I think that the torture issue is driven by domestic politics. The LGF-Rottweiler people are the torture constituency. It's a spite constituency, and anything that makes liberals mad makes them happy. Rove-Bush won by playing to the base, and that's what torture is all about.
For another example, the oil companies are only moderately interested in the Alaska oil. There's not a lot of oil, they don't especially need it right now, they have bigger fish to fry, and the Alaska oil issue gets them bad PR. But there's a big anti-environmental constituency in this country. It's another spite constituency, and anything that makes environmentalists mad makes these people happy.
Look at the death penalty. I've found personally (with individual exceptions) that the more strongly supports the death penalty, the less they care about due process and fine points of guilt and innocence.
There's no logic to this -- those are two different arguments, and belief in the death penalty makes a few people MORE scrupulous about guilt and innocence -- but if the core of your opinion is "Exterminate the brutes!", you aren't fussy about details as long as enough people hang.
I despair when I read things like this. I go through my days in total denial about certain truths it would seem. I mean what else can I do? So life goes on. Besides, I personally would not cooperate in "disorganizing" the personality of another human being--and I am surely not unique in this, so there is hope. But who are these people that will do this, who get joy out of this? They are out there clearly. Guess they are the kinds of people who tortured for Chinese emperors, in medieval times, and on the playground of the elementary school I attended. ALso, all this kind of gives lie to the late ancient notion that evil is deprivation of life and being--- there seems to be a lot of life here. Is there essence? Dunno.
I don't know about "absolute evil," but short-hand for "godawful tyranny" was often the Russian tsar (also, you know, Not Good for the Jews) or generically, "Oriental despotism".
self-evident referent for absolute evil prior to WWII-- depended on whom you were asking surely. Mortal plane= Many Europeans might have thought in terms of the Jews or Gypsies, I bet. Supernatural plane= Satan (variously defined). Hey, asking--- are the Nazis absolute evil, in this globalized world of ours, as far as China and India are concerned, to take two examples?
You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any one attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ``all men are created equal.'' We now practically read it ``all men are created equal, except negroes.'' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ``all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
The editorial board of the New Republic favors ANWR drilling, maybe they are also spiteful. Or perhaps, they don't want what they perceive as completely notional environmental concerns to stand in the way of economic development. Is that so wrong?
Not that making people fume about ANWR isn't the bee's knees.
No, just excessively enamored of their own contrarianism and endlessly propelled by the undying engine of their own self-regard from one perfervid lunacy to the next.
SCMT--was "that assessment" that we should drill in ANWR or that the TNR board is spiteful?
But yeah, baa, citing even-the-liberal-TNR board here is as much self-parody (of them, not you) as the Galt still using the my liberal Democrat friends agree argument.
TNR board spiteful. Still think that Kristol (evil teddy bear genius that he is) should buy TNR, merge it with WS, and form The New Standard. They already appear to share politics and at least one writer. It would be worth it if only for gloating rights.
And the level of disingenuousness that the Galt has been displaying lately has been unbelievable. (Yeah, I still read it at various times - sometimes, per Unf, you want to angry up the blood. But not that angry.)
No, but if you can't be Dahlia or Pongo(?), Fittleworth is the one to be. (He's the playwright married to Nobby, right? (Why, O' Great Wolfson, is "playwright" spelled as it is?))
The word is not a variant spelling of playwrite, but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright). Hence the prefix and the suffix combine to indicate someone who crafts plays. The homophone with write is in this case coincidental.
The etymology is the same, probably for "Cheesewright," which leads nicely to why you're Boko: You were once entranced by La Craye's profile, but have since seen the light, and are endeavouring to save G. D'Arcy Labs from the same terrible fate.
And I just surfed by her site and didn't find it particularly disingenuous until I got to the point about how Bush has done more to address the structural budget deficit than anyone else, what with his entitlement reforms. What is weird is that she goes on to say good comments all around, where some of those comments seem to pwn her on every particular of that assertion.
And, to run off at the mouf and return to topic, I think TNR aren't members of the spite caucus so much as the pain caucus. But in the end there's not much policy difference--both are about inflicting pain on progressive-friendly constituencies for its own sake, rather than because it serves any desirable policy goal.
(Does the fact that that link references TNR prove that I am being hasty in lumping them in with the pain caucus? Nay, say I! Or, well, one shouldn't treat them as a monolith.)
Someone ought to interview Peretz on the "pain / spite" question, though now that he's taken control of the Labor Party he might be reluctant to give a straight answer. "Labor" in Biblical contexts meant "pain", in different forms being the punishment for sin for male and female, so maybe we have the answer already.
Now that Peretz is focussing his energies on Israel I feel somewhat safer, since I'm not an Israeli.
Good point, w/d. Jane Galt is the sweet light of reason, except that she has a little trouble with universal and existential quantifiers. It's like when we discovered that Florence Craye wanted to skin Edwin, and it made her so much more appealing.
1. On Boko: Jeeves in the Morning is a favorite. A proposed marriage of which Bertie approves, a tendency to make an ass of himself, a fondness for sweaters with patches, getting drunk in a stolen costume - what's not to like? And D'Arcy even fits FL, a bit; the character's supposed to be gigantic, as I recall.
2. On TNR: I think I'd be fine with them if they were no longer, in any way, identified as Democrats or proxies for Democrats. They vary only slightly from The Weekly Standard (Iraq, National Greatness, Grampa Simpson...err Lieberman, etc.), and I wish this would be acknowledged by them and the national media. While it sucks that their niche is filled, tarnishing our brand with their crap is irritating. American Prospect is a bit lefty for me, but I can wait for it to grow.
3. The Galt: I visit irregularly, so it isn't the last few posts. From memory, I'd note the following:
She's acknowledged problems in Iraq, but can't call it a mistake because our own country took 100 years and a civil war to free the slaves. So apparently we are to evaluate policy decisions over a 100 year period. And this after warning anti-Iraq Dems that they'd have to STFU once a stable democracy emerged in Iraq.
She's troubled by the ass-raping of our general notions of civil rights and due process by the government she voted in, but she's more troubled that she's troubled. And this after concluding that Republicans were either equal or better than Dems on civil rights. (I forget.) Beyond belief. Her positions on these matters, generally, are such that I am coming to think a test about notions of democracy as a prereq. to voting isn't a wholly bad thing.
Most charmingly of all, she wants to confront those who seek abortion with images of the fetus they'll be destroying. She does not, I gather, want to confront them with statistics she's happy to cite indicating that unmarried youths having kids without a husband are doomed to poverty. Nor does she want to confront them with the fact that her own party's policy solution to this problem of poverty will be to blame the mother for having the kid for the rest of the mother's life, while doing nothing to help them out. And all this out of what appears to be a Christian sense of doing the right thing.
She can't seriously mean any of it, which is why I characterized the posts as disingenous.
Boko does come off okay, though he has got to go to Hollywood in the end.
Thinking about this question, it occurred to me that Psmith is probably the most enviable character, but then it further occurred to me that that's precisely why he's not so much fun. He's very plainly Cary Grant -- an elegantly dressed persifleur who's obviously above the situations in which he finds himself. He's a Wodehouse Mary Sue. Which is not to say one wouldn't want to be him, but rather, that one would too much like to be him.
Wodehouse said that Psmith was based upon the heir to the D'Oyly Carte family, who when asked by a schoolmaster how he was, replied, "Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah."
I think that the torture issue is driven by domestic politics. The LGF-Rottweiler people are the torture constituency. It's a spite constituency, and anything that makes liberals mad makes them happy. Rove-Bush won by playing to the base, and that's what torture is all about.
For another example, the oil companies are only moderately interested in the Alaska oil. There's not a lot of oil, they don't especially need it right now, they have bigger fish to fry, and the Alaska oil issue gets them bad PR. But there's a big anti-environmental constituency in this country. It's another spite constituency, and anything that makes environmentalists mad makes these people happy.
Look at the death penalty. I've found personally (with individual exceptions) that the more strongly supports the death penalty, the less they care about due process and fine points of guilt and innocence.
There's no logic to this -- those are two different arguments, and belief in the death penalty makes a few people MORE scrupulous about guilt and innocence -- but if the core of your opinion is "Exterminate the brutes!", you aren't fussy about details as long as enough people hang.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 11:17 AM
spite constituency
That's a really good term.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 11:20 AM
I despair when I read things like this. I go through my days in total denial about certain truths it would seem. I mean what else can I do? So life goes on. Besides, I personally would not cooperate in "disorganizing" the personality of another human being--and I am surely not unique in this, so there is hope. But who are these people that will do this, who get joy out of this? They are out there clearly. Guess they are the kinds of people who tortured for Chinese emperors, in medieval times, and on the playground of the elementary school I attended. ALso, all this kind of gives lie to the late ancient notion that evil is deprivation of life and being--- there seems to be a lot of life here. Is there essence? Dunno.
Posted by Mark | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 12:03 PM
the oil companies are only moderately interested in the Alaska oil. There's not a lot of oil, they don't especially need it right now...
So right. There's a lot more oil in Northern Canada, frex, but that isn't such a PR-friendly cause.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 12:22 PM
Good points, John. I suspect it's also to project a "we don't take no shit" image abroad.
Posted by Andy Vance | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 12:36 PM
Also called the "Nazi? Are you you talking to me?" attitude.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 12:47 PM
Before WWII, who was the self-evident reference for "absolute evil"?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:08 PM
I don't know about "absolute evil," but short-hand for "godawful tyranny" was often the Russian tsar (also, you know, Not Good for the Jews) or generically, "Oriental despotism".
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:18 PM
the pope, duh.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:39 PM
The Ottomans? Vlad the Impaler?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:41 PM
the pope, duh.
Please, text, you're not doing anti-Catholicism justice. The Whore of Babylon, if you please.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:47 PM
self-evident referent for absolute evil prior to WWII-- depended on whom you were asking surely. Mortal plane= Many Europeans might have thought in terms of the Jews or Gypsies, I bet. Supernatural plane= Satan (variously defined). Hey, asking--- are the Nazis absolute evil, in this globalized world of ours, as far as China and India are concerned, to take two examples?
Posted by Mark | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:50 PM
The Terror during the revolution in France?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:53 PM
In the 19th c., it had to have been either Boney or the Tzar, depending on who you were asking.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 1:55 PM
You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any one attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ``all men are created equal.'' We now practically read it ``all men are created equal, except negroes.'' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ``all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
Posted by Honest Abe | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:25 PM
The editorial board of the New Republic favors ANWR drilling, maybe they are also spiteful. Or perhaps, they don't want what they perceive as completely notional environmental concerns to stand in the way of economic development. Is that so wrong?
Not that making people fume about ANWR isn't the bee's knees.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:32 PM
baa-
The editorial board of the New Republic favors ANWR drilling, maybe they are also spiteful.
Is there anyone left who disagrees with that assesment?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:34 PM
maybe they are also spiteful
No, just excessively enamored of their own contrarianism and endlessly propelled by the undying engine of their own self-regard from one perfervid lunacy to the next.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:36 PM
18 was me. So the answer to 17 is "yes, me".
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:36 PM
Even the liberal New Republic?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:40 PM
Tom Delay's ANWR vote is primary spite. TNR's position is derivative contrarian meta-spite.
Or maybe it's ironic spite, in the Alanis sense of the word.
Or perhaps crypto-spite
Or quasi-spite.
It sucks, anyway, like about half af everything TNR ever did. (May they rest in peace.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:45 PM
I think of TNR's position as the product of Skinner-box conditioning. "Superstition" in the pundits, if you like.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 2:56 PM
SCMT--was "that assessment" that we should drill in ANWR or that the TNR board is spiteful?
But yeah, baa, citing even-the-liberal-TNR board here is as much self-parody (of them, not you) as the Galt still using the my liberal Democrat friends agree argument.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 4:16 PM
TNR board spiteful. Still think that Kristol (evil teddy bear genius that he is) should buy TNR, merge it with WS, and form The New Standard. They already appear to share politics and at least one writer. It would be worth it if only for gloating rights.
And the level of disingenuousness that the Galt has been displaying lately has been unbelievable. (Yeah, I still read it at various times - sometimes, per Unf, you want to angry up the blood. But not that angry.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 4:44 PM
You don't think she really wants us to buy Kitchenaid stand mixers? You're a cynical, cynical man.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 4:47 PM
SCMT, did I ever explain to you about how in the Mineshaft's Wodehousean dramatis personae, you're Boko Fittleworth?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 4:52 PM
Weiner:
No, but if you can't be Dahlia or Pongo(?), Fittleworth is the one to be. (He's the playwright married to Nobby, right? (Why, O' Great Wolfson, is "playwright" spelled as it is?))
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 4:57 PM
The word is not a variant spelling of playwrite, but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright). Hence the prefix and the suffix combine to indicate someone who crafts plays. The homophone with write is in this case coincidental.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:00 PM
Is this to be taken as an admission that you are Wolfson?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:13 PM
Merely that it didn't require Wolfsonesque dictionary sleuthing: i.e., you're lazy.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:15 PM
This is news?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:17 PM
Some things never get old.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:18 PM
The etymology is the same, probably for "Cheesewright," which leads nicely to why you're Boko: You were once entranced by La Craye's profile, but have since seen the light, and are endeavouring to save G. D'Arcy Labs from the same terrible fate.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:26 PM
And I just surfed by her site and didn't find it particularly disingenuous until I got to the point about how Bush has done more to address the structural budget deficit than anyone else, what with his entitlement reforms. What is weird is that she goes on to say good comments all around, where some of those comments seem to pwn her on every particular of that assertion.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 5:30 PM
And, to run off at the mouf and return to topic, I think TNR aren't members of the spite caucus so much as the pain caucus. But in the end there's not much policy difference--both are about inflicting pain on progressive-friendly constituencies for its own sake, rather than because it serves any desirable policy goal.
(Does the fact that that link references TNR prove that I am being hasty in lumping them in with the pain caucus? Nay, say I! Or, well, one shouldn't treat them as a monolith.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 6:07 PM
Bush has done more to address the structural budget deficit than anyone else
Wow. I mean, just... Wow.
Also, he's done more than any president to help promote homosexuality, abortion, peace in the Middle East, and clear public speaking.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 10:35 PM
Top google hit for "Wow. I mean, just... Wow":
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 10:45 PM
Fittleworth is the one to be
Except he is, as Nobby notes not rarely, a frightful ass.
How can you tell SCMT isn't Tuppy? He does seem like the type to loop back the last ring as ogged brachiates across the pool.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-17-05 11:37 PM
Someone ought to interview Peretz on the "pain / spite" question, though now that he's taken control of the Labor Party he might be reluctant to give a straight answer. "Labor" in Biblical contexts meant "pain", in different forms being the punishment for sin for male and female, so maybe we have the answer already.
Now that Peretz is focussing his energies on Israel I feel somewhat safer, since I'm not an Israeli.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 5:41 AM
The post on Asymmetrical Information discussed in 34 and 36 isn't by Jane Galt.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 9:22 AM
Good point, w/d. Jane Galt is the sweet light of reason, except that she has a little trouble with universal and existential quantifiers. It's like when we discovered that Florence Craye wanted to skin Edwin, and it made her so much more appealing.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 11:57 AM
Could Arnold Kling be Edwin?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 12:06 PM
Given that Edwin has a one-syllable catchphrase ("Coo!"), there's really only one blogospheric candidate.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 12:09 PM
1. On Boko: Jeeves in the Morning is a favorite. A proposed marriage of which Bertie approves, a tendency to make an ass of himself, a fondness for sweaters with patches, getting drunk in a stolen costume - what's not to like? And D'Arcy even fits FL, a bit; the character's supposed to be gigantic, as I recall.
2. On TNR: I think I'd be fine with them if they were no longer, in any way, identified as Democrats or proxies for Democrats. They vary only slightly from The Weekly Standard (Iraq, National Greatness, Grampa Simpson...err Lieberman, etc.), and I wish this would be acknowledged by them and the national media. While it sucks that their niche is filled, tarnishing our brand with their crap is irritating. American Prospect is a bit lefty for me, but I can wait for it to grow.
3. The Galt: I visit irregularly, so it isn't the last few posts. From memory, I'd note the following:
She's acknowledged problems in Iraq, but can't call it a mistake because our own country took 100 years and a civil war to free the slaves. So apparently we are to evaluate policy decisions over a 100 year period. And this after warning anti-Iraq Dems that they'd have to STFU once a stable democracy emerged in Iraq.
She's troubled by the ass-raping of our general notions of civil rights and due process by the government she voted in, but she's more troubled that she's troubled. And this after concluding that Republicans were either equal or better than Dems on civil rights. (I forget.) Beyond belief. Her positions on these matters, generally, are such that I am coming to think a test about notions of democracy as a prereq. to voting isn't a wholly bad thing.
Most charmingly of all, she wants to confront those who seek abortion with images of the fetus they'll be destroying. She does not, I gather, want to confront them with statistics she's happy to cite indicating that unmarried youths having kids without a husband are doomed to poverty. Nor does she want to confront them with the fact that her own party's policy solution to this problem of poverty will be to blame the mother for having the kid for the rest of the mother's life, while doing nothing to help them out. And all this out of what appears to be a Christian sense of doing the right thing.
She can't seriously mean any of it, which is why I characterized the posts as disingenous.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 3:54 PM
Boko does come off okay, though he has got to go to Hollywood in the end.
Thinking about this question, it occurred to me that Psmith is probably the most enviable character, but then it further occurred to me that that's precisely why he's not so much fun. He's very plainly Cary Grant -- an elegantly dressed persifleur who's obviously above the situations in which he finds himself. He's a Wodehouse Mary Sue. Which is not to say one wouldn't want to be him, but rather, that one would too much like to be him.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:03 PM
Wodehouse said that Psmith was based upon the heir to the D'Oyly Carte family, who when asked by a schoolmaster how he was, replied, "Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah."
Not that he isn't still a Mary Sue.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:11 PM
Rupert D'Oyly Carte, with a picture. One would probably enjoy managing the Savoy, come to that. Especially the stomping.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:16 PM
And I believe that Psmith's first name is given as "Rupert" in Mike and Psmith.
The owner of the Savoy at which the stompin' was done was the father of one of my grad school profs.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:23 PM
What, you can't stomp in the Strand? It should be permitted purely on the basis of alliteration.
Actually, that's cool. Even if it's a bit of a comedown, in energy if not in intellect, from stomping to Swinburne.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:35 PM
The Unfoggetariat also have a connection to the offspring of that (and I went to college with him).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-18-05 4:40 PM