sorts of Did I Really Just See That? stuff later in the movie, including a tattooed stripper, a woman whose house is constantly on fire (she lives in this house for years and doesn’t seem bothered by it), and a weird guy who’s inexplicably followed around the protagonist for all of his. But Dargis just ignores all of this, burrowing into the symbolic meat of the first few minutes, then presumably realizing that she has to catch a fifth screening of a revival print of The Holy Mountain or something and deciding to hit "send" and leave all of us out there in I-Want-To-Understanditville hanging.

Seriously, the article has no ending. It’s like those CGI shots of the flying arrow in Troy that looked as if the CG tech just got bored half way through and decided he wanted a sandwich. Is Dargis really that lazy? Was she edited to death? Maybe there’s some sort of goof-up on the NYT’s site. Or did she just decide that, since she loves frustrating, inexplicable movies so dang much, she should start foisting them on the Times‘ readers?

In an earlier blog, I noted that Rick Warren might be comparable to Billy Graham. While everyone was flustered about Warren speaking at inauguration — for many different reasons — I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. Liberals were upset for one reason, conservatives for another. Star Parker points out that many have called Obama’s invitation to Warren an "olive branch" to Christian conservatives and it’s clear how Obama "uses pastors" for his political gain. She writes:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright can explain how Barack Obama uses pastors. Obama sat in his church for 20 years and used his words for the title of his best-selling book, then discarded him when he became a political liability.

Regarding the Billy Graham comparison, it challenges even the most creative imagination to picture the Rev. Graham’s ever hosting a forum for political candidates.

In an interview, Barack Obama recalled a previous invitation to Saddleback Church. "…I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion." I doubt that Billy Graham would see this in the spirit of his own calling to bring the gospel to all who would listen.

Nor would I see the Rev. Graham signing onto the Evangelical Climate Initiative, as has Rick Warren…

Though Warren has remained, for the most part, politically neutral — he has injected himself into the political spotlight in a powerful way. Graham, though beloved and respected, never got actively involved as Warren has done. Does that matter? I don’t know that it’s right or wrong but I know this: I don’t want Americans to judge politics or morality on what Warren says or does. His now nationally known positions and actions could have a molding effect on young voters especially.

In a 2005 interview, Graham said: "If I took sides in all these different divisive areas, I would cut off a great part of the people that I really want to reach. So I’ve felt that the Lord would have me just present the Gospel and stay out of politics." 

I believe Warren has good intentions but has he overstepped a pastor’s boundary in the political arena? There is no conclusive answer, of course, but you can always go back the elusive question: What would Jesus do?
 

It’s finally here. Well, almost. Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, a website devoted to changing the face of pop culture, via Hollywood, launches tomorrow. It sounds ambitious but Breitbart, who was foundational in establishing the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, is up for the task of success. In the Big Hollywood introductory column today, he writes:

Big Hollywood is not a "celebrity" gabfest or a gossip outpost - it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.

Non-left-leaning writers, producers, directors and "below the line" members of the creative community will slowly begin to tell "flyover country" that their values are shared - even in glitzy Los Angeles. In fact, to foreshadow its big message, Big Hollywood will be an invitation to aspiring conservatives to drop their political dreams for the grueling Hollywood grind.

…If conservatives don’t figure out popular culture soon, the movement will die a deserving death. If Hollywood liberals can’t learn how to play well with those with whom they disagree, Big Hollywood will have a field day at their close-minded and intolerant expense.

Breitbart’s a guy with passion, especially about this. If you’ve ever heard him in an interview or even read a profile, you know this is a man who makes no apologies.
 
"Everyone [in Hollywood] I meet makes me feel like I need to be louder more obnoxious to make sure their story is told so more people feel comfortable to come out of the woodwork," he told me in an interview last year.

Send some traffic that way tomorrow and see if conservative values can start to infiltrate America’s cultural screen shot.

I see that Culture11’s Celtics loving sports blogger hasn’t written about the NBA since the Lakers beat his team on Christmas day. And now I see that the purple and gold have the best record in the NBA.

This man is an extortionist.

Julian Sanchez joins the conversation about technology and rebuilding the right:

Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills. (I say this, for what it’s worth, as someone who’s often classified as part of the broad "right," my frequent criticisms of this administration notwithstanding.) Front and center is that the end of the Cold War and a governing party that made "small government" a punchline has left it very much unclear what, precisely, "conservatism" means. The movement was always a somewhat uneasy coalition of market enthusiasts and social traditionalists, defined at least as much by what (and who) they opposed as by any core common principles. The Palin strategy—recapturing that oppositional unity by rebranding the GOP as the party of cultural ressentiment—is just a recipe for a death spiral. Conservatives don’t need to figure out how to promote conservatism on Facebook; they need to figure out what it is they’re promoting. To the extent that a new media strategy is part of opening up that conversation, great, but it had better not become a substitute for engaging in some of that painful introspection.

That brings us to Erickson’s essay, about which I wanted to say a few more specific things. First, I understand all too well why he insists on getting outside the beltway and talking to technologists rather than political operatives who know a little tech.  Washington is absolutely crawling with snake-oil salesmen who’ve discovered that you can make a tidy living extracting cash from credulous politicos who didn’t learn anything from the last dot-com bubble, provided you’re able to sling Web 2.0 jargon passably. "Go outside the beltway" is probably a decent heuristic for anyone who isn’t confident they can spot the hucksters.

That said, its worth noting that the folks on the left Erickson acknowledges as models actually tend to be people with political backgrounds who learned some tech, not the opposite. Joe Rospars, Eli Pariser, and Markos Moulistas all have degrees in political science, not computer science.  Obviously, to the extent you’re developing your own proprietary tools, you need some people with serious kung fu on your team. But that’s probably not the bulk of what a tech strategy is actually going to involve. Especially if you’re talking about exploiting social media, a big part of the task is leveraging tools other people have built without any particular partisan agenda. That means thinking of innovative ways to think and use existing tech more than rolling out your own redundant ideologically-branded version of a popular site. (Cf. Conservapedia.)

Moreover, you’re still fundamentally doing political organizing. Part of what made Obama’s vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean’s fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign.The core skill set here is still political: What you need are people who know enough tech to understand how the different tools can work with each other, and with more traditional tactics, toward the ultimately non-technical goal of persuading moderates and mobilizing your base. The tech is only useful in the hands of people who are, first and foremost, good at doing those other things.

Read the whole thing.

Eric Posner points out the stunning inconsistency of John Yoo.

If you’re not reading Alan Jacobs’ blog, you should be, and this post is as good a proof as any.

Howard Schweber writes:

The first thing to understand about what is going on in Gaza is that it is not the result of a sudden decision or an immediate and intolerable provocation by one side or the other; this thing has been in the planning by both sides for months. It was only a question of when to trigger events; both Israel and Hamas can always be relied upon to overreact to a provocation, thus each side has the ability to effectively schedule the others’ overreactions.

I dunno. Repeatedly firing rockets into populated areas hoping to kill as many Israelis as possible seems like a pretty intolerable provocation to me! Can anyone think of any country that wouldn’t consider it so?

… is tilting at windmills.

(Should’ve linked this too.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

Former President Bush (there’s currently only one of those!) has endorsed his other governor-son for president. As we await David Paterson’s Caroline Kennedy Senate appointment, I have to think that Jeb for President is not the craziest idea. Jeb for President can’t happen four years from now. But if Jeb Bush runs for the Martinez Senate seat and puts in some hard time there, voters might consider the presidential possibility, even if he would be a third Bush (the media is another story and might make a win impossible). The man is certainly qualified. He’ll demonstrate that he is, nationally, if he spends time in the Senate. Again, it’s just not the craziest idea, and people might come to agree that it’s not two cycles down the road. 

Foreign Policy interviews David Petraeus about the War in Afghanistan.

I took the red eye back to Washington DC today, went straight into work from the airport, and got treated to a gorgeous sunrise over the Potomac via the Culture11 balcony.

Early morning is one of my favorite times of day, much as I hate getting up early — I’ve always written better through the night, and although I’ve seen my share of sunrises they’ve been enjoyed due to staying up far more often than not.

Jim Manzi reads this op-ed and wonders whether liberal academics will protest.

In May, Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

I’m worried about young Mr. Friedersdorf up there at NYU. Have they dropped "Intro to Cynicism" from their journalism curriculum?

So it’s strange to read a post he wrote yesterday whose conceit is that he’s just figured out that I attended journalism school, and now he understands why he dislikes my work so much.

PS.

My favorite part of his post:

Let that be a lesson to you young people: Whatever else you do, avoid journalism school. Unless you plan to be a first-round pro football draft pick like Joe Namath, or a future president of the United States, like Sarah Palin.

It’s an admittedly weird but uncommonly naked expression of the Sarah Palin right: nothing she does is to be faulted, even if it’s the exact same thing for which you fault others.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

I’VE OFTEN ARGUED that the relationship between blogs and Big Media should be thought of as symbiotic rather than competitive, and here’s some more evidence. Jack Lail, managing editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel, emails that InstaPundit sent them nearly a million pageviews last year, and holds two spots (for instapundit.com and pajamasmedia.com/instapundit) on their list of top 20 referrers. Smart news people — like Lail — are more interested in getting bloggers to deliver traffic than in complaining about blogger competition. And smart news organizations will take advantage of new technology to facilitate their hard-news reporting ability via the “Army of Davids” approach, rather than complaining that people who post breaking-news reports on blogs or Twitter don’t have journalism degree.

It’s interesting to me that we see far more anger from Old Media folks aimed at bloggers, etc., than at Craigslist, even though Craigslist has done far more economic harm to the newspaper industry than bloggers, who probably add eyeballs rather than (as Craigslist does) subtracting them. My suspicion is that the Old Media folks care more about prestige and position than money, and bloggers have hurt them in the prestige and position department. Of course, caring more about prestige and position than money isn’t a formula for a flourishing business . . . .

Glenn is right that the relationship between blogs and Big Media should be thought of as symbiotic. Of course, Instapundit has more than its share of posts getting angry at "the MSM," alongside posts furthering that symbiosis… just as newspapers, which occasionally run a staffer written column scoffing at bloggers, meanwhile host blogs, employ bloggers, link to bloggers they don’t employ, and otherwise engage the blogosphere.

I graduated from college in 2002, when newspapers really were skeptical of blogs. By 2004, I was being paid by a Media News Group paper to blog full time. In 2006, I attended a top flight journalism school where professors forced students to blog, new media guru Jay Rosen constantly harped on the need for newspapers to innovate, and almost none of my peers, all people who sought journalism degrees, had any objection to blogging.

So I guess I’d say that nowadays Instapundit isn’t really arguing with anyone of consequence when he makes these sorts of arguments. Those who disagree with him — the estimable Nicholas Lemann excepted, if he hasn’t changed his views on blogging — are dinosaurs unlikely to do anything noteworthy in the field of journalism.

On Israel and Palestine, I argue narrowly, concerning myself with English language discourse about world events, rather than making sweeping judgments about events themselves. This is so because I’ve got no viable solution to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts, except to say that public discourse is one way that better positions are arrived at over time, and that marginally improving that discourse as best I can, negligible though my efforts may be, is the only way I can see for a largely unknown writer in the United States to contribute to a better world.

So far, I’ve asserted two main arguments: 1) I’ve argued, contra Joe, that those who condemn Israel for killing Palestinian civilians are not necessarily engaging in moral relativism. 2)  I’ve argued, contra Freddie (and using the Normandy invasion card, I’m afraid) that it’s untenable and insufficient to argue that any military act resulting in predictable civilian casualties is morally wrong and to be condemned.

Making narrow arguments like these tends to make people on both sides angry, because they see such moral righteousness in the Israeli and Palestinian causes respectively. They see it as a moral imperative to argue strenuously for the side they’ve taken. I respect their convictions, and I’m sure there are issues where I’d be demanding that all right thinking people take a strong stand for one side, but on this topic I’m going to continue arguing narrowly, without regard for any sympathies I’ve got for one side or the other. My belief is that such actors are needed in this debate more than most.

Okay, enough throat clearing.

Mark Steyn at his best is a hell of a writer, a brave reporter, and a staunch advocate of free speech, but at his worst he uses these talents in service of columns whose reasoning doesn’t quite work. So it goes today:

…Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha’s Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book "The Clash Of Civilizations," professor Huntington argued that Western elites’ view of man as homo economicuswas reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings.

Very few of us want to believe this thesis.

"The great majority of Palestinian people," Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, "they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do."

Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: "Do you think this or do you know this?"

"Well, I think I know it," said Secretary Rice.

"You think you know it?"

"I think I know it."

I think she knows she doesn’t know it. But in the modern world there is no diplomatic vocabulary for the kind of cultural fault line represented by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, so even a smart thinker like Dr. Rice can only frame it as an issue of economic and educational opportunity.

As I’ve heard it summarized, I think the Samuel Huntington thesis is correct. Why does it conflict with what Condi Rice said? Isn’t it obvious that Palestinians want a better life? Isn’t it an empirical fact that they are a relatively educated population? So too they have a culture of civil society. And though Palestinian culture has a terribly unhealthy strain in it that produces far too many suicide bombers, it is nevertheless true that "the great majority of Palestinian people" are not suicide bombers, nor do their mothers want them to be. Finally, if you can create "the right conditions," it isn’t so far-fetched to think that Palestinians won’t keep blowing themselves up. Cultures can and do change. Of course, what "the right conditions" are and whether anyone has the power to create them are thorny questions, but the narrow assertions made by Sec. of State Rice seem like they ought to be rather uncontroversial on their own.

Of course, there are plenty of Palestinians like the ones the secretary of state described: You meet them living as doctors and lawyers in Los Angeles and Montreal and Geneva … but not, on the whole, in Gaza.

In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers.

Look, I’ve never been to Gaza, and my knowledge of it is confined to what I’ve gleaned from a few books, a few conversations, and a lot of journalism, but I feel comfortable asserting, with regard to the elections there — and indeed to elections everywhere — that there is no single motivation, universally embraced by every  voter, that the ruling regime came into power. Hamas is a despicable organization. That it triumphed in an election speaks very poorly of the Palestinian polity. But that is different from saying that everyone voted for Hamas because they want to blow themselves up in an Israeli discoteque. The very fact that Hamas performs lots of social service functions implies either that they are by nature philanthropists or that doing so helps them to bolster their popularity.

At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking. After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s "disproportionate" response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of "desperation."

Did you catch the logical leap there? As Freddie points out, of course we expect better from the Middle East’s most advanced democracy that we do from Hamas! Israel is indisputably a Western society bound by civilized norms, as I’m sure Mark Steyn would agree. French President Sarkozy, however, emphatically doesn’t think that "any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of ‘desperation,’" unless I’ve missed the shocking statement in which he excused rocket attacks, suicide bombings, etc. 

Steyn goes on to point out how awful the figurehead of Iran is — no arguments here — and to reiterate the point that geopolitical violence isn’t just about education and opportunity, it’s about cultural conflict. On this point Steyn is correct, which isn’t to say that greater economic opportunities for Palestinians wouldn’t help.

Steyn goes on:

…if you’re as invested as most Western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as "England’s demise is on our agenda" becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist, and we’re the fantasists.

Do most Western elites really think that "all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs"? That doesn’t sound like the Sarkozy reaction to rioting in Paris suburbs, or the Angela Merkel take on foreign policy, or the reasoning that sent the Brits, Poles, Spaniards, et. al. into Iraq, which isn’t to say that I’m a particular fan of the Euro approach to foreign policy — only that improving mistaken foreign policy thinking requires that one critique what actual elites think rather than caricatures thereof.

The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from "moderation" and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

One irony here is the success the Saudis have had changing culture through… wait for it… schools. Another is that one reason for the Clash of Civilizations we’re now seeing is the unprecedented success the Western world has had rapidly changing cultures the world over to resemble us — a trend that terrifies the religious fundamentalists who mean us harm.

Here’s the view looking south:

And the view standing atop the rocks above, looking north:

A look at small tide pools and a couple fishermen:

And the rock formation that gives the beach its name:

I’ve few fashion pet peeves, but one is clothing that affects being worn. This is most popular in jeans, but it is also seen in t-shirts, leather jackets, and worst of all in hats, as I saw today at the mall.

My objection isn’t to the aesthetic of worn clothing. It’s to cheating one’s way to that aesthetic. The whole exercise seems unseemly to me, perhaps because purchasing a worn hat — or as above, an obviously new hat affecting wear — is so sad a substitute for the actual experience of having an article of clothing for years on end. One of my best friends in high school, a phenomenal junior tennis player, took such pride in his lucky cap, a tattered, sweat stained, bent billed, discolored wreck of a thing. Imagine a novice tennis player in his first tournament purchasing a hat like that to fake whatever it is that made my friend’s hat desirable. In so doing, he would have devalued my friend’s hat. It would be transformed from a priceless article — one obtainable only through time and effort — into a commodity that amounts to a counterfeit devaluing the whole currency it fakes. This helps explain my disdain for the brand Abercrombie & Fitch.

Want a worn looking cap? Buy a new one. Wear it a lot, especially in the sun. Go golfing in it, and throw it down in the sand trap when it takes you two strokes to get out. Wear it on a casual Sunday afternoon date, and use it to dust off the bench where you sit down to watch the sunset. Take it to a bonfire party, so that for a week afterward it smells like smoke. Inadvertently sit on it for several hours while on a road trip. Leave it on a chair, then chase your dog when he takes it, wrestle it from his jaw, observe the drool, consider throwing it into the washing machine, run it under the hose instead, and let it dry outside, where you forget it for three weeks.

After all this your hat probably won’t look very good anymore, but you’ll still be less ridiculous than if you buy a hat that is pre-worn.

Tom Wolfe defends his famous piece all these years later against The New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Payback for Tiny Mummies?

I was planning on giving Conor the last word in this debate for I always hate when someone extends an online discussion point past the point of exhaustion because they think someone is wrong on the internet. And I really hate that I’m going to be that guy because this debate has certainly worn out its welcome. So I hope my friend will forgive me for being so annoying as to add a final word (or, in this unfortunate case, the last 2,225 words).

How is it that Joe and I, each of us well read in conservative philosophy and well versed in the argument over gay marriage, come down so differently on the proper position for a conservative to take?

This is a fair question and one that I think deserves a fair response.

Homosexuality, of course, was not invented in the past few decades; it has been an orientation and behavior that has existed as long as man has been on this earth. So why is it that no society or culture has never sanctioned gay marriage? Could it be that all societies and cultures on earth have, until the past few years, been populated with people who are misguided or are —to use the term that has been directed at me for my position —“bigots”?

I know Conor doesn’t think that, nor do the other thoughtful advocates for gay marriage. But it does lead me to wonder what they believe the reason people failed to see the moral good in allowing same-sex marriage. Have we stumbled upon some newfound wisdom that was missed throughout history? I’ll certainly concede its possible, though unlikely that almost everyone was wrong and the relatively few conservative advocates of same-sex marriage are right. However, I also believe like G.K. Chesterton that:

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead….Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.

Before we overthrow the received wisdom of all our previous ancestors we might want to consider if they knew something we did not. To do otherwise would be anything but conservative.

Indeed I am astonished, every time I hear someone like Joe argue for civil unions, that a person ostensibly acting based on conservatism would imagine that marriage is more threatened by gays incorporating themselves into what already exists than by society setting up a parallel institution that has never existed before to organize the way romantic couples live together.

My proposal is not as radical as Conor thinks for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with romantic coupling. I do not support civil unions for gays; I support civil unions for any two people. I wrote a fuller explanation here but to summarize:

1. Because natural reproduction of the species occurs through heterosexual intercourse, the state has a legitimate interest in heterosexual sex.

2. The state has no legitimate interest in homosexual sex, much less an interest in preserving it within the bounds of marriage.

3. Since the state has no legitimate interest in promoting gay sex, civil unions should be “desexualized.” There should be no assumption that two people joined in a civil union are having any type of sexual relations. Civil unions should cover a broad range of domestic situations, such as two elderly sisters who share a home or a widowed parent of an adult child who has Down’s syndrome or other potentially disabling condition. Such legal protections should be completely desexualized and open to any two adults who desire to form a contractually dependent relationship.

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