The historical origins of atheism

Damon Linker has a thoughtful piece in TNR about how the militant atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are really heirs to an illiberal tradition of atheism that owes more to the French Revolution and Emma Goldman than it does to Socrates and Camus. His argument is articulate and convincing. It's also boring. Moderate justifications for secularism just aren't as entertaining as, say, Hitch's comparison of America during Christmastime to North Korea. Perhaps the audience for the polemicists is smaller, but it's also laughing a lot harder.

What's wrong with renting?

I probably shouldn't comment on the sub-prime loan crisis, since the economics of it are over my head, but this whiny Prospect article about the crisis's "conservative origins" reminded me again of the following question: Are the majority of the homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages really that deserving of our sympathy? (As opposed to, say, the homeless or the working poor?) I'd like to know how many were actual victims of predatory lending versus how many were just short-sighted and greedy. Should the government really be in the business of of bailing out people who idiotically believed that the values of their homes would go up forever?

Seems to me like the real problem is the ideology of "ownership" that keeps being smacked over our heads as an essential aspect of the American Dream. People have weird emotional issues when it comes to home ownership that they don't have with other kinds of financial investments. What should be a very simple calculus of deciding whether to rent or own is complicated by our being brainwashed to believe that you haven't made it until you own your own home. I remember reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" when I was little (in a failed attempt by my parents to foster some financial acuity in me) and the only thing I remember is the advice not to fall into the home ownership trap; rather, one should rent and put one's money into investments that will generate better returns. Granted, renting is inherently unstable, but moving seems like a minor cost compared to foreclosure. Maybe instead of regulating banks and poorly-informed consumers the federal government should issue a copy of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" to everyone at birth.

FairTax and Scientology

Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett details the fascinating genesis of the FairTax (the plan endorsed by Mike Huckabee and many of the GOP candidates that would eliminate income taxes and create a flat 23% sales tax on everything): apparently, FairTax was originally devised as a strategy by Scientologists to destroy the IRS, which until 1993 refused to recognize them as a church for tax purposes.

I didn't realize that Scientologists are currently recognized by the government as a church. They must be excited about Mitt Romney's candidacy--it's really opening doors for a Tom Cruise run in 2016...

The end of human rights

The US government refuses to say that the waterboarding of an American national by a foreign government contravenes the Geneva Conventions--signaling a real problem for human rights advocates, from an interest convergence perspective. There have always been two rationales for the US's commitment to the Geneva Conventions: the "purist" justification, in which human rights are universalist norms that trump everything else; and the "pragmatic" justification, in which the US's adherence to human rights norms triggers reciprocity by other countries to protect American citizens (in particular, American soldiers and POWs.) This is the reason you see Human Rights Watch and many representatives of the US military on the same side of the torture question. But the Bush Administration is now signaling its unwillingness to accept even the pragmatic reasons not to torture, which means a wholesale weakening of the edifice upon which the human rights system was built.

Of course, more to the point, it's pretty difficult for the administration to hold to this line and continue to argue that we are somehow better than our enemies.

Heartwarming holiday story

'Tis the season... the New York Post reports on a Muslim saving some Jews from being pummeled on the subway by a group of thugs, one of whom was sporting a tattoo of Christ on his arm. The attack apparently happened after the group wished the Jews "Merry Christmas," and the Jews responded with "Happy Hanukkah." The best part of the story comes at the end--the Post quotes one of the attackers, who will soon begin serving time for a previous hate crime committed several months ago:

"I'm trying to stay out of trouble," he said. "When I get out, I want to go into the military."

Off to that wife-beating place in the sky...

Best Ike Turner kicking-the-bucket headline ever.

Women aren't funny

Meghan O'Rourke has an exceedingly dumb analysis of Knocked Up, prompted by co-star Katherine Heigl's thought-provoking comment that the movie was "a little sexist," because it painted "the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight," while the men were portrayed as "lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys." O'Rourke basically reinforces the notion that women are humorless and uptight in her deconstruction of the funniest scene in the movie, in which Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen are shrooming in a Vegas hotel room, and Rudd, after a long monologue about what he fears in his marriage, suddenly sticks his fist in his mouth and says wonderingly, "It tastes like a rainbow!":

It is hard not to read his statement as a metaphor for the film's ambivalent view of the message "women" are trying to render unto "men": that a caring, sharing domestic life is a "rainbow" men are crazy not to accept wholesale. Poor Pete's dilemma, the tension he is trying to drive at, is that he can't swallow the rainbow (so to speak) however much he tries—and has made his wife into a disappointed micromanager in the process.

Um, or it's a hilariously accurate description of something someone would say after they've eaten mushrooms. It was obviously a non-sequitur comic moment designed to lighten the serious tone of the speech that had just gone before. Maybe if female Slate writers did more mushrooms and less third-rate grad student cultural criticism, we women wouldn't have the reputation of always sucking the fun out of the room.

Everyone hearts Huckabee...

Okay I'm back to blogging. After all, if Mahmoud Ahmadenijad can find time to post every week, so can I.

Today's thought: Mike Huckabee's meteoric rise towards the Republican nomination should be of concern. Not just because he clearly hasn't done his homework, saying things like "we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is," (yes, eliminating all energy use in the United States by 2017 is pretty bold), but because HAS EVERYONE FORGOTTEN what happened the last time a folksy, charming, evangelical Christian, big-government social conservative southern Governor who was nice to illegal immigrants and sounded like a moron on policy ran for president?

As long as they keep making those frites...

The whole Shia-Sunni thing has overshadowed another, arguably more pressing ethnic conflict--Flemish and Walloon. As it happens, Belgium, an adorable little country that you never hear about except in connection with beer and sometimes the EU, is in the middle of a major existential crisis because the Dutch-speaking Flems (ha) and the French-speaking Walloons really don't get along. It is unclear why they don't like each other, especially since you'd think that they'd be united in an overall inferiority complex about being Belgian. Seriously--it must be rough living in a country that the Economist dismisses as a "freak of nature."

Amazingly enough, the country is currently functioning without a government. Even more amazing, nobody in the rest of the world seems to care, so much so that a Belgian guy recently tried to sell Belgium on Ebay in a desperate attempt to draw some international attention to the issue. As Wonkette pointed out, the unintentionally hilarious AP headline--"Someone tries to sell Belgium on Ebay"--kind of captures the spirit of the thing.

The Real Emmys

The Creative Arts Emmys are clearly superior to the regular Emmys. Not only did they give an Emmy to Andy Samberg et al for, erm, "A Special Christmas Box", they also gave rise to possibly the greatest awards speech of all time, in which Kathy Griffin (winning for "My Life on the D-List") doesn't thank Jesus:

Can you believe this shit? I guess hell froze over… A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. So, all I can say is, "Suck it, Jesus." This award is my God now.

However, the joke's on her. According to Fox News Religion Correspondent Lauren Green, Jesus had everything to do with her winning that award. Read her reasoning here.

Next are hidden pictures of the wedding night

Today's NYT has a bonafide trend piece (i.e., not "Girls dress slutty for Halloween!" or "Young people really like to take pictures of themselves and post them online!") about creepy guys who hire photographers to surreptitiously (read: stalkingly) photograph them as they propose to their girlfriends. One of the profiled men nervously dropped to his knees and proposed to his girlfriend near the Astor Place subway stop (WTF? Did they celebrate with 50% off sushi or a trip to KMart?) while the photographer "circled them and snapped away." If someone did that to me the answer would be "hell, no." And, in fact, Slate is sponsoring a contest for pictures of exactly that happening.

According to the Times, "The idea dovetails with the current trend toward photojournalistic realism in wedding photography. In recent years the intimacies of a wedding day — a glimpse of the bride as she dons her underpinnings, the stolen mash session between the newlyweds when the guests aren’t looking — have become increasingly fair game." I wonder if wedding photographers have whole archives of the candid moments no one wants to remember: the bride sobbing hysterically before the ceremony because she knows she's settling; the bridesmaids talking smack about how much they had to spend to be there; the groom pounding an entire bottle of champagne before he walks into the church (one of my friends did this). Those would actually be worth putting on Facebook.

Is the World Flat?

Speaking of both chicks and the world being flat, this is baffling.

Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This Wall

I'm really enjoying the New York Times's "reporting" on its reasons for eliminating worst-idea-ever TimesSelect. Surely it must have been the possibility that the online ad revenue generated by page views by readers coming from other sites would outstrip revenue from TimesSelect subscriptions, and not the losses of the hordes of readers whose intelligence was insulted by being asked to pay to read David Brooks. Really, who could have foreseen this happening?

I am also pleased to note that his imprisonment behind the TimesSelect wall hasn't affected Thomas Friedman's wide-eyed wonderment about the world at all. It turns out there are two cities called Doha and Dalian, which you have probably never of because you are an idiot, and that these cities are just like America! The world is still flat, and getting flatter every day!

The existence of TimesSelect trained me out of instinctively reading everything on the NYT site, and I think that was a good thing.

Chicks

It's really great to be female in the year 2007, because we dominate the Interweb. Dominate! Several hours of web research reveals that women really, really like writing about how crazy it is to be a woman in, well, a woman's world. According to Rebecca Traister, this season's network TV fall line-up reflects a newfound collective social angst about women not only competing with men as equals in the workplace, but actually kicking their asses such that men have become useless, whiny, servile wrecks. Or, you know, the new women. The article is a mildly disturbing insight into the lemming-like mentality of TV execs--how else to explain that there are at least ELEVEN new shows centered around the theme of emasculation? Who on earth wants to watch this?? (Though the new Farrelly Brothers show, which features a grossly stereotyped Indian doctor and a very troubling incident involving a monkey, sounds promising.)

Meanwhile, (awesome) ex-Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler gives a self-deprecating interview that begs the question: Do strippers and prostitutes understand men better than the rest of us?

And, in honor of the Sex and the City movie which entered its first day of totally pointless production today somewhere up on 5th Avenue, here's Samantha Bee not helping but wondering: Is America ready for a female president?