His office, releasing a draft resolution authorizing the suit, revealed Thursday that the crux of the case will be the Obama administration’s decision in 2013 to delay the requirement on certain employers to provide health coverage to workers.
“In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work."
Oh the humanity! You put off implementing a provision in the law I've tried to repeal 40-odd times in the last year largely because I hate that provision so much! How dare you do what I claim to want so bad without getting my permission?
Seriously, though, not quite sure where he gets his standing there. Shouldn't that be for people who voted for the bill? One thing for certain, he's totally entitled to try for damages for emotional distress:
During a Natural Resources and Environment Committee meeting Thursday, [Kentucky state senator Brandon] Smith, the Senate majority whip, said:
As you [Energy & Environment Cabinet official] sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I won’t get into the debate about climate change but I’ll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There’s no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.
According to NASA, the average temperature on Earth is 57 degrees Fahrenheit -- 138 degrees above Mars' average of -81 degrees.
To be fair, Martian forests are in terrible shape. And if the atmosphere is 96% CO2, why aren't they seeing some of that global warming, huh, Mr. Smartass Scientist?
Remember the Y2K bug that was going to wreak havoc throughout the world, destroying our primitive computers that would be unable to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000 and generally breaking down the entire information economy? It finally happened, 14 years later, as we learn from Talking Points Memo:
the Selective Service System mistakenly sent notices to more than 14,000 Pennsylvania men born between 1893 and 1897, ordering them to register for the nation's military draft and warning that failure to do so is "punishable by a fine and imprisonment."
The agency realized the error when it began receiving calls from bewildered relatives last week.
Lionel Messi for Barcelona against Viktoria Plzen, via Barcaforum.
David Brooks suggests that he kind of likes World Cup soccer, and quotes some estimable writers on the subject. I'm really inclined to take the Brooksological day off and let him alone, except this:
soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way.
No it isn't. If that's how it feels to you, you should be watching a different sport.
Pinned angel, from CraftyB (not a Hobby Lobby rival, I think, but an independent artist).
I may need to offer an "I changed my mind" over the question of whether covering contraception in the health insurance policy lowers the insurance costs, by saving the costs to the company of unintended pregnancies, or not, which I chewed over most recently here, because Austin Frakt, the Coincidental Economist, has warned readers of the New York Times Upshot that this may not be the case: because among the sources cited by my source (the HHS Issue Brief of February 2012) is a study from Hawaii whose conclusions are "not unambiguous":
Based on an examination of just four health plans, the state’s insurance commissioner concluded that the mandate “did not appear to have a direct effect on an increase in the cost of health insurance.” However, this conclusion is hedged; the detailed results from each of those four plans do not unambiguously support it.
Well, mercy! They just said
Health Plan A’s data.... correlates with the statement by Health Plan A that since contraceptive coverage was offered prior to the mandate, the mandate has had minimal or no impact on Health Plan A members or employer groups.
the impact of the mandate on Health Plan B’s members and employer groups has been minimal.
the mandate has had little effect on Health Plan C members or employer groups. However, Health Plan C’s membership did increase during this period, and prior to the mandate only 29% of the members were covered for contraceptive services. Therefore, evidence of an impact, if any, may not be apparent for one or two more years.
Health Plan D’s contraceptive coverage appears to have very little or no impact on its members and employer groups.
That doesn't sound very not unambiguous to me. I don't know what Frakt is up to, but they plainly do support it, as does the other main source, much more decisively:
A 2000 study estimated that it would cost 15 to 17 percent more not to provide contraceptive coverage in employee health plans than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of pregnancy and the indirect costs, such as employee absence. Consistent with this finding, when contraceptive coverage was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, premiums did not increase because there was no resulting net health care cost increase [per Dailard, C., Special Analysis: The Cost of Contraceptive Insurance Coverage, Guttmacher Rep. on Public Policy (March 2003)].
A point Frakt makes that I certainly failed to see is that most policy holders who will use family planning if their policy covers it will also use it if the policy doesn't. They'll just pay for it out of their pockets:
In part because it is so cost-effective, most people are willing to pay for contraception with their own money, if they can afford to. (Many Medicaid-eligible individuals perhaps cannot, but most employed people probably can.)
In this way the insurer saves the cost of pregnancies either way, so covering the contraception is a net loss to them. This could well be true, except that paying for your own contraception may lead to using less than ideal methods which may fail. This could make a real difference, suggests Wikipedia not unindirectly:
Contraceptive failure accounts for a relatively small fraction of unintended pregnancies when modern highly effective contraceptives are used.[8]
But we don't know how much of a problem. How small is that fraction, and how much larger is the fraction when old-fashioned, somewhat ineffective methods are used (or unused when you really meant to use them, for reasons that I need not dwell on, except to note that they are reasons that never happen with an IUD)? Not seeing any numbers on that, I'm afraid, but if I do I'll let you know.
My own point, though, remains unchanged, because whether Dr. Frakt there is right or not, the basic fact is that the insurers have elected not to charge higher premiums for including mandatory contraception coverage (in the 2003 Guttmacher report cited above, the government had invited insurers to come back and demand compensation for any additional costs, but they just didn't have any).
So that whatever incidental or nonincidental or not unincidental economists may opine about the issue, the bottom line is that the additional premium businesses are forced to pay to take care of their slutty employees' needs may not be minus $97, that's what I was definitely wrong about, but is in fact $0, which is really not enough to make a difference to any wallets except those of the angels dancing on pinheads around Justice Scalia's splendidly robed person. There is no way for an employer to know whether he's paying it or not! Frakt is just trolling, because however much it costs it isn't enough for those cheese-paring actuaries to bother with. The premium is the same!
Looks like the promised sky-covering fireworks naming of Snowden names at Pierre Omidyar's Intercept really has taken place after all, not on the fifth of July, but close. It's possibly the most shocking misbehavior by the NSA reported in the Snowden documents so far—involving the targeting of American citizens and even a Republican!—and I'm really glad to see it come out:
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:
• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;
• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;
• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;
• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;
• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.
Also glad to see that this despicable profiling of distinguished Muslim Americans ended well before the Obama presidency began, by May 2008. That's pretty interesting timing, by the way; the FISA Amendments Act that made the program definitively illegal was introduced (by Silvestre Reyes, D-TX) in June and signed into law by President Bush on June 10, so it looks as if NSA really hustled to clean up its act before the legislature made them.
Maybe when they say the Obama administration carries on the Bush policies on surveillance they're referring to the Bush administration's last five months, and the great 110th Congress with its Democratic majorities in both houses that reformed this rogue agency.
Lots more hilarity from Pottersville, Driftglass (with a most useful note on the grammar of past and progressive), and we'll keep our eyes open for more.
Shakespeare combined the Greek honor code (thou shalt avenge the murder of thy father) with the Christian mercy code (thou shalt not kill) to create the torn figure of Hamlet.
No, that's Brooks. It's the second time we've caught him doing a Shakespeare Shorter (the first was Henry V). As an analysis, it looks about as wrong as you can imagine: the only time in Hamlet where "mercy" is used in any kind of strictly theological sense it is applied to God, not Hamlet, in Claudius's prayer soliloquy (III/iii):
43.............................What if this cursed hand 44Were thicker than itself with brother's blood, 45Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens 46To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy 47But to confront the visage of offence?
When Hamlet sees his uncle kneeling in prayer, a conveniently vulnerable position, he puts off killing him for fear of sending him straight to heaven, as in what kind of crappy revenge would that be?—better wait until he's doing something nasty, like getting drunk or banging your mother. Ironically, the moment he's just missed would have been the perfect time, because the prayer is a failure:
97My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: 98Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Moments later, Hamlet is unhesitatingly killing the person spying on him from behind a curtain in his mother's bedroom, assuming it's the king, but it turns out to be only his girlfriend's father instead. Oh well, never mind:
212I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room. 213Mother, good night. Indeed this counsellor 214Is now most still, most secret and most grave, 215Who was in life a foolish prating knave.
What I'm trying to say is, there's a lot of spooky Christianity in this play, and specifically Catholicism, but there's really no "thou shalt not kill." At all. Other plays no doubt (you should think immediately of the meditations on revenge killing in Winter's Tale and Tempest), but not this one.
Brooks is on about creativity today for some reason, mainly I guess because of an article on the Beatles by Joshua Wolf Shenk for the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, and most particularly its subtitular teaser, rousing one of his weird little business self-help book passions, for "co-opetition":
Despite the mythology around the idea of the lone genius, the famous partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney demonstrates the brilliance of creative pairs.
Thus when John first made a "demo" of the song "Help" it expressed his "throes of depression" with a "slow, moaning sound"
but Paul suggested providing it with a "lighthearted countermelody" and that fixed it up.
This is a really outstandingly terrible example because, as commenter Andrew Baker points out at the YouTube site, it is not a demo for the song, but a kind of revisionist experiment, conducted 14 years after the song was written.
So that Shenk's analysis is of an entirely imaginary, or perhaps retroactionary, sequence of events. And it's moreover clear that "Help", far from having been written in depression, was always meant to to be zippy and fun, which is why the lyric is so especially banal ("and I do appreciate your being round"), and indeed why John thought years later it might be fun to try slowing it down, like Barbra Streisand dragging "Happy Days are Here Again".
The original "Help" is a gag to go with the movie, and not even an especially great song (the album side it was on included "The Night Before", "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", "You're Going to Lose That Girl", and "Ticket to Ride", and "Yesterday" was on the other side!!!). What that bit of audio does clearly demonstrate is that Paul, not John, wrote the tune, or is at any rate responsible for the chord progression, since John at the piano in 1979 still can't quite work out how it goes.
No wonder Brooks likes Joshua Wolf Shenk; they're kindred spirits. Maybe they should co-write a column.
The mutual dependence of Paul and John as one of history's greatest songwriting pairs is one of those truisms that happens to be true, though, so let it pass. Brooks does; it suddenly starts occurring to him that Joshua Wolf Shenk's thesis is false, since many creative people, like Shakespeare, have done good stuff without a partner. So he doesn't go back and rewrite his first four or five paragraphs or anything drastic like that, but he does bend in a new direction.
John Barrymore's melancholy Dane, I believe on Broadway, 1922. Via To the Manner Born.
That's where Hamlet comes in, obviously, alongside Picasso and Saul Bellow, whose son Adam, as I learn from Edroso, has recently been out with the wingnut begging bowl looking for funds for a new network of wingnut fiction writers' workshops and conferences and so on so that future Ayn Rands and Robert Heinleins won't have to depend for their success on the vagaries of the market, there's a nice conservative thought for you.
But I digress. Brooks's hypothesis is that the case of the solitary genius as represented by Shakespeare, Picasso, and Bellow, is actually a case of divided personality disorder (Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust). Cue a little more amateur criticism and a tiny hint of race-baiting:
Picasso combined the traditions of European art with the traditions of African masks. Saul Bellow combined the strictness of the Jewish conscience with the free-floating go-getter-ness of the American drive for success.
push themselves into the rotting institutions they want to reinvent. If you are looking for people who are going to be creative in the current climate, I’d look for people who are disillusioned with politics even as they go into it; who are disenchanted with contemporary worship, even as they join the church; who are disgusted by finance even as they work in finance.
Which leads us not, as you might expect at this point, to Brooks fighting his lonely battles at the Krugman-corrupted Times, but rather straight to B corporations like Patagonia, the Lennons-and-Macartneys of our desolate era, and don't tell me you saw that coming. These companies give themselves permission to compromise between the quarterly ROI and making the world a better place, and protect it from corporate raiders (who are entitled to sue the boards of normal corporations when the boards are deemed not greedy enough) by building defenses into the structure, which is kind of the 21st-century equivalent of writing "Norwegian Wood" or The Adventures of Augie March:
They are seeking to reinvent both capitalism and do-gooder-ism, and living in the contradiction between these traditions.
You might want to wonder why anybody would mess like that with the processes of the marvelous marketplace and its ability to decide everything for the best, but as usual just when Brooks starts to get someplace interesting he runs out of space. Bye!
Was that the grand finale of the Snowden fireworks display that showed up in the Washington Post on Saturday (instead of the Intercept, which went silent three weeks ago), with the unacceptable part, the naming of victims, removed?
“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.” (Real Clear Politics)
(Never seen a hue with more than one color myself, how does that work?)
If so, I'm pretty sure it's not changing many minds one way or the other, although it really does a bit for me, in an odd way and kind of in both directions. It's some of the most intelligible writing I've seen out of the shop, for one thing (under Barton Gellman's byline with various assistants), and the documents sound relatively real, in contrast to all the PowerPoint slides and interdepartmental memos we've seen so far, marketing and turf, and they seem to show at least to my mind that the NSA may be a good deal more competent than I've imagined them to be, which would have a good side and a bad side.
The good side is that they're apparently a lot more efficient. Gellman says,
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
I have no idea whether the sample of stuff the Washington Post has is in any sense representative of anything, but it could be, and if that's the case then one out of ten is the intended target, comparing to about one out of two and a half million, which was the going number in dudebro circles, when we were being told that's where the "three hops" from the original target would inevitably get us. They're using their hops far more precisely than that, as I've been suggesting they should, and getting a much better return on the effort, maybe even surveilling some actual "terrorists".
They're also far better at minimizing than I would have thought:
NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
That's a minimization failure rate of about 1.3%, which by government standards ought to be regarded as a bit better than perfect. It is so incredible to me that I can imagine the NSA leaking it to Snowden on purpose to make themselves look good.
Moreover one of the minimization failures was the unhappy young woman who makes up the sentimental bulk of the story, whose doomed love affair with a Taliban recruit is spelled out in the documents like an 18th-century epistolary romance. NSA could easily argue that they needed to keep monitoring her for communications from the ex-boyfriend and shouldn't have minimized her at all. For all we know, all 900 cases are like that.
because that's just propaganda language, and I know if I were working for the Post I'd want to publish it too.
As ever, I think the NSA surveillance is (1) probably unnecessary and would be better dropped, (2) not as harmful to the public as feared, and (3) a very unfortunate distraction from the very serious abuses of the Border Patrol, ICE, FBI, and CIA Ops division, making the dudebros at their keyboards feel like upscale victims while overwhelmingly poor people of color suffer real physical invasions of privacy and unlawful arrest and detention and sometimes torture; and stupidly focusing rage on President Obama, who is (perhaps not very effectively) trying to make things somewhat better.
I mean, other than the police? If it's for the new movie, I think the answer is that it's not everybody, quite, though the ever-optimistic fans are expecting a breakthrough soon:
'Audience in tears!'; Dinesh D'Souza hits another home run with 'America' http://t.co/7XWbMcQTBc — Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 6, 2014
In tears of chagrin and amazement, no doubt, at how they were watching a movie so dismal that its most stirring trailer moment is when General George Washington dies in battle (that's just one of the trailers; another one has a charming appearance from a nonfictional Noam Chomsky trolling D'Souza pretty mercilessly but too politely for D'Souza to notice); watching a movie instead of fireworks and eating artificially buttered popcorn instead of barbecue. People who can't take a break from their resentment and rage even on Independence Day, because that was the only day folks really came out.
Dinesh D'Souza's new documentary America, which expanded nationwide Wednesday, grossed $4 million for the five days from 1,105 theaters. That's a modest footprint ... [which] didn't match the $6.5 million nationwide launch of D'Souza's hit documentary 2016: Obama's America two years ago, but soared more than 60 percent on July Fourth after an intensive marketing push tied to the holiday. On Saturday, America was the only film in the top 20 that was down, however.
In other words it may have enjoyed a bit of a one-day bump among people whose favorite radio talk shows were taking Friday off and who had nothing else to do because they have no families or friends other than their fellow wingnuts and hate fireworks and barbecue anyway, and if truth be told hate America too, but it will be sinking soon.
He got a warm welcome this morning, I hear from Heather at C&L, from the television people,
Why, ABC? WHY? Someone please tell me why you would put convicted felon Dinesh D'Souzaon This Week and give him plenty of time to pimp his movie? And why would you do it without even a whisper about his sentencing for campaign finance violations coming up in September?
Is Dinesh D'Souza's 'America' The Worst Political Documentary Of All-Time?
...artless propaganda, uninformed, sensationalistic and devoted to buzzphrases (“the shaming of America”), simplicity (“have the United States been a force for good or ill in the world?”) and grandstanding (“We won't let them shame us, we won't let them intimidate us”—who is them and who is us?). Insidiously, these are some of the ways D'Souza and co-director John Sullivan keep the film brisk and conventionally entertaining, not unlike a “Sharknado” sequel or a particularly embarrassing YouTube video. Filled with soaring guitars, pointless blacksmith montages and recreations with porn-level production values (check out the sponge-wig on Frederick Douglass), it's all fist-pumping anti-thought, consisting of baseless revisionist history and idle contrarianism. And maybe, deep down, D'Souza knows it: one of the lasting images of the film is his voiceover threatening, “Capitalists are under fire,” while he watches Michael Moore give a speech on the Jumbotron, eating a Times Square hot dog and standing in front of an Olive Garden.
May not be the worst of all time, but looks like a pretty good case. Sharknado sequel!
Jonah Goldberg may have been distressed by declining American patriotism as measured by whether people think this is the "greatest country in the world" or not, or how PTBAA they are (for you youngsters, that's "Proud To Be An American" as it used to be abbreviated in the Nixon era, when patriotism was marketed more than usually like a yogurt brand, but the July 2013 Pew poll he was looking at isn't the only one out there.
When you see the American flag flying, the A.N.E.S. asks, how good does it make you feel? People can choose from categories that range from “extremely good” to “not good at all.” In 2012, 79 percent of Americans responded with extremely or very good. Only 7 percent said slightly or not good at all.
There is also a question asking how people “feel about this country.” More than 95 percent of Americans either love or like their country, with 70 percent saying “love it” and only one-third of one percent saying “hate it.” Sixty-one percent say that being an American is “extremely important” on a personal level. Only 1.5 percent say it is “not at all important.”
So when you ask people to report their patriotism in specifically conservative terms of "exceptionalism" you don't find much patriotism, but when you ask in terms that apply to everybody you find quite a bit. Hm, how do you suppose we should interpret that?
The ANES survey does find, as the Pew one did, that there's a striking difference in patriotic attachment between older generations and millennials; only 67% of the latter feel extremely or very good about seeing the old flag fly (which is still a pretty powerful majority) and just 45% consider their American identity to be "extremely important".
Andrew Jackson's Big Block of Cheese. Via Mental Floss.
A standout item for me was the response to questions about inequality:
One of them was: “It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others.” People who agree with the statement are saying that the differences in people’s prospects aren’t terribly problematic for American society. Only 28 percent of Americans agree with that statement; 21 percent neither agree nor disagree. Half think it is a big problem that some people get more of a chance in life than others.
The difference between millennials and the Silent Generation on this question is 20 points. While 42 percent of the older generation thinks unequal chances in life are not a big problem, only 20 percent of millennials do. As for the reverse, only 37 percent of the Silent Generation think unequal chances are a big problem compared to 57 percent of young people.
So the generation that is finding itself a little less patriotic is the one that's having a lot clearer perception of increasing inequality in our society? As if the society's failure to live up to its promise of equality of rights and opportunities could be making it a little less lovable?
I'm hoping—not without some evidence—that they're figuring out that voting is the best revenge.
Interesting/unexpected: GOP pollster finds equal levels of enthusiasm among D and R voters in key Senate races. http://t.co/WyJPpsA4SV — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 6, 2014
Jonah Goldberg has a new butch gravatar at the National Review Online, with a better-trimmed beard and a ferociously flinty don't-tread-on-me expression behind his new glasses. No more Mr. Nice Doughy. Am I seeing things, or is he slightly cross-eyed?
A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don’t often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world.Respondents who “often feel proud to be American” were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent, depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of “solid liberals” said they don’t often feel proud to be an American.
Fuck yeah. What a bunch of losers, that 72% of the American population, failing to assert at every opportunity that they're better than everybody else, which is, as you know, the way you prove you're better than everybody else. (Note, by the way, that the survey he's talking about, to which he doesn't give a link, came out just over a year ago.) I personally find the concept of feeling proud to be an American a little weird. It's not like I did anything special. Maybe for the helpmeet, who had to pass a test, but she didn't find it all that difficult. The wave of emotion you get from, say, a good performance of "Stars and Stripes Forever", I mean the part that goes beyond the emotion of the music itself, is gratitude, and solidarity, and hopefulness. I wouldn't call it pride. There's something innocently prideful in the sense of being implicated in something worthy when we help out the tsunami-stricken Sumatrans or choose the best candidate or honor the Constitution by using it to promote the general welfare and so on, but I can't say I think we do that stuff by definition, or "often". Does Jonah? And if he does how come he's such a grouch? If we're the greatest country in the world why wouldn't that 72% be right? And why wouldn't he think we have the greatest government in the world, too, alongside the best food, in his high hopes for a reformed Domino's pizza, and TV, as seen in his monumental essay on Breaking Bad:
great novels are, by nature, conservative. I don’t mean that Tolstoy would oppose Obamacare or that Steinbeck was a supply-sider. That’s not the kind of conservatism I have in mind.* Long before one gets into the partisan or ideological precepts and dogmas, there is at the irreducible core of conservatism the idea that human nature is what it is.** Nation-states, technologies, cultures, even religions come and go, but what remains is humanity. Breaking Bad is one of the great novels*** of our age....****
*He was thinking of the kind of conservatism that isn't conservatism. **Whereas liberals believe human nature is what it isn't. ***Presumably, following the way the paragraph has been working so far, because it isn't a novel? Or because it isn't conservative either? Like Steinbeck? ****The piece also contains this remarkable piece of retroactionary criticism, which I can't resist quoting:
as TV matured, it also arguably got worse: The sitcoms of the 1960s and 1970s were on the whole not as good as those that would come in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jeez, where was I? Ah yes, Jonah arguing about how even though we are ineluctably the greatest country in the world, we have such a second-rate bunch of liberals, like John Lewis:
Georgia representative John Lewis recently said that “if the Civil Rights Act was before the Congress today, it would not pass, it would probably never make it to the floor for a vote.”
Lewis is right. If it came before the Congress today, it wouldn’t pass. You know why? Because we passed it 50 years ago.... If, somehow, we had Jim Crow today, the American people — and Congress — would vote to abolish it in a landslide.
Apparently because Jim Crow was one of those liberal Big Government programs, foisted on innocent lunch-counter operators and bus drivers everywhere:
one of Jim Crow's greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn't merely some "Southern tradition" undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks (Plessy vs. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" in the Constitution for another six decades, was largely about how blacks could be treated on railroads). (Goldberg at Townhall, May 2010)
And it intruded on their First Amendment rights too, which is why you never heard any of those white Southern businessmen complaining about Big Government stopping them from serving black people. They were obviously afraid of the jackbooted liberal fascist censorship.
Though my great-aunt Lucille, a white Californian by birth who ended up in Mississippi during the period, is said to have gotten in trouble with the other country club ladies for notoriously and flagrantly paying her black maid something like a living wage. On the other hand she never actually got busted and imprisoned for it, but I suppose Jonah must know of some cases where this happened. It would be nice of him to report them, so we could develop our understanding of how the civil rights movement for which John Lewis almost died wasn't just about sandwiches and public schools but important conservative stuff like a man being able to do what he wants with his own damn restaurant without government interference, or having to become the governor himself.
And then he's back to what he really wanted to do, abusing MSNBC:
Contrary to what you hear daily on MSNBC, Republicans don’t want to force Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Ben Carson, Senator Tim Scott, or any other African American to the back of the bus.
I don't watch MSNBC that much, but I'm positive if they were saying it daily I would have heard it by now.
And Hillary Clinton:
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case, Hillary Clinton insisted we are following in the footsteps of anti-democratic Middle Eastern theocracies. According to Clinton, the majority on the court were like Iranian mullahs, behaving “in ways that are disadvantageous to women but which prop up them because of their religion, their sect, their tribe, whatever.” The shocking, inarticulate stupidity of this analysis is outdone only by the stunning ease with which Clinton offered it.
It's the sentence, not the analysis, that's inarticulate, meaning of course that it wasn't offered with ease at all, stunning or otherwise, but it didn't in any case say what Goldberg said it did:
“It is a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are very unstable, anti-democratic and frankly, prone to extremism, where women, and women’s bodies, are used as the defining and unifying issue to bring together people — men — to get them to behave in ways that are disadvantageous to women but which prop up — ah, them — because of their religion, their sect, tribe, whatever,” Clinton said. She said America was still far from that, but she said the court’s decision raises “serious questions.” (Aspen Daily News, with some retranscription from the video)
Since she evidently does not think the US is very unstable, anti-democratic, or prone to extremism yet.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes celebrated soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S. because it strikes a blow against “anti-soccer trolls” who believe in American exceptionalism. “Part of embracing a truly worldwide competition,” Hayes cheered, “is accepting the fact the U.S. cannot simply assert its dominance. Turns out we have to play just like everybody else.”
If you truly love America, you'll only follow the sports where we always win. And stop heedlessly accepting facts. Because facts are for unexceptional people.
“I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama explained, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” By this standard, American exceptionalism isn’t exceptional, it’s a vague and meaningless form of national self-esteem, rather than a complex concept describing the uniqueness of the American founding and American character.
I object: it's both exceptional and a vague and meaningless form of national self-esteem.
As we learned not so long ago, the concept of "American exceptionalism" originated in fact with Comrade Stalin, as snark: his characterization of Americans' silly belief that they alone among all the nations could escape from the inevitable collapse of capitalism and concomitant proletarian revolution. And he was right, in a kind of ass-backward way, in that as it turned out the proletarian revolution didn't really happen anywhere. So America wasn't exceptional after all.
But it's more than that, as well. Wikipedia defines "exceptionalism" as
the perception that a country, society, institution, movement, or time period is "exceptional" (i.e., unusual or extraordinary) in some way and thus does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles.
Do Goldberg and his fellow exceptionalists mean that owing to the uniqueness of its founding and of its national character the United States does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles? That we can be as abnormal, irregular, and unprincipled as we like? Or what? What does this "complex concept" entail?
Wikipedia goes on to say,
In ideologically-driven debates, a group may assert exceptionalism, with or without the term, in order to exaggerate the appearance of difference, perhaps to create an atmosphere permissive of a wider latitude of action, and to avoid recognition of similarities that would reduce perceived justifications. If unwarranted, this represents an example of special pleading, a form of spurious argumentation that ignores relevant bases for meaningful comparison.
This is to me what it's all about; I can't think of a different way of interpreting it. And if Obama says he's an exceptionalist now it doesn't make any difference, I still think it's both stupid and vicious.
The doctrine of the exceptionalist is vague, but it's not meaningless. It's saying that your normal language and normal understanding don't apply to me, because I'm so special. So I can invade any country I like, for instance, and you just have to accept that I've got good reasons; or I can refuse to provide the citizenry with access to health care, or fail to set up an adequate gun safety regime, or leave the banks virtually unregulated, unlike all the other countries in the world, because that's just how I roll. We had a gentleman's revolution! And a Constitution! You can't compare us to some cruddy place like France or Brazil or Finland! I gotta be me!
And why would I want to believe in that? All of us refusing to say America is "the greatest country in the world", though, Jonah, the 72%, vulgar, lustful, and compassionate—we are America, pal, and you're really not. America is precisely what you don't like!
(Of course if birth control is not your boss’s business, shouldn’t their beef be with the Obama administration insisting it is?)
You're so right, Kathryn Jean, and it's a longstanding problem. Like the way the Lincoln administration forced plantation owners to get all involved with their workers' finances, by insisting on giving them wages. Gross!
Gideon!
As chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, has faced many a tough question relating to figures but that did not stop him dodging a simple multiplication calculation put to him by a seven-year-old.
Sam Raddings asked Osborne what seven times eight equals but the chancellor refused to answer. “I’ve made it a rule in life not to answer a load of maths questions,” he said. Luckily, Sam, who was part of a child panel interviewing Osborne on Sky News, stepped in to point out that the answer was 56. The chancellor’s refusal came just after he had told Sam in response to a question as to whether he was good at maths: “Well, I did maths A-level so I have been tested at school.” (Via Atrios)
"You see, laddie, when you reach a certain stage, you've got peons to take care of the maths for you. And I got there rather early."
He had a special A-level outfit too. Via The Void.
Today's David Brooks is one of a kind of mini-series in which he pokes about in the backyard for bones borrowed from the opinionist Kevin Lewis of the Boston Globe.
Lewis performs an odd but very valuable little public service in the form of a daily blog at the National Interest where he runs, without comment, the author-written abstracts of social science papers recently published or accepted for publication.
David Brooks is a subscriber, and I guess regularly picks up on particular abstracts and copies them into his Rainy Day Social Science Prompts file, and then every once in a while (December 2010, March 2011, December 2012, and today) assembles [jump] 800 words' worth of them into an ersatz column, rewriting the abstracts for intelligibility and a little of that Bobo quirkiness. They are among his most inoffensive efforts; he doesn't especially choose them to push a propaganda line, I don't think, or anything other than providing us with a little amuse-gueule to while away our time and not take up very much of his.
But then again, it's Brooks, so there is some propaganda there, some anti-liberal trolling about girls playing sports, for example, and some anti-neoliberal trolling about Who Lost Vietnam. And because he has no idea that an author abstract is, by definition, self-serving, and that to find out what's going on in a paper and whether it actually found the stuff it claims to have found (let alone the stuff you claim it found when you're writing up your own version) you need to, um, look at the paper itself, he digs a couple of funny traps for himself.
Title IX has produced some unintended consequences. Phoebe Clarke and Ian Ayres studied the effect of sports on social outcomes. They found that a 10 percentage point increase in state level female sports participation generated a 5 or 6 percentage point rise in the rate of female secularism, a 5 point rise in the proportion of women who are mothers and a 6 point rise in the percentage who are single mothers. It could be that sports participation is correlated with greater independence from traditional institutions, with good and bad effects.
Or it could be that the results are totally spurious, as indeed seems to be the case with this one, which had apparently shown up at Deadspin, Freakanomics, and the Journal of Socio-Economics before Professor Brooks brought it to our attention.
According to Andrew Gelman at the Washington Post writing in May this year, this foolish paper was a classic case of correlation not amounting to causation. The researchers simply plugged in the state numbers, making no attempt to learn whether the girls who played high school sports had any relationship with the women who identified themselves as secular, had babies, and failed to marry their baby daddies. Thus there is no reason to suppose that the correlations mean anything at all.
It is pretty well known, in fact, from studies that ask the questions as this one did not, that the girls who play high school sports are more likely to delay first sexual encounters and avoid early pregnancy. I have no idea whether they are "secular" or not.
Hearts and minds may be a myth. Armies fighting counterinsurgency campaigns spend a lot of effort trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local populations. But Raphael Cohen looked at polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and found that public opinion is a poor predictor of strategic victory. Public opinion is not that malleable, and its swings are more an effect than a cause. That is, counterinsurgency armies get more popular as they win victories; they don’t get popular and then use that popularity to win.
That's not exactly what he found, as we learn from the unedited abstract. He found that winning tactical battles might make the invader more ostensibly popular but being popular doesn't help the invader win strategic battles; if you care about what the population thinks you just don't win, which suggests to me that all victories are pyrrhic.
Cohen defended his dissertation, from which this article is a spin-off, at Georgetown University just last month, and the dissertation abstract clarifies his findings considerably:
1) historically, most successful counterinsurgencies have not been fought this ["hearts and minds"] way; 2) when this approach has been tried, it rarely proves effective; and 3) instead, military victory comes from successful population control. Population control, in turn, employs some combination of three sets of tactics: physical measures (e.g. walls, resource controls and forced resettlement), cooption (of local elite and often the insurgents themselves) and "divide and rule" strategies.
In other words, the way to win is to be that person you always swear you aren't, who aims to win and doesn't give a shit about the people you're conquering.
Since Cohen studied three counterinsurgencies in depth (Kenya, Malaya, Vietnam), it isn't clear whether he really has a big enough sample to generalize from, or even what he means by "successful". Certainly, though, the British defeated the Kikuyu "Mau Mau" uprising in Kenya and the more-or-less local-Chinese insurgency in Malaya before withdrawing from the empire business altogether a couple of years later; while the US was unquestionably defeated by the Vietnamese. I've never understood, and I mean since around 1963, how the last qualified as an "insurgency", as if the US had some kind of legitimate imperial interest in backing up the claims of the so-called RVN. I am sure that US forces used all the population control techniques Cohen advises alongside the "hearts and minds" stuff, though I don't suppose they ever got very good at coopting the enemy.
There's definitely a lesson, anyway: If you want to hold an empire, you need to be an imperialist, like, you know, Vespasian. And Trajan. And Hadrian. And if you want to be loved, imperialism may not be the best line of work for you. Or, more succinctly, imperialists need to be psychopathic assholes, it literally goes with the territory, so just don't.
An earlier version of this column misstated the findings of a study in the journal Economics Letters about corporate success. It found that C.E.O.’s were disproportionately less likely — not disproportionately likely — to have been born in June and July.
