Another deeply unappealing decision

Just a few thoughts on the highly probable nomination and rather likely ultimate victory of Hillary Clinton as the next POTUS:

1) Criticism of Clinton is not inherently sexist.

2) A lot of criticism of Clinton WILL be and IS sexist. And not just from Trump.

3) Anyone about to criticize Clinton would do well to pause long enough to ask 'would I criticize a rich white male candidate the same way?'

4) Names are going to be tricky. First man? Mrs./Madam President? When she visits Saudi Arabia, will she wear a head scarf? Lots of etiquette to grapple with.

5) Clinton is somewhat to the left of the American median on certain social issues, particularly those pertaining to women. In every other respect, she is center right or (in foreign policy) an out-and-out hawk. She is not a liberal ...

5a) ... I think. It's hard to say given how quiet she is on actually positions. This isn't as bad as it was to start the campaign, but she still shies away from actually opining on anything controversial, or as in Keystone, she waits until public opinion is clear and then sneaks out a presser where it's sure to be buried by the Pope's visit or other major news stories.

6) She is to Obama on transparent government and civil liberties as Obama is to John Yoo. That's not a compliment, and it's not just her email, either. She just doesn't seem to care about these issues.

7) She is thoroughly artificial and, as shown by the ongoing charlie-foxtrot of her emails, more than a little dishonest.

8) Not all of which is entirely her fault. The dishonesty, yes, but if I spent 25 years, sometimes bruising and often intensely personal, in the political spotlight, I'd probably be a little control-freakish myself. That doesn't make it a good quality to have in a president - it isn't - but it's probably unavoidable if we're going to have candidates with the depth and breadth of experience Clinton brings.

9) I could see myself voting for a moderate Republican over Clinton.

10) No such Republican has a chance of facing her. Trump isn't going to win, but neither is anyone who is willing to stand up and tell his voters that everything he's promising is bullshit.

And 11) Unless something truly bizarre should occur, I'll be voting for her in 13 months. Woo.

(inspired by this column from a few months back: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/charles-krauthammer/2015/04/21/krauthammer-queen-hillary-coronation/26090519/)

Yesterday, evil won

EDIT: I appear to have placed too much faith in the Great State of South Carolina: contrary to statements below, it appears the Confederate flag outside the capitol building was NOT lowered to half mast when the US and SC flags were lowered. Instead, they left it at full height. So that's, you know, horrifying. http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150618/PC16/150619374

Ok. Let's talk about Charleston.

First off, in case anyone was still puzzled about whatever could have inspired Dylann Roof to kill 9 people in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Looking at you, Rudy Gulianihttp://talkingpointsmemo.com/…/rudy-giuliani-charleston-chu…), let me lay your confusion to rest: He hated black people. He wore clothing with apartheid-era flags from African nations, he told his roommate (who should be remembered for the rest of his life as a feckless imbecile who could have spoken up and didn't) repeatedly that he wanted to spark a new civil war between whites and blacks, and he told one of the survivors in the church that "You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go." This was not a jilted lover going overboard, this was not a bout of delusion or mental illness, this was racism.

What makes America exceptional

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/03/obama-and-american-exceptionalism/?tid=sm_tw

This is an interesting article, and one that helps me understand a distinction I had not previously recognized. I do not believe America is the greatest country on Earth. Even if such a subjective statement could be quantified, there is no possible metric by which America can be said to stand above all others (and yes, the opening monologue from The Newsroom is on point here) ... except, perhaps, for aspiration.

More people want to be in America, to become American, than any other nation. The reason for that is not (or shouldn't be) quality of life; otherwise, the most popular nation on Earth would be Sweden, probably. And yet people aspire to be like us, or like our best vision of ourselves, because moreso than any other country, we aspire to be better too. And as the article says, it's not been the wealthy and privileged who've striven for continuous improvement in America: it's been "the ability of the unsung and the outsiders to challenge the country’s elite and force change."

After the scripture reading, part 3

I love my job, but there's a drawback to being a courts reporter. Several really ugly crimes are up for me to write about in the next week or two, which means lots of reading really ugly criminal complaints. Everything is not ok.

Anyway, a lighter diversion is my recurring series on the scriptures chosen each week for our church services, and the frequently funny, horrible or otherwise discordant passages that come immediately afterward. This week comes to us a passage from Revelation, chapter 5 verses 11-14:

11 Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, 12 saying with a loud voice,

“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”

13 And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying,

“To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.”

14 And the four living creatures kept saying, “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshiped.

Which is a very nice passage, although best taken with a grain of salt: the fact that a snippet of meaningful imagery should slip its way into the torrent of hallucinogenic froth that is Revelation is no more surprising - and no more meaningful - than that the face of the Virgin Mary should on rare occasion manifest itself on pieces of toast.

So, what comes next? Why, Revelation 6, of course! Which, if you're too lazy to click the link, is the classic bit where the four horsemen are introduced: Conquest, War, Famine and Death.

Not one stone will be left on top of another

Fuck Baltimore.

I can't find the post now, but at one point during the resurgent riots after a Missouri prosecutor massaged a grand jury to ensure he had a fig leaf not to charge Darren Wilson, I wrote on one social media or another something to the effect that I was torn, that rioting would only be more ammunition for those who support police in their brutality, but that if I were a young black man in Ferguson, I'd probably be out there overturning cars as well.

I am no longer conflicted.

After the scripture reading, part 2

Maybe I'll make a series of this. I'm thinking this might be a fun ongoing project.

This week's scripture was Acts 16:23-34, which is the bit about Paul and Silas in jail and there's an earthquake but they don't run away and then they tell the jailer not to kill himself and then he becomes Christian and gets his whole family saved with him whether they become Christian themselves or not because woo.

Ok, that last bit was uncalled for. It's fairly standard for biblical texts to present decisions by patriarchal males as group decisions. And it does say the rest of the household rejoiced with him, so I guess it wasn't too onerous to change religions overnight.

But anyway, that's what was chosen to read in church. What comes immediately after? Is it horrible, like the two I cited last week? Well, not really, but there's a reason this passage isn't cited as much: it's Paul playing politics.

Reading between the (approved) lines

My favorite part of scripture readings at church is reading the verses immediately AFTER the chosen reading, which are invariably horrid. The reading ending with Isaiah 25:9 misses the wonderous bit in verses 10 and 11 about how the Moabites will be crushed into a dungheap, and EVEN THOUGH they spread out their arms like swimmers to stay afloat in the poop, STILL the Lord will smoosh them in deeper. A truly lovely picture of a loving God.

Or this week, the scripture was the bit at the end of Acts 4 about how the early Christians were actually as determinedly anti-Capitalist as a society can be, which is cool. And then it ended, and I kept reading the bit about Ananias and Sapphira, where God murders two people for being generous, but not generous enough. Because the Lord Almighty was Stalinist before Stalinism was a thing, yo. Still had a little Old Testament to get out of his system, maybe?

The first is less unsettling than the second - God may be disgusting and prone to stomping people who already are down, but at least isn't murdering them out of spite - but both are still definitely not high points for the biblical God. And yet more reason why anyone who claims their morality stems for a literal reading of the Bible is either full of (but not drowning in!) shit, or utterly insane.

The point of no return

I never played Spec Ops: The Line, but I did binge a few months ago on its TVtropes page, and I also read several articles and interviews about and with the developers. This is a game that took considerable inspiration from Apocalypse Now and its own predecessor, Heart of Darkness; unsurprisingly, such a pedigree resulted in a much darker and more self-aware take on the standard military shooter than is common.

What stuck with me was a comment made by one of the executives or produces from the company - one of the people whose job depends on making a popular and financially successful product - who said in an interview that the game was intentionally designed so that there would come a point where the only morally defensible option available to the player would be to turn off the game and stop playing.

I thought that a fascinating concept at the time, but having just read ALL the spoilers on TVtropes, I didn't feel the need to buy it and see for myself. But now I can attest to that phenomenon, because for the first time, I have shelved a video game because of my discomfort with what it is calling on me to do.

The Atlantic, The Intercept, and what the story is actually about

A few days ago, I read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/. I thought it was outstanding, both as a piece of writing and as an example of journalism that can actually clarify horrifically complicated questions and help people make decisions with significant real-world impact.

Today, I read https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/20/atlantic-defines-real-islam-says-isis/ via the twitter account of Glenn Greenwald (which, despite my enormous respect for the work he does, I find very irritating; everything he tweets or retweets seems to start from the base assumption that American foreign policy can do no right, end of story.)

I think the author of the second piece is misreading Wood's article as badly as he or she accuses Wood of misreading Islam.

The point of the Atlantic piece is not to establish which variant of Islam is correct or 'most Islamic', and neither does it claim to do so. Wood's stated goal was to determine what ISIS wants, and he persuasively argues that what they want is based on a very strict reading of the founding texts of Islam. That hundreds of millions of Muslims, including many highly knowledgeable and deeply devout Muslims, disagree with this interpretation has little bearing on whether or not ISIS will base its actions on these beliefs, which is entirely what the article was about in the first place. And while I wish he hadn't used the phrase 'cotton-candy view of their own religion', it is true that many both in and out of the Muslim community have denied that ISIS has any connection with Islam out of disgust and embarrassment rather than scholarly and doctrinal grounds.

If you read the Atlantic article as trying to determine whether ISIS represents "true Islam" (a phrase which, despite the headline of the rebuttal, never appears in the original article), of course it is hilariously unbalanced. But *it isn't trying to do that.* What he is trying - and I think he succeeds - to do is to shed a light on the way a very particular group thinks and the reasons it thinks that way. One can have “a coherent and even learned expression of Islam" and still disagree with other members of the faith, or even be a minority. And while he does not stress of the many non-ISIS Muslims that "their version of the religion is more genuine," neither does he claim that ISIS's version is more genuine. All he's doing is describing what their version is, where it comes from, and what it means in terms of predicting the future actions of the group.

And as an American voter who needs to have an opinion about ISIS and what the U.S. should do about it, I'm very grateful that he did so.

I sympathize with the author of the second piece, Murtaza Hussain, who I assume is Muslim. It must be horrifying to see and hear about such acts perpetrated in the name of your own faith when your own understanding of that faith is so radically opposed to such acts. It's ridiculous that, like far to many Muslims, I'm sure Hussain has been called on repeatedly to defend his faith or to publicly denounce the actions of ISIS and its ilk, like a sort of loyalty test for 'the good Muslims.' I'm equally certain that many of the people already inclined to blame Islam as a whole for the actions of some adherents have misread Wood's piece just as Hussain has, and that he's already had to deal with repeated doses of idiocy from such folk.

But make no mistake: although very narrow in its scope (and http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/in-defense-of-islam/?_r=0 and http://www.unz.com/gnxp/islam-is-not-a-religion-of-the-book/ both discuss important factors to consider that fell outside the scope of Wood's article), this is journalism that we need. The fact that Wood's article will inevitably be misinterpreted by readers with a prior agenda against Islam is no reason to misinterpret it in the same way. Because ISIS is a problem, and anyone trying to grapple with that problem, whether from a doctrinal or foreign policy perspective, must be willing to confront why ISIS does and believes what it does ... no matter how uncomfortable such a study is likely to be.

EDIT: Another good article on the distinction between labeling a group Islamic on a theological level rather than a sociological level. I think it's fairly clear that the original article dealt with Islam as a sociological phenomenon, but I can see how some readers who regard Islam as a theological system could misinterpret Wood's statement that the group is 'very Islamic' as an endorsement of their interpretation of the faith.