On Not Getting Fooled Again

(Update: apparently I forgot to linkify things that were supposed to be links!  I was sure I had done.  That’s what I get for posting on only one cup of coffee.  Fixed now.)

As most people probably know by now, on Friday President Obama accepted an invitation to speak to and answer questions from the Republican caucus at their annual retreat — on the condition that the news media be allowed and the speech and Q&A session be broadcast live.

And as most people probably know by now, the Republicans are almost certainly thinking to themselves, “how could we have been so stupid?”  (The answer, I think, is that they got so used to the lies they use to keep the rubes voting for them that they kind of forgot they were lies, and they honestly believed their sad little talking-points recital would leave Obama transfixed and tongue-tied, and he’d eventually have to break down and admit they were right about everything.)

If you haven’t seen the video, you should try to find time to do so — it’s a bit over an hour, but it’s pretty remarkable.  Each time someone asks a question, it’s clear they think they’re scoring a major point, and that there’s just no way the President can refute their argument.  And each time, he calmly, reasonably, cuts their head off.  You can see the whole thing at Shakesville (with links to more discussion), and TNC provides the soundtrack, but I’ve provided some highlights below the fold.

Quick Hit: Spending Freeze

So apparently President Obama is planning a freeze on all new non-defense discretionary spending.  That leaves out, as far as I can tell, current funding levels, additional DoD funding, and anything to do with Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.

The left-wing/liberal/progressive blagoweb pretty much thinks this is stupid.  Jeff Fecke provides a partial defense, which to Fecke’s credit doesn’t descend into “he’s playing 37-dimensional chess, you just have to trust him!” but still rests on too many hypotheticals for my comfort.  Krugman takes a gloomier view.

Here’s my thing.

Politically, I don’t see this working well.  Liberals think the last thing we should do is freeze spending on “discretionary” domestic programs like, oh, say, education.  Conservatives, and moderates who have been bombarded for generations with conservative messages about how government deficits are terrible things, will find plenty of ground to accuse the administration of flim-flammery if Fecke is right and the freeze is aimed at providing deficit-hawk-ish cover for passing health care and jobs bills, and if not they’ll just hang the failing-to-substantially-improve economy around his neck (actually, they’ll probably do that no matter what).

And as policy, to be blunt, it’s shit.  It has no significant impact on actual deficits — according to tonight’s Marketplace report, it will cut “only $250 billion over 10 years, but that’s out of a $3.5 trillion budget every year,” — but it cuts funding from areas where we really need more investment (like education and environmental programs), hurting people who need help.  (And, cf. LGM, ignores the areas of real waste.)

So, I mean, maybe tomorrow night’s State of the Union turns it all around — maybe President Obama lays out a bold new liberal vision for the country, inspires the people to rally behind it, and shames recalcitrant Democrats into pushing forward a progressive agenda; or if that’s too fanciful a dream, maybe at least he proposes policy initiatives that make the current situation look less dire.  Maybe.  I’ll wait and see.  But it doesn’t seem likely.

Update: I just got an email from the Washington Post with the subject line “Breaking News: Obama to promote more education spending in State of Union speech” — how does that square with this “spending freeze”?  I don’t know.  FWIW, here’s their story on the subject.

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No snappy title for this one.

The AP has called the race, and AG Martha Coakley has conceded.

The Democrats fielded a lackluster candidate against a background of growing dissatisfaction with a Democratic Congress and Presidency, and ran a weak, halfassed campaign.  That should have meant a close race — but it took a really spectacular failure of tactics and strategy to produce this outcome.

State Senator Scott Brown is an anti-choice, pro-torture, pro-war, teabagger and proto-Birther, who promised from the beginning of his campaign to be “the 41st vote” in the Senate, i.e. to march in lockstep with the Republican party leadership no matter what’s right, what’s good for the country, or what the voters of Massachusetts actually want, just like every Republican (excluding Arlen Specter and including Joe Lieberman) does.

And now he’s the next United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Now he holds the seat that Ted Kennedy held for nearly half a century.

I can only assume that Senator-Elect Brown’s first order of business, after delivering what I fear will be a smug, gloating victory speech tonight, will be to rush to DC, visit Arlington National Cemetery, and there, twice — once for himself, and once carrying out the will of the majority of Massachusetts voters as expressed at the polls — spit on Teddy’s grave.

I’m sorry, Senator Kennedy.  It’s a disgrace to your memory, and will inevitably redound to the misfortune of our state and our country.

Massachusetts Democrats, AG Coakley, assorted strategists — this was your race to lose, and lose it you did.  A wet paper bag should have been able to beat Scott Brown (Scott Brown of all people!) in this race by at least ten points, so long as that bag had a “D” after its name.  You are a disgrace.

To the rest of the country, I am sorry.  The Democratic supermajority in the Senate wasn’t really doing a lot of good, but I suspect Brown — new whizkid celebrity for the Republicans that he’s certain to be — will be able to do a lot of harm.

Mr. Brown, you’ve won the election: you’ll be my Senator.  I accept that, but I sure don’t have to like it, and I will fight like hell to see you ousted in 2012.  You do not deserve that seat.

And now, if you’ll all excuse me, I have an appointment with a gentleman from Knob Creek.

I Don’t Care If You’re Offended

Updated below to address a criticism.

A little while ago, I got into an argument with a friend.  In the course of objecting to a joke that disparaged women, I said something snide about religion (in this particular case the religion in question was Christianity, but it was a remark about religion in general).  My friend asked whether a Christian might not be just as offended by what I’d said, as a feminist¹ would be by the sexist joke.  I pointed out that our society privileges Christianity and accords more power and respect to Christians, while it marginalizes women and feminism, and seeks to prevent their access to power, so the ceteris isn’t paribus, but he insisted that how offended someone is, is something that’s determined solely by that person and how they feel about what was said, and doesn’t get scaled according to the person’s social status.  My position, he argued, was really that I just cared less whether certain groups were offended, than I did about others.

It was an interesting discussion, and it led me to conclude this:

I actually don’t care whether anyone is offended². Offense is a vague, amorphous concept, and it is completely subjective, as my friend pointed out.  Anyone can claim to be deeply, mortally offended by anything, and it may very well be true; even if it’s not, there’s no way to dispute it.  “You don’t really feel what you claim you feel,” is a line of argumentation that doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

What I care about is harm. What I ultimately said in this other argument was:

The problem with sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, etc., remarks and “jokes” is not that they’re offensive, but that by relying for their meaning on harmful cultural narratives about privileged and marginalized groups they reinforce those narratives, and the stronger those narratives are, the stronger the implicit biases with which people are indoctrinated are. That’s real harm, not just “offense.”

Now, I think many people who write about and try to fight structural bias are just accustomed to using “offensive” as something of a shorthand for this notion of harmful-because-it-reinforces-pernicious-memes; I know I generally have.  But offense is only defined in terms of how the offended person feels, which means it’s an insufficient concept.  It actually obscures the real problem.  As my friend argued, a Christian may be very genuinely offended if an atheist mocks one tenet or another of their religion, and there’s no way to say that that feeling of offense is less real or less valid than any other.  And to mock another person is certainly not a nice thing — or more to the point, not a kind thing — to do, so one can argue that the atheist shouldn’t do it for that reason.  People are unkind to each other all the time, however, and it doesn’t always do the same degree of harm.  If I make a snide joke which hinges on the scientific impossibility of a dead person returning to life after three days, I don’t cause significant harm.  There is not a widespread perception in US society that people who do believe such an event happened once, a couple thousand years ago, are so out of touch with reality that they should never be taken seriously, or should be kept away from positions of power, or are automatically stupid; there is not a long history of atheists oppressing Christians and denying them their basic human rights³.

Mocking the powerful and privileged for those characteristics society arbitrarily uses as a basis for according that power and privilege reverses, rather than participating in and reinforcing, the cultural narrative that justifies their privilege (and that in so doing necessarily justifies the marginalization and oppression of the powerless and unprivileged).  Mocking the powerless and unprivileged for those characteristics society arbitrarily uses as a basis for their marginalization does participate in and reinforce the narratives that justify that marginalization.

These things build up.  Over a lifetime, they build up a great deal: these usually-unspoken cultural narratives are precisely the stuff of implicit bias, and we’re soaking in them.  It’s a mistake to object to them as merely “offensive” — tacitly accepting that the inherently subjective idea of offense is of primary importance, which enables the privileged in claiming, confident it can’t be disproved or even argued against, that they’re “offended” by challenges to their privilege: or as Fred Clark has it, empowers the cult of offendedness — instead of pointing out that they do real harm.  They offend too, to be sure; and it’s unkind to offend on  purpose, or to fail to apologize for giving offense.  But the much greater harm lies in strengthening, even though it’s only a little bit at a time, the negative stories about marginalized groups that are woven into our society, both in the minds of the privileged, and of the marginalized people themselves.

That’s what I care about.

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¹ I’m reporting this more or less as he argued it — I remain opposed to the use of terms like “feminist” as nouns.

 

² This is not strictly true, of course. All other things being equal, I prefer for people not to offend each other; and I especially prefer that no one offend me or people I care about.  Not saying or doing offensive things is a reasonably worthwhile goal, as is pointing out when others say or do offensive things and asking them not to.  But prevention and mitigation of harm should always take priority over concern about offense.

³ [Update 2010-01-19]: colormonochrome correctly noted that there is a significant history of oppression against Christians, for example from (speaking very roughly and varying in different parts of the world) about two thousand years ago to, say [note that I am not a historian by trade!] 500-1000 years ago in most of Europe, more recently in some places, and ongoing in others, and I’m sorry that I essentially disregarded that. However, given that in my specific examples I’m talking primarily about US society, I believe my claims hold up in that context. Christians have never been a persecuted or marginalized group in the United States, especially not at the hands of atheists.

I Guess That’s What.

Asked and answered.

Bye-bye, Loud Obbs.  Don’t bother to write.  And congratulations to CNN on finally deciding that middle “N” might mean something after all.

Yet Another Post About Roman Polanski

First of all, let’s get this part out of the way.  Any and all claims that Roman Polanski should not be extradited to face both sentencing for the 1978 statutory rape charge he pled guilty to and trial for fleeing to France to avoid that sentence are absurd and without merit, and serve to encourage rapists and support rape culture.  And no, that the victim has said she forgives him and doesn’t want the prosecution to continue does not settle the matter.

Second, see Scott Lemieux and C.L. Minou, respectively, on the currently popular (among establishment pundits and conservatives, that is) meme that liberals and the French are supporting Polanski.  It’s true that many people in professional circles that intersect with Polanski’s are demanding his release (though some are not), and some of those people are liberals, but their liberalism has nothing to do with their support of a child rapist: indeed, they’re supporting Polanski despite being liberals, because their loyalty to “one of us” trumps their political, philosophical, and moral beliefs (which I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have) that drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl is wrong.  In short, the idea that “free Roman!” is a liberal cause is a fiction, and its primary proponents are the people who have an interest in seeing liberalism delegitimized: right-wing bloggers and pundits, and mainstream Village types.

Third, expanding on some of what I said above, I think it’s interesting and possibly useful to examine why they’re supporting Polanski, because I think it reveals a number of important things about structural problems in our society.  To that end, I’m reproducing a couple of comments I left at Shakesville:

Damn Hollywood fools—what kind of hold does Roman Polanski have on you?

I’ve been thinking about this, and my theory is that the major components are the deeply internalized misogyny that comes with belonging to patriarchal societies (of course); reflexive defense of “one of us”; relatedly, the classist view that rapists are bad, low-class people, so by definition a charming, perhaps slightly debauched rake like Polanski couldn’t possibly be one of them; the common misconstruction of rape as being a kind of bad sex, which allows them to equate Polanski’s case with, say, Lawrence v. Texas; and a perverse kind of self-defense by which, rather than admit to the remotest possibility that they were wrong to hold Polanski in esteem as an artist and a person, they double down on their insistence that he’s the real victim here. This last was the piece that really made it click for me, when I remembered something Amanda wrote at Pandagon a good while back (though she was talking about climate change denialism):

Some people will get so defensive that they’ll actually double down to prove the nay-sayers wrong—they’ll marry that bad boyfriend or put more money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of “I told you sos”, will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last possible moment when it’s becoming clear that they cannot sustain this bad decision any longer.

You know, I think my theory a bit upthread left out something else that’s important. Probably another major component of the mental process that leads all these people — who no doubt think of themselves as good people! — to sign on in support of a fugitive child rapist is that they believe in what I’ve called the myth of the individual, or put another way, are bad (as are many people) at thinking systemically, seeing things as parts of systems. So (along with all the other parts) to them this is purely a matter of something one person did to another, a long time ago, which the one has suffered for (in some rather dubious sense of the word “suffer”) and the other has forgiven, and so that should be the end of it; they don’t, or can’t, or refuse to see that it’s an act which affects more than just Polanski and his victim.

I think a lot of these same elements — “one of us,” the idea that by definition only low-class, bad people can be rapists, the misconstruction of rape as sex, the unwillingness to admit to a mistaken judgment of character, and the mistaken idea that a crime (especially mistaken in the case of a hate crime like rape) is a matter solely between the victim and the perpetrator and has no external ramifications — can also be seen in another recent example of rape culture at work.

Another Note on Kennedy: Politicization

Atrios and Amanda Marcotte have this exactly right, of course.  And more generally, as Aimai notes, using a major figure’s death to try to galvanize support for the causes that person believed in is a perfectly normal, reasonable thing to do, and it would really be nice if we’d all stop pretending that there’s something wrong with saying: Ted Kennedy is no longer with us, but let us honor his memory by fighting harder, by doubling our efforts, to achieve those goals to which he dedicated his life.  Health care for all.  A living wage for all.  Equality under the law.  The principle that human rights do not end where citizenship does.  A better world.

After all, on the one hand Kennedy was a master politician.  He loved politics, he lived and breathed politics, he believed — as I believe — that politics is not only a necessary, inherent part of human life but has the potential to be used for great good.  To suggest that we would do him best honor by refraining from politics seems odd, at best.  And on the other hand, it’s not as though conservatives are going to scrupulously avoid “politicizing” his death, though they’ll mainly do it under cover of pretending to decry liberal “politicization.”  Indeed, digby points out that Limbaugh is already doing this.

Actually, Limbaugh is a little bit right, here, though I’m pretty sure it’s by accident.  Attaching Kennedy’s name to the bill most likely to pass — some watered-down compromise with no public option and a lot of giveaways to insurance companies — would be an insult to his memory.  Senator Kennedy was a pragmatic incrementalist, as also am I, but he always fought to get as much as he thought he could each time.  Incrementalism ceases to be pragmatic if you seek only the tiniest improvement even when a greater leap is feasible, and health care, now, is surely such a case.  Nearly four in five Americans supports a public option. To fail to take advantage of that opportunity, and especially to embrace such failure as a fitting tribute to Senator Kennedy’s legacy, would truly be an insult.

Punishment, Revenge, Compassion and the Nature of Civilization

A little less than a week ago, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan man convicted of the Pan-Am Flight 103 bombing which killed 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from prison to return to Libya, under the authority of the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill.  Probably the most succinct summary of events is the  BBC’s timeline, but there’s been much ink spilled over this, so by all means ask The Google if you need more information.

As I say, much ink has been spilled, virtually all of it in outrage as far as I can tell.  Al-Megrahi is dying of final-stage terminal prostate cancer, yet there are deafening cries from all over the US and the UK that to have released a dying man who could harm no one now, so that he might die, one hopes a bit more comfortable, at home, surrounded by family, and so that his family might have the comfort of seeing him again — that to have done this is monstrous, horrible, an affront to justice and rightness and an insult to the families of al-Megrahi’s victims.

What I would like to know is, how does it help the families of the victims, or serve the cause of justice, to inflict unnecessary suffering on a helpless, terminally ill person?  Don’t demand revenge and claim it’s justice you want: the two are incompatible.  Indeed, revenge and civilization are incompatible.

Societies have the right to punish people by imprisonment and confiscation of assets, to the extent that such punishment helps to deter future crime and is not disproportionate to what the criminal has done, and to the extent that confiscated assets can help to compensate the criminal’s victims; and societies have the right to imprison people who commit crimes, so long again as the duration of imprisonment is not disproportionate to the damage done to society by the criminal, to protect society from further damage.  No reasonable person could suggest that any of these purposes is served by keeping a terminally ill man in prison, without access to adequate medical care, for the last, painful months of his life.

To refuse to release al-Megrahi would have been to repay barbarism with barbarism.  Secretary MacAskill clearly made the right choice.

(What Does It Take For CNN To) Fire Lou Dobbs

As folks like the indispensable Dave Neiwert have amply chronicled, CNN’s primetime star Lou Dobbs has long provided a mainstream loudspeaker for radical racist/xenophobic nativism, and contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia about “illegals” that leads to the murder of 9-year-old-girls.  His vicious, fact-free anti-immigrant ravings alone should have prevented him from ever being allowed a spot on a major news network.

But now he’s picked an additional target, and a new set of paranoid fantasies: President Obama and the Birther cause.  It’s hard to imagine how he could get any farther beyond the pale at this point.

Media Matters’ press release covers the essentials and links to a number of their other posts on the subject.  Ta-Nehisi and tristero are all over it too, and make very good points, as usual.

CNN needs to either fire Dobbs, or drop the “News” from their name and give similar amounts of coverage to every equally plausible conspiracy theory: the moon-landing-hoax theory, for example, and the Roswell coverup, and of course the 9/11 Truthers while we’re at it.  Maybe throw in a special on how no one really knows for sure whether the Freemasons secretly control all the governments of the world.  Rehire Glenn Beck, why not?  He’s no crazier than the Birthers.

Dobbs is an embarrassment, CNN.  Dump him: your credibility’s on the line.

Domestic Terrorism

A good man was murdered yesterday.

Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas was one of only a handful — perhaps two, or three, or four, there doesn’t appear to be a clear consensus — of doctors in the entire United States who perform late-term abortions.

Yesterday, as he was walking into church services, someone shot and killed him.

Tiller has been a major target of the anti-choice movement for a very long time.  He has lived with near-constant death threats, frequent vandalism, and other intimidation and demonization, for many years; in 1993, in an earlier attempt on his life, he was shot in both arms, but recovered and returned to practice.

Only a couple of months ago, he was acquitted of trumped-up misdemeanor charges brought in an attempt to prevent him from helping women.

He has been attacked by Bill O’Reilly, persecuted via the Kansas legal system and, now, murdered for doing his duty as a doctor as best he saw it to help women who, on top of being faced with terrible, heartbreaking decisions, were being bombarded from all sides by messages that they were bad, unworthy people who deserved no help.

They did deserve help, of course.  They do deserve help.  Dr. Tiller was one of very few people willing to help them; and now that number is smaller.

It’s important to understand this about late-term abortions: they are a procedure that is simply never performed except for reasons of medical necessity.  They are performed when the mother’s health is gravely imperiled by the pregnancy or the prospect of giving birth, or when the fetus suffers from congenital deformities or defects which will ensure its life is very brief and very painful, or when the fetus is already dead to save the mother the trauma of delivering a stillborn baby, or sometimes when the mother’s only chance to survive cancer is to enroll in an experimental treatment which doesn’t accept pregnant women.  No one ever, ever wants late-term abortions to be necessary; but sometimes they are.

Now that there is one fewer doctor who performs these procedures in the country, many women will be unable to have this necessary procedure performed.  Some will be bankrupted trying to pay for medical care for an infant which cannot survive.  Some will be plunged into depression over delivering a corpse or watching helplessly as their babies die.  Some — dozens? perhaps a hundred or more? — will die along with their fetuses, due to the birth complications that made the abortion a necessity.

The domestic terrorist who murdered Dr. Tiller has killed them too.

I was going to add links to this post, but so much has been written that I hardly know where to start.  Virtually every political blog on my blogroll has one or more posts about it, should any readers want more.

So I’ll just point to Jill Filipovic’s list of suggested organizations to donate money to in Dr. Tiller’s honor, to Sara Robinson’s explanation of how terrorism like this is a natural consequence — indeed, the goal — of decades of right-wing eliminationist rhetoric, and to Ann’s list of things we can do.