Steven Pinker at Gene Expression

Normally I think of Evolutionary Psychology as having two main strains. The "liberal" strain that sees only female academic/social underachievement as due primarly to genetic causes, and the "conservative" strain that sees both female AND non-white academic/social underachievement as primarily due to genetics.

I had assumed that Steven Pinker was in the liberal camp, since, as the blatantly racist American Renaissance web site notes in its mostly positive review of Pinker's Blank Slate:

Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature—that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.

He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.

Prof. Pinker also tries to evade the implications of racial differences by emphasizing the universal meaning of human nature.

“Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences,” and, further:

“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”

So imagine my surprise when Pinker turns up in the less blatant but nevertheless thoroughly racist Gene Expression

UPDATE - that link redirects to Khan's current science blog via Discover Magazine now. But I found it again at the Wayback Machine. Enjoy.

If Khan has it removed from the Wayback Machine, I have a downloaded copy - just ask for it.

The beginning of the interview dwelt on the things that Pinker has in common with the Gene Expression crowd - with Pinker characterizing his political opponents in the standard Evolutionary Psychology way:
"Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities."

I started to wonder when/how they would bring up the race issue. I had the answer when I got to question 8:


(8) I want to go back to "empirical hypotheses ... too dangerous to study." This was the topic of the Edge Annual Question. Your own offering was the possibility that the kind of research that we have just discussed may uncover a genetic and evolutionary basis for population differences in mental abilities, personality, and other psychological traits. What are your projections for the trajectory of this idea? Will it be put to the decisive test sooner rather than later? If the hereditarian view is vindicated to any extent, what disruptions and realignments of the intellectual and political landscape do you foresee?


"population differences" is the term of choice at Gene Expression for "the intellectual superiority of whites" and Pinker got that. He answers carefully, while including the obligatory "politically correct" slur:

I suspect that we'll see more studies of this kind, unless they are beaten back by politically correct opposition (as seems to be happening to Bruce Lahn's work on possible recent selection on genes governing brain size). Whether group differences will be found is an empirical question that will differ according to the trait and group comparison. If innate differences are found and acknowledged (two big if's), the effects would include questioning the assumption that all groupwide social differences (e.g., in crime, poverty, and health) are caused by discrimination or a rigged economic system. It would be an enormous challenge to the unspoken consensus of mainstream left-of-center politics during the past fifty years--though also an enormous danger to societal fairness if the claimed difference turns out to be a false alarm. And true or false, a claim of racial differences would also embolden racist kooks and unsavory political movements. (Of course, if the research decisively shows no group differences, that would take the wind out of their sails, a positive development.) Either way, it's dangerous territory, and the moral issues in exploring it are complex.

It's striking how full of conservative jargon and liberal bashing Pinker's comments often are, yet he claimed in an email to me that Stephen Jay Gould's ideas about evolutionary psychology are dismissable due to Gould's politics:

The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature.

The implication is that Pinker is above politics and all about pure science. Of course the motley crew at Gene Expression makes the same claim, although "feminist" is a dirty word throughout the site, and they never miss a chance to tout studies that they believe prove that non-whites are genetically less intelligent or more violent than whites.

I think the connection between the far right and the Evolutionary Psychologists needs to be monitored carefully. They have too much to offer each other - "scientific" respectablity for the right and lots of funding for the EvPsych project of, as Marvin Harris called it "biologizing inequality."

UPDATE: It seems that Pinker and blatant racist Steve Sailer are good pals, and even back in 2002 Sailer is pleased that Pinker is making progress on the racism front:

Reading The Blank Slate is particularly enjoyable to me because Pinker and I are so much on the same wavelength. We even have similar expansive concepts of evidence, relying not just on refereed journals but also on Tom Wolfe, Dave Barry, and the great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Further, Pinker is an enthusiastic subscriber to my iSteve mailing list. And arguments that I've made over the years pop up throughout The Blank Slate.

For example, according to Pinker, his section on IQ on pp. 149-150 embellishes upon various of my articles. My VDARE series on how to help the left half of the bell curve was apparently a particularly fruitful source. Here's an excerpt from The Blank Slate with links to my supporting articles:

“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the Presidential qualifications of George W. Bush.”

Several readers have complained that while The Blank Slate is excellent on sex and individual differences, it wimps out on racial differences. My response: "Thank God." Pinker is not only a major scientist, while I'm merely a journalist, but he's also much more articulate. If he had written a book about race, there would be nothing for me to say.

Further, it's important to realize how far Pinker has come over the years. He started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

Adapting Minds preview

You can get a good preview of Adapting Minds here.

Adapting Minds hits a nerve

A few months ago I blogged about Adapting Minds by David Buller. I see that the book has hit a nerve with the Evolutionary Psychologists.

Cultivating a persona of fairness and impartiality, David Buller has written a critique of theory and results from evolutionary psychology. To those unfamiliar with the primary literature, some of his claims may seem plausible. That has not, however, been the reaction of those who know this literature intimately.

Over the next few months, we will be developing on this website a collective response to Buller. It will be collective because we think each scientist should respond to the research that he or she knows best. We will try to provide links to primary sources, so that interested readers can see for themselves what the literature says.

I will be tracking the EvPsych response to Buller's book, which is one of the most damaging to the Evolutionary Psychology cause that I have yet seen. I will also try to find a response from Buller - or contact him myself and ask him about his reaction.

Number 3!

An Inconvenient Truth is now the third highest-grossing documentary of all time, having just passed Bowling for Columbine.

Fun with John and Clarence

I'm reading Strange Justice - the Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. I'm doing research for a possible play about the period based on this book, David Brock's Blinded by the Right and a few others.

There are some fascinating bits in the book, like this one:

Thomas liked to taunt another member of the office, who was prim and painfully shy, by making outrageous, gross, and at times off-color remarks. "Clarence was loud and boisterous, kind of the office clown. He couldn't help himself but to needle the guy - he just liked to get under his skin," Rothschild recalled in an interview.

The target of Thomas's taunting was John C. Ashcroft.

Another:

Terrel H. Bell, who was secretary of education at the time, recalled in his memoirs being "shocked at the sick humor and racist cliches" voiced by some Reagan appointees, who, for instance, referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Lucifer Coon," called Arabs "sand niggers," and described Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination, as "the lesbians' bill of rights."

Giving the doctor a head start

Watch the clip in Quicktime .mov format

At the time this was taped, a doctor at an abortion clinic had recently been murdered. This anti-abortion protestor liked to joke about giving doctors a head start before shooting them.

Unfortunately I blabbed too much in this clip, but you can see her laughing about her joke when I sarcastically said that I loved it.

How to be a Hooters "Girl"

Female employees are required to sign a statement that they "acknowledge and affirm" the following:

1. my job duties require I wear the designated Hooters Girl uniform.
   
2. my job duties require that I interact with and entertain the customers.
   
3. the Hooters concept is based on female sex appeal and the work environment is one in which joking and sexual innuendo based on female sex appeal is commonplace.
   
4. I do not find my job duties, uniform requirements, or work environment to be offensive, intimidating, hostile, or unwelcome.
   

No need to worry about sexual harrassment when you work for Hooters - you've signed a statement saying you don't mind it.

More at Smoking Gun

Catholic Church sued over another pedophile

This time a murderous pedophile.

Remember, all female Catholics out there - this is how the Catholic Church deals with the priest shortage - because it feels that no woman, no matter how holy she is, is as worthy of the priesthood as the lowest pedophile gun nut murdering fanatic.

And BTW - their ideal woman is someone who can get pregnant without having sex.

via Pharyngula

Now I know that the Democrats in Connecticut did the right thing

If I didn't think so before, I would now, thanks to Dick Cheney:

...Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might embolden Al Qaeda terrorists.

“It’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy,’’ Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview with news agency reporters.

Any friend of Cheney's is not a friend of Dems and must be thrown out on his ass.

I'll miss Jon Stewart's Droopy Dog impressions of Lieberman though...

The official Beatles canon

soundscapes.info

anti-Gore astroturf

Brought to you by Exxon Mobile.

In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith’s Yahoo account indicate it didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.

Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp.

A DCI Group spokesman declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video, or to explain why Toutsmith appeared to be sending email from DCI’s computers.

Because for big corporations, making billions of dollars is not enough. They must squeeze every last cent out of the world before sending it straight to hell.

Do human beings run Exxon Mobile? Do they have children? Grandchildren? Do they give a damn if their future will be screwed thanks to Exxon Mobile?

Pandagon -> Crooks and Liars

Borat strikes again

Borat in the Heartland - what a great combination!

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center.

But he sure shook up this town before leaving in a hurry.

Introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan, he was said to be an immigrant touring America. A film crew was with him, doing some sort of documentary. And he wanted to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to show his appreciation, the announcer told the crowd.

Speaking in broken English, the mysterious man first told the decidedly pro-American crowd - it was a rodeo, of all things, in Salem, of all places - that he supported the war on terrorism.

"I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards," he said, according to Brett Sharp of Star Country WSLC, who was also on stage that night as a media sponsor of the rodeo.

An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd.

I actually prefer Bruno though, like the time he went to "the gayest part of America - Alabama!"

watch Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno

Trapeze school

I watched my daughter take lessons on the flying trapeze at the Trapeze School on the West Side Highway in Manhattan yesterday.
Watch a video of one of her lessons here.

The Hunting of the President

I finally got to see the movie The Hunting of the President. I had read the book a few years ago, and forgot some of it, so it was just riveting to be reminded of the horrors of the "Arkansas Project" and the total complicity of the mainstream media, especially CNN in trying to pump up the Whitewater non-story and an adulterous blowjob into an impeachable offense.

I had forgotten about the horrible expriences that Susan McDougal had to go through for refusing to lie for evil Ken Starr and his evil crew. When McDougal refused to cut a deal with them, and went to jail instead, they made sure to make her experience as miserable as possible.

McDougal talks about it in this interview at Buzzflash.

Bush keeps pushing the authoritarian envelope

Yahoo News:

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

"That's the big question ... the definition of who can be detained," said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

Scott L. Silliman, a retired Air Force Judge Advocate, said the broad definition of enemy combatants is alarming because a U.S. citizen loosely suspected of terror ties would lose access to a civilian court — and all the rights that come with it. Administration officials have said they want to establish a secret court to try enemy combatants that factor in realities of the battlefield and would protect classified information.

The Administration is slowly inching its way towards a government that can detain any citizen at any time for any reason without the right to a fair trial. And all the people that support Bush are aiding and abetting his goal of an authoritarian state.

People like those recently mentioned by Paul Krugman

Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.

Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)

Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.

And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?

The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.

It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?

And meanwhile, Chris Matthews lavishly praises crazy fascist crackpot Ann Coulter.

The New Yorker on Wikipedia

There's a good article about Wikipedia in this week's New Yorker. Favorite part:

Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viegas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called "history flows," found that the talk pages and "meta pages" - those dealing with coordination and administration - have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site's content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, "People are talking about governance, not working on content." Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. "Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting," he told me.

For all its protocol, Wikipedia's bureaucracy doesn't necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went int arbitration. "User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own," his accuser charged in a written deposition. "His views on climate science ar singular and narrow." A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist - a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site - who yells the loudest - wins

Connolley believes that Wikipedia "gives no privilege to those who know what they're talking about," a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. "Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule," he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have "the lowest error rate in history.") Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that "'disaster' is not too strong a word" for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is "infested with moonbats." (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. "The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks," Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn't. There is no such test for truth.

The territoriality of Wikipedians is a huge problem. And to be an insider, you have to have lots of time on your hands to participate in Wikipedia editing.

Of course territoriality isn't limited to Wikipedia. It pops up all the time in human groupings. There's a seemingly desperate need to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This even happens, absurdly on Internet discussion boards where your identity can be completely hidden and the rewards of being an insider are almost nil - it's not like a country club where you get access to the best golf times and tennis courts and business networking through your insider status.

The best part of observing group dynamics on Internet discussions is that the insider/outsider games are played in black and white print, and you can easily watch and analyze it, and track it through time.

Shakespeare exhibit

The Yale Center for British Art currently has an exhibition of paintings and documents associated with William Shakespeare and his times. It's a good show, and the museum is free, so it's well worth the trip to New Haven.

Warriors! Come out to play-ay!

The Warriors Subway Scavenger Hunt

Teams can sign up in groups of nine delegates. All participants are requested to be in full "colors", just as gang members are in the film. Cyrus will be there to kick off the rally and give your team instructions. The team that arrives at the screening location first with all aspects of the scavenger hunt completed wins.

Grand Prize: Nine leather "Warriors" vests, and an August 3rd brunch with the cast and crew of The Warriors!

Carnival of the Liberals

I made it into Carnival of the Liberals #17

I emailed this article to Steven Pinker

Dismissing ‘Sexist Opinions’ About Women’s Place in Science is about Ben A. Barres, a female-to-male transsexual who has experienced the science world from both sides now, and has some strong opinions about the claim, made by Lawrence Summers, heartily supported by Steven Pinker, that discrimination against women is less important than evolutionarily-endowed female incompetence and female disinterest in math and science.

I don't expect to get a response from Pinker, but I imagine his response will be that Barres was a man trapped in a woman's body all along and that's why he is good at math and science.

Of course Barres doesn't make his claims based purely on his personal experience.

Interesting excerpt from the article:

Q. Why do some people attribute differences in professional achievement to innate ability?

A. One of the reasons is the belief by highly successful people that they are successful because of their own innate abilities. I think as a professor at Stanford I am lucky to be here. But I think Larry Summers thinks he is successful because of his innate inner stuff.

Q. What about the idea that men and women differ in ways that give men an advantage in science?

A. People are still arguing over whether there are cognitive differences between men and women. If they exist, it’s not clear they are innate, and if they are innate, it’s not clear they are relevant. They are subtle, and they may even benefit women.

But when you tell people about the studies documenting bias, if they are prejudiced, they just discount the evidence.

Q. How does this bias manifest itself?

A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don’t get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what’s fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support. This is such an obvious no-brainer. If you just do this with a small amount of resources, you could explode the number of women scientists.

And Elizabeth Spelke debated Pinker on the issue a year ago, and smited evolutionary psychology just-so stories about female incompetence with the mighty power of data.

I love David Brock

David Brock does such good work with his Media Matters for America organization. But don't overlook his excellent autobiography Blinded by the Right - The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

When he was a conservative, Brock wrote a book called The Real Anita Hill which smeared Anita Hill and portrayed her as "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty." When Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's book Strange Justice came out in response to the Brock book, Brock and conservative friends went to work:

...Ricky (Silberman, vice chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision and close friend of Clarence Thomas) and I sprang into action to discredit the Mayer and Abramson book. At mid-morning, we met at the Capitol Hill offices of Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, the most powerful right-wing lobby behind the Thomas nomination... Rick was joined by Barbara Ledeen, a neo-conservative operative who was the executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, the antifeminist group Ricky had formed, in part with Scaife money, from Women for Judge Thomas...

Like the Hiss-Chambers case, the Thomas-Hill case lent itself to endless hairsplitting over the true meaning of obscure factoids. I knew the ins and outs of the case better than anyone, and I knew how to twist and turn them to our advantage. I had done this previously, in my book, in the service of a sincerely held belief. Now, I wasn't sure why I was doing it. I was just doing it. As Barbara Ledeen took notes on a legal pad, I played the role I was expected to play. Donning my defense lawyer hat, I dissected the Mayer and Abramson excerpt, methodically turning back each new damaging allegation they raised and patching up the sizable holes they had shot in Thomas's defense.

The three of us then collaborated on a radio script for Rush Limbaugh's show at noon... We would use Rush to crush Mayer and Abramson, defend Justice Thomas, and protect Republican prospects in the impending election that would bring Newt Gingrich to power. We faxed off the script. Tuning in to his show, I listened as Limbaugh read from the fax virtually verbatim. The war was on! Hearing Rush blast those feminazis gave me a jolt of adrenaline. I was back on message. Forget that hysterical Ricky Silberman, I told myself. I'd show her, too, by going out and proving that Mayer and Abramson were frauds and liars. Consumed by a kind of mania, as if my entire worldview and indeed my self-conception depended on the outcome, I was now on a mission to sink Strange Justice.

Working harder than I ever had, I set about re-reporting the book for a review for the Spectator... My work on the Spectator review inevitably caused me to reinterview sources I had relied on in writing my book. One of them was Armstrong Williams, who had been on Thomas's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission staff at the time Anita Hill also worked for him in the early 1980s... In my book, I relied heavily on Williams's recollections to discredit the testimony of Hill and another ex-employee of Thomas's, Angela Wright, who also claimed that Thomas had behaved inappropriately toward her. Williams had supplied me with a particularly evocative anecdote that I used to show Thomas - in contrast to Anita Hill's portrait - as prudish in sexual matters. According to Williams, Thomas had once compelled him to dispose of a copy of Playboy Williams had been toting, telling his aide the magazine was "trash." I had interviewed Williams in his Dupont Circle office and on the telephone several times, and we had kept in touch since the book's publication, though we hadn't spoken at any length since I had come out as gay in the Washington Post eight months before. Williams invited me to discuss Strange Justice over dinner at a Tex-Mex place on the Hill, then asked me back to his apartment for a drink.

Sitting on an overstuffed sofa not far from me, Williams had something else besides Strange Justice on his mind. As he began to pepper me with graphic questions about whether I was dominant or submissive in bed, I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat, looked away, and tried to change the subject. Williams, who was unmarried, countered with increasingly lewd banter until I quickly brought the conversation to a close, thanked him for his time, got up, and walked out. Was Williams baiting me like an antigay bigot? Was he coming on to me? I had no way of knowing for sure, but either way, I had to conclude that he was a poor character witness for Clarence Thomas... I grew agitated as I glimpsed some uncomfortable truths about who these conservatives really were, and what they really represented...

The biggest problem raised by the Strange Justice authors for the Thomas camp was the testimony of yet another woman, Kaye Savage, who had not been heard from during the first round of hearings. Savage made the claim... that she had seen Playboy pinups papered along the walls of Thomas's apartment in the early 1980s, when she and Thomas had been friends and Anita Hill was working for Thomas...

...Mark (Paoletta) phoned me back. He said he had posed my question about how to discredit Savage to (Clarence) Thomas, who knew I was at work on a review of the Mayer and Abramson book. Mark told me that Thomas had, in fact, some derogatory information on his former friend Savage; he passed it along to Mark so that Mark could give it to me. Quoting Thomas directly, Mark told me of unverified, embarrassing personal information about Savage that Thomas claimed had been raised against her in a sealed court record of a divorce and child custody battle more than a decade ago. Thomas also told Mark where Savage worked after Mark related that I was eager to hunt her down as soon as possible. Surely skirting the bounds of judicial propriety to intimidate and smear yet another witness against him, Thomas was playing dirty, and so was I.

...I grilled Savage, a mild-mannered, middle-aged African American civil servant, with the menacing threat of a personal exposure hanging in the background. I then told her that she could either cooperate with me and give me what I needed to discredit Strange Justice, or I would have to discredit her as a witness by disclosing whatever personal information I had about her, just as I had blackened the reputation of all the other women who had come forward with damaging information about Thomas. In the face of this threat, Savage refused to recant her accusations. I continued to press for anything I could get her to say to blunt the impact of her accusation. We agreed that Savage would give me a written statement in which she would say the Strange Justice authors had distorted and sensationalized her quotes. When I got back to my office at the Spectator, Savage faxed me a statement, but it was too weak to be of any use: the Strange Justice account would still stand. I called Savage at her office and insisted on some changes that would allow me to cast at least some doubt on the way Mayer and Abramson had quoted her. After a struggle on the phone in which I renewed my threats, Savage made some handwritten changes to the document and faxed it to me again... I knew Savage had given me enought to work with so that I could use the statement in my review to make it appear as though she had recanted the story, which in fact she had not.

...I next set out to blow away the Mayer and Abramson story that Thomas had been a frequent customer of an X-rated video store near Dupont Circle, called Graffiti, where in the early 1980s he was alleged to have rented X-rated videos of the type that Hill claimed he had discussed with her in graphic terms. In the hearings, Thomas had pointedly refused to answer questions about his personal use of pornography other than to categorically deny that he had ever talked about porn with Hill. The Graffitti story was another theretofore unknown piece of evidence for Hill's case, and it was a powerful counterpoint to the prudish image of Thomas presented by supporters like Armstrong Williams and repeated by me in The Real Anita Hill. Now that Mark had opened up a channel directly to Thomas, I asked him to find out for me whether Thomas had owned the video equipment needed to view movies at home in the early 1980s. Such equipment was not then as commonly used as it was in the mid-1990s, and I figured if I could assert in the review that Thomas had no way of watching the movies, the matter would be settled definitively.

Mark came back with a straightforward answer: Thomas not only had the video equipment in his apartment, but he also habitually rented pornographic movies from Graffiti during the years that Anita Hill worked for him, just as Mayer and Abramson reported. Here was the proof that the Senate investigators and reporters had been searching for during the hearings. Mark, of course, was still a true believer in Thomas's innocence. He couldn't see the porn rentals as at all significant. To Mark, Hill was still a liar despite suggestions to the contrary. But I had some distance from Thomas and I was troubled by the damaging report. It made Hill's entire story much more plausible. I can still remember exactly where I was sitting when Mark let me in on what had to have been one of the most closely guarded secrets within the Thomas camp, a secret, no doubt, that had been kept for three years among Thomas's most trusted advisers.

It was at this moment that Brock finally admitted to himself just how low he had fallen to be part of the hard-right crowd:

...I was no better than the Arkansas Project brigade after all. The strange lies were mine. All the attacks, the hateful rhetoric, the dark alliances and strange conspiracies, an eye for an eye, nuts and sluts, defending Pinochet, throwing grenades, carpet-bombing the White House, Bob Bork, Bob Tyrrell, Bob Dornan, Bob Bartley, Bob Barr - it all led right here: I lost my soul.

Brock has been working on getting his soul back ever since, and running Media Matters is part of that project.

This is important stuff. But one of the most memorable parts of the book has to be this portrait of Laura Ingraham:

I hadn't known of Laura's antigay past at Dartmouth, where along with her then-boyfriend Dinesh D'Souza, she had participated in the infamous outing of gay students, who were branded "sodomites," until I cringed as I read about her Dartmouth Review exploits in a 1995 profile in Vanity Fair. To make matters worse, I was quoted in the piece saying that Laura was unreservedly accepting of homosexuality, which in my presence she always had seemed to be. On more than one occasion, I had taken her barhopping along the gay strip in Washington, where she seemed to have a blast. Inevitably though, as we drownded ourselves in more and more alcohol, the evening would take a ghastly turn. One night, after downing several cocktails and snorting an unidentifiable white powder an acquaintance had given me - which turned out to be the cat tranquilizer Ketamine - I was sick in the bathroom for several hours trying to get my bearings as Laura, in a drunken stupor, crawled through the packed two-story dance club on her hands and knees looking for me. Her purse had been locked in my car trunk, causing her to call a friend in the wee hours of the morning to rescue her. In the meantime, she had managed to leave me a series of violent messages, threatening to "break every window in my house" if I didn't return the keys immediately.

David Brock is a regular guest (usually Wednesdays) on the Al Franken Show.

How did I become a Republican?

I don't know what's going on. I've gotten two voicemails from some New York congressman saying that he wants to recognize me as some kind of Republican pioneer - I ignored them figuring it must have been a mistake. Then I just got a Grassroots Survey from Dennis Hastert commissioned by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

I've checked my financial records and don't see any signs of identity theft where somebody donated money to the Republicans in my name. I certainly never deliberately gave Republicans money. Is this some rightwinger's joke? Did somebody donate in my name with their own money as a prank?

Oh well, I'll fill out the survey and send it back. Although I imagine my answers are going to skew the results.

Sale at K-Mart

Bob, my pal and clinic defense partner loved this joke so much, you can hear both sides complaining about it in this video clip.

My husband sucks, but he can't help it - nature made him that way

What is it with women who write for the NYTimes? Poor Daphne Merkin can't find a daddy, Maureen Dowd blames feminism for dating woes - although claims she herself has a great social life - then Amy Sutherland writes an article about what a jerk her husband Scott is When she objected to some stuff he did "he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever." In other words, no bitch was going to tell Scott what to do.

Sutherland's answer to her husband's deep-seated hostility and aggression was to try to train him to behave reasonably and with consideration using animal-training techniques.

Sutherland didn't come out and say her husband couldn't be expected to treat her wishes with consideration due to the fact, detected by evolutionary psychologists, that men are just like that, but she used the language of evolutionary psychology, explaining that:

The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much

.


Maybe Judith Warner noticed that Sutherland's article has been the Times's first or second most-emailed article for about two weeks now, and wanted a piece of that action, which is why she wrote an article confessing that her husband treats her with contempt:

On Sunday night, though, as I read The Times’s laid-back-boys-on-campus piece — while simultaneously giving a bath, putting away laundry and writing a week’s worth of columns in my head — the colorful image of sarong-clad men and women suddenly lodged itself inside my mind. It seemed to have some kind of great significance; column potential. So I raced to share it with Max, who was having a little lie-down on the couch, having done some very tiring driving earlier in the day.

As I began to talk, his fingers reflexively felt for the TV remote, trying — and I really don’t think this was conscious — to turn me either down or off. When this proved fruitless, he resorted to words: “interesting,” first, then “work on that” and, finally (TV volume rising now) “Sounds great — get to it!”

Warner's husband wants to make sure she knows that no matter how big a hoity-toity famous writer for the NYTimes she is, he's more interested in watching TV than hearing about her work. No bitch is going to take up HIS TV time.

Warner doesn't claim that scientists have found a biological reason for why her husband is such a creep, but she expects they WILL find it soon:

The pattern of selective male laziness and female frenzy that begins among young men and women in college persists long after graduation. Someday soon, I am sure, an evolutionary biologist will teach us how all this is hard-wired — and why it is worthwhile.

Of course Warner immediately assumes that the cause is biological, not social. Notice that Warner doesn't attribute her husband's attitude to their relationship. No, it turns out that her husband, as a man, is naturally "lazy" while she, being female, is of course in a female frenzy. This is not about Judith and Max, it's about the supposed essential natures of men and women, and Judith's and Max's personalities happen to be a perfect match for these alleged universal male/female traits.

Both Warner and Sutherland seem to believe that their marriages are just swell. They sound like awful relationships to me, even though Sutherland, at least, tries to present alpha Scott as having traits that make up for his incredible screw-you attitude. After all, he does do an hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent. How many men even know there is a "northern Vermont accent?" That's gotta outweigh all kinds of obnoxious, risky, selfish behavior.

When organizations like The National Marriage Project wring their hands and search for reasons for why women are increasingly uninterested in marriage, they have no further to look than the NYTimes. If intelligent, accomplished women are fed shit by their husbands and call it chocolate eclairs, what the hell's the point? Who needs to spend time with someone in your off hours who responds to your request to pick up stinking clothes by picking them up LESS, as alpha Scott does; or who makes no secret of the fact that he'd rather watch TV than listen to his accomplished wife talk about her interesting ideas, as lazy Max does? And I'm sure that the Judith/Max household can afford Tivo, so there's NO excuse for that behavior.

Judith, Amy, please: sooner or later, even evolutionary psychology will no longer be sufficient to keep you from realizing that the person who swore in public to love and honor you now treats you like a buzzing gnat or insubordinate household help. Sooner or later your resentment and self-respect are going to assert themselves and you'll be forced to admit that you and he aren't really gender archetypes acting in a script authored by natural selection after all. Someday, maybe, even your power to get back at your husband by portraying him as a jerk to an audience of millions will not suffice.

Permanent link

Plame & Wilson sue Cheney

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Sues Cheney and Others Over Leak

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby of participating in a ''whispering campaign'' to reveal Plame's CIA identity and punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.
...
The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

OH Yeeeeahhh! It's Watergate time for the Bush crime syndicate!

Expect the Bush Admin to attack the judiciary more than ever now.

Kafkaesque

My dealings with the Copyright Office to date:

===========================

submitted via the Copyright Office's web form 7/6/2006:

Why doesn't the Copyright Office ask for proof of authorization for derivative works? Someone registered a derivative copyright on my play, TAM LIN, without my authorization and then used it as the basis for a very expensive lawsuit against me for violating this unauthorized copyright when I produced the original work.

I noticed that the derivative work copyright registration form doesn't even ask for the name of the author of the original work, much less proof of authorization.

Why doesn't the Copyright Office do a better job of protecting authors of original work from unauthorized derivative work copyright registration?

Nancy McClernan



-------------------------------------------
From: Copyright Information [mailto:copyinfo@loc.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 8:53 AM
To: nancy@
Subject: Re: derivative copyright

Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author. Anyone interested in a work who does not know the owner of copyright may search the records of the Copyright Office. Or, the Office will conduct a search at a fee of $75* per hour. For further information, request Circular 22, "How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work."

Among its other functions, the Copyright Office serves as an office of record, a place where claims to copyright are registered when the claimant has complied with the requirements of the copyright law.
We are glad to furnish information about the provisions of the copyright law and the procedures for making registration, to explain the operations and practices of the Copyright Office, and to report of facts found in the public records of the Office.
However, the Regulations of the Copyright Office (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 37, chapter II) prohibit employees from giving specific legal advice on the rights of persons, whether in connection with particular uses of copyrighted works, cases of alleged domestic or foreign copyright infringement, contracts between authors and publishers, or other matters of a similar nature.

Many requests for assistance require professional legal advice, frequently that of a copyright attorney. Your local bar association may be able to recommend a copyright attorney.



**************IMPORTANT NOTE**************
As of July 1, 2006, most filing fees are $45 per application.
For other fees, please see:
http://www.copyright.gov/reports/fees2006.html


**********************************
Copyright Office
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave SE
Washington DC 20559
(202) 707-3000
www.copyright.gov
**********************************


------------------------------------------------------

From: Nancy
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 3:05 PM
To: 'Copyright Information'
Subject: RE: derivative copyright

You did not answer my question. I wasn't asking for legal advice, or for an explanation of copyright laws.

I thought my question was pretty easy to understand, but maybe not, so let me rephrase.

WHY doesn't the Copyright Office's derivative work copyright registration form ASK for proof of authorization?

Please answer that question, or explain why you can't answer that question.

That has nothing to do with legal advice and everything to do with the practices of the Copyright Office.

I've already BEEN through courts, and forced, at GREAT EXPENSE, the registrant of the unauthorized copyright to cancel his ill-gotten registration. The case was Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions tried on April 24 - 26, 2006 by Judge Lawrence Kaplan in the US Southern District Court in Manhattan and my attorney sent you all the materials needed to support the cancellation. Why hasn't the cancellation of registration PA-1-254-494 gone through yet? I still see it listed in your database.

But the point is I never should have had to do it. Every single copyright owner can find themselves in the same position as I - if they are lucky enough to afford the court costs - because of the failure of the US Copyright Office to protect their rights.

The Copyright Office's statement: "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work." is absolutely meaningless because the Copyright Office does exactly NOTHING to enforce it. There should be mechanisms to prevent the easy defrauding of the Copyright Office, and penalties for those who do defraud the Copyright Office.

The current situation is intolerable and has got to stop.

So please answer the question about the failure of the current derivative copyright registration form to demand proof of authorization of the owner of the original copyright.

Nancy McClernan

#4!

I blogged a couple of weeks ago that An Inconvenient Truth was the 7th-highest grossing documentary of all time. Well it recently surpassed Madonna to become number 4.


Here are the current rankings:

1 Fahrenheit 9/11 $119,194,771
2 March of the Penguins $77,437,223
3 Bowling for Columbine $21,576,018
4 An Inconvenient Truth $15,039,000


The #1 grossing documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 is going to be tough to beat, but Bowling for Columbine better watch its back. Michael Moore take note.

Why would a feminist wear high heels?

The typical stick-heeled high heeled shoes that the fashion industry insists that women wear are pointless and idiotic. I could maybe see wearing them if your partner has some kind of sexual kink involving such shoes - and then only if you're pretty sure you won't be walking around much in them - but other than that, what's the point?

In her annoying, typically light-weight review of Katha Pollitt's latest book Virginity or Death! Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, complains that mean old Katha is too strident because she expresses distate for such shoes. Cox says:

But there’s a world of difference between choosing to wear heels that require foot-soaking and choosing to cut your toe to fit your shoe.

But the difference is degree, not kind.

Other then some kind of iron-clad traditionalist aesthetic that causes you to be utterly incapable of shaking the idea that mincing around on your tip-toes is the pinnacle of beauty, or being a slave to the fashion industry, what possible reason is there for any woman, much less any feminist to wear stick-heeled tippy tap shoes for walking around in? It makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

So Pollitt objects to high heels and Cox calls her strident. Anybody who doubts Cox's fundamental anti-feminist position should think about that for a moment. "Strident" is an absolute cliche of anti-feminist rhetoric. And to use it in reference to a reasonable and relatively low-keyed writer like Pollitt (who once suggested I tone down my rhetoric when I cc'd her on an email) is simply Cox's way of upholding the grand anti-feminist tradition of characterizing ALL feminists as "strident."

Einhorn's nonsense

I see that Edward Einhorn has written his own piece about the case of Einhorn v Mergatroyd Productions, and predictably, it's full of bullshit.

To begin with the first paragraph:

Recently, I was involved in a drawn out and highly publicized dispute between myself and Mergatroyd Productions over my direction of a stage play entitled Tam Lin. The dispute centered around the concept of a director's copyright. Mergatroyd had fired me the day before the opening of the play and then used, I contended, the blocking and choreography I had created for the play without paying me for my work. Judge Kaplan's final decision avoided the question of copyright, awarding me money for the implied contract we had instead—that I would be paid, and that Mergatroyd Productions would be able to use my work. This made the copyright question moot.

The judge actually agreed with Mergatroyd Productions. We never said we wouldn't pay Edward Einhorn - we told him, both in person and via email that we would pay him. The issue was that Edward Einhorn wanted the full $1000 that we originally offered. But since we had to fire him for the good of our show, and since he then tried to sabotage the production through an email to the cast and crew, we felt he didn't deserve the full amount.

And JUDGE KAPLAN AGREED WITH US - awarding Einhorn $800 - LESS than what Einhorn demanded. Actually he tried to extort $2000 out of us, by serving us a cease and desist letter from David Einhorn, his brother. Eight hundred dollars was very close to what we were prepared to pay Einhorn, had he deigned to negotiate with us instead of pulling his bullshit copyright scheme, in the words of Judge Kaplan "aided and abetted by" his brother. So this incredibly expensive lawsuit was really over a couple of hundred dollars, David Einhorn's lack of professional ethics, and Edward Einhorn's gigantic ego.

And of course the argument for a director's copyright is flawed from start to finish. I'm currently working on an article about the Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions lawsuit, complete with transcripts from the trial for the Dramatists Guild's newsletter. Then I'll be posting an expanded version here, with additional gory details like the Village Voice's article about the trouble that playwright Richard Foreman had with Edward Einhorn (scroll down to "Disobeying the Foreman.") In private correspondence, Foreman told me that he always thought Einhorn made a mess of his (Forman's) plays, which is why he told Einhorn on a Manhattan street corner one day that he'd prefer that Einhorn never direct his plays again. Unfortunately, I didn't know about Foreman's experience with Einhorn until after we hired Einhorn, and Einhorn proceeded to make a mess of my play.

Einhorn agreed to cancel his ill-gotten derivative copyright on my play TAM LIN, although I see that it's still listed in the Copyright Office's database. I recently wrote to the Copyright Office asking them why they are so lackidaisical about confirming whether or not an author of an original work has authorized a derivative work. I will report their response (or non-response if it comes to that) here.

It was on the basis of his fraudulent derivative copyright registration that Einhorn sued me for producing my own work. If the Copyright Office had been doing its job, Einhorn would never have been allowed to register his bullshit "blocking and choreography" script.

Einhorn admitted on the stand that the copyright registration was a scheme he and his brother devised to extort money from Mergatroyd Productions (wait until you read the transcript.) But the Copyright Office's weakness will be there for unscrupulous attorneys like David Einhorn to exploit until people speak up.

More once the article is complete...

Hang on Stevens

A message to the liberal-moderate members of the Supreme Court via the Al Franken Show blog.

Performed by Mike Ruekberg and 2 Tickets 2 Paradise, with lyrics by Ben Wikler.

Now if only I can get a copy of the Paul Krugman theme song.

Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?

The rightwingers must be chortling for joy over this incident:

"You can’t be in here protesting," officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.

"Well, I’m not protesting, I’m having a cup of coffee," I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.

Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go."

Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."

He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. "Hey, listen. I’m a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I’m sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I’m not protesting and you can’t kick me out."

"You’ll either go or we’ll arrest you," Adkins threatened.

"Well, you’ll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.

You know the rest. Handcuffed, led away to the facility’s security office past people with surprised looks on their faces, read my rights, searched, and written up.

via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

NEWSFLASH: Ann Coulter has no ethics

Wolcott links to a NYPost article pointing out that Ann Coulter is a massive plagiarist. Wolcott takes Jonathan Alter and others to task for appearing on TV with Coulter and he's so right:

Confronted with a serial plagiarist, commentators often attempt a jackknife dive into the murky motives of the offender, trying to untangle the nagging compulsions that made the copycat risk his or her career by taking a heaping helping of other people's work. (Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words is probably the definitive book on the psychodynamics of plagiarism.) In Coulter's case, no dive is necessary, no onion-peeling of motives required. She is so devoid of character and psychology that any investigation would be superfluous. She's swiping other people's work not because she's trying to slip something past us but because she's sloppy, lazy, and arrogant. She just doesn't give a fuck. She's learned that the rules of journalism and public discourse don't apply to her, having cheerfully violated them so many times before only to be rewarded with the cover of Time, countless cable-news appearances, and bestselling success.

Who are the twisted freaks in the media who keep promoting Coulter's career? She IS a freakshow. Al Franken finally wised up and stopped appearing with her because she's just a bag of bluster and hate, with virtually no substance. And WHO are the creatures who like her? It's scary to think that they're out there running loose, disguised as human beings.

Is the NYTimes on an anti-feminist crusade?

Smirkette Cox (left) would like to replace Smurfette Dowd as the lone female in the New York Times Op Ed hive colony.

It seems like you can't read the NYTimes anymore without discovering yet another article attacking feminists. Whether it's the shameless Smurfette Maureen Dowd pushing anti-feminist stereotypes, to David Brooks giving women typically idiotic advice like have children young and start your career at 40, to the relentless promotion of evolutionary psychology aimed at keeping women in their proper place through "science" from John Tierney and Daphne Merkin, the Times appears to be a serious feminist hater.

From Pandagon comes news of yet another attack on feminism, in the guise of a book review by the smirking Ana Marie Cox, formerly known as Wonkette. She should be called Smirkette now. It's utterly appalling that they would give a review of Katha Pollitt's latest book, Virginity or Death! to a second-rate gossip columnist like Cox.

I'm convinced that Cox is trying to position herself as a replacement for Dowd in the "woman columnist" slot in the Times' Op-Ed section by becoming a clone of Dowd - shallow, obsessed with being popular with the kewl kidz, and a feminist basher while freely enjoying the fruits of the hard work of feminists. Of course Cox has always been shallow and obsessed with popularity, so it's a cinch for her to fill Dowd's pointy-toed, 4-inch heel tippy tap shoes.

It's significant that Cox would bash Katha Pollitt - Pollitt should be the replacement for Dowd in the "woman columnist" slot. She's a better thinker AND writer than either Cox or Dowd, and if the Times insists on limiting female op-ed voices to a single representative, it should pick someone who isn't an embarassment to womankind.

Life is...

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
-- Horace Walpole

And a farce by the Marquis de Sade for those who think and feel.

Find teh funny - zen master edition

Muir just gets more Zen all the time.

more at Pandagon

Touched by Mary Gross

When I was fifteen and in sophmore gym class, I decided to give jockdom another chance. I had recently broken up with my first real boyfriend, and was in the mood for a change. Previously I had avoided gym class, and when I couldn't avoid it, participated as little as possible.

I didn't start out that way. When I was about nine, I really wanted to be a jock. I joined a girls softball team and went from bad shortstop to semi-adequate outfielder. My team, the Bensalem Doves, was actually good in spite of me - we won the division championship both years I was on the team, and the second year we were undefeated. So I got two trophies just like everybody else. But the only way I could claim credit for our record was, maybe, that I psyched the other teams out by making the sign of the cross when they came up to bat. I was very religious as a kid, ironically.

I don't think I ever actually learned all the rules of softball while I was on the team, and I spent most of my time on the field hoping that the ball wouldn't come to me. So in spite of my proto-feminist belief that it was important for girls to play sports as much as boys I was a lousy jock. And after the second year in softball, I admitted it and didn't try to fight it any more - until I was fifteen and depressed and looking for a way to redefine myself.

Bad move.

I don't know why they allow kids to play field hockey without helmets. They didn't provide helmets in my day, and I'm told kids are still not required to wear them. Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to distribute long heavy wooden sticks to a group of adolescents wearing nothing more protective than gym shorts and t-shirts and tell them all to try to hit a tiny ball at the same time?

Now I know even less about the rules of field hockey than I did the rules of softball when I was a player, but I'm pretty sure it's not considered good form, at the very least, to raise your field hockey stick over your head and then slam it down on the ball like you're playing golf. But nobody told Mary Gross.

So there I am, back on the jock trail, chasing after Mary Gross, who was controlling the ball. She decides to go for a hole in one. She swings her stick violently up and back and connects with my face, knocking me out for maybe five seconds. The next thing I remember was the gym teacher quickly hustling me off to the school nurse, more annoyed that I delayed the game slightly than worried about my welfare. I ran with the blood streaming. The field hockey stick had rammed my lower lip into my upper right tooth, ripping a big gash in my lip. I had to have a bunch of stitches - big long black ones that protruded straight out from my lip, just in time for a Halloween party - and yes, my ex-boyfriend was at the Halloween party.

After it was all healed, my lower lip was uneven - the scarred side was slightly lower than the other. This was bad, and at first I thought that was the only permanent disfigurement. It took me years to realize that my nose had been broken. I had always had a small hump on my nose, but now it was also out of alignment from left to right - and got worse over the years. My septum was deviated. Eventually I had rhinoplasty. That was ten years ago.

Even more slow to develop, but just as ugly, was my discolored tooth. When Mary Gross literally hit me with an ugly stick, she also killed my upper right tooth. Over the decades it slowly, steadily became discolored. I tried various whitening schemes until a dentist finally declared it dead and said no amount of topical treatment would lighten it up.

So today, finally, all these years later, I have corrected the last effect of the touch of Mary Gross. I had a nice white veneer placed on that tooth. Now I'm ready to get back in the saddle again - I'm ready to give physical fitness, at least, a chance. But nothing that involves free-swinging wooden sticks, that's just madness.

An Inconvenient Truth - with a bullet

An Inconvenient Truth is the 7th highest grossing documentary of all time, and unlike numbers 1 - 6, is still in theatres.

UPDATE An Inconvenient Truth is now number 5 and closing in fast on Madonna's Truth or Dare.

Huck Finn blog

I have a new blog up, to help promote my play in progress HUCK FINN. The blog is also a tribute to Mark Twain, who was very focused on promoting his work any way possible.

I was fed-up with Blogger when I began the site, so created my own blog, using SQL and ASP to connect the front-end to the database, although I still need to do a little tweaking of the text handling. But if Google wants to buy my blog service too, I'm cool with that.

The logo for the play is based on a significant event in the story. I wonder if people will get that.

The site includes my ongoing project of recording the entire original novel's text narrative. I had to do it myself, since I don't know any 13 - 15 year old boys who want to do all that work for free. But hell, I think I sound more like the character than Garrison Keillor or any of the other adult males who read the unabridged versions available on iTunes.

Book 'im, Dan-O

Limbaugh Detained At Airport

Via Tom Tomorrow

The atheists nightmare

From the good Rev. Bookburn and You Tube:
The atheist's nightmare: the banana
Kirk Cameron seems a bit skeptical.

I get emails

This choice item showed up last week in my Inbox:

This is the whiney and unfairly remunerated Daphne Merkin reporting in, having stumbled on your blog late this night instead of sleeping or finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW. Aside from insulting me, you sound like a generally unreflective and overly self-regarding person. >From glancing quickly at your bio, I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful, since you seem to have abandoned one early putative interest (illustrating) for another ( playacting) on the basis of meeting a "beautiful young man." Your blog makes me fshudder on behalf of bloggerdom, seething as it is with envy and bravado and received wisdom. I hope your plays are better than this.

Now I still haven't confirmed that this is the actual Daphne Merkin, but if it isn't her, somebody sure can do a great parody, from the revelation of a mundane-yet-pretentious detail of her life: "...finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW..."; to the utter cluelessness on the subject of feminism: "I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful..." to the pitch-perfect whine and operatic grievance that suffuses her every written thought.

For those of you who don't know, Daphne Merkin is a writer who has been published in the New Yorker and the NYTimes - she seems to have a regular slot in the Times' Sunday Magazine.

I certainly hope it WAS Daphne Merkin though. The thought that I might have given her a moment's discomfort, and slowed down her project of reading the entire Great Authors Home Library Collection almost makes up for many and sundry moments of utter frustration and itchy trigger finger I experienced before I wised up and began ignoring anything connected to her byline.

And in fact, the item that "Daphne Merkin" responded to was written after I began to disregard her work. I wrote an item way back in February (ancient history in blogland), in response to an item on Pandagon, where Amanda happened to catch the Merkin show at the NYTimes. When I received the email it took me a few moments to remember what in tarnation she was on about.

I'm guessing that Merkin recently learned how to Google her own name which is how she came to find my remarks about her. But when I Googled her name myself I discovered my item on page 13 of the hits for "Daphne Merkin." The Pandagon article was on page 10. And Amanda and I are certainly not the only people on the Internet to say something critical or unflattering about Daphne Merkin. I see that Granny Gets a Vibrator at the top of page 10 of the Merkin hit parade says:

So in today’s NYT Magazine, whiny defeatist anti-feminist Daphne Merkin informs us that there’s nothing hot about women over 45.

“It would seem fairly self-evident,” she declares based on the flimsiest anecdotal evidence she could muster, “that as women enjoy longer and more active lives in a culture that venerates youth, especially in women, something's gotta give — and what gives, mostly, are men.”

And even earlier, on page 3 of the Merkin Google hits, is a Susie Bright article at the Huffington Post in which Bright says:

Meet Daphne Merkin, The Lady Who Talks Dirty But Hates Sex.

Daphne's latest think-piece, Our Vaginas Ourselves, appeared two weeks ago Sunday's Times magazine. (I wanted to respond more quickly, but was distracted by L'Affaire Leroy).

It starts out with a promising lede: "These are cruel times for vaginas." Go, Daphne, Go!

She began to talk about those awful operations that some Beverly Hills plastic surgeons promote, to refigure your labia and sew your hymen back together. I can't type the description without wincing!

But why is this surgery a new trend? Why does feminine self-loathing seem to be going over the edge?
You are not going to believe Daphne's answer.

According to Merkin, this nightmare has came to pass because feminists in the '70s looked at their vulvas, schooled themselves in gynecology, and demanded to have a say in reproductive rights!

GONG, please!

"Truth be told, I always considered myself lucky to have escaped coming of age at the height of the consciousness-raising era, when anatomical self-examination took on the aspect of a collective ritual. Those were the days when women felt obliged to convene in sisterly circles with mirrors and flashlights the better to study their bodies, themselves. Never having been one to enjoy group activities of any sort, the thought of becoming more closely acquainted with my private parts in a public setting seems potentially traumatizing rather than liberating or, God knows, celebratory."

Indeed, it has always seemed to me that one of the singular advantages of being a woman lies precisely in the "dark continent" quality of our genital cartography...

What a piece of work. The only reason Daphne even knows what a speculum is, or has the legal right to abortion, or maybe even a clue what is involved in clitoral consciousness-raising, is because of revolution initiated by the very women she disdains. I'd call her a cunt, but frankly, she hasn't earned it.

What is she talking about, women "OBLIGED" to perform genital examinations in PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS? Is she high?

The Bright article goes on to quote the great Betty Dodson - whom Merkin could certainly learn a thing or two from - taking Merkin to task.

So lots of people think that Daphne Merkin is a hopeless, regressive feminist-bashing whine-meister besides me. Is that what Merkin meant when she accused my blog of seething with "received wisdom?"

Did Merkin Google her own name and then go down the list, shooting off defensive, whiney screeds to anybody who ever complained about her? Are famous (famous-ish at least) well-paid editorialists that incredibly petty? And what about poor neglected David Herbert?

I will have more to say about Merkin's idiotic comment about the spark that ignited my playwriting career presently.

Man-Dude Love

Wolcott and Digby have made an important discovery.

Find teh funny - Alan Keyes edition

See the whole thing here.

Frequent challenges at Pandagon.

note from Karl Rove

Hey guys,

I wasn't indicted. That's the good news. The bad news is that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Let's face it, we fucked up. Iraq is now rife with ethnic cleansing and summary executions. Global warming is getting worse, and that robot boy Al Gore is getting attention with his dog and pony show.

How to deal? In the time honored fashion - shoot the messengers and blame the scapegoats.

If ANYBODY suggests that Iraq isn't a shining example of democracy, attack them. I don't care how. If you think of something really low down and mean, and don't want to say it yourself, send it to Ann Coulter. So long as it's low down and mean, she'll say it. Keep up the good work with infiltrating the major news organizations with operatives. And if somebody notices all the operatives, start screaming, 24/7 about the leftist slant of the mainstream media.

Don't count out linking Iraq to Al Qaida. I realize that there's a certain percentage of people now who don't believe that Saddam was behind 9-11. But guess what - there are still plenty of people who do! God I love this job.

Whenever the base starts to get restless, you can easily stampede them back into the herd with our two big dogs: Terrorism and Homosexuality. There's nothing that scares Ma and Pa Johnson out in Bumfuk South Dakota like the thought of a bunch of Arabs blowing up the world's biggest ball of string, or a bunch of gays waltzing into the Johnson homestead, stealing Ma's wardrobe and making a pass at Pa.

Remember, if the base had a chance to fix Iraq and end global warming, but along with it had to give gays "special rights", they would gladly see Iraq's streets flowing with blood and the polar ice caps burst into flames.

And never forget - Dear Leader has been appointed by God to be the Decider. To question his Decisions is to question God.

Karl

Pollitt's back

After months of hiatus from her Nation column to work on a book, Katha Pollitt is back, and saying something that many of us have also been saying to Nader voters and fans of Daily Kos:

For more than thirty years, opposition to legal abortion has nourished right-wing politics at the grassroots. The right, you see, never got the memo about abortion being a trivial "cultural" issue, or the one about how a strong uncompromising position would alienate potential recruits. Liberals got those memos. Liberals got other ones too, and not just on abortion: Don't bother with small rural conservative states. Build big top-down Beltway organizations that don't give members much to do except send money and e-mail their Representatives. Focus on the national picture--the White House, Congress and, above all, the courts.

You go, Katha Pollitt.

The New York Times should hire her now, in spite of its quota of one female op-ed columnist for every seven males.

How to spin Paul McCartney into a conservative hero

Pity the poor conservatives. So many people in the arts are flat-out liberals. But some conservatives like pop music too, just like normal people. Which pop music celebrities can they celebrate, without running the risk of promoting liberal causes?

Paul McCartney turns 64 on Sunday, and The National Review Online has an editorial about it. So I'm reading, I'm reading, and the author is talking about McCartney's career, and her own career as a teen magazine journalist, and I'm reading and I'm going "where is the conservative spin"? I mean, I knew that McCartney is an agnostic, a vegetarian, a peacenik, and like the other Beatles was always opposed to the war in Viet Nam. He may not have been as vocal about it, but McCartney is no less a liberal than John Lennon was on a whole slew of issues.

So how is the rightwing bitch gonna spin this? And finally, the answer comes at the end:

Linda and Paul met at a small press reception for the release of the Sergeant Pepper album, the very first time “When I’m Sixty Four” was played in public. A shrewd, fierce New Yorker, she created on their Sussex farm (while her family handled Paul’s money) a very private and quite simple—considering their fortune—family-focused life for the singer, especially when their four children were growing up.

In contrast, Heather Mills, according to her many critics, is an attention-seeking gold-digger obsessed with her causes, which include animal rights, and especially the hunting of baby seals.

So THAT'S it. Bitch is going to jump on the press's whipping girl, Heather Mills and paint her as a greedy liberal bitch who forced poor Beatle Paul to care about those stupid animals! You'd think that Mills having a child with McCartney during the brief marriage would have mollified the wingnuts, but she's needed as a symbol, so forget that. She must be contrasted to the good wife, family-values Linda.

Now of course conservatives won't hear anything that might impact their simplistic beliefs about the world, but Linda McCartney was no fucking Stepford Wife conservative ideal. BEFORE she hooked up with McCartney she was a divorced single mom working as a photographer. Once they were married, she was the one who got Paul to become a vegatarian. And why did they become vegetarians? Out of compassion for animals. Linda McCartney was a huge animal rights supporter.

Holy hopping jesus on a pogo stick. The only mystery about conservatives is - are they really that stupid, or are they really that shameless?

more love from the anti-abortion crowd

Watch in Quicktime mov format

From back in the 90s on Women's Center security patrol

Jon Stewart hammers Bill Bennett

In case you missed it, check out the video clip at Crooks and Liars where Jon Stewart takes on professional hypocrite/homophobe Bill Bennett over Bennett's desire to deny human rights to homosexuals.

I love Al Gore

And the fact that our country is run by an ethically deficient cretin instead of this good and decent and thoughtful man is a tragedy, not only for this country, but maybe for all human civilization.

Republicans should hang their heads in shame. They are the ones to blame when the environmental shit hits the fan.

If you haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" GO SEE IT NOW!

We are living under a virtual dictatorship

From The New York Review of Books

The President's recent political weakness hasn't caused the White House to back away from its claims of extraordinary presidential power. The Republican lobbyist Vin Weber says, "I think they're keenly aware of the fact that they're politically weakened, but that's not the same thing as the institution of the presidency being damaged." People with very disparate political views, such as Grover Norquist and Dianne Feinstein, worry about the long-term implications of Bush's power grab. Norquist said, "These are all the powers that you don't want Hillary Clinton to have." Feinstein says, "I think it's very dangerous because other presidents will come along and this sets a precedent for them." Therefore, she says, "it's very important that Congress grapple with and make decisions about what our policies should be on torture, rendition, detainees, and wiretapping lest Bush's claimed right to set the policies, or his policies themselves, become a precedent for future presidents."

James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the "same hands" is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.

more on the patriarchy's double-standards

Via Ann Bartow

Cable TV's premium Playboy channel is about to take all those dating reality shows a step further with its new show, "Foursome."

Playboy TV will roll out the half-hour show July 8. It will take two couples each week and follow them for 24 hours to see if they end up in the sack, Daily Variety reported.

Every move will be recorded -- including bedroom moves.

Among the more racy episodes revealed by Playboy is one in which one of the men is so obnoxious, he drives the women into each others' arms.


The network said while women are being encouraged to discover "their inner bisexuality," man-on-man action is being strictly banned from the show.

Of course. Because so many straight men are incredibly hostile to homosexuality - unless it is between women.

Bunch of hypocrites and gender fascists.

Go Al Gore!

This cartoon appears in this week's New Yorker. You can buy a print at the Cartoon Bank

.
The New Yorker has a great review of "An Inconvenient Truth" in the latest issue. I especially liked this

(Gore) knows that people find him exasperating, and he has learned to modulate his voice; one has the impression of a complex personality that has gone through loss, humiliation, a cruel breaking down of the ego, and then has reintegrated itself at a higher level. In the movie he is merely excellent. But in person—he is on a speaking tour to promote the movie—he presents a combination of intellectual force, emotional vibrancy, and moral urgency that has hardly been seen in American public life in recent years. It will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with Gore’s bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.

An Incovenient Truth web site.

Fun at the Women's Center

Click to watch the video

Back in the day, my friend Bob and I did security for a women's health clinic in South Jersey. Well, Bob did security and I videotaped him doing it. Sometimes we got a little silly, as in this video clip.

I love LOGO

I'm not gay, but I love LOGO, the gay channel. It's so refreshing to watch TV that is not completely dominated by the straight male mindset. I had no idea that there was a counterpart to "Girls Gone Wild" called "Guys Gone Wild" until I saw it on LOGO. Of course "Guys Gone Wild" commercials would reach the target demographic on other channels, but straight males would go into gay panic, so only straight male desires are catered to on "general audience" channels. Damn I hate living in a Patriarchy.

LOGO is good for other reasons - rerunning all the "Tales of the City" series, showing "In the Life," good offbeat movies - and even its commercials are refreshingly different. Now if only they would syndicate "Queer As Folk" and show it on LOGO it would be a damn-near perfect channel.

Is Gregg Easterbrook a complete moron?

With all the talent out there in the blogosphere working for free, you'd think Slate could pick and choose whom to hire, but instead they get this bozo, who, as Atrios points out, says things like:

Intelligent design is a sophisticated theory now being argued out in the nation's top universities. And though this idea assumes existence must have some higher component, it is not religious doctrine under the 1986 Supreme Court definition. Intelligent-design thinking does not propound any specific faith or even say that the higher power is divine. It simply holds that there must be an unseen intellect imbedded in the cosmos.

The intelligent design theory may or may not be correct, but it's a rich, absorbing hypothesis--the sort of thing that is fascinating to debate, and might get students excited about biology class to boot. But most kids won't know the idea unless they are taught it, and in the aftermath of the Kansas votes, pro-evolution dogma continues to suggest that any alternative to natural selection must be kept quiet.

Not suprisingly, Easterbrook doesn't believe in fact-checking, and neither does his editors at Slate.

What is wrong with these people? Have they no shame?

Read more at Media Matters

Find teh funny - repetition edition repetition edition

Helping Chris Muir, right-wing wit about town, find the funny.
See the whole thing here.

Based on the challenge at Pandagon.

Newsflash: old guy doesn't like new-fangled foolishness

One of the New Yorker's sacred Great Men of the Arts, John Updike, doesn't like the idea of an online library:

"You are in the front while writers cower in their studies," he told the audience. "I see bookstores as citadels of life. They civilize neighborhoods." His favorite local store "brightens my life and the whole street it's on."

Speaking of the May 14 New York Times Magazine article called "Scan This Book!" about the universal library of the future--where all texts would be available digitally and snippets of them mixed together the way listeners mix favorite music--Updike mocked some of the writer's predictions, including that authors will be involved in more performances and that readers will have "access to the creator." He called the article's vision a "pretty grisly scenario," a kind of "throwback to a preliterate society where only a live person adds, shall we say, value." He wondered if the culture of celebrity had made "signed books seen only as a ticket to the lecture platform." The written word, he continued, is "supposed to speak for itself and sell itself even if the author's picture is not on the back cover." Sadly, he said, the author has grown "in importance as the walking, talking advertisement for a book."

and ...

He noted, too, that "yes, there is a ton of information on the Web but much of it is unedited and inaccurate." By contrast, the book, he continued, "is still more exacting and demanding of writers and consumers."

He concluded, "Booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

I love a good bookstore, but what I like even MORE is easy access to information. If you live in a sweet upscale hi-culture neighborhood, and I feel confident in predicting that John Updike does, then yeah, you might miss those little boutique bookstores where everybody knows your name. But as you are probably aware, most of the world does not live in neighborhoods like John Updike's.

I absolutely love that I can go online anytime, almost anywhere and look stuff up. Stuff like - hey, I remember why I dislike John Updike, because I read a review he wrote about a book by a gay author about gays - but I don't remember the name of the book or exactly what he said or when he said it. Now if I had to go to a library or a bookstore to get the info, I wouldn't bother. Who has the time? But abracadabra, I enter "Updike" and "gay" and "review" into Google and Google gives me the facts:

The book is called "The Spell" the review was written in 1999, and I find that "Updike zeroes in on his real complaint about gay male relationships where "nothing is at stake but self-gratification." "Novels about heterosexual partnering," Updike explains, "however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family."

Updike also said: ""Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society's circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight."

Thank you, Gay Today

Have you ever heard such a pile of right-wing shit? And when I enter "updike", "apologizes", "The Spell", and "review" into Google I find no evidence of Updike having second thoughts on the topic.

The best part of Updike's recent comments is his bemoaning the culture of celebrity. As if his entire career hasn't benefitted from a culture of literary celebrity. And that's what it boils down to - the stripping away of privilege. Now even I can post stuff to a blog and have it read, potentially, by thousands of people. I might be as good a writer as Updike, maybe better, but unless you're annointed by the literary gatekeepers it doesn't mean anything. Updike dimly understands that the days of the literary gatekeepers are numbered, but he doesn't get why - not because of some newly-invented celebrity culture, but because celebrities won't be quite so celebrated as they once were because of all the competition.

Professional editorialists have the same reaction to Internet bloggers - they feel threatened by the competition. And so they should. You no longer have to go to cocktail parties with the editor of The Atlantic to get your license to opine, like that mental midget Caitlin Flanagan. Anybody can do it, and although the Flanagans and the Updikes of the world and their cocktail party pals can't admit it, some of those anybodies who might never have had the opportunity to be heard before everything went online might be good.

But it isn't just the chance to opine that's new. It's the chance to get at info. I doubt Updike has ever had a comparable experience, but when I was an impoverished teenage mother living in a white trash town, I went to the town's tiny library to try to take out copies of the plays of Shakespeare - I had recently been enthralled by the BBC's production of AS YOU LIKE IT and I was suddenly a Shakespeare fanatic. Well this white trash library had available about four of the plays. It took me over a year to track down, one way or another, all the rest. Now you can go to Shakespeare Online and read everything Bill S ever wrote plus essays on the plays, a glossary a quiz and additional sources. I'd say that's an improvement.

Of course Updike's not going to like it. I doubt that another annoying privileged old guy, Harold Bloom likes it. Anybody can be a Shakespearean scholar if they want, and more efficiently than if they had to go to the big city library to get at the relevant texts.

I love libraries myself. I wish libraries were open 24-7 so that you could go to them for a night out - I'd rather spend time in a well-appointed library than a noisy bar any night. But I'd be there for the pleasure of the experience, not for the efficiency of information gathering.

Of course privileged, well-paid, annointed Great Men of the Arts have time to linger over shelves and watch the women coming and going talking of Michaelangelo. The rest of us gotta get stuff done and pay the rent, suckah.

Is it a coinicidence that guys who are considered science fiction authors get what the authors of Important Novels don't?

Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Fates Worse Than Death, said:

In the children's fable The White Deer, by the late American humorist James Thurber, the Royal Astronomer in a medieval court reports that all the stars are going out. What has really happened is that the astronomer has grown old and is going blind. That was Thurber's condition too, when he wrote his tale. He was making fun of a sort of old poop who imagined that life was ending not merely for himself but for the whole universe. Inspired by Thurber, then, I choose to call any old poop who writes a popular book saying that the world, or at least his own country, is done for, a 'Royal Astronomer' and his subject matter 'Royal Astronomy.' Since I myself have become an old poop at last, perhaps I, too, should write such a book. But it is hard for me to follow the standard formula for successful Royal Astronomy, a formula going back who knows how far, maybe to the invention of printing by the Chinese a couple of thousand years ago. The formula is, of course: 'Things aren't as good as they used to be. The young people don't know anything and don't want to know anything. We have entered a steep decline!' But have we? Back when I was a kid, lynchings of black people were reported almost every week, and always went unpunished. Apartheid was as sternly enforced in my hometown, which was Indianapolis, as it is in South Africa nowadays. Many great universities, including those in the Ivy League, rejected most of the Jews who applied for admission solely because of their Jewishness, and had virtually no Jews and absolutely no blacks, God knows, on their faculties. I am going to ask a question -- and President Reagan, please don't answer: Those were the good old days? When I was a kid during the Great Depression, when it was being demonstrated most painfully that prosperity was not a natural by-product of liberty, books by Royal Astronomers were as popular as they are today. They said, as most of them do today, that the country was falling apart because the young people were no longer required to read Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and St. Augustine and Montaigne and the like, whose collective wisdom was the foundation of any decent and just and productive society. Back in the Great Depression, the Royal Astronomers used to say that a United States deprived of that wisdom was nothing but a United States of radio quiz shows and music straight out of the jungles of Darkest Africa. They say now that the same subtraction leaves the United States of nothing but television quiz shows and rock and roll, which leads, they say, inexorably to dementia. But I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.

And Douglas Adams said in "The Salmon of Doubt", more succinctly, if not better:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Shelf Awareness by way of Sivacracy.