John Holbo

This is a follow-up to Corey’s post, I suppose.

Given that concerns about the character of the new Pope are immediately being raised regarding his conduct during the Dirty War and its aftermath, in Argentina, it says something that the National Review editors are attempting a bit of preemptive damage control on a different front. “His counting poverty as a social ill should not be misconstrued as …”

Really? The new Pope is against poverty? The editors looked at what this new Pope is known for; looked down the list of concerns and doubts people might have, upon skimming the first set of news stories, and this jumped out as the thing we need to be reassured isn’t as bad as it might look, because there’s two sides to the story? (It turns out to be ok because he’s not in favor of ‘statist solutions’ to the problem.)

I mean: I could understand if the editors decided to write a pure celebratory piece that didn’t mar the occasion by drawing attention to anything any critics are already saying. But that they decided to let a touch of concern show through, and this showed through – of all things.

And Republicans wonder why people think Republicans don’t care about the poor.

I haven’t watched the video of Sullivan debating same-sex marriage with Douglas Wilson (no, I never heard of him either). To judge from this First Things write-up, I can expect some familiar, bad arguments from the anti- side: first and foremost, a failure to appreciate the sense in which theological arguments ‘can’t be offered’ in this sort of debate (a failure of appreciation at least semi-shared by the author of the First Things piece, Peter Leithart.)

Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity.

Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say.

The problem isn’t that they can’t be offered – it’s a free country! say what you like! think what you like! It’s that the person offering the argument can’t reasonably expect it to be accepted. It will be – should be – weighed in the balance as a private expression of preference. But someone else’s preference as to how I should behave doesn’t, automatically, carry much weight. [click to continue…]

I’m reading a book on Mannerism [amazon] and stumbled on a pair of amusing quotes. The first, from Alberti’s On Painting (1435) really ought to be some kind of epigraph for The Hawkeye Initiative. (What? You didn’t know about it. Go ahead and waste a few happy minutes there. It’s hilarious. Now you’re back. Good!)

As I was saying, here’s Alberti, warning us that, even though good istoria painting should exhibit variety and seem alive with motion, you shouldn’t go all Escher Girl boobs + butt Full-Monty-and-then-some:

There are those who express too animated movements, making the chest and the small of the back visible at once in the same figure, an impossible and inappropriate thing; they think themselves deserving of praise because they hear that those images seem alive that violently move each member; and for this reason they make figures that seem to be fencers and actors, with none of the dignity of painting, whence not only are they without grace and sweetness, but even more they show the ingegno of the artist to be too fervent and furious [troppo fervente et furioso].

On the other hand, here’s a quote from Pietro Aretino, praising Vasari’s cartoon of “The Fall of Manna In The Desert”:

The naked man who bends down to show both sides of his body by virtue of its qualities of graceful power and powerful ease draws the eyes like a magnet, and mine were held until so dazzled that they had to turn elsewhere.

There’s no accounting for taste. [click to continue…]

A post by Michael Walsh, at the Corner, advocating repeal of the 19th Amendment:

And women’s suffrage … well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.

Who’s with me?

Not enough women, would be my back-of-the-envelope guesstimate.

Just so you know I can explain a joke as well as anyone: the form of this ‘repeal the 19th’ joke is that he knows it’s not acceptable to say so. So he says so, knowing people will realize he must be joking. But the thing is: he isn’t! On some level! Otherwise it wouldn’t be funny. But you could never get him to admit that. He’ll always have ‘it was a joke!’ deniability, due to the manifest unacceptability of his opinions. Even though it wouldn’t be a joke unless, on some level, it wasn’t a joke. That’s what makes it hilarious! Hide in plain sight! Anti-feminism ninja! I wonder why more women don’t vote GOP? They must not have a sense of humor. Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Go team! Go team! Go team! (We are so clever. What? We lost again? Dumb broads, this is all their fault.)

I read Jonah Goldberg op-eds; also Media Matters; thus, back to back, this: [click to continue…]

Dave Weigel calls this, from Yuval Levin, the ‘best riposte’ to the new HHS regulations. I must say: if this is the best they can do …

Levin’s objection is that HHS is just looking for a way in which they can say that, technically, we’re not doing this thing people say infringes their religious liberty. HHS is hereby neglecting to address the larger spiritual issue of religious freedom. But the original complaint about the contraception mandate was that technically you can be made out to be making us do this thing. Technical hitch calls for technical fix. It ain’t pretty, but what were you expecting from a lawyerly work-around? [click to continue…]

We’re going to be having a book event soon: Envisioning Real Utopias. I’m not jumping the gun with this post – or maybe I am.

Anyway, here’s my question. But first, the set-up: there are two ways for revolutions to succeed, and two ways for them to fail. [click to continue…]

Victor Davis Hanson on ‘the meaning of the Inaugural Address’:

Three, the bitter election wars to achieve and maintain a 51–53 percent majority (the noble 99 percent versus the selfish 1 percent, the greens versus the polluters, the young and hip versus the stodgy and uncool, the wisely unarmed versus the redneck assault-weapon owners, women versus the sexists, gays versus the bigots, Latinos versus the nativists, blacks versus the “get over it” spiteful and resentful, the noble public sector versus the “you didn’t build that” profiteers, Colin Powell/Chuck Hagel/reasonable Republicans versus neanderthal House tea-party zealots), in Nixonian fashion have left a lot of bitter divisions that lie just beneath the surface of a thinning veneer.

Now that’s a sentence! Please feel free to award points for style and content.

Is he trying to say that America is divided, because the Democrats (but not the Republicans?) are a partisan force? Or is he trying to say that Democrats are perilously divided against themselves (because they have tried to turn America against Republicans?) Or is he trying to say that there are bitter divisions in the Republican party (because Democrats have found some wedge issues), and as a result the possibility of civil, orderly government/society is threatened? Your guess is as good as mine, I suppose.

Very interesting – and long – bloggingheads discussion on the future of higher education in the age of MOOCs – Udacity, Coursera – between Tamar Gendler and Clay Shirky. Shirky’s thesis: Napster got killed but its brief and dramatic algae-bloom of a life changed the ‘story’ of music distribution. No going back. So now we have iTunes and other stuff and record companies don’t look like they once did. Likewise, maybe Udacity isn’t the future, but the ‘story’ changes after recent, dramatic successes. That’s a wishy-washy way for me to put it, but it is one of those ‘the revolution is coming but we can’t know what it will be like yet’ prophecies, which are inherently – and sensibly! but frustratingly! – bet-hedging. Here’s a slightly more concrete way to cash out ‘story’: we tend to operate with notions of the proper form and function of the university that are too closely tied to pictures of the ideal college experience that are, really, too atypical to function as paradigms. ‘We’ meaning pretty much everyone still: academics, our students, their parents. Shirky’s idea is that MOOCs are going to unbundle a lot of stuff. You don’t have to buy the 4-year package to get some learning. It’s pretty obvious there’s more unbundling to come – it’s gonna make buying individual tracks on iTunes seem a minor innovation – and it will put pressure on current higher education’s strong tendency to bundle a lot of functions together to the point of indistinguishability (teaching, research, socialization, credentialing). Beyond that, the success stories about these MOOC’s are going to shift our sense of what is ‘normal’ to such a degree that there will be no going back. It has a lot to do with how previously under-served populations will inevitably be much better served; that’s going to become too obvious for old ways of doing it to continue to seem at the center of higher education. (Now I’m back to being vague, while also sounding radical. Sorry about that. Read Clay’s piece on all this – probably you’ll have to wait for his blog not to be down, which it appears to be at the moment.) [click to continue…]

Merry X-Mas, CT’ers! Here’s a seasonal something I whipped up a while back, then reworked, which I’m releasing now as a convenient PDF. “A Truly Awful Christmas Volume – A Visitation of Sog-Nug-Hotep” (PDF – and a big one at that. Approx 18 megs, 58 pages. Looks good on an iPad.). The usual sort of faux-Lovecraftian horsing around, you understand. But that really never gets old – relatively speaking. I am proud of my lettering.

It’s too damn late for you to do much online shopping, but if it weren’t, I’d recommend my friend Josh Glenn’s book, Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, for the kids. His book is better than that boring old Daring Book For Girls and Dangerous Book For Boys, or whatever they were called. I’m glad to see that Josh’s title is selling healthily without me giving it an appropriate pre-X-Mas boost. But you might file away Unbored as a notion, for a later occasion. Or check out Josh’s series on Radium Age SF. Healthy stuff, in large doses!

If you need it by Christmas, and you want to support someone who is also my friend, you might gift someone Adam Roberts, I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas, available on Kindle. An “I Am Legend” “Christmas Carol” mash-up, you will quickly perceive. I was hoping for more of a plummy, Dickens voice. But Roberts went for a Lemony Snicket-y thing, I should say. Nothing wrong with that! But I assure you that his fake horrors-of-Christmas etymologies are not the real deal. Mine are!

It seems to me that, just as ‘peak oil’ refers to the “the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline,” so ‘peak pale’ ought to refer to the point in time when the maximum relative rate of white vote extraction is reached by the GOP, after which the party’s rate of election is expected to enter terminal decline. (So it isn’t that we’ve ‘run out of’ whites – not exactly. Let’s be precise about this, shall we?)

I am not sure how this relates, if at all, to my previous post.

Corey’s post about the more toxic stuff in Jefferson’s writings was interesting, wasn’t it?

This bit –

Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?

– reminded me of something else I read recently, in The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, by Mark Changizi [Kindle version only $1.99. Good deal!]

The book manages to hit the popularized-but-substantive sweet spot pretty consistently. The chapter on skin color reports some of Changizi’s own research. He starts with a puzzle: why is it no one has a good name – a name they are satisfied with – for their own skin color? ‘White’ people aren’t white: tan, pink, salmon, off-white, peach? There are 11 ‘basic’ colors, per Berlin and Kay. None are good descriptors of anyone’s skin color. This result generalizes. ‘Black’ people aren’t any better at finding words for their own skin color they are satisfied with than ‘white’ people are.

Why would that be? A hypothesis. [click to continue…]

Jonah Goldberg : “If the GOP wants to win more black votes, it will need to get a lot more ‘racist.’” Yes, if there’s one thing black voters are waiting for, that might bring them back into the warm embrace of the GOP, it’s the enticing prospect of attending an endless pity party with a ‘liberals – and blacks! – have wrongly accused the GOP of racism’ theme. (Because, after all, the Davis-Bacon Act was totally racist!) But Charles Murray gave Goldberg a run for his money, in the anti-Dale Carnegie sweepstakes, with his hypothesis that the reason Asians don’t flock to the Republican Party is that, as a group, they have a ‘ludicrously inaccurate’ view of … well, of political reality.

Goldberg and Murray – and others I could mention – are casting about for a way for the GOP to win over minorities without saying ‘sorry’. Indeed, they are looking for a way to win over minorities while saying ‘you’re welcome!’ in an aggrieved, long-suffering sort of way (this white man’s burden hasn’t been lifting itself, y’know!) [click to continue…]

For some strange reason, Amazon is selling a Criterion Collection 2-disc set of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for $1.99. I would like to hear the extensive Fincher commentary, so maybe I’ll buy it at that price, even though I already own it. Thing is. I didn’t like the film. It didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed very self-serious, in an Oscar-fodder-ish way. Without having anything serious to say. It seemed to commit the elementary fallacy of assuming that, because the story doesn’t make any ordinary sort of sense, it must make some extraordinary, deep kind of sense. [click to continue…]