Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Let’s Play "Draw The Logical Inference"

• Abu Bakker Qassim and A’del Abdu al-Hakim are two men who were being held in Guantanamo although the government determined that they were not enemy combatants. They were not terrorists or members of the Taliban. They were held for more than a year despite this.

• The Bush Administration is so committed to its theories of arbitrary executive power, and so willing to use legal maneuvers to avoid any judicial scrutiny that are comically transparent (except that nothing this destructive to the rule of law could be comic), that even Michael Luttig–a judge who not only has impeccable reactionary credentials but had a potential Supreme Court nomination in the balance–couldn’t take it anymore and lashed out at the Bush administration’s disgraceful tactics.

• The two were finally released to Albania this weekend–with their appeal scheduled to go before the D.C. Circuit on Monday.

Hmm, I’m sure it’s all a coincidence, just as it would be a coincidence if you gained a few pounds after going on a deep-fried-pizza and cheesecake diet. And as Hilzoy says, this isn’t an isolated case:

This administration has built up quite a track record of freeing people (or, in Jose Padilla’s case, bringing unrelated charges) just in time to render their appeals moot, thereby preventing the courts from finding their conduct illegal or unconstitutional.

They held Yaser Hamdi for years without charges, on the grounds that he was a dangerous terrorist who did not need to be tried, and then, when the Supreme Court claimed that he had a right to contest his imprisonment in a neutral forum, they abruptly released him to Saudi Arabia. After accusing Jose Padilla of planning to detonate a dirty bomb (but not charging him with that or any other crime), and after keeping him locked up as an enemy combatant, the government charged him with unrelated crimes just in time to avoid defending his detention before the Supreme Court.

In both cases, the government had claimed that it was vital to our national security to keep these men in prison without charges — so vital that it was worth scrapping both the plain meaning of the fifth and sixth amendments to the Constitution and centuries of legal tradition in order to hold them as uncharged enemy combatants. Oddly enough, however, keeping Hamdi locked up and Padilla uncharged was less important than keeping the Bush administration’s supposed right to detain United States citizens without charges, indefinitely, from being challenged in court. It’s an interesting set of priorities.

Now, right before the Uighurs’ case comes before the DC Circuit Court, the government has found a way to moot this appeal as well. If the Bush administration’s lawyers and policy makers had the courage of their convictions, they would not be afraid to make their case in court, on the merits.

Let’s be clear: the constitutional definition of executive power being advanced by the administration is utterly farcical. They may be suitable for their most egregious lickspittles, but it can’t be sold even in very conservative appellate courts, and they know it. (They are also blurring distinctions between the laws of war and legal methods of combating terrorism to aid in this aggrandizement of executive power.) It’s a scandal.

"The Worst, Most Severe Way"

Democracy on the march in Iraq!

Human rights groups have condemned the “barbaric” murder of a 14-year-old boy, who, according to witnesses, was shot on his doorstep by Iraqi police for the apparent crime of being gay.

Ahmed Khalil was shot at point-blank range after being accosted by men in police uniforms, according to his neighbours in the al-Dura area of Baghdad.

Campaign groups have warned of a surge in homophobic killings by state security services and religious militias following an anti-gay and anti-lesbian fatwa issued by Iraq’s most prominent Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Time for another Pajamas Media open challenge to human rights activists! Or perhaps another “link-rich refutation” of the idea that human rights was not the overriding reason fro the Iraq War! But, in fairness, who would have thought that installing an Islamic theocracy could have such results?

And, of course, as Tim points out, gay rights is one issue on which the Bush administration is willing to engage in some diplomacy with Iran:

Human rights organizations and the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus protested on Thursday a decision by the Bush administration to back a measure introduced by Iran denying two gay rights groups a voice at the United Nations.

In a vote Monday, the United States supported Iran’s recommendation to deny consultative status at the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council to the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians and the International Lesbian and Gay Association, based in Belgium.

But if you squint really hard, you’ll see that the war was really fought to help liberal hawks spread liberal democracy and freedom! Really, I can’t imagine why anyone may not have believed that this was Bush’s overriding priority…

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Just to assuage the many angry emails and commenters demanding to know when they will get some more hockey blogging, the Lemieux/Berube analysis of Round 2 is now up. His first-round Eastern Conference analysis was perfect, while I went a mere 2-for-4. Sure, it could be said on my behalf that few people predicted all of the first 4 seeds to lose, and I was the only person (including spouses of team members) to pick the Avs over the Stars, and I didn’t exactly give Calgary a ringing endorsement, but…I don’t think any of that will assuage your bookie.

Some very interesting matchups in Round 2; Sens/Sabres in particular looks like a doozy (they’ll be skating like it’s 1984.) Round 1 was interesting because there were a lot of upsets, but disappointing in that there was only one game 7, and in that one the home team played as if their water bottles were filled with an Ambien-and-scotch mixture developed by Patrick Kennedy. Hopefully one or two will go the distance in this round…anyway, I’m picking Sharks-Avs and Senators-Devils.

It’s Not That They’re Lazy About Defending Fetal Life And Poor Women. It’s Just That They Don’t Care.

Well, how about that. It may seem counterintuitive to think that increased access to and education about contraception will prevent unwanted pregnancies and hence lead to fewer abortions–what a crazy idea, tried only by those crazy liberal democracies that don’t see the American health care system as the world’s best!–but apparently the GOP-led move to irrational sex ed and de-funding the provision of contraception to poor women has had this result:

Poor women in America are increasingly likely to have unwanted pregnancies, whereas relatively affluent women are succeeding more and more in getting pregnant only when they want to, according to a study analyzing federal statistics.

As a result of the growing disparity, women living in poverty are now almost four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally than women of greater means, the study found.
[..].
The abortion rate also rose among poor women while declining among the more affluent.

What a surprise! Which brings us to the choice faced by American pro-lifers: protect fetal life through the largely ineffective and grossly inequitable method of criminalization, or by increasing access to contraception, decreasing child poverty, etc. Given that the pro-choice mix of policies consistently leads to lower abortion rates (even in Canada, where abortion is unregulated and state-funded), there’s little question about what works. But give the typical pro-lifer the choice between protecting fetal life and regulating female sexuality, and I think we all know what the answer is:

Leslee Unruh, president and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a South Dakota-based nonprofit that seeks to educate [sic] about abstinence programs, said the growing number of unintended pregnancies among poorer women shows that traditional sex education programs are failing.

“Programs for poor women are often so condescending, even degrading,” she said. “They teach how to put on a condom rather than how to take control of their lives.”

Oh, yeah. On the other hand, there’s nothing at all degrading about being told that you should not be given the tools to make choices that busybody reactionaries deem inappropriate, and reproductive freedom should be reserved for the affluent. Truly, I must (as centrists are always telling me to do) bow to the formidable moral consistency, sincere concern for the prospects of poor women, and not at-all-illogical policies of the American pro-life movement. The sooner that Democrats sell out to them, the better!

To conclude, there are two kinds of people in the abortion debate: people who think the politics of the forced pregnancy lobby are inextricably intertwined with atavistic conceptions of sex and gender, and people who simply refuse to look at the evidence.

Again With The Flanagan

Things, we should know by know, can always get worse. Keeping this simple truth in mind, we can be less surprised that Caitlin Flanagan has decided to supplement her “feminists stole my car keys” shtick with the even more irritating “the party left me, and let me engage in some blubbering self-pity and strawman demolition about it!” shtick. It has all the key elements of this worthless genre, starting with the attribution of motives to people that somehow manage to avoid citing specific claims. (As another reader unfortunate enough to have read the thing implores, “Also, do you have any quotes? Or is the “abundantly clear to me” thing a weasel phrase. You know? One of those phrases people use when they don’t actually have any quotes, but they just want to imply they do?” I believe this question is universally applicable to all such articles. And vague invocations of cocktail parties that you seem to attend 20 times a week or apocryphal cab drivers don’t count.) I believe that this type of nonsense is what people mean when they cite the evils of “identity politics” (and the more the phrase is used, of course, the more likely the user is to be a frequent practicioner.) The idea is to take discussions of ideas and make them about people. To put it as clearly as possible, nobody cares about Caitlin Flanagan’s lifestyle choices, or home decorating preferences, or sex life. People can arrange their domestic lives however they see fit and remain political allies; indeed, the only person in these discussions who makes a habit of busybody criticisms of other people’s lifestyle choices is Caitlin Flanagan. People are critical about Flanagan because she receives a soapbox in some of the nation’s most prestigious magazines to spout her shallow and perniciously reactionary ideas about gender relations, and are critical of these ideas (not the fact that she stays at home to supervise her household staff per se.) Similarly, there is no point at which the Democratic Party “decided to stigmatize the white male,” and it is not from the case that “The union dues-paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us.” To be honest, I’m a white male. To reveal an even greater secret, several recent Democratic Presidential candidates fall into this category, and it is rumored that there are scattered white males remaining in this country’s political and financial elite. Attacks on white male supremacy are not attacks on white males per se; to the extent that this is the perception, Democrats like Flanagan are rather part of the problem.

I was going to ask why people publish this, but it’s actually an easy answer. Not only because her routine flatters powerful men who want brainy women to wait on them hand and foot, but because she is in fact a gifted writer. Which should remind you something about technical skill. I’m sure Kip Winger can play more complex changes than Keith Richards or Joey Santiago, but…

Update by djw: The line about the stigmatization of the white male ought to be quoted in full, because along with her Colbert appearance, it would seem the pretense of a mask is coming off. How risible do you have to be to win Sully’s quote of the day? Here:

“The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the ’60s – civil rights, women’s liberation, gay inclusion – we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues – paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.
And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.
It’s the contempt, stupid.”

I’m sure Caro’s next volume will shed some light on the tragic and strategically flawed decision (remember: independent of civil and women’s rights) to heap ridicule and venom on white men. Silly me: I thought Vietnam was LBJ’s greatest error.

…UPDATE the second–Echidne really hits her groove this time:

Well, no, you are not a member of a traditional family, Caitlin. The traditional family does NOT consist of a working father, a working mother, a nanny and/or a housekeeper. You have yourself stated that neither you nor your husband has ever changed sheets in your house. The traditional family has at least one blood-related person who changed sheets. Even minor Greek goddesses change sheets, scrub toilets and wash floors.

But not Caitlin Flanagan. She has created an odd myth of possibly nonexisting happy 1950 housewives, but by no stretch of imagination can she be counted as one. She works as a writer. She is a working mother, and a wealthy one. Indeed, she is the very thing her articles so mercilessly flagellate. And her assertion that the book based on these articles is not even vaguely political is utter and despicable rubbish. The book is all politics, the sexual kind.

[...]

Enough already. The reasons why people like me hate Flanagan’s writings are really very simple:

First, she argues for patriarchy and the inequality of the sexes within the family and hence within the wider society. One follows from the other. Are feminists supposed to embrace her for telling us that we should be second class citizens?

Second, she doesn’t even bother to do her woman-bashing well. She is a good writer but not a very good thinker and her empirical research lacks a lot. She doesn’t alter her arguments when someone presents relevant criticisms; she simply repeats them in the next piece. This is insulting to the readers.

Third, she is a sham. She does not have the lifestyle she pretends to have. In fact, she is exactly the type of woman her articles deplore.

Hehindeedouch!

The Barbour of the Confederacy

It’s not exactly surprising that Haley Barbour would refuse to issue a posthumous pardon to unjustly convicted civil rights pioneer Clyde Kennard. (And I should say that I happen to share a general principled opposition to pardons in many cases; whatever the question being raised about a given aspect of the legal system, “making it more arbitrary and capricious” is the wrong answer. When someone is both absolutely innocent of the crime and his conviction was an important symbol of racist authoritarianism, however, these objections obviously don’t apply.) Consider his base. It’s obviously not reasonable to expect Haley, a man willing to seek the support of the Council of Fascist Conservative Citizens, to repudiate that part of Mississippi’s heritage, now is it? (Current headline at the CoCC website: “Multiracial youth more prone to violence say orthopsychiatrists.”)

But, of course, if people like Trent “We wouldn’t have had all these problems if Strom Thurmond had been able to preserve apartheid!” Lott and Jeff “white civil rights lawyers are race traitors” Sessions can be proud Republican representatives in the United States Senate, why should Barbour have to cross his racist allies either?

Today In The Global War On Straw

Shorter A. Yasmine Rassam: “Anybody who thinks that women’s rights have taken a step backward as Iraq becomes an Islamic theocracy with limited coercive capacity must think Saddam was a liberal feminist, because of course things can only get worse if they start at an optimal point.”

I suspect that this particularly silly wrinkle in the “objectively-pro-Saddam” routine is going to become more common among people who care about women’s rights only when they can be used as a pretext to depend hare-brained imperialist schemes…

Elsewhere in the Wide World of Non-Sequiturs, in an “update” to his risible argument about how it’s crazy to think that invading countries to seize material goods is “imperialism” (I would add it as an update to that post except that it might imply that the two arguments have some logical relationship to each other), Glenn Reynolds says that “I do think that seizing Saudi and Iranian oil would be entirely morally justifiable on terms usually approved of by the left: They didn’t earn it, they inherited it (it’s like the Estate Tax writ large!…why isn’t war for oil not only morally permissible, but morally required, if the forcible redistibution of wealth in other ways (including “windfall profit” taxes — or Evo Morales’ seizure of natural gas wells in Bolivia) is OK?).” The assumptions here are that 1)the consequences of legislation constitutionally enacted and applied with due process are precisely equivalent to one state simply seizing goods from another sovereign country by force, and 2)the American “left” is generally in favor of confiscatory taxation and the large-scale nationalization of businesses. Given that all of these assumptions are plainly erroneous, there’s obviously nothing to discuss. (And I note again the instructive conflation of “windfall taxes” and “ending corporate tax breaks and subsidies” that has been so convenient to country-club Republican statists like Reynolds.) What this post does make clear is that Reynolds’ claim that Ward Churchill is the “face of the left” isn’t just rhetoric; he really seems to believe it. He’s perpetually shadowboxing with a tiny, uninfluential faction of the left, pretending that it holds some influence in this country. Evidently, discourse with someone with so little understanding of American politics is a complete waste of time.

Moussaoui

While I certainly don’t see this as a reason for celebration, and while as longtime readers know (and I will return to sometime in the near future) I’m a tepid opponent of the death penalty, I’m inclined to agree with the Talking Dog: “As a result of this legally correct verdict, following a government prosecution rife with misconduct and a virtually impossible burden given FBI agent testimony that no matter what Moussaoui said, Bureau chieftains could not be convinced of the merits of a 9-11 plot, Moussaoui will be automatically sentenced to life in prison…Let’s just say it’s gratifying to see a judge and jury do their job the way the law actually intended.” For the reasons that Talk Left has collected in voluminous detail–see here in particular–a death penalty verdict in this case would have been pretty appalling. A death penalty case requires a level of professionalism that the state manifestly failed to meet here, and given Moussaoui’s exceptionally tangential-at-best connections to 9/11 I can’t say it’s a tragedy.

…Lithwick:

This case was about a conspiracy, about some factual connection, however attenuated, between Zacarias Moussaoui’s jihadi heart and the events of 9/11. And although the government has steadfastly stood by its legal claim that it was enough for Moussaoui to have wanted to be on those planes on 9/11, enough for him to have delighted as those planes went down, the jurors recognized this afternoon that a conspiracy to aid in a terror plot requires more than just a bad heart, and more than mere willingness to participate in the next one.

This decision, which will doubtless bring with it some serious national fallout, is more subtle, and more courageous, than the prosecution itself. Acting as a check on a runaway state, these jurors refused to allow a government needing a scapegoat and a man wishing for martyrdom to stand in the way of the facts. These jurors understood that for this country to kill a terrorist for his ideas, hopes, and dreams is not much different than the terrorist’s desire to come here and kill us for ours.

Random Notes

Game 7 watchin’ tonight (NHL Game 7s are about as exciting as anything in sports, but if you have a rooting interest they don’t actually provide any pleasure when you’re watching them…Well, actually there was no tension at all. The word “fiasco” seems grossly inadequate…) so some interesting posts elsewhere to alert you to:

• A great article about “crisis pregnancy centers”–one of the key elements in the stealth attack on the reproductive rights of poor women–trying to actively defraud and humiliate women. Those who wish to indulge in Remembrance of Trolls Past will enjoy the discussion thread at Lindsay’s, where someone argues that Planned Parenthood clinics are hypocrites if they don’t…provide housing for poor women. Similarly, law schools are complete hypocrites and frauds if they don’t personally hire all of their graduates to do legal work. (In fairness, this troll doesn’t also make the “Planned Parenthood forces women to get abortions because it’s just a license to print money, unlike delivering babies which doesn’t pay anything!” argument, proving that our trolls are truly first-rate.)
• Ezra with some useful health care data. The key point: “Meanwhile, the question that Cannon, and others of his ideological ilk, need to answer is whether they think the marginal benefits of our system are worth the marginal cost. We spend around twice what any other country does per capita, and we see very little, if any gain, from the added expense.” Once you throw in the gross inequities of the American system, it’s an easy answer…
• A very concise and lucid post about exactly why Bush’s “signing statements” are so constitutionally problematic. If they’re just statements advancing an interpretation for the courts and executive agencies to consider, they’re still not terribly consistent with a separation-of-powers system, but arguably harmless. When the statements assert the power to completely ignore duly enacted laws, however, that’s an entirely different and exceptionally dangerous proposition. Bush’s responsibility in such instances, to state the obvious, is to veto (or seek to amend) laws he thinks are unwise. The executive most certainly cannot, however, simply declare itself not bound by Congressional enactments; this goes far beyond the constitutional power to enact laws, and indeed stands completely opposed to the framework established by the Constitution.
• Good Tom the Dancing Bug this week, pointing out the duplicity of the arguments made by oil companies (and, more importantly, the President and the GOP in Congress.) One can argue that oil companies are entitled to windfall profits because of the volatility and risk in the industry, and one can argued that they’re entitled to government subsidies and tax breaks to facilitate investment and risk, but it’s ridiculous to advocate both simultaneously. On a related note, it’s worth noting that key Senate proposals have been erroneously described as a “windfall tax”–which is problematic if you buy the former argument–when in fact they’re meant to eliminate favorable accounting provisions that give companies a tax break.

Worst. "Debunking". Ever.

Another one of those Bozell-lite critics of the dread Liberal EMM ESS EMM tries to turn this WaPo article noting the egregious flip-flop involved in Bush’s recent demagogic rhetoric about the national anthem , with even more embarrassing results than usual for such an outfit. What exactly is the evidence that pointing out the comically transparent inconsistency of Bush’s recent claims that makes the WaPo a liberal newspaper? It all comes back, of course, to the Clenis:

Do we have any doubt that when John Podesta was Clinton’s Chief of Staff aide in the White House from 1998 through 2001, that the Washington Post wouldn’t be pestering them over whether Jon Secada (or Julio Iglesias, or whoever) sang the National Anthem in Spanish at the White House?

Yes, I don’t think they would. For the entirely obvious reason that Clinton never said that “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English,” and many of his prominent supporters weren’t making it an issue. Graham’s answer to this obvious point? “…Bush’s and Rice’s remarks were both drummed out of them by reporters.” Oh, I see–so if the President makes an argument in response to a reporter’s question, than noting its egregious inconsistency with past practices is ipso facto proof of liberal bias! (I assume that Graham also believes that this applies to “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”–after all, since it was “drummed out of him,” its accuracy is completely off-limits, and newspapers who don’t accept that must be “conservative!”) A fascinating conception of journalism.

I have to think that this is just bad faith hackery. Nobody could possibly be this stupid.

…Amanda explains in handy chart form.

And The New Pipelines Will Carry Ponies From Iran To Tennessee

Shorter Verbatim Glenn Reynolds: “Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.” (via Lambert.)

There’s the most obvious level of idiocy here, which Tim notes–the idea that we can just use troops we don’t have to invade a country and seize their oilfields, and we could get them running at full capacity lickety-split because there certainly wouldn’t be any sabotage or terrorist attacks on pumps and pipeline during a war–would have to become considerably more rational to be described as “nutty.” In addition to that, there’s the idea that dictators would be “broke” (with the implication that they wouldn’t be able to stay in power) if oil prices dropped. Hmm, lessee, to find really low oil prices we’d have to go all the way back to…1998, when the average inflation-adjusted price was less than $15 a barrel. What a democratic paradise the oil-producing countries must have been! And finally, you have to enjoy his sneering at the fact that people would call invading countries to seize their material assets “imperialist.” I can’t imagine why! Next thing you know they’ll be calling governments that don’t respect legal limits on state power and don’t have fully competitive elections “authoritarian.” (As Jim Henley notes, this is also a fascinating innovation in “libertarian” theory; I can only assume that Reynolds supports the Bolivian nationalization as long as it will increase capacity and reduce marginal prices…)

And yet, there are people who will take anything Reynolds writes about foreign policy seriously.

…and Matt answers the other question I was wondering about; Iranian and Saudi oilfields aren’t being pumped at intentionally reduced capacity the way they were in the 70s…

On the Uselessness of "Authenticity"

As many people have pointed out, Tom Frank’s review of Joe Klein is in fact pure gold from beginning to end. I think this is the key to understanding his worldview, and the core of Millionaire Pundit Values more generally:

Eventually, though, a discernible order emerges. But it’s less a coherent thesis about consultancy than a handful of prejudices that, for Mr. Klein and certain other writers still enthralled by the creaking swingerisms of the 60’s, stand solid amid the swirling oceans of history. The first of these is authenticity, or, I should say, the transcendent aesthetic and philosophical value of authenticity. This is something of a theme in Mr. Klein’s oeuvre: Years ago, he wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl songwriter who came to personify proletarian trueness for the 60’s, so surely Mr. Klein knows the authentic when he sees it. And he claims that people used to see it often enough in the political realm.

[...]

This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader types from consultant-directed puppet boys. Real politicians say honest and heartfelt and down-home things like “Turnip Day”; candidates who listen to consultants mouth shameful clichés and “banana-peel words.” (Of course, if authenticity is what’s required to win, and if what consultants do is strip away authenticity, then one wonders why anyone hires consultants in the first place, a mystery that the book never really resolves.)

The first problem here, of course, is that Klein’s concept of “authenticity” is just a feeble tautology; as even the sympathetic Times review points out it’s always retrospective. Winning candidates somehow always have “authenticity” and those that lose don’t. A few more hundred votes in Florida and Klein would be saying that Gore finally let his true self shine at the convention, and who is a scion of the East Coast elite like Bush trying to fool with his fake-cowboyisms and Potemkin ranch? And when a candidate is sometimes authentic but loses, then suddenly it’s no longer a good thing; then it’s a case of “Negative Turnip Days” or something.

But leaving that aside, there’s a bigger problem, which is that trying to discern “authenticity” is an utterly idiotic way of evaluating candidates. In this, DLCers like Klein are very much like Naderites like Michael Totten, who whined about mean Democrats who didn’t like it when you tell them “that Al Gore is a blowhard and a phony.” But the answer to this, of course, is that even if it’s true, who cares? Whether he’s a phony or a blowhard or was once mean to a girl in the fourth grade, what’s rather more important is that he wouldn’t pass massive upper-class tax cuts or pack the federal courts with neoconfederate cranks or launch disastrous wars etc. etc. etc. (And, of course, there’s the additional humor involved in someone voting for Ralph Nader because his opponent is a “blowhard.” Had Totten been alive in 1912, he would have voted for Taft because his opponents were too portly.) Klein and Totten circa 2000, for all their differences, believe in evaluating candidates with standards that might be appropriate–or at least harmless–for an elementary school student council election. To make Presidential politics about trying to replicate the moment in which Bobby Kennedy made you all starry-eyed is, in a fundamental sense, to not be interested in politics at all. And, of course, making politics about these silly personality issues, like passing notes about the pretty girl in the front row, is a luxury most obviously available to affluent white guys largely isolated from the consequences of bad government policies.

And for that matter, it should be noted that “authenticity” is completely meaningless in all contexts. There is a taco chain in Seattle with horrendously bland food; when we were arguing about going there, a friend of ours argued that “but real Baja food is supposed to be bland.” Well, fine, but again who cares? Bad food is bad food whether it’s made according to traditional recipes or not. Authenticity is only good if it involves faithful replication of good recipes–and even then, what matters is that it’s good, not that it’s authentic. Faithful replication of bad traditions is no virtue. Authenticity is always beside the point.

…Laura has more.