The most distressing thing about D’Souza’s book, to me, is that Newt has jumped all over it. Ferguson’s point is accurate – whatever the virtues of D’Souza’s theory, it’s not needed to explain Obama’s actions, and it comes off as the crazed ravings of a deranged partisan. Whatever happened to just pointing out that the people you disagree with are wrong? Why do they need to be part of some multi-generational cage match with Western Civilization?
In that light, Newt’s support for this book completely nixes him from my list of supportable 2012 candidates. The same intellectual curiosity and desire to be edgy that helped him become Speaker and made him open to a lot of genuinely useful conservative reforms also made him open to the sort of partisanship that helped re-elect Bill Clinton. Twelve years out of power haven’t changed a thing.
2012 needs a simple candidate for the Republican party. “Excessive government spending and regulation are strangling the American economy. We must fix both, and set loose the American entrepreneur.” There may be other issues at play, but they will need to take a backseat to that simple message. And, particularly, we will not want complex explanations for simple problems getting in the way.
D’Souza’s theory is politically noxious and utterly unnecessary. My ideal 2012 candidate would greet it with a shrug of the shoulders; my nightmare candidate would behave exactly as Newt has.
I think this story accurately reflects a bizarre reality: most fat people don’t realize that they’re fat.
I currently live in one of the fittest cities in America, where jogging, biking, hiking, and going to the gym are considered routine, almost necessary behavior. I come from a small, poor, rural southern town where the ability to avoid physical labor is considered a virtue.* The people in my hometown are almost uniformly obese; when I go back home, I sometimes think that the only people who aren’t fat are a few rich people and the meth addicts. Comparing the people in Austin with people in my hometown is striking and distressing.
I was fat for a while, too. Got my BMI up around 33 or so before I did something about it, and I’ve spent the last five years between 24 and 26. My wife’s around 20. These are normal body sizes, even if I occasionally weigh in five or six pounds on the heavier side of normal.
Yet when we go to my hometown, we’re treated like visiting Somalians, who need to be given food and lots of it. Our eating and exercise habits (i.e. sometimes we walk around the block after dinner) are considered exotic and foolish. My obese family lectures me on which starchy convenience foods are healthy. The quote at the end of the linked story – “There is this tendency that if everyone around you looks a certain way, you either want to look that way or you’re comfortable looking the way you are” – is 100% accurate. When healthy people visit the land of the obese, it’s the healthy people who are gawked at and talked about.
During the welfare wars of the 80s and 90s, Republicans kept arguing that welfare created a culture of dependency. There were large swaths of the country where being dependent on the government dole simply did not carry any stigma with it among the locals. In the absence of being told that it was wrong, many welfare recipients regarded it as a normal way of life. The Clinton/Gingrich welfare reforms did a lot to combat that mindset by making work the norm again and reaffirming that there is, in fact, a stigma attached to welfare.
It’s not obvious to me that there’s any sort of government reforms that can combat obesity; reducing food stamp benefits would probably only encourage the purchase of more ramen noodles and less healthy food. Moreover, most fat people aren’t on the dole. They stuff their faces with the proceeds of their own labor.
But it is obvious, in a country where most obese – not merely overweight, but obese – people don’t even recognize their condition, that there is insufficient stigma attached to being fat. They look at themselves and aren’t bothered by what they see, often because so many of those around them look just as fat (or fatter – I know a number of obese people who don’t think they’re fat because they’re not as fat as someone else they know).
Obesity isn’t just aesthetically displeasing. It drains the physical and spiritual well-being from the fat person. There needs to be more emphasis on this. It’s currently considered rude or mean to draw attention to the obese, just as Republicans were once labeled as a bunch of meanies for trying to force welfare recipients to find jobs. If anything, we’re currently being too nice to the obese. A caring society does not let its members destroy their bodies and souls through ignorance and self-delusion.
*Is it any wonder that the south has higher obesity rates than the rest of the country? Avoiding physical labor, let us say, is a very, very old activity there.
In the Middle East, Egyptians are buzzing over the trial of Hisham Talaat Moustafa, an Egyptian real estate tycoon, for murdering Suzanne Tamim, a Lebanese pop star. Prettier than Napoleon summarizes the sordid details:
Egyptian millionaire politician woos Lebanese pop singer, spending over $7 million on her. His mother refuses to consent to their marriage, so the pop star leaves him. He pays $2 million for a contract hit and has her murdered.
“She made him kill her, and she deserves it,” said Sherine Moustafa, a 39-year-old Egyptian corporate lawyer, an opinion that was echoed by every woman of dozens interviewed. “If he killed her, this means she’s done something outrageous to drive him to it,” reasoned Ms. Moustafa, who has no relation to the convicted businessman. Both her sister and mother, who sat next to her, agreed.
This is the standard argument presented, more even by women than by men, in the Arab world, where strict patriarchal traditions continue to hold female victims responsible for crimes against them by men. If a woman is sexually harassed, then she must have been dressed provocatively. If raped, she somehow must have put herself in a compromising position. If pregnant out of wedlock, her conduct is to blame. And if she is murdered, then she must have committed an even more abhorrent crime.
We might be somewhat less boggled if we examine a similar reactions from women to a man murdering a woman. Specifically, OJ Simpson’s murder of Nicole:
“This is a story about race and gender and how they intersect,” said Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, who is white. “It’s about a black man married to a white woman being judged by black women.”
That alone required an emotional calculus that every black woman had to figure out. As the trial became bigger than the sum of its testimony and more personal to its viewer-chorus, the same facts summoned different interpretations. White women tended to identify with Mrs. Simpson as an abuse victim. Black women, pulled by competing loyalties, tended to see Mr. Simpson as a black man framed by the system — even if he had been indifferent to the black community, and even if they thought he might be guilty.
“We’re willing to put aside his personal preferences,” said Denise Cade, a securities lawyer in Washington, who is black and believes that Mr. Simpson may have had something to do with the murders but that the prosecution was flawed. “We have been oppressed for so long that we really do take people back. Maybe this will bring him home.”
. . . .
“The reason a black man may beat his wife is because he is facing racism on his job and racism in America,” Ms. Cade said. “What is the reason a white man beats his wife? It’s certainly not because of oppression in America. We can understand what our black men feel. That’s why we don’t rally around those feminist people.”
To Hisham Talaat Moustafa and every interviewed Egyptian women, the Lebanese Suzanne Tamim was a nonperson. To OJ Simpson and many black women, the white Nicole Brown Simpson was likewise a nonperson. Had Moustafa murdered an Egyptian woman or Simpson a black woman, reactions would be different because a real person was just murdered. What would have happened if the reporter from the New York Times had asked the Egyptian women how they’d feel if Ms. Tamim had been Egyptian? It’s likely they’d say that no Egyptian woman would behave in such a way.
CULTURE MATTERS
Prettier than Napoleon asks,
What is the lesson here? Don’t become a Westernized pop star? That’s not what got her killed. Refusing to be this guy’s mistress after he wouldn’t buck his mother and marry her is what got her killed.
Some parts of Lebanon are quite Westernized (see this old Steve Sailer essay for details) and it appears that the relaxed, tolerant, mostly Christian and secular world is where Ms. Tamim came from, as opposed to the more clannish Shiite or Sunni worlds. The real lesson is that when dating outside your own culture, remember that you might be a nonperson to them. Given the witches’ brew of cultures and politics that is Lebanon, Ms. Tamim probably never tried to date a Muslim man from her own country: too much blood has been spilled on both sides for there to be trust. In all likelihood, she thought that Moustafa wasn’t like those crazy Muslims back home: he was a good guy who’d made a fortune and seen the world and who saw her as a human being. She didn’t realize until too late that to him, she was always a nonperson.
I appreciate that in making the CRZ, a “sports hybrid,” Honda would have to make some performance compromises. They seem to have done a competent job, which will probably disappoint anyone interested in real performance.
But did they have to make a commercial that actually makes the car look slow?
On the commercial, it takes fully one second to go from 20 to 22 miles per hour. I used to have a Civic Hybrid, certainly not something that anyone would call a “sports hybrid,” and it accelerated faster than the CRZ does in its own commercial. Look at the car weaving through columns in the garage. It looks slow.
Apollo posted this at 8:34 PM HKT on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 as Uncategorized
. . . or Rick Perry is full of crap. Or both, but can this possibly be true?
I can’t find any “fact check” sites looking at this, but the claim that 80% of all private sector jobs created in the US over the last five years were created in Texas genuinely buggers belief.
Bear in mind, I’m not questioning the awesomeness of Texas – which is epic. Rather, I just can’t believe that the rest of the country sucks that much. The other 49 states can barely manage to create 1 job for every 4 created in Texas?
The mafia rule is useful to remember, namely that just because a random person looks defenseless and ridiculous, he might have relatives in the mob. A corollary to this rule for directors: never be rude to an audience member, as he might be a theater critic for the New Criterion:
In contrast, the extraordinarily rude couple seated next to me at Orlando was a bother and a bore. After about ten minutes worth of their incessant whispering, I very politely asked the fellow if they would be so kind as to knock it the hell off before I choked them (nicely, though). “She’s the director!” he hissed back. And so she was, and the two were discussing the play and taking notes during the performance. What I found perplexing about his riposte is that he seemed to think that I should be less angry at being treated rudely by the director of the play, rather than more angry. She’s not some clueless prole! She’s The Director! Her being the director of course explained her arrogance, but not her stupidity: The Classic Stage Company is a reasonably large venue—the last action I saw performed there was the Trojan War, for pity’s sake—but the director, Rebecca Taichman, apparently saw fit to sit and chat and generally behave like a yokel from Teterboro among people who had paid $65 a ticket rather than sequester herself in a remoter corner of the theater. I mention this mostly as a curiosity—we theater-goers are accustomed to being treated with contempt by directors, but they usually express it through their work, not in person—and as evidence for my longstanding hypothesis that theater companies regard their audiences mostly as a source of revenue and then only as a necessary evil, something to keep the actors from feeling ridiculous while they perform.
I’m not quite sure what this paragraph in this NYT piece is supposed to mean:
The strategic decisions unfolded at a feverish pace on Monday over an unusually wide playing field of nearly 75 Congressional districts, including here in Ohio, a main battleground in the fight for the House and the Senate. The developments resembled pieces being moved on a giant chess board, with Republicans trying to keep Democrats on the defensive in as many places as possible, while outside groups provided substantial reinforcements for Republicans.
But plainly it is meant to convey that Republicans are cheating. Imagine you were playing chess with someone, and suddenly they got “substantial reinforcement” from “outside groups.” What does that look like? Do a dozen blue pawns and two blue bishops suddenly appear on the board? Or would the dozen pawns and two bishops be the same color as his pieces? Are they controlled by the “outside groups,” who suddenly turn the game into three-way chess? Or does your opponent get to control them?
Those of us who oppose limits on campaign spending by individuals or groups have always said that campaign regulation is mostly just an effort to protect incumbents by reducing the amount of criticism that others are allowed to air. I don’t think there could be a finer example of this principle in action than seeing Democrats, when the country has turned decidedly against them on policy grounds, attack “outside groups,” implying that there’s something illegitimate about groups of Americans running political ads.
We had the strongest team by far back when I played junior league football. You couldn’t play school ball until 9th grade. My second year, our coach took us over to PA to play a much older and heavier team without telling us who they were. We noticed as soon as we pulled up to the field. We also sensed what was coming.
They kicked our asses up and down the field in a 2 hour full contact scrimmage. I was the go to running back that year and I still remember every kick-off and carry. lol I got hammered every time, even just blocking. But I probably played harder right to the end in that game than any other I had ever played in. Our whole team did. We were crushed as far as scoring and obliterated on the field. Even more, I still remember the pride we felt afterward from playing them hard on every down.
Tucker Carlson’s prep school doesn’t roll that way, along with too many other public and today, I imagine.
Look, I get that Dan Riehl is a big shit on campus when it comes to blogging, but this is seriously asshole-ish stuff even for him. Clearly this post of his gives me great insight into the character of Tucker Carlson based on the current actions of the prep school he attended 30 years ago. Brilliant insight, Dan.
Its pretty clear to anyone who reads Dan’s blog that he was “that” asshole football player in high school. Not the quarterback, or one of the wide receivers, or one of the stars of a program that even mattered. No he was the douche that thought he could act like an Alpha Dickhead simply because he hung out with people ten times more talented and accomplished than himself.
Artists Rendering: Dan Riehl in High School
Memo to Dan: Real alpha males don’t have to go around being dicks all the time to prove how manly they are. Grow up, asshole.
Jamie posted this at 1:30 PM HKT on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 as Buffoon Watch
I feel I should explain my political position in some detail. This is not an easy task. I fear it is not enough to claim that I am—perhaps it would be wiser to say, “believe I am”—a liberal. The term itself raises the first complication. As you well know, “liberal” has different and frequently antagonistic meanings, depending on who says it and where they say it. For example, my late beloved grandmother Carmen used to say that a man was a liberal when referring to a gentleman of dissolute habits, someone who not only did not go to Mass, but also spoke ill of the priests. For her, the prototypic incarnation of a “liberal” was a legendary ancestor of mine who, one fine day in my native city of Arequipa, told his wife that he was going to the main square to buy a newspaper and never returned. The family heard nothing of him until 30 years later, when the fugitive gentleman died in Paris. “So why did that liberal uncle flee to Paris, Grandma?” “Why else, son? To corrupt himself of course!” This story may be the remote origin of my liberalism and my passion for French culture.
That federal mandates threatened perfectly respectable health care programs insured hundreds of thousands of low-skill, low-income workers? Or;
That the only companies able to get exemptions on such mandates were those big enough to throw around their weight in Washington.
It’s a rhetorical question, as both happened thanks to the Glory and Wonder™ that is ObamaCare. Here’s hoping every single congressman who voted for that wretched bill is thrown to the dogs this November and forced to find a normal job. Too bad most of them have options besides working for small companies without McDonald’s ability to lobby their successors.
I read this story, linked from Drudge, about polling on Prop 19 (pot legalization) in California. It follows the tactic of using “what do these random people think?” quotes. The first random person they quote is a parody of why I don’t like this tactic:
The idea of taxing recreational marijuana draws a lot of attention.
“They should tax the hell out of it and send the money directly to the schools,” said Deborah Wynn, 56, a jobless student aiming to work in the medical industry.
Color me persuaded.
Apollo posted this at 11:42 PM HKT on Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 as Journalism
Hopefully I’m not the first to point out that the “receipt” accounts for only $3258.81 of the $5400 the hypothetical taxpayer was charged. That accounts for only 60.03% of the taxes paid. Given the biases of the people who came up with that receipt, I suspect the remaining 39.97% was spent on decidedly less sympathetic causes. What percentage of my taxes was spent on name plates for the Robert Byrd [Fill in the Blank] in West Virginia, or financing UAW retirement plans through the GM bailout? Didn’t make the list.
One thing that is dramatically hidden in that graph is the employer’s share of FICA taxes, which is 7.65% on top of the 7.65% the employee pays. So for every dollar of Social Security and Medicare taxes shown on that receipt, there’s another dollar that the employer is paying on that employee’s behalf that, absent the tax, would largely have gone to that employee. So even though that employee thinks he’s only paying $5400 in taxes, there’s another $2611.71 that he’s not aware of. If he’s self-employed, he pays it all himself: a self-employed person using those same tax figures would have paid $8011.71, 23.46% of his income.
And, of course, showing the taxes for someone who makes $34,140 looks much more sympathetic than the numbers of someone earning higher amounts. As income increases, larger percentages of it are taxed at increasingly high rates. And FICA taxes stop after $106,800 in income. A single man making the dread $250,000 per year would only pay FICA on less than half that amount, but most of his income would be taxed at or above 28%. He would have paid $68,873.50 in income taxes, and only $8,170.20 in FICA taxes. $77,043.70 in total taxes, with only 10.6% of that going toward FICA. That man’s contribution toward foreign aid and the Smithsonian would have looked considerably less sympathetic. Those numbers would start to get ridiculous as one approached the highest echelons of income; for individuals making $10,000,000 or more, I reckon the amount they “gave” to the NIH would, if given to a private college, have resulted at least in a library wing with their name on it.
Personally, I’m glad I don’t get a receipt for my taxes, otherwise vast periods of my life would be spent contemplating the bottles of Scotch I could have purchased with the part of my income that was wasted on Head Start and Amtrak.
If you only read one funny article all day, make it this article on the Tea Party. John Miller and Jonah point out some of the ways this article is funny. After the “the rule of law” bit, I think this is the next funniest:
[The 5000 Year Leap] spins the Constitution in a way most legal scholars would not recognize — even those who embrace an “originalist” interpretation.
It argues that the Founding Fathers were guided by 28 “principles of liberty,” above all, a belief that government should be based on “Natural Law,” or “a code of right reason from the Creator himself.” The founders, Skousen wrote, believed in the equal protection of rights, but not the equal distribution of things — an argument that many Tea Party activists now make against the health care overhaul passed in March.
Natural Law! A code from the Creator himself! Founders weren’t Communists? What a bunch of wingnuts!
The Tea Party is the most interesting and widespread (and therefore important) political movement in America since the Civil Rights movement. And the way our journalists have treated it is instructive: first, they dismissed it; then, they mocked it (teabagger – anyone heard that term lately?); then, they called them racist; then, they called them radicals; now, they’re using the Tea Party as a tool to prove their own ignorance.
If the mainstream press’s attempts to destroy the Tea Party weren’t enough of an argument to stop taking journalists seriously, the fact that millions of protesting Americans marching in the streets know more about our nation’s history than the writers and editors of the The New York Times should be enough to show that the ideal of journalism is dead at America’s major newspapers. I mean, if you get your information from the Times, you’re getting it from people who literally do not know what they’re talking about. That’s the opposite of journalism.
Apollo posted this at 12:57 PM HKT on Sunday, October 3rd, 2010 as Humor, Journalism, Tea Time
