Getting Soft

I'm not sure what's going in Queens. A student unleashes Graffiti of Mass Destruction and isn't even strip-searched before being handcuffed and detained? No waterboarding? Why, before you know it she might try to smuggle an Advil into school! Clearly, there's just no discipline these days.

Update [PC]: This week's Roman Polanski Award for Inappropriate Sexualizing of 12-Year-Old Girls goes to Professor Ann Althouse:

She's an especially cute girl, willing to pose with her wrists together in the handcuff position. I'm sure some readers appreciate the entertainment on that level. Do we know the whole story of why she was arrested and why handcuffs were deemed necessary?

I dunno, maybe she was asking for it?

Amanda Marcotte notes in the comments to the post Scott links that "it’s more than a little disturbing that Althouse’s need to compete with every woman in sight in the great game of fuckability takes her to the point of lashing out at a 12-year-old who is seen as 'cute'".

UPDATE[SL]: People are being too hard on Althouse's reflexive authoritarianism. Have you considered the possibility that the student had to be handcuffed because otherwise she would be sending hand signals to Al Qaeda? Or perhaps Althouse is just angling for an appointment to 9CA? Fortunately, a further good should come out of this; the next time an elementary school student writes innocuous graffiti on a desk, school officials really will have no choice but to shoot her.

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And the Ann Althouse Award for Contentlessness in Blogging goes to...

... Ann Althouse!

It seems to me that the President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value! Bush—despite his reputation for simplicity—did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world.

Shorter?

The President suffers from the delusion that he wants to do things differently. If he had just wanted to continue doing what Bush had done, he wouldn't have wanted to do things differently. Bush understood that stuff is hard, and he solved different hard stuff the same way every time. Obama said he wanted to solve different hard stuff differently during the election, and once he won it, he suckered himself into believing that he could wield the power he won to solve hard stuff his own way.

Second-order shorter:

It seems to me that Ann Althouse often writes about ideas she does not have. If she had ideas, she would write about them instead of the having of them, but because she only writes about the having of them, no one ever knows what they are. Her posts are like pictures of laptops idling on tables at which no one works: ideas could potentially be communicated through them, but for now they deliver no actual content, only the low hum of pointlessly cycling hard drives.

Warning: Because her name has appeared three times in this post, she will, of course, show up in the comments and claim that her vacuousness is actually a vortex into which someone has been sucked. (Someone should alert her to the definition of "vacuum" that doesn't involve suction.)

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"We've plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence."

Ann Althouse wishes to emphasize that, while Glenn Reynolds based his assumption that Amy Bishop is a left-wing radical on a single RateMyProfessor comment, her own evidence is absolutely airtight:

LGM expends much effort trying to make it look as though the only source for Bishop's politics was some student review on RateMyProfessors. But — I've already linked to this — here's the Boston Herald:

A family source said Bishop... was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting

Well, I can understand why Althouse is proud of citing two whole pieces of what can charitably be called "evidence." After all, she once wrote an op-ed asserting that Sam Alito was a moderate who deserved liberal support that had no evidence at all. But it should be obvious that this anonymous quote is scarcely better evidence of Bishop's politics than isolated RateMyProfesors comments. I know "family sources" who consider my partner a radical leftist because she eats vegetables other than iceberg lettuce and drives a Subaru; without knowing who the family source is or how well he/she knows Bishop the quote isn't reliable evidence of anything. Moreover, the quote is self-refuting -- a radical leftist obsessed with Barack Obama? It's better evidence that the "family source" considers anybody to the left of Jim DeMint a "far-left political extremist" than that Bishop had radical politics.

Of course, even if this highly unconvincing "evidence" was accurate, it doesn't really matter, as Althouse leaves the other Scott's central point untouched. Scott Roeder's murder was explicitly and admittedly political in purpose, while Bishop's homicides seem to have resulted from an apolitical personal grievance. To argue that the MSM is biased because they're not treating these cases the same way is idiotic.

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Ann Althouse defends Rush Limbaugh from accusations of race baiting

As Hendrick Hertzberg points out, for people like Althouse the only significant form of racism left in America appears to be the racism of liberals who patronize black people (by electing them president apparently), while falsely accusing conservatives of racism, when they're the real racists (Harry Reid! The 1964 Civil Rights Act, enacted over the objections of the Democrat Party etc etc).

Hertzberg also points out that he didn't claim Limbaugh was a racist -- only that he used "racist coding." In any case, what sort of person listens to the audio clip to which Hertzberg links and feels impelled to defend Limbaugh?

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Reading Stanley Fish so you don't have to...

Va at Whiskey Fire:

I confess I anticipated the possibility that Fish would review Going Rogue, as he has fashioned himself in his Times blog into a more loquacious Ann Althouse, but I hoped it wouldn't be quite like this. But now, there it is, indelibly posted on Stanley Fish's blog forever, daring me to believe that there is any point in going on, that there is any amount of success and eminence you can achieve that can't be hopelessly shat away. I make my living, such as it is, reading books and teaching other people how to read them, so I take Fish's embarrassing review as a personal affront. But it's more than personal; it's existential. Not only is Fish's review an object lesson is just how inane it is possible for a person to be and still mean it, it implicates all human endeavor in its inanity. It says: the only context in which it makes sense for you to be reading this is in a rocking chair, slowly rocking, on the front porch of civilization, rocking slowly as the sun sets, rocking slower, and ever slower, until you and everything there is expires.

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Things Can Always Get Crazier

Sorry for the absence -- visiting family followed by visiting significant other's family (important news for upper midwesterners: Bell's Rye Stout and Old Ale are exceptional even by their standards.) It's almost reassuring to return to the intertubes to find Reynolds and Althouse engaging in analysis of an ordinary photo of Obama that's crackpot even by their extremely high standards. Actually, especially in the case of the former it's even worse than that; rather than analysis, he and his readers seem to think that what's wrong with the picture (a black man in a tux who isn't carrying a tray?) is so obvious it doesn't even require analysis, although said wrongness is certainly not apparent to sane people. And to think these people used to talk about Bush Derangement Syndrome...

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This is how we frame the narrative.

The Other Scott already noted Glenn Reynolds's tendentious link and Steven Taylor's pithy rebuttal of its underlying "logic," but I wanted to focus on the quotation from Reynolds's reader in the update, because it points to a fundamental disconnect between the rhetoric of the right and the left:

I'm guessing the "she's a socialist" part won't get talked about much in the MSM. But if she had been a conservative it'd lead every evening news cast for two months.

The crucial difference between this mass-shooting and other recent ones is that, for example, Nidal Hasan didn't consider himself a liberal, nor did he devote himself to liberal causes—he was, it seems, someone with pretensions to Islamic jihad. Scott Roeder, however, shot George Tiller in the service of a mainstream conservative cause. The difference, obviously, is not in the media's furtherance of a narrative, but in the non-incidental relation of particular ideologies with acts of violence.

Conservatives complain 1) when liberals ask that any brown person with a funny name not be labeled a jihadist until evidence of such is unearthed, and 2) when mainstream news outlets link the murder of prominent abortion doctors to conservative causes. They fail to see the lack of equivalence: liberals don't espouse jihad against the United States, but conservatives do inspire those on their fringes to engage in politically motivated violence. The politics of the George Tiller murder are an indictment against conservative rhetoric because that rhetoric made Tiller a target; whereas the personal politics of Amy Bishop are utterly irrelevant in the absence of a vocal and sustained opposition to the existence of the university and the tenure system among liberals.

That conservatives are working a false equivalence is made evident by Reynolds's pathological desire to find evidence that will allow him to turn this tragedy into mere political gamesmanship. Unlike his acolyte Althouse, whose affected contrarianism runs so vast and deep she'll write anything if she thinks one rube will do a double-take reading it, Reynolds plays politics to win. He wants to own the narrative, and because his platform trickles up into all the right places, he mostly has a legitimate claim to it. In this case, he hikes over to RateMyProfessor.com—a site that allows angry students to vent anonymously after they receive grades they deserve—and finds a comment in which an undergraduate calls her a "socialist" and before you know it, all the usual suspects are employing "socialist" as an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier, e.g. "socialist Alabama professor," "socialist serial killer," etc. On the strength, then, of a single comment by an upset undergraduate, conservative hacks are folding socialism into what they imagine her profession to be—be it a professor or a serial killer—in an attempt to create the impression of equivalence between ideology and act where none actually exists.

At least not yet. (The day still being young and all.)

UPDATE: More here.

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