Red Lobster isn't as good as it used to be.
At the Bloomington location, there's precious little to be had for entrees under $20. Even any two appetizers would be over $20. I guess if you had one appetizer, a cup of soup and a soda, you could just barely get in under $20, if you weren't tipping particularly lavishly.
Back when it was all about the thirty shrimp, it meant something.
4.last: If you're Brooks, you aren't.
Yeah, I figured we were all assuming that. Or does he actually write some kind of Mr. Pink speech about learn-to-fucking-type?
I feel like the thoughtful ones give him more credit and treat him more seriously than he deserves. Nothing I've read by David Brooks makes me think that he deserves to be engaged with more serious consideration than goes into making fun of his penis - which would already have more thought than his columns in it, but without the pompous self satisfaction that they do.
I was shocked and then not at all surprised right afterwards to learn that he got his post at the NYT because of his Bobos book. Good god NYT - that's what made you think he had something important to say? I guess if that was the reason then he's certainly giving you what you wanted from him, but that only makes things worse.
Red Lobster is one of the few restaurants my parents go to and they think it's ridiculous to ever spend more than $20 on a meal anywhere, so there must be plenty of under-$20 options there. Looking at the website, it looks like most of the fish entrees are around $15, at least in their location.
I'm pretty sure my mom would go for parmesan-crusted fresh tilapia, $14.99, or maybe wild-caught flounder, $12.99. My dad would go for the admiral's feast (shrimp, scallops, flounder, all fried, naturally) for $18.49.
So I find myself in the awkward position of vaguely understanding Brooks' point while still thinking he's an awful person and a laughable approximation to a public intellectual.
As far as the one about the moral debate goes, though, I think he gets Brooks' nostalgia wrong. Brooks doesn't want to be one of those sages, he already thinks he is. Just look - he taught a class at Yale on moral philosophy!
What David Brooks wants is to have the moral debates that people were having back then, because having the right answers to those debates wouldn't require him to change any of his views right now. From what I've seen a lot of educated social conservatives have picked up on the fact that in a bunch of debates they are, in fact, on the wrong side. (And not just the losing side - literally they know on some level that they are the bad guys here.) And that's really uncomfortable as a place to be, especially if you aren't willing to give up your view/actions/etc.* The debates in the 40's were far enough back though that Brooks could be on the right side without having to change his views about much (I mean, not actually but they look that way to him since he doesn't really know much about them), and so he'd like to just go back and play that game instead of the one where he's arguing for bigotry and so on.
*Notice how many of the smarter social conservatives talking about gay rights, policing issues, etc. are basically resorting to "don't be mean to me by bringing this up" and "can't we all pretend that this immoral/bad thing isn't happening?" That's not an argument people make when they think they're in the right, or holding a basically defensible position.**
**Before anyone feels comfortable remember how almost everyone responds to, e.g., third world poverty benefiting people in the US. Everyone knows it's wrong but we'd have to give up so much to make it not wrong and can't we just forget it's a thing after all it's so far away you know? (Not everyone reacts this way, but I think the sensation of "can we not have this debate because I'm not comfortable with being on the right side but I know which one that is" isn't too alien to anyone's experience.
8: Brooks might not deserve to be treated seriously but I think the second article neb links makes an important point about the way that, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates is not treated as seriously in the general public discourse.
Or I could have waited a minute and noted that 13 gets it exactly right.
$18.49 plus tax is within spitting distance of $20. Not even a Diet Coke would they have to drink?
I think their "meals shouldn't be over $20" rule applies before adding the cost of Diet Coke, tax, and tip. They're proud of their generous 15% tipping policy.
My parents stopped going to Red Lobster about ten years ago, but I don't think it was due to David Brooks.
Sometimes they even indulge in exotic foreign food, like fettucine alfredo at Olive Garden or bourbon chicken with fried rice at Max Orient.
The truly sad/ignorant/ludicrous thing about Brooks' complaint about people not talking about living good lives or character or whatever is that, right now, there's actually a really massive amount of stuff being written about that now in moral philosophy. Like, way, way more than in let's say the 40's. And while all philosophy requires thought and attention to read it's mostly all on the accessible side (relatively low in terminology/jargon, not overly invested in terms from old debates, relatively close to the stuff that made it interesting, etc.). So in fact he's literally asking for something that already exists in massive quantities.* It's just that if he were to take seriously the stuff that's out there (and acknowledge it) he'd have to recognize that he is not actually that good at that sort of thing, and is certainly nowhere near as clever or insightful as most of the people in that debate.* So he pretends it doesn't exist and laments its absence.
*A lot of which has a psychology side to it as well. It's fascinating and plenty of it is in book form so there's no need to comb through journal databases or anything. He'd have to ask someone who works in ethics to start him out, though, which is unlikely to happen.
**See also: David Brooks every time he talks about economics, only there at least he's willing to admit that it exists.
11: and yet you can spend over $20. It's not hard.
That New Republic link reminds me how much better TNR has gotten since all its writers resigned in a huff. I've actually read a handful of their pieces in the past week or so. That didn't used to happen.
they know on some level that they are the bad guys here
Are we the baddies? is always worth linking, on the off chance that anyone didn't jump right to it.
Omg, the guest speaker at heebie u graduation just quoted David brooks.
About the social education you get at college being more important than the academic one.
About the social education you get at college being more important than the academic one.
More brooks quotes. He's currently reading The Path To Character.
This is the keynote speaker, not a student.
Moar brooks!! Moral struggle against yourself! Also he's a heebie u alum and he just insulted all the graduates by talking about how his own kids went to Dartmouth and whatnot.
That sounds like someone familiar with the most important public intellectuals of our time, Heebster! A vote for civilization!
You know, the $20 thing was asinine but it was about 15 years ago, so it's also asinine to refute it with a contemporary menu in nominal figures.
This guy loves all the motivational books. He's pretty surprisingly awful. Worse than usual.
He was a PE major. Now he's a COO at a national food distributor, by being scrappy, I think.
How do you know how bad he usually is?
He's done, thank godbrooks. Now we're on to the honorary degrees.
The thing that I most remember about Brooks' shitty, shitty book (which I did not read except as excerpted in his shitty newspaper column and elsewhere), other than the Red Lobster/salad bar stuff, was that when he was describing the yuppie playground of Chevy Chase (which, fair enough!) and its complete disconnect from the heartland, one of his totemic indicators of said red states drive like this-ism was the multiplex which showed foreign films, which we all know rubes in flyover country are completely unfamiliar with. When Bobos came out, that movie theater was showing -- to its presumed audience of university professors, State Department apparatchiks, Madeline Murray O'Hare -- My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Everybody was curious to see how "Chris in the Morning" was holding up.
I know that in much of the country r/d l/bster or A/pl/b/ies or other chains restaurant are going to be your choice for cheap food, but not only are they mediocre at best, but overpriced compared with the excellent food you can get from small establishments, often just storefronts or food trucks in big cities. I grant you that rents are high, but public transit and cheap good food make big-city living much more affordable than suburbanites seem to think.
It's true my parents gravitated towards the chains, which must being meeting needs a Taqueria for instance won't, such as familiarity and comfort, but I never understood giving in those concerns. When they were younger they didn't live like that; I'm in my 60s and still don't. Were they threatened? By what?
Ugh, I'm so hot. It's like 90. Sun just went behind the treeline but ugh in this robe.
my parents gravitated towards the chains
Same with my parents, grandparents, and in-laws. It's mystifying. I'm pretty sure Red Lobster was my grandfather's favorite restaurant, and he had retired to central Florida where it could not possibly have been difficult to find real seafood.
I'm so hot.
Even after all those kids!
You probably wore something under the gown. That's always a mistake.
Well I'm going straight from here to an election party. It seemed seemly.
I'd've thought that going straight to an erection party was a good reason to go nude under the gown but whaddo I know.
That New Republic link reminds me how much better TNR has gotten since all its writers resigned in a huff. I've actually read a handful of their pieces in the past week or so. That didn't used to happen.
I think all their good pieces now are pieces from The New Statesman.
No, neb, election. You're mistaken.
Franklin County is pretty, and has one of the better PA Turnkpike rest stops.
Remember when you could judge the literacy of an American city by the number of bookstores it had?
That should properly be spelt Turn'kpike.
What David Brooks wants is to have the moral debates that people were having back then, because having the right answers to those debates wouldn't require him to change any of his views right now.
Bingo.
And thanks for the link to the TNR article, which was much more thoughtful than the other piece (which was funny but also left me feeling twinges of pity for Brooks).
In the 40s, nobody had twinges of pity for David Brooks.
I'd like to hear more about these twinges of pity for Brooks that people keep talking about. The man has real influence over the most important policy debates of our age, and he's consistently wrong about everything. And not just wrong, mind you, but mendacious and cruel. No doubt his life is difficult, but I can't be bothered to give a shit.
As for Coates, I think people tend to overrate his originality, but he's one hell of a cultural translator. He actually reads scholarship, including some stuff that isn't easy, and then makes that work accessible for a broad audience. And he regularly credits his sources. I can't think of any other journalist who does that these days. Chait is auditioning for the role of the neo-curmudgeon in the school play. Ezra Klein is too busy pretending he's omniscient -- because that's his brand -- to offer footnotes. And pretty much everyone else out there is too lazy to bother reading anything that isn't in their twitter feed. I guess Kevin Drum is an exception. But he's sick and a blogger, so that doesn't count.
The depressing thing is that if Brooks (or his inevitable equivalents elsewhere) didn't exist, this entire liberal internet infrastructure (including, at least sometimes, this place) would come crashing down. Is it lamer to be a mendacious idiot or to have wasted over a decade making fun of mendacious idiots or pointlessly "refuting" them for the sake of self-gratification and time-wasting? I mean, it's clearly worse morally to be the mendacious idiot, but Jesus Christ the amount of time I've set on fire worrying about things like "this idiotic NYT columnist sucks."
I grant you that rents are high, but public transit and cheap good food make big-city living much more affordable than suburbanites seem to think.
Come on, better buses and taco stands are so not offsetting the housing costs in big cities. At least not out in CA.
To be fair, I think idp's mostly talking about Chicago, where rents are a lot lower in than in most other big cities. I also like the phrase "chains restaurant" even though I'm pretty sure it was a typo.
I can't think of any other journalist who does that these days.
The other thing Coates does is bring some actual life experience to his writing. I just can't stomach the Yglesias/Klein type screeds anymore because it's so blindingly obvious that they're coming at everything with zero years spent in the real world.
Yglesias mugged a guy once, or something.
58: True, I'm not familiar with Chiraq at all, outside discussions of their murder rate.
If there's a consistent correlation between high murder rates and low rents, that suggests an obvious path toward making San Francisco (and other expensive cities) more affordable.
38: Man, that was really one of his examples? That's so stupid. Even in Omaha the big multiplexes programmed some foreign and independent film, and there was a one-screen art house as well. And Lincoln had a pretty good university film society deal as I recall. Perhaps things are a little different now with the downloads, but the book came out right when I was leaving Nebraska.
Also, I live in a big city with lots of amenities because it's cheap. $60 pre-tax and I've got a bus card good all day everyday, unlimited rides. Cheap house, convenient to pretty much everything in the city, no need for a car, lots of free or cheap entertainment available all the time, a bunch of cool stuff I don't take as much advantage of as I should -- flyover cities have a lot to recommend them.
32: I had not realized that the book came out that long ago until researching the above comment. I concede that $20 probably went a lot farther at Red Lobster, back in 2000.
He actually reads scholarship, including some stuff that isn't easy
Damn, man, I'm 2500 miles away and I felt that pat on the head.
65: For white guys? Practically nonexistant, especially if you aren't involved in the drugs trade.
Actually, crime has mostly been falling faster than the national average this last little while.
68: Huh, that seems to call into question my theory in 63. I hope no one's starting acting on it yet.
Probably easier to make more murders in San Francisco than to give it Minnesota's winters.
ZODIAC KILLER'S IDENTITY REVEALED: WAS FRUSTRATED ANTI-GENTRIFICATION CAMPAIGNER!
I have a mostly facebook friend who adores Brooks. I always feel a little superior about this until I remember that I have basically no idea what Brooks is about because at some point I took someone's word for it that he was horrible and never really read him.
My ability to feel twinges of pity for Brooks was killed off during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. I forget the details, but one of his NYT columns at the time could be essentially boiled down to the idea that he favored the war because there was nothing good on TV.*
Also, I was living in Nebraska during the early years of his NYT gig, and it was abundantly clear that his bloviations about the "heartland" (I hate that term) were BS.
*Nothing that could provide meaning, you see.
67: I knew somebody would willfully misread my comment. But I should have guessed it would be you. I'm slipping!
64: My parents saw Clerks at university film society in
Lincoln. At least the part up to the sex with the corpse.
There really should have been a purge of punditry following the Iraq war -- liberals who supported it did so by abandoning liberalism, just as conservatives supported it by abandoning conservatism. Only the optimistic opportunistic morons should have been allowed to remain.
Oh wait . . .
I read more Brooks in the Deadspin thing than I've read in the last 5 years. TRO is right in 57, but the solution at a personal level is pretty easy: stop giving these people your attention.
Gwsift at 60 is totally right, as is Charley at 77.
Is it lamer to be a mendacious idiot or to have wasted over a decade making fun of mendacious idiots or pointlessly "refuting" them for the sake of self-gratification and time-wasting?
Here's the thing, TRO. These guys are read by people who have the power to change things.. I couldn't count the number of times a grantmaker has forwarded me a NYT piece over the years. (Some of them) LOVE this sort of thing.
The takedowns, snarky as they are, help to a) affirm reality; and b) provide ammunition for more tactful rebuttals.
Guy in front of me at Costco is just buying the book Clinton Cash, nothing else.
Is it possible that Brooks has discovered the synthetic a priori stereotype? Perhaps Red Lobster is a condition on the possibility of the heartland experience.
It's probably a Mothers Day present.
MHPH, 21: Like what? Would like recommendations, especially anything thinking about ecology. Not a philosopher at all.
Witt's right that the dispiriting influence of Brooks et al among people we need lies behind the sometimes-distasteful snark. I'm careful not to express the impatient contempt I feel and resign myself to the call to witness, for evangelism, so to speak.
Once my initial phase of reading a lot of the "somebody said something awful and here is why they are wrong and in a just world would not be a part of mainstream political discourse" posts that were a staple of Bush-era liberal blogging wore off, I eventually settled into the view that I'm glad people are taking up that cause, as those columns/comments/etc. need to be refuted, but also I'm glad I'm not obligated to read all of the commentary and the responses to it.
I've enjoyed living in a Brooks-free bubble for years.
I'm not familiar with things on ecology - it's well outside of anything I've studied. As far as the "let's talk about characters and good lives" stuff that Brooks goes on about the Templeton foundation has been funding a lot of research recently (causing various worries regarding their motives and all, but funding is funding). And there are various books out there, most of which fall in the general category of virtue ethics - Nussbaum and Annas both have a fairly long bibliography and are (mostly) fun to read. Some of the stuff out there (especially with the Character Project link) is more technical, but overall it's something that people can dive into without too much preparation ahead of time.
84: Have you read Thoreau's Faith In A Seed? I dunno if it is exactly what you're looking for, but it's a good read, and does a great job blending the practical/scientific parts of ecology with the social/philosophical side.
I can't remember where I read it, but apparently the president of the US likes to call Brooks to get his personal opinion on things. The current president.
I have also heard about Obama calling up Brooks to ask him things. It's hard to square with his totally justified and amusingly open contempt for Maureen Dowd, because there's not much difference between the two that I can see as far as insight or capacity for serious thought.
I like to think it's that he's just stroking Brooks' ego because he doesn't want Brooks to start influencing the NPR liberals and centrists who take Brooks seriously in ways that would cause him trouble. "My goodness Dave, really? And they melt the cheese on top of that? That is interesting - you really know your stuff about the heartland. I'll have to pass this along to my speech writers, and think about it some more." I'm guessing Dowd is fixated enough on "all democratic men are really ladies and all democratic ladies are really men" that there's no point in trying to keep her mollified.
I like 91.2 as well. I have the impression that you (if you are the POTUS) have to stroke the influential journalists from time to time.
57: The depressing thing is that if Brooks (or his inevitable equivalents elsewhere) didn't exist, this entire liberal internet infrastructure (including, at least sometimes, this place) would come crashing down
Lemme guess: this is hyperbole, right?
More seriously, my cow-orker reads the NYT, and thereby Brooks, on a regular basis, and reports to me on the latter's meanderings. He usually makes a guess the internets will be nattering on critically about Brooks's latest today, and ... invariably they are not. At all. I have the impression that much of the liberal internet has Brooks on ignore.
Lots of impressions over here today, as you can see.
I have the impression that much of the liberal internet has Brooks on ignore
True for me, but there are the secondary effects mentioned above that we do have to pay attention to.
And they melt the cheese on top of that?
Silly David Brooks. In the real heartland, it isn't cheese, it's Velveeta.
87 the Templeton foundation has been funding a lot of research recently (causing various worries regarding their motives and all, but funding is funding)
I've been having a little argument with myself lately about whether or not it's problematic to apply for Templeton money. I was always firmly against it, but now that I'm no longer eligible for a lot of the new-faculty things and don't have many other options it seems kind of tempting.
For $5, I'll reassure you that applying isn't the same as accepting the money. That way, you only face a moral problem if you get paid for it.
Is this something to do with the rat from Charlotte's Web?
96: Maybe the Templeton Foundation has funded a work on moral philosophy that will help you make this decision.
Look, I don't know what you all do in Pittsburgh, but here in the real heartland we would insist on proper cheese for our rat toppings.
From what I remember the vague consensus on the Templeton grants was that they really were mostly on the level - there wasn't any interference and they really were funding entirely secular/non-religious stuff just like any other organization would. (And, well, philosophy is not physics so people giving out research grants is nothing to sneer at.) The suspicion was that they weren't pushing their own agenda in who they funded directly so much as pushing their agenda by making "funded by a grant from the templeton etc." a relatively prestigious thing to get, and then to slide some of that prestige over to the people they like. But I think a lot of people thought that was a fair price to pay for pretty generous amount of funding.
The other worry was that just because they're not pushing a religious agenda in their funding (and they really weren't - it was surprising) they're still pushing an agenda as far as the sorts of moral philosophy they're interested in funding. (There's a lot of virtue ethical stuff coming out of Templeton grants, but not too much utilitarian political theory.) But virtue ethics was already an active area of research and, well, if they think their general outlook works best with virtue ethics* then, hey, that's fine.
*It might do this, I mean, really. Aquinas style stuff is probably one of the better bets for Christian ethics, though that's probably not who they'd want to go with. But some of the individual stuff they funded wasn't at all congenial to their stuff. They do seem to have made a good faith effort to draw a strict line between people involved in their religious stuff and the people administering the philosophy grants.
What sort of cheese would one melt on top of David Brooks?
A friend of mine who is a bioinorganic chemist got her first independent funding from the Templeton Foundation, which is kind of strange when you think about it. I think they funded her because her work touched in some way on origin of life questions (the chemistry of early metabolism, I think).
102: Something European popular among upper class Americans, but with a layer of American cheese on top of that.
If molten Tony Blair poured over David Brooks is wrong, I don't want to be right!
If molten Tony Blair poured over David Brooks is wrong, I don't want to be right!
Jonathan Franzen is the David Brooks of novels.
I feel gross just having read the passage linked in 108.
Just the first paragraph is pretty gross.
What about it bothers you, pussycat?
Do you ever get that not-so-literary feeling?
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Great, now I have to go back and re-read this old thread to see what it is I believe exactly.
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I read that bobos in paradise book and liked it when it came out. I don't read him now so I only see those those critiques on blogs and the like.
In the sense of trying to capture the central tendency of the times, this is the functional equivalent of a David Brooks column.
The link in 117 is way better than any conceivable David Brooks column in every possible way.
I know it can never happen but I hope to god someone can somehow cause it to appear under Brooks' byline in the actual Times.
I'm just hoping Ortberg gets her own column in the NYT at some point.
I've taken Templeton money a couple of times. It's great. The old man himself was an original. Perfectly extraordinary. The only really rich person I have ever known who made all his money himself (starting by fleecing at poker the upper class twits he was at an Ivy with as a scholarship boy).
The foundation is mildly corrupt at least in its English end -- the big prize went with distressing regularity to extremely nice English scientists who had done a stint on the committee that awards it. But they fund a lot of good work, and the programme they had for journalists was so fantastically much better than anything else which purported to teach journalists about real science and philosophical issues arising therefrom. If you wanted to learn you would. They did not push an explicitly religious agenda, and if American journalists weren't so fucking pompous and up themselves, they would never have made a fuss.
It's possible that scientists have access to magically untainted funding streams, where the dollar bills are plucked from organic money trees fertilised by the shit of happy native virgins and watered with mountain springs, but as a journalist I have never had access to that kind of money -- I suppose the Rausing tetrapak fortune would be the closest to completely ethical funding, but not enough of that has come my way -- and when I think of the newspaper proprietors who have paid my mortgage over the years, I am glad to have cleaned a bit of their filthy money.
If Templeton lets you do work that needs doing, take it, and remember that you are in the same moment striking a blow against smug posers everywhere.
92: "I have the impression that much of the liberal internet has Brooks on ignore."
I know I do.
The fact that conservative culture and politics is perfectly okay with lying and making shit up, and thinks this is a normal thing to do and is taken aback when someone checks actual facts about things*, is well-documented but there are some people who are just brazen enough about it to bring you up short anyway. Brooks is a master of making the mendacity sound faux-reasonable to people who pay no attention to anything at all, which has proven a more durable gig than the Coulter strategy of calling for the mass murder of anyone who isn't buying your current book; but really, he deserves to be shunned and ignored just as much.
* I remember during the early Oughts being part of a "left-right" anti-war blog called Stand Down, and one of our libertarian contributors put up a column describing a public protest in a then-typical anti-war conservative "I'm not one of these fruitcakes but I oppose the Iraq War anyway" vein. And a bunch of us leftists on the site took one look at his description of left-wing protesters and it was painfully obviously made-up, the kind of thing you'd write if your entire experience of protest culture was listening to your racist uncle rant about the long-hairs back in the Sixties. We confronted the writer and said, "look, we do not believe you met these people or heard them say these things, you are making shit up," he was confused. Of course he was making shit up, why would we expect otherwise?
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The new LRB thing on the death of OBL is... eye-opening, if true.
I read it with weary Le Carrésque cynicism until the part about the vaccinations cover story. That made me enormously furious in the first place (that they would undermine aid workers all over the world in service of their adolescent revenge fantasy) but to find out ithat t was a lie to protect a source really makes me wish that Osama had been armed, not an elderly invalid, and equipped with the ability to fly to Langley and cram his entire, lanky body up the arse of whoever thought that was a good idea.
Anyway, read the whole thing.
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"ithat t" sb taken as some sort of sputtering, inarticulate rage noise
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The editing process for something I have spent two months on can only be described as death by a thousand cunts.
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If it took you two months to edit something, the poor sap who wrote it probably has it worse than you. Try to show some consideration.
It took me two months to write the damn thing to their apparent satisfaction
I deliberately misconstrued a perfectly clear comment to make a stupid joke. And I'll do it again.
My sense of humour is still up the fucking oak tree
I can't get the link in 125 to load, but I do very strongly disagree with whoever decided Osama was a more important enemy than polio. They can't even count.
124: Years ago I read something by Amanda Marcotte about the insane rumors that circulate in certain fundamentalist circles (e.g., Proctor and Gamble funds the church of Satan & etc.) and the strange state of mind of the people who circulate them.
On the one hand, except for a few fringe cases, people don't seem to literally believe these things, but at the same time they don't seem to think that they're lying either.
Their epistemological standard seems similar to that of your anti-war conservative: if matches up with what you feel is right (in his case, "liberals are bad") then it's more or less just as good as being true.
I always assumed the Proctor and Gamble rumor was put out by Amway as a way to get people to buy soap from a source somehow worse than a giant megacorp.
The problem is that there were predictions of doom that were needed to scare people into giving money- Obama will put everyone in FEMA camps! He's secretly a mooslim atheist communist! Liberals were smug because of course when none of this came true people would abandon those liars who'd fed people a line, no one likes to feel like a sucker. So then they had to pretend this shit actually happened- parts of Detroit are no-go Sharia enclaves, and who are you to say differently, have you actually been there? And since the suckers didn't want to feel like suckers they believe it and are asking for more- repeat etc.
134: That was Slacktivist's explanation.
Hepatitis, not polio. Polio's an oral vaccine, you couldn't use a polio vaccination programme to collect DNA.
It's kind of an unlikely story. The plan was supposed to be: fly into the middle of a large Pakistani town, break into a house, shoot OBL, and then fly away again, hoping no one noticed, because you're actually then going to lie and say that he got killed a week later in a drone strike? If the ISI is that much on side, why didn't they just shoot him themselves and FedEx the body to the US? Or why not do a ground insertion?
And the question of what happened to the body is very unclear in Hersh's article.
That's probably where I read it then. Probably from a link here.
134:That's the story I heard as well, and of course Amway's motives weren't complicated at all. Marcotte was writing about the people breathlessly forwarding the story to each other via email and Facebook and was speculating about what exactly they were getting out of it.
Amway has motives on many different levels.
137: Yes, but the story undermined vaccination campaigns in general, and polio is the one with the big campaign on the verge of eradication but requiring 100% compliance to accomplish it.
125 -- From the article, it looks like the vaccination doc was collecting DNA for the CIA, just not bin Laden's DNA.
It's a good article, although the breathless tone as if the specific details of the cover story were important to Obama's reelection is kind of tiresome. That the CIA is revealed as having lied to the Senate about the intelligence is a big damn deal though. Way more important, IMO, than the incompetence of Obama and Brennan in concocting a cover story about what happened to bin Laden's body.
Count me among those who would gladly take Templeton money if offered. There's nothing in the research I do that would be useful in pushing a religious agenda, so why not?
137: As I understand the story, the idea is supposed to be exactly that - presumably in a town with a large Pakistani military presence, helicopters coming and going aren't that unusual - but they managed to crash one and then blew it up, which is a bit more eye-catching. ISI were sort-of onside but couldn't be seen to be, and so preferred to be shocked, shocked that the Americans would do such a thing. The body was apparently shot to pieces and the pieces tossed from the helicopter; although I agree that this raises questions and that Hersh spends more time covering what didn't happen to the body than what did.
(And to be clear, I'm just pointing out what I think the article is saying, rather than breaking my "never argue with ajay or Dan H about military-related things" rule.)
137: Or move him to a more remote area and give the US the coordinates for a drone strike. It's not like hellfire missiles completely vaporize people. There would be DNA left to analyze.
I don't know, I heard a rumor that Obama is having the CIA include DNAse in their bombs to obliterate any evidence. They're going to be testing it in west Texas this summer.
145: well, there are four possibilities with regard to the ISI.
1) no one in the ISI had any idea that OBL was in Abbottabad.
2) the ISI (or a subset of its staff) knew perfectly well that OBL was in Abbottabad, and either
a) ISI top brass gave him up to the US, or
b) an ISI officer gave him up to the US against the desire of ISI top brass or
c) no one in ISI gave him up to the US.
1) is the official story from the US and from Pakistan. Even if it weren't true, 1) is still the story that Pakistan would want everyone to hear, and it's still the story that the US would tell if it wanted to make the ISI look incompetent but patriotic and not necessarily anti-US.
2c) makes the ISI look competent and patriotic but anti-US, as does 2b) to a slightly lesser extent.
2a) makes them look like competent but venal lackeys of the US.
2b) and a bit of 2a) is the Hersh version. My personal guess would be that 2c) is correct.
The body was apparently shot to pieces and the pieces tossed from the helicopter; although I agree that this raises questions
Indeed it does.
"Boss, shall we dump this?"
"What?"
"The body of the world's most wanted terrorist. The one we just finally tracked down and killed."
"What, you mean just chuck it out the back as we fly over the Taliban heartland, thus denying us the chance to verify it's really him, and gifting the Taliban a monumental PR victory if they find it?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah, sure, chuck him out the back."
#conversationsicantimaginehappening
Osama bin Laden was brought back to the US to receive plastic surgery to serve as Hilary's running mate.
Yeah, I guess I just don't care that much about the ISI. The CIA deliberately misleading the Senate, with the full knowledge and connivance of the President, because criminals inside the government need a cover story to evade prosecution -- that's a big damn deal.
If we were a functional democracy, the Senate would have Brennan's head on a pike.
The tone about Obama trying to steal military glory -- I guess that's probably from the source, and maybe is sincere in that sort of conservative self-delusional way. The real deal with the timing, though, is that now that the Senate is safely in Republican hands, the truth about the value of torture can finally be told.
Although I'm sure lots of people in the ISI, and in the Taliban, are going to care a whole lot about this. It was always unlikely that there wasn't Pakistani complicity in both (a) the captivity and (b) the raid, but putting names on that can't being doing anyone any good.
Vox isn't buying Hersh's story. I hadn't been aware that Hersh had descended into general crankery.
Vox doesn't have anything to say the CIA's story to the Senate.
Hersh's story accounts for the seemingly odd fact that OBL was in Abbotobad, but the idea that he was a prisoner of the Pakistanis for 5 years is odder still.
OBL wasn't entirely silent in that period. The idea that Pakistan would allow him sufficient freedom to put out videos seems far-fetched.
Yeah, but ajay's 148(1) really is a colossal intelligence failure, if true. Do you buy that? I would believe that it was house arrest with some ability to do stuff so long as the Pakistani government and its supporters were never to be the target.
he CIA deliberately misleading the Senate, with the full knowledge and connivance of the President, because criminals inside the government need a cover story to evade prosecution -- that's a big damn deal.
It should be a big damn deal, but, you know, torture and Iraq and PRISM and so on.
I agree with the consensus on Templeton. They are interested in funding theistic philosophical projects, but they fund other things, too, and no one seems to be pressured to conclude that God exists or anything like that.
It was always unlikely that there wasn't Pakistani complicity in both (a) the captivity and (b) the raid
This is a good point. Note that (as Hersh correctly says) the Pakistani authorities have been publicly very angry about US drone strikes on Pakistani territory, in order to give them plausible deniability vis-a-vis their own headbanger community, while privately providing the US with targeting information and airspace clearance for the strikes. The questions are: who in ISI knew OBL's location, and who in the Pakistani government knew what when about the raid. ISI is very far from being a unitary actor here.
157: My impression is that Templeton has by and large won over an initially very skeptical scientific community. People who have been funded by them all attest that there was no pressure regarding how to do the work or what conclusions to draw.
It's true that they are, to some extent, buying respectability and maybe they will try to do something unsavory with that respectability later on. But there's little sign of that so far and in any case I don't think it would work.
They've even done their bit to discredit the discovery institute and the intelligent design crowd. Some years ago they told the ID folks that the question of design fell within the foundation's purview and if people had any scientifically credible studies to propose, they would consider funding them. The ID people never even bothered submitting anything. So apparently intelligent design is officially too hokey for Templeton.
I think basically the same thing has happened in philosophy, or at least people have stopped seriously worrying about it. I doubt it has happened as much as in the sciences though because who funds philosophy? I mean, they walked in and started throwing literally millions of no-strings-attached money at people doing philosophy* and that's just downright weird. Everyone assumed they must have some ulterior motive, but so far it hasn't really made itself clear.
*And actual philosophy - not just that (clearly the majority) part of philosophy of religion which is poorly disguised apologetics.
and that's just downright weird.
Although not totally unprecedented.
I can, and probably do, believe that the U.S. has not been entirely truthful about the circumstances of bin Laden's death, but big chunks of details in Hersh's reconstruction literally make no sense to me (including especially the "shot the body to ribbons and then threw said ribbons out of the helicopter because reasons" part that a bunch of people are calling out and the idea that even though the OBL capture was a sham they Seals would build a replica compound to practice the raid on).
162 was my take as well. Lots of nonsensical and/or overdetermined stuff in there. Had to fake the death of the "courier" since "he didn't exist and we couldn't produce him"? Since when does anybody "produce" someone like that? Had to create the treasure trove story because "[t]he White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him?" Yes, I'm sure the White House was really worried about the backlash they'd get for killing a superannuated OBL.
Plus there are a number of tells that suggested Hersh's main informant was reporting not from direct (or even indirect) knowledge but from what his gut told him must have happened (e.g., "It would be navy officers who came up with the 'burial at sea' idea.") And plenty of suggestions of a serious anti-Obama stolen valor axe to grind.
This thread is reminding me of this limerick I wrote some years ago (and Seeds and ajay were there too):
There once was a man from Abbottabad
Whose balls were so big he couldn't get out of bed.
Nobody knew him,
Except those who blew him;
Namely, some Generals from Islamabad.
that even though the OBL capture was a sham they Seals would build a replica compound to practice the raid on).
I think building replica compounds prior to operations is just what they do. I know they built one for the failed attempt at freeing the Iranian hostages in 1979. And I believe Israeli counter-terrorism forces threw up a quick replica compound of the Entebe airport, prior to that operation. So its not really so unusual - more like standard procedure.
Crazy packing time so no time to do anything but really scan that Hersh article but 1 thing that stuck out was the question about needing an imam to bury a body in accordance with Muslim law. This is technically true, I guess, but actually false since any Muslim male can act as an imam for such a purpose.
They were doing several raids a night in Baghdad and Afghanistan at peak tempo (under McChrystal) so it's not that they'd build a replica for each one; you'd do it for an operation if you had a lot of lead time and resources and it was a tricky enough job that you thought it would be important.
As it turned out, of course, the replica was faulty in one very important way; they built the exterior walls out of chain-link fence, and so when they came to hover over the real thing, the downdraught didn't go out to the side as it had done on the replica, but was caught by the walls and pushed back up at the helicopter, hence the crash.
I think building replica compounds prior to operations is just what they do.
Right, but in Hersh's telling the raid was literally a sham. They landed with an ISI minder, the ISI guards left as soon as the helicopters arrived, and they picked up the unguarded bin Laden with only a single shot fired that inexplicably hit one of bin Laden's wives. We'll ignore "and then they crashed a helicopter to make this plausible".
Barry, were you able to give away your book collection?