Y files

I suppose I agree with Ezra’s point about The Great Gatsby, namely that if you look at the events of the story in detail it turns out that Gatsby’s downfall is primarily due to an unlikely car accident rather than the working out of metaphysical necessity. 

But I guess I’m not sure what kind of criticism this is supposed to be. Restricting ourselves to the domain of Baz Lurman adaptations, Romeo & Juliet has this same quality. Yes, our star cross’d lovers are doomed by family rivalry but the ultimate tragic dénouement involves a remarkable amount of bad timing and miscommunication. Ned Stark’s downfall is a reflection of his tragic excessive reliance on personal honor, but in the details also comes down to a lot of bad timing and unfortunate coincidence. Or suppose Raskolnikov hadn’t mixed up the timing and ended up killing Lizaveta along with Alyona Ivanovna? 

The fact that great authors across genres and times rely on coincidence to make their tragic schemes work is telling us that contingency plays a large role in human affairs not that the authors are cheating.

“Condition Oakland”, Jawbreaker.

“Welcome to Paradise”, Green Day.

“Journey to the End of the East Bay”, Rancid.

I feel like Operation Ivy belongs here but….

Clearly invading Iraq was a bad idea and college senior Matt Yglesias was not only mistaken about believing it to be a good idea but was operating under a number of misapprehensions about foreign policy and American politics. 

The main not-totally-obvious thing I have to say about this is that the underrated villains in this drama are the leading Democratic Party politicians of the 2002-2003 era. “Because trusted leaders of my political party say so” is of course not a good reason to back any political position. But the evidence is overwhelming that elite signaling and top-down leadership matter for public opinion formation. I remember quite clearly that in arguments around the dining hall people who were (rightly) opposing the invasion would (wrongly) emphasize the Bush Bush Bush factor in their arguments and I would rebut by pointing to Hillary and Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, John Kerry and John Edwards. Madeleine Albright. The whole crew.

Since that time I’ve gotten to know a lot of liberal or left-wing people who’ve never liked that whole crowd. Which is fine. Those politics aren’t my politics, but in this particular case that political orientation gave people a more clear-eyed view of what was happening. I saw a sharp partisan disagreement about Bush’s tax cuts, plus a reasonably broad consensus about his Iraq gambit. 

So what you learn is that this is a pretty poor heuristic.

On the actual policy, what holds up reasonably well from the old pre-war case is that the Clinton era “containment” policy on Iraq was crumbling. The endless sanctioning of Iraq was not a viable long-term strategy for the region. That left you with two kinds of options. One—the wrong option—was to get more aggressive. The other—the correct option—was to realize that the goal of military domination of the Persian Gulf is just fundamentally misguided. The project is motivated by fuzzy thinking about oil, and it’s been extremely costly over the decades. Protecting Kuwait from a direct and flagrantly illegal cross-border military attack is a defensible (though arguably not necessary) use of military force, but the whole rest of the undertaking dating back to long before Bush was a mistake.

I like Quentin Tarantino, but I loved Django Unchained. Tarantino’s always made good movies with good dialogue and good pacing and suspense. And he’s always been very skilled at his special Tarantino genre pastiche thing. But until Django the pastiche always just seemed like a stylistic tick. What he’s done is actually unearth a subject that’s worthy of his skills at it. 

The issue is that not only is race central to American life and history, but profoundly problematic treatments of race are central to the history of American cinema.

You simply can’t tell the story of American film without touching on Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, The Searchers, and other apologias for the antebellum south or briefs for white supremacy. It’s not just that these movies happened. But they happened and they’re incredibly influential and prestigious and in some ways deservedly so. Plenty of directors could make a great film about race (though fewer do than would be ideal), but Tarantino is almost uniquely suited to making a great film about race on film in America—one that situates a tale of Texas gunslingers as a “Southern” rather than a Western, one that if anything exaggerates the sheer evil of slaveholders rather than downplaying it, one where the helpful white guy ultimately screws up and nearly ruins everything.

Is there anything funnier than an 18th century German philosopher explaining a joke:

Suppose this story to be told: An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flor out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in." 

At this story we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure: not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in it that we note as satisfactory to the Understanding, but because our expectation was strained and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing. 

Get it?

I liked Lincoln a lot, and frankly didn’t see the allegorical film about political compromise that many pundits seem to be discussing.

The focus isn’t on political pragmatism, it’s on warranted pessimism about the prospects for racial equality. Thaddeus Stevens who ought to be hero of the film is told brutally and accurately that he’ll never be as loved as a Lincoln who even in private discussions with an African-American can’t bring himself to see black Americans as fellow Americans. The film opens with black soldiers fighting for their own freedom, and a black corporal offering an articulate and entirely correct forecast of the whole trajectory of things. It’s an unusually blunt reminder from a historical film that we actually know how this story ends even as Lincoln can’t really face or articulate what he’s doing.

I strongly recalled Ta-Nehisi Coates’ critique of white readings of the Civil War as “tragic” when watching Lincoln walk amongst the corpses and then immediately order Grant to offer lenient terms of surrender. 

The problem with the film has really nothing to do with politics or allegory and instead just story. This idea that Amendment XIII has to be passed during the lame duck session even though the 39th Congress was going to be more Republican than the 38th doesn’t make much sense. The film seems to suggest that Lincoln thought that winning the war would make passage of the amendment impossible regardless of the partisan composition of congress, but the logic of that view isn’t really explored persuasively. Apparently it’s genuinely not clear to historians what Lincoln thought he was doing. That’s fascinating, but it also makes you wonder why Spielberg and Kushner chose to tell this particular story rather than the story of the Emancipation Proclamation or some other episode. 

But to read a little bit against the grain, what Lincoln could not have known was that Lincoln himself would be assassinated and that in the wake of his assassination the 39th congress would go beyond the 13th amendment to pass the 14th amendment. Whatever reasons Lincoln thought he had for needing to pass the amendment in the lame duck were ultimately mistaken and the whole drama was somewhat pointless. In light of Lincoln’s assassination, the genuinely consequential decision Lincoln took was made months earlier when he dropped the more Radical Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket in favor of white supremacist War Democrat Andrew Johnson. 

As it happens, my senior thesis in college was largely about Young Earth Creationists and now that Marco Rubio’s got the idea back in the news I’m feeling fussy about it. 

The key thing here is that contrary to what people often say, there’s absolutely no empirical evidence that the planet earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 4 thousand years ago. Take the standard scientific account of what the earth was like in 2000 BCE. Now imagine that God create the universe exactly like that 4,000 years ago. He put fossiles in the ground whose state of carbon decay was just so. There’s no “evidence” about this hypothesis one way or the other. Scientific materialism just incorporates as a baseline assumption that these kind of radical discontinuities in the nature of reality don’t happen. But maybe they do? 

Do they? Of course not. I think that’s ridiculous. Just like it would be ridiculous to say that roasting toddlers for dinner is morally acceptable. But we can’t empirically prove that toddler-roasting is wrong, any more than we can disprove the “God is playing an elaborate joke on us with the fossils to test our faith” account of geology. 

From the Eustace Diamonds:

“It was bad to interfere with Charles, bad to endure Cromwell, bad to punish James, bad to put up with William. The House of Hanover was bad. All interference with prerogative has been bad. The Reform Bill was very bad. Encroachment on the estates of the bishops was bad. Emancipation of Roman Catholics was the worst of all. Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad.The meddling with Universities has been grievous. The treatment of the Irish Church has been Satanic. The overhauling of schools is most injurious to English education. Education bills and Irish land bills were all bad. Every step taken has been bad. And yet to them old England is of all countries in the world the best place to live in, and is not at all the less comfortable because of the changes that have been made. … To have been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism – and yet never to lose anything, not even position, or public esteem, is pleasant enough.”

And now here’s Kevin Drum:

And you know, if you immerse yourself in right-wing media, it all makes a sort of sense. “This is not hyperbole,” one Republican told Andy Kroll last night, “This country is done. The writing’s on the wall. Dead.” A relative told me last night about a friend who’s literally afraid that her life savings are now in danger because Obama was reelected. James Fallowshas been following the story of a small businessman who says it’s over: he’s going to close up shop now that Obama is back in office. All of these people believe that Obama is something close to a dystopian antichrist. And yet….a majority of Americans decided to put him back in office. If Obama really is the guy you’ve been told he is, that’s not just inexplicable, it’s nothing short of criminal.

So what happens now? What happens when churches continue to thrive, the economy recovers, Obamacare turns out to be a fairly benign expansion of healthcare coverage, taxes don’t change much, and America doesn’t find itself under foreign occupation? I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t really have anywhere to go with this. But a big part of the conservative base has been told that another four years of Obama will literally result in America no longer being a free country, and their fear of what that means is quite real. So what happens now?

Basically, nothing will happen.

I think that you should vote for Barack Obama if you think he’d be a better President than Mitt Romney, but that you should instead vote for Romney if you think he’d be better than Obama. If you think that there’d be literally no difference between the two of them then I think “tie goes to the challenger” is a reasonable principle. But under no circumstances does it make sense to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.

That said, forecasting the long-run impact of particular elections is very challenging (one can certainly tell a story in which left-wing defections throwing the 1976 election to Gerald Ford would have led to a more progressive long-term outcome) so people are going to disagree.

But I’ve noticed that various anti-Obama pro-third-party arguments on the Internet proceed with an annoying two step. Usually the headline and the lede of the piece will be very focused on Obama, the evils of Obama, and the braindeadness of the Obamabots but then the argument will employ as a lemma something like it doesn’t matter who you vote for because your vote won’t make a difference anyway. I think that math is more contestable than people often realize but whatever you make of it, if your argument is that it doesn’t matter who you vote for then that’s an argument about voting not an argument about Obama. If it’s true that you shouldn’t feel constrained to choose a major party candidate on the grounds that your vote won’t swing the outcome anyway, then the exact same conclusion would hold even if Obama had cracked down on banks much harder or never bombed a soul or delivered single payer health care or whatever you like. The argument may be correct, but it’s an argument about an entirely different subject.

I also think that as an argument written for public consumption on a well-traffic blog or website (as opposed to simply offered over drinks at the bar) it’s an illegitimate form of argument. 

“Why I’m Voting For Jill Stein” or “Why I’m Voting For Gary Johnson” is, qua article, an effort to persuade other people to do the same thing. A persuasive argument that takes as one of its premises its own failure to persuade is inherently problematic.

Articles that posit some kind of difference in behavior between residents of swing and non-swing states are even worse in this regard. In 2004, John Kerry came within about 60,000 votes of carrying Ohio and the election. But he also got less than 55% of the vote in California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Which is to say that an even modestly successful effort to organize third party defections in non-swing states would rapidly turn the majority of those states into swing constituencies.