Matt Zeitlin

Of all the controversies in the world, the McWhorter-Behe Bloggingheads Disappearence is a rather minor one. To quickly sum it up, John McWhorter, the Manhattan Institute fellow and all purpose race-pundit (also an academic linguist), read Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution and was really, really impressed with it. So, he invited Behe to do a diavlog to him, and, in the slightly vulgar words of biologist Abigail Smith “gave Behe one hot, 44 minute blow-job.” Now, plenty of people are lured in by smart, scientifically informed folks like Behe, but few go so public with their fandom, and subsequently, McWhorter requested that bloggingheads pull down the episode because he “feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site.”

This fiasco is pretty embarrassing on a lot of levels. First of all, it’s embassing for McWhorter. Despite whatever disagreements many have with him on race issues, he has a doctorate in linguistics and has taught at plenty of great institutions. He’s clearly a smart, basically reasonable guy, and beyond that, has been an atheist all of his life. So, I imagine that plenty of his friends and acquaintances gave him a lot of gruff for being so credulous. But because of the nature of the internet, the diavlog will live on forever, even if it’s no longer hosted on the bloggingheads site. Secondly, it’s embarrassing for bloggingheads, which has distinguished itself by having dozens of reputable and even renowned scientists on the website. This, of course, follows up on the appearance of young-earth creationist Paul Nelson on bloggingheads’ weekly “Science Saturday.”

But beyond any negative reprecussions for the participants, I think this entire episode shows how seductive Intelligent Design can be, especially for the educated laymen. Basically McWhorter had always accepted the Darwinian account of how our present diversity of life came to be, even if he had some nagging doubts about how an amoeba could turn into a skunk. Moreover, he probably thought very little of biblical creationsts. And then he read Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, which very cleverly preys on these nagging doubts that a laymen might have. Behe’s basic argument is that some features of life, especially cellular structures,  are “irreducibly complex,” meaning that there’s no way that they could have come about in an incremental, “random” process of mutations being selected by natural selection.

What makes Behe so seductive is that he’s not openly a Holy Roller creationist. He’s actually a biologist, with a tenured position at Lehigh University. And he — like Stephen Meyer, who I wrote about at Campus Progress – is always very careful to phrase his position in skeptical, scientific terms. He always says that he’s just following the evidence, and says that his method is essentially scientific and compares himself to past scientists whose research lead to paradigm shifts in their fields (like the big bang theory in physics). And since the Darwinian story of mutation and natural selection leading to evolution is so contrary to how humans basically view the world – we instinctively attribute design to complex structures and often see patterns and design where they don’t actually exist — an argument like Behe’s, which lets someone openly express their instinctual doubts about evolution, can be quite attractive. And McWhorter is attracted for all those reasons. Fundamentally, he just can’t accept the Darwininan story, that a natural, “unguided” process can create such complex wonders like life on earth. And so he’s enamored with Behe.

And while biologists can dutifully review Behe’s books and show why his specific examples are wrong, it won’t do much use. When you show that flagella, the cellular structures whose apparent uber-complexity Behe devotes much of Darwin’s Black Box to, aren’t actually irreducibly complex, the IDers will come up with another example. There will always be aspects of life that currently existing evolutionary biology or chemistry can’t precisely explain, and so Intelligent Design folk will always have something to bolster their arguments.

I think, instead, what’s important is not to necessarily engage with the Intelligent Design folks on scientific terms, but to point out how they’re ideologues, not scientists. For instance, Intelligent Design only really started as funded, organized movement after the 1987 Edwards v Aguillard Supreme Court decision banned creationist teaching in public schools.

In that decision’s wake, “Intelligent Design” sprang up and later found a home at the Discovery Institute, whose infamous “wedge document“  — which explains the purpose and goals of the organization — is devoted nearly entirely to the culture war, and very little to actual science. Nearly all the prominent Intelligent Designers, like Behe or Stephen Meyer, are really just religious or cultural ideologues. Explaining the history and character of the movement, more so than engaging in a tiresome line-by-line refutation of someone like Behe, will probably do more to convince a fundamentally intelligent, open-minded person like McWhorter that Intelligent Design is not a respectable scientific hypothesis.

PS – Funny enough, one of the best takedowns of ID is written by none other than Bob Wright.

The Economist limns General Stanley McChrystal’s “counterinsurgency guidance for Afghanistan.” The  annoymous blogger finds that McChrystal has very high expectations for what the military should and can do in Afghanistan:

One interesting angle that the guidance suggests is that the Army may be thinking that it cannot rely on the promised surge of civilian aid professionals; it has to do the job itself. This may be true. Afghanistan is in the middle of a war. Development workers go into their field to help the world’s poor. They don’t go into it to risk getting killed. Soldiers, on the other hand, do go into their field knowing that they risk getting killed. A familiar insurgent tactic is to assassinate development workers and wait for a clumsy military response, which they can evade. That is insurgents’ territory of strength. Insurgents are much more reluctant to attack military forces head-on; that is their territory of weakness. The COIN guidance proposes that the military forces become the development workers. If insurgents want to attack the development workers, they then have to attack military forces head-on. It might work. It depends on instilling a new ethic amongst American soldiers. Their job is no longer mainly to risk their lives trying to kill the enemy. Their job is mainly to risk their lives trying to fix the local irrigation system. It’s a concept. A little hippie-ish. But a concept.

This strikes me as a huge problem. In the development and diplomatic communities, where we’d expect there to be the most people trained and ready to this type of development and diplomatic work, there aren’t really enough people who have the technical, linguistic and cultural skills to do so. Are we expect that combat troops — who, after all, are primarily trained in combat — to do any better? This is not to say that these type of counter-insurgent skills, and the overall mindset that population protection is an important military tactic, are not spreading throughout the military, but still, it seems to be putting a whole lot out of soldiers to also expect them to be diplomats and development workers.

This is hardly an original observation, but perhaps the high expectations McChrystal has for soldiers shows that counterinsurgency is actually incredibly difficult, especially if you don’t want to do it by traditional means — which essentially means making civilians pay the price for having insurgents in their midst — and that the US should, in general, avoid getting itself involved in such situations.

In the neverending and utterly inane dispute between sportsbloggers and sportswriters, Deadspin hold a special place. The blog, which is Gawker Media’s sports site, is one of the most widely read sports blog and wins the ire of old-school sports writers for its combination of snarky commentary, oftentimes directed at the sports media, and its willingness to do “lifestyle” reporting on sports. And by lifestyle reporting, I mean posting pictures of athletes in embarassing situations. When Buzz Bissinger, the renowned sportswriter,  went on Costas Now to confront Will Leitch, the founder of Deadspin, he went on a sputtering, spickle-flecked rant that probably changed the coordinates of the blog-old school media debate.

This is all just a wind-up to this excellent piece about a former NBA scorekeeper that was posted on Deadpsin. The nut of the story is that scorekeepers get a huge amount of discretion in recording blocks and assists and, not surprisingly, the scorekeepers, who work for the home team, favor the home players in their scores. The best part is when “Alex,” fed up with being ordered by a team executive to give Hakeem a triple double, decides that in a Grizzlies home game against the Lakers, to give Nick Van Exel as many assists as possible:

Which is perhaps why, a little more than a year later, with Nick Van Exel and the Lakers in town, Alex decided to act out. “I was sort of disgruntled,” he says. “I loved the game. I don’t want the numbers to be meaningless, and I felt they were becoming meaningless because of how stats were kept. So I decided, I’m gonna do this totally immature thing and see what happens. It was childish. The Lakers are in town. We’re gonna lose. Fuck it. He’s getting a shitload of assists.” If you were to watch the game today, you’d see some “comically bad assists.” Alex’s fingerprints are all over the box score. He gave Van Exel everything. “Van Exel would pass from the top of the three-point line to someone on the wing who’d hold the ball for five seconds, dribble, then make a move to the basket. Assist, Van Exel.”

No one noticed. From his chair, Alex could hear the legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn calling the game. Van Exel’s having a great game! He’s moving the ball exceptionally well! And in the next day’s writeups, Van Exel was of course the hero. Alex thought, What the fuck?

Besides all the anecdotes and the incisive look into a part of basketball that’s rarely talked about, another thread of the piece is how this home-team favoritism can be pretty easily detected  in the statistics. Because points can’t be adjusted by scorekeepers, you can see how assists jump up at home and go down away in a way that doesn’t track the expected increases and decreases in points.

Also, teams and the NBA have a great incentive for people not to know about scorekeeping chicanery. For one, most of it is just tawdry. Teams want all-stars, and will thus inflate the stats, or on a day-to-day basis, will encourage scorekeepers to produce a triple-double. Also, the NBA has an incentive, in a post-Donaghy era, “when the NBA wants desperately to convince you there are no magnets in the pinball machine,” to make everything seem on the up-and-up. This combination of self-interest on behalf of the teams and the Association — whose granting of access most basketball writers depend on for their jobs — and the use of statistics to expose malfeasance makes it the perfect story for Deadspin, which doesn’t care about access and doesn’t have the bizarre hostility to use of statistical methods that still plagues so much sports writing.

I should note as a caveat that “Alex” was working for the Grizzlies from 1995 t0 1998. I imagine now that such blatant messing with the stats would be harder to get away with due to, among other things, Deadspin

As presented in New York magazine. Though I suspect that the author of this annonymous social diary, which documents a bunch of blacking out and surely regrettable sexual encounters may be slightly jazzing up the real events of her life under the influence of a tad too much Jay McInerney.

When I first saw that Ted Kennedy had died, I had my own blog-obit already planned out. I was going to talk about despite having the least impressive natural endowments of the three political Kennedy brothers, how he actually achieved the most good of any of them (not the most original point, I know). But then Dylan, despite it being very early in the morning/late at night on the East Coast, explained his policy achievements much better than I could. Then Tim Noah’s obit went up, and yeah, that’s really what I was getting after. But here are some scattered thoughts.

I guess what’s so interesting about Kennedy is the sharp contrast between his staggering substantive accomplishments and the procedural travesty that was his political existence. To put it simply, he never really worked for anything, and none of his accomplishments — with the exception of all the legislation for which he’s responsible — were very much a reflection of anything besides the luck of his birth.

He got into Harvard because he was Kennedy, and then got kicked out for cheating. He enlisted in the Army because he was draft eligible, but through his father’s connections got a plumb job at NATO headquarters and left the service as a private. He went back to Harvard, graduated, and went on to law school. Only because he wasn’t yet old enough to become senator, he waited out a few years as a Boston assistant district attorney, and then won his first senate election at the age of 30 in what Joe Klein describes as “the closest thing to a regency appointment the Senate had ever seen.”

Then, inexplicably, when one considers anything else besides his breeding, he was considered as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate, but demurred. And then Chappaquiddick. It was through a combination of the press’s love for the Kennedy mystique and the now-baffling level of deference that the media and the public gave politicians for grave personal failings that Kennedy was able to survive politically an incident that, at best, refelcted a horrible combination of entitlement, cowardice and callousness.

The point of recounting all of this is to show that Kennedy’s rise and sustained influence reflect the type of privilige on account of birth and social standing that ought to sicken every liberal. If liberalism means anything, it’s diminishing the influence of birth on one’s chances in life. And, almost too ironically, Ted Kennedy is probably the political figure who has done the most to make that vision, that dream, to anything close to a reality in the United States.

It was because of his name that he never had to be worried about reelection. Once again, on a procedural level, Kennedy’s lifetime Senate seat was distressing, but substantively it allowed Kennedy to be bolder in his vision for American than nearly any other senator. As Matt Yglesias points out, Kennedy was  able to achieve so much through another illiberal, anachronistic feature of our political system — the cult of seniority in the Senate. Just like the deep social injustice of inherited wealth and power that allowed Kennedy to become so powerful, the seniority system in the Senate is systematically illiberal. There are far many Max Baucuses than Teddy Kennedys.

But unlike so many others who achieve so much purely on the basis of their birth and accrue so much power simply by staying around for so long, Kennedy recognized that his great power and privilege could be used for good, to help those who didn’t have the advantages Kennedy was born with. No matter how sickening the cult of Kennedys is, no matter how offensive it is to basic American values to have “political royalty,” at least Kennedy had the oblige befitting his noblesse.

Hopefully, one day, there won’t be anymore Ted Kennedys. And, if that day comes, it will be because Kennedy’s vision was finally realized.

The mainstream, professional, American pornography industry lives in the shadow of sexually transmitted infections. This, of course, makes sense. Performers in porn have unprotected sex all the time with up to hundreds of people a year. If, for example, a few performers were to get HIV, it could go through a massive part of the industry incredibly quickly, endangering both the lives of the performers and the viability of the industry. Accordingly, there is a strict testing regiment: a PCR DNA test every month. Unlike the antigen or antibody test, which look for, well, HIV antigens and antibodies, the PCR DNA test actually takes a sample of the patent’s genetic material and look for the presence of HIV itself, not just antigens or antibodies. That the industry requires such an extensive test shows how seriously they deal with the problem. And the results have paid off.  To quote Tracy Clark-Flory’s piece at Salon, “Since 1998, the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation has reported five HIV cases among actors in straight porn. That’s a relatively low number, industry insiders point out, given the cosmic amount of condomless sex that has gone on in that time” Now, Clark-Flory, along with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation “are disturbed by the idea that five infections over 11 years is considered adequate.”

So, naturally, they suggest that condoms be mandated, or at least adopted, in pornographic movies. This is a pretty strange demand. Best I can tell, there’s no market demand from the viewers of porn for condoms, and even more importantly, the performers themselves really, really don’t want them. Clark-Flory even quotes some of them. This one is particularly graphic:

[A single scene amounts to] over two hours of intercourse in various positions with constant stops and starts during which male performer’s erections rise and fall, condoms frequently tear or unravel and the degree of latex abrasion on the internal membranes of female performers’ vaginas lead to micro-abrasions that make them more vulnerable to all kinds of STIs. Most condom-only female performers eventually abandon condom use, not under pressure from producers, but rather because of the constant rawness and end-on-end bacterial infections produced by countless hours of latex drag.

But because 5 people over 11 years have transmitted HIV — which considering the high HIV rates among people who even approach the sexual activity of porn performers is absurdly low — the admittedly feminist and pro-liberation Clark-Flory thinks there’s justification to mandate condom usage despite the fact that almost none of the stakeholders (or at least no stakeholders she could quote) want them. She thinks that “ethical” porn consumers should demand something that no one wants!

If you allow me to reference some Eastern European Lacanians, well, just one Eastern European Lacanian, I think Flory-Clark’s advocacy for condom usage in straight porn, which she seems to think is just such an obvious idea — neigh, an “ethical” one — to support, is almost perfectly indicative of how hedonism, tolerance and freedom has created its own restrictive structures that, in classic Zizekian fashion are still incredibly limiting, not to mention insidious. To quote the Slovene himself:

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man’s revolution — “revolution without revolution.”) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevski motto “If God doesn’t exist, everything is prohibited”? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! – And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).

Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the “right measure” between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner’s famous “Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it” from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today’s “biopolitics.” Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is “safe sex” — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying “Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?”. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent “opium without opium”: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of “opium without opium.”

I’m not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on in authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the “safe” part of safe sex always struck me as slightly dishonest, and almost puritan in its obsession with hygiene and control. I should not that it’s particularly interesting that Clark-Flory who wrote a piece entitled “In Defense of Casual Sex” is the one recapitulating this all-encompassing focus on health and safety in sexual activity. It’s ethical!

I was going to write a longer post on the usefulness of various Marxist ideas in scholarly practice, but as he is wont to do, Dylan has already done so and made any extra thoughts I might have a bit superfluous.

I would like to add that I think Will is right, in a limited sense, that due to the various cultural prejudices and path dependence in academia, that some Marx influenced ideas are more widespread than the value of the research program would say they deserve (world systems theory, for instance), but that’s a criticism of just about any scholarly approach or program that has staying power, and doesn’t have a ton to do with Marx himself or any of his ideas.

Will Wilkinson says that it would be interesting to debate this proposition:

It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx

Will’s a very smart guy, and naturally, is not exactly predisposed to be a fan of  Marx. But still, this is just silly. Although Rand was writing some 100 years after Marx, if you just look at the academic work influenced by the two, it’s pretty easy to see which lodestar would be more embarrassing. On one side, I present to you much of the British historical profession in the 20th century, including luminaries who, despite occasionally noxious and naive politics, were (and are) great scholars; Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E.B. Thompson. Not to mention the literary theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists and scholars in just about every field who are deeply indebted to Marx. Carrying the Randian torch, on the other hand are…Leonard Peikoff? Alan Greenspan? Chris Sciabarra?

So when Wilkinson says that “Marxists, neo-Marxists, crypto-Marxists, post-Marxists, etc. have an enduring influence on intellectual fashion,” he seems to dismiss out of hand that the “enduring influence” might be a result of a Marxian scholarly program bearing fruit in all these fields. Now, I’m not saying that the Marxist interpretation or approach to anything is necessarily always correct, or even the best approach, but Marxist and Marxist-derived ideas are certainly useful in a great many scholarly endeavors.  Now, I’m sure that Will believes, in good faith, that “Standard, non-Marxist economic history is not only better history, but equally sweeping,” but surely he can see why others may disagree.

UPDATE This piece by Robert McHenry at the American, comparing Marx and L. Ron Hubbard is also pretty silly.

I saw Julie and Julia with my mom this afternoon and I just loved it. Obviously, Meryl Streep was amazing, but her ability to totally dominate the screen as a perfectly crafted and expansive character is nothing new. Stanley Tucci, who plays her endlessly supportive diplomat-husband Paul, interacts with Streep, often wordlessly, in a way that reminds one of what good acting can mean. The scene, for instance, when Julia gets the news that her sister, who had just married some 15 or so years after her, is pregnant, has maybe a sentence or two of dialogue, and yet is able all the complex and conflicting emotions that one must feel upon hearing that someone they love dearly is able to have a sort of happiness that they won’t (namely, bearing and raising kids).

But I’m not a film critic, so if you want more discussion of the movie, just read A.O. Scott or Dana Stevens or something. I want to talk about Amy Adams, specifically, Amy Adams’s legs.

The premise of the film is that Julie Powell, played by Adams, cooks every recipe in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. Having eaten many of the recipes out of the book, it’s very obvious that consuming all that rich, butter-drenched French food, and more importantly, devoting a serious amount of one’s awake, not-working time to preparing it will result in some weight gain. Now, Powell and her husband are well aware of this, and throughout the film, point this out. And accordingly, Adams is dressed up so that it looks like she is gaining the requisite weight that is the inevitable result of her literary-cum-cooking adventure.

But dressing someone up will only get you so far. When, for instance, your French-cooking heroine is pouting around wearing very little besides her husband’s dress shirt, you realize that, in fact, Amy Adams hasn’t been eating boeuf bourguignon for a year. She’s actually a miraculously thin Hollywood actress. Now, I imagine most people don’t really notice these slight intrusions of reality, but in a world where Christian Bale’s entire acting career has consisted of stunt weight-loss followed by stunt weight gain, and where Charlize Theron can win an Oscar for putting on some pounds and letting the makeup artists go to town on her beautiful face, it’s nice to see actors actually act like they’re slightly heavier than they really are, even if it means the occasional, unavoidable slip-up.

But sometime it’s just funny. For instance, there’s a unintentionally hilarious scene in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe, who’s playing a schizophrenic mathematician, takes off his dress shirt, revealing two pythons have taken up residence underneath the sleeves of his undershirt. For a brief moment, we realize that the same guy who played a gladiator named Maximus is supposed to be this frail, mentally ill mega-nerd.

But Crowe’s physical imposingness, which besides that one brief moment, is consistently obscured and underplayed by clever directing and acting, is not an impediment to his portrayal of John Nash, just as Adams, due to a combination of good costume design, make up and skillful acting, is able to be convincing enough in her portrayal of Powell.

If you haven’t seen District 9, consider all the entirety of this post to be spoiler-laden.

Spencer Ackerman is a fantastic national security reporter, but I’m afraid that I rather strongly disagree with his take on District 9.

Specifically, I think he’s off base in his discussion of the Nigerian gangsters that control the alien slum of District 9:

Nigerians, however, are psychotic savages motivated by superstition, greed and avarice. It’s not really accurate to say that the (mostly) white South Africans are portrayed as blemishless. After all, they’re oppressing and ultimy ately exterminating the Prawns in pursuit of lucrative military technology. But they’re treated as, well, civilized, even as they act monstrously. The Nigerians in District 9 act without logic and proportion and use violence and voodoo as a first recourse. You could tell the morality play of District 9 entirely without them, and so their inclusion just emphasizes the way in which white anxiety is the engine of the movie.

Let’s deal with the white South Africans first. Yes, they aren’t treated as “blemishless.” Instead, a great number of them are actively malevolent in their treatment of the prawns. They put them in a disgusting slum and then initiate a transfer into a concentration camp. Oh yeah, and all the horrific medical experiments that are part of a larger effort to exploit the prawns’ genes and weapons technology. Then there are the MNU mercenaries who are hardly “civilized” and instead seem to just enjoy killing prawns. These mercenaries, despite the (literal) vestiges of civilization and authority, are eventually exposed to be brutal murderers who just enjoy killing prawns. The rest of the white South Africans are actively deluding themselves about the true nature of MNU and the South African government’s prawn policy or are justifying it by depicting the prawns and disgusting bottom feeders that deserve neither rights nor compassion. Wikus, before he turns into half-alien, half-Afrikaner ET-Jesus, is a bumbling, bureaucratic product of nepotism who gleefully destroys a prawn incubator, killing scores of prawn young.

But Specner’s right that the Nigerians “act without logic and proportion and use violence and voodoo as a first recourse.” I imagine that Neil Blomkamp, the director of District 9, wanted us to initially see the Nigerian gangsters as Spencer does. But as the movie goes on, we realize that MNU (whose CEO, incidentally, is a black South African) and the Nigerians really are the same. Both exploit the prawns, both treat them horribly in pursuit of their weapons technology Both have no problem killing as many prawns, or Wikus for that matter, if it means they can accomplish their nefarious ends. And isn’t MNU’s weapons program really just “voodoo” done by people in white coats?

By making the Nigerians seem so alien and unappealing at first, Blomkamp is really showing that our conceptions of savagery or naturalistic superstition are actually quite faulty. We, the “civilized” white South Africans, are just as savage as the drug-addled violent and incomprehensible Nigerians.

Ackerman also argues that “The Magic Negro has officially been replaced by the Magic Prawn, in the form of Christopher. The selflessness he exhibits is completely unwarranted by the objective circumstances he faces. Of all of the things that kept me from suspending disbelief in this utterly fantastical movie, that was the largest obstacle.” I imagine that he is referring to the actions of Christopher Johnson, the prawn who buddies up with Wikus in pursuit of the fluid that will let Christopher power up the ship and fly away, and let Wikus become a full human again. Specifically, considering how horrible humanity and and Wikus specifically have been in their treatment of the prawns, why would Christopher show such compassion for Wikus?

The short answer is that he doesn’t show compassion, so much as craftily pursue his own self-interst. Remember, Christopher convinces Wikus that he can can treat him soon, but then after they retrieve the fluid, Christopher then tells Wikus that he’ll actually have to wait three years. Now, it could really be that Christopher intended to help Wikus immediately and then after seeing the experiments being done on the prawns at MNU headquarters he realized that he needed to wait for three years, or maybe Christopher is being a little more crafty than we’re giving him credit for. Also, Christopher realizes that he needs Wikus (just like Wikus needs him) if he wants any hope of getting the fluid back.

Also, the stock archetype that Christopher Johnson best represents isn’t the magic negro, so much as the cinematic archetype to end all cinematic archetypes…Jesus! First of all, his name his Christopher. Christ -opher. Second, his last name is Johnson, giving him the initials “C.J.” Also, he’s going to come back to earth in three years. Which, for all we know in prawn time, is the same as waiting on Friday for Sunday to come around.

Mark Schmitt has a very good piece on the history of the much talked about “public plan.” What’s interesting about the plan is show it was originally conceived as a piece of honest wonkery by Jacob Hacker, as a way to give Americans the benefits of government sponsored health care and to increase competition with private insurers, especially in places where one or two insurance companies dominated the market. And, as a piece of wonky health policy, the public plan wasn’t perfect, but made a lot of sense, and was more politically palatable than going for single payer.

But this was, weirdly enough, the root of the problem. The only real health care constituency on the left was the single payer constituency. And the public plan people decided to sell their plan — which, even if it passed in its original form as seen in the House, would not be anywhere near big or powerful enough to turn into single payer — as a back-door path to single payer:

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

Basically, the very same interest groups and constituencies that made single payer a political impossibility weren’t going to be fooled by the public plan, especially when it’s promoters were openly telling liberals that the public plan would eventually lead to something like single payer. The insurance companies, medical device companies, pharma, hospitals everyone else aren’t complete and total idiots. Even though polls have shown that a large portion of the public supports a public plan, the political center of gravity on health care, which is largely determined the the bizarre nature of a 60 vote senate, seems to be around fairly extensive insurance regulations, some sort of mandate, subsidies for the poor, increases in Medicaid and a newly empowered Medicare panel. If, after all this huffing and puffing, a plan containing those policies is signed, liberals should be pretty happy.  Also, it was about all anyone could expect.

One day, they’ll pronounce my name correctly. One day.

The ideological makeup of the Court remains roughly the same, while the demographic balance has shifted so that the Court is more representative of the country it governs. This is a good day for America.

If Twitter’s travails today were really just a result of their failure to scale up their infrastructure to support their high levels of activity, that would be acceptable. Twitter is a small company that, best I can tell, has no way, present or future, to actually make any money. But it turns out that, at least according to Twitter itself, that the current outage is the result of a denial of service attack. Which means that there is some person or group of people who is intentionally denying the tweeple of the world their lifeblood. This is the face of evil.

Also, Ezra has some good thoughts regarding the Great Twitter Outage of August 6, 2009:

Twitter appears to be down. What I would like to do is tweet that Twitter is down. But I can’t. Because Twitter is down. That’s like a Twitter paradox, which is also an idea that would make for a good tweet. But I can’t tweet about not being able to tweet, because Twitter is down. The fact that my first reaction to Twitter’s fail was to meta-tweet about it is, of course, also a humorous window into the Times In Which We Live, but I can’t tweet that, either, because Twitter is down.

Twitter. Is. Down.

It’s pretty silly that I’m having a real reaction to Twitter’s nonfunctionality. After all, 140 character or fewer updates are about the least serious or meaningful or substantive form of expression beyond grunts and chest pounding. Being that as it may, I’ve also usually spat out ten or tweets by this time of day, and so I have quite a bit of pent up snark, appreciation and mini-commentary.

So here, dear readers, are the things I would have tweeted about.

1. Mark Ames’s lexis-nexis fu on Megan McArdle’s father is really, really dumb.  Even though I’m a long time McArdle defender to my liberal friends, I’ve been disagreeing with her more and more as she’s started writing more about health care and so am more susceptible than usual to the myriad harsh criticisms of her and her work. But that doesn’t make her History’s Greatest Monster and Ames’s piece is really exceptionally lazy– not to mention useless — criticism. See Ezra for more.

2. The George Scialabba seminar at Crooked Timber wins the internet. There is no greater evidence of market failure than the fact that Scialabba doesn’t have a wider audience. When I win the lottery and buy or found a magazine, Scialabba will be one of my first hires.

3. This Politico headline — Pelosi’s Plan: Wine, Dine Big Donors – and the accompanying unflattering  pictures are great evidence for why it’s hard to be a woman in politics.

4. Jerry Cohen’s sudden death is quite sad. I always considered him the redistributionist angel (or is it devil) on my shoulder. I always found his work to be the best argument for a more aggressive egalitarian politics and even an egalitarian personal morality.

5. My colleague Emily Rutherford captured the Twitterfail mood best: “I was mentally composing my tweet about twitter being down, and realized that I have a problem.”

When the world is righted back onto its axis and twitter is back up, you can follow me @MattZeitlin

UPDATE Twitter’s back. All my sketichly thought out marginalia will return to its proper place.

Sally Quinn’s Post article where she elicits quotes from a bipartisan clique of Washington’s elites expressing their utter shame and dismay in response to Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Monica investigation has been criticized over and over. I won’t go line-by-line or explain why it’s so horrible — just read it – but this one quote is just so absurd in light of the events that occurred between Jan 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2009:

Washington’s insider press corps has shown little pity for any of them. The feeling toward the president is similar.

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

The crazy thing about the collective freakout to Monica-gate and Bill Clinton more generally is how little sense it made on its own terms. It’s obvious that the press and the greater Washington elite doesn’t mind being lied to — there was no equivalent freakout about Iran Contra or the pre-war intelligence fiasco — but the fact that they were willing to cut Bush so much slack despite the fact that he, in a deep way, despised Washington as a city and as a social group is really just mind boggling.

I haven’t written much about health care because I’m not particularly interested in/somewhat overwhelmed by the day-to-day parliamentary wrangling and because other bloggers, like Klein and Cohn, are doing such a good job covering it. But here are my very sketchy health care thoughts.

1. Before Thanksgiving, at the latest, Obama will sign something called health care reform.

2.” Health care reform” will include some sort of mandate, subsidies for those who can’t purchase health insurance, community rating and a wide range of new regulations for health insurance companies. It will also include a beefed up Independent Medicare Advisory Council. It probably won’t include a public plan or health insurance exchange. If it does, it will be too weak to do anything. On paper, and pretty much in reality, it will achieve universal coverage.

3. President Obama will give a speech at the 2012 Democratic convention saying that he’s done something that every Democratic president since FDR has tried to do — cover every American.

4. This will be the greatest domestic policy accomplishment since the Johnson administration.

5. Besides IMAC, there won’t be any good price control or delivery reforms and so further reforms will happen, but much later.

Brad DeLong, who kindly linked to my post on Robert George’s Journal op-ed, admonishes me by saying that “Matt Zeitlin forgets the Iron Law of Intellectual Conservatism: intellectual conservatives are not smart and accomplished, and so they only sound smart and reasonable only for a particular historical instant–and then they are clearly seen as silly and stupid”

While I agree that George’s arguments against gay marriage are fundamentally silly, my opening complementary mentions of George’s intelligence were meant to convey the proper respect that I feel is due to someone who is as academically accomplished as he is.

But that’s really neither here nor there. DeLong gets around to discussing Burke, who oh-so-many conservatives love to use to bash any plan for social reform or any meliorisitic policy, and makes the good point that Burke didn’t like tradition or the status quo for its own sake. Instead, he was a political reformer who thought that those seeking to do reform should look to their past to support and guide their melioristic, reforming or even revolutionary policies. Most democrats and liberals fall pretty squarely and that camp, while conservatives seem to cling to a combination of southern-fried reaction and ahistorical, anti-welfare state radicalism. Hardly Burkean.

This may turn out to nothing, but Evan Perez of the Wall Street Journal has a big story claiming that “Obama administration officials are holding discussions that could result in White House counsel Gregory Craig leaving his post.”

This would be a pretty big deal. Not only is White House counsel an incredibly important position that is usually staffed by the someone the President wholeheartedly trusts, but Craig has been a huge Obama supporter going way back. He was one of the first Clintonites to go over to the Obama team, canvassed for him in New Hamphsire in January, advised him on the campaign, and most notably,  publicly disputed Clinton’s claims of extensive foreign policy and national security. It’s often said of Obama that he doesn’t really value loyalty and personal ties all that much, and if fires Craig, that would be great proof.

Not only that, but the reasons for the administration’s concern strike me as incredibly lame. Perez writes that the White House is unhappy with the political fall out that came as a result of Craig dealing with “the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the release of Bush administration-era national-security documents, and efforts to find legal ways to indefinitely hold some detainees who can’t be put on trial.”

While it’s certainly true that the fallout from all three of these has been pretty nasty, capping Craig seems like a bad way to deal with it. Closing Guantanamo was a campaign pledge that was finalized during the transition. The fact that foreign countries and Congress are being as difficult as possible isn’t surprising considering the way Congress works and the fact that other countries are perfectly in their rights to be wary of accepting these detainees. There was no obvious way to manage this very, very sticky and difficult situation any better than it has. We have a bunch of detainees who are probably dangerous and some of whom can not and will not be tried, and yet any administration would be uncomfortable releasing them. Getting rid of Greg Craig won’t change those fundamental facts.

As for the torture memos, not only was there a strong a priori case to be made that the Obama administration was obligated to release them, but the fact of torture was already public knowledge. Sure, the CIA was upset and the Republicans jumped all over them, but the fact that we had torture had been seeping out for years, and everyone knew these memos were out there, and seeing as they were no longer in effect, it made sense for the White House to release them on their own volition.

Also, releasing the memos, if it really was a bad idea, is something Obama really ought to take responsibility for. Perez writes that “Mr. Craig and Attorney General Eric Holder won the fight to release the memorandums, with minimal redactions, but the White House had to move quickly to limit political damage.” So, yes, Craig and Holder convinced Obama to do something, and there was some controversy. This does not strike me as a good reason to fire Craig.

Now, obviously, the people who are currently deciding Craig’s fate know a lot more than I do and are much, much smarter than me, but I still think it would be a big mistake to fire one of the most skilled, knowledgeable and experienced attorneys currently in the game, just because cleaning up after eight years of Bush recklessness hasn’t been easy.

UPDATE Marcy Wheeler has more.

Robert George is a very smart and accomplished man. He makes his arguments honestly and rigorously. So, when he goes to the Wall Street Journal to make an argument against gay marriage, it’s probably a good idea for gay rights defenders to perk up their collective ears. But what’s interesting about his pretty simple natural law argument for why gay marriage is a bad idea is how, well, silly it is. This isn’t really his fault. Natural law is a silly concept, and it’s often times just a cudgel used by conservatives to deny the rights claims of minorities. But anyway, here’s George:

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

What makes George’s natural law argument better than most is that he points out how our current legal understanding of marriage is premised on some sort of possibly procreative sexual union between the two opposite-sex people. But this only gets you so far. All he’s established is that the institution of marriage, at least formally, embeds some assumptions about the gender and behavior of the couples. What George can’t prove is whether this set up currently meaningful or if it’s in accordance with our ideas of justice

Historians and social scientists who actually study the empirical reality of what marriage is today don’t agree with George. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, for example, characterize modern marriage as “hedonic marriage” where people meet and institutionalize their relationship because they want to share “consumption complementarities — activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse.” Now, the language and formal  institution of marriage may not have caught up with the changes we’ve seen since, say, the 1960s, but those changes are real, and if George wants to make an argument for excluding gays for marriage based on what marriage is, he should actually cite how marriage has changed over the years and where it is today. The work of Stephanie Coontz is useful here as well. So, when George frets about what happens “If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined,” he’s really fighting a lost cause. Marriage has been redefined, and it’s been redefined in a way that makes excluding gays illogical.

But George seems to be aware of some of these problems and so writes “But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation.” [emphasis added]. If there is a great benefit to those who enter into marriage from doing so, if “a comprehensive sharing of life” is indeed a good thing, than the burden would fall on George to show why someone’s sexuality is a reason why the state should not recognize and confer equal benefits to gays and lesbians.

But aside from any flaws in George’s description of how marriage actually works in today’s society, there is the sheer lack of recognition of how gays are disadvantaged because of their sexuality by not allowing them to marry. As Jon Chait pointed out, conservative arguments about social policy tend to absolutely ignore the welfare of gay citizens, and instead make tendentious or speculative arguments about why affording them equal rights willhurt everyone or will irrevocably damage our institutions.

This seems like the insurmountable challenge for opponents of gay marriage. The institution has already changed into one that is no longer based around procreation. Also, we are approaching a societal consensus that discriminating against gay people just because of they’re sexuality is bigoted and wrong. Lots of gay people want to get married and abide by the standards, rules, regulations and expectations of married people. So, it’s going to take a lot more than a legalistic, nostalgic definition of marriage combined with a slippery slope argument about polyamory to deny a strong claim from fairness and equality about why a group of people should enjoy some rather basic rights .