Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 24

‘Virtues’ Update

A few things:

1) I highly recommend AEI’s Banter podcast in general, but the episode with Rob Long and James Lileks talking about the book is fantastic. How’s this for a tease: Lileks has, in his house, a place he calls “the closet of mysteries.”

2) In other podcast adventures, I had a fun time with David Madeira the other day; you can listen here.

3) Also, I did a long, rambling interview with Katherine Jean Lopez at National Review Online. It’s not as entertaining as the one for WTE. But I did sneak in Lucille Bluth and Mister Bob Harris.

4) The Seven Deadly Virtues is sold out on Amazon right now, but still available at Barnes and Noble. Amazon should be resupplied shortly. All in all, it’s a high-class problem to have.

TNR on Lena Dunham

It’ll be interesting to see if this James Wolcott blowtorch of a review costs The New Republic more subscribers than its endorsement of the Iraq War. It’s unclear which is more of a betrayal to the left. Sample hotness:

Such is the critical protection racket for the Lena Dunham legend that even Daum’s comparison of her subject to Woody Allen and J. D. Salinger was found not flattering, but mildly deflating. “Comparing Lena Dunham to Woody Allen Is Unfair—To Lena Dunham,” contended a headline at the Indiewire site, assuming a contrarian stance. “Likening the ‘Girls’ Auteur to Allen and Salinger predictably raises hackles,” the subhead read, “but what had they done at her age?” The author, critic, and hackles-tamer Sam Adams, wrote, “It’s worth pointing out that at 28, which is Dunham’s age now, Woody Allen was a successful but not widely known comedy writer and standup comic who had yet to release his first album, and J. D. Salinger was still four years away from publishing The Catcher in the Rye.” The article neglects to note that perhaps the reason Salinger didn’t match Dunham’s precocious output was because his early twenties were interrupted by something known as World War II (it was in all the papers), during which the future novelist was drafted, landed ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day, took part in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, interrogated prisoners of war as a member of the counter-intelligence division, and bore witness to one of the newly liberated concentration camps, a sub-camp of Dachau; after the war, Salinger entered a mental hospital, suffering from what today would be designated post-traumatic stress disorder. So the guy was busy.

The section on the New York Times’ Dunham obsession–which is largely based on this bit of progressive samizdat–is truly amazing: These tools have been swooning over her since she was a teenager.

For the Clip File

Jonathan Gruber on Obamacare as bamboozlement:

“You can’t do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that,” Gruber said. “In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in, you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get for the thing to pass. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

This clip ought to be part of every 2016 Republican campaign ad.

Google’s Robotic Karate Kid

What could possibly go wrong?

Kill it. Kill it now.

Free Beacon = AWESOME

Michael Bay levels of Awesome.

By the time Hulk slams Andre, you’ve already had “where will you run when the darkness takes hold,” “I’m baaaack,” and drunk Uncle Joe.

There’s no other publication in America that’s this much fun.

Note on Comments

Still shaking out the redesign a bit here and there. Comments exist, but only on the stand-alone post pages, so you have to click on the headline to get to them.

Congressional Question

Galley Friend X submits the following question. I don’t know congressional politics in granular detail, but maybe there’s an obvious answer:

Honest question: Have white Democrats ever elected a black congressman? That is, has a black D ever been elected from an non-minority-majority district? I can’t think of any. But every black R is, essentially, elected by white people. (And we’re the racists!)

There’s probably an obvious answer to this–maybe a big-city district that isn’t quite minority-majority, but is maybe 35 percent African-American. But like I said, I don’t know off the top of my head.

Let the Recriminations Begin!

It’ll be interesting to see what Princeton neuroscience professor / amateur poll modeler / political hack Sam Wang has to say today.

You will recall that a mere four weeks ago Wang was pushing his way into the public square to insist that Democrats had a 63 percent chance of holding the Senate. Like all normal pollsters, his model mysteriously followed the herd in the weeks that followed, making Republicans a slight favorite to take control of the Senate. But even his final model predicted that GOP 54–which is where we are most likely headed–had only a 5 percent chance of occurring.

I wouldn’t single Wang out for special ridicule–everybody makes mistakes–except for three things:

1) He went out of his way to throw a lot of elbows at Nate Silver and everyone else following the election in an attempt to get attention for himself. This wasn’t just some guy, working his own quirky model, and seeing what happened. Wang was obviously on the make and in a particularly unattractive manner. See, for instance, this tweet:

@QuiteColdNight Stu Rothenberg thinks GOP will pick up >7 Senate seats? That is so wrong it does not even deserve the word “wrong”

— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 9, 2014

2) You didn’t even need a model to see that 54 seats was the most likely outcome. Lots of things from last night were surprising: The gubernatorial results and the margins in places like KS, VA, and KY. But the overall Senate number of 54 always seemed like the single most likely of all possible outcomes. And to have a model which gave GOP 54 the same percentage chance as Dem 51 was pretty obviously flawed.

3) Now, there’s nothing wrong with building a deeply flawed model–people make mistakes–except for how condescendingly boorish Wang was  about it. Remember the great quote from his Daily Beast profile:

He is the author of two books on the brain and his recent work focuses on autism. Politics, he says, is just kind of a hobby. “It’s a relatively easy problem compared with the other things I do,” he told me.

Wang should go back to studying autism. I understand that if he does that, the New Yorker and the New York Times won’t pay attention to him anymore and he’ll lose some Twitter followers, but so what. He’s almost certainly better at neuroscience than he is at politics and it’s more important work–much more important–anyway.

But he ought to apologize for having been such a tool on his way out the door.

Honest Question on Lena Dunham

Galley Friend Mark Hemingway has a fantastic piece up about Lena Dunham’s sexual . . . experimentation? . . . on her much younger sister. I can’t recommend it enough. The Dunham family has tried to put this episode to bed by having the now-adult younger Dunham sister declare the Smith College version of “no harm, no foul.” On Twitter, of course. Here’s Grace Dunham:

As a queer person: i’m committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful

— Grace Dunham (@simongdunham) November 3, 2014

This is an honest, not smart alecky, question: Where does the left draw the line on the question of people having the right to narrate their own experiences? And the specific case I’m thinking of is Ray Rice’s physical assault on his girlfriend, Janay Palmer. At the time of the assault, Palmer refused to press charges. When Rice was suspended by the NFL, Janay–who is now Rice’s wife–released a statement decrying the punishment and saying it was “a nightmare in itself.”

If you come from “queer” world, do you think that Janay Rice has the right to narrate her own experience and determine what has and has not been harmful? Is it wrong for police to charge Ray Rice with a crime and for the NFL to suspend him, since doing so places the verdict of a privileged white man (Roger Goodell) above the narrative experience of an African-American female (Janay Rice)? Or is there some sort of societal imperative which, in some cases, overrides the right of personal narration?

Again, I’m not trying to be snarky: I’m genuinely interested in how leftism squares a circle like this.

By the by, I’m so out of touch that I don’t fully understand what “queer” means anymore, though I have the sense that it doesn’t mean what it did five or six years ago. But I suspect that it’s not an accident that once you begin the cultural movement to decree that the self is infinitely plastic and that all society must celebrate such plasticity, that you wind up with the type of logic Grace Dunham exhibits here regarding the sanctity of personal experience. After all, if you and only you can determine what gender you are–which is a relatively objective fact–then it only makes sense that the individual should get to define much more subjective things, too. Like whether or not a certain behavior was normal, or abusive.

Coffee and Markets Podcast with Brad Jackson

Had a long, occasionally schmaltzy, conversation about The Seven Deadly Virtues with my buddy Brad Jackson on the Coffee and Markets podcast this morning. You can listen (or download) it here.