March 294th.

It's about time to pause my job search for a couple weeks, as the industry tends to just hibernate until the new year. New job openings will appear, as everyone finalizes their 2021 headcount. It'll be fine.

Last night the Shitgibbon and his pet lunatics sat down in the Oval Office and discussed how to stage a coup, by physical force, using the military and everything. Attorneys on Twitter are now (re-?)acquainting themselves with the dust-caked federal crime of "seditious conspiracy," which seems to mostly get pulled out for terrorists (even white ones) because, let's be honest: it exceeds the ambition of most criminals. Unlike every other conspiracy charge, seditious conspiracy doesn't require you to have gone as far as to start your overthrow of the government or its laws, so this seems to qualify. Good times!

This is the first winter I've had a violin nice enough to really feel affected by the weather. Higher-end violins are built more lightly, so they can resonate more, which makes them more sensitive and harder to play, and also makes them more likely to disintegrate when rented to students (who are mostly kids). I also haven't particularly liked my rental violins, so it's a treat to have one I really enjoy. It's still a stupid instrument.

My violin teacher, already working remotely, and with finances only somewhat better than you'd expect for a Millennial musician, went down to Puerto Vallarta a few weeks ago. My first question was "Are you coming back?" and the question is open, but he's certainly ripe for the expat life. Absent the ability of the Bay Area to put you in a room with the right people, you might as well go someplace else.

(There's a famous Scottish fiddler named Alasdair Fraser, who actually lives relatively nearby here, and whose son Galen is also a local musician. Alasdair wrote a pair of tunes I learned in simplified form, but my teacher described being out at a jam session, and "Galen's Arrival" came up, and Galen said, "That's me! I'm Galen!" and of course the song was written for his birth. But there are no jam sessions.)

We're staying home. We should walk the dog more. We're all healthy, for the moment, but the pandemic is looking grimmer than ever.

One nice feature of a new job will be that I'll have less time to read Twitter.

reading retreat

I took a couple nights last weekend at a retreat cabin in the mountains. I finally finished William F. Buckley's God and Man At Yale, and it is a slog. 60 years on, and myself having worked my way through 90s liberal arts education at the tail of political correctness, it's hard to understand what he's so exercised about. I have that problem with conservatives in general, which is why I picked this book up. I'm hoping that in reading books that matter to conservatives, I'll develop a more charitable understanding of a worldview where someone just can't decide whether to vote for Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

"I just don't know, Larry. Do I vote for the guy who hates fags as much as I do, or the guy who promises to cut Medicare and use the savings to build a base on the moon?"

I finally found a couple of quotations that illustrate the thrust of the book. He spends some time establishing that there are actually some limits professors have to operate within--no Communists, for example.

In short, I maintain that sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy: there are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be "tolerated."

Now these limits are very wide indeed, and they are limits prescribed by expediency, not by principle. My task becomes, then, not so much to argue that limits should be imposed, but that existing limits should be narrowed. [p. 151, his italics]

He's arguing in part for what he calls "values inculcation," which is to say that Yale professors should teach the obvious and absolute truths of Christianity and capitalism as the highest goods. You could maybe forgive this as a product of his age, except that he insists repeatedly that students must learn the methods of skepticism and free inquiry...so that they can come to the conclusions Buckley approves of. I thought this encapsulated the idea nicely:

There is great and decisive freedom to be found within the sense-making limits of orthodoxy. [p. 174]

Or, as Stephen Colbert put it:

Though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be you Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

I think all I've learned from this is to confirm that the supposed intellectual foundation of conservatism is a crock. Buckley was a repellent human being, and he was supposed to be the grown-up in the movement. American conservatism amounts to saying that the world was created by white capitalist Christians, and that's the way it should be. You can see this in their insane, apocalyptic continuous freakout about President Obama: one popular trope has it that "we don't know anything about him," that somehow the media gave him a pass during the election. Or that he's some kind of overprivileged affirmative-action hire. The abundant documentation and the autobiography that predates his running for office tell his history pretty clearly, but the American right can't accept the true story it tells: a successful, hard-working, self-made, intelligent black man.

I dunno. I keep hoping there's a non-loony viewpoint in there somewhere, and I guess there used to be some: I'm all in favor of making changes carefully and thoughtfully, which is something conservatives used to advocate when they needed a civilized public story while privately lamenting that women and blacks ever got the vote. Now they just lament publicly, and there's a population segment that loves it. I appreciate the honesty, in a way. Shine some sunlight on all that hatred and anger and fear. Maybe we can talk about it. Maybe some people can get a hug, and a nap and some graham crackers.

Then again, Rick Perlstein wrote a great piece for Rolling Stone about how none of this is new.

maybe you can help me out

I had this conversation on Facebook back on April 8th:

Dear women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people: You know the Republican Party despises you, right? As in, doesn't respect you enough to tell you so to your face? As in, it will always, always, always end up screwing you over by working to take away your rights and any public services that might help you, for the benefit of industry and oligarchs, even if they told you they wouldn't?

One way in which I've found the Tea Party to be a breath of fresh air is that they've at least been pretty up-front about their hatred. That carries its own very serious problems and brings out the worst in voters, but it has the feel of suppressed urges being laid out on the table for everyone to have to acknowledge.

A friend responded:

I don't buy that the Republican Party "despises" non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people. What I do buy is that the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party has drastically different expectations of how society should be structured, and that those expectations are not being met in the same way they were, say, 75 years ago. Their frame has virtually no overlap with the average liberal frame, such that their fighting/talking points come across as jibberish to a non-ultra-conservative, or in this case that they "despise" those groups.

Me:

That's a very generous, not to say politically correct, way of looking at it. That's useful for understanding how conservatives see themselves, but it strikes me as being of the same school as the media's "We'll report both sides, and who are we to judge?". I admit I'm making a value judgement, and "despise" is a strong word, when maybe "fear and disdain" would suffice. When the "frame" from 75 years ago, which they're trying to enact today, says that blacks and Latinos should have difficulty voting, or that women shouldn't have to be paid an equal wage, or that blue-collar (hence lower-income) workers shouldn't be protected from workplace hazards...is that treating those people as full and equal human beings? The Republican Party, as a governing entity, constantly says through actions and often through words, "I don't consider you a full member of society because of your race/gender/sexuality/income. You do not deserve the full protections and rights that others do." If devaluing someone's humanity isn't despising them, then I'm not sure what is.

It's an interesting question, and really at the core of the divisions in American society, and our mainstream culture's painful addiction to what Paul Krugman calls the "cult of balance":

Think about what's happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating -- offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent -- because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

Krugman once said that if one political party declared the Earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ On Shape Of Earth". It really is that ludicrous.

We're so far from being willing to declare that even the most basic things are wrong (even factually, not just morally or ethically) and not just a difference of opinion that I'm starting to think that with the current media environment we could never even have managed desegregation.

Yet, nothing is simple. Same-sex marriage is alive and valid in six states plus D.C, which was unthinkable just a decade ago.

What do you think? I'm pretty harsh on the Republican Party (and by extension, its supporters) because I find its actions despicable. What's another way to look at it? How else do I interpret things?

Obama *always* looks bad when he's working

Like everyone else, I've been disappointed in Obama's public wishy-washy-ness, his pathological desire for compromise and consensus with a lunatic opposition. Time and again it looks like he backs off and backs down and the Republicans run roughshod all over him, when he could make a different choice to stand up stronger, speak up earlier, or use the language of a more forceful conviction.

I don't want to deny his moral failures: on any number of anti-terrorism practices (government surveillance, Guantanamo Bay, the PATRIOT Act, ad infinitum), or the financial meltdown. On the other hand, despite superficial appearances, he has clearly been working against DADT (the Pentagon's "no gays" policy) and DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex relationships): these are clearly going down. Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's feeble defense of DADT and lifted its stay, meaning the military had to stop enforcing it immediately, rather than "as soon as we're certain it won't impact operations." The administration's "defense" of those laws has been hard to judge: one Justice Department brief on DADT, in particular, was viciously homophobic. In retrospect, it looks more like the administration has been giving everyone cover and saying "okay, well, we tried to defend it, we failed," while the courts rightfully eviscerate them. It's been a long and complicated game.

So it's depressing to watch what looks like him getting batted around on the debt ceiling issue by the GOP, like a budding sociopathic child pulling the wings off a fly. But it wasn't all that long ago that we were saying the same things about him during the health care reform process, which most of us were surprised to find ending in the passage of an imperfect bill that nonetheless puts us well on the road to truly universal health care.

Several times now, Obama has played Rope-a-Dope, allowing himself to suffer bad political optics while playing more subtle games to successfully accomplish his goals. To be honest, I think he's earned a little benefit of the doubt. Let's sit back and let the man work.

maybe you can help me out

I had this conversation on Facebook back on April 8th:

Dear women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people: You know the Republican Party despises you, right? As in, doesn't respect you enough to tell you so to your face? As in, it will always, always, always end up screwing you over by working to take away your rights and any public services that might help you, for the benefit of industry and oligarchs, even if they told you they wouldn't?

One way in which I've found the Tea Party to be a breath of fresh air is that they've at least been pretty up-front about their hatred. That carries its own very serious problems and brings out the worst in voters, but it has the feel of suppressed urges being laid out on the table for everyone to have to acknowledge.

A friend responded:

I don't buy that the Republican Party "despises" non-whites, non-heterosexuals, and poor people. What I do buy is that the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party has drastically different expectations of how society should be structured, and that those expectations are not being met in the same way they were, say, 75 years ago. Their frame has virtually no overlap with the average liberal frame, such that their fighting/talking points come across as jibberish to a non-ultra-conservative, or in this case that they "despise" those groups.

Me:

That's a very generous, not to say politically correct, way of looking at it. That's useful for understanding how conservatives see themselves, but it strikes me as being of the same school as the media's "We'll report both sides, and who are we to judge?". I admit I'm making a value judgement, and "despise" is a strong word, when maybe "fear and disdain" would suffice. When the "frame" from 75 years ago, which they're trying to enact today, says that blacks and Latinos should have difficulty voting, or that women shouldn't have to be paid an equal wage, or that blue-collar (hence lower-income) workers shouldn't be protected from workplace hazards...is that treating those people as full and equal human beings? The Republican Party, as a governing entity, constantly says through actions and often through words, "I don't consider you a full member of society because of your race/gender/sexuality/income. You do not deserve the full protections and rights that others do." If devaluing someone's humanity isn't despising them, then I'm not sure what is.

It's an interesting question, and really at the core of the divisions in American society, and our mainstream culture's painful addiction to what Paul Krugman calls the "cult of balance":

Think about what's happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating -- offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent -- because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

Krugman once said that if one political party declared the Earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ On Shape Of Earth". It really is that ludicrous.

We're so far from being willing to declare that even the most basic things are wrong (even factually, not just morally or ethically) and not just a difference of opinion that I'm starting to think that with the current media environment we could never even have managed desegregation.

Yet, nothing is simple. Same-sex marriage is alive and valid in six states plus D.C, which was unthinkable just a decade ago.

What do you think? I'm pretty harsh on the Republican Party (and by extension, its supporters) because I find its actions despicable. What's another way to look at it? How else do I interpret things?

rant rant ranty rant

If you've known me long enough, I may have vented at you about the American right's lack of principles. They show this mostly through their language: if they were to say "We're reactionaries who think gays and minorities are inferior and we want to rewrite the world to reflect a mythical period of moral perfection from the late 50s," I could respect them, but instead they claim to be conservative. They're the ones with solid, unshakeable principles; it's us lily-livered, egghead, elitist, intellectual, bleeding-heart liberals who change our beliefs at the drop of a hat in pursuit of our true goal of a bloated government freeing everyone from the need to work.

(Or something. I'm not really clear. Right-wingers are often mumbling about socialism and "statism" and how leftists want to grow government at all costs. In their world, it seems the Department of Defense is not a government agency, and "I think everyone should have food, shelter, and health care, and the government has critical and sometimes limited roles to play in making that happen" is not a clear enough declaration of belief. Too many commas, maybe.)

Anyway, here's two juicy examples.

• The Republican war on the constitution. This is just the stuff Republicans want to repeal or change; it'd be another long list to talk about the stuff they perverted and degraded during Bush II's reign of destruction. (To be fair, Obama isn't pulling enough of it back, but at least we've returned to paying lip service.)
• Homophobe fan club Focus on the Family applauds the Wisconsin Attorney General for refusing to defend domestic partnerships, then a year later (to the day) excoriates the California Attorney General for refusing to defend Proposition 8.

As a bonus feature, a Talking Points Memo reader sent them this:

Why, oh why do conservatives over and over again demonstrate little to no empathy for their fellow man until they themselves are humbled? And even then... their empathy is limited only to those in their own predicament.

Take Dick Cheney (please). This man is quite tolerant of homosexuality (for a Republican), because he has a gay daughter. But in every other way, he is almost the definition of a hard-liner in both foreign and domestic affairs: pro SS privatization; anti-social safety net; and pro-torture.

Rush Limbaugh is infamous for the harsh things he said about drug users... until he was discovered to be one himself. Perhaps now he has the good sense not to talk about drug enforcement... but does anyone believe that Rush's experience and expensive rehab made him in any other way a gentler, more considerate person?

And now there's Duke Cunningham [sent to prison for corruption] who has suddenly become a bleeding-heart on prison conditions and the criminal justice system.

The full post uses more confrontational language than I would choose (I often feel like that's really saying something) but doesn't have a bad point.

Prop 8: on the other side

I hopped over to TheNextRight.com and RedState.com (not giving them any links, sorry) to see if conservatives were freaking out about the Prop 8 decision. The Next Right didn't mention it at all--they are, or were when I was reading more regularly, trying to create a sane American conservatism not based on retrograde culture war and massive tax breaks for billionaires. Well, not based on culture war, anyway.

RedState had a few pieces on the decision, of which I read the two longer ones (hereand here): wrong, sometimes in subtle ways, but to their credit, they both managed to write two pages without mentioning that the judge was gay (something the defense declined to contest at any point in the proceedings). And the comments were relatively moderate, free of suggestions for armed rebellion, and with some clear peer pressure to keep the nuttiness down. This surprised me, and not only because American conservatism is a cesspool of fear-driven reactionary polemic divorced from reality. RedState's founder, Erick Erickson, called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a "goat f*&king child molester" on Twitter, and that's a representative sample of his discourse.

The columns themselves have a lot of tricky fallacies (which usually amount to "Of course gay marriage is wrong, it's GAY MARRIAGE"), but the comments are more striking, and match conservative views of law and government over the past many years.

The recurring theme is a profound misunderstanding, which seems nearly deliberate, of what's in the Constitution, why it's there, what "rights" are, how the government works. See, for example, this classic Onion article.

• "Free speech" suits the needs of the moment. Sarah Palin referred to media criticism of her as a violation of her free speech rights, and opponents of marriage equality seem to think their "First Amendment rights" including preventing gays from getting married. The honest idea of the First Amendment as supporting, say, free speech, or religion--you know, for everyone--seems less important.
• Selective reading: one commenter said that California already treats everyone equally, because everyone has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex. The decision specifically notes that that for gays and lesbians, that's the same as not having a right to marry, and the fundamental right in question is to marry the person of your choice.
• One comment, which I now can't find, said something like "Yes, but where's the constitutional harm?". As though the decision didn't address that in the first 3 pages and spend the remaining 135 explaining it.
• The commenters seem very upset that one man nullified the will of 7 million California voters. One more leftist commenter responded, "Yes, those 7 million voters enacted an unconstitutional statute." I imagine if the voters of California voted some right-to-abortion law that a judge overturned, they'd be fine with it.

They seem not to understand that this was the chance to litigate this. The state declined to defend Prop 8: the proponents themselves stepped in to provide the defense, and they did an awful job, because they were holding a logically indefensible position. Most of their expert witnesses were withdrawn before trial, for no stated reason, and one of the remaining two was determined to be partly unqualified as an expert, and the other was deemed wholly unreliable because he's not an expert in anything. This was the time to throw your cards down: you think gays marrying will somehow damage heterosexual marriages? Prove it. Think straight couples are better parents than gay couples? Prove it. There was no shortage of money or fanaticism on the proponents' side, but they had a full trial in open court to prove every lie and stereotype they'd been spreading about homosexuals, and all that happened is they disproved their own points. Here's the scale of the failure:

At oral argument on proponents’ motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents’ counsel the assumption that “the state’s interest in marriage is procreative” and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Counsel replied that the inquiry was “not the legally relevant question,” but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”

That's a bad answer to be coming from a lawyer. Especially if it's your lawyer.

There may be a twist in the epilogue: this article wonders how much farther the case can actually get: if California doesn't appeal the decision, Prop 8 proponents may not have standing to drive the appeal, since they weren't originally the defendants and only stepped in to cover for the state. And really, who's going to be able to show they've been harmed by another group of strangers being able to marry? Comedy!

I bet he doesn't kick puppies, either

Back home again with the girl, so naturally I'm reading the news. Thanks to Talking Points Memo, here's a gem of an interview with Harold Ford, who's considering a primary challenge to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was appointed to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. Ford appears to be a Joe Lieberman sort of Democrat (which is to say, one who disagrees with everything the Democratic Party stands for and would like to accomplish), and the whole interview is meandering and Palin-esque in places, but this is the real money quote (emphasis added):

Q. Guns. Let's talk about this issue.

A: I never got an A rating, like my opponent -- would-be opponent -- has enjoyed. I don't own them. I do shoot them, and I shoot them at things that can't shoot back. And will continue to do that. And by that, I want to be clear, I don't mean children. I have done a little bird hunting in my day.

To be honest, it hadn't occurred to me that a candidate for Senate might shoot children on his days off, but now that he brings it up, I guess it's...reassuring? Or something.