Straw dogs

Straw Dog photo from China News Service. Typical People's Republic, no credit to the photographer or even the author of the piece it illustrates, but there's an editor name, because hierarchy.

Via Steve M ("Libertarian Talk is Cheap"), I'm looking at a weird article by the editor in chief of Reason, one Nick Gillespie, who's been living by his own account off Koch brothers philanthropy for 21 years and wants us to know that old Charles and David are not hypocritical moralist Republican authoritarians but literally—wait for it—too liberal for the John Birch Society:

while the Koch brothers remain staunch opponents of Obamacare and government spending, “they are at odds with the conservative mainstream” and “were no fans of the Iraq war.” As a young man, Charles was booted from the John Birch Society (which his father had helped to found) after publishing an anti-Vietnam War newspaper ad, and David told Politico of his support for gay marriage from the floor of the 2012 Republican National Convention.

Hey, I'm not a fan of Taylor Swift but I have no intention of occupying Manhattan with 250,000 of my best friends to put a stop to her. Indeed, I am completely happy to accept her existence, welcome her success, and admire her pluck. I just don't have any interest in listening to her sing. That's what not being a fan means. So, does it mean whenever the Iraq war came on the radio in 2005 Charles and David didn't stop talking or went off to freshen their drink or take a pee? I can well believe that. As Steve says,

Funny, I don't recall them putting together a massive interconnected funding apparatus to stop the war. Nor do I recall them doing any such thing to advance the cause of same-sex marriage or immigration reform. In fact, the vast majority of politicians who've benefited from their help have been pro-war, anti-gay, and anti-immigration.

Commenter Eric complains:

Eric said...

Libertarian talk is cheap? Is it cheaper than the cheap moralizing of the liberal left?

Give me a call when Al Gore or Al Franken funds a PBS series or the largest cancer research program in the country.

http://ki.mit.edu/

1:16 AM

Well, I'll tell you, Eric, we know something about David Koch's PBS support, and it's that he expected it to buy him something—positive coverage—and he put away the checkbook when it didn't. The same goes for his support of the former New York State Theater in Lincoln Center, for which he paid $100 million to have it renamed the David H. Koch Theater; but when one of his most favored charities, the theater's former tenant, the New York City Opera, was about to die, and he and Michael Bloomberg were literally the only people in the United States who could have saved it, they refused to step in, apparently because the company had just staged an opera, Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, with an unsympathetic portrayal of the heroine's husband, J. Howard Marshall II, who when alive had been the owner of 16% of Koch Industries.

As for cancer research, there's something I learned about that when I was getting my radiation treatments at the Beth Israel Cancer Center in Union Square, a setting furnished with a luxuriousness unlike any medical establishment I've ever been in: practically everything that can have a nameplate on it, from the massage chairs to the broom closets, is a donation from some millionaire or other, and that's the reason it's so opulent, because cancer is the one thing elderly white male millionaires fear (David Koch's incurable though manageable prostate cancer was discovered in 1990 or so and his generous giving to the cause dates from there). It's just so many burnt offerings to placate the cancer gods. And they can afford it, too. When they start spending that kind of money on malaria or river blindness or some other disease they know they won't get (the way the Gates Foundation does), you just let me know.

And Charles or David may have funded a public TV series, but how about a movie grossing upwards of $50 million? Would they donate 100% of their share of the profits to the Alliance for Climate Protection (the big nonprofit Al Gore founded with the earnings from An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, and still going strong today as the Climate Reality Project)? Or how about 100% of their Nobel Peace Prize winnings ($750,000). Oh wait, they didn't win one, in spite of their advocacy for peace in Iraq which we just heard about for the first time. I guess they were too busy taking over Wisconsin.

But in any event that's not at all the point. PBS funding and contributions to cancer research and whatnot aren't related to libertarian talk; billionaires of any political persuasion may be involved. The point is, when they're putting their libertarian money where their libertarian mouths are, where does the money go? Does it go to candidates or organizations who opposed the Iraq war or favor same-sex marriage?

And as you know very well it does not. It goes overwhelmingly to authoritarians, warmongers, gay-bashers, and Know-Nothing nativists, d/b/a The Republican Party and its ancillary units. Oh, there's the old Koch-funded Cato Institute representing David's publicly proclaimed broadminded views on marriage equality in particular, but the Cato Institute doesn't run the government; the Koch-funded House Republican Caucus and Senate Republican Caucus (thanks to the cloture rules that allow a minority to block any and all legislation) do. If Charles and David approve of marriage equality why don't they tell those guys, who could do something about it?

Straw Dog by yuen.e.

As it happens, I just came across something like an answer, or a better way of expressing an answer I knew, in an unexpected place, the Pando Daily, which I am coming to rely on as the only place for Ukraine news that's cynical enough to be believed, and a post by Gary Brecher bringing up the ancient Chinese trope of the straw dog.

The relevant text is from the Daodejing (Classic of the Way and the Power) traditionally attributed to the quasi-mythical sage Laozi ("Old Fellow"), opening of the fifth chapter:

天地不仁,以萬物為芻狗。
聖人不仁,以百姓為芻狗。

tiān dì bù rén, yǐ wàn wù wéi chú gǒu
shèng rén bù rén, yǐ bái xìng wéi chú gǒu.

Heaven and earth
do not act from benevolence;
the ten thousand creatures serve
as their straw dogs.
Sages and emperors
do not act from benevolence;
the hundred clans serve
as their straw dogs.

The "ten thousand creatures" are basically everything that lives, the "hundred clans" (literally hundred surnames) are all the common folk, and straw dogs were just that, animal images made of bundled straw, for use in sacrificial rituals; the Song-dynasty commentator Su Zhe explained,

"We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

What Brecher says specifically is that the pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine are Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's straw dogs; he'll gladly weep for his brave and selfless and stupid fascist Orthodox brethren, but now he has what he wanted (Crimea, and I guess the drastic slowing or permanent end to the process of integrating Ukraine into the EU), he has thrown them into the street.

Anyhow we're all straw dogs to the Kochs. They may very well be believers at a theoretical level in marriage equality but they'll sell it out every day for what they really care about, which is their freedom to poison us all, treat workers like shit, and lower their tax bills. And their support for immigration? They'll put up with comprehensive reform if they have to, I'm pretty sure, as opposed to really shutting the borders, but they'd prefer to keep the situation just the way it is, because illegal immigrants are easier for employers to abuse.

From blogger Da Boshu (Big Potato).

Vampire foreign policy

"I never drink... wine."

Shorter David Brooks, "The Autocracy Challenge", May 30 2014:

Obama's proposal to make U.S. foreign policy less violent is all very well, but autocrats. It has been scientifically proven that autocrats need to be cockslapped every 17 months or so. And there's an autocrat under my bed, Daddy, I'm scared.

Big Dick Cheney was visible on the TV complaining about Obama, and specifically his approach to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was so shocked by this public display of um, [jump]
adult-onset learning disability as if it were something to boast about that instead of screaming I said something sweetly reasonable: "You had seven years to do it your way, Big Dick."

David Brooks thinks he can change the terms of the argument by introducing the word "autocrat" (Russian samoderzhets), for reasons I can't even begin to imagine, in the concept of autocrats vs. democrats as the New Cold War. He gets it from Robert Kagan's long read, "The Allure of Normalcy", of which Brooks's column may be said to be the not very coherent Readers' Digest version, an ambitious piece that seems to aim at presenting a kind of neo-neoconservative doctrine. Kagan, in turn, thinks he can change the terms of the argument by being somewhat more polite to his wife's employer and withdrawing the word "isolationist".

Which makes some sense, I suppose, as some of us think it's very odd to refer to Obama's program as isolationist when it is built entirely on mulilateralism, takes as a principle aim to

"rebuild and construct the alliances and partnerships necessary to meet common challenges and confront common threats"

and insists in former Secretary of State Clinton's words that

"We must use what has been called "smart power", the full range of tools at our disposal – diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural – picking the right tool or combination of tools for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy."

Unfortunately Kagan kind of spoils his generous gesture by adding that the Harding and Coolidge administrations (which left the management of foreign affairs pretty much to private business) weren't in his view isolationist either and tagging the Obama foreign policy with Harding's bastard coinage "normalcy".

The every 17 months thing is from Kagan's description of a responsible system of deploying U.S. power as represented in bipartisan fashion by the G.H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations and their interventions

in Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995), Iraq again (1998), and Kosovo (1999).

That's a pretty funny bag of examples. There was no good reason for Panama or Iraq 1998 (if you want to be charitable to Clinton you can blame it on bad intelligence), Iraq 1991 was brought on by incompetent US foreign policy, Somalia was a colossal disaster, and the actual emergencies in Haiti and former Yugoslavia weren't happening because of somebody's 17-month schedule. And isn't it OK, if you want to commit troops who may get killed to some operation, to at least try to make a case that vital national interests are involved? It's not as if the Obama administration hasn't conducted any military interventions, either.

It's the same old blood in fairly old bottles, that's all (neoconservatives never drink... wine).

Interlocutors

Zurich striker Loris Benito copes with a marten on the field, March 2013. Photo by Marcel Bieri.

So I'm listening to the Steve Inskeep interview of the president on foreign policy this morning, basically on the above-the-fold wars, in Ukraine and Syria, and it sounds to me, to tell the truth, as if he's waffling—waffling and maybe blustering a bit, using a lot of words like "robust" and "success", but the thing is: he's not arguing with me.

Or rather, he's not arguing against me; the imaginary person he's debating is the one represented in Inskeep's questions, who's worried or affects to be worried [jump]
about American "weakness", and the question whether "we" can, as we think we did in the past, make the leadership of other countries do what "we" want.

The slaughter in Syria continues, and the "moderate opposition" we've attached our hopes to doesn't look like much of a player. The Russian Federation has annexed Crimea, meaning that they've already scored a net gain in territory, opening a lead in the game, I guess, that they will maintain to the final whistle, except for the fact of its being not a game, but real life, that Ukrainians and not Americans are obliged to live, and there's no inevitable final whistle for that except when our species extinguishes itself, or the sun fails if we survive that long. Obama can't tell his imaginary interlocutor how stupid the premises are, because the interlocutor just would not be able to understand.

He takes his language from the people he's arguing with, in the usual quixotic attempt to find a position they can understand, which is not going to work of course, just keep the discussion on the same idiotic 1950s kind of plane, but the reason he's not arguing with me is that he's on my side, in his maddeningly gradualist way; he's always looking for ways in which the US can take a peaceful approach, but he's only looking for the ones that won't, if you know what I mean, give Fred Hiatt and the Kagans a heart attack. I of course don't give a fuck about Fred Hiatt and it's very hard for me to accept this, but Obama's ability to act really depends on his ability to keep these fools in check.

Later, on what he hopes to bequeath to the next president by way of a to-do list, he's talking about open issues in places like Iran, Israel-Palestine, Guantánamo, and I'm reminded of something I wrote once about the unconventionality of his style; the way the usual sports metaphors don't apply because they come from the wrong sports. To the extent he's playing a game at all it's not a digital game like football, where every moment takes place inside a formally constructed play in which one team is all defense and the other all offense (to say nothing of his own silly baseball metaphor), but an analogue one like soccer, where the situation on the field is continuously changing and evolving, and you can't on the whole make set-piece plays but must work all the time to create chances inside the fluidity. Success, there, is keeping things open as long as they're not resolved.

And drones and surveillance: talking about trying to ensure privacy rights "not just for Americans but people around the world." He didn't have to bring in foreigners there, and I like that. He's not waffling here at all, though he's not being at all explicit either, he's claiming to have made progress in these matters and in the prisoner population in Guantánamo, which I might be inclined to dispute, but there you go; here he is arguing with me, and doing it in an entirely different way: acknowledging the justice of my demands and asserting, right or wrong, that he's doing his best.

Alex Morgan, in an unidentified moment. Via.

Update:

On reading the Times analysis of the West Point speech, by Peter Baker, I think I've pretty much got it right:

Mr. Obama has become increasingly convinced that while the United States must play a vital role beyond its borders, it should avoid getting dragged into the quicksand of international crises that have trapped some of his predecessors. It is time for an end to what he called “a long season of war.”

There's even an apposite quote from a Kagan (Robert) on the subject of interlocution:

Mr. Kagan said this was “a more narrow definition of our national interest than the post-World War II tradition” and added that he thought Mr. Obama had come to the conclusion that it fits the public mood. “He’s been in a kind of dialogue with the American people,” Mr. Kagan said, “and I think he’s concluded that they would be happy if he never used force.”

The Glennemy within

Chips and sandwich. Photo by Jim Rice, Sydney Morning Herald.

It is quite possible that I will never read any reviews of Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, NSA and the US National Security State, but if I do, Michael Kinsley's effort in the New York Times Book Review will not be one of them, because I'm one of those stupid people whose judgment of who to pay attention to is biased by prior experience; I hardly ever read anything by Greenwald unless the fact of his writing it is the news in its own right or I'm really looking for trouble, because I can't stand his style and figure if he has anything important to say somebody else will repeat it; and I never read anything by Kinsley because I can't imagine he would have anything important to say. Well, OK, I'll look at it.

Yup, he does say

It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government.

That is at best very poorly expressed and at worst totally wrong.

"It seems clear to everybody, or rather to a subset of everybody with at least one member, and that minimal member is your present author." Wait wait, it only seems that it's clear to you? You're not sure whether it's clear to you or not because that appearance of clarity could be an illusion? Or it seems to you that it's clear to everybody although you acknowledge that it's not?

First Amendment jurisprudence is so familiar to the literate populace that even someone as stupid as me can pretty much say what's in it without help from Dr. Google, viz., on the one hand, that the private companies that own newspapers and the employees of those newspapers decide what to print without prior restraint (though hopefully in consultation with representatives of the executive in the case of material the publication of which might be "harmful to national security" because sometimes no doubt it really is), and are thus certainly the ones who make the ultimate decision; and, on the other, that it is possible that in so doing they could incur legal consequences, and in a separation-of-powers democracy (which, pace Kinsley, we still are) that decision is up to the judiciary, as opposed to the imaginary monolith government to which Kinsley refers. And I'm guessing Greenwald would agree to these stipulations (though I have no way of knowing for sure if I refuse to read him).

And then again, I feel there's something not quite justified in reacting to Kinsley's stupid piece and its stupid reception by writers who ought to know better with an imitation of Greenwald's style, as Barry Eisler does:

even more fascinating and revealing than Kinsley’s own demand — that when it comes to what the press should publish, "that decision must ultimately be made by the government,” and that journalists who don’t toe the government line might need to be “locked up" — has been the reaction of Kinsley’s peers.

Followed by Tweets from Jonathan Alter, Jonathan Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, God-help-us David Gregory, and so forth congratulating Kinsley on his splendid defeat of the Glennemy. They no doubt deserve to be mocked, but Eisler isn't mocking them: he's seriously accusing them of rejoicing in attacks on the First Amendment, that "even more fascinating and revealing" being an authentically Greenwaldian way of saying "even more in agreement with my most improbable assertions, according to me". And "locked up" shouldn't be in quotes there, because it's not what Kinsley said, which was to propose two extremes, one of which has actually come to pass:

So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.) This is not a straightforward or easy question.

Yes, Kinsley confuses the leaker and the journalist once more, but he doesn't say a journalist who "fails to toe the government line", which could only mean one who publicly disagrees with officially promulgated views, not one who may (though not, in my opinion, should) be regarded as complicit with what may be regarded as a national security offence.

Eisler goes on to say,

As for what causes people to fixate so intensely on Greenwald that they come to care more about his personality than they do about the Constitution, I can think of a variety of reasons. Some of them were part of an interesting discussion between Greenwald himself and Chris Hayes on Hayes’ show All In. Greenwald suggested a lot of the animosity has to do with his application to Obama of the principles he previously applied to Bush. The same liberals who cheered those principles when they were applied to a Republican find them heretical when applied to a Democrat.

And here again the Greenwaldism. Arguing that the anti-Greenwald party cares more about his personality than the Constitution begs the question of whether they noticed that the Constitution was in some sense under attack there, which they certainly did not any more than Kinsley himself, who merely has no idea of how badly he understands the Constitution and would not dream that he could be accused of subjecting it to abuse.

As to Greenwald's belief that he has done nothing but apply to President Obama the same "principles" as he did before 2009 to President Bush, that's where I came in. I can say that I largely stopped reading Greenwald when Bush was still in office, probably in mid-2007, not long after he started the Salon column, because he stopped being readable. Christ, those things were long and overseasoned with the adjectives! I was prepared at that point to believe that Richard Bruce Cheney had chopped his mother up and fed her to the seagulls, but I wasn't prepared to read it from GG.

But I think he's mistaken in saying he applies "principles" to Bush and to Obama; what he applies is prosecutorial techniques, which can be used, as we have learned, to convict the innocent along with the guilty. It's not "heretical" as far as I'm concerned (not being a religious person, I'm not sure I could judge) when Greenwald claims that Obama has "slaughtered...Muslim children by the dozens." But, as I've said at some length, it's really, really wrong. The attitude toward Greenwald has become personal because of the way he has personalized it, and he really has nobody to blame but himself. (Unless he likes it that way, of course, in which case he should stop blaming anybody.)

Santa Monica, actor dressed in bread, uncredited photo.

Glorious Weekend

This weekend was so amazing that I couldn't even get my shit together enough on Tuesday to talk about it. That and the fact that Tuesday was absolutely the most ridiculous, crazy day ever. This whole doing two jobs thing is starting to kind of suck.

So yes it's Wednesday. And yes you are getting a weekend recap. So deal with it.

Friday, on the way home, I picked up a few packs of firewood for our new firepit and a 12 pack of Summer Shandy...because let's be honest- nothing better on a hot summer day than an ice cold beer. Mmmm. Oh and we haven't even used the firepit yet. But I'm super pumped we have it and can't wait!

Saturday- workout in the morning, help my brother and sister-in-law with some yardwork, and a concert for work. Oh and napping. So much napping.

Sunday- we started the day super productive- yardwork, grocery shopping, taking the pooch for a walk. We were taking it easy, lazing on the couch when my friend Kari invited us out to her and her husbands house for a doggy play date, grilling out and of course, plenty of beers.

For the most part, Lucy did very well with the other two dogs. There were a few small scuffles- one involved food so that was understandable. I really hope she continues to get better with other dogs though- too many of our friends and family have pups.

After a late night Sunday, and a dog that doesn't like sleeping in other people's houses, naps were necessary on Monday. Followed by a little pool/beer time down at a friends apartment. We hung out with him (and missed his wife who was traveling) and his parents, and it was awesome.

Glorious first pool day of the summer

Steak, baked potatoes and asparagus for dinner. Bed at 9:00. I'm down with that!

And then Tuesday sucked. But it's already hump day...and we're well on our way to another weekend. A weekend where one of my best friends has decided to make a visit!! Woo hoo!

Tough-minded man gets mushy

Update: Welcome Cowgirls and Cowboys from Mike's Roundup at C&L! Make yourselves at home! (and thanks for the shoutout, TG)

Animation from Edward Muybridge's Descriptive Zoopraxography (1893), via Wikimedia Commons.

The simple, shapely format Brooks adopted for Part I of his "Summer Reading—Not" list, a list of four items bookended by an opening and a concluding paragraph, has turned out to be too hard to sustain, and this morning's Part II is just a mess, but there's something interesting going on.

He begins with a Brooksian dichotomy between "Athens" and "Jerusalem", the former for books that will improve you by firing up your external ambition, the latter by cultivating your spiritual side. But he only has one Athens book in mind, really, Thucydides's [jump]
history of the Peloponnesian War, for its hero Pericles, who more than any other person supervised the transformation of classical Athens from a democracy to an autocratically ruled imperial power, with a war of choice he brought on in a classic (literally!) wag-the-dog move as his high-handed and dubious management of the city's finances was coming under question.

Yes, it seems to be a tribute to Imaginary George W. Bush and the Eternal Republican Ascendancy he didn't create (the Athenian empire, of course, degenerated through and beyond the war, until it was ready to drop into the arms of Alexander the Great 18 years after Pericles died). Brooksy goes on to reinforce the point with quick references to biographies of Alexander Hamilton (the "conservative" side of the Revolution), Theodore Roosevelt (a dab hand at starting wars when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he was really better at avoiding them after he became president), and Winston Churchill, and then bursts alarmingly into a long quote from W.H. Auden, eight lines separated by paragraph returns the way a high school term paper might be set in 14-point type. I'll get back to the Auden in a moment.

Jerusalem is represented first by the Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo, apparently the very same book he was pushing what seems like just yesterday (in fact it was a couple of weeks ago) as providing a model for how you could develop a deep understanding of the feelings of a teenage girl who gets pregnant—no, I still don't get it—garnished with some random Christian and Jewish self-help books like gribenes sprinkled on your pork chop, and then he turns very oddly to an ecstatic and (if memory serves) slightly schlocky romance, Scott Spencer's Endless Love.

And finally winds up with George Eliot's Middlemarch, the tale of a girl who didn't get pregnant but instead married an idiotic, overbearing pedant with the idea that as a mere girl she could not contribute directly to the betterment of the world but could assist a Great Man in his work, with a bunch more quotation and paragraph breaks. Brooks seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that it is Dorothea's fault that her first marriage doesn't work out, as he chooses this as one of his favorite quotes:

“She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.”

(In fact Reverend Casaubon failed to take any delight in what she was, being an irredeemable fool, which was the basic problem.)

The whole piece really doesn't make sense, but there is this one thing: Brooks apparently believes that the Auden poem, "Leap Before You Look" (what a great title for a country-western song!), is all about Great Men and their readiness to take risks, maybe (since it was written in December 1940) Sir Winston himself, as a kind of WWII counterpart to "If" or "Invictus", but it isn't; Auden had been received into the communion of the Church of England a couple of months earlier, in October (after having unchurched himself years before), and the poem is addressed to his unbeliever lover, Chester Kallman, an invitation to a conversion.

Augustine's confession is the story of a conversion to Christianity too (while Dorothea Brooke goes the opposite direction, I suppose, from the chokingly dry religion and oppression of her first marriage to—spoiler alert!—joyous secularism and equality in her second), and what I'm wondering is something I think I've wondered before (can't find the post, though): is Brooks really returning to his first love, Old Mr. Buckley, and taking that leap before you look himself? Into the Roman church, I'd think, or its Antonin Scalia branch, given the unsuitabilities of the current Pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury alike to have the care of the Brooksian soul—is Brooks turning Christian?

Via.

That Auden poem, by the way, may be on a silly subject—I think that Anglicanism was a bit of a pose, of Eliot emulation and an understandable fondness for Episcopal drag—but it's a great, great piece of work:

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

                                                            December 1940

I believe in Slovenia

Beppe Grillo of the Movimento Cinque Stelle, at a press conference.

As the world began fretting today over the fascist takeover of the European Parliament (which is not in fact going to happen, I'm glad to say; the elections results are bad and no doubt very embarrassing to a lot of people, especially in France and England, but there will be maybe 87 anti-Europe MEPs at the most out of the 751 total seats, not enough to bring the edifice down), it occurred to me that the election results provided the data for a little test of a hypothesis I'm interested in: the idea that high voter turnout tends to benefit the left but may also benefit the extreme right. Especially because nobody was talking about turnout except to observe, vapidly, that it was higher this year than in 2009 (43.1% overall compared to 43.0% last time, which is about as significant as—well, probably not very significant).

Anyway I found the results with turnout figures by country at the Parliament's own website, and used them to construct the chart below, which cost me many hours and probably brain cells that could have been useful as I slouch toward senility, and probably still contains some serious errors:

Country	Turnout (%)	Left + Green	Liberal + Right	Nativist	Off the Continuum
Belgium	90	10	10	1 (Vlaams Belang)	0
Luxembourg	90	2	4	0	0
Malta	74.8	4	2	0	0
Italy	60	34	22	5 (Lega Nord)	17 (Comedians)
Greece	58	12	5	4 (Chrysi Avgi, Anel)	0
Denmark	56.4	5	4	4 (Dansk Folkeparti)	0
Ireland	51.6	5	2	0	0
Sweden	48.8	10	7	0	0
Germany	47.9	43	38	8 (Alternative für Deutschland, NPD)	0
Spain	45.9	34	23	0	0
Austria	45.7	8	6	4 (Österreichische Freiheitspartei)	0
Lithuania	44.9	3	6	2 (Order and Justice)	0
Cyprus	44	4	2	0	0
France	43.5	23	27	24 (Front National)	0
Finland	40.9	4	4	3 (Finns Party)	0
Netherlands	37	7	13	8 (Party for Freedom, Christenunie)	0
Estonia	36.4	2	4	0	0
United Kingdom	36	23	20	24 (Ukip)	0
Bulgaria	35.5	4	13	0	0
Portugal	34.5	12	7	0	2 (monarchist Greens or worse)
Romania	32	17	15	0	0
Latvia	30	3	5	0	0
Hungary	28.9	6	12	3 (Jobbik)	0
Croatia	25	4	7	0	0
Slovenia	21	1	3	0	1 (believers in Eurovision)
Czech Rep.	19.5	7	13	1 (Svobodní)	0
Slovakia	13	4	9	0	0

This ranks the countries of the EU by voter turnout in these elections, from 90% for Belgium to a truly desperate 13% for Slovakia (still better, of course, than a school board election in the US) and then lays out the voting results in terms of number of seats won, broken down by tendency and my own dangerous arithmetic (that's where the errors would be).

 ("Liberal" means liberal in the 19th-century sense, like the English Liberal Democrats or German FDP;  where it says "nativist" I originally had "fascist" but decided that was possibly a tad unfair.)

So, if you divide into three groups of nine countries each you find a pattern: out of the top nine countries (about 48% turnout and up), five or just about 56% were won decisively by the left; out of the next nine (36% to 46% turnout), three or 33% went left; and of the bottom nine (13% to 35.5%), two or 22% went left.

Or with an alternative model

• High turnout (above 50%) 4 out of 7 left (57%)
• Medium turnout (40 to 49%) 2 out of 8 left (25%)
• Low turnout (30 to 39%) 2 out of 7 left (28%)
• Very low turnout (below 30%) 0 out of 5 left (0%)

There are a few different ways of slicing it, and they all give you about the same result; the left was not terribly likely to win these elections anywhere, but success for the left and higher turnout were pretty clearly associated, and success for the nativists does not appear to be associated with turnout at all.

This is NOT AN ACTUAL STUDY (watch out, Brooksie! you can reknot your necktie now), which would need to consider the voting percentages rather than the number of seats and would best be done in conjunction with looks at the elections of 2004 and 2009; merely a little demo of how such a study could work. But it is pretty suggestive.

Update:

I'm not totally sure if I'm getting this right, by the way, but I think the Verjamem Party got its start when Eva Boto's song, the Slovenian entry at the 2012 Eurovision competition in Baku, lost, and angry Slovenes decided that all their current political parties were inadequate to right this injustice.

Fretful symmetry

Astroturf nail art by Marlene Vinha.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, is interested in the fate of the "Tea Party" in last Tuesday's primaries and in its long-term effect on the Republican party, which he thinks he can clarify by comparing it to something even more imaginary:

think about another recent grass-roots movement that reshaped our politics: the netroots/Deaniac/antiwar insurgency, which roiled the Democratic Party between 2003 and the ascendance of Barack Obama.

I swear I was right there, joined MoveOn in 2003, and I'm still waiting for our politics to be reshaped or at least to see the old party just a little bit roiled. My best recollection [jump]
is that is that it got no attention at all, although the country, Democrats and Republicans alike, eventually did realize that Bill Clinton should not have been impeached and the Iraq War should not have been started and Moved On, but without so much as a thankyou to us hippies for pointing it out to them years before, correct me if I'm wrong. I certainly don't remember any Democratic politicians desperately working to outdo each other in the primaries to show how antiwar they were in the way Republicans have been jousting and one-upping over their relative Rightness over the past six years.

What Douthat's up to here may be called the Argument from Symmetry: Given a recognized phenomenon on the Right side of the equation, it must be the case that there has been an equal and opposite phenomenon on the Left side, its mirror image, which can be used to suggest, say, that the "Tea Party" was a grassroots movement.

Symbolic set (white picket fences and Astroturf) at a townhall meeting with George W. Bush in Sterling, VA, January 2006.

The Tea Party was money, deployed to create an online presence for a certain vague or merely stupid rhetorical stance (complaining about rising taxes as the tax rates sank and government-run health care where it didn't exist in the ACA but not where it did in Medicare), to fund dark-horse lunatic Republican primary candidates, and basically to give an insurgent appearance to the Republican establishment in the 2010 midterm elections. As Michael Brendan Daugherty noted at the time at The American Conservative,

Curiously, the phenom got the most energized and received the most credit for backing Scott Brown, a pro-choice Republican, who supported Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare plan—one similar to the Senate scheme he now claims to oppose. He is, by all appearances one of those dread “RINOs” —Republican in Name Only—that conservatives once despised.

At the National Tea Party conference, attendees wore pins with Scott Brown’s figure under the “American Idol” logo. Palin referred to him and recently elected New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as “ours.” It didn’t matter that Brown and Christie won as moderate Republicans running against badly damaged Democratic candidates. Their victories infuriated liberals, and that counts most of all to Tea Partiers.

While it undoubtedly featured some "real" people (the Medicare patients tooling around on their government-issued scooters at the 2009 rallies) alongside the low-rent media personalities from talk radio, CNBC, and Fox, it began as a project of Charles and David Koch and began to acquire some real political influence with the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in January 2010. As faithful Old Corporatist Bill Scher was saying in the Wall Street Journal toward the end of last fall's government shutdown,

[Tim] Carney says this Citizens United–fueled dynamic has led to a "Republican leadership vacuum." I would go a step further: It has broken the Republican Party in two.

Both the ascendant Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action groups are financially backed by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers, leaders of a single corporation that appears to be trying to surpass the Chamber of Commerce as the dominant funder and power center of the Republican Party.

In the 2012 elections, the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity each spent roughly $35 million. But since then, the Kochs have used another group they created, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, to spend $200 million supporting an array of organizations determined to destroy ObamaCare.

According to Open Secrets, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce spending now "dwarfs" the old Chamber, which has been urging Republicans to keep the government open and increase the debt limit, to no avail.

The Kochs and others like them no longer have any use for a "Tea Party"; its work is essentially done, as the old GOP politicians have bent to its will. I'm sure the Kochs in particular would like to get past their Frankenstein's monster to push through an immigration bill (they love immigration as long as it combines with the lowest possible minimum wage law). And the great thing about Astroturf is you can just roll it up and lay it down wherever you like.

The Remodeling Project, performance piece by Heidi Kayser, in Boston's Fort Point Channel, May 2012.

We send Tweets

Following on reporting from Tengrain and M. Bouffant on the Associated Press's cowardly misreporting of what happened at Richard Martinez's press conference on the murder of his son Chris by a person who should not have been permitted to carry a gun, I have sent the following Tweet to the AP:

@AP RIchard Martinez's words "Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA." should have been in your story
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 26, 2014

And while we're up, here's—my, my, my, it's Todd Kincannon speaking, as TBogg says, for his comrades of the conservative persuasion on his view of Richard Martinez:

Speaking for the right... pic.twitter.com/13a2JDoGti
— TBogg (@tbogg) May 26, 2014

Ah yes, I remember young Todd well, drunk-Tweeting abuse about Trayvon Martin, trying to make a case that this classic Romney-rally photograph was a fake

(it wasn't), drunk-tweeting abuse about Wendy Davis, and so on, and so on. There's no grief or generally human feeling he won't disrespect with a cocktail in one hand and a smartphone in the other. What a dirtbag. 

Annals of derp: The latest from Benghazi

War criminal Allen West trying to go full McCarthy, with a tale of a seatmate on a flight from Detroit who told him what *really* went on in Benghazi:

West’s source also informed him that there was a covert weapons scheme going on in Benghazi that saw us arming radical Islamists with weapons so they could overthrow Gaddafi. West says that it’ll make Iran-Contra “look like the Romper Room,” and that it came back to bite us in the end.

Worst was when those thugs found out they were wasting their time, given that Qaddafi had been dead for nearly a year.

Image by Liza Sabater.

(I think it's pretty well known that if the CIA was funneling weapons anywhere out of Benghazi it was to opposition in Syria, which is bad enough to make Iran-Contra look like, maybe, Teletubbies, but only because it looked like Teletubbies in the first place.)

Can't let West go without noting the extraordinarily McCarthyite shamelessness and slime with which he attempted last week to impugn the patriotism of Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who lost three limbs in Iraq (of course West lost his honor as a man and a soldier in Iraq, so maybe he feels as if he's her equal in some respect).

Annals of derp: The latest from Benghazi

War criminal Allen West trying to go full McCarthy, with a tale of a seatmate on a flight from Detroit who told him what *really* went on in Benghazi:

West’s source also informed him that there was a covert weapons scheme going on in Benghazi that saw us arming radical Islamists with weapons so they could overthrow Gaddafi. West says that it’ll make Iran-Contra “look like the Romper Room,” and that it came back to bite us in the end.

Worst was when those thugs found out they were wasting their time, given that Qaddafi had been dead for nearly a year.

Image by Liza Sabater.

(I think it's pretty well known that if the CIA was funneling weapons anywhere out of Benghazi it was to opposition in Syria, which is bad enough to make Iran-Contra look like, maybe, Teletubbies, but only because it looked like Teletubbies in the first place.)

Why, this room is filthy!

Get all that dirt back under the rug where it belongs!

From a totally irrelevant discussion at ChessWorld.

From the must-be-read long piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject of reparations to the black community for the centuries of crimes perpetrated on it by the majority population:

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”

Yep. We can't study it. And I think it's pretty clear why: because we know in advance what kind of conclusions such a commission would be forced to reach if it had any intellectual honesty at all, that reparations are owed. And that "full faith and credit" they love to talk about was tossed out long ago, on this issue. They'd have to take that blindfold off.

Of course Congress decided a long time ago it should be against the law to study whether gun violence affects the nation's health, finally lifting the prohibition last October, and the House just ordered the Defense Department not to study climate change. Do I detect a pattern?

"The Three Bears" updated -- now featuring Mama Bear, Baby Bear, and Other Baby Bear

YouTube description: "Tornado hunter Ricky Forbes was driving through Kootenay National Park when he spotted the black bear cub sitting dangerously close to the highway." (Newsflare link: http://www.newsflare.com/video/14601/weather-nature/mama-bear-rescues-baby-bear.)

by Ken

Kids! You tell them once, you tell them a thousand times, but do they listen?

Apparently Baby Bear just had to find out what was on the other side of that roadside concrete-divider thingy, not reckoning that getting to the traffic side of the divider is one thing but getting back over is another thing entirely. Luckily Mom was able to "handle" the situation. But what I like best -- knowing that the rescue is safely achieved -- is troublemaking Baby Bear's cub sibling perched atop the divider taking in the show.

Hat tip to HuffPost's Hilary Hanson.

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Vincent Harding (1931-2014)

"For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man."

-- Vincent Harding, who wrote MLK's 1967 anti-Vietnam
War speech, to the National Catholic Reporter in 1997

"Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech 'could border a bit on treason.' "

-- from Matt Schudel's WaPo obituary of Dr. Harding

by Ken

No, the name of Dr. Harding, who died from an aneurysm on Tuesday at 83, wasn't familiar to me. It's a shame that an obituary has to be the way we learn about people we should have know about, but better late than never.

In his Washington Post obit, Matt Schudel describes Dr. Harding as "a historian who was an influential behind-the-scenes figure during the civil rights movement and who wrote a controversial speech for Martin Luther King Jr. that condemned the war in Vietnam." That speech, Matt says later, "was seen as bringing together the two major tides of protest in the 1960s: civil rights and the antiwar movement."

Here's how Matt chronicles the speech that, nearly 50 years later, still provided the hook for its author's obit:

Dr. Harding, who said his service in the Army made him a dedicated pacifist, was a lay minister in Chicago when he began working for the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He moved to Atlanta in 1961, settling around the corner from King’s family.

Soon afterward, Dr. Harding and his wife founded the Mennonite House, one of the South’s first interracial gathering places for proponents of civil rights.

While teaching at Atlanta’s Spelman College in the mid-1960s, Dr. Harding began to explore the moral implications of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He wrote a letter to King and other civil rights leaders outlining a critical stance toward the war, then composed a speech for King that addressed Vietnam in the context of civil rights.

King delivered the speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. The speech, often called “A Time to Break Silence,” was little changed from Dr. Harding’s original draft.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal,” King said. “And that time has come for us in Vietnam.”

He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and said it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

King concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

An overflow crowd of 3,000 gave King a standing ovation, but his message was not well received in other circles. A New York Times editorial criticized King’s views, and the NAACP called the speech a “serious tactical error.”

Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.”

It's easy to make fun of Barry Goldwater's "could border a bit on treason" imbecility. But just think how his modern-day ideological heirs would react -- when, for example, it already qualifies as out-and-out treason to show insufficient respect toward an obviously thieving, gun-violence-promoting pile of puke like Cliven Bundy.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Dr. Johnson said. And the dominant strain of American fake-patriotism, so long so intimately entwined with the scourge of racism, has reached such depths that it has become the worship and practice of scoundreltry.

As for Dr. Harding's life after (and before) the MLK speech:

In his later academic work as a historian, Dr. Harding wrote several books describing the development of radical ideals among African Americans and said King belonged squarely in that tradition.

The 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War, Dr. Harding said, was not an anomaly but was a pure reflection of King’s evolving views of the role of civil rights on the world stage.

“For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep,” Dr. Harding told the National Catholic Reporter in 1997, “Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man.”

Vincent Gordon Harding was born July 25, 1931, in New York City and was raised by a single mother who worked as a cleaning woman.

He graduated from City College of New York in 1952 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1953 before serving in the Army for two years. He received a master’s degree in 1956 and a doctorate in 1965, both in history from the University of Chicago.

A Seventh-day Adventist early in life, Dr. Harding later adopted the Mennonite faith, known for its pacifist beliefs.

After King’s death, Dr. Harding became the first director of what was then the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center and then led the Institute of the Black World, both in Atlanta. In 1974, Dr. Harding moved to Philadelphia to teach at Temple University and later the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology in 1981.

He wrote or edited more than 20 books, including “The Other American Revolution” (1980), “There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America” (1981) and “Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero” (1996).

In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Harding was a prominent voice in an often-heated debate over the purpose and direction of black studies courses. Although he had been educated at mixed-race or predominantly white institutions from high school through graduate school, Dr. Harding advocated a form of racial separatism in education, at least for a while.

“Those who have colonized us for 300 years are essentially unqualified to educate our children,” he wrote in the Times in 1970.

Dr. Harding believed African American communities should develop “alternatives to white public and private education” and “the means to keep these black experiments in educational creativity under the control of the black community.”

Other scholars, both black and white, criticized his views as polarizing and academically unsound.

It would be “a very serious error,” Michael R. Winston, director of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, told The Washington Post in 1982, to believe “there’s no room for conventional scholarship in black studies.”

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