Aszilvasy

What are you?

Wow.  No hello I see.  Fair enough: down to business.  Our goal for this site is that it can serve as a place to see our American culture through a variety of prisms: politics, art, beer, bees…really wherever the world or our fancy directs us.  We want it to be a place of nuanced and measured discussion among thoughtful people.

Okay, who is this “we”?

Well, the primary “we” refers to two educators who are interested in just about everything.  We also hope to have some regular and semi-regular contributors throughout. We hope to build a community of readers eager to share their unique knowledge and perspectives.

Why do you call your site “The Idlers”?

First and foremost, because we are fantastic procrastinators.  Being interested in just about everything is intellectually stimulating and horribly distracting.  But, also, since we hope to maintain a regular posting schedule (daily posts curating the web with longer, more deliberate pieces scattered throughout) we decided to harken back to another great procrastinator, a man of great intelligence, prose, and contractions: Samuel Johnson.  His Idler consistently churned out well-written pieces on all matters of culture.  While we neither have his capacious intelligence nor can we replicate his periodic prose, we do hope to embody his thoughtfulness and breadth of subject-matter.

Wait, Samuel Johnson?  He believed [insert idea here], and he is clearly wrong!

Well, that’s not a question, but okay.  True.  He was, and we will be, wrong about all sorts of things.  But all our opinions and ideas come from myriad sources, and we’re hoping to be a place where we can look at different points of view, figure out where that voice comes from, and think deeply about the ramifications of the thoughts.  No one is right about all things, but we will strive to enter in at the strait gate, whatever that may be.

Are you guys trying to be “fair and balanced”?

Depends what you mean by “fair and balanced.”  Will we treat all ideas as though that have the same merit?  No, because they don’t.  GW Bush isn’t a lizard, for example.  To treat that as an equal claim would be dumb.  Will we listen intently, and try to have an open, honest, and thoughtful discussion of difficult topics?  Yes.

If you want to have open dialogue, why are there no comments?

We have found that the most intellectually interesting websites we’ve read shun comments.  We want to serve as curators of the web. We want our site to be filled with only the most interesting and best comments from (our) readers.  We’d much rather you send us a direct comment, complaint, question or criticism than allow it to go, likely unread, in the comments. Also, we’d like to avoid verifying (yet again) Godwin’s Law.  We’re pretty sure that it would be verified on the first day we had any extensive comments.

But you’re wrong/I’m right/I have something to share/I have experience with/You’re forgetting about . . .?

Well, great news for this.  Rather than typing a well-informed and thoughtful comment that internet trolls, teenagers, and spambots will all ignore for various and sundry reasons, send us an email.  We’ll look through and post those that further the discussion.  Hopefully, we’ll get to put people in conversation with each other.  We see this as an endeavor to build a community of diverse minds.

While we’re hoping to also publish original poetry and (perhaps) short stories down the line, one thing we can say is that we will accept images: photos, art, etc. The visual arts enrich a website, and if you’re willing to allow us to publish it only with an attribution (which is what we will assume if you send us a visual file), we will try to find a place to use it.

Additionally, if you find an interesting video you’d like to share from YouTube, or some other source, please feel free to send that along as well.

Frank Underwood is a pretty loathsome man, but that’s par for the course when you’re a screen villain.

Underwood is the always-scheming, almost comically insincere Democratic congressman from South Carolina who is the main character in the Netflix series House of Cards. He is played with admirable skill and gusto by Kevin Spacey. I’m only about 10 episodes into season one, but today I skipped ahead to the just-posted third season. That’s because the ending of one new chapter in particular — number 30, or the fourth episode in the new batch – is causing much wrath and condemnation among Christians:

“How Hollywood Spits on Christianity,” blares Robert Davi on Breitbart.com.

“Shame on Netflix: House of Cards Spits In the Face of Jesus,” harrumphs Tim Graham at Newsbusters.

Graham describes what upsets him so: Frank Underwood visits an empty church, has a brief theological discussion with a bishop who says there are really only two rules in life (love God and love your neighbor), and finally asks for time alone to pray at the altar. So far, so pious. But then — oh, the humanity!

[Underwood] sidles up to the crucifix – just a few feet above his head – and mutters most cynically to God the Son. “Love…. that’s what you’re selling? Well, I don’t buy it!” Then he spits in the face of Christ.

When he gets out a handkerchief to wipe off his offense, the whole thing shatters on the floor. He instructs the Secret Service to clean up his mess, and walks off with a ceramic ear. “Well, I’ve got God’s ear now,” he quips.

That’s almost correct. What Graham doesn’t mention is that, right when Underwood reaches out with his hanky, there’s an inexplicable shudder or rumble that goes through the crucifix. It’s as if Jesus tears himself off the cross and self-destructs, rather than undergo the indignity of letting the vile Underwood touch him and wipe away the evidence of the latter’s blasphemy.

In other words, something supernatural (perhaps even miraculous and divine) happens in that scene. How very odd that Graham, who ought to be delighted with the scriptwriters’ nod to the Almighty’s power, neglects to bring it up.

It’s less odd, I suppose, if all Graham seeks to do is promote the red-meat narrative that Hollywood secularists love spitting in God’s face.

But even apart from the metaphysical surprise of Jesus, untouched by human hands, falling off the cross… isn’t it a given that scoundrels and miscreants like the fictional Underwood do ignoble things? I never knew that meant that writers, actors, and producers endorse actual wickedness (or even perceived wickedness such as spitting on an inanimate object).

When Charles Dickens created Fagin, was he giving two thumbs up to petty street crime? When Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho, was he advocating the slashing of motel guests? When AMC broadcast the adventures of Walter White in Breaking Bad, was the creative team going to bat for meth-cookers and murderers?

You have to wonder if the protesters understand how fiction works.

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P.S.:  Breitbart’s Robert Davi provides more evidence for two things: How well some pontificating Christians know the Bible, and what Jesus-loving hardliners mean with that whole “Love thy neighbor” credo.

Angry about the Spacey scene, Davi writes:

Perhaps it’s time for Christians to start a crusade [against blasphemy]. Heck, President Obama brought them up – incorrectly, I might add. Well, doesn’t the Bible say fight fire with fire?

Um, no, actually, it doesn’t.

As a matter of fact let them start The Knights of the Judeo-Christian Values so that there is accountability for the blaspheme against Christ and the Ten Commandments. An ISIS of Christian fundamentalists who refuse to let the name, image, morality and Christian faith and holidays be attacked.

Oh, hello there, true colors!

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter IX I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Hank Rearden is an awful human being. He’s jealous, possessive, self-centered and misogynist. He has a short fuse and a violent temper. He makes a point of never caring about anyone’s welfare but his own. He feels contempt and disgust for [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter IX While Francisco is being cryptic at Dagny about the disappeared capitalists, their conversation is interrupted by a surprise visitor: The sound they heard was the turning of a key in the lock of the entrance door. The door opened and Hank Rearden came in. …Francisco had risen to his [Read More...]

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks “it’s important that we acknowledge the full spectrum of speech that’s in potential danger.” She contends that “more moderate people should recognize that they owe a debt to blasphemers and satirists, who create a free speech zone in which the rest of us can operate”:

The violent responses to “The Innocence of Muslims,” the provocative – and low-quality – film that played a role in sparking protests that gave cover to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, might not seem to be an indicator of risk for a more respectful project about Muhammad, like two that are in production in Qatar and Iran. But as the Hollywood Reporter explained in 2013, one of the projects had already been met with calls that it be banned on the grounds that it showed part of the prophet’s body, though it does not reveal his face.

Among other incidents, she highlights “when Yale University Press published an academic book about the response to the [Danish Muhammad] cartoons that declined to reproduce those images or other depictions of Muhammad, discussing them in absentia“:

[Reza] Aslan suggests that while such decisions often come out of a desire to be respectful, they don’t just deny audiences important opportunities to see powerful relevant images, but they reinforce a kind of soft anti-Muslim sentiment.

“The idea that Yale University Press thought that a book that 13 people would read anyway, an academic tome about the cultural, political and religious ramifications of these images,” he said, “that somehow that would threaten the lives of Yale University Press employees, it’s that kind of silly, knee-jerk cowardice that only feeds into this notion that Muslims are this kind of irrational, almost animal-like being who have to be handled with gloves.”

Meanwhile, Matt Wuerker tries to understand why his fellow cartoonists are so often targets these days:

Satire intended for a small readership of Danish nativists no longer stays in Denmark. Cartoons that work for a sophisticated Parisian audience are now flashed around the world to an audience that wouldn’t know the difference between brie and Beaujolais. All that most people in places like Yemen or Pakistan see in those cartoons is someone defiling a religious tenet. They also fail to understand the difference between Charlie Hebdo and Le Monde, or Mad Magazine and Time.

This, I think, is the crux of why, in this day and age, “those damn cartoons” seem to be so uniquely inflammatory. Cartoons, because they’re mostly visual, can uniquely carry satire across cultural and language barriers. In some ways, this is a great asset, but that transmission of images doesn’t mean the joke, the intent, the cultural resonance is transmitted as well. In fact, the tone and humor often are lost in transmission while the offense and provocation are not.

I propose that we give the New York Times some new sort of Pulitzer Prize for Top Performance in Eggshell-Walking. I further nominate the BBC for Dhimmitudinal Pussyfooting, CNN for Petrified Around-the-Bush-Beating, Channel 4 for Greatest Advances in Mousiness, and the Associated Press for the Cowardly Mollycoddling of Its Own Collywobbles.

And I’ll tell you what brought that on.

The Times has a news article about the historic new Charlie Hebdo issue that is hitting French newsstands tomorrow,

… in a print run of up to three million copies, compared with a typical print run of 60,000 copies.

The Times merely links to the issue’s cover and doesn’t actually show it, and even tries to downplay the measly link with the remark that the image has

… already [been] widely seen on the Internet.

The cowering subtext of that phrase seems to be, “Spare us, dear terrorists, and go after the bloggers and media folks who, like Libération, were professional insensitive enough to actually publish a picture of the cover.”

It’s true that the cover image has been spreading across the ‘net, but that doesn’t let you off the hook if you lay claim to being a world-class news organization. Today, the Charlie Hebdo cover is the news story, and not just some illustrative eye candy that, if you’re the editors of America’s premier newspaper, you can decide to take or leave.

So, here:

By the way, this fearful timidity is now business as usual at the Times (disclosure: I freelanced for the paper on and off more than a decade ago). In last week’s Times profile of Charlie Hebdo, the only two covers the U.S. paper chose to print were one ridiculing the French far right, and another that made fun of president François Hollande. Chickenhearted to a

the paper thus sidestepped the issue, tiptoeing gingerly around Muslims’ sensitivities in ways that it doesn’t and won’t for any other group on earth.

It’s not just the Times, to be sure. Pas du tout. I showed last week that editors at CNN, the New York Daily News, the Associated Press, and other media outlets also chose to obscure or deep-six the Charlie cartoons that their colleagues in Paris had been murdered for.

But how can I call other journalists out on their spinelessness when I’m writing under a pseudonym?

I can’t. So let me share another picture with you.

And a name: Rogier van Bakel.

That’s me in the photo. That’s my real name. Violent god botherers, do your worst.

Anyway, the media cowardice is hardly limited to this side of the Atlantic. Guardian columnist Nick Cohen (who calls radical Islam “a real fascistic force”) reminds us that major British media have also handed over their testes to medieval-minded morons, without so much as putting up a fight.

[T]he BBC, Channel 4 and many newspapers won’t run any images of Mohammad whatsoever. They would at least have acknowledged censorship if they had announced that they were frightened of attacks on their staff. They would have clung to a remnant of their honor if they had said: “We are not censoring out of respect. We loathe the murderers who enforce their taboos with Kalashnikovs. But we do not want to spend years living in hiding, as Salman Rushdie did. Or be stabbed in the street, as Theo van Gogh was. Or hear an Islamist smash at our door with an axe and cry: “We will get our revenge,” — as Kurt Westergaard did. So we are backing away.” …

Instead, most journalists have lived a lie for years, as have many in the arts, academia and comedy. We take on the powerful — and ask you to admire our bravery — if, and only if, the powerful are not a paramilitary force that may kill us.

Unless we find the courage to overcome fear, the self-censorship will spread.

Cohen seems to have arrived near a breaking point with his fellow liberals.

European liberals might try to be true to their principles and ally with dissidents, liberals, leftists and free thinkers within Muslim communities. They might help ex-Muslims who fear that one day they will be murdered for apostasy. They might reflect that a Muslim man will encounter xenophobia from the right. But they will hear no rigorous criticism at university or other leftist institutions of the sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia and bloodlust of militant religion.

He sees “a lying and frightened future.” On that note, here‘s how the U.K. Telegraph neutered the latest Charlie cover. It’s enough to make you weep in frustration.

Yes, the fear is, of course, palpable. Being jittery is not an unreasonable reaction if you’ve seen what befell Theo van Gogh, Zafar Bhatti, Ettore Capriolo, Molly Norris, Muhammad al-Qatta, Salman Rushdie, Flemming Rose, Junaid Hafeez, Morris Sadek, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Stéphane Charbonnier and his Charlie crew, Aabid Mehmood, Asia Bibi, Lars Vilks, Aziz Nesin, Kurt Westergaard, Tufail Naqvi, Martin Rynja, Rashid Rehman, Hitoshi Igarashi, Salmaan Taseer, and so many of their fellow “blasphemers.”

But fear does not have to mean surrender. You can do your job despite it, push through it, shake it off, decide that this is a burden and a risk that we’ll share together, collectively, across the globe.

It’s OK if you decide not to, but then please stop it with the rousing editorials asserting that you stand tall for freedom of expression.

Staffers at the Times, the BBC, CNN, and other media have gone from being real journalists, to printing what the powerful (in this case, men with guns and bombs) want them to. Especially, they now decline to print what the powerful want to see banned. Their entire careers, these media mavens have paid self-congratulatory lip service to the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword. If they believe it, it would behoove them to start acting accordingly.

In a complex undertaking, Harvard University Press is publishing translations of important Indian texts in a series called the Murty Classical Library.

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII Pulled by a coal-burning engine that’s not designed for the poorly ventilated tunnel it’s about to enter, the doomed train chugs upward into the mountains: Some of the passengers aboard the Comet were awake. As the train started its coiling ascent, they saw the small cluster of Winston’s lights [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII Stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere, Kip Chalmers is furious, and is inundating the head office with telegrams demanding that he be given transportation or else. In New York, James Taggart is woken out of bed late at night, and like any good boss, responds by [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII In the previous installment, I wrote that we were approaching the most infamous scene in Atlas Shrugged. The scene that ends this chapter, more than any other, lays bare what Rand thinks of people who don’t subscribe to her philosophy – and what she believes should happen to them [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII When someone pops up out of nowhere on a lonely road late at night to hand you a bar of gold, it probably wouldn’t be your first impulse to wonder how they determined how much gold to give you. But Hank Rearden is curious, and Ragnar Danneskjold has an [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII Ragnar Danneskjold continues explaining his business plan: “I have been selling the cargoes I retrieved to some special customers of mine in this country, who pay me in gold. Also, I have been selling my cargoes to the smugglers and the black-market traders of the People’s States of Europe. [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII Hank Rearden asks Ragnar Danneskjold, the pirate, why he’s chosen a life of violence against society, rather than just disappearing like the vanished industrialists: The shock that came next was to see Danneskjold smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VII Hank Rearden has moved into an apartment in Philadelphia, so as not to have to see his family anymore. He’s also – finally – begun divorce proceedings against Lillian, handing his lawyer a blank check and telling him: “I don’t care what means you use, how many of their [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VI To finish off this chapter, I want to flash back to an earlier scene. In it, the villains are discussing the one part of Directive 10-289 they’re worried they may not have the power to implement: the part about the state taking over all existing patents. Somehow, they have [Read More...]

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VI At the end of their conference, the villains agree to put Directive 10-289 into effect. When Dagny reads about it in the morning paper, she bursts into Jim’s office, announces that she’s quitting, and storms out: The newspaper was twisted into a roll by the time she stood before [Read More...]

On Monday afternoon, the National Organization for Marriage, one of the biggest anti-LGBT groups on record, basically broke the Internet with this tweet:

That tweet — When #marriage is redefined, what prevents a person from “marrying” his/herself? — was accompanied by a link to a story about a woman named Grace Gelder who held a “self-marriage ceremony” as a symbolic gesture of self-acceptance and self-love:

 I’d been essentially single for almost six years and built up this brilliant relationship with myself. Nevertheless, I was aware of getting into a rut, where a relationship with someone else seemed like too much hard work. So I really wanted to pay tribute to this adventurous period of self-discovery but, at the same time, look forward to a new phase. …

I really don’t see it as any kind of feminist statement, but creating a wedding of this kind on my own terms felt incredibly empowering.

Of course, NOM made it into a gay thing. And in response, the hashtag #WhenIMarryMyself trended nationwide, forcing us to reflect on how different our lives would be if we all put a ring on… ourselves.

I don’t have to explain why this is maybe the most hilarious, desperate argument any conservative group has ever made against marriage equality. Instead, here’s a roundup of the Internet’s most glorious reactions to NOM’s utter confusion.

Makes Thanksgiving easier.

Not gonna lie, this is my dream proposal. What a way to make sure I get what I’ve always wanted!

Can I get some of those without applying for a marriage license?

Important question.

Okay, I laughed out loud.

Finally, a loophole that works!

One mind is better than two.

Claim what is rightfully yours!

The scary part is that this will be their next argument.

Wishing you all a joyous self-wedding!

Mike Huckabee has terrible news for Republicans: If they accept the legal reality of marriage equality, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful will be done with them. Not just a little done, but completely done.

Huckabee was on the American Family Association’s radio broadcast this week discussing the Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the same-sex marriage cases before them — leaving in place lower court rulings that declared those bans unconstitutional — when he made the comments in question:

“If the Republicans want to lose guys like me — and a whole bunch of still God-fearing Bible-believing people — go ahead and just abdicate on this issue, and while you’re at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either. Because at that point, you lose me. I’m gone. I’ll become an independent. I’ll start finding people that have guts to stand. I’m tired of this.”

This might sound like good news for the Republican party — sure, they’d lose the hardcore “God-fearing Bible-believing” voters, but they’d also be back in step with a majority of Americans on both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. But Huckabee doubts that very much.

As far as he is concerned, continuing to fight for increasingly unpopular laws will help the Republican party, whereas moving forward with a legally compliant platform will lead to defeat. Presumably, he divines this from the same source that assures him holy war with Islam is guaranteed victory

Depriving other people of their civil rights might be important to the religious and theocratically-inclined wing of the Republican party, but not to the majority of Americans.

As we saw in the last presidential election, women’s rights and gay rights played a substantial role in how voters perceived the parties — and how they voted as a result. Aiming to deprive Americans of those rights has harmed the Republican party’s ambitions, now and in the foreseeable future. Even among those Republicans who support a blurring of the lines between church and state, there are some who have acknowledged this.

Huckabee’s guarantees, then, fall rather short, and it sounds more like typical fear-mongering than anything else: If you don’t do what (I say) God wants you to do, you’re going to pay!

Personally, I would love to see the Republican party shed its hardcore religious baggage and stop defining itself by religious ideas about who to hate, who to deprive of rights, etc. If abiding by the Constitution is all that it takes to do that… well, hallelujah! (Now if only Huckabee could promise to take Santorum with him…)

Atlas Shrugged, part II, chapter VI The villains are debating the membership of the Unification Board, the new government agency that will control every aspect of America’s economy under Directive 10-289. The first proposal is for them to choose a representative of each industry and profession; but then Fred Kinnan, the union leader, steps in. [Read More...]

Julian Baggini identifies a “highly contagious meme [that] is spreading around the world,” one that “takes serious ideas and turns them into play, packages big subjects into small parcels, and makes negativity the deadliest of sins.” The culprit? What he terms “Generation TED”:

To be progressive and radical once meant being sceptical and opposed to large corporations. For Generation TED, however, this is outdated thinking that leads only to cynicism and inertia. It’s time to grow up and accept that to do good things in a capitalist world you often need to tap the wealthy. In reality, this has always been true: think of Engels supporting Marx, or Beatrice and Sidney Webb funding Fabian Socialism with inherited wealth.

The rejection of cynicism, however, sometimes looks less like realism and more like naive, starry-eyed optimism.

In its mission statement, TED says: ‘We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.’ It goes without saying that this change is supposed to be for the better. Viewers get to choose which adjective best describes the video they’ve watched: beautiful, courageous, funny, informative, ingenious, inspiring, fascinating, jaw-dropping, or persuasive. ‘Bullshit’ and ‘misleading’ are not on the list. Generation TED believes that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all.

He continues, “Generation TED does lack sufficient scepticism”:

Truly great ideas are sculpted with the chisel of critical thought, not created fully formed by spontaneous genius and good intent. We don’t need to wallow with postmodern irony in the contradictions and paradoxes of the modern world but nor should we ignore them. There are signs that Generation TED is learning this lesson. TED, for example, has added an asterisk to its strapline ‘Ideas worth spreading’, which leads to a series of wry footnotes including ‘and challenging’. It is as though even TED has realised that undiluted positivity is not enough and that critical, sceptical voices are needed too.

Previous Dish on TED skepticism here.

Amanda Taub defends California’s new “Yes Means Yes” law, arguing that it “emerged as a response to a status quo that has proved to be an all-too-powerful tool for sexual predators, because it enables them to claim to see consent in everything except continuous, unequivocal rejection”:

This week, a Detroit man murdered a 27-year-old mother of three named Mary Spears after she rejected him in a bar. Right now, a woman is in critical condition in a New York City hospital because a man slashed her throat on the street after she declined to go on a date with him. In April, a Connecticut teenager was murdered by her 16-year-old classmate after she turned down his invitation to prom. Stories like these (and there are others) should remind us that women have a lot of reasons to fear the consequences of saying “no.” That’s all the more reason why silence shouldn’t be presumed to be consent.

That argument in particular changed Ezra Klein’s mind. He now supports the law, even though it’s unlikely to be enforced very often:

If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. Because for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

The Yes Means Yes law could also be called the You Better Be Pretty Damn Sure law. You Better Be Pretty Damn Sure she said yes. You Better Be Pretty Damn Sure she meant to say yes, and wasn’t consenting because she was scared, or high, or too tired of fighting. If you’re one half of a loving, committed relationship, then you probably can Be Pretty Damn Sure. If you’re not, then you better fucking ask.

Robby Soave and others fire back:

First of all: who is to say that “Yes Means Yes” will actually decrease instances of sexual assault? The law’s main function is to push colleges to investigate and adjudicate sexual assault based on a narrower set of standards and without recognition of established due process rights. Given the track record of campus rape trials, there is little reason to think colleges will excel here. I predict more lawsuits—from both accusers and the accused—and similar levels of sexual assault. The heavy hand of government does not automatically and instantly change culture in the manner that central planners envision. …

Klein’s do something at all costs approach is also an indictment of the modern left’s warped priorities and callous disregard for due process. Safeguarding the rights of the accused was once a cardinal virtue of civil liberalism. But for many so-called progressives, paranoia about sexual violence trumps all other considerations. They have much in common with the tough-on-crime conservatives of past decades, in that respect.

Freddie also goes after Ezra – and the elite media in general – for not addressing the law’s risks:

We know that the police state targets the poor. We know that false convictions are far more likely to happen to black and Hispanic men. We know those things. Doing away with the presumption of innocence will not mostly hurt privileged white frat boys. It will hurt poor people and black people the way that our judicial system always does. So if you, like Klein, want to be breezy and loose in your talk about the consequences of a law that many or most admit is badly flawed, fine. But let’s count those costs like adults.

And Judith Shulevitz stands up for the rights of accused rapists:

What’s happening at universities represents an often necessary effort to recategorize once-acceptable behaviors as unacceptable. But the government, via Title IX, is effectively acting on the notion popularized in the 1970s and ’80s by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon that male domination is so pervasive that women need special protection from the rigors of the law. Men, as a class, have more power than women, but American law rests on the principle that individuals have rights even when accused of doing bad things. And American liberalism has long rejected the notion that those rights may be curtailed even for a noble cause.

“We need to take into account our obligations to due process not because we are soft on rapists and other exploiters of women,” says [Harvard professor Janet] Halley, but because “the danger of holding an innocent person responsible is real.”

Meanwhile, Shikha Dalmia’s reaction to the law last week provoked this rant from Erin Gloria Ryan, under the headline “Consent Laws Are Ruining Sex, Says Writer Who Probably Has Awful Sex”:

First, the assumption that sex is a horny guy trying to convince a tired woman to lie there while he pumps away at her sex hole while she wonders to herself if this is what she really wanted is an assessment of heterosexual intercourse so grim that I feel a great deal of pity for the person whose life experiences have led to those conclusions.

That, McArdle points out, is not an argument; it’s just sex shaming:

When guys do this to them, left feminists easily recognize it for what it is: reactionary, misogynist bile spewed by angry people who couldn’t think of an actual argument. So why does Erin Gloria Ryan feel free to deploy it against a woman with whom she disagrees? Why didn’t her colleagues at Jezebel take her aside and say, “Hey, that’s not how we roll. We’re against sex shaming, remember?”

This is not the first time I’ve run into this idea that all’s fair as long as you restrict it to conservatives. Although the exact post seems to be lost to the mists of Internet time, I’ll never forget when a woman at a major feminist site accused me of holding the political opinions I do because — wait for it — I was trying to catch a man. Or the liberal men too numerous to count, or at least bother counting up over the years, who have hailed me with every misogynist slur you could imagine, and a few I’m sure you couldn’t.

Dalmia herself hits back at her detractors:

[I]n a Wonkette-Jezebel gynocracy, discrediting someone’s (imagined) sex life = discrediting their argument.

When Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who wanted taxpayer funded contraceptive coverage, a “slut,” the whole feminist establishment rose in unison to condemn him—and rightly so. Ultimately, he was forced to do the decent thing and issue an apology. “I did not mean a personal attack,” he said. “My choice of words was not the best, I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.” The question now is, can Gray and Ryan manage to rise to Limbaugh’s level? I’m waiting, sisters!

Nick Miroff reports on the aftermath of a horrifying mass disappearance in Iguala, where “43 student teachers appear to have been rounded up after a day of protests, then marched into the hills and apparently massacred by local police and gang members, who prosecutors say control the city and its officials.” The discovery of at least 28 bodies, “so butchered and burned that Mexican authorities say it could take two months for DNA testing to determine if they’re the missing students”, has sparked protests throughout the country:

Iguala — in one of Mexico’s poorest and most troubled states, Guerrero — is the place where the country’s radical protest traditions have collided tragically with a new reality of gangster-run local governments. It’s not to say that local police wouldn’t have roughed up protesters, or possibly worse, in the past. But in Iguala, where prosecutors say police act under the orders of the gangsters, there was no restraint. Where crime bosses rule — the local capo goes by the nickname “El Chucky” — there was apparently no patience for pesky protesters and other such democratic nuisances. What has been so shocking to Mexicans is that the traffickers would treat them just as any other criminal rivals. One grisly image circulating social media shows a dead student whose face has been removed.

Claudia Romero stresses that this was not an isolated incident:

[T]he state of Guerrero is only one of several Mexican states where organized crime is fighting a turf war. The government of Iguala, moreover, is not Mexico’s only bureaucracy paralyzed by corruption. Police brutality is nothing unique to this case, either. Murders, disappearances, torture—these are weapons law enforcement across Mexico has turned on peaceful protesters. Ayotzinapa calls to mind other similar cases, including; Aguas Blancas, Acteal, and Tlataya, where corrupt police in league with the mafia have effectively criminalized social protests.

“It’s not always clear,” Kathy Gilsinan adds, “whether the local government is working for the drug cartels, or the other way around”:

InSight Crime’s David Gagne suggested on Thursday that Guerreros Unidos was likely “acting as ‘muscle’ for corrupt local officials,” since the cartel itself had little incentive to target the students. “Oftentimes criminal groups can take actions that authorities cannot,” InSight Crime’s co-director Steven Dudley told me. As to who exactly is working for whom in Mexico’s criminal-political nexus, Dudley said, “The short answer is, we don’t know. And the longer answer is, it changes all the time.”

Leon Krauze blames President Enrique Peña Nieto for failing to address Mexico’s serious corruption problem:

In lockstep with his party’s long held tradition, Peña Nieto has mostly turned a blind eye to numerous allegations of corruption at both the municipal and the state level. In the months before the kidnapping of the Ayotzinapa students, Jose Luis Abarca, the allegedly corrupt mayor of Iguala, had numerous and serious complaints filed against him. Federal authorities merely stood by. Now, the man is on the run, along with his chief of police. I’d be surprised if they’re heard from again and amazed if they’re ever prosecuted and sent to jail.

The US, Carimah Townes argues, doesn’t have clean hands here either:

Though Mexico is well-known for government corruption and systemic violence, the U.S. cannot be absolved of its involvement. The U.S. has contributed billions in financial aid to Mexico’s military under the Merida Initiative, with very little oversight. Indeed, due to concern over the U.S.-Mexico partnership and little knowledge of how the money is actually spent, Amnesty International stated, “In August [2012], despite the failure of Mexican authorities to meet human rights conditions set by the US Congress as part of the Merida initiative, the US State Department recommended that Congress release the 15% of funds subject to the conditions.” The Washington Office on Latin America, also attributes the overall militarization of Mexico’s public security to a U.S.-backed remodel, under which law enforcement officials are military-trained.

(Photo: Abandoned clothing is seen near clandestine graves in the outskirts of Iguala on October 13, 2014 in Iguala, Mexico. Mexican authorities found four more graves containing human remains near Iguala where 43 students went missing after a confrontation with local police that left 6 dead last September 26. By Miguel Tovar/LatinContent/Getty Images)

The Newton County Board of Commissioners in Georgia just approved a display of nine “historically significant documents” to be placed in the local courthouse.

And, as alert readers know by now, that’s really just a code for Let’s get the Ten Commandments up in city buildings… and we’ll just surround it with other shit so no one can sue us.

In fact, the Ten Commandments display, along with another about the phrase “In God We Trust,” are really the only two that have no historical significance at all. It’s not like our laws derive from them. Hell, only two of the Commandments are legally forbidden — and it’s not like that’s the case because they were written in the Bible.

[Pastor of Berean Baptist Church Tom] Rush said the replicas were purchased through donations from Newton County citizens.

“There is no cost to Newton County,” he said. “They will also pay for the cost of installation, if that is necessary.”

More code words. By “Newton County citizens,” he means “Christians.”

The group sponsoring these displays, by the way, is called “Ten Commandments Georgia“…. in case there was any doubt about the true intentions here.

The group exists to:

… acknowledge God through knowing, obeying, and displaying the Ten Commandments thereby, restoring a common moral code based upon God’s laws and the founding philosophy of our country.

And their ultimate goal?

Our all encompassing goal is to see in our day a restoration of a common moral code based upon God’s laws, The Ten Commandments. A restoration that will make our families happier, our neighborhood safer, and our government more just.

They want a theocracy. And since they can’t legally do that, they’ll pretend that their religious commandments are somehow part of American legal history through these displays. Because keeping the Sabbath Day holy holds the same weight as the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence.

(Thanks to Brian for the link)

Yesterday was the first day of legal gay marriage in North Carolina, which means you knew this was going to happen:

William Locklear and his partner showed up at the county courthouse Monday expecting to get married after 31 years together.

The couple didn’t get the chance.

A magistrate turned them away.

“He said, ‘I won’t be performing your marriage because of my religious beliefs,’” Locklear said.

The article never mentions the faith of the magistrate, but would anyone like to take a wild guess…?

The solution here is a no-brainer. This isn’t a church; it’s a government building. If your religion prevents you from doing your job, you need to find a different line of work. (While we’re at it, if your religion supports bigotry, you should look for a different one of those, too.)

It doesn’t even make sense since no one’s asking the magistrate for approval or endorsement of the marriage. It’s someone who just has to read a few words and sign some paperwork. Does the guy also refuse to marry people who have been divorced? Interracial couples? Couples who don’t want to have children?

The unnamed magistrate — and I don’t know why a government official who deems himself above the law should be given the protection of anonymity — hasn’t resigned or been fired yet. For some reason.

Thankfully, the couple found a magistrate happy to perform the ceremony and got married earlier today.

(via Joe. My. God. Image via Shutterstock)

Gallup asked “registered voters to rate the importance of 13 issues to their vote for Congress, and then to indicate which party would do a better job on each issue.” Republicans came out ahead:

Aaron Blake captions:

The GOP has an advantage on eight of the nine most important issues tested by Gallup, while Democrats lead on the four least-important. Among the issues the GOP leads on: the economy, the Islamic State (ISIS), the budget deficit, foreign affairs and even immigration.

Democrats, meanwhile, have finally gained an advantage on the Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare — only to see it wane in importance as an issue. The lone big issue on which Democrats have an advantage (and a big one, at that) is equal pay for women.

Alex Rogers flags the fear-mongering ad seen above, which tries to make political hay out of the Ebola crisis by blaming the lack of preparedness on budget cuts supported by Republicans:

Erica Payne, the producer of the ad and president of the Agenda Project Action Fund, blamed the Ebola crisis wholly on the Republican Party. “I think any Republican who attempts to chalk this ad up to politics is a Republican who is too afraid to examine the results of his of her actions and the very real consequences that they have,” she said. “They have developed a governing philosophy that is so fanatically anti-investment that they literally have at their doorstop death. There is no exaggeration in this.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH, tells Sam Stein that Ebola research has been hampered by stagnant funding over the past decade:

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.” …

Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion — barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013.

But Nick Gillespie doesn’t buy that the NIH and other government health agencies are hurting for money:

According to its budget documents, the NIH got about $23 billion in fiscal 2002 (George W. Bush’s first budget year), a figure that rose to $30.2 billion in 2009 (his last budget year) before peaking at $31 billion in 2010. It dipped a bit from then and came to $30.1 billion in 2014, which is about the same amount the NIH requested in President Obama’s 2015 budget plan.

You can argue that the United States needs to be constantly and massively increasing its spending on everything and that every time spending doesn’t go up in a lockstep fashion (and faster than inflation, as it did throughout the Bush years) that you’re killing people. You can also argue that the topline budget figures for various agencies don’t matter, but then you’re really talking about the ways in which bureaucracies, especially in the budget sector, misallocate resources. The one thing you really can’t do is say that the federal government, which is not actually controlled by the Republicans (just saying), has been slashing its spending on anything.

Noah Rothman adds:

There are some conservatives who have convinced themselves that the federal government is to blame for the spread of Ebola to the United States. A few conspiratorial types insist that Washington is indifferent to the spread of this deadly bug to America, despite the fact that this claim defies Hanlon’s razor and there is no evidence to support it. There is, however, sufficient evidence to suggest the federal agencies responsible for preventing a public health crisis – from medical care, to transportation, to oversight – are simply too unwieldy and prone to human error to take the necessary precautions which might have prevented Ebola’s spread across the Atlantic. That is a debatable point, but it is apparently so dangerous to the left that they are mounting a counteroffensive.

Several new books include works of, and details about, the poet John Berryman, who would have been 100 this year.

I have to agree with Asawin Suebsaeng: of course he is.

On some critical public issues – take the scourge of “native advertising” – he has done more to bring the question to light than any other media source (I try but the Dish doesn’t have the mega-reach of a “comedy” show on HBO). That story was almost quintessentially journalism: it took on established interests – the whoring media industry – and called them out on it. It shamed the New York Times for their “re-purposed bovine waste”. That it did so with humor and wit and jokes is neither here nor there. Great journalism should be entertaining. It doesn’t all have to be vegetables. Was Mark Twain merely a humorist? Is Michael Lewis not our finest contemporary non-fiction writer?

Jon Stewart comes close – but the one frustrating aspect of his show is his meek interviewing. It’s as if once he has to enter a more conventional interactive piece of journalism, he panics and turns it into light comedic banter. Or he recoils when he needs to put the boot in – and apologizes for being too mean. Colbert pulls it all off through irony – he plays a fake journalist, but nonetheless exposes real truths and real phonies. But Oliver has taken all this a step further. His extra eight minutes give him a chance for relatively long-form investigative journalism – such as the wonderful bit on the Miss America pageant and its bullshit claim that it grants fellowships to far more women than it does. Yes, it’s funny; yes, it ended with a live comedy skit with Oliver as a losing pageant contestant. But its methods – tracking down massive amounts of documents to prove that Miss America is full of it – were classically journalistic.

And Oliver has a position each time: sponsored content is a massive scam betraying every ethical principle of journalism; the Miss America pageant is an utterly preposterous dinosaur engaged in comedic attempts to cover up its fathomless sexism. It’s opinion journalism at its entertaining best. The closest to it is arguably Real Time with Bill Maher – a comedy show that contains a serious broadcast about current events and ideas.

My own view is that Americans seem unlikely to tune into a weekly, lively show about the week’s events or news – of the kind you get in Britain. They want to be entertained – especially if the show is about the news. But what the brilliance of Maher and Oliver suggests is that there might be room for shows not unlike theirs’ but with less of an escape clause to claim it’s all jokes, never mind, move on … Why not a show that does what Oliver does but a few inches closer to opinionated and witty journalism? A show in which the punchlines are not always jokes but also key arguments to shift the public debate? I suspect Oliver and Maher and Colbert and Stewart have opened a door. Who will go through it?

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