The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages are the worst

It’s supposed to be a respectable newspaper, but it has always published the most awful trash — and the latest example is a paean to white people. Not just any white people, though, but specifically well-bred WASPs. He favors a hereditary ruling class defined by race.

The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation’s most prestigious schools.

It just gets worse and worse. The country has gone downhill to the point where mongrels like Obama and Ted Cruz can achieve high political position. He also sneers at education, other than the social primping done at Andover and Yale; but even they’ve gone to the dogs ever since they began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks.

I know we’ve all been busy rolling our eyes at that racist misogynist homophobic shitbat, Phil Robertson, but maybe we should spare a moment to recognize that not just the A&E network, but one of the most influential newspapers in the US, loves its racism.

Please arrest David Brooks

He confesses to criminal behavior. He smoked marijuana in high school, although he later stopped.

I think we gave it up, first, because we each had had a few embarrassing incidents. Stoned people do stupid things (that’s basically the point). I smoked one day during lunch and then had to give a presentation in English class. I stumbled through it, incapable of putting together simple phrases, feeling like a total loser. It is still one of those embarrassing memories that pop up unbidden at 4 in the morning.

I’ve read his essays in the New York Times, and given that response to smoking weed, I suspect he’s still lighting up a couple of times a day.

But here’s the weird disconnect in this particular story: He and his buddies smoked weed back in the day. It was fun. They went at it for a while, and then It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it. I’ve never done the stuff myself — I have kind of a phobia about smoking anything, from growing up in a house with chain-smoking parents — but that’s what I saw in all my friends, too. There might have been a brief stoner phase, but then they gave it up, or maybe would just have an occasional joint at a party, but it was not a serious problem. I knew more people lost to alcoholism than to marijuana.

Yet the point of Brooks’ column is that Colorado and Washington have made a major mistake in legalizing marijuana! Apparently he was a wise and sensible human being who could try a drug a few times without harm, but all those kids in those Western states? Not to be trusted. And how dare the government abstain from scolding activities that he once enjoyed!

But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.

Right. Subtly discouraging lesser pleasures involves throwing young people in jail.

It’s bizarre. Brooks really is a prim little snob; what he got away with should not be allowed for Youth of Today, and he’s got this weird thing going where he wants less government except that the government should be using threats and the police to make damn sure the kids like the arts rather than partying. So…does he also favor shutting down all state-run liquor stores? It would be the only consistent position to take, after all.

But it doesn’t matter. Brooks needs to be jailed, just to encourage a nurturing moral ecology for the rest of us and to get him off the pages of the NYT. If they can’t get him on drug charges, how about arresting him for wanton cruelty to logic and reason?

My wife is going to get a shock when she gets home

According to Fox News, that respected source, marriage died in 2013.

Marriage is over.  

It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.  

But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.  

If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.  

It’s over. Go get rings, go get lawyers, go rent a nice hall, but City Hall should bow out.

I really wasn’t looking for a divorce, but I guess Mary and I will just have to live in sin from now on. Hmm. Maybe it will add a little thrill of the forbidden.

The Supreme Court is full up on Catholics, I think

Six of nine is too many, I think, especially when their religion is beginning to shape court decisions. Even the judge we’d hoped would be a little more progressive, Justice Sotomayor, bent over backwards to pander to weird Catholic views on contraception. It’s even worse than that: she granted an injunction to allow Catholic employers to not fill out a form stating that they were not providing coverage for contraception.

Late on New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a small number of religiously affiliated groups a temporary injunction from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows them not to cover contraception in their health care plans if they fill out a form that states that they want an exemption from the law for religious reasons. Go ahead and read that sentence again. These Catholic non-profits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be). 

Those wicked people! Their bosses told them that they weren’t paying for their condoms, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the bosses to also dictate that they can’t go anywhere else to get support for contraception.

That church really is an evil and controlling organization, through and through.

So I invented a new law the other day

I’d prodded the libertarians again, so they poked back en masse, and it was hilarious. The arguments were so familiar and so inane and so wrong that I had to say it: in any discussion about libertarians, the comments by libertarians will invariably make the stupidity of libertarianism clear (yes, I stole it with a twist from Lewis’ Law).

There was the usual knee-jerk attempt to associate me with that liberal socialist, Obama — because it doesn’t abide by the laws of PZ’s god Obama. Class warfare, confiscate and redistribute… — followed by sneering comments that I’m a political naif and therefore ought to shut up about it. Look, Obama is not my god: as far as I’m concerned, he’s been a colossal disappointment, occasionally able to say a few good things, but a failure at doing them. He’s a center-right politician, a relatively conservative Democrat, who has expanded the surveillance state and maintained programs like Gitmo and the drone war that can only be described as villainous. He only looks good when compared to the circus full of clowns that the Republicans and Libertarians fielded in the last election.

So don’t call me politically inept when you think Obama is a socialist.

The other thing these libertarians did, so predictably and at least a little more productively, is try to tout the virtues of their political philosophy. Freedom, no initiation of force, no corporate welfare, no censorship, no drug war, peace…no initiation of force, individual liberty, live and let live, no corporate welfare, no drug war, etc. Yes? So? Those are things progressive liberals are all for, too, and we do it without the destructive baggage of unfettered capitalism, which they all neatly leave off their laundry list.

You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed. Libertarianism is a philosophy for the well-off, the privileged, and those who dream someday of being a wealthy boss with power over the peons. When capital is the measure of success, those who have it thrive at the expense of those who don’t; when we don’t have redistribution of wealth, we do not have equality of opportunity.

The US is already a libertarian paradise, and look what it gets us: a widening gap between rich and poor, a rotting infrastructure as the exploiters look for short term gains while neglecting services vital to those who can’t afford a limousine service, a corrupt and decadent privileged class, and thriving new political parties that are simply nuts. To use one of Ayn Rand’s favorite words, this country is infested with looters: only they’re not the poor, they’re not the mythical “welfare queens”, they’re bankers and obscenely overpaid executives and corporations that demand the right to buy elections.

And there stand the libertarians, the useful idiots who cheer them on.

Wow, Phil Robertson is getting famous!

I never watched his duck show, and I didn’t know who he was until he started saying these egregiously stupid things, but now the all-seeing eye of the internet is scrutinizing him carefully and all kinds of slime is emerging. You already knew he was a homophobe, and you also probably knew he was some kind of nasty racist, but did you also know he was a misogynist and proud recipient of male privilege? And that he uses Christianity to prop his odious beliefs? And if you didn’t know, are you at all surprised?

He’s speaking to a sportsmen’s ministry in Georgia, waving a Bible and telling the men they have to marry girls who are no more than 15 or 16, and that by 20 they are too old.

By the way, that quote he throws around, that George Washington said you can’t run the world without god and the bible? Totally fake; so fake even David Barton has disavowed it, which tells you it’s got to be ridiculously invented.

Spider-Man gets a new costume! Fans are the same old sexist scum!

Apparently, there’s a new Spider-Man movie in the works, and he’s got a fancy new costume (without nipples, I’m happy to report), and it’s got the hardcore comic fans in a lather. Well, not about the costume. It turns out that a few photos of the actor playing Mary Jane Watson were also leaked, and…she’s not sexy enough for some.

There’s actually 28 pages of people arguing whether Woodley is hot or not, seven times as many as there are talking about the new costume. (Although, like all comment threads, they go off-the-rails after a while. Flicking through, there’s an intense argument over whether the phrase "lipstick on a pig" is sexist, and a fair amount of discussion about porn.)

I hope the people making the movie aren’t as superficial as the ones who want to see it, although I fear there may be some unfortunate feedback between the two groups.

Speaking of libertarians…

Adam Lee has a live one. This guy, fuguewriter, is now claiming that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to electrical energy, in defense of Ayn Rand’s magic MacGuffin in Atlas Shrugged that produces near-infinite quantities of electrical energy.

Be honest and make an argument. Show how *thermodynamic law* – any one of them, or all – is what infinite *electrical* energy would violate, especially under a new conception of energy, which presumably would get beyond QED (which Rand knew a bit about from interviewing Oppenheimer, knowing about Feynman, etc.).

This is one reason this isn’t a serious discussion: y’all jump to the attitudes without an argument in between. So much easier that way. The fixed, permanent contempt for the other is maintained.Then, when challenged, if an argument’s provided it’s hash.

So, pony up. Show how (allegedly) infinite electrical production (whatever that would mean exactly) is specifically a violation of thermodynamic law, particularly under a new conception of energy – which presumably gave access to an unsuspected type of energy. This will be a pretty trick.

Gosh, Ayn Rand met Oppenheimer and knew about Feynman, which makes her physics fantasies plausible. I’ve met Krauss and read some of Hawkings’ books, therefore I guess I’m a physicist now.

That was easy. It doesn’t even require any math!

Geraldo Logic

This will be useful shorthand. You may recall that Alec Baldwin lost his show for calling a photographer a “cocksucking faggot” — now Geraldo Rivera weighs in on the phrase.

SKLAR: When I heard about what Alec Baldwin – Alec Baldwin had a history of making these homophobic slurs.

RIVERA: That wasn’t a homophobic slur.

SKLAR: Okay —

RIVERA: I mean if you grew up where we grew up —

SKYLAR: And yet he is no longer on the network, right?

RIVERA: Sean, Baldwin and I all grew up within ten miles of each other and when we were growing up, in my year especially, those comments were commonplace.

Remember that next time someone strolls in and starts flinging the “cunt” insult around, and tries to excuse it because it was commonplace when they were growing up in Australia or England or New Jersey or wherever. Just let them know they’re using Geraldo Logic, and with any luck they’ll feel a twinge of shame.

Nah, they won’t. We know from long experience that they won’t.