Victorious.
There is, of course, a limit to how much Assange can win. In the US, officials are finding that while there were certainly structural reasons like expanded technology and overclassification behind the theft of the leaked documents, practical reasons were equally important. Thanks to an imperative from then commander of the U.S. Central Command David Petraeus and others to share information with allies on improvised explosive devices and other threats, the Central Command allowed the downloading of data from its secret in-house network, SIPRNet, to removable storage devices, officials tell TIME. The information was then carried to computers linked to secret networks used by allies and uploaded. The process was derisively called “sneaker net,” because it was so inefficient, although it replaced the prior need to manually retype all information into the allied computers.
New restrictions on downloading media have been imposed over the past six months, restoring the restrictions that existed before the leaks. That may be one victory for the US.
—Massimo Calabresi, “Why WikiLeaks is Winning its Info War”
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
—Julian Assange, “The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance“
Molester, pervert, disgusting, an embarrassment, creep.
The hard hard work of increasing US and decreasing THEM is never ever done.
Why SF doesn’t work any more.
On the one hand, there’s earnest little think-pieces like this, that limn lively ideas whose time’s long since come, whose time’s been settled for a good long while now in the chair over there by the door, tapping its toe, looking at its watch; basic, simple ideas, easy to communicate, desperately necessary, more than able to carry us through the state in which we seem to have stuck ourselves:
As productivity increases, we seem faced with a choice between environmental disaster or massive unemployment. Unless, of course, we slow down by reducing working hours and sharing the work. Half a century of economic growth has not increased our happiness. More free time might well do so. It will certainly improve our health.
And on the other, there’s a couple of septaugenarian billionaires who’ve decided in their wisdom to poison the none-too-healthy political discourse of the United States, skirting genocidal levels of ethnic hatred; to pillage and loot the remnants of the vibrant middle class that was this country’s finest achievement, the whole point of all that hullabaloo of freedom and liberty; to repeat until we all can’t help but say ourselves: we can no longer afford to take care of the things we’ve built, the schools we need, the art we love, the friends and relations too old, too ill, unlucky at just the wrong time; they’ve coldly plotted, these two, the murder of millions if not billions of people yet to come, just as any supervillain might; they decree that my daughter and your son must live lives so much smaller than they possibly could have been, so much meaner than they potentially could be—and all because these two men in some abstract sense feel they are not making enough money, here and now; in some abstract sense (which no doubt they could explain to you at some length, with charts and diagrams), they feel they pay too much in taxes.
(Meanwhile? The nominally leftist party in this country, on the verge of historic midterm defeats, is standing up for unpopular tax cuts for the rich and quietly working to gut the last vestiges of its former triumphs.)
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
(Yes, Papa. We know. They have more money. —Watch how big that more becomes, you let it grow unchecked a bit.)
And I will spit on your grave.
In 2006, my attention (such as it is) was captured by the story of one David H. Brooks, who hired 50 Cent and Don Henley and Stevie Nicks and Ærosmith to play his daughter’s bat mitzvah with the profits he made from a sweetheart deal selling inadequate supplies of substandard body armor to our sub-minimum-wage soldiers in Iraq. —How inadequate and substandard? Studies demonstrated that 80% of Marine casualties with upper body wounds could have survived with better (or any) armor. —How sweet? When that study was leaked, soldiers who’d scrimped and saved to buy their own superior armor were suddenly ordered to leave it home, to avoid any possible hurt feelings on the part of a certain David H. Brooks.
And then it receded into the mists of who the fuck can possibly do a damn thing about it? —Why, even today, when a progressive regime has finally triumphed over the forces of evil to take both cameras and the White House itself, a two-year investigation by one of our preëminent journalistic organs that demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt the staggering waste and corruption endemic to the shadow cabinets that are tasked with keeping us safe inspires little more than yawns. —How much worse our apathy and despair in the deeps of the Bushian aught-naughts! What chance had any of us then against such a banal kernel of evil as this David H. Brooks?
And so I let it go. What more was there to say?
—Today, I followed a cryptic link from William Gibson’s Twitter feed, and I read this article with a mounting sense of—well, I’m not sure what the word is. But:
Several years ago, David H. Brooks, the chief executive and chairman of a body-armor company enriched by United States military contracts, became fixated on the idea of a memory-erasing pill.
It was not just fanciful curiosity. A veterinarian who cared for his stable of racehorses said Mr. Brooks continually talked about the subject, pressing him repeatedly to supply the pill. According to Dr. Seth Fishman, the veterinarian, Mr. Brooks said he had a specific recipient in mind: Dawn Schlegel, the former chief financial officer of the company he led until 2006, DHB Industries.
There is no memory-erasing pill. And so Mr. Brooks sat and listened this year as Ms. Schlegel, her memory apparently intact and keen, spent 23 days testifying against him in a highly unusual trial in United States District Court on Long Island that has been highlighted by sweeping accusations of fraud, insider trading, and company-financed personal extravagance.
DHB, which specialized in making body armor used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid for more than $6 million in personal expenses on behalf of Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
And—it isn’t schadenfreude, no; this is something colder, older; a little frightening, really: I went and poured myself a shot of bourbon to dull the edge a bit, but then I went and read it again:
Mr. Brooks, who his lawyers have said is in a “tenuous emotional state,” has watched much of the proceedings with glassy eyes and a nervous demeanor.
They straight up just lost nine billion dollars of our money in saran-wrapped bundles dropped in the dust of Iraq.
They’re coming for Social Security, the one thing the Republicans couldn’t wreck when they were running the show, because we just can’t afford it anymore.
It may not be enough compensation to one day use the last of the money in my pocket to hie myself to some Long Island cemetery, there to spit on the grave of this particular David H. Brooks.
It’ll probably have to do.
Ichorous, squamous, and rugose.
“I would have given a lot to be at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last night, where Elton John (his fee a reported 1 million bucks) performed for America’s leading homophobe, and not only because I would have enjoyed that moral dichotomy. I imagine the event to have been more rite than celebration, a frog on a throne, something darker than blood flowing from the champagne fountain, some tincture of BP spill mingled with something more Lovecraftian, a conjunction of Bacchanalian and Bactrian purposes and flavors. I’m certain it was just the usual bad taste scenario, overweight men flirting with women half their age, a toga party for grown ups, as we’ve seen before with certain corporate entertainments; but you can’t completely disassociate the idea of ancient evil from Limbaugh’s buffoonish act. He’s the clown at the party of the damned, dressed in a froggy zipskin suit and playing with a string of mummified human hearts, flicking out his whiplike tongue to snag Viagra from a crystal bowl.” —Lucius Shepard
“You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
So, right: the default response to a post from John C. Wright, then, turns out to be exactly the same as the default punchline to a New Yorker cartoon. (—And I have to keep reminding myself: this is from the intellectual end of the rump.)
Important events, and important ideas.
Oodles of channels of 24-hour news, moldering reams of newspapers that will not die, 127 goddamn feeds in my goddamn Google newsreader, and I’m only now finding out that Utah Phillips died sometime last year? —Somebody’s priorities are way the hell out of whack.
Cochliomyia hominivorax delendum est.
How’s that for eliminationist rhetoric?
I feel vaguely guilty, making such a deal of accepting John C. Wright into my life. After all, what’s he done since then? A turgid apologia (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi) that in no way indicated he’d thought at all as promised on what the Elders of Sodom had wrote, and an all-but-unreadable screed against empiricism (I think): Neo cannot say why he chooses to fight, and thus homosex is wrong, quod erat dammit. Overall a disappointing performance I must say.
—And then John H. Richardson has to cast a chilly pall over the whole enterprise anyway by going and talking to Mike Austin, an eighth-grade teacher in Oklahoma who until recently was saving the world one essay at a time over at the Return of Scipio.
Yeah, that Return of Scipio. Took me a minute too.
And Richardson has a lovely conversation or two with Austin, who seems a much nicer person than the Scipio Resurgent, much I’m sure as John C. Wright is much nicer than 
johncwright; he seems a hale enough fellow, I suppose, who could essay a hearty laugh—but that’s just how it works. Most of us are better than our manifestos.
But still and all:
As we drive back to my hotel through the clean wide streets of Oklahoma City, I take a chance on some gentle teasing: “Everything’s so well-groomed, you got no garbage, no graffiti—I do not see the collapse of American civilization here.”
His answer comes out cold as a can from a Coke machine: “If you were to look at the streets of Nazi Germany in 1936, they would appear a lot like this. Probably cleaner.”
I’ve heard this exact argument before, from the Glenn Beck follower types, but I can’t believe they really mean to compare their fellow Americans to the most cold-blooded killers in human history. It must be rhetoric. They can’t be that alienated from the society that has given them, beyond any civilization in history, lives of such extraordinary privilege and comfort. My voice rises with my exasperation. “You could say that about any town anywhere!”
His answer comes back steady and patient, like he’s explaining history to one of his eighth graders. “The government in Washington, DC has encroached so much on states’ rights, it seems like we don’t have a federal system any more, rather an imperial one. And when the states lose their rights guaranteed in the Constitution, then what you have is tyranny.”
Obama is a fascist, he continues. Setting the limits of investment-bank incomes and claiming the right to seize General Motors are just two examples. Where in the Constitution does it grant him those powers? Are we a nation of laws, or is this a lawless regime that sends out its goons like Mussolini?
(And there it is, the voice of the blog: What has always stood against lawless men? Force. That is the only idiom understood by such men. To answer lawless men with force is to speak their language.)
[…]
“There are things worse than violence, John,” Austin tells me. “Slavery is worse than violence. The most peaceful place in the world is the cemetery.”
It is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…
There’s a new outfit in town—
—whose name’s suggested perhaps by all the glittering potentates who came to do homage to the aforementioned Elders of Sodom on receipt of their open letter to Wright. The basic mission statement for members reads as follows:
As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
This first of September, the Kalends of Sextilis, they’re asking for a show of hands. They suggest a link to fiction which is in any way on mission, and while there’s this or that I could point to, there’s also this or that game I don’t want to give away, and so instead I’ll highlight an old series of posts:
It’s how I started swatting at screwflies, anyway.
John C. Wright will of course forever be known for or at least in light of his hatred of homosex, but for all that he can’t bring himself to wish for the destruction of its practitioners, adherents, and supporters; at worst, we all get to sit in closets again, as Morality ever-so-passively just somehow returns. —Mike Austin, the (former) Scipio Resurgent, is at once more cosmopolitan and strict (then, Scipio was famously Græcophilic), but even he can’t bring himself to take the action he seems to think is vital; can’t help but laugh with the mainstream media man who’s come to talk to him; can only lash out at abstract ideas that have never set foot in Oklahoma or anywhere else. —They may have gone around the bend, but there’s enough shame yet to prevent them from actually advocating the clear, precise, destructive, eliminationist praxis needed to bring about the world they think they want.
And where there’s shame, there’s hope?
Room enough, anyway, for words: and enough of them, from stories told, from lives lived, from experiences actually had, will always outweigh an argument merely propounded.
We’ve always been better than our manifestos.
Sure thing.
Who’s keeping the office pool on Christianist Ministers Likely to be Found in the Next Six Months with a Baggie of Meth and a Rentboy these days? I want to put a benjamin down on Steven Anderson.
Go, look, see.
Yes, the beginning of this chapter’s been a slow burn (in more ways than one), but if you haven’t read this week’s Dicebox page because you’re doing the web equivalent of waiting for the trade, well, you’re putting off till later what you could be appreciating right the heck now.
Just walk it off down Highway 61.
I was thinking as I wrote the below of comfort zones and how far my daily round tests mine, and I don’t think it’s to my credit that the writer on my feeds most likely to make me roll my eyes is Radley Balko. —For all that I fiercely agree with the work he’s done and the fight he fights, there’s still that fundamental assumption clash, and when he starts to talk about say health care I find I’m biting my tongue.
The point that’s missed in the Bob Dylan story, as a less inflammatory for-instance. —Dylan goes for a walk before a concert in Long Branch, New Jersey; somebody sees an old man in a jacket wandering around in the rain, looking at houses, and calls the police; the young whippersnappers don’t realize they’re dealing with, y’know, Bob Dylan, and take this old man who has no ID back to where he says he came from, where he’s vouched for, and exeunt. —I saw it as a charming little anecdote about how celebrity somehow still doesn’t always guarantee special treatment, with a grace note re: the ineffable charms of Long Branch’s run-down, once-glorious Shore-side neighborhoods; Balko, well—
I don’t know. I find it pretty depressing. There was a time when we condescendingly used the term “your papers, please” to distinguish ourselves from Eastern Block countries and other authoritarian states. Post-Hibbel, America has become a place where a harmless, 68-year-old man out on a stroll can be stopped, interrogated, detained, and forced to produce proof of identification to state authorities, despite having committed no crime.
I guess I just don’t see the punchline.
Joe Strummer in the comments makes the obvious point:
How is it that it’s suddenly the “end of America” when a 68 year old white guy gets stopped by cops and asked where he is? Hasn’t this been a feature of the African-American experience since… whenever? Welcome to the party, folks.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m instead thinking of “The Pedestrian.”
“Your name?” said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn’t see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.
“Leonard Mead,” he said.
“Speak up!”
“Leonard Mead!”
“Business or profession?”
“I guess you’d call me a writer.”
“No profession,” said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.
“You might say that,” said Mr Mead.
He hadn’t written in years. Magazines and books didn’t sell anymore. Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.
“No profession,” said the phonograph voice, hissing. “What are you doing out?”
“Walking,” said Leonard Mead.
“Walking!”
“Just walking,” he said simply, but his face felt cold.
“Walking, just walking, walking?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Walking where? For what?”
“Walking for air. Walking to see.”
Balko dates our fall from grace to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hibbel, from 2004. Bradbury wrote “The Pedestrian” in 1951, after getting stopped by the police while walking with a friend down Wilshire Boulevard—
Bradbury answered “Well, we’re putting one foot in front of the other.” The policeman didn’t appreciate Ray’s humor and he became suspicious of Bradbury and his friend for walking in an area where there were no pedestrians. After some arguing the policeman told them to go home and to not walk any more. Bradbury said “Yes, sir, I’ll never walk again.”
The Dylan story, and the Bradbury story, are measures of how we still aren’t living up to an ideal, not how far we’ve fallen from some idyllic past. To pretend otherwise is to mistake one’s rhetoric for the real—the same error in kind if not degree as fighting off a homosexual lobby comprised mostly of happily married heterosexual couples. It may well fit the narrative of one’s current fierce fight—Hibbel is a nasty little watermark in the constant erosion of the Fourth Amendment—but it seems as if you’re seriously arguing that there was ever an America where the cops wouldn’t stop a 68-year-old man out on a stroll, or any of the rest of us who looked to someone like we didn’t belong. And that makes you seem (charmingly, frustratingly, dangerously) out of touch.
One way of course to avoid or at least curtail these assumptions, these privileges, these rhetorical irrealities, is to read outside one’s comfort zone, and I’m in no way trying to imply Balko doesn’t. Nothing’s a guarantee some asshole on the internet won’t find some nit to pick. I’m just trying to bring it back home, you know? Here is this boat in which we all find ourselves. —Anyway, with the addition of johncwright as noted below, I think it’s safe to say Balko’s no longer anywhere near the person I read most likely to make me roll my eyes, a distinction anyway of dubious merit for all concerned.
John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself.
Actually, I don’t know that he’s necessarily recoiling in craven fear and trembling. But: he has taken down his storied post, “More Diversity and More Perversity in the Future!” in which he excoriated the SyFy [sic] channel for “recoil[ing] in fear and trembling when lectured by homosex activists,” after said post received 800+ lecturing, hectoring comments; and besides, I can never pass up an obscure joke.
I’ve been going by his LiveJournal every night now, ever since I caught a link to that rant (via the Mump), and I figured out this was that guy who wrote those books I’ve never quite gotten around to picking up—and now I can’t tell whether I’m glad I dodged a bullet, or whether I wish I hadn’t.
Tonight, after nuking the aforementioned storied post, he (in the course of defending his apology) posted the following:
First let us clarify who the enemy is. It is not the homosexuals. The enemy is the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) that are devoted to a Leftwing antinomian agenda, and willing and eager to use pressure tactics to enforce the doctrinal conformity so near and dear to the heart of the Left.
Which is me giving you the full context of the paragraph, and not the experience of reading it; the experience of reading it was rather more like—
The enemy is the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) that bleep! does not compute
When I found my jaw and resettled it on my face I found myself nodding along—well, yes, in a world in which the homosexual lobby is for the most part comprised of happily married heterosexuals, well, sure, perhaps there might very well be something sinister about their devotion to an antinomian agenda. —That our world, the world in which both I and John C. Wright unarguably exist, does not in any way resemble this world does not in any way invalidate the logic; merely the premise.
Sorry. Jaw’s still a little loose. —There.
I tried to post a comment. I was going to quote the bit about the homosexual lobby (who for the most part are happily married heterosexuals) and I was going to ask whether I might ask how he came by this particular fact. But he’s locked down comments to his LiveJournal; only those he’s added as friends are allowed to comment at all. The rest of us are banned.
Can’t say I blame him. The shitstorm was mighty. Battening the hatches is only rational.
MacAllister and I have not exactly been arguing or even discussing but more like honing points off each other. I’m going to quote hers first because it’s my blog and I get the last word, and I’ll grab hers from this tor.com thread:
I think we cannot conflate the art and the artist.
Actually, what I think is more vehement than the above statement.
In 1953, Isaac Asimov called SF “that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” and I find that description compelling precisely because so much of the impact of science upon human beings has precisely to do with issues that, once upon a time, were dictated to us by shamans, holy men, or chicken entrails.
I think it’s damaging to conflate the art with the artist. The writer is not the book. When we’re talking about the literature of ideas, especially, I think it’s damaging to us as thinkers, readers, and writers to artificially and arbitrarily shield ourselves from ideas we disagree with, find unpleasant, or even repugnant.
And there is nothing in that I do not agree with, but—and I’m going to grab mine from a whiles back when the Islets of Bloggerhans were talking about Orson Scott Card again because, you know, not inappropriate:
Science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.
One can respond: well, yes, but there’s nothing about aberrant homosexuality in Ender’s Game, so how can it clash? Heck, there’s nothing in that book about homosexuality at all! And I will resist the urge to say oh, you think so? and I will even resist the urge to say precisely! —Instead, I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant.
Which is why it’s not an argument and hardly a discussion. I’m talking about why I’m no longer terribly interested in reading Card’s work, nor Wright’s; she’s talking about why such work must remain available to be read. —A book doesn’t always have to be an axe for the frozen sea within, for God’s sake, but one should never lose the ability or God forbid the inclination to read for the hacking. But when the only challenge a book’s likely to pose is the challenge not to throw it across the room—
Why’d this come up in the first place? —Most of the 800+ comments to that storied post were along the lines of “I’ll never read your books again, thanks for warning me off, you’ll never get dime one of my money.” (“Every time you bloviate offensively on the internet, a reader swears off your work for life,” says Catherynne Valente, in one of the many open letters to Wright that have sprung up of late.)
Now, there’s a difference between “I do not wish to read you, or support you with my money,” and “You should never be published ever again!” though I can appreciate how it might be a difficult distinction to make on the receiving end. Especially when it’s more overtly couched as a boycott: “I’m never buying a Tor book again so long as they keep publishing writers like you.” (I’m sure John Mackey can sympathize.) But there’s also a difference between “You should never be published again!” and “I’ve fucking had it with living in world where you and yours make the rules!” —And I think what it is is my Emma Goldman baseline’s not wanting to be part of a revolution that depends on shutting people up.
Even if one of the ways I try to keep my little corner of the world safe from them and theirs is to, you know, not bother to read works by this author or that.
Barry and I were emailing about Wright and Card and suchlike. “Ah!” I said at one point. “Sitting in judgment of other people with my morning coffee on a chilly day off from work with a baby in my lap. —Have I mentioned how glad I am she’ll grow up in a world where these moral monsters are marginalized? Have I mentioned how terrified I am I’m wrong?”
That initial, storied post is an ugly thing, a ham-handed attempt at excoriating the SyFy [sic] channel from an infantilely Manichean lex naturalis, full of the sneering braggadocio of a playground bully preening for his sycophants (says me, with a sneer). —His basic argument (expounded in a later comment to that post) was a syllogism in Camestres:
Odd as it sounds, I was fully loyal to the sexual revolution as an idea. Then someone tried to convince me that two lesbians licking each other in the crotch was the same in all ways, just as sacred, just as romantic, just as normal, just as beautiful as Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult, Micky and Minnie, Adam and Eve, Jove and Juno, Father Sky and Mother Earth, me and my wife.
(Or Ruth and Naomi? says me, preening.) —And yes, the premises fall apart in your hand when you gingerly try to pick them up, but yes, it’s a just-so story, and thus irremediable to them what believes. What’s striking is the ugliness of the language, the revulsion, the almost-desperate hodgepodge of totemic icons thrown up in defense, all in an argument that insists on the rigor of its logic, on the intractable ad hominemity of the other side. It seems to have struck Wright, too:
I think my posts were accurate but were not measured.
Let me give you a hypothetical:
Imagine standing in the waiting room of a hospital, and overhearing a doctor joking with a nurse about some patient about to die, and the doc uses gross slang to describe the patient’s bowels dissolving and so on—and you realize that patient is your loved one.
Now, the doctor said nothing untrue, and he was engaged in what actually he thought a private conversation (even if it was in a public spot). But you would be shocked, and he should be careful of your feelings.
And—well, yes, the analogy’s strained and rather terribly objectionable, but the basic sentiment, the apology itself, that’s sound enough, surely? Commendable, even, in an internet where no one ever walks anything back ever? (Though it’s with a poor and a threadbare, sketchy grace: “I had damn well better offer these people, enemies or not, the olive branch, and quickly. They will not accept it, if I am any judge of character: indeed, they will take it as a sign of weakness and redouble their efforts. But that is not my concern and not the orders I was given.”)
Except—the “you” above is a very particular, rather singular you, with a very particular and singular loved one who’s about to (figuratively) die:
There was one commenter whose feelings I actually hurt. His mother is a homosexual, and he was rightfully offended at the language I used to describe homosexuality. Him I apologized to privately, but I would also like to do it publicly. It is hard to tell, just from reading words, when people are being sincere, and when they are not, but I thought this one guy was sincere, and that most of the rest of you were engaged in rhetoric.
To him, wherever he is, I am sorry. I regret my words, and I regret my thoughtlessness. Please forgive me.
—And the queerly thrilling horror that’s been creeping over me the past few days comes sharply into focus, with all this talk of a monolithic Left and their antinomian agendas and a homosexual lobby filled with heterosexual couples and a straight Sappho and the evil space monkeys: he literally does not realize that every single person who snapped at him in the 800+ comments left on that storied post, every single one, was reacting out of anger that had come through grief, was just as rightfully offended by the language he’d used, was no matter how rude in response just as deserving of apologies both public and private, that each of them was or loved or knew someone whose life had been bent or broken or wrecked or deflected by the appallingly arbitrary rules he was defending, his dreadfully unnatural lex naturalis—
Yeah, but I wasn’t going to do, well, that.
This was about—what, exactly? Grace, yes, and the koan; trying to get past the two-minute hate—I did say it was anger that came from the grief, and did allow as how the responses were rude (and got my own licks in: “Shorter Wright: My sexual peccadilloes are moral imperatives; your sexual peccadilloes are suspect; their sexual peccadilloes are disgusting”—hardly one of my finer moments)—but trying to make a point of how maybe one should listen to an objectionable author just as one might listen to their works, when really you’re more than ready to sit in judgment on a chilly August night over a splash of bourbon, is just as chary as offering up an olive branch you’re ready to snatch back at the first rebuff. —And there’s more than a little disaster tourism in all this, too, which I realize mucks up the clarity of that up there, but none of our motives are ever pure.
And maybe if I did get a chance to ask him directly how he came by the striking notion that the homosexual lobby are for the most part happily married heterosexuals, he’d just tell me that by “homosexual lobby” he meant, of course, the monolithic Left, and as homosexuals comprise a minority of the Left much as they do the population at large well QED, but maybe he wouldn’t; I don’t know. There’s a herky-jerky searching quality in all the self-serving bluster that, well. Doesn’t so much fill me with hope. But it’s certainly captured my attention the past few days.
Or maybe it’s just I have a weakness for pompous brio. —Whichever; anyway, tonight I added John C. Wright as a friend over to the LiveJournal.
(Oh, I added Catherynne Valente, too. After all, her baseline work for the bare minimum hit of the stuff she’s jonesing for, for which she’d forgive an artist just about any asshattery, is Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale—and what are the odds? So’s mine!)
Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!
I realize Kathryn Jean Lopez is beyond shame; I realize there is no hope for the National Review, and perhaps there never was. Still. This needs to be spread as far and wide as possible:
If only as an object lesson in how not to play this little game.
Bring it on.
“America’s psychopathic healthcare system is sacrificing tens of thousands of lives, mainly working class and African American, for the sake of profit. Health advisors and boards of trustees routinely kill people, knowingly, to defend the bottom-line. Right now, those who are scaremongering about the NHS are lobbying vehemently to ensure that nothing about this vile state of affairs ever changes. They aren’t stupid enough not to understand the consequences of what they are doing, but the current rate of death and misery is part of creating an optimal investment climate. This is social sadism. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. To remedy this intolerable state of affairs, I propose a lobby or solidarity group to ‘Save America’ (or ‘Save America From Itself,’ or ‘Stop Them Before They Kill Again’—you get the picture). There should be rock concerts in Hyde Park to raise money for the millions of Americans who have no healthcare. Bob Geldof and Bono—and here’s the excellent thing—would be totally uninvolved in any of this. Funds should be available for those who have been told by their insurance companies that their life is less important than shareholder value, to pay for an airline ticket to any country where they can get treated properly. And all support should be given to those heroic freedom fighters taking on the inhuman monsters who have been getting away with killing their people for far too long. I bet negative PR like that would get some reforms going pretty fucking quickly.” —lenin
Really a quite serious matter.
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
The funny thing about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” bullshit isn’t that it’s completely pulled out of the collective ass of the Republican party, no. The kneeslappingly hilarious punchline is of course that these “death panels” already exist:
Ensuring that everyone has access to care has become a full-time cause for Ms. Demko. She and her family have been without insurance since her daughter was born four years ago with what doctors say is Down syndrome. Her husband is a self-employed contractor so the family had relied on her job as a substance abuse counselor for their health insurance.
But Demko said she couldn’t keep working full time with an infant with special needs. When she quit, she didn’t realize that would result in her family’s being unable to get health insurance.
Ohio does not require insurance companies to cover children with disabilities considered to be preexisting conditions.
The fact that “Obama’s bureaucrats” are working overtime to pass legislation that would (ideally) prevent private health insurance coverage from being denied for precisely that is precisely why the right wing has desperately kicked out the bottom of the barrel and started clawing its way down through the earth’s crust.
The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”
One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.
The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
—Investor’s Business Daily, “How House Bill Runs Over Grandma” [via]
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (but intends to retire from this post in 2009), a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
“I realize,” said John Holbo, “it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…”
Because you aren’t funny!
I don’t know; it’s a good point, it’s a very very good point, but the column’s terribly earnest, and anyway the Joker’s beef has to be sympathetic or else the discourse doesn’t work, you know? Do you really want to give them that card? —And besides, what we’re talking about here are useful idiots who’ve been ginned up to protest the fact that their health insurance companies will be forced to abide by the terms of their policies. The same useful idiots who earlier this year marched against their own taxes being cut. We aren’t talking Heath Ledger. We aren’t talking Jack Nicholson. We aren’t talking Cesar Romero and we’re certainly not talking Marshall Rogers. We’re talking Gathering of the Juggalos.
Still: turnabout, fair play, and my his eyes look creepy when you brush away the fake remorse:
