Zephyr Dear

This is a factual account of Marie Curie’s life, nothing more, nothing less.  That’s all it means.  Anybody who tells you any different is lying and trying to start something.

 

 

Marie Curie Was A Difficult Woman

People love Marie Curie.  People lose their ever-lovin’ minds over how much they love Marie Curie.  People even believe that she is entitled to attend social events with her colleagues without being sexually harassed and assaulted.  Damn, I wish people believed that about me.  Turns out you only have to get two Nobel Prizes to claim that kind of privilege, so at least there’s a clear target.  Yes, Marie Curie is the Joan of Arc of Science.  And just like with good ol’ Joan, I believe that the people who love her are split into two camps: those who wish she was alive now and those who are kind of glad she’s dead so that they don’t have to deal with her.  This is muddled not only by the likelihood of overlap between the two groups, but also by assumptions that people are squarely in one group when they are actually in the other.  And also, just like with Joan, there’s that pesky group of people who actually killed her, but they’re too dead for us to care about.

I know a lot about Marie Curie.  The trouble is that I don’t know if any of it is true.  I’m not a Historian, I’m just the sorry old SOB who’s been walking in her muddy bloody tracks for twenty-five years.  I also have a pretty vivid imagination because I didn’t go to graduate school in the Humanities which is specifically designed to beat that out of you.  Unlike me, Historians spend years in Special Collections libraries and are under a lot of pressure to excavate facts that prove the stories people tell are not accurate and that things actually happened another way entirely.  Quite frankly, I’m amazed that they’ve stayed in business this long with a shtick like that, but you should check the comments below for relevant information.  Believe the ones that confirm what I say and take the others with a big grain of salt.  I’ve never trusted people who don’t believe I’m right about everything, and you shouldn’t either.

I remember my mother telling me stories about the drafty garret that Marie lived in when she first attended the University of Paris.  She told about bitterly cold nights when, after an impoverished Marie had covered herself in every stitch of cloth and newspaper that she owned or had scavenged, she took a chair and laid it upon herself, hoping somehow that the weight of it would make her feel warmer.  As I got older this story evolved from a quit-cher-bitchin fable into a study-or-else one and so I’ve progressed through life with a bony shivering Marie following me about like a hungry stray.  Some of the story probably goes back to my mother having grown up painfully poor in Minnesota and the frostbite scars on her nose.  Incidentally, the fact that stories of Marie Curie were used to guilt us into wearing our scarves probably explains a lot about my family.  I’ll tell you about our slide-ruler swordfights sometime.

Marie had a helluva two-body problem just like a lot of us do now and her university didn’t have any clear policy on it just like ours still don’t.  In fact, she wasn’t even employed by the university: her husband was.  She did get his job after he died, but that was after she had been awarded two Nobel Prizes so they kind of had to.  This makes my senior colleague right when he told me that it’s easier to get tenure nowadays.  His timing was unfortunate, it being the day after I got tenure, but I really can’t disagree based on data.  Unlike me, Marie didn’t have her own lab and so she did all her experiments in a hallway.  I remember something about the roof leaking on her stuff.  Because it wasn’t secure, she walked around with the most valuable thing she had – radium – in her pocket to keep it safe.  When she died and they cut her open, the tumors spilled out of her abdomen like a birthday piñata.  Maybe the radium that had pressed against her for years had something to do with that, but it’s kind of late to be pointing fingers.  After all, once she was famous every other damn place in the world the university had a big ceremony to honor her and there was likely free food.  And it was probably French food, too.  During her thank-you speech she got up and said, “I could have accomplished twice as much in half of the time if I’d had the proper facilities.”  That’s French for “F*ck You, Losers!”

Marie wrote lots and lots of letters to her daughters because they didn’t have Skype back then.  I’ve seen reproductions of this correspondence.  The letters are filled with chit-chat interspersed with the derivation of various theorems from first principles.  I don’t know if Marie was trying to lecture them into her world or desperately trying to fit herself into theirs, but I do know that being someone’s mother means that you do both constantly.  My own mother and I are two women who can’t stand being in the same room together but would kill without compunction or remorse anything that threatened the other.  It doesn’t make any more sense to me than the French chit-chat and the equations (me being an experimentalist and all) within Marie’s letters to her daughters, but I accept the validity of all three.  Whenever I think of Marie I automatically wonder what she would think of me.  I wonder if she would be proud of me or even like me at all.  Then I look at myself in the mirror and conclude definitely not.  I vow to get up an hour earlier the next morning, work harder, and finally make something that wouldn’t disgust her.  Thank God I have Marie to wonder about because I am too terrified to wonder about my own mother.  It feels safer to cry over poor old Marie and her womb full of tumors than to visualize myself as a parasitic blob within someone else’s.  A greedy growth to be cut out bleeding and raw and laid naked to a world bent on testing its viability over and over again.

Kindred as circumstances have rendered us, what woman actually knows the recesses of another woman’s heart?  We’ll never really know the important things about Marie: what she snickered about secretly to herself, what she silently yearned for and if she ever painted her nails.  Really I don’t know if any of what I know about Marie is true.  I suspect that some of it is.  Actually, I am convinced that all of it is.  I mean, it has to be.  Why would I make up a bunch of stuff to form a precise narrative projecting all of the resentment and ambivalence that I feel towards academia and my family of origin upon a female scientist that everyone loves, including me?  My conscious mind doesn’t like the idea and so I’m digging in on this one.  If you’re really curious about Marie you should read one or more of her many scholarly biographies, if only because the authors of those took longer than three hours during the middle of one night to write them.  Nonetheless, I will be shocked to hear anyone claim that Marie Curie was not a Difficult Woman.  And you should never envy Difficult Women.  They have Difficult lives and are Difficult to be around.  They might have a lot of friends online, for example, but they tend to utterly exhaust the real people that they know.  This inevitably becomes a Difficult thing that leads to many more Difficulties.  Yes indeed, Difficult Women generally say too much, want too much, and die too young.  They do not live forever, but once in a while, they change Science or Politics so thoroughly that their memory does.  En masse we neuter their ghosts and worship what’s left.  But my mother and I will always like the Difficult version better.

 

If you liked this, you might like this one too.

Filed under: Gut-Busters

John Derbyshire has, fortunately, not merited inclusion in these pages since he defenestrated himself from National Review in 2012 for writing what I called at the time “a confoundingly racist guide for white parents about how to speak to their children about their social interactions with black people.” Now, he’s struck again. This time, it’s with a piece about 12 Years A Slave that can’t be called a review, because as Derbyshire cheerfully admits up front, “No, I haven’t seen the thing, but I’ve read reviews. Also I’ve seen (and reviewed) a specimen of the allied genre: Civil Rights Porn,” but that attempts to demonstrate that slavery wasn’t actually so bad.

There’s a line of critique of Steve McQueen’s film–and really of McQueen’s work more generally–that the way it lingers on the suffering of slaves like Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) is pornographic and degrading to the viewer, without improving our understanding of slavery as an institution and the way its legacy continues to poison us. But that isn’t what Derbyshire, who has described himself as a racist for a decade, meant. Instead, his argument is that 12 Years A Slave, which is based on Northup’s first-person account of his abduction and sale into slavery, after he’d grown up free, goes too hard on slavery as an institution, and on the people who owned their fellow human beings.

This isn’t actually an idea that deserves to be taken seriously. But examining Derbyshire’s reasoning does provide some insight into the cruelty and delusions of his worldview, and his unwillingness to engage with the ways in which trade in human life and work degraded not just people who were held in bondage, but the people who held them there. And it’s a reminder of just how factually shoddy you can be in your film analysis and still get your writing on culture published.

One of Derbyshire’s complaints is that he’s sure 12 Years A Slave doesn’t take into account the fact that some slaves spoke affectionately of their masters into account. He quotes Harriet Walker, who participated in the Slave Narratives program, as evidence that some slaves did, in fact, speak this way. Walker recalls: “Mars George fed an’ clo’esed well an’ was kin’ to his slaves, but once in a while one would git onruly an’ have to be punished. De worse I ever seen one whupped was a slave man dat had slipped off an’ hid out in de woods to git out of wuk. Dey chased him wid blood hounds, an’ when dey did fin’ him dey tied him to a tree, stroppin’ him ’round an’ ’round. Dey sho’ did gib him a lashin’.”

Derbyshire might have a point that 12 Years A Slave didn’t explore the idea that some slaves were loyal to their masters, or that some slaves saw the punishments meted out by their masters and their masters’ employees as justified, except that the movie does both of those things. While in the first stage of his captivity, Solomon meets another man named Clemens (Chris Chalk), who was stolen and resold into slavery, though unlike Solomon, who was previously free, Clemens was stolen from another master. When the man shows up to claim him, Clemens rushes, weeping, into his arms. Laster in the film, Solomon meets Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodard), a slave who has settled into an established position as her master’s mistress. In portraying both Clemens’ open relief and Shaw’s compromise, one salved by the belief that her owner will be tortured by hellfire, 12 Years A Slave actually has more nuance about the kinds of affections slaves might have felt for their masters than Derbyshire’s column does.

Beyond the basic inaccuracy, getting oppressed people accustomed to their circumstances, or making clear to them that those circumstances could be worse, does not, in and of itself, make those circumstances defensible, much less admirable. Would Derbyshire have us believe that domestic violence is an excellent addition to any marriage because a woman who’s told that if she leaves her husband, she will be killed, accustoms herself to being battered instead? Are we supposed to believe that gay people in the 1960s preferred the closet to living openly when such lives were not available to them, and when the alternatives were unemployment, terrible violence, medical malpractice, and alienation from their families? Maybe he would! He certainly goes on to talk about how well most Chinese people he knew in the early 1980s accustomed themselves to Communism, suggesting that “You didn’t have to think much, or take much responsibility. And that suits many of us just fine.” But it’s a mistake that Derbyshire will make over and over again in this column, arguing that because there are worse options available at the time, that slavery wasn’t so bad.

He goes on to suggest that “Slavery is more irksome to some than to others; and freedom can be irksome, too. Personally, I’d be a terrible slave—too ornery. I know people, though—and I’m talking about white people—who I quietly suspect would be happy in slavery,” which is an incredibly bizarre and un-sourced assertion. It also ignores the extent to which slavery wasn’t merely an economic system. The slave narrative Derbyshire quotes mostly talks about the difficulties of making a living on one’s own, which is, of course, a reality that has everything to do with conditions like the accumulation of land holdings in large plantations, the lack of industrial development in the South prior to the Civil War, and the closing of jobs to African-Americans rather than to any sort of natural order. And while there’s no question that economic and food security are attractive things, slavery did not precisely provide those things on a consistent basis, and it was a master’s prerogative to withhold them. More to the point, slavery isn’t just about trading labor for housing and food. It’s about constraining almost every aspect of a person’s life, from their physical mobility in day-to-day life, their access to education, their right to practice religion in their own way, to marry who they choose, conduct their marriages as they saw fit and to raise their children as they chose, and to seek leisure on their own terms. I’m not sure Derbyshire’s imagined voluntary slaves would see that as quite such an attractive bargain.

He goes on to quote Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s Time On The Cross as saying “U.S. slaves had much longer life expectations than free urban industrial workers in both the United States and Europe.” Derbyshire doesn’t acknowledge labor historian Herbert G. Gutman’s extensive critique of the reasoning and methodology behind Fogel and Engerman’s argument that slavery was economically efficient and that slaves shared their masters’ goals–he does say that “I am told (by Bob Weissberg, who knows this territory well) that Time On the Cross is in serious disfavor with the current generation of social scientists for painting too nuanced a picture of Southern slave society,” which is not an answer to Gutman’s methodological criticisms and examination of the data sets his colleagues used, nor does it acknowledge that Weissberg was also fired from National Review over his racial views. And he slides over the fact that even Fogel and Engerman’s records suggest that the rates of physical violence inflicted on slaves was higher than Derbyshire implies earlier in the review. And even if Fogel and Engerman’s analysis was unimpeachable, pointing to Europe and suggesting some workers shorter life expectancies is hardly an affirmative defense of slavery. If you live longer, after all, the person who owns you can extract more labor from you.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that Derbyshire cites Scarlett O’Hara as a sociological expert. Or the way he echoes his own defense of himself as a racist by suggesting that “Venturing into very seriously un-PC territory, Fogel and Engerman argue that Southern white men anyway did not desire black women, an aversion the authors put down to ‘racism,’” because who we find sexually attractive of course has nothing whatsoever to do with social conditioning. Or the fact that he suggests that paternalism and racism even among Abolitionists, which I think no serious person would deny existed, somehow puts slave owners up in the ledger.

In the end, Derbyshire himself sums up his own work, writing: “In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality.” His critique of 12 Years A Slave has no actual relationship to the film in question, and a decidedly deluded relationship to reality itself. The piece is a remarkable reminder of how long certain ideas persist, and how long it’s possible for certain people to stay employed by bandying them about.

The post Columnist Hasn’t Seen ’12 Years A Slave,’ But He’s Sure It’s Too Hard On Slavery appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Robert Steven Connett shares this painting, "SEAPODS," in the Boing Boing Flickr pool, and says, "It will be exhibited and available for sale, at the "Espionage Miami 2013" group art exhibition in Miami Beach Florida, during the Art Basil USA exhibitions, (December 6, 2013 – January 31, 2014), Harold Golen Gallery, 2294 N.W 2nd Avenue, Miami, Florida 33127, Wynwood Arts District."

Check out more of his fantastic psychedelic, inspired-by-nature art in his Flickr feed or his website, grotesque.com.

A pen and a blank sheet of paper. One of my favorite therapists.

Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen is the sort of female hero I wish we saw more of in popular culture.  She's the female protagonist who drives the plot specifically through her actions and her decisions.  Her "specialness" is not her birthright, it's because she has made choices that have fostered far-reaching consequences. 

This stands in stark contrast to many heroines in Young Adult literature who are often born "special" or "different."  They don't have to do anything to earn their position as "Girl Who Would Change the World."  Before Catching Fire, I saw a trailer for the upcoming Divergent, which appears based on a similar sort of idea. The heroine of that series is subjected to a test that is meant to declare her proper role in society.  Apparently in this dystopian future, the free will to choose one's own path has been stamped out in favor of letting "the test" determine that. Much to her shock, our heroine learns that the test "didn't work on you," setting up a story that surely will place her in opposition to society, probably as part of a revolution.

A brewing revolution is also at the heart of Catching Fire, but in this case it's not because Katniss was born with a defect, or because she's a special snowflake.  Here it's specifically the fallout of her defiance at the end of the first Hunger Games.  By being willing to die rather than play the Game the way her leaders demand, Katniss has become a symbol of defiance against the oppressive government.  This puts President Snow in a difficult position. He cannot tolerate the seeds of revolution, but Katniss is too popular among the people for him to move against her directly.

The opening act of the film does a good job of laying out the early rumblings of rebellion. Snow's new Gamemaster, the absurdly-named-even-for-this-series Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), suggests that Snow first attack Katniss as a symbol. "Show them she's not one of them anymore." When it appears that long-game is taking too long, Plutarch pushes Snow to another action, cut all the champions of the Games down to size by making 24 of them participate in what amounts to an all-star match-up.  If everything goes to plan, it will eliminate the Champions as potential instigators of insurrection and force Katniss to either get her hands dirty or die.

That's a strategy that works only if the Champions are willing to toe the party line, and it's evident from the early media tours it's clear that most of them have no interest in being the Capital's dancing monkeys.  There's a thrilling sense of inevitability here.  What Katniss has brought about is too large to be put down by any government edicts or propaganda.  Before the onlookers may have bought into the lie that this bloodsport had some honor to it, this time the political strategery reeks of bullshit a mile away.  Every move Snow makes seems likely to only incite further defiance.

And all because of one girl who volunteered herself as tribute in order to save her sister.  Everything in The Hunger Games saga goes back to that one moment.  It's not an act she was fated to take. It's not an action she was born to make, and it's not something she took on because she was special in some way.  It's a moment of pure free will, and it plants the seeds of further resistance in the name of free will.

One girl can change the world, and not because she's destined to from birth - but because she is capable of having an impact beyond her station.

Twilight merely asserts that Bella is somehow special because the vampires can't read her mind.  Later entries in the saga further this concept of her "specialness" by having her become pregnant with a vampire's child.  Bella doesn't have to really earn her place as the girl who changes her world. She merely has to show up and play out a predetermined script, in a way.  It's the polar opposite of how Katniss becomes the axis her world turns on.

Not that the "destined hero" doesn't have its place, or is inherently bad.  Buffy certainly would fall into that catagory and she's an excellent female protagonist.  What helps there is that even though her powers are her birthright, the series was often shaped by the consequences of how Buffy made use of that power.

I get why many young adult leads might share this "born special" idea.  At that age, everyone feels like an outsider.  It can be a great metaphor of how teenagers feel like they are special even as they're forced to fit in with the crowd.  It's a power fantasy, even if the subtext of "the people who change the world were fated to it, so nothing the non-chosen ones do matters" is a bit disturbing.

But if there were more heroines who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

I enjoyed much of Catching Fire, though I have to confess I've never read any of the novels.  This seemed to work in my favor during the first film, as I came away with a more positive reaction than many of my friends who were devotees of the source material.  This is definitely the Empire Strikes Back of this series, right down to the darker tone, larger scope and bleak cliffhanger.  When the film faded to black, I couldn't believe I'd have to wait a year to see the next chapter.

Having said that, I'm fully aware that my reaction would be very different if the following chapter wasn't a certainty.  These days, you can't take it for granted that a film will perform well enough for a follow-up, not even if the original movie is based on a successful series of books.  Just ask anyone involved with The Golden Compass.

The first Hunger Games could have worked as a standalone film. If it somehow had bombed, you could still walk away from that movie feeling you got a complete story, much the same as how the the original Star Wars could easily stand on its own.  Catching Fire - like Empire Strikes Back - is very much an Act Two.  There's enough meat that it doesn't feel like it's only there to set up the third part, but I'd be lying if I said it provides much closure or resolution.

In fact, there are so many sudden reveals in the film's final ten minutes that I'd probably tear into the film under any other circumstances.  A lot of very important stuff is unexplained, though I'd wager that much of it will be laid out in the third chapter, as it ends up being explained to Katniss.

BIG SPOILERS BELOW

In case you're curious what those issues are:

- Plutarch Heavensbee has been on the side of the good guys all along?  How did he get Haymitch to trust him? How was Finnick brought into the scheme?  Should we really trust either of these guys?

- How did the aforementioned steal the aircraft that picked up Katniss and Beetee? Does the Capital know about this and if not, why did they apparently send a second craft that nabbed Peeta and Johanna?

- Much confusion about Beetee's motivations in splitting up Peeta and Katniss during the climax.  The way things went down, Katniss improvised on the fly and brought the house down, but what was the "real" plan? Why make Katniss deliberately suspicious by seeming to send her and Peeta into separate traps?  Since she knew to cut out Katniss's "tag," Johanna was definitely in on the plan, which makes me even more curious about how all of this came together.  This is one area that I think could have written and revealed more smoothly.

(By the way, if these are explained in the novel or subsequent novels, don't tell me. I'll see how Mockingjay handles these points next year first.)

There's a lot in the climax that has the appearance of coming together too neatly.  Knowing that at least some of it was part of a plan helps, but there are a few wildcards within that plan that are inviting me to nitpick.  The series has earned my trust that much of this will be explained, so I'm not letting it get to me too much.

But know that if you are writing a script that has some of these issues, you will NOT get the benefit of the doubt.  As I've said before, never write a spec script that ends with "To Be Continued."  Don't end a script with so many character's motivations in confusion as they are here.  The filmmakers wouldn't have taken that big of a risk in the first movie.  They had to earn that chance.  If you're submitting a spec, you haven't gotten the same cred, and thus, judgement will be harsher.

Overall, I think I enjoyed Catching Fire even more than the first film.  This time around it was less irritating that circumstances kept Katniss from having to get too cold-blooded in the Games.  The last time around it was drilled in pretty hard that anyone who wasn't on Team Katniss was an outright asshole who probably deserved to die even outside the battle royale situation.  Katniss seems to end up with even less blood on her hands this time around, but the overall morality feels less manipulative than before.

The filmmakers have definitely raised their game here and hopefully they'll push it even further in the two-part finale, the first of which is set to open next winter.

Via TheWrap.

Ah, the price of fame!

Whenever I write something critical of the relatively recent dogma of “biblical inerrancy,” someone always responds by insisting that Christians have been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years.

That’s not true. It’s not possible.

Christians haven’t been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years, because for most of the last 2,000 years, most Christians weren’t reading the Bible at all.

For the first of those 20 centuries, Christians weren’t reading the New Testament because it was still being written. Even 1,900 years ago, many of the texts we refer to as the New Testament were still a work in progress.

It took another 200 years after that for those texts to be collected into anything like a formal canon. That only came about after Emperor Constantine made Christianity Rome’s official religion. The next step, then, was to translate the Bible into Latin so that every Roman-therefore-newly-Christian could read it. Jerome didn’t finish that project until 405.

At that point — 1,600 years ago — it might finally have become possible for Christians to start reading the Bible in the same way that white evangelical inerrantists read it today, but that’s not how they read the Bible. Take a look at Augustine or any of the other early church writers from the first five centuries of Christianity and you’ll find all kinds of approaches to the text — wildly inventive allegorical schemes, symbolism, reinterpretations of the New Testament almost as radical as the NT authors’ reinterpretations of the OT — that would give contemporary defenders of “biblical inerrancy” the howling fantods.

Well, then, what about after Augustine? How did Christians read the Bible in the next several centuries?

They didn’t. Not most of them, anyway. The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 and literacy in western Europe collapsed right along with it. During the Dark Ages, books were hard to come by, and people who could read and understand them were too. Christians were reading the Bible during those many long centuries, but not most Christians. It was read by, and within, the church. The prevailing hermeneutic, in other words, was nothing like the individualistic, face-value literalism that characterizes the approach of modern inerrantists. The prevailing hermeneutic was to interpret the Bible as meaning what the church says it means.

The majority of Christians during those centuries didn’t read the Bible at all, lacking both the ability and the opportunity to do so. They heard bits of the Bible read to them — in Latin, which they may not have understood — and they learned a lot of biblical lore from songs, statuary, pageants and plays. That was mixed in, of course, with a lot of other lore that was likely regarded as biblical, even though it came instead from, say, the Gospel of Nicodemas or the Vision of Tundale.

That’s how things remained for about half of those 2,000 years during which Christians have supposedly been reading the Bible in just exactly the way we’re reading it today.

The big changes didn’t come until more than 1,000 years after St. Jerome finished his Latin translation. The biggest change didn’t have anything to do with the church itself. The biggest change was technological — the invention of the printing press and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible in 1454.

Another big change came with first the Geneva Bible and then the King James Version in 1611 — more than a century after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, these made English translations of the Bible widely available for the first time. And thus, for the first time in the English-speaking world, it became possible to begin reading the Bible the way that proponents of “inerrancy” read it today.

So if we can’t say that most Christians have been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years, can we at least say that some Christians have been reading the Bible this way for 400 years?

Yes, I think that’s fair. I think the same hermeneutic now championed by Al Mohler’s Southern Baptist faction and by things like the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” first began to take shape about 400 years ago.

And here’s a brief timeline of some of that theological development:

1607: Jamestown founded in Virginia.

1611: King James Bible published.

1619: First 20 Africans sold into slavery in Jamestown.

1620: Plymouth Bay Colony founded in Massachusetts.

1636: The Desire, the first North American slave ship, built and launched in Massachusetts.

1643: Plymouth adopts a fugitive slave law.

1657: Virginia adopts a fugitive slave law.

1661: King Charles II of England calls for the Christian conversion of African slaves.

1667: Virginia passes law saying that slaves who convert to Christianity will remain slaves.

From there on it’s just a matter of filling in the details.

The shape of contemporary white evangelicalism — including the way it reads and interprets and wields the Bible — flows from that. That’s where the argument began and that’s where the argument remains.

Late last week Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) made a big show of trying but failing to sign up for Obamacare because of the notoriously buggy website. (Actually he appears to have been using the DC exchange site.) He even did a special tweet noting his hopeless situation. Not terribly surprising given the frustrating experiences so many have had.

Actually, it turns out he had successfully enrolled and got a call confirming that about an hour after his tweet. But it gets better.

Read More →

Sen. Cruz (R-TX) says that killing the filibuster (and that's really what it is) "will poison the atmosphere of the Senate."

All the snark aside (and this deserves plenty of snark), I think this does point to the bad position Senate Republicans put themselves in - namely, that it is just not really credible that any more poisoning is possible in the Senate. And no person captures that more clearly than Sen. Cruz.

I am done and beyond done with this whole MayMay thing. This has gone so much further than I wanted an argument about a fucking browser extension to go.

The degree to which I feel directly, even physically threatened (MayMay is posting that they would be better off if I were dead, then inviting me to meet in person to discuss this) is not worth it. MayMay has gone from “kinda nasty on the Internet” to “holy shit, would this person physically harm me?”  I’m not going to deal with that just to debate some points about Tumblr conduct.

So I officially give up.  I don’t want this fight.  Unless I have to talk further about safety concerns, this is the last post I am ever making anywhere with the name “MayMay” in it.

Christ. Here’s a mom and baby cow.

Fifty years ago Friday, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. The assassination was a tragedy -- and it turned the target into something of a secular political saint. There are few modern presidents about whom The Post's own George Will and E.J. Dionne can agree, but JFK appears to be one.

"It tells us a great deal about the meaning of John F. Kennedy in our history that liberals and conservatives alike are eager to pronounce him as one of their own," Dionne notes. A Gallup poll last week found that Americans rate him more highly than any of the other 11 presidents since Eisenhower. A 2011 Gallup poll found that he came in fourth when Americans were asked to name the greatest president of all time, behind Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Bill Clinton, but ahead of George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson.

Some of that reputation is hard to argue with. Kennedy was a brilliant rhetorician who inspired a generation of young Americans, and his death left a lingering scar on the American psyche. But it's important that his presidency be evaluated on its actual merits. And on the merits, John F. Kennedy was not a good president. Here are six reasons why.

1. The Cuban Missile Crisis was his fault

Historians disagree on what exactly led to the October 1962 crisis that almost ended in a nuclear exchange. But basically every interpretation suggests that, had the Eastern Seaboard been wiped out that month, it would have been the result of Kennedy's fecklessness.

Let's take the most pro-Kennedy view — ably summarized by Max Fisher here — first. By the telling of Yale's John Lewis Gaddis (an able if very pro-Western historian of the Cold War), the placement of missiles in Cuba was motivated by a desire to avoid an American invasion of the island. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev believed that such an invasion was imminent — not an unreasonable view, given that Kennedy had tried to do just that a year earlier with the Bay of Pigs Invasion — and viewed the missiles as a necessary deterrent. Kennedy did not understand this, Gaddis argues, instead viewing the move as an attempt to improve the Soviet position relative to the United States's in case of a nuclear exchange, which led to him fumbling about until reaching a deal that included promising not to invade Cuba again.

If that was the situation, then what appears to have happened is that Kennedy misinterpreted Khrushchev's action as an act of aggression against the United States and prepared for war — including doing numerous things to potentially provoke one, like revealing the missiles' existence publicly and going on DEFCON 2 — in response to his misunderstanding, backing down only once the Soviets told him what they really wanted, and he calmed down. A+ statesmanship, right there.

Another notable Kennedy defender is Graham Allison of the Kennedy School, whose book "The Essence of Decision" is a classic treatment of the crisis. Allison refers to the Cuban missile incident as, "a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general." But he willingly concedes that Kennedy took numerous actions that increased the risk of war. "NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots loaded active nuclear bombs and advanced to an alert status in which individual pilots could have chosen to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb," he notes.

Allison defends that on the view that raising the stakes improved the U.S. bargaining position. All of that would make sense if getting rid of the missiles was a major security priority. It wasn't. The Soviets already had ICBMs, as well as nukes on submarines stationed near the United States.; they could nuke the United States whenever. Putting nukes in Cuba didn't change that. As Benjamin Schwarz noted in The Atlantic recently, "The U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs [submarine-launched ballistic missiles]."

But the worst part of Kennedy's handling of the crisis is that he spurred the missiles' deployment in the first place. There was the Bay of Pigs debacle, of course, which confirmed to Cuba and the Soviet Union that there was a real threat of an American invasion they needed to deter.

Further, as Schwarz notes, Kennedy had deployed medium-range "Jupiter" missiles to Italy and Turkey (which, of course, bordered the USSR) earlier in his term. The missiles had no deterrent value and were basically only useful as a means of attacking the Soviet nuclear arsenal as part of a first strike. That meant they were extremely destabilizing, something that was known at the time and provoked concern from Sens. Albert Gore Sr. (D-Tenn.) and Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.). Insofar as wanting to counter U.S. nuclear capabilities was a major motivation for Khrushchev, the Cuba move mainly made sense as a counter to a way more dangerous move by Kennedy. Kennedy even conceded to aides that the Cuba and Turkey missiles were "the same."

If Gaddis is right, and Kennedy viewed Khrushchev's move as an attempt to jockey for a better position in a potential nuclear exchange with the United States, then Kennedy surely would have concluded that Khrushchev only placed the missiles in Cuba because he placed them in Turkey first. Kennedy, under Gaddis's telling, escalated knowing the situation was his fault.

You should really read Schwarz's piece in its entirety, but the quote it includes from Sheldon Stern, who served as the JFK Library's resident historian for over two decades, is a good summation: "John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis."

2. The Bay of Pigs invasion was his fault

This is hard to break out from the missile crisis it helped trigger, but, remarkably, nearly triggering a nuclear war was not the only way in which the Bay of Pigs invasion was a massive mess. There were, of course, the hundreds of deaths and thousands injured, and the tremendous damage it did to America's reputation around the world, but perhaps the most enduring legacy of the invasion was that it firmly established Cuba as a Communist state.

As David Grann noted in his biography of William Alexander Morgan — an American member of the Cuban revolutionary forces who pushed for a democratic Cuba against a Marxist-Leninist faction led by Che Guevara — the first time Fidel Castro identified Cuba as a socialist country was when the Bay of Pigs invasion happened. When Kennedy took office, it was probably too late for Morgan's side to win; Morgan himself had been executed a month before the invasion, and Che was gaining ground with Castro, who had once had more in common ideologically with Morgan. But the invasion sent Cuba firmly into Soviet hands. "It was supposed to rid the hemisphere of a potential Soviet base, but it pushed Fidel Castro into the waiting arms of the Soviet Union," the historian Peter Kornbluh says. "It was meant to undermine his revolution but it truly helped him to consolidate it."

And despite happening very early in his term, it was Kennedy's fault. He had several meetings on the subject and received numerous memoranda, many giving him cover to nix the operation. Aides Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Goodwin, McGeorge Bundy, Thomas Mann, and Chester Bowles all expressed skepticism, as did William Fulbright, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. The president himself seemed to be conflicted. But he went through with the plan anyway, despite having numerous opportunities to reverse course and plenty of bureaucratic support had he chosen to do so. He didn't, a bunch of people died, and Cuba is still under Communist rule today.

3. He escalated in Vietnam

Some post-defeat revisionists, most notably Oliver Stone, have tried to argue that Kennedy would have somehow saved us from escalating in Vietnam. There's little evidence for this. For one thing, Kennedy's decision to overthrow South Vietnamese president Ng nh Di m was a decisive move for greater hands-on American involvement in the conflict.

After that, the North Vietnamese escalated in an attempt to destabilize the South Vietnamese state, which in turn spurred Lyndon Johnson's 1964 escalation. That's the thing that most revisionist accounts fail to address. Kennedy's comments on the war during his lifetime obviously don't take into account the North Vietnamese escalation. It was enough to spur Johnson to escalate in turn, and we have little reason to believe Kennedy would have acted any differently.

What's more, Robert Kennedy himself said in 1964 that JFK never considered withdrawing. Some, like Robert Dallek, try to argue around that and cite comments that suggested Kennedy wanted to get U.S. advisers home, but I'm inclined to agree with Tom Ricks's interpretation of those comments: "Sure, Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam -- just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: We'll scale down our presence after victory is secure. And much more than Johnson, Kennedy was influenced by General Maxwell Taylor, who I suspect had been looking for a 'small war' mission for the Army for several years."

4. Oh, and he backed an ill-advised coup in Iraq too

Ricks points out that Kennedy also authorized a 1963 coup against the pro-Soviet military leader of Iraq. The guy was hardly a saint, but you should generally avoid killing other countries' leaders when you can help it (I would argue you should avoid killing people, full stop, but that's another matter). The coup put the Iraqi Baath party in power, setting in motion the chain of events that would result in Saddam Hussein's decades-long rule over the nation.

5. He went way too slowly on civil rights

Kennedy is to be commended for sending federal marshals to protect Freedom Riders and troops to defend students at the state universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and for calling for a ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations in 1963. But let's not mistake the man for a friend of civil rights. When the Freedom Rides started, Kennedy was enraged, demanding of his adviser Harris Wofford, "Can't you get your Goddamned friends off those buses? Stop them."

He took a decisive turn in 1963 by calling for a real Civil Rights Act, but that came after two years of pressure from civil-rights protestors, and he still wasn't ready to go all out. As Jackie Robinson — who backed Nixon in 1960 — put it, he "needed prodding" on the issue. Nick Bryant, who wrote the sole history of Kennedy's civil-rights record (appropriately titled "The Bystander"), concludes that Kennedy probably would have passed the Civil Rights Act had he lived, but, "At the time of his death, however, Kennedy had only a small record of accomplishment in civil rights." He adds that his administration "adhered to a distinctly southern timetable in the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education."

It's hard to say if Nixon would have been better on civil rights — though it's worth remembering that he was friends with Martin Luther King Jr., was an NAACP member, and expressed to King his frustration with the tepid pace at which civil rights was moving — but Hubert Humphrey, who made his name in politics with a 1948 stand for civil rights at the Democratic convention, certainly would have been. In any case, Kennedy's record is nothing to write home about.

6. He passed no domestic legislation of any consequence.

So let's recap the legislation Kennedy signed into law:

He signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a good step toward ending wage discrimination based on gender but one which was extremely incomplete. It's hard to disaggregate its effect from that of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which, surprisingly to many, ended up including an amendment extending its protections to victims of sex discrimination as well as race discrimination. The CRA was a stronger law, which makes isolating the Equal Pay Act's effects tough. That said, we know that the Equal Pay Act imposes an onerous standard on women trying to prove discrimination, and some scholars have argued that it is basically useless for women in white collar professions or other jobs with less standardized wages. A good first step? Sure. But hardly transformative.

He created the Peace Corps, famously. While that organization played a valuable role in improving foreign attitudes toward the United States during the Cold War, it's far too small to be a significant development agency, and the work it does is not especially conducive to that goal either. As Gal Beckerman put it in a good profile of the agency in the Boston Globe recently, "The agency has never been structured to do development effectively. In fact, if you were trying to design an organization to avoid having a lasting impact, it might look a lot like the Peace Corps: inexperienced volunteers sent to work in near-total isolation from one another, with time limits guaranteed to make their impact only short term." And as Robert Strauss has pointed out, its placements are rarely based on where volunteers would provide the most help. The corps was probably a net good, but was much too small and inefficient to justify the extent to which it's burnished Kennedy's reputation.

He signed legislation into law giving the president the authority to negotiate sweeping tariff reductions, power that would be used to great effect by Johnson.

He signed a modest increase in Social Security benefits, boosting the minimum monthly benefit from $33 to $40 ($257.76 to $312.44 in 2013 dollars) and enabling early retirement at age 62.

He also signed modest changes to Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the main welfare program at the time, renaming it Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and changing the federal matching program.

What of his executive actions domestically? Well, he allowed collective bargaining among federal employees, your view of which will depend on whether you think the public sector is a proper place for labor organizing or if, like Franklin Roosevelt, you think that an inappropriate expansion of the practice. The Apollo Program was first conceived under the Eisenhower administration but Kennedy provided strong public support for it. If you think space exploration's important, that's a big step, but the Johnson administration did the heavy lifting in actually completing a manned moon landing. Whether Kennedy would have done the same is, of course, impossible to know.

Similarly, whether Kennedy would have passed much of the legislation enacted under Johnson is hard to say. The 20 percent across-the-board tax cut Johnson signed in 1964, for example, was a Kennedy initiative; depending on how you feel about tax legislation that predominantly benefited high earners, that might be a credit to Kennedy. But we do know that Medicare, Johnson's leading domestic accomplishment, would not have been passed under Kennedy. JFK had tried to pass the legislation in 1962 and the effort went disastrously, as Kennedy antagonized Democrats in Congress whose support he needed. The bill died in the Senate in July 1962, not to be considered again until Johnson took office.

Liberals and conservatives are both wrong about how mainstream their views are – but in different ways:

It isn’t just that liberals are more divided and conservatives are more united, it’s also that liberals believe they’re more divided, and conservatives believe they’re more unified, even when it’s not necessarily true. The study asked people about their opinions on a range of questions on both political and non-political topics, then asked them to guess what proportion of people who shared their general ideology agreed with them on that particular question. The results showed that liberals displayed a “truly false uniqueness effect”—they were more likely to think that their views were different from those of their peers, even when they weren’t—while conservatives displayed a “truly false consensus effect,” believing that their views were the same as their peers, even when they weren’t.

The authors also found evidence that the liberal false uniqueness effect has at least part of its origins in liberals’ personal desire to feel unique, as measured by a “need for uniqueness” scale. In other words, liberals who were more likely to see themselves as the type of person who’s different and special were more likely to think their opinions were unique as well.

Conservatives are trying out a new slogan to influence the ongoing budget negotiations: “Spend One Dollar Less.”

As reported by National Review’s Jonathan Strong, twenty major conservative leaders all signed a letter stating that “If Washington wants to take on more debt isn’t it fair that they at least be forced to spend One Dollar Less next year than they’re spending this year?”

There are several problems with this argument, but it also points to an important question: Should government spending as a share of the economy go higher or lower as we get wealthier?

On the specific “Spend One Dollar Less” argument, it’s worth noting that raw dollar spending is an incomplete way of understanding what the government does. In order to gauge the size of government spending you need to reference the actual size of the economy. How much of the economy’s resources is the government using? A large, rich country spending a certain amount of money is less an issue than a small, poor country spending the exact same amount, all else equal.

Every year there is some amount of growth and inflation in the economy. As such, the amount of government spending needs to grow in dollar amounts each year simply in order to keep doing the same things on the same scale. This is why spending and debt, when actually being analyzed, are usually conveyed as a percentage of GDP.

And that’s not all. The government provides services to—which means that as the country grows in population the government should also expand to keep the level of services constant. The U.S. population has increased about 0.7 percent in each of the past several years, with 2.25 million new people in 2011. Those are new people who will need roads, schools, clean air and water and all the other things the government provides. To keep services constant, government spending in raw dollars will have to increase too.

This also points to a related and more interesting question. Over the next decade the federal government is expected spend about 22 percent of GDP. Should that number grow or shrink as we get richer as a country? This is a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives.

As the sociologist Lane Kenworthy, author of the forthcoming Social Democratic America , notes, it’s a historical fact that as countries have grown richer, they have spent more on social insurance. As we become richer we value security and insurance more and we are willing to spend more on it. We do this as individuals, and we do this as a country as well. Insurance mitigates against bad luck, including the bad luck of being born in poverty.

Conservatives would counter that, as we grow richer, there are more opportunities to provide security privately, without the use of government. As such, government spending should be reserved for very core, minimal functions, which will shrink as private forms of insurance and risk-mitigation flourish.

The last decade hasn’t been too kind to the latter vision of how prosperity will evolve. The serious market income gains have been concentrated in the top 1 percent of Americans, who in turn use it to fuel luxury spending competitions rather than run private welfare states. As MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff reports, private food banks are terrified of the sequester (which cut The Emergency Food Assistance Program that helps food banks) and recent food stamp cuts, because they can’t offset that austerity with private charity. Economic insecurity has increased, and longer-term trends don’t point to any reversion soon. Any sensible politics that evolve out of this situation will involve government spending to increase with the times.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. Follow him on Twitter here .

How Valve demonstrates democracy in the workplace:

The following is why a socialist organization of investment across society would be positive. One would not be held captive to the beliefs and politics of individual funders, but instead to all of society.

"In other words, the American business environment makes it difficult to experiment with the kind of radically flat organization that Valve is pioneering. Firms usually turn to private funders or to capital markets when they reach a certain point in their life cycle. Both kinds of investors are likely to be impatient with arrangements that benefit employees if they don’t provide measurable short-term payoffs, even if they have long-term economic advantages."

When Janet Sinclair shipped her greyhound from San Diego to Boston with United Airlines' PetSafe program, she was horrified to discover her dog nearly dead on arrival, covered in feces and blood, with blood in its stool and urine. The dog had been exposed to punishing heat, its cage had been kicked across United's shipping facilities by their handlers. The vet bill was $2700, and the vet confirmed that the dog's injuries were the result of heat stroke and rough treatment.

United agreed to pay the vet bill, but only if Sinclair would sign a nondisclosure agreement promising not to tell anyone about their monumental screw-up. Instead, Sinclair went public. The ensuing media attention revealed hundreds of other people whose pets were injured and killed by United.

"And the woman in front of me said – 'Is that your dog?'" Sinclair said. "And she said, ‘Honey, I sure hope you’re taking video of this.’ And that was the beginning of the worst day of my life."

She shot cell phone video that July day and shared it with NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit. The video she recorded periodically shows her pets left outside, not in a temperature-controlled vehicle. According to the National Weather Service, the high in Houston that day was 94 degrees. When they touched down in Boston, Sinclair said her dog was barely alive.

"Sedona’s entire crate was filled with blood, feces, urine," Sinclair said. "Sedona was in full heat stroke. All of the blankets were filled with blood. She was urinating and defecating blood. She was dying, literally, right in front of me."

United Airlines Refuses to Pay Veterinarian Bill Without NDA [Elyce Kirchner and David Paredes/NBC Bay Area]

(via Consumerist)

To the question about INTJs. I have an INTJ friend. She is an absolute asshole, but I tolerate it because sometimes she can be cool and I hate conflict. It’s probably different for a sibling relationship, though. But INTJs do tend to be assholes.

Miranda Blue of Right Wing Watch, a watchdog blog that reports on the radical right in part by posting fair-use clips on YouTube of activists speaking in their own words, writes: "One of the guys we monitor, former Navy chaplain Gorden “Dr. Chaps” Klingenschmitt, has now figured out a way to get our entire YouTube account taken down for weeks at a time just by filing multiple frivolous claims against our account. Now, we’re trying to get YouTube to change its policies to prevent people like Dr. Chaps from taking down entire watchdog organizations – which is surprisingly easy to do."

Dr. Chaps, by the way, believes President Obama is literally possessed by demons, and that gay men in the military are having sex with each other on the altar at West Point's chapel. He has a website, where he solicits donations for his "religious work."

[2] It’s reached the point where I’m somewhat suspicious of any man who is unusually vocal about fighting against abuse. I get uneasy the moment I get even a whiff of him using it to glorify himself, his incisive judgement, his righteous anger, whatever. Extra eeks if it’s a huge central part of his identity. And I’m sure most of the time I’m getting unnecessarily mistrustful of people who are okay but just have that kind of offputting style to their approach :( But then I worry that I’m not…

[3] Sometimes I wonder if the more awareness of abuse grows, the more people will start using the concepts and vocabulary as tools for control and abuse. I hope not, I hope the growing awareness will mean not even that is a shield any more. Ugh, anyway. …I would include a cute photo here, but apparently I’m not allowed links, alas!

I don’t have much to say except a very sad “yep.”  I’ve seen the same thing.  Some people are drawn to the idea of fighting abusers not because they care about survivors but because they like having an acceptable target for “righteous” violence.

You can get really close to a tone argument here, because I don’t want to say “therefore, anyone who ever talks about abuse in a way that isn’t perfectly gentle and polite is an abuser themselves!!!” 

But there are people out there who cross the line from “justified anger” to “anti-abuse heroes answer to no one,” and they’re fucking scary.

…Yeah, we need a cute photo around now.  Here’s a picture of a pig that has a little house.

Well, this all seems sort of inevitable in hindsight, doesn’t it? Telltale has more or less perfected its episodic storytelling formula, and bounteous riches are beginning to flow. And from among those glittering prizes and sparkling gem clusters, the Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us dev has – if a report from IGN is to be believed – plucked a veritable holy grail. It now allegedly has some sort of Game of Thrones game in the oven, though exact details are still hazy. This does, however, link up pretty well with my Dan Connors interview from earlier this year, so I am cautiously optimistic about the (for now) rumor’s veracity.

(more…)

He described a choir made up of military wives as “concentrated evil” and went on “We cannot afford to be complacent about such ordure. We have to destroy it, instantly, utterly…the poppies should be burned – not just a few, in a symbolic Islam4UK-style action, but all of them in a mass cremation of postcolonial bunting.”
He supports the troops “like a rope supports a hanging man” and has repeatedly called for their murder. “It's sensible for occupied people to attack and kill British troops. The antiwar movements of imperialist states depend on them doing just that…I think the killing of occupation soldiers is more than understandable - it is an absolute necessity.”
Communists are so desperate at this point that they’ll see revolution in just about anything. In the midst of the London riots, as working class areas were being destroyed, Seymour wrote “The intention has been to show that the party of order can keep control throughout the coming battles. I hope, with every fibre in my being, that they cannot.”
...
A soi-disant anti-racist who thinks racial harmony will be brought to the world by tweeting such things as “White America needs to be brought to its knees”; masquerading as a “Marxist” he has managed to coin the term “theophobia” and feels the need to put the term ‘ex-Muslim’ in scare quotes.
His ridiculous neologism seems only to apply to one particular monotheism. In response to a video of some Christian children singing, he couldn’t help but comment “Jesus made these little fuckers and their despicable parents” and tagged the video “Hitler Youth Christmas Special”.
...
He has described any commemoration of 9/11 as ‘necrophagous’.  It is an event already somewhat sterilized by the media’s excision of the images of people jumping to their deaths, but for Seymour it must be entirely forgotten, an event about which we should “shut the fuck up”.

Hey, MayMay got around to telling me to kill myself!  Whee.

I don’t want to subject the Internet to a tedious rebuttal, except to say that the accusations against MayMay are not about “not going to a party”; their ex details here why this goes way beyond that.

(Also, it’s really fucking disturbing that they think the reason I disapprove of telling people to kill themselves is that it’s a devious PR move to carefully manicure my public image.)

More science vs. magic in Texas schools: creationists in the state are rejoicing as the State Board of Education has held up the approval of a Biology textbook "because of alleged factual errors." The science tome from Pearson Education, one of America's largest publishers, contains a section on natural selection, and nothing about how Jesus made the dinosaurs. [AP]

Speaking on the Senate floor shortly after the filibuster rule change was pushed through over his objections and that of all of his Republican colleagues, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) was explicit: When Republicans control the White House and Senate, they will change the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for the Supreme Court, too.

It's the GOP warning that there will be hell to pay -- "a heavy, heavy price," in John McCain's words -- when they are in the majority. Abortion, civil rights, environmental laws. We'll hit you where it hurts.

It's what Norm Ornstein is getting at when he told our Sahil Kapur that at some level Mitch McConnell wanted this to happen, and in this way, with Democrats going first so they can be blamed. "McConnell's threat, it seems to me, makes clear the strategy: let Dems take the first step, and we will then bear no blame when we entirely blow up the Senate's rules after we take all the reins of power."

Harry Reid knew what he was getting into. But this is where we're headed.

The first of four studies on a poorly-understood link between sleep quality and depression indicates that when antidepressant medication and insomnia therapy are used together, recovery from depression is more thorough, and faster. (Thanks, Miles O'Brien)

I think part of the reason the MayMay stuff affects me so deeply is that they remind me of a couple people I’ve had to deal with in my offline life.

These people had three traits in common:

1. They kept Enemies Lists.  Very long lists.  They were absolutely defined by the number of people and groups they hated and how vociferously they hated them.

2. They had a history of questionable to outright abusive behavior in their personal lives, which they were absolutely unwilling to discuss or account for. They took any questions about this behavior as personal attacks, and added the questioner to the Enemies List.  If a whole lot of people or an entire community questioned their behavior, that did not cause them any self-doubt; they believed they were persecuted martyrs for the anti-abuse cause.

3. They described themselves as anti-abuse activists, and glorified the idea that they were justified in doing any harm they wanted to abusers or abuse apologists. They then proceeded to say that everyone on their Enemies List, and everyone who criticized them, was an abuser or abuse apologist.

—

These people mostly just made themselves miserable and isolated, but they did harm to others as well. They were able to get away with some really horrible behavior—things like stalking people, threatening physical violence, demanding their girlfriend have no friends they didn’t approve of, or trying to make drunk people have unprotected sex with them—because of their “but I’m anti-abuse!” smokescreen.

It’s sort of tricky to talk about this because I don’t want this to become a reason to ignore unpopular whistleblowers, but… this is a pattern I’ve seen several times and been directly victimized by.  The words “I’m fighting against abusers” are cheap, and people who are themselves abusive can use those words to their advantage.

I think they’re possibly dangerous, and definitely damaging to the cause of addressing abuse in kink communities.

They’ve completely contaminated the originally-okay idea of “tools for identifying possible abusers” by turning it into “tools for identifying possible abusers and people MayMay doesn’t like and some completely random people too.”  And they’ve used very flimsy connections to possible abusers as an excuse to out kinksters without their consent.

They seem utterly unable to conceive of any reason a person would criticize them except for “is persecuting me because they are pro-abuse.”  And most troublingly, there are numerous reports of them behaving abusively toward partners and exes, and they haven’t accounted for these except by claiming this is yet more persecution.

I read several pieces today that, together, were a somewhat grim insight into the acute social and economic crisis of our time. The first is a challenging and persuasive historical account by historian Peter Turchin of what Aristotle first observed in The Politics. The graphic (by Jennifer Daniel) is a crude but powerful summary of an historical pattern we see again and again in human history:

In this cycle, I’d say the US is roughly in the elite fratricide moment, which means very choppy waters ahead. Turchin’s thesis is basically the following: the eternal tension between liberty and equality has a recognizable shape in historical and economic cycles, which are perhaps better understood today. The optimal moment for successful societies is when the middle class dominates, where political institutions reflect a mass interest in governing the society well, because everyone feels they have a stake (so more people than usual want and need collective success), and because they share some basic commonalities in experience, and so can find a way to compromise.

When societies grow more unequal, commonalities fray. Wealth accumulates among the few, who begin to see the polity as something to be used for private interests rather than engaged in for public-spirited reform. But as wealth at the top grows and grows, and as more and more of the middle class attempt to become part of the super-wealthy club, the loss of economic demand among the increasingly struggling majority puts a crimp in the social mobility of the wannabe elites. So we have a wealth glut: hugely wealthy one-percenters and a larger group of under-employed or unemployed professionals. It’s from these disgruntled elites that you will get the tribunes of the new plebeians. And they will be guided by revenge just as destructively as the top one percent is now guided by naked self-interest.

What disappears in this moment of the cycle is the lubricant for all successful polities: a sense that we are all in this together. When that crashes into economic stagnation, and the fight for a slice of the pie gets even more frenzied, you’re in for some serious social unrest – which will either lead to a period of reform or to further social and economic disintegration.

So do we have elite fratricide? When a Harvard and Princeton alum like Ted Cruz emerges as a wildly swinging wrecking ball for the entire global economy, you bet we do. When Republicans up the ante on judicial appointments by trying to prevent a president from filling any vacancies and when the filibuster has become much more common than, you know, actual legislation, ditto. When the response to that is to scrap one of the last remaining mechanisms for legislative balance and compromise, ditto. When a major political party offers nothing on a major social and fiscal problem, like our grotesquely inefficient form of socialized medicine, but is content merely to attack, attack and attack the law of the land and sabotage it, ditto. When a former Tory prime minister breaks ranks and accuses his elite successors of ignoring the impact of growing social immobility, ditto. When news channels decide to become propaganda channels, and when there are close to no major media institutions retaining trust as neutral arbiters of our national debate, ditto. When elite sister breaks with elite sister over an appeal to the masses, ditto.

You can probably add a whole litany of additional data points yourselves. But to my mind, what matters now in politics is finding a party or a candidate that recognizes this core problem and tries to ameliorate it.

Obama was and is such a person, but the response to his moderate reforms shows how deeply intractable this crisis now is. It may have to get worse before it gets better – and that may mean a dangerous period of unrest and dysfunction. But the challenge remains: how do we reverse this centrifugal force on the polity, especially when it has been put on steroids by the globalized economy? At some point, someone among the sane Republicans and sane Democrats is going to have to run on a robust and aggressive platform of reform that can – yes – begin sharing the wealth and tackling the entrenched and destabilizing perquisites of the super-rich, as well as tackling the populists who engage in selfish and dangerous exploitation of the resentments of our time.

For now, though, we actually have a figure in the middle of this polarizing vortex still straining to forge a middle ground. He’s our president. If he doesn’t succeed, someone else more radical will follow him. That’s why I, as a conservative, continue to support him. It’s time to leave ideology in the dust and see our predicament with unblinking eyes. It’s time for a conservatism that can grasp the necessity for reform – despite the ideology that made sense thirty years ago but has obviously become incapable of adjusting to our time – and build a new majority from the center on out. That small-c conservatism – the type that cares about the coherence and stability of the polity above all other considerations – can take shape among Democrats and Republicans. If Obama cannot succeed in it, more radical options will present themselves. But if real reform cannot find an anchor in this society anywhere, we will all face the consequences.